CELEBRITY DEATH

The death of someone you grew up with is always surprising, and maybe at least a little cautionary. You know the Grim Reaper is eyeing your generation, and that may be cause for anxiety. But when the person who died is a mega celebrity, there’s a certain satisfaction in reflecting that you managed to stay around to see the story end. And I think it’s mainly the ubiquitous figures of our own generation that give us that special relation to their deaths, regardless of whether we were fans or followers or what have you. We were all fellow travelers, in a certain sense, watching the story unfold because it was unfolding in the Big Time in tandem with our own lives and, at times, it was almost impossible to ignore.

For me, Michael Jackson’s death provides an occasion for this kind of reflection, more so than any other performer of his generation, because he was born exactly a year before me and because his fame was so huge, and it helps that his career had such a noticeable three act structure. His childhood era was my childhood era, and he was a star whose voice and jivey movements on variety shows dominated radio and TV c. 1970 -- eleven for me, y’know, the age when most people begin to have some definite ideas about sex and taste in clothes and taste in music and the opposite sex, and all that. Along comes this kid who can out-Smokey Smokey and it registered as ‘late Motown,’ for the simple reason that all the Motown greats I knew of as a kid were quite a bit older. So if someone my own age was suddenly front and center, well, then a new age must be dawning. For me, it didn’t matter much as my tastes were being formulated by folk-rock and British pop and such, but the thing about Michael Jackson, from the start, was that you couldn’t ignore him. But there was also no guarantee that he wasn’t just a flash in the pan.

But the idea that Motown’s great era was over was supported, in my view, by Michael’s plaintive hit “Ben,” which underscored, in its overplayed ubiquity, the reason why, c. 1972, I wasn’t listening to radio much anymore and certainly not AM. Those were largely insipid times, radio-wise, and so the close of the first act is Michael becoming somewhat ‘obscure’ for anyone, like me, who was more concerned with singer-songwriters and rock guitar gods, those staples of FM that now are called ‘classic rock.’ Sure, in the late '70s, when The Bee Gees went disco and had the temerity to enact Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Michael hoofed about as The Scarecrow in The Wiz, but it didn’t exactly catapult him to film stardom, and anyway it looked like he was hanging on to Diana Ross for lack of any other career moves.

But in the '80s, with the birth of MTV, came a vehicle tailor-made for Michael’s showmanship: no more the silly lip-synching in television studios: the songs of his most vital period could be choreographed and enacted as mini-musicals. And Jackson was in his prime. I guess I was too, but I didn’t notice it. Mid-twenties in the early '80s was not a particularly inspiring time, and so it was all that much easier to look on as a spectator -- as everyone seemed to be doing -- of a pop phenomenon. Every age and race of listener seemed to feel the vitality and talent and artistry of Micheal Jackson’s performances at that time. I never bought a copy of Thriller, and the fact that I know the songs is solely from the fact that they were unavoidable, the way those great Motown songs had been in their day. My daughter, who was born the same year as MTV, once walked around the house with a little plush penguin she had dubbed 'Michael Jackson' and for that brief time, at about age four, she was clearly in step with her age group, attesting to the completely infectious energy and timeliness of a musical artist -- as had occurred when I was five and The Beatles came to America.

So that second act ends with Jackson as 'King of Pop,' a supreme talent who can seemingly do no wrong. And even if it’s impossible to do Thriller more than once, the fact of it remains and the feelings of devotion he inspired then never completely subsided, even though he became more and more idiosyncratic. No one minded too much so long as the work he was producing was of the highest quality, but by the late '90s hardly anyone was making that claim any longer.

And so the third act is the one in which he marries Presley’s daughter, and builds Neverland, and starts to look, first, like a slightly more masculine Diana Ross, and eventually like a slightly human mannequin. In this phase, we arrive at that level of mediaized grasp of all things that seems truly debilitating for any kind of creative venture (except providing the technology by which we snoop and snipe): Kurt Cobain, the Great White Hope of the alternative rock world, kills himself; Bill Clinton gets hounded for his sexual misdoings and nearly loses his presidency. It’s a pretty shallow time, and 'Jacko' becomes one of the more garish and cartoonish exhibits in the freakshow of pop culture (though still a million-seller). It’s a period in which I spend a lot of time shaking my head at what so-called postmodernism hath wrought, and there is much to shake one’s head over in Jacko’s career as he hits middle-age, but it’s also a time when ‘excess’ becomes a word with no meaning because there’s no way to measure how far anyone might go in self-indulgence, nor is it easy to fathom the kind of life that excessive wealth makes possible in the late 20th century.

The third act could end with Michael on trial, when the shenanigans at Neverland -- the kind of place perfect for the moment when adolescent urges begin to make themselves felt where formerly all had been innocence and sweetness, and which would be fine except that Jackson’s urges were, allegedly, that of a fortysomething for preteens -- finally blew his cover, at least for yet another mediaized moment. And maybe, if so, it shows how humbling is the law of the land when a family of nobodies can bring to a lowly courtroom in Santa Monica the much vaunted 'King of Pop.' But if that were it, then the ‘next act’ would begin with the 50 shows in London and maybe some version of late laurels as a mature performer igniting a new generation with his showmanship (etc) ... or not.

Instead, the Reaper steps in and draws down the curtain. And the end of Michael Jackson seems to me much like the end of Elvis Presley. Elvis died on the day before my 18th birthday, and I’m sure there are teens standing about now, as I did then, simply shrugging at the death of such an ‘iconic’ ‘influential’ ‘history-making’ ‘dynamic’ ‘innovative’ ‘irreplaceable’ figure. Because by the time Elvis died he was simply a middle-aged guy in a white jumpsuit, doing the Vegas act, and about as interesting to a teen as a vacation with the parents. Jackson, at this point, is better known as a freaky-looking guy of dubious tastes ailing financially and possibly physically. And what the death of such a figure marks is a milestone for those who can remember the immediate effect of ‘the early Elvis’ or ‘the Thriller Michael’ -- it’s suddenly clear how long ago all that was and how little it matters now except in the minds of those who were marked by it.

6-25-2009

It’s time to wander into a room
Where no one knows you,

The passage from familiar to strange
Enacted again as an ending.

Who finds the shadowed glove,
The old hoofer’s shoes, can keep them

As emblems of those delicate steps
We made with you, each pair of eyes

A priceless fix -- a rubber life-raft,
Its pneumatic curves hugged forever

As a child’s broken toy bounces
Back to life on video replay --

To never land in an empty place
Where no one knows your face.

WHATCHA READIN'?

On Facebook I got tagged with a task: list the 15 books you find to be the most memorable. Not necessarily ‘the best’ or ‘the greatest,’ but the books that stayed with you. The ones, as I understood it, that marked you, made you a certain kind of reader. For fb, I simply listed the books, but here I’d like to spell out a little bit what the experience of reading these books meant, and to that end I’m presenting them in the order of my first readings, more or less, so that what emerges is a bit of a bildung, or educational development through a sequence of discoveries. And, as discoveries, I’m unapologetic about the fact that these are all literary texts. Books about science or history, to me, are books about things as they are or were; one reads them to learn something. Books of argument are likewise for the development of thought and knowledge. But literary texts are experiences, and it’s as experiences that I value them.

1. Alice in Wonderland (1865) / Through the Looking Glass (1871) -- Lewis Carroll (British)
This is the book I most readily associate with childhood, with the kind of humor, whimsy, wit, and sense of the fantastic that I’d claim as part of my own make-believe and which, as rendered by Lewis Carroll, stayed with me through adulthood -- as witnessed in my unflagging love for Monty Python’s madcap antics, in my joy at Finnegans Wake’s verbal pyrotechnics, and in my sense that the best books should include narrative, poems, jokes, talking animals and objects, and amazing pen and ink drawings. Whether reciting ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ or ‘Jabberwocky’ to bewildered children, or reading this book aloud, as I have done for younger brothers, daughter, other people’s children, I remain a devotee of Lewis Carroll’s peculiar imagination. I think it’s because this book so resourcefully played hide-and-seek with the conventions of genteel children’s fiction, while remaining genteel children’s fiction, and yet something so much more (‘go ask Alice’) that the book stayed with me, indelibly, from about age 12 or so. I read them in an edition with both books, and here’s a case where I think the sequel is at least as good as the original.

2. David Copperfield (1850) -- Charles Dickens (British)
Dickens, for me, is forever the novelist of early adolescence and no one will ever take that mantle away. The starting place of my love for the English language is Victorian prose, but not just Victorian prose -- Dickens’ Victorian prose. No one does it like Dickens, no one writes prose so enjoyably read aloud, so full of personality and voice. And the story is such as can be read to ten-year-olds with no worry about too much being over their heads. Dickens’ narrators preside over a moral universe and, as with Austen who I didn’t read till much later, the fun is watching how it will all come out and be put more or less right. Copperfield remains in place as the most memorable Dickens for me because of that sense of vocation that permeates it; we are reading of the life of the narrator who will come to be a writer (much like Dickens himself) and that fascinating alchemy, life into art, captured my imagination and never quite let go, for that, to my mind, is still the greatest story, witness my later and longstanding fascination with Joyce and Proust. But that’s not to say that the characters -- each with their familiar tag -- are not also justly indelible, from Barkis is willin’ to the most ’umble Uriah Heep, to the princely, dastardly Steerforth, to Betsy Trotwood, Mr. Dick, the incomparable Mr.and Mrs. Micawber, and all the rest, this is the book most teeming for me with a major supporting cast of ‘character actor’ turns. Which, again, makes it all the more fun for read-aloud performances.

3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) -- Friedrich Nietzsche (German)
I first read this book in 1973, in the era when pseudo-wisdom texts were quite the rage -- The Prophet by Kahil Gibran, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Teaching of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada (I read Seagull, not the others) -- but this one was by a major thinker of the 19th century who had already produced at least two formidable works -- The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science -- when he chose to go off the rails even more and produce this unlikely book in the ‘voice’ of Persian/Iranian prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster). The book, even for readers and scholars of Nietzsche, is a bit of a hard-sell (I base this on a seminar I took at Princeton in 1989, led by the Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nehamas), but for others its sui generis quality is intriguing, even if it is ultimately judged as not rigorous enough as philosophy, not dramatic enough as narrative, and not artistic enough as literature. But a book this odd -- philosophy with jokes and poems and allegories, dramatic scenes, and plenty of pithy aphorisms -- for me was a must. If you weren’t, like me, subjected, from first grade, to the teachings of Christ as interpreted by nuns and priests of the RC Church, then maybe this book would be a much less necessary antithesis in your teens, but I read it annually each year of high school (is it any wonder I didn’t go on dates or participate in many student activities?) and stand by it as the book that made Nietzsche matter to me. In it can be found the most joyous acceptance of life -- a life in which we won’t really know what the truth is and won’t necessarily be able to make anything happen the way we want it to -- that I’ve ever met with.

4. The Brothers Karamazov (1881) -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
When we come to Dostoyevsky, it’s very hard to say which is the novel of The Big Four (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (or, Demons) (1872), The Brothers K) that was the most memorable to me. Each was, in its own way. C&P because it was the first I read and because I was instantly hooked by the übermenschlich dissatisfaction of Raskolnikov, who entered my pantheon as yet another great misanthrope to set beside Hamlet; re:The Idiot, it would be hard for a teen, still nominally a Christian trying to work out what the true imperatives of the faith were, not to be struck by the Christlike travails of Prince Myshkin; and The Possessed was the one I conceived most readily in cinematic terms, casting the novel as a film in the manner of recently successful period films -- I’d say it’s the novel that gave me my strongest sense of scenic structure; but I chose The Brothers K because it shared much of The Possessed’s cinematic power, but gave us protagonists who weren’t played mainly as targets of satire or as cautionary fables. And for all Dostoevsky’s attempts to render the true value of religious faith, I was irritated at Raskolnikov’s conversion, and was, in the end, not willing to accept Myshkin as Christlike, nor even as a Quixote, but at the end of Brothers K I recall -- I was fifteen -- crying real tears with Aloysha, the saintly brother. More than that, I recall that I read Ivan as a more mature version of Raskolnikov, with bits of Rogozhin and Ippolit (my favorite characters in The Idiot) thrown in for good measure, to say nothing of actually meeting the devil, and recognizing, via The Grand Inquisitor, that if Jesus returned his first task would be to separate himself from his believers, but that his believers would reject him just as readily as did the mob of his own day. Then there’s Smerdyakov, and old man Karamazov, characters just waiting to be rendered by some great character actor at the top of his game.

I’m looking forward to reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers K, as I have of the other three; I don’t think my admiration will suffer as a result. I should also say that the great attraction of Dostoyevsky, as my supreme 19th century novelist, was that his stories, prose, and characters had none of the genteel mannerisms of Victorian or Edwardian English prose, that he, unlike Shakespeare-hating Tolstoy, rendered characters that had some of the same wild passions, obsessive griefs, voracious monologues, and hearts of darkness that one found in The Bard, and that, unlike the French, the spirituality of his characters was always in crisis, about to be born or to be killed once and for all. Then there’s the humor of Dostoevsky which seems to be a wicked irony aimed at human foibles, an irony necessary if we would avoid drowning in sentimentality when faced with his waifs and whores and drunken rogues and suicides.

5. Faust I (1806) and II (1832) -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German)
It should be said that Nieztsche, Dostoyevsky, and Goethe would not be on this list so early in my reading, were it not for Hermann Hesse. It was reading his novels, beginning in 9th grade, that turned me to Nietzsche, one of his heroes, and it was probably some Kaufman intro to Nietzsche that gave me the name Dostoyevsky to track down. But Goethe was a bit more of a stretch, mentioned in Hesse (remember the portrait in Steppenwolf?), but as a distant figure, as Shakespeare might be for a Romantic poet; what led me to him was the fact that he wrote Faust, a story that fascinated me as it combined elements from other favorite reading not listed here: the Gothic (I was an avid Poe reader around eleven years old), the occult (read lots of those kinds of tales), the meeting with the devil (as in The Brothers K), and the notion of the heroic tragic figure (which Shakespeare’s plays planted in my mind from the summer between 8th and 9th grade).

But Marlowe’s version didn’t deliver, for me, something that I wanted, without knowing exactly what that ‘something’ was. Maybe I simply didn’t want an Elizabethan Faust, wanted to feel something more medieval at work in the tale. But in saying ‘medieval’ I believe now what I mean is ‘allegorical,’ or ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that Goethe’s version provides. His Faust is epic drama, which was preferable to me to epic poems -- Homer, Dante, Milton -- and to dramas so banal as to be playable on stage. Faust takes place in the poetic imagination, and its tragic sense has to do with human limitations on their grandest scale of conception. Ok, grandest scale for scientists, scholars, artists. In other words, not the epic of battle and adventure, but the epic of the searching, striving soul. Faust became the romantic hero par excellence because his battle was a battle of wits with Mephistopheles, but was also a battle against mediocrity, against staying trapped in what should only be a momentary identity for the man of ceaseless thought, and was further a battle against God as the one who had wagered on him, making him a kind of Job figure, or even a Christ -- doomed to do what his creator had already determined. That’s what I mean by metaphysical. Lear can rage against nature and fortune, as can Macbeth against instruments of darkness, and Milton’s Lucifer can rail against God, but only Goethe’s Faust can question his own identity as the one who must question. And the defeat of Mephisto in the name of Gretchen-transfigured had a kind of quotidian mysticism satisfying to a reader who was already starting to wonder what it was, exactly, that so-called modernism did to romanticism.

In other words, Goethe’s Faust is sui generis not only in the sense of not being containable as a particular genre -- making it one of the most unique reading experiences in all of European literarture -- but also ahead of its time in being as ‘modern’ as you can stand. I like to say that Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Rimbaud ended the 19th century for me (as retrospective reader), but in a sense Goethe had already looked beyond all three. I’m not saying I saw that in my first acquaintance with the text, but the sense of finding a work bizarre enough to qualify as something wholly other (not ‘literature’ in any traditional, disciplinary sense) was there in both the early and the enduring fascination.

To Be Continued...