Concert: The White Stripes

The White Stripes. WoW.

We arrived at the Boston Opera House at 7:20 pm to see the 7:30 show. We should have known that there would be an opening band. Time was ours to kill. We sat in the front row of the mezzanine seats, just right of center. The place was bathed in a warm glow from acres of ornate golden plasterwork. Warm chandeliers lined the side walls and the deep red of the seats was a ready sea for White Stripes aficionados. The fans barely trickled in for the opening band. We sat there, mouths agape, as music pounded our eardrums. A drummer and two guitar players pounded and screamed and generally looked and sounded great. Too great. After several rocking tunes abused our bodies, L. glanced at his watch. It had been eight minutes. We felt old. We meekly went to the lavish foyer for a glass of something to dull our senses. I opted for a shot of vodka. It was key.

We sat on a marble step in an empty niche near the impressive bust of Benjamin Franklin Keith (B.F Keith), who commissioned the original building. The tiny plaque beneath his oversized bust had tinier print. We watched people stroll over and squint at it. We watched the crowd descend and ascend the curving staircase in front of us. A rough-around-the-edges crowd. Some fashionistas, but mostly semi-dolled up girls with guys in jeans. A distinctive couple popped up the steps, each with two drinks. They had outwitted the bar line. He had better hair than her, dark and artfully hung across his forehead. They both wore the trendy new pencil thin jeans. They bounced with anticipation. Finally the lights dimmed and the masses headed for their seats.

The mostly empty theater filled up rapidly as we found our seats again. The lovely pencil pants couple had the two seats next to us. They hit their feet and jiggled, in the best sense possible, for almost every tune. At the end of the concert I heard them tell someone that they were over from London for just this one night. See you in London, then, right.

The White Stripes strolled onto the black, white and red stage and it was energy, noise and that relentless and deeply satisfying drum beat for an hour and a half. I have to say they are fucking good. They have these clean lines and a deep, sexual connection to the music they spin. It is fun to watch them. Meg, the drummer, exudes chill. Jack, the other half, exudes pleasure. And then, at about the second song, Jack took off his long black coat and bent down to chat with the front row. He plucked a nine-year-old girl from the row, after a nod from Dad, and got her comfy just behind the piano. That tiny tot enjoyed the entire show from her privileged vantage. When Meg come stage front to sit and play her bongos, Jack held the little girl’s hand and brought her forward. They gave her a tambourine and she happily tamped that thing off beat for two songs. The audience loved this. A punk rocker, doing his own thing, wearing togs from Hot Topic and sporting a razor thin mustache, man of pleasure who can sing to a nine year old like the ultimate cool Dad. It could have been creepy, Michael Jacksonesque, but he was straight level wholesome when he offered his hand and she clutched it having the time of her nine year old life.

Did I mention the noise? WoW. I have never gotten the bazillion decibels thing. I guess this is why I have never really been a concert fan. I prefer the intimacy of a back waters blues bar, where you can see the eyes of the singer and he can, and does, talk to you. Not that the Whites are impersonal. Meg and Jack, formerly married to one another, had an undercurrent of modern love in their stage work that turns intimacy on its head and gives me a kind of hope for all of us.

This White Stripes concert was worth every sacrificed brain cell and any irreparable damage to inner ear drums. I don’t know the first thing about Detroit, garage rock, punk, British pop and couldn’t name a band in the same league as the White Stripes. But I know that they put on a damn good show. And probably once was enough, for me.

September Book Club: The Historian

Warning:

You may want to wait until after you finish the book before you continue. . .

The Historian
By Elizabeth Kostova

Professor Rossi suddenly appeared gray as the humor drained from his eyes. “ ‘Dracula – ” He paused. “Dracula – Vlad Ţepeş – is still alive.’ ”

Indeed Dracula lives. This is the narrator’s “cri de coeur” as she draws the reader into a fast paced tour of libraries and monasteries across the globe. An American man, her father, who I see as less than dashing, joins forces with a Hungarian speaking Romanian to fight evil. The woman, Helen, seeks revenge against her absentee father; he is compelled to rescue his doctoral advisor who has mysteriously disappeared. They fall in love, of course, somewhere between the silver bullets and the archive stacks. It is their daughter who tells the story of adventure, temptation and sacrifice. She has grown into a staid professor herself, but the appearance of a book has caused her to dig into her father’s past and tell the story so that someone out there in the world of books will hear her cry and beware Dracula, who lives and lurks among us.

Kostova presents the hero/devil perspective problem in history. The Wallachians view Vlad as a hero because he held off the Turks and their unholy traditions. The Turks see him as a devil/terrorist who threatens their power. The world sees Dracula as an enemy to the natural order, but Dracula and his minions see humans as fundamentally evil and are willing to “live” with the consequences of this philosophy. In life Vlad was a warrior willing to destroy life to gain/retain power. In death he is willing to take life so that he may pursue the great books in which the “truth” of humanity’s dark side is preserved. What is his ultimate goal? He does not want to gain power over humanity. Rather he sees himself as a guardian of the truth. A painful truth that humanity tries to deny by preserving only the good books and all the while falling victim to their own evil nature in the course of history. So Dracula is a protector of the truth of humanity as evil. While this does not make him redeemable, it does give him a valuable role in humankind. This may explain why he lives among us today, at least in our literary souls.

Kostova presents Dracula's evil as pure ego—pure self interest. Perhaps evil is inherent in human nature, but it is not the predominate trait unless it is cultivated. It can not be set loose easily—except perhaps in large anonymous crowds. If the personal/relational is maintained, then evil energy/power can be sublimated or transformed into harmless activity—sports or competition, or even civilization building. Vlad stopped defending his people and instead fought the faceless/inhuman Turks. In this process he lost control of his evil tendencies and become evil himself.

Yes, Evil exists. Yes, humankind wants to hide or deny this truth. We want to suppress this truth precisely because we cannot conquer evil AND we fear that evil is not a supernatural force (like Dracula) but an intrinsic feature of our humanity. It is the beast inside of us as Golding knew and illustrated in The Lord of the Flies. Kostova hints at this by presenting Helen as Vlad's long distant descendant who carries Vlad’s blood. She gives both his hidden genetic evil and the more pressing contamination of her vampire wound to her daughter, our narrator. The beast is inside of her, but perhaps it is not inside of all of us. So, like the narrator, we must confront the possibility that we have inherited evil or that we could be contaminated at any time by a sudden or subtle attack. We must learn to live with this knowledge. Perhaps this is why the narrator never marries. The novel supports the idea that family and love are worth protecting from evil, even at great personal sacrifice. Yet the narrator does not marry or have a family in the end. Instead she has devoted her time to research, uneventful travel, her students and friends, writing innocuous historical accounts and university politics. This could be a plot device to free up the narrator to fight evil in a sequel perhaps.

Kostova’s novel is timely, and not because of the tension between the West and East. Specialists in America knew that the a sizable population of poor and elderly people in New Orleans would not be able to afford escape or be physically unable to help themselves in the event of the inevitable Hurricane. Yet nothing was done to effectively solve this problem. I suspect that much of the population provided the work force to support more affluent tourists in the city. Their labor was necessary to support the city’s lucrative tourist trade. Thus we had the intellectual power to see the problem, but lacked the will to do it. Is this not inherent evil? To see injustice and stand aside? Did that population really have a choice about living there? Were there excellent public schools to empower them to choose their careers? Did they have healthcare to empower them physically to pursue a productive career? They suffered in life and eked out meager lives alongside our quaint picture of New Orleans. Now they are exiles and many have paid with their lives.

So is evil out there or in here? That is the question. As we grow more global, the truth may be that evil grows along with our collective humanity. Perhaps evil grows in strength as we give our will into the collective. Evil grows in crowds. Or at least the potential for mass evil grows as we lose our sense of moral responsibility and become anonymous.

Love flourishes where two or three are gathered. Evil reigns when we forget that we are human—animals, really—who are made of meat and can be reduced to meat and in the eyes of a man turned butcher such as the various Vlads of the world today.

Burning Questions
(and some possible answers or at least page references)

1. Why couldn’t the librarian find Dracula himself? Why did he have to follow the others? Did Dracula not want him to get at his library? Probably he was not a good enough scholar. Part of the deal is that you have to prove your undead self to Dracula by actually finding him.

2. What happened to Massimo?

3. Why was Barley there except to add a bit of romance? They don’t end up together in the end? Will he come back in a sequel?

4. What was the deal with the bibliography? Was Dracula leading these scholars in their research in order to document his evil deeds? Why add their names to the list except as a way to brag or lure further scholars?

5. Why does Dracula have his tombs (his homes) in monasteries? What is Kostova trying to say with this choice? Is it merely the surprise of it? Evil hidden inside of goodness? Are good and evil often confused or hard to distinguish—for example when the narrator is confused about whether she sees an altar or a sarcophagus in France? Note: Dracula becomes a vampire by acquiring the knowledge from monks in the West who have written it in a book. See page 640.

6. What exactly is Dracula researching? He has two tasks for Rossi: catalogue AND make new acquisitions…perhaps he is still researching the occult?

7. How was Master James involved? Who was Elsie? See page 625.

8. Why was Helen’s old boyfriend, Geza Joszef, looking for Dracula? To destroy him or somehow join his minions? I think he wanted to destroy him. But I don’t think he got a book. Somehow he is defending Hungary, but is not personally invested in the search for Dracula. Maybe he represents the disinterested State or the vestiges of the historical attempts to conquer Vlad.

9. What is the point of defeating death if life after death is so grotesque? What is Dracula after? Why is he willing to be undead? What is Dracula’s ambition? He says that the world is changing and that he intends to change with it. Does this mean that evil as we know it will morph into a more evil form? Is Kostova hinting that the modern clash between East and West is the continuation of the same battle fought by Vlad?

10. Is Dracula a hero because he protects the truth as he sees it?

11. Dracula needs someone to catalogue his collection: thus he is not a genius, a creative thinker. He needs help. Is this humility? Laziness? Does evil always need minions? Note: Dracula does have “magic” or supernatural powers—the food and travel, names appearing on documents, changing shape, etc.

12. Is Dracula a librarian or a historian? He collects books—all kinds with no canon. A historian uses books and texts to understand the past and shed light on human nature. Dracula has no perspective on the past—he is still in or of it. He does not see both sides of the issue. He is not a historian; rather he collects texts that humans want to suppress. This makes him a collector or a preservationist, not a historian.

13. What is the significance of the narrator getting the book in the end? Is Dracula still alive and distributing his books? What was the function of those books in the first place? Were they temptations?

14. What is the point of pursuing Dracula if he cannot be destroyed (as the novel indicates) and if the pursuit destroys families and lives?

Quotes and Memorable Language:

“As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward with its shadowy claw.”

“It’s the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me.’”

“But history, it seemed, could be something entirely different, a splash of blood whose agony didn’t fade overnight, or over centuries.”

“The Dracula of Stoker’s imagination had a favorite sort of victim: young women.”


“I was becoming wise in the way of the story.” --narrator, 78

“The dragon was our protector,
But now we defend ourselves against him.” --folk song

“I know the modern world. It is my prize, my favorite work.” --Dracula

“I became an historian in order to preserve my own history forever.” --Dracula

“With your unflinching honesty, you can see the lesson of history,” he said. “History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is. Why should you not use your great mind in service of what is perfectible?” --Dracula

“Together we will advance the historian’s work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean with blood.” --Dracula

Fun Links

Meet the Author: an online video of Kostova discussing her novel: http://www.meettheauthor.com/bookbites/599.html

Online NPR interview with Kostova: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4730352

Anita Diamant: The Last Days of Dogtown

We were late. We had been told that our reservations could not be held past 7:00 pm. We arrived at 7:10 and thank goodness there was a table down front and directly to the podium’s left. Diamant was enjoying her dinner at the table next to us. She was seated in my line of vision and just cattycorner to L. We recognized her from her portrait on the book jacket. The Attic has a raised stage at one end that places the diners at the feet of the speaker. Tables clustered close to the stage and fans gathered at the bar to the rear of the room. Altogether the tiny place held about seventy guests. Intimate.

I ordered a martini, a classic one with vodka and olives. L. ordered a Blue Moon, one of the twenty beers they offer on tap. He ordered a seafood sampler for us to share: crab cakes, catfish and calamari. The drinks came just as a distinguished lady sat down behind me. She had eaten downstairs because she didn’t know that dinner was available stage side. She was Helen, a retired psychoanalyst. She had read Diamant's best seller The Red Tentand given it away for birthdays, Christmas gifts or any occasion at all. She was from the area, but had never been to one of Newtonville’s events. She came to see Diamant. We chatted. Right now she is reading a whole stack of anti-Bush books that her friends send her. She also has an anti-feminist book, just to see what they have to say. She leaned into me as we spoke and often put her hand on my arm and leaned her ear close to my mouth. She was an instant, if fleeting, bookish friend.

Diamant is a local and Newtonville is her local book shop. She extolled her audience to cherish local book stores as she does. Helen assumed that I was Jewish and started to discuss
the emergence of ritual bathing places for woman after they finish their menses that sprang up in the area after The Red Tent was published. Imagine that: fiction recovering history and then materializing into the present. You have to admire that. I asked Helen if I would be allowed to bath there, but she didn’t get a chance to answer.

I had purchased Diamant’s The Last Days of Dogtownlast week in Boston and finished it over the weekend. I had no idea that September 13th, the day of the reading, was actually the official publication date. Diamant told us that she was pleased to be “at home” to celebrate the event. She read the author’s note and shared the genesis of the novel. Eight years ago she came across a pamphlet about Dogtown (never the official name of the town) and slipped it into a file knowing that someday she wanted to write a novel about it. She then researched the history of the era—the clothes, language and food. She read a few passages that focused on the characters of Cornelius and Easter before she took questions.

Most of the audience had not yet had a chance to read the novel. Most of the questions were about her creative process. She was asked about her current reading and the authors she admires. She is reading now about Katrina and the aftermath as well as a British novel. She named among her favorite writers M.F.K Fisher. I did ask her to speak about the character Ruth. It turns out that Ruth was mentioned in the historical record, but that the narrative she created was pure fiction. The pamphlet about the historical town merely mentioned some of the people who were remembered to have been residents. She used these as seeds for her character studies.

Similar to The Red Tent, Diamant explores what it means to be on the outside of the main historical narrative. Her characters are pushed to the edge of acceptable society, yet they do not suffer there necessarily. Although set in early America, this is no Little House on the Prairie, where the characters struggle with right and wrong. In Dogtown the characters are already deemed wrong and therefore bad by the city folk. They are judged, but not condemned. They are able to join the ranks of the respectable if they choose.

After the reading the organizers asked us if they could use our table for the author to sign books. I would have been reticent to have her sign my book. I know too well my tendency to blubber. But being asked to move meant that we were automatically first in line. I asked an organizer if I could pilfer the poster announcing the event off the podium. An autographed poster would be perfect for my workstation or my classroom. Diamant thanked me for asking a question about the novel, one of the first she has gotten. I couldn’t help but tell her in as few words as possible that The Red Tent was our book club’s first selection and how it had galvanized our group and led to years of fruitful reading. Just a tiny bit of blubber, but sincere.

I clutched my signed poster and book as we left. We floated through a perfect end-of-summer night toward the little shops that line Newton’s centre. Ice-cream was on L.’s mind and I was happy to end the evening by sharing a rich concoction at the Stone Creamery.

Garrison Keillor

My father tuned to 90.1 fm, the public radio station, as we drove from Hutchinson to Newton to visit our grandma. We made the trip every Sunday after 11:00 mass. Sleepy Sunday in the interval between mass and grandma’s fresh and hot lunch taxed the stomachs of the Kelley kids. We had grown used to the drive and had our games to occupy us for stretches at a time. We spotted out-of-state license plates. We held our collective breath as we passed tidy prairie cemeteries. Our eyes glued to the horizon so that we could be the first to spot several landmarks. “One more corner, I said it first!”

Later we would bring books, gadgets or tiny treasures too. The radio became a hot zone for tense negotiation. Soon enough we longed to turn the dial higher up the fm frequency to hear the Top Forty countdown get closer to number one. Dad had no ear or patience for our music. Instead he favored classical music and gently extolled the benefits it had on human intelligence. It took work to create and listening to it edified the mind and soul. We groaned, but he held sway. Often we would be on the road at the right time to catch Garrison Keillor’s weekly radio show, The Prairie Home Companion. Garrison’s voice soothed our nerves. We stopped our fidgets and listened. He was funny without a laugh track. You had to really listen to get his quirky take on American life in the Midwest. I liked being in on the story.

I lost track of Garrison somewhere around sixteen years old, and then found his show again after college. Now I had dishes to do and laundry to fold during the broadcast. I took to carrying a small radio between the kitchen and basement as I went about my tasks. I even crocheted heavy, uneven stitches to the news from Lake Woebegone. The same vignettes made new every week, thousands of times. It was like getting a postcard from a real place each week. The characters had lives in parallel with mine. My own life seemed ripe for humor too if only I had a story teller to help me see the folly of my foibles and the pretense of my triumphs.

I longed to see the show. Before long it was one of my few articulated life dreams. “The man is as jewel, an American treasure,” I was known to profess at dinner parties. He tells stories and we sit by the radio immersed in the sound of his voice. Who else can claim us like him? His other program, The Writer’s Almanac, gives America one good poem a day. Is that not the measure of a good deed? I bought his anthology of good poems and it seemed that his voice was there giving cadence and texture to poems that might otherwise have fallen flat.

So when I heard that he was bringing his show to the Kansas State Fair in my hometown, it had already been decided. I would go. I would try to bring my betrothed, who was able to attend in the end. I would pay any price. Garrison and Pronto Pups were almost too much to bear.

The show started precisely at 5 pm and indeed it was live. The Kansas wind was relentless. It cooled us and kept the porcine odors headed due North instead of choking us. It must have been a tyrant to Garrison though. Yet, the wind whipping across the plains is Kansas and this is his gig. Local flavor is his thing. The musicians were talented. Guy Noir spiced up with a guest appearance of the Kansas governor, Kathleen Sebelius, playing herself. They performed the English Major skit, a personal favorite. And then Garrison settled himself on the faux front porch and brought us the the News from Lake Woebegone. He wove a strange tale that episode, but kept the eight thousand spectators as rapt as little ones at bedtime.

I looked around and watched my fellow Kansans as they listened. It was odd to be in public with my hands still while Garrison weaved his tale. I felt vulnerable in a new way. My private pleasure in his story was now radically public. That voice, deep and slow and tinged with delight, calmed my unease. That voice telling tall tales over the years has shaped me into a Midwest girl who knows that stories come from ordinary folk and nourish us along with our daily bread.

Red Sox v. Angels

I vowed to have all the right Red Sox gear—hat with brim appropriately worn and curved over the eyes and baseball jersey—before we went to our first game. Alas. I was out scoping the city and had found myself in Chinatown when L. called. He was on his way home from work and was passing the scalpers at Fenway Park. We decided to go for it.

In true Eastern European style he paid only $5 over the ticket price for two seats. We found out later that Red Sox tickets are the most expensive tickets in the baseball market. He had no idea what constituted a good seat, but we had seats and it was less than an hour until the first pitch. I hurried home and my usually comfortable blue rubber Crocs rubbed raw spots on the tops of my feet, but I didn’t want to slow down and be late for the fun. I was hungry too, but ate only an apple in anticipation of the ball park goodies.

When we converged at the house, L. had already donned his red t-shirt, but I settled for a green t-shirt, jeans and comfortable shoes. We made it to the park on time (about 20 minutes walking), found our seats and settled in for the event. Our seats were straight down the first base line all the way out past the yellow foul line. It was field level, but just across from the bull pen. We were happy. In fact, it was perfect. The weather was pristine. I hardly needed the light sweater I had brought and a breeze kept the American flag fluttering at half mast to honor the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

We had it all: beers, foot-long hotdogs (with mustard, raw onion and relish, oh my!), a few peanuts from our friendly neighbors (who have a four-year son adopted from Korea with the pictures to brag about him), the friendly drunk a few seats over, the rowdy drunks who got thrown out, fly balls in our direction, a homerun, the seventh-inning stretch, we sang “take me out the ball game,” Wally the frog mascot came by to spread good cheer and of course several rounds of the Wave. Not to mention a 6 – 3 Red Sox victory over the Anaheim Angels.

I still plan to get a hat.

Happenings Around Town

I am officially stimulated. I stroll the streets in the Back Bay and feel a real fear to enter the endless boutiques and eateries, not to mention the high-end organic food stores and condomworld. There is too much here. The sidewalks are flooded with college types--pudgy around the middle with bosooms to the wind. Strange, yet sad. Oddly comforting.

So first things first, the house. I spent yesterday on the phone with plumbers, architects, real estate agents, Dani, and my sister as along the way we determined that our kitchen sink drains into the bedroom of the tenant below. Charming. I also learned that last year there was a "rat problem" that has been "temporarily solved." Luckily I do not fear rats. Of course I have never lived with them. I discovered that the garden behind the house is lovely, however. It was even on the Back Bay garden tour this year. Come and have tea with me before the weather turns too bitter and the rats come home to sit by the fire!

Events: of course, now I get the whole Red Sox thing. We can hear Fenway park when it is in a tizzy. So we shall get tickets, eat peanuts and drink beer while I struggle in vain to explain why the batter gets a free base if the pitcher hits him. Baseball appears simple, but this is true only if you have grown up in a country that has it in its blood. We rob it of its metaphors for goodness sake. Do the Brits have cricket metaphors? I promise to buy us Boston Sox garb for the event. Here are my burning questions: Why Red? Why S-o-x and not socks?

Other events: we are headed to Newtonville for an author reading. Book Club get jealous: Anita Diamant of The Red Tent will be there to read and sign her new book, The Last Days of Dog Town: A Novel. I picked up the new novel last night and have already tucked into the first several chapters. A world away from The Red Tent, but I'll reserve comments until I have more to say about it!

Other fun stuff: We are trying to get tickets to the White Stripes concert in a few weeks. They will play in the Boston Opera House, of all places.

And before either Anita or the Whites there is Garrison Keillor, the American Jewel, at the Kansas State Fair.

Yes, it does feel like the Fall of Rome.

Bostonland

It is a foreign land, I know it. When I enter the walk-in closet, complete with toilet and sink, my sinuses contract and air escapes only in robust sneezes that clear all rational thought from my brain. I was forced to locate the local drugstore and buy allergy medications. Give thanks to the pharmaceutical gods! After dining on clam chowda for lunch and fresh fruits and vegetables from the Haymarket for dinner, I was devastated to find my bowels in utter spasms. I ventured out once again to the drugstore for Pepto-Bismol. Praise be to the gods of the pink tablets now in cherry flavor! The odd thing about this foreign country, called Boston, is that so many people speak English. I am surprised to hear my native tongue spill out of so many mouths. And they sound and look so Americanish. It is a strange land—the future is here.

Seriously our new digs are too good to be true. We are a block from Newbury Street and the sheer number of restaurants, salons, and boutiques gives me the shivers. The people on the street range from average Joe to diva fashionista. Even on Labor Day weekend there are people on the streets at all hours and music thumps from bars with brawny door guards who are ready to wave you in or toss you out.

Yet our spacious, high-ceilinged apartment is deadly silent. Few cars use our little thoroughfare. The cicadas and the frogs and the birds of Indiana are missed at night. Luckily the sunshine still greets us at dawn.