Poetry

W B Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888)

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Ten years ago, Sal and I had a week­end break in Knock in Coun­ty Mayo, Ire­land, dur­ing which we took a pleas­ant side trip to Sli­go and “Yeats coun­try”. In those days I was into “col­lect­ing” lit­er­ary graves and we took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to vis­it Yeats’ final rest­ing place, which turned out to be sit­u­at­ed in a glo­ri­ous set­ting at Drum­cliff, under the impos­ing Ben­bul­bin rock for­ma­tion. William But­ler Yeats was of course one of the fore­most twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Eng­lish lan­guage poets, and in Sli­go they’re right­ly proud of him.

Ben­bul­ben

I con­fess to not hav­ing read much Yeats, but there are two of his poems in par­tic­u­lar that have res­onat­ed with me from old. One is his evoca­tive ren­der­ing of the Greek myth, Leda and the Swan, and the oth­er is this, the twelve-line lyric poem, The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free.

Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free in 1888 when he was a young man, liv­ing in Lon­don and feel­ing lone­ly and home­sick. The 1880s had seen the rise of Charles Stew­art Par­nell and the home rule move­ment in Ire­land and devel­op­ments there had had a pro­found effect on Yeats’ poet­ry, informed by his sub­se­quent explo­rations of Irish iden­ti­ty. The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free is about a yearn­ing for his child­hood home (the isle of Inn­is­free is a real place, an unin­hab­it­ed island in Lough Gill, where Yeats spent many of his child­hood sum­mers). It is a place of seren­i­ty and sim­plic­i­ty, and to we, the read­er, that place becomes not Inn­is­free, but wher­ev­er we hap­pen to pic­ture our own rur­al hide­away; the place to which we pre­tend we shall one day escape and leave behind our cur­rent man­ic, urban lives (“on the pave­ment grey”).

The Lake Isle rep­re­sents an escape, a poet­’s vision of a roman­tic, idyl­lic, and time­less way of life. I love the way he evokes the tran­quil life, in the bosom of nature, in that mas­ter­ful­ly sim­ple phrase where­in he says he will “live alone in the bee-loud glade”. How effec­tive­ly this con­jures up a pic­ture of a hot sun­ny day alive with the hum of insects!

Of course, such an ambi­tion rarely comes to pass and it remains for most of us a fan­ci­ful idea. Indeed, Yeats died in France and only returned to Sli­go in a cof­fin. But his poem remains a great favourite with the Irish (it’s quot­ed in Irish pass­ports) and to roman­tics every­where who yearn for tran­quil­li­ty and “hear it in the deep heart’s core”.

I will arise and go now, and go to Inn­is­free,
And a small cab­in build there, of clay and wat­tles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the hon­ey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes drop­ping slow,
Drop­ping from the veils of the morn­ing to where the crick­et sings;
There mid­night’s all a glim­mer, and noon a pur­ple glow,
And evening full of the lin­net’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lap­ping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the road­way, or on the pave­ments grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

William But­ler Yeats
Music

The Glenn Miller Orchestra plays In The Mood (1939)

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In this blog, I have writ­ten about both Elvis Pres­ley and the Bea­t­les, but before them, in an extra­or­di­nary four year peri­od between 1938 and 1942, there was a man who scored 23 num­ber-one hits in the US: band­leader and icon of the swing era, Glenn Miller. Miller was per­haps an unlike­ly star and cer­tain­ly a reluc­tant one, as he shied away from the spot­light and hat­ed per­son­al appear­ances, but he nonethe­less had such an ear for melody and such keen arrang­ing skills that most of his out­put became clas­sics of the age – think Moon­light Ser­e­nade, Penn­syl­va­nia 6–5000, Tuxe­do Junc­tion, Chat­tanooga Choo Choo, and of course In the Mood, one of the best dance songs to emerge from the peri­od and the one big band song that gave the swing era its defin­ing moment.

Miller had cut his teeth as a free­lance trom­bon­ist in a vari­ety of bands in the late 1920s and ear­ly 1930s, and worked as a com­pos­er and arranger for the Dorsey broth­ers. He had put an orches­tra togeth­er for British band­leader Ray Noble in 1935, and in 1937 formed his first band, but this proved short-lived after fail­ing to dis­tin­guish itself from the pletho­ra of rival bands. Miller knew that he need­ed a unique sound and in 1938 he put togeth­er an arrange­ment with the clar­inet play­ing a melod­ic line with a tenor sax­o­phone hold­ing the same note, while three oth­er sax­o­phones har­monised with­in a sin­gle octave. It soon became the basis of the “Miller sound”, the tem­plate for what big band music would sound like.

In the Mood is based on an old jazz riff that had been passed around in var­i­ous incar­na­tions for many a year. It was a fel­low named Joe Gar­land who cre­at­ed a new arrange­ment for the riff with the title of “In the Mood”, but it was Miller who pared the tune down to its bare essen­tials. Released in Sep­tem­ber 1939, the tune went on to top the charts in the US for thir­teen straight weeks. With its famous intro­duc­tion fea­tur­ing the sax­o­phones in uni­son, the catchy riff anchor­ing the tune, the two solos (a “tenor fight” between sax­o­phon­ists Tex Beneke and Al Klink, and a 16-bar trum­pet solo by Clyde Hur­ley), and the sus­pense-build­ing end­ing, it has all the Miller spe­cial­i­ties. A true mod­el of sus­pense and dynam­ics. Here it is as fea­tured in the 1941 movie Sun Val­ley Ser­e­nade.

 

Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller
Art

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem (1566)

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Last Sun­day, my fam­i­ly and I attend­ed a Christ­mas car­ol ser­vice at our local church, resplen­dent, as every year, with can­dle­light and sea­son­al good­will. As well as the age-old car­ols that we all know and love (or at least tol­er­ate fond­ly, after the decades of rep­e­ti­tion), there were of course sev­er­al appo­site read­ings, and it is the one below, from Luke 2:1–5, that inspired the sub­ject of today’s blog.

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Cae­sar Augus­tus that all the world should be reg­is­tered… So all went to be reg­is­tered, every­one to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Beth­le­hem, because he was of the house and lin­eage of David, to be reg­is­tered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.

This of course refers to the cen­sus at Beth­le­hem, and the scene was depict­ed won­der­ful­ly well (albeit set anachro­nis­ti­cal­ly and anatopis­ti­cal­ly in 16th cen­tu­ry Flan­ders) in this 1566 oil paint­ing by one of my favourite artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As is usu­al with works by this Nether­lan­dish Renais­sance mas­ter, much plea­sure is derived from view­ing the piece up close and dis­cov­er­ing the mul­ti­tude of details.

We are look­ing down on a snow-cov­ered vil­lage (and indeed this is one of the first exam­ples of snowy land­scape in West­ern art, the pre­vi­ous win­ter of 1565 hav­ing been, not unco­in­ci­den­tal­ly, one of the harsh­est on record). Peo­ple are going about their dai­ly busi­ness: clear­ing the snow, cross­ing the frozen pond, warm­ing them­selves around a fire. The chil­dren are throw­ing snow­balls, skat­ing, sledg­ing, spin­ning tops. In the right hand fore­ground, we see a man with a large car­pen­ter’s saw, lead­ing an ox and an ass, on which rides a woman wrapped up tight­ly against the cold. These are of course none oth­er than Joseph and Mary, who have come to Beth­le­hem to be enrolled in the uni­ver­sal cen­sus ordered by Emper­or Augus­tus.

With a few deft brush­strokes Bruegel bril­liant­ly cap­tures vil­lage life, whilst sub­tly depict­ing the scene just pri­or to the nativ­i­ty (since after reg­is­ter­ing, there was, of course, no room at the inn). I could spend ages glimps­ing new details revealed in Bruegel’s works, and indeed have done on sev­er­al occa­sions in var­i­ous gal­leries of Europe, where I have usu­al­ly been left to it, meet­ing my long-suf­fer­ing fam­i­ly lat­er in the gift shop! Fun­ni­ly enough, this piece I have yet to actu­al­ly see (it’s in Brus­sels’ Musée des Beaux Arts, which is still only “on the list”).

 

Poetry

Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)

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“Who’s for the game?”

“Who’s for the trench – Are you, my lad­die?”

These are words from poems by Jessie Pope, poet and pro­pa­gan­dist well-known for her patri­ot­ic and moti­va­tion­al poet­ry that was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the Dai­ly Mail to encour­age enlist­ment at the begin­ning of the Great War. Anoth­er poem renowned for express­ing the patri­ot­ic ideals that char­ac­terised pre-war Eng­land was Rupert Brooke’s The Sol­dier, a son­net in which Brooke speaks in the guise of an Eng­lish sol­dier as he is leav­ing home to go to the Great War. It por­trays death for one’s coun­try as a noble end and Eng­land as the noblest coun­try for which to die:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some cor­ner of a for­eign field
That is for ever Eng­land

Or, as the Roman lyri­cal poet, Horace, had it in his Odes: Dulce et deco­rum est pro patria mori (How sweet and hon­ourable it is to die for one’s coun­try).

Lat­er, how­ev­er, when the grim real­i­ties of the war had set in, Wil­frid Owen chose to express in his poet­ry a very dif­fer­ent kind of sen­ti­ment, and when he wrote this poem whilst recov­er­ing from shell-shock in a hos­pi­tal near Edin­burgh in 1917, he bor­rowed from Horace’s phrase for his title: Dulce et deco­rum est.

No jin­go­ism here, no rose-tint­ed roman­ti­cism nor noble ideals. This poem speaks instead from Owen’s direct expe­ri­ence; a vignette from the trench­es, where the grue­some effects of a chlo­rine gas attack are described in com­pelling detail. It makes for grim read­ing. Wil­frid Owen, who ded­i­cat­ed this poem to Jessie Pope her­self (I won­der how that went down?), at least pro­vides us with an artistry of words in this descrip­tion of the hor­ror of the front line. But he reminds us that, were we to expe­ri­ence first-hand the real­i­ty of war, we may hes­i­tate to repeat plat­i­tudes such as Horace’s “old Lie”.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent dou­ble, like old beg­gars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, cough­ing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunt­ing flares we turned our backs
And towards our dis­tant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells drop­ping soft­ly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecsta­sy of fum­bling
Fit­ting the clum­sy hel­mets just in time,
But some­one still was yelling out and stum­bling
And floun­d’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drown­ing.

In all my dreams before my help­less sight
He plunges at me, gut­ter­ing, chok­ing, drown­ing.

If in some smoth­er­ing dreams you too could pace
Behind the wag­on that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hang­ing face, like a dev­il’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gar­gling from the froth-cor­rupt­ed lungs,
Bit­ter as the cud
Of vile, incur­able sores on inno­cent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To chil­dren ardent for some des­per­ate glo­ry,
The old Lie: Dulce et deco­rum est
Pro patria mori.

 

Wil­frid Owen
Music

Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, Elvira Madigan (1785)

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In the course of lunch recent­ly, my good friend and sub­scriber to this blog, Jason, sug­gest­ed that I do a piece on one of his favourite pieces of music, Mozart’s Piano Con­cer­to no. 21, the “Elvi­ra Madi­gan” con­cer­to. “You’ll know it” he said, when I con­ced­ed that I couldn’t bring it to mind from its name. Upon lis­ten­ing to it lat­er, I nodded…of course, yes, I know this alright, and yes, Jase, it cer­tain­ly does qual­i­fy for an “occa­sion­al glimpse”!

The con­cer­to is in three move­ments, but it is the sec­ond move­ment, the Andante in F major, that is the well-known part we’ll high­light here. Mozart wrote the con­cer­to in 1785, in the mid­dle of a pro­lif­ic cre­ative burst in Vien­na in which he wrote no few­er than eleven mas­ter­pieces in a 24-month peri­od. It was writ­ten for one of his so-called “sub­scrip­tion con­certs”; he would hire a venue, engage some musi­cians, take all the pro­ceeds from the con­cert and hope­ful­ly make a prof­it.

I was intrigued to learn how the con­cer­to came by its nick­name, “Elvi­ra Madi­gan”. What a sto­ry it turned out to be! It is a rel­a­tive­ly recent nick­name, as it is named after the 1967 film Elvi­ra Madi­gan made by Swedish direc­tor Bo Wider­berg in which the andante was promi­nent­ly fea­tured. The film is based on the true and trag­ic love sto­ry of Dan­ish tightrope walk­er, Elvi­ra Madi­gan (the stage name of one Hed­wig Jensen) and Swedish noble­man and cav­al­ry offi­cer, Lieu­tenant Six­ten Sparre of the Scan­ian Dra­goon Reg­i­ment.

While per­form­ing in Swe­den with her step­fa­ther’s cir­cus in 1887, Elvi­ra Madi­gan met Six­ten Sparre and the two fell in love. How­ev­er, since he was a mar­ried man and from a dif­fer­ent, high­er social class, their love was doomed. After two years of exchang­ing love let­ters, they abscond­ed and holed up in a hotel in Svend­borg in Den­mark for a month. From there, 21-year old Elvi­ra and 34-year old Six­ten took the fer­ry to the near­by island of Tåsinge and stayed at a lit­tle pen­sion in the fish­ing vil­lage of Troense. When Sixten’s fam­i­ly with­held finan­cial help, the couple’s last hopes fad­ed. They went out to the for­est, had a last meal…and then com­mit­ted sui­cide with Six­ten’s ser­vice revolver.

They are buried togeth­er on Tåsinge and to this day their graves are still vis­it­ed by tourists and roman­tics from all over the world. Mozart’s emo­tion­al and dream­like melody fits their trag­ic sto­ry per­fect­ly. Take a qui­et time to expe­ri­ence the music, below, whilst perus­ing the accom­pa­ny­ing images I found of Elvi­ra, Six­ten and the places in which they spent their last days. If you remain unmoved, you may want to just check your pulse…

 

Elvi­ra and Six­ten
Film, TV, and Theatre

Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

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Writer/director John Hugh­es had had a series of suc­cess­ful movies in the eight­ies fea­tur­ing teenage angst and adven­tures (Weird Sci­ence, Break­fast Club, Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off) when he embarked on this, the more grown-up movie, Planes, Trains and Auto­mo­biles. It’s a com­e­dy, and it is indeed packed with com­ic set pieces, but it’s a lot more than that: it has a gen­uine pathos and poignan­cy.

Inspired by an actu­al hell­ish trip that Hugh­es had per­son­al­ly expe­ri­enced, in which var­i­ous delays and diver­sions had kept him from get­ting home for an entire week­end, Hugh­es appar­ent­ly wrote the first six­ty pages of the script in just six hours. Steve Mar­tin plays Neal Page, a mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive des­per­ate to get back home to Chica­go to see his wife and kids for Thanks­giv­ing, and who along the way becomes sad­dled with show­er cur­tain ring sales­man Del Grif­fith (John Can­dy). Mishaps befall the two through­out their trav­els, and they endure every indig­ni­ty that mod­ern trav­el can inflict on its vic­tims.

The suc­cess of the movie is found­ed on the essen­tial natures of its two prin­ci­pal actors: Steve Mar­tin and John Can­dy embody them­selves, and this is key to why the film is able to reveal so much heart and truth. Neal spends the movie try­ing to peel off from Del, whilst Del spends the movie hav­ing his feel­ings hurt and then com­ing through for Neal any­way. It is road trip and bud­dy movie rolled into one, done to high­ly comedic effect, and my fam­i­ly returns to it time after time.

The last scenes of the movie deliv­er the emo­tion­al pay­off we have been half-expect­ing all along. Neal under­goes a kind of moral rebirth: we know he has learned a valu­able les­son about empa­thy, and there is true poignan­cy in the scene where Neal finds Del wait­ing alone on the L plat­form. Inci­den­tal­ly, there is a moment just before this scene where Neal, on the train home before he returns to find Del, starts to laugh qui­et­ly to him­self as he recalls their mis­ad­ven­tures. It’s won­der­ful­ly nat­ur­al and it turns out that there was good rea­son for that: unbe­knownst to Steve Mar­tin, Hugh­es had kept the cam­eras rolling in between takes on the Chica­go train, while Mar­tin was think­ing about his next lines, and in so doing cap­tured this unguard­ed moment. I include it, along with a few of the oth­er great scenes in the two-part mon­tage below.

 

Music

Elvis Presley appears on the Milton Berle Show (1956)

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The cul­tur­al impact of Elvis Pres­ley is hard to over­state; when he explod­ed on the scene, the whole phe­nom­e­non of youth enter­tain­ment explod­ed with him. John Lennon said: “before Elvis, there was noth­ing”. Now, whilst this might be an over-egged point, giv­en that even in the ‘40s Frank Sina­tra was inspir­ing devo­tion from teenage “Bob­by sox­ers”, nonethe­less there’s no doubt­ing the cul­tur­al par­a­digm shift that Elvis launched. His records, his look, his moves, his duck­tail quiff, his clothing…these all became embod­i­ments of the new rock ‘n’ roll style, and, with eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty putting more mon­ey into Amer­i­can teenagers’ pock­ets, it spread like wild­fire.

This sen­sa­tion did­n’t occur overnight, how­ev­er. By the end of 1955, Elvis had already record­ed two dozen sin­gles, but these were only hits on the Coun­try and West­ern charts, not the main Bill­board charts. That changed with his debut sin­gle for his new label, RCA Vic­tor – Heart­break Hotel. This time, Elvis did shoot to the top of the pop charts and stayed there for sev­en weeks, turn­ing him into the dar­ling of radio and record stores up and down the coun­try. It was, how­ev­er, tele­vi­sion that tru­ly made him the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, and if any one appear­ance might be called his coro­na­tion, it was this appear­ance on the Mil­ton Berle Show on 5th June 1956, when he set his gui­tar aside and put his whole being into a scorch­ing and scan­dalous per­for­mance of Hound Dog.

Pre­vi­ous tele­vi­sion appear­ances had fea­tured Elvis either in close-up, singing a slow bal­lad, or of his full body but with his move­ments some­what restrict­ed by the acoustic gui­tar he was play­ing. But here, for the first time, the 21-year-old Elvis Pres­ley was seen from head to toe, gyrat­ing his soon-to-be-famous (or infa­mous) pelvis.

You can bet that the reac­tion to Elvis’ per­for­mance in the main­stream media was almost uni­form­ly neg­a­tive. The New York Dai­ly News described Presley’s per­for­mance as marked by “the kind of ani­mal­ism that should be con­fined to dives and bor­del­los”. The Jour­nal-Amer­i­can said that Elvis “can’t sing a lick and makes up for vocal short­com­ings with the weird­est sug­ges­tive ani­ma­tion short of an aborigine’s mat­ing dance”. The Catholic week­ly peri­od­i­cal, Amer­i­ca, got right to the point, mean­while, with its head­line: “Beware of Elvis Pres­ley”.

The com­plaints and con­cerns of these reac­tionar­ies, how­ev­er, was pret­ty much drowned out by the screams of young girls, and by the end of 1956, when the Wall Street Jour­nal was already com­ment­ing that “Elvis Pres­ley is today a busi­ness”, they had to accept that the times had changed.

Literature

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869)

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Con­sist­ing of over half a mil­lion words, spread over 1200 plus pages of small print, and involv­ing around 600 char­ac­ters (includ­ing rough­ly 160 his­tor­i­cal fig­ures), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace enjoys almost myth­i­cal sta­tus as the arche­typ­i­cal­ly mon­u­men­tal nov­el that most peo­ple either casu­al­ly have on their list of books to tack­le one day, or who wouldn’t dream of tak­ing on. It is one of the most famous works of lit­er­a­ture in his­to­ry and gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be an absolute mas­ter­piece.

War and Peace is cer­tain­ly a chal­leng­ing read and not one to be tack­led light­ly. I came across it in a pile of sec­ond-hand books left by fel­low trav­ellers in a hotel in Peru, of all places, and realised that here was my oppor­tu­ni­ty to take it on (there must have been quite a few peo­ple over the years who have read it whilst on a gap year). Antic­i­pat­ing a slog, but not expect­ing to derive any actu­al plea­sure from it, I dived in. What a pleas­ant sur­prise! Despite some admit­ted­ly dis­tend­ed and mean­der­ing pas­sages on his­to­ri­og­ra­phy and some lengthy mil­i­tary minu­ti­ae, I found it a thrilling read. It is his­tor­i­cal nov­el, fam­i­ly chron­i­cle, and philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise, all rolled into one, cen­tred around Napoleon’s inva­sion of Rus­sia and fea­tur­ing the inter­twined lives of the Bezuhov, Bolkon­sky, Ros­tov and Kura­gin fam­i­lies.

If you want to under­stand the big pic­ture, thinks Tol­stoy, you have to exam­ine the details – which is exact­ly what he did. He stud­ied count­less man­u­scripts, let­ters, and diaries, and vis­it­ed all the sites where the bat­tles (Schön­grabern, Auster­litz, Borodi­no) took place, draw­ing maps of the area and inter­view­ing locals who had lived through the war. The nov­el is so long and detailed because he believed that that was the only way to tell this sto­ry. To do it jus­tice, the can­vas had to be broad.

So War and Peace demands patience and focus, but if you are will­ing to accept those con­di­tions, it is well worth the effort. If you’re in the mar­ket for an epic work encom­pass­ing love, war, reli­gion, fam­i­ly, class, his­to­ry, and phi­los­o­phy, you could do worse than to bump it up that “must read” list of yours.

 

Leo Tol­stoy
Art

Antonio Canova’s Sculpture of the Three Graces (1817)

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Back in May, my fam­i­ly and I vis­it­ed the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um in Lon­don, and enjoyed, amongst oth­er things, its impres­sive col­lec­tion of sculp­tures, includ­ing this beau­ti­ful piece from the great Ital­ian neo­clas­si­cal sculp­tor, Anto­nio Cano­va. The Three Graces were daugh­ters of Zeus and com­pan­ions to the Mus­es, and were a cel­e­brat­ed sub­ject in clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture and art. They are Thalia (youth and beau­ty), Euphrosyne (mirth), and Agla­ia (ele­gance), and the god­dess­es are depict­ed hud­dled togeth­er, nude, hair braid­ed and held atop their heads in a knot, the three slen­der fig­ures meld­ing into one in their embrace.

The sculp­ture is carved from a sin­gle slab of white mar­ble. Canova’s assis­tants would have rough­ly hewn out the mar­ble, leav­ing Cano­va to per­form the final carv­ing and shap­ing of the stone to high­light the Graces’ soft flesh. It was com­mis­sioned by John Rus­sel, 6th Duke of Bed­ford, who vis­it­ed Cano­va at his stu­dio in Rome in 1814. Bed­ford was cap­ti­vat­ed by the group of the Three Graces which Cano­va had carved for the Empress Josephine, the estranged wife of Napoleon Bona­parte (“I frankly declare”, he is report­ed to have said, “that I have seen noth­ing in ancient or mod­ern sculp­ture that has giv­en me more plea­sure than this piece of work”). Josephine had died in May of that year, and the Duke offered to buy the sculp­ture from Cano­va, but Josephine’s son claimed it (and that ver­sion is now in the Her­mitage, St Peters­burg) so Bed­ford com­mis­sioned a new one.

The com­plet­ed stat­ue was installed at the Duke’s home, Woburn Abbey. An 1822 cat­a­logue of the sculp­ture at Woburn summed up the appeal of the work: “in the con­strained flex­i­bil­i­ty with which their arms are entwined round each oth­er; in the per­fect sym­me­try of their limbs, in the del­i­ca­cy of detail, and exquis­ite­ness of fin­ish, in the feet and hands; in that look of liv­ing soft­ness giv­en to the sur­face of the mar­ble, which looks as if it would yield to the touch…this great sculp­tor has shown the utmost del­i­ca­cy and judge­ment”.

It is indeed remark­able to get “up close and per­son­al” with a great sculp­ture like this and mar­vel at the skill and del­i­ca­cy required to achieve such an exquis­ite fin­ish from a block of stone. Canova’s oth­er mas­ter­piece, Cupid and Psy­che in the Lou­vre, elic­its the same admi­ra­tion.

  

Anto­nio Cano­va
Film, TV, and Theatre

The Sales Speech in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

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David Mamet’s two-act play, Glen­gar­ry Glen Ross, was first staged in 1983, and won the Pulitzer Prize, remain­ing some­thing of a clas­sic of con­tem­po­rary the­atre. It was adapt­ed for film in 1992, by Mamet him­self, and it is almost a word-for-word tran­scrip­tion of the play, with the one excep­tion being this: the most famous, most quot­ed, and most pop­u­lar scene of the movie, which is the sub­ject of this blog, didn’t exist in the play but was writ­ten appar­ent­ly to bulk out the piece to film length.

In cre­at­ing the scene, Mamet arguably sets the tone for the entire movie. The movie fea­tures the pres­sured lives of real estate sales­men played by Jack Lem­mon, Ed Har­ris and Alan Arkin, strug­gling to close deals in this tough­est of tough rack­ets, and about to receive a vis­it from Blake (Alec Bald­win), the moti­va­tion­al speak­er from Hell, who has been sent from “down­town” to read the riot act. It’s excru­ci­at­ing stuff; it takes a while to dawn on the sales­men just how tough this grilling is going to be (“Put that cof­fee down. Coffee’s for closers only…”) and we gri­mace at the rit­u­al dis­em­bow­elling of the poor men (“You call your­self a sales­man, you son of a bitch?”).

Edi­fy­ing it ain’t, but nonethe­less it’s an act­ing mas­ter­class from all con­cerned: Bald­win dish­ing out the flak; Lem­mon like a rab­bit in the head­lights; Har­ris ini­tial­ly deri­sive and scep­ti­cal but then brow-beat­en and forced to endure the spiel; Arkin sub­mis­sive, silent. We can see and hear from the win­dows that out­side is dark and the rain tor­ren­tial; inside, the office is shab­by and bleak and Blake is an unre­lent­ing and piti­less tor­men­tor. Now imag­ine you’ve just been told that you’re fight­ing to save your job in this month’s sales con­test, in which first prize is a Cadil­lac Eldo­ra­do, sec­ond prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is “You’re fired”. It’s stark, to say the least. You wouldn’t want to be in this game…

But hey, you’re not in this game — so sit back, relax, and enjoy not being on the receiv­ing end of this ver­bal mac­er­a­tion and instead observe the equal mea­sures of brava­do and human frailty exhib­it­ed in this won­der­ful­ly uncom­fort­able per­for­mance by some great Amer­i­can actors.

Alec Bald­win

 

 

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