a blind flaneur

Last night on the jetty at the mouth of 16-Mile Creek, a boorish oaf felt that he should tell us that we were facing the wrong direction to see the sunset. Had we listened to him, we would have missed this roseate drama in the clouds east of Oakville. [Photo by Ms. Modigliani]

I’ll admit it.  I never gave Lord Byron a scrap of  respect. It started with the name. I couldn’t get past “Lord” and its absurd notion of hereditary privilege. Whenever I needed a whipping boy for the excesses of Romanticism, Byron was my flagellant.

Along comes Edna O’Brien, who’s written a new biography called Byron in Love. I could listen to Edna O’Brien read the phone book. She read snatches of her biography and this legendary poem in an On Point interview with Tom Ashbrook. She describes the poet as both beautiful and lame, with a complicated sense of self embracing “deformity transformed” and an “under look” that women found irresistible. He may have been the model for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

I knew he was a monster, but I never considered Byron as a person with a disability. Maybe I should give him another chance.

She Walks In Beauty, Like the Night
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Laurence Sterne was a flaneur and blogger before either word was uttered. Consider his credo  from Tristram Shandy:

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.”

(Left5)Laurence  Sterne painted in watercolour by French artist Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, ca. 1762. [Source: Wikipedia]

Ms. M took this poem to a memorial service for a friend in Oakville. When you need to hear affirmation, count on Mary Oliver.

When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

—–
From New and Selected Poems

For several Sunday mornings now, I have walked down to the Little Miami River following a path in the woods that takes me past some mossy stones that once made up foundations for several small cabins. Runaway slaves found refuge there on their journey north to Canada in the 1850s. The spot isn’t far from the Mill where I used to live, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad. The woods are so thickly overgrown now with honeysuckle that I have to search for the stones. In the quiet of the morning I’ve heard a wood thrush singing, even this late in August. I pause then and hum a little of  Duke’s gospel masterpiece, “Come Sunday.” And I think of Emerson’s simplest statement of faith, “I believe in the still small voice.”

This clip of Come Sunday comes from Ellington’s First Sacred Concert in 1965. The singer is Esther Marrow. Mahalia Jackson recorded another live version with Ellington in 1958, on the eve of her own legendary performance at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Update 082910: Into this arc of connections from Emerson to Ellington comes Moncure Conway (left) , abolitionist preacher and biographer of Tom Paine, who died in Paris in 1907. Thanks to Sue Parker for introducing him in the comments.  “The Grinnell’s old barn also still exists close by (although in much altered form!) where the formerly enslaved group resided, according to Moncure Conway’s autobiography… Underground Railroad lore is often only that, but in this case I feel confident because of these two sources. Sadly, the only other account I have found about Grinnell Road was in the Siebert papers at Ohio Historical Society. There I found an account of a running young woman captured (by slave hunters) on horseback on Grinnell Road.”

Duke Ellington in 1963. [Photo by John Pratt/Keystone Features-Getty Images/NYT]

One of my great joys in listening to Radio Open Source is Christopher Lydon’s reliable insight into the cultural resonance of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I never imagined a connection between Emerson and Duke Ellington until Lydon traced it in an interview with Ellington biographer Harvey Cohen:

Who was Duke Ellington, really, without the music? I say he was the Ralph Waldo Emerson of the 20th Century — the affirming genius of a specially American democratic energy. Emerson, like Ellington, was both blues man and enthusiast, a definer of public style and inner ecstasies. Ellington, like Emerson, was a lonely, compulsive composer better known as an itinerant performance artist. It intrigues me that Ellington and Emerson were both towering individualists, each set in his own band of eccentric voices: Ellington in his orchestra, Emerson in the Concord circle.  Both would be remembered as enablers if they had created nothing themselves. It is fun to think of Johnny Hodges, the alto saxophone star, as Ellington’s Hawthorne, or of co-composer Billy Strayhorn as Duke’s Walt Whitman. Or of Herman Melville as Emerson’s version of Ben Webster or Charles Mingus.

Albert Murray, in Stomping the Blues and elsewhere, helped me feel the giant scale of Ellington’s achievement, up there with the Henry James class of American immortals. “Those who regard Ellington as the most representative American composer have good reason,” Murray writes. “Not unlike Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner in literature, he quite obviously has converted more of the actual texture and vitality of American life into first rate, universally appealing music than anybody else.”

You can hear echoes of Emerson’s “American scholar” address in Harvey Cohen’s take on the connection:

Before World War II, here in the United States, if you were teaching at a college, as I do, it was dangerous to your career to teach courses about American art, American music, American literature — because it was not held up as anything respectable. Everybody knew at that time that European culture was the kind of culture that everybody should aspire to, and that American culture, especially African-American culture, was second-rate or worse.

What I argue in the book is that Ellington was a primary influence in getting Americans to accept their own art as something serious and lasting. He did it by broadcasting his music on the radio from the Cotton Club in the late 1920?s, which really changed the definition of African-American music. His extended pieces really expanded what Americans expected from African-Americans.

Also when Ellington went on tour for the first time after the Cotton Club, he toured on a theater circuit. People were listening to the Ellington Orchestra while sitting down, as in a theater or at a classical concert. To us today this is not so striking. But back in the day, in the context of the 1930s, it was huge.

According to Lydon:

Harvey Cohen’s jam-packed Duke Ellington’s America makes it a great long season of jazz biographies — after Robin Kelley’s Thelonious Monk and Terry Teachout’s Pops.

After listening to an Open Source interview with biographer Harvey Cohen,  I wanted to hear Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige Suite. It’s one of Ellington’s longest and most ambitious compositions. It’s had a complicated and incomplete recording history since its premiere at Ellington’s first Carnegie Hall concert in 1943. I believe I have a vinyl record of that legendary performance, first released in 1977, somewhere in my house. But even if I dug it out of storage, I no longer have a stereo turntable to play it.

So YouTube comes to the rescue. Thanks to Praguedive for posting excerpts from the 1944 studio recording. Part 1 includes “Work Song” and “Come Sunday from the “Black” movement, and part 2 features “The Blues” from the “Brown” movement. The last clip here is the complete “Brown” movement from the Carnegie Hall concert.

Rick Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, says he doesn’t claim ‘architectural tolerance” as a doctrine. But his evocation of a diverse and tolerant streetscape caught my attention. It sounds like something Jane Jacobs articulated 50 years ago. It’s certainly the kind of street this flaneur would walk down. I want to think that such architecture naturally would accommodate the accessibility needs of people with disabilities.

Bell was talking about possible design concepts for the controversial Islamic community center that’s been proposed for the neighborhood near Ground Zero in Manhattan. He was interviewed this morning by Steve Inskeep on NPR:

INSKEEP: So, if you were the architect that they came to to design this building, you’d be looking for something that was somehow open to the community, but at the same time allowed a certain amount of privacy and contemplation once you got inside.

Mr. BELL: That says it very well. An opening to the community, I think, also has to address the rancor, the controversy that has grown up about this building, fears that some in the community have that need to be addressed – and no better place than here.

INSKEEP: Do you think it’s likely that no matter how its designed, no matter how its built – that if it ever does come to pass, if the Islamic center is constructed – that the vast majority of people who come to Lower Manhattan or even who walk on that particular street a couple blocks from the World Trade Center site, will never even notice it?

Mr. BELL: People see what they want to see. And there will be people who will stop at this building after it’s done and say, you see, I told you so. Look how different and alienating this is. So different from our experience, how different from my synagogue, how different from my church, ho different from the place I work or the place I live. That won’t be bad. You know, it’ll cause people to maybe think about why it’s different and in what ways it might also be similar.

As an architect, I dont think I would claim a doctrine of architectural tolerance, but if you look at the streetscape of New York in terms of its great variety of styles, its great historical variety of when buildings were built, it’s an active and vibrant mix of architecture that talks about how, on this world, we have to live together.

Andy sent me a link to this clip of La flambée montalbanaise, sung by Christiane Raby (see her on Myspace). He’s learning this tune on an accordion, which must be formidable! His arrangement is similar to this one by Quadro Nuevo:

George Caleb Bingham. The Jolly Flatboatmen in Port. 1857. Oil on canvas.  St. Louis Art Museum.