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by Adam Gopnik, December 23, 2005 12:29 PM
The New York transit strike is over, the buses buzz and cough again outside our windows, and we seem likely to get in two full days of shopping after three of mere sporadic consumption, a thing my wife disapproves of. Last night we took the children to see The Nutcracker as we do every year, and I enjoyed it greatly as I always do ? no matter how many times one sees it, the music is beautiful. But I am still struck uneasily, as I have been for the last few years of performance, by how much tragic foreboding there is implicit in it. The two civilizations that came together to produce it, after all ? the German romantic civilization that E. T. A. Hoffman came from, and the Russian one that Tchaikovsky celebrated ? would both in the next century know catastrophes that would be unique in human history, if the other one wasn't arguably worse. And one sees, in the first act of The Nutcracker, offered as play, the original source of the disasters: the small boys in late 19th century Russian house all march as make believe soldiers in mock-drill, and everyone is delighted to watch them. It puts one inescapably in mind of John Keegan's point that it was the mass militarization of civilian culture in the late nineteenth century ? that cultural change that had monarchs out of their court robes and into military uniforms, complete with medals ? that was the entirely new thing of the time, and led directly to the catastrophe of the First World War. The boys in the Nutcracker house are in training for a war whose extent and destructive force that they don't yet conceive. Watching the children play at war beneath the Christmas Tree, I can't help but recall how easily liberal civilizations have been driven to suicide in the recent past ? and turn of the century Russia was, as Nabokov never tired of explaining to Edmund Wilson, if not yet a liberal civilization at least one with many hopeful signs of becoming one ? by an infatuation with war and a fear of national humiliation. What awaits our own Nutcracker house is unknown, but the suicidal impulses are there every morning on the front page. My brother Blake, to retain the family note of hyper-texting, who is the art critic at the Washington Post, last year wrote a cheering commentary in favor of using "Merry Christmas" in place of "Happy Holidays," even if one was not a Christian, on the sound grounds that Christmas is an ancient pagan holiday in origin, nicely hyper-linked to the lovely nativity story in Luke, which even orthodox Christians agree was a late add-on to the gospels, and so belongs already to the realm of pleasing fiction. (There could never have been a census that required everyone to go back to their native towns, because the chaos it would have created in the Roman Empire would have been even worse than a New York city transit strike.) Two days ago, after weighing the ups and downs of C. S. Lewis in a very good radio discussion with, among many shining others, E. J. Dionne, I said to our hostess at the end, "Merry Christmas" ? meaning it both as an act of conciliation to the ghost of Lewis, an act of greeting to my brother, who lives there in D.C., and as a mildly rebellious act of annexation, a hyper-linked greeting to the many faces of the season. But what we mean by "Merry Christmas" is complex enough and, in its way, rich enough to take one last moment of long-winded bloggy reflection. It would be fatuous to pretend that the holiday is somehow free of Christian content just because we want it to be ? symbolism may be complex but it is never without content ? and equally fatuous to look past both the sincere, well, passion of the Christian believers who claim the day, and the long history of persecution of the non-believers, who annex it. One can make up a holiday, but one can't just make up a holiday. (One recalls Phillip Roth's narrator's exquisitely rendered unease in Letting Go about Christmas, and his compensatory love of Thanksgiving, which carried over into Portnoy's Complaint.) Certainly, one couldn't celebrate Christmas in France without being aware of it as first of all a religious and even tragic holiday ? listen to William Christie's rendering of Charpentier's Christmas music ? with Easter just off in the wings. Certainly, I began the story of The King In The Window on Epiphany in Paris, recognizing the sacred nature of the date, and yet in another way secularizing it, making the ascension of a young boy to the role of one of the three Kings into the motif of an adventure, though one with a serious purpose: Oliver really does become a King, by accident, and has to learn how to be one after he already is one. I used, or re-used, knowingly and I hope lightly, Christian myth throughout ? a key scene takes place in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris ? rather I would say as Lewis reused pagan myth for his own Christian purposes. (Narnia after all, is guarded by a banished faun.) The moral of the book is an Enlightenment moral ? thinking is better than trusting to your unconscious ? but the imagery of the book is, often and unashamedly, Medieval and even mystic. I wonder if this blending of myth ? in which Christians have always participated as much as pagans ever did ? is not some violation of our idea of the sacred, but just what we mean by the sacred: our own set of necessary images worked out as a story whose meaning we may scarcely know. There seems something rococo, needless and rather arrogant about inventing another holiday to celebrate, or being too hesitant about this holiday's religious weight. The core symbolism of Christmas, after all, is almost a treasury of all the symbols and beliefs that are inextinguishable from any human heart, that are in fact, inextinguishable because they take as a subject the idea of the inextinguishable: light in darkness, birth and hope in hardship, the certainty of spring in a bleak midwinter. These feelings are tied so deeply to the rhythm of the season, and to the rhythms of human existence, that
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by Adam Gopnik, December 22, 2005 11:25 AM
This blogging, I now see, is addictive stuff, and what makes it addictive is the hyper-text, the links, provided in this case by my diligent Powells editor. It makes the casual tightrope of allusion across which the writer normally walks ? a nod to a sister here, to a much-loved book there, a novelty product elsewhere ? into a deep net of solid cross reference beneath his feet. The things really exist; you can check them out for yourself! (Imagine if Tolstoy could have written War and Peace in this manner: "Eh, bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now on more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you ? if you are not telling me that this means war???.") The links, which shine for the writer like Christmas lights on the dead tree of his prose, are both thrilling, as they glowingly wink the reader on to deeper knowledge ? an off-hand reference becomes a hard, positive thing ? and falsely seductive, since of course the hyperlinks illuminate the paragraph without really improving it, give it a sense of depth that is enlivening rather than really enlarging. It reminds me of that Christmas, in 1966, I think, when we got a 3-D tic-tac-toe game for the first time. At first you are amazed by all the new dimensions, vertical and diagonal, that enliven the over-simple game, and it is not until New Year's that you realize you are still just playing tic-tac-toe. That was the same Christmas, as memory rushes in, when I got my first Beatles records: The Early Beatles, the American version of Please, Please Me; Help; and the just-out Revolver. Forever after, the Beatles, too, have always been associated for me with Christmas, and though this is obviously accidental, I have discovered that it is, generationally, widespread. A lot of people got Beatles records for Christmas and mixed them up with the season. Accidental but not, to coin a word, unserendipitous; the Beatles' music, in its neat classical forms, has some of the haunting quality of a carol. Certainly a song like "Yesterday" is closer to "What Child Is This?" than either are to anything else, and both are deeply English. (Set question for some future music scholar: Compare and contrast John Rutter, wonderful English inventor of new carols ? "The Donkey Carol," "Born in a Stable" ? with Paul McCartney.) The pain of the transit strike falls unevenly, as injustice always does: if you have to actually get somewhere it is unspeakably tedious and difficult. Yesterday, the trip in and out of the office and radio studio and back home had me walking, by my count, more than two hundred blocks. (I can only count distances in New York city blocks, even in the country; the house on the beach that we rented last summer was, I told the children, two blocks from the ocean, even though there is nothing there but sand.) I also had a long immobile stretch served with two other sufferers in a cab on Second Avenue. But if you have nowhere you have to go, why, then not going anywhere while staring at the stiller streets is a pleasure. Meanwhile, I am using the enforced stillness to begin writing, or anyways sketching, new books. I've started my next fantasy novel ? not, as I insist on saying, a book for children of all ages, but for adults of any condition, including juvenile ones ? and the children have been debating it, back and forth. Luke would like the book to be a clean break with The King in the Window, starting with a new child and a new place and a new magical logic; and smaller Olivia, whose book in a sense it will be ? about a girl in New York, as The King is about a boy in Paris ? would like it to be attached to the rules and characters of the first book. He wants his world cleanly distinguished from hers; she wants her world indistinguishable from her older brother's. Not the first time this split has shown itself. (Olivia gave the book-to-be its title The Steps Across The Water.) I have a clear idea for it, and a beginning and an end, but the middle ? ah, the middle ? will probably take a couple of years to construct. Beginnings come easily and ends come quickly ? the muse (mine being a quick but breathless girl, who I imagine looks a bit like Keira Knightley, minus that rabbity moue) brings both in what I sometimes think is a deliberate tease. But the middle ? ah, the middle is all sweat.
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by Adam Gopnik, December 21, 2005 11:02 AM
The bus and subway strike in New York is now into its second day, and second bitterly cold morning. I didn't go to Washington yesterday, which seems wise, since the mob scenes at Penn Station looked like people waiting for a train in Madrid in 1940. I shall do the radio broadcast, about Lewis and children's literature, including my own The King in the Window anyway, but will walk the fifty or so blocks from home to a radio station to do it, good for the soul and sneakers. I wish they made Heelys in my size; Heelys, for those without smallish and middle-sized children, are sneakers with drop-down wheels in their soles, which fall like landing gear when the child wants to glide somewhere. They are extremely cool, and allow a child who is being hectored by a parent on a fine point of conduct simply to sail away down the street, imperturbable. Although the papers this morning are full of anger at the strikers, I didn't sense much actual rage on the streets yesterday, or even on the news and radio I heard throughout the day. Just a will to slog through it. Crowds are made up of irascible individuals, but tend to become stoical as groups, for a little while anyway. When I lived through the transit strikes in France exactly ten years ago ? at exactly the same time of year, too ? I thought that the Parisian willingness to endure it more or less uncomplainingly, even though a willingness to endure things more or less uncomplainingly is not typically a Parisian virtue, was the consequence of the old French traditions of sympathy with syndicalism. I'm now inclined to think that it's a more universal trait: at first, at least, we treat acts of man as acts of god, to be borne. The strike, for all the suffering it's causing, does have a snowstorm-like effect on the city. On some avenues the traffic is running bumper to bumper for hours, but elsewhere, where cars are banned outright ? so that a few avenues can be saved for emergency vehicles; I am slow on the uptake, and it took me a while to figure that out ? the effect is calming and nearly pastoral. Last night, however, our family was compelled into virtuous cultural action; Martha, my wife, rose from her sick bed to accompany my son's fifth grade class out to Brooklyn, where they had long-held tickets to see an original-instruments, all-male version of Measure for Measure (all-male for Elizabethan authenticity, I mean). They car-pooled with other class mothers and kids, and we got steady every-ten-minute or so cell-phone calls from them as they inched along the FDR drive and across the bridge, a half-hour drive ending up taking about two. Anything for the Bard, such is the motto of my son's fifth-grade, even the long trip to Brooklyn in a transit strike. The six-year-old and I, impelled into our own cultural hi-jinks, decided to go see Pride and Prejudice a few blocks away on 86th street. Actually, I pressed her to see P & P; she wanted to go see the Narnia movie for the third time. She identifies completely with Lucy, the overlooked little girl who leads the way to Narnia. She shares none of my announced Narnia-scruples; the cobbler's children have no shoes, and the critic's children have no crabby opinions, or at least not the crabby opinions of the critic. Pride and Prejudice was actually an easy sell, though, since it stars Keira Knightley, whom she knew and liked from Bend It Like Beckham, her favorite movie, and Pirates of the Caribbean. P and P was fine; at least the ever-beautiful Keira looked more ravishing than ever as a brunette, though that slightly rabbity, toothy moue she does would be just as winning as she thinks it is if she did it half as often as she thinks she needs to. But, though I should have known this from my friend Anthony Lane's review, still I was shocked by how Bronteized the movie was! It has a very lovely German Romantic design, all moonlight and plaintive women at windows, but how wrong they are for the story. In the war between sense and sensibility, after all, Jane Austen is entirely on the side of sense ? her peculiar genius was to make sense seem sexier than sensibility ever does. But having Lizzie as an romantic heroine, staring out at the windswept ? well, not moors, but moorish things seen from mountaintops ? deprives the whole story of its motive, since Lizzie is just as outraged by Lydia and Wickham's running away as Darcy or the Countess or anyone else, and even more relieved when they are made respectable by Darcy's money. It ends with Darcy muttering at Lizzie, "Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy...." just like Danny Kaye in the dream sequence in Hans Christian Anderson. (Though in that one, obviously, he mutters "Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Anderson???" I have never had the chance to do this, since the one condition that my own Lizzie made on agreeing to marry me was never to have to use my name.) In the long, slow Wuthering Heights, or Lows, of the movie, we could hear the witch sneering in the Narnia movie and the dragon roaring in Harry Potter movie in the little theaters on either side of us, and I felt a touch guilty for dragging the baby to this one. But she sat rapt and upright, watching, right through. And she seemed to enjoy it on the whole. "What was the moral of that movie, would you say?" I asked, as we walked together on the silent streets on our way out, with what I hope she knew was slightly mock sententiousness. "Get to know people," she said immediately, "Get to know people before you think you know them. But that's not, like, a moral, really, Dad, that's more, like, advice, Get to know people before you think you, like, know them. A moral is, like, Be wise." Then she glided away from me on her Heelys, down the busless street. I thought she had a real point about Jane Austen there; Austen makes moral drama out of material that we don't usually think of as belonging to the realm of morality. She makes what look like questions of manners into questions of morality, questions of the conduct of the table into questions of the choices of the heart, and shows us that manners in the end are really just the surfacing of morality. (I was startled, in the credits of the film, to see that Jenny Uglow was listed as historical advisor; she's the author of the wonderful
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by Adam Gopnik, December 20, 2005 10:53 AM
We woke this morning to find the New York buses and subways on strike, and Madison Avenue, outside our windows, shut down tight even to cars, for some strange retaliatory reason, and so we are locked into our little Manhattan neighborhood. Fortunately we did the bulk of our Big Shopping yesterday ? stocking up at Toys R Us on huge pieces of brightly colored plastic with computer chips inside, which hide from kids or race when kids press their buttons or rock or roll or do battle, brightly colored plastic robot against brightly colored plastic robot, in fighting modes medieval or modern ? and then took it all home on what may be remembered as the Last Bus Ride. I am supposed to travel to Washington D.C. today to take part in a radio discussion tomorrow morning on C.S. Lewis and Narnia, but doubt that I will be able to find my way to Penn Station in the striking cold. My wife, still fluish, doubts the wisdom of any movement at all on the part of any thinking being on this day. So I spend the morning sorting through books and swearing that I will finally use this holiday to organize the piles and hills and small heaps of books ? some on bookshelves, most in piles or even hidden behind screens ? that are the result of a bad book-buying habit, and particularly the consequence of having spent much of the last two months out on a book tour. No one, I think, has pointed out that the one problem with a book tour is books. I don't mean the book you're, well, exhibiting ? a suitably nineteenth century word; Barnum exhibited his midgets, he didn't promote or sell them, and that is what we authors do with our books. I mean the books you pick up in the bookstores along the way. Sending an author, or this author at least, from bookstore to bookstore, is like sending my six-year-old on a tour of chocolate shops: the pleasure soon gets drowned in the realization that you really can't have it all. At every bookstore along the long, long road I have traveled with The King In The Window ? the adventure story I have written for adults of all ages, including young ones ? I found a new book, or more often two, that I was desperate to own. Everyone says that the book business has become codified and limited and to some degree of course this is true. But, blessings on the heads of all the independent book-sellers, Powell's among them ? and if every artist until the nineteenth century could lavish praise on his patrons, why not I on mine? ? I seemed to find a book everywhere I went that I just had to have and read. Some were local: accounts of Portland noir or of overlooked Seattle woman poets of the nineteenth century; odd corners of San Francisco history or strange facts from the San Jose past. I have a particular weakness for collections of columns by hard-drinking, bittersweet local columnists of the forties and fifties, of which there seem to be a lot, all including an "I'll Be Home for Christmas from the Bar" piece. Others were more cosmopolitan or even European or scientific and philosophical: I found Gerald Weissmann's book on Darwin and Audubon on a high shelf at Powell's, a book I'd wanted for a long time, and an old volume by the great Edward Marsh, the British wit, at I think Elliot Bay in Seattle. I even found in Portland an unknown (to me) book about the Montreal Canadiens of the nineteen-seventies, inarguably the greatest hockey team of all time, written by their play-by-play man Dick Irvin, and was so excited to find it that I put it down on a stray shelf when I went to read and never found it again; I feel about it still the way the man in Gogol felt about that overcoat. The trouble is that by the time you get to the airport, the book bag feels achingly heavy, and then by the time you're ready to leave the next hotel ? with another score of books in the satchel from the next bookstore ? the idea of schlepping them all through the airport and hoisting them into the tiny overhead bin, and bringing them on home just brings tears of exhaustion to your already exhausted eyes. So, regretfully, but decisively, like a Russian aristocrat of the last centuries lightening the sled by throwing moujiks to the pursuing wolves, you toss books aside and leave them in the hotel room, for the cleaners, or next guest, to find. I left Cecil Beaton's diaries in Seattle, one of those long, encyclopedic plankton-into-people things of Richard Dawkins on my bedside table in Portland, a book about the onset of the Battle of Britain by Ian Fleming's much superior brother Peter in, I think, Los Angeles. Others leave their hearts in San Francisco; I left there a copy of a life of Genghis Kahn that had held me spellbound over one lonely dinner (the great Kahn turned out to be a pioneering multi-culturalist and thoughtful, broad minded ecumenicist, sort of Bill Moyers with a big mustache and a yurt) for the next pilgriming author to find. (My wife points out that I should have just had them shipped, but me finding a "shipper" while out on the road is pretty improbable; it's all I can do to find the bookstores.) But people find what they need in books, wherever they may find them. My wife, Martha, still, as I say, fluish, has been re-reading Salinger's stories in her sick room. Fill to the brim with that great and still, if anything, insufficiently appreciated man's writing, she has paused as I come in and out of the sick room, to read out loud to me magical moments of description and dialogue. Nothing though quite equaled a moment she found in Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters when Buddy Glass stops and, caught in a traffic jam uptown, watches disconsolately the traffic going downtown on the same street. "You realize what this means," she said, her feverish eyes alight with a Harold Bloom-like glow of insight. "Madison Avenue once ran both ways!" Madison Avenue, I should explain for non-New Yorkers, now runs, relentlessly, one way, uptown ? or did, until this morning, when not a car or bus can be seen on its lovely, pristine asphalt.
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by Adam Gopnik, December 19, 2005 11:24 AM
Having, over the past few months, found my own children's book, The King in the Window, doing strenuous and generally losing battle on various lists with Bill O'Reilly's children's book ? How to Become a Seven-Year-Old Reactionary Blowhard, or whatever it's called ? I don't want anyone to think that I am a sore loser just because I think that O'Reilly has it all wrong about secularists and Christmas. (I am a sore loser, but I wouldn't want you to think that.) I mean by this his notion that the liberal humanist has turned on Christmas out of lassitude and an unreadiness to meet the demands of the spiritual life. In fact, the secular humanist Christmas is approximately ten times more demanding than the religious kind. The believer, after all, only has to bow his head and profess his faith, and go to what was quaintly called, on the public service announcements of my childhood, the Church of his choice. The non-believer, who nonetheless loves the season, lacking true faith, has to immerse himself instead in events, with all their eventfulness. Just this week, our own Jewish-Lutheran-Pagan-Buddhist ménage, for instance, has tickets for Messiah, the Nutcracker (with dinner after at a Russian restaurant where they do the thing right, complete with decorations and presents for the children), the Radio City Christmas show, and a carol ceremony at the Unitarian Church down the street (where last year the minister, wisely avoiding the whole touchy Bethlehem-stable issue, gave an odd though informative seasonal sermon about how Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer came to be written.) We are also giving, at my wife's insistence, two Christmas parties, one for unattached pagans on Christmas Eve, and another for atheistic families on Christmas Night, for which one amateur piano-playing father has had to learn the chord sequence for Mel Torme's "Christmas Song." The believers, believe me, have nothing to complain about. They should be grateful for all the spare time mere faith provides. This Christmas week, to be sure, promises to be busier than any other recently simply because my wife, Martha, was down with the flu all last week, and couldn't do her usual efficient preliminary shop-scan, which usually solves all smaller stocking-present problems even before they present themselves. It also left me with the usual struggle, common to Good Dads in this age of the Good Dad: dressing the six-year-old girl in the morning. In my experience, each father has a small area of expertise in this field, and doesn't easily stray from it. Mine is tights. I do tights very well, picking them out to match and helping them on with a solid bunch-and-pull system, harder than it looks. I do tights, but I don't do hair. The whole business of barrettes ? I can't even confidently spell the word ? and clips is beyond me. As a consequence, the six-year-old girl arrived at kindergarten looking a bit like Zelda Fitzgerald just before madness hit: impeccably dressed, but significantly disheveled. (My eleven-year-old boy, of course, dresses himself, on the American eleven-year-old boy principle that all clothes should be large enough for two eleven-year-old boys to fit into.) The idea of belief, to be sure, takes odd turns in this odd time. Last night, during that Messiah at Carnegie Hall, between choruses I leafed through the PLAYBILL, and found one of those prescription drug ads, urging your doctor to become a pusher for his own good. It was for a sleep aid, and warned sternly that you shouldn't try it "unless you have several hours to devote to sleeping." An odd thought, this, having to be devoted to unconsciousness before you could attempt to cure insomnia; as though one should have several hours each day dedicated to aimlessness, a period of the year specially consecrated to blank mindlessness. Our fathers ? or your fathers, somebody's fathers anyway ? kept, as Handel reminds us, the birth, the passion, and the ascent high in their devotions. We are spiritually superior; we cannot even take a pill without being devoted to its effects. So there O'Reilly.
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