Getting high in Delphi

As I review travel journals from my past, I often whine about how -- unlike us at their age -- kids nowadays don't do anything but sit at home and play with their electronic toys.  I was happy to learn, however, that a friend's 20-year-old twin grandchildren are spending their one week spring break on a whirlwind trip to Amsterdam.  No, not part of a tour group, or a study program, or a group of Dutch food enthusiasts.  They're doing what we used to do at their age -- just showing up someplace foreign, and seeing what  happens.

In commemoration -- despite my recent sneering at my occasional posts copied from old travel journals -- I offer the following extract from the journal I kept during a six-week backpacking trip through Europe.  The year was 1970, the year that the press discovered and remarked on the hordes of American kids traveling on the cheap.

I had traveled by bus for five hours (including repair of a flat tire) from Athens up to Delphi on the lower slope of Mount Parnassus.  I had barely emerged from the bus when the proprietor of a hostel grabbed me and bid me enter.  Decent hostel.  Bed in a room shared with three others for 18 drachmas -- just 60 cents in American money.  Yes!  This is what travel in Europe by young people was all about that year!  I met a couple of English lads who shared the room with me, along with a Swiss guy, and we made plans for the next day.

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Friday --31 July [1970]

My two Lancashire friends and I got up early Monday and started the long hike up the slopes of Mt. Parnassus.  We were quite lucky in that the sun was often behind a cloud and so we could escape some of the heat.  Even so, it was slow going, and we lost a lot more water than we had along to replace it.  But the views were fantastic.  We climbed to what I believe are called the Shining Rocks, on either side of the Oracle and Apollo's temple.  To get from one to the other required a long walk back into the hills and up the slopes until the canyon became shallow enough to cross.  Had some good conversation during this, and discovered and photographed a land tortoise. 

Then we made the mistake of trying to descend the cliffs on the right side of the oracle.  There was quite a tricky bit of rock climbing, which became steeper and steeper as I descended -- in the process of which I got separated from my companions.  Finally, I succeeded in thoroughly scaring myself, and carefully retraced my steps back up the cliff and tried to work my way back to where we had crossed the canyon.  My legs were bare and were getting semi-burned (not very bad -- but I didn't know that) and scratched with the prickly gorse I was climbing through.  I made at least one false start down the canyon and had to retrace.  I was having panicky worries of being trapped without water, and I was feeling quite dehydrated.

But all ended well, and I made my way back down, returned to the youth hostel, stuck my mouth under the water tap, and took a cold shower.  The other two didn't get back for an hour, and I was afraid they might be stranded, but they had found a way down the cliff after being thoroughly scared.  It was all in all a memorable hike.  The beauty and wildness and loneliness of the area will, I hope, come out in my slides.

Being recovered, I went over to the ruins and, using their guide book, did a careful study of them.  Saved the museum for the next day, it being close to sunset.  I had dinner alone in the youth hostel's restaurant, and was joined for a beer afterward by my mates, who were preparing their own meals.  A wild bunch of English started a party going, record-playing, dancing, singing and all, and we watched with amusement, nursing our beers.

I seem to have an interesting affinity for the British --seem to be accepted by them as English with an unexplainable U.S. passport.  They were alarmed because an American had replaced the Swiss [in our four-person room] this night, and [the American] wanted me to change places with his friend so they could be together (nothing came of this -- guess they changed their minds).  They said I couldn't do it, they would be overwhelmed with Americanism.  "You're not anti-American, are you?"  "Well, yes, of course!  And these are archetypical Americans!"  Turned out to be a Beach Boy type from Berkeley.

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Not great literature, but my journal captures some of the excitement of the time.  Reminding me not only of the iconic places I visited, but also of some of the people I met.  I hope my friend's twin grandchildren have as much fun in the Netherlands.

Only as old as you feel

"If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub."

--Ursula K. Le Guin

Today's my birthday.  At some point in your life, you reach your last year of feeling able to greet birthdays gleefully.  I think I reached that point the year I turned 16 and could get a driver's license.  Turning 21, and being able to drink legally, is pretty anti-climactic for a college student -- it's not as though he's never tasted alcohol until then.

But, today, I accept one more year fairly complacently, even if I'm well past the stage of being gleeful.  So I'm a bit surprised to read the irate reactions of Ursula K. Le Guin to birthday well-wishers, back when she was only a year older than I am now.  The reaction of Ursula -- a formidable writer of science fiction/fantasy --was essentially, "I'm old, old, old, and don't try to sweet talk me into thinking otherwise!"

A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative.  Wanting to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they're led to deny old people their reality.

With all good intentions, people say to me, "Oh, you're not old!"

And the pope isn't Catholic.   ...

"My uncle's ninety and he walks eight miles a day."

Lucky Unk.  I hope he never meets that old bully Arthur Ritis or his mean wife Sciatica.  ...

Old age isn't a state of mind.  It's an existential situation.

Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, "Oh you aren't a cripple!  You're only as paralyzed as you think you are!  My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now she's in training for the marathon."¹

She segues into some rather painfully true statements about ageism in America, all the while insisting on her status as old.  Really old.  Not the kind of "old" who you see laughing and playing tennis in ads for "Golden Years Active Living Housing." Or for Margaritaville, for that matter.

But then, both Ursula and her husband suffered from crippling sciatica that made walking more than a block or two impossible.  Maybe we all end up there eventually.  But I haven't yet, thank you very much.  Meanwhile, feel free to wish me a happy birthday, and feel no guilt whatsoever at assuring me with a straight face that I don't look a day over 35!

Don't offer to buy me a drink -- I"ll buy you one!

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¹ Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare, "The Diminished Thing" (2017)

Slurs and humility

I took piano lessons for six years as a child.  During my final three years, I would practice one and a half hours each day, usually before school.  I enjoyed it, but -- like many kids -- once I was 15, I decided that enough was enough.  I quit.

Years later, near the end of my legal career, I resumed piano lessons from a teacher in Seattle, dropped out again, and returned to the same teacher several years later.  She was an excellent teacher, far more accomplished than my childhood teacher, having studied at the Leningrad Conservatory as a young woman.  She seemed pleased to have me as a student.

She asked me to perform at a couple of student recitals -- which I did, feeling somewhat awkward among a flock of child and teenaged performers.  I recall performing the second movement to Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata.  To a limited degree, I'm a perfectionist, and I wasn't too happy with my playing. But my teacher told me that it had gone very well, and I took her word for it.

I suppose that compared with her sixth graders, I was a delight to teach.  If I learned all the notes to a piece, followed all the printed notations in the score, and in addition brought some sense of emotional feeling to the piece, she professed herself very happy.  "Good sense of musicality," she would say.

What brings all this to mind is my current reading of Every Good Boy Does Fine, by Jeremy Denk.  I hope to review this excellent book once I finish it, but what I've read so far impresses me with how little I knew about any of the classical pieces I played, with whose playing my teacher had professed herself satisfied.  Denk is not only an outstanding pianist, but an excellent teacher, and his book -- published this week -- is a memoir of his life (written at age 51), intertwined with discussions of the difficulties he had mastering the pieces he was taught.  These discussions are, the reader quickly realizes, a vehicle for teaching the reader an appreciation of musical theory.

For me, it's also been a vehicle for teaching me humility -- although, insofar as my musical training was concerned, attaining humility has been hardly an accomplishment.  I learned to play entire pages, listening to the melody where there was a discernable melody, juicing it up with a bit of emotion, and otherwise just playing the notes.  Denk will spend a number of paragraphs discussing the profound musical effect of omitting just one note in a flight up a scale.  His discussions are a revelation, and what they reveal is that no one ever perfects the playing of a classical piece, because there are always new subtleties to be discovered in a good composition -- subtleties that augment the pianist's understanding of the composer's vision, and that can be incorporated in his performance.

A few minutes ago, I looked over my copy of the score to the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique, and noted the composer's copious use of "slurs" -- those curving lines above or below the flow of notes.  They indicate phrases, notes that should be considered together, like words in a sentence.  I always ignored them, because the phrasing seemed obvious without them.

Denk, as a college student, tended to ignore them as well.  His teacher demanded otherwise, making him sing nonsense lyrics while playing.

The point of the lyrics was that they would force me to observe the slurs written on the page, taking breaths with the words.  Painstakingly, I played , while Bill made me sing along ....  We practiced until I could do all the slurs exactly as written, which seemed fussy and prissy ....

But Denk appreciated the teaching, once he got the hang of it.  But then a later teacher called the slurs simply "sloppy notation" by Beethoven, notation that should be ignored.

Sometimes, learning from two teachers with opposing views can be valuable.  Denk appeciated the opinions of the second teacher, but ended up siding with the more exacting demands of the first.

These days, I find the slurs almost more beautiful than the notes.  They tell you about the play of the music against the beat, the visible against the invisible. ... Slurs look like an arc, and imply a journey.

I don't offer these quotations because I have any feeling, one way or the other, about slurs.  But Denk's discussions remind us that highly trained musicians can argue over matters that are far above the notice or understanding of a novice pianist -- even one who has been praised for his "musicality" by his well-meaning (and probably long-suffering) teacher. 

Denk's entire book -- in the guise of a well-written, humorous, self-deprecating memoir -- is an encouragement to everyone, whether music novices or experts, to avoid complacency, and to realize that no matter how well you think you know a piece of music, there's always something more to discover. 

Usually, a lot more.

Erich Korngold

Briefly, I should mention that I attended a concert by the Seattle Symphony on Saturday, featuring a stirring performance of the well-known Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5.  Perhaps to offset the Russian flavor of this offering, the night's performance was dedicated to the "brave people of Ukraine," and the yellow and blue colors of the Ukraine flag were projected on the stage's surrounding walls.

The performance was guest conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, the youthful artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, who introduced each piece with a brief talk.  His short lectures were well-presented, and helpful.  His leadership of the orchestra was unusually dynamic, even acrobatic, and the orchestra seemed to respond with vigor.

In response to enthusiastic applause, the orchestra ended the evening with a short musical encore by a Ukrainian composer.

More exciting than the Tchaikovsky, perhaps, was a performance of Erich Korngold's Violin Concerto in D major, immediately before intermission.  The violinist was James Ehnes, who has performed as a guest violinist to great acclaim with orchestras worldwide, and is especially well known in Seattle as artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

Korngold composed a ballet at age eleven that took Europe by storm (Der Schneemann), and followed up with a piano sonata at the age of 13, a sonata that was played across Europe by Artur Schnabel..  He is one of history's great child prodigies, but his classical career in Vienna was cut short in 1934 by the rise of Nazism.  Because he was Jewish, Korngold immigrated to America, and accepted an offer to write screen music for Hollywood.  He wrote the scores for 16 Hollywood films, but vowed to compose no more classical works until Hitler was driven from power.

His violin concerto, composed in 1945, was Korngold's attempt to return to classical music after the fall of Germany.  It is a fairly short work, 24 minutes in Saturday's performance, arranged in the traditional three movements.  The music is stirring, and displays themes from a number of the Hollywood scores he had composed earlier.    

According to the program notes, Korngold's attempt to return to classical compositions was not successful with the critics, and for many years his reputation remained that of a Hollywood composer of film scores.  Since 1970, however, again according to the program notes, and after his death in 1957, his compositions have received increased critical appreciation.

The Korngold concerto received an enormous standing ovation from Saturday night's audience, but the applause was probably directed more toward Ehnes's impressive violin technique and musicality, than to the composition itself. 

Ehnes responded to the applause with a short solo encore by Paganini.

Florence's "film"

Stepping out of Villa San Paolo, through the gate, and on to the winding street, via della Piazzola, I experienced a sensation perhaps new to me, but one felt often by first-time visitors to Italy.

Goethe had felt a vague sense of bewildered incredulity ... when, as a starry-eyed northerner, he finally arrived in Rome.  As he writes on November 1, 1786, "I was still afraid I might be dreaming; it was not till I had passed through the Porta del Popolo that I was certain it was true, that I really was in Rome."  A few lines later, he adds: "All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the first engravings I remember -- my father hung views of Rome in the hall -- I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long -- is now assembled before me.  Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world."

I was part of a group of forty university students, beginning a six-month stay on an overseas branch campus.  It had been a long flight from San Francisco to Milan in a chartered DC-6, with refueling stops in Montreal and Shannon, Ireland.  We had arrived at Milan in the dark, and immediately transferred to a bus, riding in the dark to Florence.  We arrived at our new campus at about 2 a.m. on Easter morning.  Our eyes were pressed against the bus windows as we lumbered through the twisting streets of the Florentine outskirts, but could make out little in the dark.

It was my first trip to Italy -- my first trip out of North America.  Like Goethe, I had long been strongly attracted to Italy, but it was all from second hand experiences:  My grandmother's painting in her home of the Rialto Bridge in Venice.  Evocative illustrations of an imagined classical Rome in my high school Latin book.  Stories set in post-war Italy in the neo-Realism Italian films then popular in college towns.

But it wasn't until dawn, when about half our student group emerged tentatively from the villa on our way around the block to attend Easter mass at a local church, that I had my Goethe moment.  A woman, dressed all in black, was standing on her front step, sweeping dust into the narrow street with an ancient broom, a collection of twigs, actually.  I found myself walking through a Vittorio de Sica film set.  I was really in Florence, really in Italy, really in a world unlike anything I'd known.

Events of the next few days only accentuated this feeling.  Visiting the little tabaccheria a block or so from the villa to buy toothpaste ("col-GAH-tay") and hand soap ("pal-mo-LEE-vay").  We had taken a six-credit course in intensive Italian the prior quarter -- now we had to put it to use.  Because no one with whom we had to deal spoke English.  Not even workers whose job involved tourists.

Taking the bus that Easter afternoon from the school to the center of town -- back then, you boarded through the back of the bus and gave your 30 lire fare to a little man sitting at a desk by the door.  He gave you a flimsy paper ticket that no one ever looked at again.  Stopping at a café near the city center and ordering a liter of wine for our group of four or five.  Did we dare, I asked myself?  Half our group was under 21.  No one cared!  No one asked for an ID.  No one even raised a skeptical eyebrow, revealing that he was going along with our little scheme against his better judgment.  Almost as astounding as being served as minors was being allowed to drink at a table on the sidewalk.  Outdoors!  In full view of the public, including small children.!

I was only partially naïve.  I had seen enough movies to have some idea of how life was lived in Italy.  But seeing it all in a movie at a Palo Alto theater was far different from living it.

At the time, during those six months, I felt sorry for the "older generation," most of whom seemed to visit Europe -- if they did at all -- in American Express tour buses.  And, although more tolerant of differences among people now, I still do.  Life isn't the same from a bus window, or while being passively herded about by a tour guide.  As André Aciman, who also wrote the quotation above, has noted in the same recent essay:¹

Visiting a place is not necessarily the experience of it  The real experience is the resonance, the "pre-image," the afterimage, the interpretation of experience, the distortion of experience, the struggle to experience the experience.  What we do when we think about experience, even when we don't exactly know what to make of it, is itself already experience.  It's the radiance we project onto things and that things radiate back to us that constitutes experience.

As Aciman has explained elsewhere, "my Florence" isn't just observing an impressive collection of architecture and paintings, or even drinking wine in a sidewalk café.  My experiences -- both as a child, hearing about Florence, and as a student struggling to find my way about Florence, asking for train tickets in broken Italian, understanding how to cash a check in an Italian bank -- and again, as an adult reflecting back on those student experiences and testing them against my observations during subsequent visits -- all combine to produce "my Florence."  A Florence that is unique to me, but that has enough in common with that of others as to make conversations with them about student travel a study in nostalgia.

Aciman explains this process as the creation of a "film."  Our own experiences with a place, or that we bring to a place, create a "film" about the place, a film that makes that place our own.  Without that film, a city is just bunch of buildings and streets.  We modify the physical reality of a city by the film in which we encase it, a film that then draws us to that city, and makes it a place in which we feel both comfortable and alive. 

Those are thoughts whose truth we all sensed, from the first day we were there -- although truths we would have expressed less fervently and eloquently, perhaps.  As one of our group remarked near the end of our six months, "You know, we will all probably come back here again in the future, but it will never be the same.  We'll be tourists, not Florentine residents."  Her comment suggested a little overseas campus snobbery, one that we all felt, but of course she was right. Even if Florence objectively were to be unchanged, "my Florence" would be different.  "My Florence" is never a completed structure -- it evolves with every new visit, or every book I read about the city, or every news story that originates there.

Four of us spent our last week in Europe, before flying back home, in Paris.  After arrival by train, we took the Metro to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where the school had booked us hotel rooms.  I walked out of the subway, onto the Boulevard, and once again felt like I was on a movie set.  An American in Paris.  I almost danced down the sidewalk, hearing Gershwin in my head.  My friends laughed, and told me to calm down.  But I was already constructing "my Paris," spreading my own "film" about it.

Italy, my Italy, is magnificent, but in this way not unique. 

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¹André Aciman, Homo Irrealis, "In Freud's Shadow, Part 1" (2021)

Quindecennial

It's frightening to consider that a wee innocent babe who arrived on Earth on the day that I posted my first post on this blog would today be a high school student.  And celebrating his 15th birthday.  

A birthday also celebrated by this blog.

Yes, it was on March 20, 2007, that I put pen to paper -- or fingers to keyboard -- and posted my first blog post.  It was a display of brilliance that gave great promise for the future.  In its entirety:

Ok, my friend. Now that you've spent too much time deciding how this blog page should appear esthetically, and even more time deciding how best to present to the indifferent world an idealized description of your ever-important Self, you really might want to decide what it is you're going to write about. Don't you think?

Gosh and golly ... I stare off into space ... and await inspiration.

 

Fortunately, inspiration did arrive, and I thought of a few more things to say in later posts, of which, to date, there have been 1,464.  Readers who were around last year, recall my bragging that I had published a record 148 posts in calendar year 2020.

Nemesis follows hubris, as the Greeks liked to say.  This past year -- as I began complaining as early as October in "Autumnal Melancholy" -- has been a year of writer's block.  I've kept hoping I'd bounce back, but so far it's getting worse.

I did post a moderately acceptable 100 times in calendar year 2021 -- not yet the dread "Nemesis" -- but that number was padded, perhaps, by an unusually high number of reprints from travel journals and other writings from my younger years.  Embarrassingly, those reprints often received the highest amount of reader interest, as measured from recorded hits.

But I'm a fighter, not a quitter.  I will struggle back to new levels of both quality and quantity.

So, as is my annual tradition, let's take a look at both quantity and quality during this past year.  By far, the highest number of hits landed on my summary of my September visit to Lake Como.  Following, by number of hits, were a reminiscence of a troublesome college roommate; a review of Mark Richards's Father, Son, and the Pennine Way; and a tribute to (and obituary for) my closest childhood friend.

As usual, it's easier to list the most popular posts than it is to decide which were the "best."  In my eyes, which were "best" often merely means the ones I feel happiest reading over again now.  Rather than rank them, I think I'll do what I did two years ago -- simply list my nine favorite in order of date of publication.  

1.  "Charley" -- remembering a memorable sophomore roommate.

2.  A description of my first pandemic trip out of state -- by train to Oxnard, California.   "Trains in the Time of Covid".

3.  A review of Mark Richards's Father, Son, and the Pennine Way.  

4.  A review of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's YA novel, DaVinci's Cat.

5.  A salute to the drinking of milk.   Drink Your Milk.

6.  An appreciation of my sister's rural home in central Idaho.  "Nature's Art".

7.  A summary of my stay for a week in a rental on the shore of Lake Como, Italy.  "Happy Days at Lake Como".

8.  A tribute to (and obituary for) a close childhood friend, "Lee Quarnstrom, 1939-2021"

9.  A celebration of November rain in Seattle.  "November Rain".

I've modestly omitted all of my various travel journal reprints, reprints that proved surprisingly popular.  My list is meant to be a list of accomplishments during the past year, not of my writings as a wild-eyed youth.

I look forward to my sixteenth year of blogging.  Hopefully, I'll find ways to shake off  the somewhat puzzling lethargy of 2021.

Back to Bar Harbor

I arouse myself from my blogomatic slumbers, like a great, sleepy bear coming out of hibernation, and I shake my head.  This hasn't been a good week -- a good month -- not just for my blog, but for the world in general.  Several sources agree:  Putin has become the "New Stalin," dragging his nation back into the  isolated, backward morass of the USSR in the 1950s.  

Of course, Stalin was cautious and conservative in his foreign policy, as, generally, were all leaders of the Soviet Union.  In his attack on Ukraine, Putin is more like Mussolini or Hitler, fanatical, aggressive, and emotional.  But domestically, yes.  Putin, like Stalin, has gradually worked himself into the position of an absolute dictator.  A Tsarist ruler.  And like Stalin, he has -- in the past week or so -- completed the elimination of every source of information for his people, other than information that he chooses to release through his own propaganda outlets.  No more internet, no more Facebook or Twitter, no more non-Putin newspapers or television stations.  

To an extent to which our very own Mr. Trump could only dream, Putin has established that -- for Russians -- the truth shall be whatever he finds useful for them to believe.  

And, as this week's Economist notes, in a leader entitled "The Stalinisation of Russia":

And, as Stalin did, Mr. Putin is destroying the bourgeoisie, the great motor of Russia's modernization.  Instead of being sent to the gulag, they are fleeing to cities like Istanbul, in Turkey, and Yerevan, in Armenia.  Those who choose to stay are being muzzled by restrictions on free speech and free association.

Congratulations on your Great Leap Forward into the past, Russia.

But, no, I didn't intend this to be another foreign policy diatribe.

Nope.  As I said at the beginning, I'm like a bear coming out of hibernation.  I see all about me signs of spring.  Ukraine is far away; much closer are the flowers that bloom in the spring (tra la).  And like that awakening bear, I have a great hunger.  Not for food.  Not for honey.  But for travel.

And so, while the people of Ukraine have been suffering incredible losses of property, lives, and families, I have been indulgently planning myself a little trip.   Making bookings.  Flashing my Visa card.

You may recall that I broke my pandemic travel fast last May by traveling to Maine, to Bar Harbor?  I'm doing it again this year, May 16-20.  Like last year, I'll fly into Portland, Maine, spend the night in that pleasant city, and then drive to Bar Harbor.  I'll be away a day longer this year than last.  And -- since I once more will depend on United Airlines for my connecting flight from Newark to Portland -- I will this time hold my baggage close to my chest.  Not checked.  After last year, I have lost all confidence in that airline's ability to forward my checked possessions to the correct city.

Bar Harbor is beautiful in the spring.  I loved it last year.  I love Acadia National Park, which it adjoins.  And I love the Maine coast, which I hope to examine more extensively this year.

I'll have more to say about it in weeks to come.  Meanwhile, I look about, see what the world's become, shake my great furry head, and decide I'd best avoid further hibernation.