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A timeless meditation on grief and music

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Few things meet us in our heartbreak the way music can. Music “is a way of escaping the world and rising above it”, letting the words and notes “float on the air before coming back down to rest.” We need music at all times, but especially in times of grief and sorrow. Music can be our lament, our prayer. And music can also bring us back to renewal.

The Great Passion (2022) by James Runcie, is “a meditation on grief and music” as imagined through the writing of one of the greatest masterpieces of Baroque sacred music, J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The narrator of this historical novel set in 1726-27 is thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann, who is sent away to school in Leipzig by his father — an organ-builder — after the death of his mother. Silbermann’s initial weeks at the school are difficult, as he constantly thinks of his mother while fending off the bullies among his classmates. But when he is taken under the wing of the school’s cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, his life changes permanently.

Over the course of the next several months, and under Bach’s careful tutelage, Stefan’s musical skill progresses, and he is allowed to work as a copyist for Bach’s many musical works. But mainly, drawn into Bach’s family life and away from the cruelty in the dorms and the lonely hours of his mourning, Stefan begins to feel at home. When another tragedy strikes, this time in the Bach family, Stefan bears witness to the depths of grief, the horrors of death, the solace of religion, and the beauty that can spring from even the most profound losses.

Throughout this deeply moving book, Runcie uses the voices and thoughts of J.S. Bach; his second wife, the singer Anna Magdalena; the always attentive Silbermann; and Bach’s daughter Catharina, three years Silbermann’s senior who also lost her mother — Bach’s first wife — when she was young. In their own way, each teaches us how music speaks to grief. Everyone, in every age, experiences loss. But the immediacy of what we can lose is especially present in this eighteenth century setting where mortality is as close as the latest plague or bout of fever.

Over the course of the book, which includes pages of insightful and often delightful dialogue (*), Runcie builds to a crescendo in the final chapters. Bach immerses himself in his work to first create a stunning masterpiece and then to teach it to his musicians at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. We see how each of the main characters uses music as a way to work through grief. And Runcie, an award-winning filmmaker, playwright and literary curator best known as the author of the seven books in the Grantchester Mysteries series that served as the basis for the PBS Masterpiece series, has captured in a very imaginative way, what it must have been like to “sing, play, and hear Bach’s music for the very first time.”

That music has, of course, lasted through the centuries, and I want to share two arias with you that speak of the power of this work. Stefan’s role in the Matthew Passion is to sing the soprano solo Ich will dir mein Herze schenken, which is sung in the video below by soprano soloist Griet de Geyter with the Netherland Bach Society.

Ich will dir mein Herze schenken, / Senke dich, mein Heil, hinein! / Ich will mich in dir versenken; / Ist dir gleich die Welt zu klein, / Ei, so sollst du mir allein / Mehr als Welt und Himmel sein.

I will give you my heart; / sink within, my Savior! / I will sink into you; / although the world is too small for you, / ah, you alone shall be for me / more than heaven and earth.

The NBS site describes the Matthew Passion, the story of the last days of Jesus, in this way.

He (Jesus) is betrayed, tried, crucified and buried. The lyrics were compiled by Picander (the pseudonym of Christian Friedrich Henrici), probably in close consultation with Bach himself. For their theme, they took the story as told by St Matthew the Evangelist. As different groups or people have their say, the singers get different roles — Christ, Judas, Peter, a slave girl, the pupils, the high priests, the people and the soldiers, etc. At key moments in the story, Bach and Picander added chorales and arias as a reflection of the biblical story. The action is suspended and the events are placed in the theological context of Bach’s day. The chorale lyrics and melodies come from the Lutheran hymn book and were well known to the congregation in Leipzig. Even though Bach’s harmonies were new, everyone would have recognized the melody and the words. The lyrics for the opening and closing choruses and the arias were brand new, however. Both the arias and the chorales often link up seamlessly with the evangelical words.

Erbarme dich, mein Gott is another of the great arias from the Matthew Passion. The Listeners’ Club blog describes it as follows:

We’ll start in one of the most sublime and powerful corners of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: the alto aria, Erbarme dich, mein Gott (“Have mercy Lord, My God, for the sake of my tears”). In the drama, this aria reflects Peter’s solitary heartache in the garden after he denies knowing Jesus three times. It’s set in a lilting 12/8 time, suggesting the baroque dance rhythm of the siciliano.

Aching beauty and profound sadness coexist in this music, along with a mix of other emotions which transcend description and literal meaning. The Polish poet and novelist Adam Zagajewski has called Erbarme Dich “the center and the synthesis of western music.” The violinist Yehudi Menuhin called the aria’s lamenting solo violin obligato “the most beautiful piece of music ever written for the violin.” 

My son pointed me to the Erbarme dich “for the gravitas. It hits you like a ton of bricks.” This video, also by the Netherland Bach Society, features an amazing counter tenor soloist, Tim Mead, along with Shunske Sato on the violin, from the All of Bach performances.

The Great Passion is a deeply moving and thoughtful book built around one of the masterpieces of western music. Many thanks to my friend (and regular reader) Phil Kopper at Posterity Press for the recommendation.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

*There is a wonderful bit of playful dialogue between Bach (the Cantor) and Stefan about the key of music they live their lives in.

Sometimes, I look at people and wonder what key they live their lives in. If you think of your friend, Monsieur Gleditsch, he is all B flat major: cheerful, loving, filled with hope and aspiration. But if you take a man like Stolle, he is B major: emotion and impetuosity and passion. His wife, Sophia, is G sharp minor, the corresponding key. The richer lives are played in different keys, while the plainer stay the same. Think of our rector, Ernesti, forever stuck in D sharp minor, all gloom and anxiety, despite the hope of heaven. If you had a key of your own, Monsieur Silbermann, what do you think it would be?

I don’t know. What would your daughter be?

Catharina? She is B minor, the key of patience, like her mother. If you want to compliment her musically, which is, I think, what you are asking me, you would have to stretch to the triumph and rejoicing of D major, but that seems a little bold for you in your current position. Perhaps you might prefer something calmer, such as E flat major, but then you would probably need to find a partner in C minor. It’s a nice game, don’t you think? When you sing, which key makes you feel most at home?

I’m not sure I ever feel at home.

Then you must try to find your home, Monsieur Silbermann.

Image of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig by lapping from Pixabay

The ‘toons

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I really appreciate — and enjoy — political cartoons. And can I say that I really miss Tom Toles? Since he retired as cartoonist for the Washington Post the old rag has never been the same.

To help get me through this political season, I’ll occasionally post a few of my favorite ‘toons. I suspect they will make you laugh, think, and/or cry. Or get mad. As Toles said in a final NPR interview,

(T)he nature of political cartooning is — the thing that differentiates it from other commentary is the image for sure. And the image is part of its strength — a great deal of its strength, actually. And it’s something that touches a more visceral spot in the brain of the viewer or the reader. And so it’s volatile. It’s almost a dangerous, combustible combination of meaning and imagery.…

Editors have never been in love with cartoonists because cartoonists are trouble. And it takes a certain kind of editor that will put up with somebody that’s causing his inbox to fill up with things he doesn’t want to deal with. 

I think John Lewis would call that making “good trouble.”

For my money, Mike Luckovich is the best of the current crop, day in and day out.

Here are a couple of the latest from the current Washington Post editorial cartoonist, Ann Telnaes.

And I’ll end with a vintage Toles from 2020:

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

The image of the cartoonist’s desk is from The Comics Journal, which posted an essay excerpted from the introduction to Jeff Danziger’s book, The Conscience of a Cartoonist: Instructions, Observations, Criticisms, Enthusiasms. 

Declassifying my online newsletters (with an update)

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We are drowning in misinformation and half-truths masquerading as facts and history. Politicians whose policies are at odds with large majorities of the American public attempt to confuse and obfuscate in order to stay in power. A large percentage of the leadership and members of one of our political parties has supported overthrowing a lawfully elected government. That party is working overtime to institute minority rule across the country. In this setting, words take on Orwellian meaning.

In wading through the sea of malarky, I find myself looking for analysts who cut through the laziness and both-siderisms of too many corporate-funded mainstream pundits. I want to see what’s possible once you push away the irrelevant “noise.” I have found at least one answer, and I want to pass along those suggestions to you. (*)

Online newsletters are becoming an important source for independent thought and information

Except for the occasional op-ed (such as the one below from The Hill) I don’t see the types of stories and analyses I’m searching for in the always escalating battle over money, clicks, and eyeballs. To compensate, I find myself turning more and more to newsletters published by a group of thoughtful journalists, historians, and other observers on the Substack platform, where writers can share their works for free or for the price of a subscription.

To pass along what I’ve found of interest on Substack for this edition of the Weekly Reader, I want to highlight a few of the writers I regularly read to expand my perspectives (and not always around the news).

But first, let’s consider the challenge that arises when corporate-funded media does not focus on the key news of the day

Over and over again I find that what I am given by the mainstream media misses what’s truly important in people’s lives. The new Inflation Reduction Act, just signed into law by President Biden, represents a generational investment in climate and healthcare. 

(Unfortunately) “only 41% of Americans are even “moderately aware” of the provisions of the bill. But when asked about specific provisions of the IRA, Americans overwhelmingly support the specific programs included in the bill. For example, per Ipsos, Americans support authorizing Medicare to negotiate drug prices by 71%, support renewable energy initiatives by 65%, and support extending subsidies for ACA by 64%.

Here’s another example. I happen to think that the grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, along with other descendants of the leaders of the New Deal, are on to something that’s being missed in all the hoopla over the misdeeds (which are very serious) of the former president.

Democrats are on the verge of a huge legislative accomplishment, to significantly reduce energy and health care costs and tax inequality. This moment reminds us of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the historic 1934 midterm elections. There, the Democrats saw electoral gains instead of losses — generally a rare occurrence for the party in power.  

We, the descendants of FDR and his New Deal cabinet, believe FDR and Democrats in Congress saw gains in 1934 in large part because they weren’t afraid to propose and pass ambitious pieces of legislation known collectively as the New Deal. In 1933 and 1934, FDR and the 73rd Congress enacted a slew of historic legislation that stabilized the economy by providing jobs for millions of unemployed, rescued the banking system, held major corporations and the wealthiest more accountable, and invested heavily in basic infrastructure and the sustainability of our natural resources.  […] 

We think FDR would be mightily impressed — but also hyper-vigilant about the risks still lying ahead — from the health of our economy to our basic freedoms to our democracy.  

President Biden and the Democrats are having an exceptional term in office delivering for the American people, a fact which is almost totally missed by a media focused on horse race politics, reliance on past norms, escalation of conflict, and the interests of their billionaire-backed owners.

UPDATE: Almost on cue, the New York Times ran an article with the headline “Even on Biden’s Big Day, He’s Still in Trump’s Long Shadow.” Veteran journalist James Fallows (see list below) immediately pointed out that the story is “framed” by the author and editor in a way that diminishes Biden’s accomplishments while:

  • presenting as neutral, observable fact what is in reality the writer’s or editor’s judgment and assessment;
  • using a “news analysis” of why Trump gets so much attention, thus giving him more attention; and
  • relying on the instinctive reduction of public life to politics, which most reporters find fascinating, as opposed to the way public decisions affect households and communities, which most people care about much more.

The New York Times is one of the worst at framing news to meet the interests of their corporate backers, editors, and reporters without owning that fact and recognizing their role in shaping public opinion with what should be factual news stories. To recognize the problem, the author and editor of this particular article need to look in the mirror.

In terms of the newsletters I read, it will be no surprise who tops the list

At least once a week I quote historian Heather Cox Richardson and her Substack newsletter Letters from an American. These insightful writings show up in my email inbox (usually around 2:30 a.m.!) six days a week. Her pieces, often taking the news of the day and placing it in a broader historical context, are must-reading for me.

As an example of what you will find, check out her August 13, 2022, letter on the importance of Social Security:

By the time most of you will read this, it will be August 14, and on this day in 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While FDR’s New Deal had put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act is known for its payments to older Americans, but it did far more than that. It established unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. 

It is a compelling piece of scholarship as well as a great piece of biography on the nation’s first female cabinet member. Richardson reminds us of how far we’ve come as a nation, and how much we have to lose if Social Security is ended, as proposed by the current crop of billionaire-funded Republicans in Congress.

Because this is a long list, let me simply share the names and links of the other writers I read on a regular basis, with one or two sentences of explanation

Here’s some of what is currently on my Substack Library list in alphabetical order (I’ve left off a few that are probably only of interest to me):

I encourage you to check them out…and to send me recommendations on Substack newsletters you enjoy.

And now for the humor

Apropos of nothing in the post above, I wanted to share two bits of humor: one a political cartoon and the other a comment from an internet site.

The cartoon — by the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Luckovich — is the best I’ve seen about how Trump supposedly “declassified” everything that left the Oval Office.

This second is a comment on the same topic made by an anonymous (to me) commentator:

Declassifying is what Trump does every time he walks into a room. 

Enjoy reading!

More to come…

DJB

*Thus, I’m “declassifying” my list for all to see. The use of the word is just a little joke with no Orwellian meaning intended.

This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image of laptop by Free Photos from Pixabay

An unparalleled chronicler of the American spirit

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David McCullough, who passed away on August 7th at the age of 89, always made you feel part of something larger than yourself. It fit with his belief that history “is a larger way of looking at life,” a source of strength and inspiration. At a time in our country when fake populists are attacking history and historians, we need to hear McCullough’s voice. A sense of history, he wrote, “is an antidote to self-pity and self-importance…history is a lesson in proportions.”

Many of the tributes following his passing describe McCullough as the dean of America’s historians. The statement from the National Trust, where he served as a Trustee and an Honorary Trustee, spoke to his extensive efforts and eloquent voice on behalf of historic preservation. Those observations are certainly true. But what I saw most frequently in McCullough’s life and work was someone who believed in, and spent a lifetime chronicling, the unique American spirit.

In my more than two decades with the National Trust, I was fortunate to engage with David McCullough at various functions and hear him speak multiple times. If I remember the story correctly, David and the CEO who recruited me to the Trust, Richard Moe, had become close friends going back to Dick’s time in the Carter White House. McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas — the National Book Award–winning epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal — was “required reading,” as Dick would phrase it, during the administration’s negotiations over the future of the canal. 

When I heard of McCullough’s passing, I pulled out one of his more recent works, a slender volume I have reread over the past few days. Although I reviewed the book soon after it was published, I wanted to revisit it again. It reminds me of why he was such a forward-looking storyteller of the American experience, examining the past to help explain the present. As McCullough said in a 2004 speech at Ohio University, “History is both now and then, today and yesterday…. No one lived in the past, only the present.”

The book also reminds me of one of the most memorable personal interactions I had with David McCullough, at an especially difficult time in our country’s history.

The American Spirit

The American Spirit (2017) is a collection of fifteen speeches given by the author over twenty-five years. There are a number of commencement speeches, a talk made before Congress, and a July 4th naturalization speech given at Monticello, among others.

And there is also a speech David McCullough made just weeks after the attacks of 9/11. I remember it like it was yesterday, because I was there, sitting next to him before he rose to speak.

On October 20, 2001, McCullough gave the keynote address at the Trust conference in Providence, Rhode Island, gracing us with the memorable speech included in The American Spirit. Providence is a city, as its name suggests, that celebrates its religious history. Few communities carry off having a “Steeple” street with the historical understanding that Providence brings to its houses of worship. And the most important of those sacred places in the country’s fight for religious freedom is The First Baptist Church, Providence, which was the very first Baptist church that was established in America. It was also where the opening session of our 2001 national conference was held.

I was staffing McCullough backstage before he went out to remind us of who we are and what we believe as Americans. He could have said he needed this time to collect his thoughts. Instead, he wanted to talk. I mentioned that while I had difficulty selecting a favorite from among his many works, my father had no such problem. An engineer, Tom Brown loved his book on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, a fact which delighted David to no end. He told me that it was one of his favorite books to write. As the New York Times noted in its obituary, “The Great Bridge (1972), his exhaustive account of the technology, personalities and politics involved in building the Brooklyn Bridge, was hailed as a monument in its own right.” That day in Providence we discussed the Brooklyn Bridge as well as his recent study of John Adams, and he offered to sign a copy of the former for my father and the latter for me, a generous gift I will always treasure.

A prized note from a memorable occasion

Afterwards, I sat on those hard, wooden pews as mesmerized as any young college student at the feet of a beloved professor while David McCullough made the case for “the importance of history as an aid to navigation in such troubled, uncertain times,” as he says in this book’s introduction.

The time after 9/11 was a period of great uncertainty. But it was also a time when he could use the scholarship from his recently published masterwork on John Adams to remind us — once again — that we have worked through difficulties before in this country.

We think we live in difficult uncertain times. We think we have worries. We think our leaders face difficult decisions. But so it has nearly always been….It is said that everything has changed. But everything has not changed….We have resources beyond imagining, and the greatest of these is our brainpower….And we have a further, all-important, inexhaustible source of strength.  And that source of strength is our story, our history, who we are, how we got to be where we are, and all we have been through, what we have achieved.”

Speaking in 1994 at Union College, McCullough touched on a similar theme when he said,

I think what most of us want — as most people everywhere want more than anything — is to be useful. This and to feel we belong to something larger than ourselves. What is needed now…is a common understanding of what that larger something can be. What we Americans need above all is leadership to define the national ambition.

Writer and social critic Lewis Lapham has written that “What joins the Americans one to another is not a common nationality, language, race, or ancestry…but rather their complicity in a shared work of the imagination.” David McCullough, whose work was often pointing back to the Declaration of Independence and its formative role in shaping the ideals of America, spoke of the same guidestar. “Beware the purists, the doctrinaires,” he cautioned. “It has been by the empirical method largely, by way of trial and error, that we have come so far. America itself is an experiment and we must bear that always in mind.”

Protecting history was a trait we saw at the Trust, where he chose his battles over contemporary political and preservation issues carefully. But when he engaged, his skills were formidable. And his insights were right on target.

“At some point in his life,” C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb told historian Douglas Brinkley, “McCullough decided to tell the world that American history mattered.”

It was his mantra. He was the nation’s schoolteacher. I love all of his books. But McCullough was also about his persona; he was the whole package of writing skill, resonant voice and grand presence.

This is a good time to remember the importance of history and the power of history. The power of story. David McCullough often quoted a letter Abigail Adams wrote to her son, the future president John Quincy Adams, when he was eleven years old and protesting that he did not want to make the hard voyage across the Atlantic with his father. She wasn’t having it.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

As McCullough goes on to point out, “the mind itself isn’t enough. You have to have the heart.”

Today, we are contending with difficulties. But so it has nearly always been. That makes this an especially good time to work to ensure that the story — of who we are and all that we have been through to reach our achievements as people and as a nation — is not lost in the uncertainty, fog, and upheaval of the present day. If we don’t, we will have forgotten the legacy of David McCullough at our peril.

More to come…

DJB

Image of David McCullough at work from his Facebook page.

Classified

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For some unknown reason, this seemed like a very good day to highlight the song Classified by James Booker, the man none other than Dr. John described as “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.” 

Known as the “Piano Prince of New Orleans,” the eye-patch-wearing, flamboyantly dressed entertainer who walked with a limp from a childhood injury was among the most colorful characters in the Crescent City during his lifetime. At the age of ten, Booker was given morphine after being struck by a speeding ambulance and from then on suffered from mental health disorders and drug addictions. The life of one of the city’s most gifted musicians ended tragically early when he passsed away at age forty-three.

James Booker

A child prodigy, he was the son of a piano-playing Baptist minister and had extensive classical training, mastering works by Frédéric Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach in his early teens. No recordings of his “straight” classical interpretations have surfaced, but Booker’s adaptations of Chopin (“Black Minute Waltz”) and Ernesto Lecuona (“Malaguena” and “Gitanerias”) still circulate.

Not exactly sure why this seems so appropriate at the end of this crazy week…but enjoy, nonetheless.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Tayeb MEZAHDIA from Pixabay

The books I read in July 2022

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David McCullough, who passed away last Sunday, encouraged the 1994 graduates of Union College in Schenectady, New York, with the following:

Read books. Try to understand the reason things happen, why they are as they are. If you see only the surface phenomena, then the world becomes extremely confusing, ever more unsettling. But if the reasons are understood there’s a kind of simplicity that emerges.

Four years later, he gave the graduates at the University of Massachusetts similar advice.

Read for pleasure. Read to enlarge your lives. Read history, read biography, learn from the lives of others. Read Marcus Aurelius and Yeats. Read Cervantes and soon; don’t wait until you’re past fifty as I did. Read Emerson and Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor and Langston Hughes….Whatever your life work, take it seriously and enjoy it.

In that spirit, each month my goal is to read five books from different genres that cover a variety of topics. I read in order to learn and to start conversations with those I encounter along the way. Here are the books I read in July 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!

The Lincoln Highway (2021), the third novel by Amor Towles, is a self-described “multilayered tale of misadventure and self-discovery.” Set in ten days in 1954, it begins when eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson returns from the juvenile work farm in Salina, Kansas, where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett and his precocious eight-year-old brother Billy set out on the road with the intention of going to California. But other characters quickly insert themselves and the small band ends up going in the opposite direction. Throughout the twists and turns, Towles explores how “evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder.” We learn how a single wrong turn on the highway of life can set you off course, but the misdirection doesn’t have to be forever. Finally, balancing accounts can be a messy business. Because Towles writes the final sentence in a chapter better than anyone, you are compelled to turn the page in this terrific read.

There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century (2021) is a remarkable memoir by foreign policy and national security expert Fiona Hill. This is her very personal story of growing up in England’s coal mining country as part of the wrong class, in the wrong region, with the wrong accent and nonetheless working her way through St. Andrews and Harvard to the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, and service in the White House. Hill uses her story as both backdrop and cautionary tale. Her upbringing in a region that was forgotten in the 1980s certainly shapes her worldview and her empathy for the forgotten areas in the U.S. and the U.K. Modern Russia, which she has spent most of her career closely studying, is another cautionary tale. “Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future,” she writes, “a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization.” Finally, her time on the National Security Council led her to see that “In some respects the crises of 2020 would mark the final reckoning with the revolutionary reforms of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.” In the book’s final section, Dr. Hill lays out the issues we face in straightforward language and then provides prescriptions for the sick patient because our left-behind citizens deserve better. We will all do better if we recognize that life is a team sport.

Carlos Lozada‘s What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020) is the Trump book you didn’t know you needed to read. As the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post since 2015, Lozada read upwards of 150 works on “the Trump era” — a period “suffused with conflict, crudeness, and mistrust” — and then created this wide-ranging, sobering, at times funny, and always insightful work focused not so much on Donald J. Trump, but on how we see ourselves in this moment. He leads us on his literary journey through ten chapters, with titles such as See Some I.D., The Chaos Chronicles, and Russian Lit. In each he considers 10-15 books that address a common theme, helpfully identifying books that “challenge entrenched assumptions and shift our vantage points….” The most important “enable and ennoble a national reexamination … They are the books that show how our current conflicts fit into the nation’s story, that hold fast to the American tradition of always seeing ourselves anew.”

Holes (1998), a novel by Louis Sachar, takes the reader on a darkly humorous trip as Stanley Yelnats reckons with his cursed past and his misplaced present. Because of a curse put on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather, Stanley always finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which is how he ends up at Camp Green Lake digging very large holes, because the adults have told him it will build character. Of course, Camp Green Lake is not a camp. It is not green. It doesn’t have a lake. And the holes Stanley digs are not always literal. Written with pre-teens in mind, Holes has won the prestigious Newbery Medal. Two decades after its publication the book continues to delight pre-teens, teenagers, and adults alike. As I stayed up late reading, laughing out loud while appreciating the lessons about perseverance, companionship, and overcoming both cruelty and personal history that shine through in Holes, I was glad it came my way as a recommended choice for summer reading.

Hokusai Pop-Ups (2016) by Courtney Watson McCarthy, a paper engineer and graphic designer from New York, is a moveable book featuring the work of Japanese artist Hokusai. We discovered the book at Giverny, the home of impressionist painter Claude Monet. Hokusai Pop-Ups contains, of course, information on the artist but the scene stealers are McCarthy’s dazzling pop-ups of Hokusai’s art. The reader is told of his early apprenticeships where Hokusai learned woodblock printmaking, along with his frequent name changes (up to 30 over his lifetime) that often accompanied job and artistic shifts. Hokusai wanted to live well into his second century in order to master his craft. He did not quite make it, but his impact is nonetheless impressive, most especially on painters such as Monet and architects and designers in both Europe and the United States.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: To see which books I read in January, February, March, April, May, and June, click on the links. You can also read my Ten tips for reading five books a month online.

I will have a fuller appreciation of David McCullough in next Monday’s post.

Image by Prettysleepy from Pixabay

We either build hope together or lose hope separately

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As the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, Benjamin Franklin is purported to have said, “We must all hang together, or … surely we shall all hang separately.” Almost 250 years later, an English-born naturalized American citizen nears the end of her remarkable story that began in the coal house and took her to the White House with similar thoughts about the absolute necessity of working together.

She sees too many people born into similar circumstances in the generations after her who did not have the same opportunities she was given. “Deprived and disadvantaged, they will continue to be preyed upon by unscrupulous politicians who offer them a promise of opportunity in return for their votes.”

Those who are left-behind deserve better, however. Their problems are everyone’s.

They are our fellow Americans and fellow Brits, in some cases our family members and friends. Helping them will not be purely a selfless act. Because as long as they feel that there is no hope for them, there will be no hope for the rest of us. There will be nothing for us, anywhere.

There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century is a remarkable memoir by foreign policy and national security expert Fiona Hill. How she ends up with that conclusion comes out of her very personal story of growing up in England’s North East — coal mining country — the wrong class, in the wrong region, with the wrong accent and nonetheless working her way through St. Andrews and Harvard to the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, and service in the White House. That last stop is where most of us first came to know her as a key witness in the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

Her years as a nonpartisan national security analyst in the Trump White House come in the middle of the book and are told in her direct, honest manner. Hill doesn’t spend excessive time on wild Trump tales, with the exception of her disbelief at how much the former president wanted the main purpose of his first state visit to England to be the introduction of one dynasty (his) to another (the Queen’s family) and not a celebration of U.S.-U.K. ties. Her reaction to this narcissistic statecraft — which was visible to all who watched that visit with open eyes — is fully understandable. She does, however, focus on the challenges of working in a dysfunctional work environment and the impact that approach to governance, combined with Trump’s “autocrat envy” worldview, has on serious policy needs. Outside of the prologue and a few pages at the end of her description of the White House years, Hill’s participation in the impeachment trial gets very little play in this book.

Instead, in much of the book she focuses in an empathetic and understanding way on her upbringing in coal mining country as seismic shifts in global economics combined with Margaret Thatcher’s brutal and de-humanizing policies of the 1980s closed opportunity after opportunity for the region’s citizens. Her father, a former coal miner who ended up working as a hospital porter, encouraged her to leave England’s North East, saying “there’s nothing for you here, pet.” She was one of the fortunate ones who still had enough support systems, contacts, access to government assistance, and personal motivation to work her way out. But early on she notes that “opportunity does not materialize from thin air and no one does anything alone.”

At age 13, Hill was on a school exchange in Germany when she first heard the three questions that would follow her from childhood to adulthood, “all in the following order:”

  1. “So, where are you from, then?
  2. What does your father do? (there was no follow up about my mother), and
  3. What school do you go to?”

These were not “get to know you” questions in England. “This was a highly determinative trifecta of questions — the beginning of a socioeconomic class sorting exercise. Depending on how you answered, you could be either accepted or written off.”

Hill uses her story as both backdrop and cautionary tale. Her upbringing in a region that was forgotten in the 1980s, a key turning point when “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off” certainly shapes her perspective and her empathy for the forgotten regions in the U.S. and the U.K. Modern Russia, which she has spent most of her career closely studying, is another cautionary tale. “Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future,” she writes, “a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization.” Finally, her time as a national security analyst on Donald Trump’s National Security Council led her to see that “In some respects the crises of 2020 would mark the final reckoning with the revolutionary reforms of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.”

What moves There is Nothing for You Here from absorbing memoir to an even more compelling call to action is the book’s final section: Our House. In those 80 pages, which some reviewers criticize as a boring Brookings paper but which I found persuasive, Dr. Hill lays out the issues in straightforward language, and then provides prescriptions for the sick patient in useful detail. It is set up in the chapter that ends the previous section — The Horrible Year — which chronicles 2020. Hill is struck with how much the U.S., the U.K., and Russia began to resemble each other, not only in the disastrous response to the pandemic but in their separate but intertwined marches toward authoritarianism with populist leaders primarily focused on gaining power and riches.

All three had faced the challenges of managing major economic and technological shifts and had had to deal with the political consequences of post-industrial decline. Prime among those political consequences: governments seemingly without the interest or ability to solve the deadly serious challenges of the twenty-first century (emphasis added).

But we don’t have to follow the Russian model here in the U.S.

Education was key to Hill’s survival and advancement, and she strongly believes that we have to provide modern, 21st century education for children, young people, and adults to survive and thrive in the new world we now face. She also makes the strong case that where class is the determinative factor in how one is accepted in England, that key factor is race in the United States. Here in the U.S., we have “wasted human capital on an enormous scale over the last forty years by constraining social mobility for millions of people.” The problems the U.S. faces have “festered since the 1980s” so fixing them will take time. Nonetheless, she is optimistic that we can do so.

(O)n the national level, it will require a major policy effort to create the kind of comprehensive antipoverty, education reform, and jobs-creation programs for the United States to succeed in creating a new infrastructure of opportunity for all Americans in the twenty-first century. One-off initiatives and temporary interventions are insufficient.

The work also has to be place-based. In a very compelling chapter entitled No More Forgotten Places, that follows a similar chapter on working to remember and support forgotten people, Hill writes:

In the final reckoning, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, there should be no such thing as the wrong place to live.

Building opportunity that is spread more evenly across America’s vast landscape and its population is key to addressing our partisan polarization and fragmentation.

Dr. Hill provides examples that can be taken to scale, changes in policy that would benefit wide swaths of Americans, and specific steps each of us can take to help build forward together to create opportunity in the 21st century.

If you are a CEO or an executive of a corporation or other large organization, she shows how you can help break down barriers and even the playing field. In a similar fashion she has ideas for those who are retired and have free time, an experienced working professional, a young professional, a college professor or administrator, a college student, or a teacher. These go from simple and practical (volunteer as a mentor); to more challenging (set aggressive hiring targets for women, minorities, and underrepresented groups); to significant policy changes (pulling together and streamlining existing government and philanthropic funds and setting clear development goals). They are people-based and place-based.

Fiona Hill’s call to action may seem improbable. However, no less than the Financial Times applied that descriptor to Hill after she stepped before the country to effectively speak truth to power. She has seen firsthand where we are headed without a major change in direction, one that recognizes that our left-behind citizens deserve better in part because we will all do better — we will all build hope together — if we recognize that life is a team sport.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Historic photo of Newton Cap Road Bridge in Bishop Aukland, England.

Joni Jam

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As the entire world now knows, Joni Mitchell performed at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival for her first public performance since suffering a debilitating brain aneurysm in 2015. Thanks to the power of the internet, millions who were not there in person have seen this legendary performance.

Singer Brandi Carlile was “the force behind Mitchell’s return to the stage. The crowd was beyond elated as the voice behind classics like ‘Both Sides Now’ graced Fort Adams for the first time since an evening appearance there in 1969.” Carlile’s full introduction to the surprised and delighted crowd is worth watching…

…as she acknowledges the power of congregation and radical love. “To power structures, folk music is — and always has been — utterly fucking destructive… It’s a truth teller and a power killer.”

As Sheila Weller writes in Next Tribe, the “performance of the two icons singing at the Newport Folk Festival is a bit of soothing sunshine in a dark year for women.”

There are many articles highlighting the show and some of the top videos from the evening’s performance. I’ll refer you to this one at The Bluegrass Situation, as well as this one at NPR. And here are three of my favorites.

Summertime — according to some insiders, one of the first songs Mitchell took up as she recovered from her illness. I love the deep timbre of her voice.

Big Yellow Taxi — party time at the Joni Jam. And Mitchell changes the lyrics to be, “They took all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum. And they charged all the people an arm and a leg just to see ‘em”. This was a song that was often used to open preservation and Main Street conferences back in the day.

Finally, Both Sides Now — Written when she was 23, it was meant to be sung by Mitchell at 78. As one commentator wrote, “This has got to be one of the most imperfectly perfect performance ever.” I bet, like Wynonna, you won’t be able to get through this one without crying.

Mysterious. Lovely. Touching. Beautiful. Thank you, Brandi Carlile, for helping make this happen. And thank you, Joni Mitchell, for being you.

More to come…

DJB

Image of Joni Mitchell and Brandi Carlile at Newport Folk Festival 2022 credit jonimitchell.com

Remember this fact: Baseball owners just want to make money

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John Feinstein, one of the deans of sports writing in Washington, isn’t always right. But he sure was spot on Tuesday evening when he wrote the following for the Washington Post:

Here’s a pretty general rule when it comes to running a sports franchise: You don’t trade away a generational player. You especially don’t trade one when he’s 23 and hasn’t even reached what should be his best years.

Even if his agent is baseball’s answer to Lord Voldemort, Scott Boras.

Juan Soto, late of the Washington Nationals

The Washington Nationals had just committed the unforgivable sin of trading their generational talent — Juan Soto — just a year after gutting a World Series-winning team and trading stars such as Max Scherzer and Trea Turner. Just four years after letting another mega superstar in Bryce Harper get away. And the reason is generally because the team’s owners — the Lerner family, who made their money in commercial real estate — think that home-grown talent should give them, the billionaires, a local discount when negotiating salaries. Juan Soto is worth $500 million in this market, but the Lerners tried to get him for a mere $440 million.

This from an ownership group that bought the franchise for $450 million some 16 years ago and is now looking to sell it “for north of $2 billion.” That’s more than four-times its original value. The Lerners are not small-market owners. Washington is not Kansas City. This is a team where the city put up a lot of money to build a stadium (almost $1 billion when you factor in interest) and took a great deal of grief for that decision. This is a team in the nation’s capital that has proven to be a strong draw with a wealthy and knowledgeable fan base drawn from a two-state area (plus the District of Columbia).

A fan base that just got kicked in the teeth — again — by owners who have proven they are only in it for the money.

Feinstein, again.

What should they have done rather than trade Soto? Simple: Say to Boras, “Okay, Scott, you win; what’s the number we need to get a new deal with Juan?” If Boras answered that Soto wasn’t going to sign regardless of what the Lerners offered, say that publicly. Out Boras for who he is, again — and still don’t trade Soto. Hand him over to the new owners for the two years until he can become a free agent and let them deal with the migraine that is Boras.

The Lerners owed that to their fan base, not a potentially empty promise that things will be better in a couple of years.

A number of sportswriters and commentators have pointed out that especially in the trades of Trea Turner and now Soto, the Nationals owners have shown that they really don’t care about the fan base. The Nationals are “the team that loses perennial all-stars.” Players that the locals have supported with their emotions and money.

The Lerners are among baseball’s richest owners. But they have lost all those great stars because they have “chosen” not to pay them.

Kevin Blackistone, another nationally recognized Washington Post columnist, took the forceful case directly to the Lerners. “We enriched the Lerners through taxes to build the stadium and this season by shelling out $279.30 on average for a family of four to watch the worst team in the game”, wrote Blackistone. The owners promised last year that they were rebuilding — quickly — around Juan Soto when they traded off the core of their 2019 World Series championship team. Then they broke that promise earlier this week. Their “stewardship” of the team (and I use that term loosely) has led to what may be the fastest fall of a World Series champion in history.

As they traded away stars like Scherzer (a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer), Turner, and Kyle Schwarber, while also losing Anthony Rendon and Harper, they raised season ticket prices — 21% in 2022 alone. TWENTY-ONE PERCENT for what is essentially a AAA minor-league team. I know. I’m a season ticket holder in a group with some other friends.

For now.

Baseball business types have and will continue to argue that what the team is doing is smart business, and “just the way the game is” these days. However, the Dodgers, Yankees, Braves, Red Sox, and other perennial winners don’t tear down their teams at the drop of a hat and force their fan base to sit through at least five years of terrible baseball before they have the promise of a decent team. No, this stewardship by the Lerners is veering into Peter Angelos and Daniel Snyder territory (to mix sports). Both the Orioles and the Washington Football Team have eroded decades of fan loyalty as their owners pursued the almighty dollar (not to mention the stroking of their insatiable egos).

Robyn Ryle hit the nail on the head last March when she wrote about inequality and baseball. I linked to it on More to Come but you should go read Robyn’s piece. It is well worth the time. She writes of how some commentators will scream about the salaries of MLB players, such as Mike Trout and Juan Soto (once he reaches $500 million…which he will). But she paraphrases Chris Rock to note that Trout and Soto are rich, while the owners are wealthy. “There’s a big difference between the two.” The owners, CEOs, and other capitalists want you to yell about labor, conveniently forgetting that the Lerners have enough money to pay $500 million and the salaries of the other 25 Nationals. IF they choose to do so.

I last saw Soto play at Nats Park last Saturday evening. Like all fans, I want to see a good product. So do the players. The owners? Not so much. Robyn framed the problem in a way that most of us can understand.

Let me put it more plainly — the players want baseball to be good. The owners just want to make money. Period. End of story.

The Lerner family can’t sell the Nationals fast enough for me.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: In a comment to my March post, my fellow season ticket holder Tom wrote about the giant tax elephant in the room and what is probably the real reason the Lerners are selling: the roster depletion allowance (RDA).

The RDA is a tax escape hatch baseball owners enjoy for 15 years in which they can write off the massive salaries they pay their players. The Lerners bought the team in 2006. Their RDA expired in 2021 or 2022. So they can’t write off the $400 million-plus Juan Soto wants now or enjoy the $200 million annual estimated write-offs they’ve enjoyed for years. A new owner certainly will….It’s a tiny bit about baseball and a ton about taxes.

Tom then quoted a law school professor on federal income tax who said on the 1st day of class: “If you see unusual behavior, it is often due to the tax code.”

Image of money by S.K. from Pixabay.

A feast for the eyes in this moveable book

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The influence of Japanese art is everywhere at Claude Monet‘s home in Giverny. From the Japanese water lily garden to the artwork in his bedroom to the impressionist masterworks that were featured in the studio, it was clear that Monet called upon the inspiration of Japanese artists as he worked and where he lived.

Monet’s water lily pond (credit: Candice Brown)

Perhaps none was more important to Monet than Katsushika Hokusai, a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. Born in 1760, his legacy remains, some 150 years after his death, as important as ever.

He is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai was instrumental in developing ukiyo-e from a style of portraiture largely focused on courtesans and actors into a much broader style of art that focused on landscapes, plants, and animals.

The Great Wave from the movable book Hokusai Pop-Ups

Although Hokusai lived during the time when the isolationist policy of sakoku in Japan was rigorously enforced on penalty of death, he nonetheless came in contact with western art and influences, which led him to shape his work into a new and unique style that influenced Impressionism and Art Nouveau and a range of contemporary artists working today.

The basics on Hokusai’s life and work are included in the short but gratifying book Hokusai Pop-Ups (2016) by Courtney Watson McCarthy, a paper engineer and graphic designer from New York. It contains, of course, information on the artist but the scene stealers are McCarthy’s dazzling pop-ups of Hokusai’s art. The reader is told of his early apprenticeships where Hokusai learned woodblock printmaking, along with his frequent name changes (up to 30 over his lifetime) that often accompanied job and artistic shifts. Hokusai wanted to live well into his second century in order to master his craft. He did not quite make it, but his impact is nonetheless impressive. A quote from the artist Vincent van Gogh included in Hokusai Pop-Ups captures this spirit and passion.

If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.

This delightful movable book is, to put it simply, a feast for the eyes.

Hokusai’s art, notes McCarthy, was “realized in jewel-like colors.” The more modern focus of his work on landscapes, simple views of everyday scenes in Japan, and common folk — coupled with “his sense of balance and harmony, and his highly stylized but ever-changing techniques — seem to capture the spirit and traditions of his homeland.” It is through McCarthy’s intricately engineered pop-ups — one of the more recent in a long and impressive history of movable books that has delighted and informed children and adults alike through the ages — that Hokusai’s art “comes to life” in a new and exciting fashion.

Kirifuri Waterfall at Kurokami Mountain

Many of Hokusai’s best-known works, such as Ejiri in Suruga Province, Chrysanthemums and Horsefly, Phoenix, Kirifuri Waterfall at Kurokami Mountain in Shimotsuke, The Poem of Ariwara no Narihira, and the iconic The Great Wave are included, each accompanied by explanatory text and complementary quotes from writers and artists.

Phoenix

The author’s backstory is also interesting.

With a degree in theatrical scenic design, (McCarthy) worked as a model builder and designer in a variety of fields before discovering the magic of movable books. From the time she dissected her first pop-up book, determined to solve the riddle of how it worked, she was hooked. After experimenting with cards and other small projects, she went on to design and engineer Eye Magic, M.C. Escher Pop-Ups, New York Times—acclaimed Gaudí Pop-Ups, Pop-Up Numbers, Dalié Pop-Ups, and Hokusai Pop-Ups.

Monet’s bedroom at Giverny

Monet came to Hokusai’s work in 1867, when he visited the Japanese pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. There he saw a wealth of ukiyo-e prints, including many by Hokusai, an artist who had died in 1849 and whose works were unknown to him. The chance encounter changed the direction of Monet’s art, “leading him to create a Japanese-inspired garden in the grounds of his home and fill it with waterlilies he obtained from the pioneering nursery of Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, himself gripped in the love of Japanese art.”

Water lily garden (Credit: Andrew Brown)

Japanese art and Hokusai not only influenced impressionists like Monet, but many of the pioneering architects and designers of the late 19th and early 20th century also fell under its spell — individuals such as the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald, as well as the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Now, thanks to the moveable book artistry of Courtney Watson McCarthy, we have also been led to a deeper appreciation of this great Japanese artist.

More to come…

DJB

UPDATE: My friend Jeff Cody sent a note (included in the comments) that I want to point readers to: Regarding Hokusai, Jeff said, I think you’d find this commentary by Jason Farago (NY Times) pretty cool.

For other More to Come posts on Japan, art, gardens, and architecture, click on the links below:

Image: Japanese water lily pond at Giverny by Claire Brown