My Mother's Records

One

There are some places that live on in your mind. Long after you have walked out of them for the last time you find yourself back inside them in your dreams. It has been many years since I walked though the rooms of my grandmother’s house, but it remains an important place to me; not as it is now, in other people’s hands, but as it was when I was a child.

While each room of my grandmother’s house has a set of details that I can vividly recall, the centre of that house, its heart, was at the back, off the kitchen. It was the room we came to for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the room we sat in to watch Coronation Street or play card games like Happy Families. Every meal had a ritual. At lunchtime part of the ritual was Gran turning on the radiogram. It was a large piece of oblong furniture made of wood that sat in the corner of the room. To turn it on Gran lifted the lid and propped it up like the bonnet of a car and then turned one of the chunky dials inside until it clicked. After the radio had been turned on you had to wait awhile in silence for it to warm up. Gran would be in the kitchen preparing sandwiches while I sat at the table and slowly the sombre voice of the National Radio news announcer would fade into the room calmly stating the catastrophes of the day.

When I stayed with Gran in the holidays I sat in Grandpa’s chair at the dining table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Behind me there was a large cabinet. The cabinet had cupboards at the bottom, a bench in the middle, and cupboards above. On the bench space were piles of papers and books: Grandpa’s papers and books. It was a jumble of things all crammed in a row, and a huge edition of Webster’s dictionary sitting un-consulted amid the jumble. It was Grandpa’s side of the table. Gran’s side had the toaster and a chair for the cat. It was on Grandpa’s side of the table that I can remember being swung and dropped through his hands, and given horsey rides on his knee, and the giggling fear of it.

I hear from my mother that her father was a man of dark clouds and bursts of light. In the days of light he was a man of great charm. In the days of bruised clouds and thunder he could be mean. He died when I was five; the same year as my Dad. I never really knew him. A heart attack. It came in a massive bolt at the table one lunchtime and he was gone.

There are only three things I remember about him: the horsey ride; a curiously lonely looking figure out in the middle of a field at the back of his house; and a bike ride on the Taieri Plain.

On this bike ride Grandpa sat me on the handlebars of his heavy, black bicycle between his arms, and pedalled out into the long, deserted back roads behind Mosgiel. Here you can find the fields, and ditches overrun by weeds, the high holly hedges and the hills off in the distance lying like a woman on her side. Here is the old landing strip and hangers used for the reserves in World War Two. Everything silent and shrunk against the largeness of the sky, filled with the heat and the rasping of crickets. I have no memory of Grandpa talking on this bike ride. What would he have said if he had known this was our last time together? What parts of him are parts of me?

Quite sometime after that trip my mother gave away a pile of 78s. She gave them to a kid I knew that had a wind up gramophone and collected 78s to play on it. I didn't know what 78s were at that time, or why she had them or what they meant.

They were her father's records.

Grandpa liked opera arias and he bought 78s of Bjoerling, Caruso and crooners such as Lanza. He was a decent tenor himself and liked to sing at church or embarrass my Gran by serenading her while she scrubbed potatoes or shelled peas at the kitchen sink. My mother has some tapes that have Grandpa singing on them. He sings a lot of hymns. There is a kind of plodding melancholy to many hymns which can be comforting or depressing depending on how well they are sung. On these tapes he sometimes sings them well, and sometimes without much enthusiasm. He was quite old then, although he was never really old, and his voice wavers a bit, especially as the recording goes on. I think he was attracted to the emotional weight of certain hymns and sang them well. A hymn with a decent melody, and a reasonable lyric or two gets a better treatment than a dirge with noble protestations of faith. He also sang the odd Italian tune: O Sole Mio, that kind of thing.

Buffalo 66 is one of my favourite movies. In it the anti-hero’s father sings a song. He sings it in the spare room of the suburban family home. It has been clear from the scenes before that he is not a good father. That he is a bitter and angry man. The son remains at the kitchen table, upset, while the father takes the girls he believes is his son’s wife down to the spare room to hear him sing. He’s made tapes. He finds a Nelson Riddle record. It’s a record of orchestral arrangements that you can sing a long to. He sings Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread). As he sings it the lighting changes in the room: it goes dark, there is a soft spot light on the father, he is standing in front of red drapes, and he spreads out his arms. It is magic. All anger and bitterness is gone, the accumulated muddle of the room has disappeared, he is alone with himself, made better by song.

I think that The Great Caruso must have been a very influential movie. It certainly made the reputation of its star, Mario Lanza. While Lanza was often criticised for being an amateur without the stamina to learn an operatic role, in truth this was probably part of his appeal to all the men around the world who could sing a nice song at parties, or in churches and dream of other things. Lanza, like Caruso, was also a bit of a ham. Technicians tend to forget, when they criticise tenors and sopranos who are hams, that opera is also about drama. It is not sufficient simply to hit all the notes, you have to sell the song as well. Caruso could sell a song. Even though it is going too far to take a big sobbing intake of breath in an opera aria as Caruso does in Pagliacci I still love it because he seems to be swept away by the drama itself.

I have never much liked art that is realistic. Art for me has always been about escape. Realistic art is false. If you want realism just open your eyes: it's a toddler reaching for food at the table; it's a mother with rollers in her hair; it's breakfast tables and net curtains. Do you think Grandpa sang Italian arias in Mosgiel in the 1960s because he wanted realism?

If you read closely between the lines of this story I think you can see what I am saying: that music comes to me from my Grandpa through my mother; that I inherit opera from him and perhaps the urge to perform; perhaps also some of my dark clouds and my desire for escape. But then what do I really know of him?

It's a nice story.

American Dreams

I’ve never been to New York. Like most people though I have visited it. I have been to the New York of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman. Each one shows you a particular New York. They are guides with their own agenda, happy to show you what interests them but indifferent to your own tastes. Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser is about New York turning itself into New York. As such it is about The American Dream, and Martin Dressler is an American Dreamer.

At the end of the 19th century, when this book is set, Martin, the novel's main character, moves into a hotel built by a hopeful land speculator in the middle of farmland. The farmland is in the north of Manhattan Island:

Up here, in the wilderness, even the names changed: the Northern extension of Broadway was the Boulevard, a wide avenue of hard-packed dirt. From the high platform of the Eighty-first Street station he could see to the west the half-iced Hudson and the red-brown Palisades, to the east the thin dark river and bluish-brown hills of Brooklyn. (p.74)

It is, as I said, a book partly about New York turning into New York, the same place that Whitman observed:

On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

That’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. There are times in the Millhauser’s book where Martin walks though the city of New York paying close attention to its energy and industry. He observes it as a capitalist but it is described as if he were a poet:

From trains rushing north and south he pointed at the tops of horsecars and brewer’s wagons, at wharves and square riggers and barrel heaped barges, at awnings stained rust-red from the showers of iron particles ground off by the El train brake shoes. He pointed at open windows through which they could see women bent over sewing machines and coatless men in vests playing cards around a table, pointing at intersecting avenues and distant high hotels - and there in the sky, a miracle of steel- frame construction, the American Surety building, twenty stories high… (p.95)

Both authors are clearly describing the same place: a city making itself - from the busy hands of women at sewing machines, to the steel-frame buildings and the foundry chimneys burning high into the night. A place of capitalist dreams.

The curious thing about The American Dream is that it is both the hard-headed, restless, pursuit of business, and a dream with all the fantastical, surreal and languid possibilities of a dream. The pursuit of business and the experience of dreams both seem to share other characteristics though. They have a never ending, never satisfied quality to them, and as they go on they both seem to become more and more elaborate, eventually over-extending and collapsing into thin air.

The beginning of Martin's vision starts when he is nine and he goes with his family to Coney Island. Standing in the sea, with his back to the beach, he has the first of many visions:

Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England – and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction. (p.16)

Martin is attracted to vast networks of order. Here he is sitting in the lobby of hotel:

What seized his innermost attention… was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge. But could you say that a bridge or a steam boiler was an idea? (p.24)

They are ideas that turn into things, and these things are impressive, but they also seem to urge us on to both greater achievements and greater follies. As the book progresses the capitalist fantasies become grander to match Dressler’s growing business success.

And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming. Above the dynamo was an underground hive of shops, with electric lights and steam heat, and above the shops an underground park or garden with what seemed to be a theatre of some kind. Above the ground a great lobby stretched away: elevator doors opened and closed, people strode in and out, bells rang, the squeak of the valises mingled with the rattle of many keys and the ringing of many telephones, alcove opened into alcove as far as the eye could see. Above the lobby rose two floors of public rooms and then the private rooms began, floor after floor of rooms, higher and higher, a vertical city, a white tower, a steel flower – and always elevators rising and falling, from the cloud-piercing top to the darkness where the dynamo hummed. Martin had less the sense of observing the building than of inhabiting it at every point: he rose and fell in the many elevators, he strolled through the parlour of an upper room and walked in the underground park or garden – and then it was as if the structure was his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators. (pp.173-4)

It is passages like this in the book where I feel the magic of Whitman tips into the madness of Fritz Lang where a city might look like the grand, anonymous vision above, and where people might feel like this:



Whitman and Lang sit either side of the time when this novel is set. Whitman can see the smokestacks without alarm, although not perhaps without unease:

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

Lang, creating his movies after World War One, from a country prostrated by inflation and unemployment, has a less romantic vision in mind. It seems to me that both Whitman and Lang exist in the book Martin Dressler, as both exist in the idea of the American Dream. It is dream that is restless, and we live in a restless age. What has been built by the hands at the sewing machines, and the cranes pointing through the sky has been wonderful, but Whitman were he alive today would not be bathing in the waters around Manhattan, nor would he be able to take the fresh farm air from the ample hills of Brooklyn.


Martin Dressler
Steven Millhauser
Crown Publishers, New York, 1996

Time is the school in which we learn

In May, 1998, the day before I went to Japan, my mother and I walked along Oriental Parade in Wellington. It was a sunny day. We sat on one of the park benches on the Parade and looked out across the harbour to the dock cranes and the office blocks. My mother told me that one of things she missed when my father died was someone to tell things to. I knew that what she was telling me then was that this was what she would miss again when I went overseas. At that time I was supposed to be going for a year, but it turned into five, almost six years in the end.

The story my mother told me about missing the simple act of being able to tell my father something came back to me when I was reading Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking.

In December 2003 Didion’s daughter fell ill and went into septic shock. While she was hospitalised and put into a coma, Joan’s husband John died of a heart attack. They had been married for forty years.

For a long time I read The Year of Magical Thinking and enjoyed it, but didn’t feel the impact I thought I was supposed to be feeling. When people write “I can’t imagine dying without this book” in the blurb on the back cover I think it is fair enough for the reader to expect impact.

The impact came in Chapter Seventeen when Didion’s record began to resonate against the stories in my own family:

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I need to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of a response. I read something in the paper I would normally have read to him. I noticed some change in the neighbourhood that would interest him. (p.194)

I know that in 1978 the Terrace Tunnel opened in Wellington. I believe this was the final stage in the new motorway development. This was the motorway development that controversially bisected the Bolton Street Cemetery. I also know that Star Wars came to New Zealand in 1978. I know both of these things because my father died in 1978. My mother told me that my father wanted to see Star Wars when he was sick, and that they went, and that he enjoyed it but she didn’t because it was so loud and he was ill. She also told me that it seemed like a race at times when it came to the Terrace Tunnel; would he live to see it opened?

My mother and father were married for quite a long time given that he died when I was five. Given that he died when I was five I have not learned a lot about how a marriage works from my mother and father; just about how it is remembered. Although Didion’s book is about the death of her husband it is also about her marriage: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.” The final part of the book is about how marriage and a person are begun to be remembered:

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

I have lived my life with the photograph on the table. It was only really when I became a father that I began to be bothered by silly questions. Was my father taller than me or shorter? What did his voice sound like? Was he a dad that changed nappies or was he a chauvinist? It is curious that this book makes me reflect on these things, because most of the book is not likely to.

Quite a lot of this book specifically describes the events surrounding John’s death, quite a lot is about the daughter’s illnesses. Didion’s observations are interesting. She notices for example that when tragedy erupts the survivors and witnesses normally note afterward how ordinary the day was before the lightening strike of catastrophe. She notices that although grief is actually seriously deranging it is not something people expect treatment for even in the modern American age of counselling and therapy. These are interesting things to say and combined with the awfulness of the events described make the first two thirds of the book compelling.

However, I felt that the book only really began to speak in its final third:

We are not idealised wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious, about her “self-pity,” her “whining,” her “dwelling on it.” Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

I think this is very good writing. The death of my father means more to me now that it did when I was five. The phrase: “marriage is memory, marriage is time” makes sense to me now. Fifteen years ago I would not have noticed these six words in the book. Time is the school.

What do we learn in the school of time? Wouldn’t most of us rather be twenty-two again and able to sneer at the middle-aged? I used to think so, but now I must acknowledge that when I was twenty-two I had no wife, and no child, and was really only a boy who hadn’t noticed that his father was dead. I was a boy that didn’t really understand how loss operated in the life of those left behind. It is now the time for my generation to begin to understand those things for themselves.

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate, London, 2005

Back on the treadmill

"In short, getting out of bed in the morning and making breakfast involves more complex decisions than the average game of chess."

- Naked Economics

I read this sentence while I was waiting to get my hair cut. The guy who cuts my hair is from Iraq. He charges $15. There were three people ahead of me, and nobody after me. That means he made $60 and worked about one hour. There will be other customers in the day, but I would say the morning rush was over. I wonder what the rent on his place is? It can't be much because it's a single, small room at the far end of Newtown, right down near the zoo, but still, it must be something. Then there must be the rent on his flat, and power, and food on the table and all that.

I have to teach my Year 10 students about economics next term so I am reading about it. This is sort of interesting, and sort of annoying. The first book I read was Freakonomics. It was a book that perfectly captured the interesting/annoying feeling for me. It's interesting to hear their theories, and it's annoying that they're so frigging confident that they're right. It's an imperial thing. Sorry to be tangental, but I am also watching a documentary about the British empire and I noticed how all the soldiers in the old photos look cocksure in their swishy uniforms. Nowadays when you think of a British soldier you think drab, or dowdy or brown. It comes through in the writing too. The Undercover Economist (British) is so much more prudently written, more hedging and helpful. Freakonomics is brash. America is the current imperial power.

The quote at the beginning of this post made me think that you can only really understand this sentence if you are all grown up. If I had read this book when I was a teenager or at university I wouldn't really have understood it. He's talking about weighing up the costs of doing things. Not the monetary cost alone, but the social costs and what not, even the cost in your head of having a big fry up for brekkie against your age, the death of someone about your age in the morning paper, and the health warning on the packet about cholesterol. Cost. While I am here typing this I am thinking about how I need to wash the car, attend to the lawn, sweep the floor, and pick up E. at 12.30. When I was a teenager my mother's labour allowed me to laze around and believe I had problems. Ha!

When it was my turn for a haircut I noticed a picture of two boys stuck to the hairdresser's mirror; one boy was probably about three and the other about one. They looked like Dad. I suppose his children are playing out in the sun this morning, or helping mum with the housework, or with family while mum works and wondering where dad is. E is running around at creche getting her clothes dirty and playing with Tom. For them there is also a cost. It's a cost they do not see. It is our turn now to labour so that they can be free.

Taking the piss

If only reading were like exercising: the more you read the nicer your brain looked. I could walk into a room and people would think, "check out the guns on that guy's brain; his frontal lobes are really ripped". Instead, my brain remains flabby and out of breath. I spend hours on the treadmill and when someone asks me to explain something all I can usually muster is a blank look. Sometimes when I try to explain something I find that I only really remember odd fragments of the overall pattern and crucial pieces of the puzzle seem to escape me. One thing I have learned though: being able to tell a funny story about the topic gets you off the hook. What I don't know about the Roman Empire is a few volumes longer than the complete Hansard, but I can always divert people by telling them how the Romans washed their togas and brushed their teeth with urine. This trick saves you from answering the original question about Augustan tax policy and, curiously, makes everyone think you must be quite bright because you know obscure stuff about urine in Rome.

Things I read in a book today

I've been reading again. The book's first chapter should be called: Dumb product ideas in History. Here are my two favourites.

1. Goff's Low Ash Cat Food - "Contains only 1.5% ash"

This is fantastic because you go on a real emotional journey responding to this product name. Here's how my emotions played out. First: Yuk, it says this cat food has ash in it. Second: Wait a minute, the slogan sort of implies ALL cat food has ash in it. Third: Why the hell do they put ash in cat food? Four: Could it be for health reasons, to add some mineral supplement or something? Five: But then why would this company be promoting a low ash range? Etc, etc.... In the end there is no reason not to buy this product because it has ash in it (if all the others do too), but you're not going to, right? Why? It's called shooting the messanger.

2. The Impact

In 1994 General Motors released their first electric car... the Impact. How could this name have gotten through the fifty three billion planning and marketing meetings without being knocked back? How could the guys at Goff's not think through how most people would respond to the idea of ash being in food?

Here is the answer:

"It was thought that the mountain could induitably be climbed were it five thousand feet smaller."

Summary of the committee meeting in London to discuss climbing Everest in 1921

Which neatly demonstrates why almost all meetings are bad, and likely to produce conclusions that radiate stupidity.