So, now that Trent Lott has stepped down as Majority Leader, the question naturally rises for the Democrats: what next?

It seems to me that the Democrats have an opportunity here, but it’s an opportunity that is almost always missed when it arises in the course of political life. When politicians reach a fork in the road, and this particular opportunity lies one way, the politicians almost invariably choose the other path. What is the opportunity? The chance to shut up, say nothing, and move on to the next thing.

By this I mean, no gloating; no crowing and attacking; no rubbing of the hands with glee before looking around and saying, “Who’s next?” I’m hoping that the whole Lott fiasco does not start another feeding frenzy of the sort that consumed politics from the late 1980s — when Senate Democrats organized to scrub President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court — and well into the 1990s, when the unfortunate phrase “the blood sport of Washington” became so apt. Perhaps the fact that a great deal of the pressure on Lott came, eventually, from Republicans may alleviate any need for reprisal and counterattack. Perhaps.

This isn’t to say, though, that the entire issue should be swept under the rug. I was listening to the public radio program Here and Now earlier today, and they had a guest — a journalist whose name I do not recall — express the fear that Lott’s decision to step down as Majority Leader would put an end to the entire story, which involves the larger reality that racial issues are still a very big problem in America. This journalist drew a parallel with the conclusion of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, when for about a week after the verdict there was a great deal of concern in the national media about what it all meant — especially the fact that whites by and large thought that Simpson had gotten away with murder, whereas an almost identical proportion of African Americans felt that the correct verdict had been rendered. What did this mean for race relations in the United States? We still don’t know, because no real dialog ever took place — instead, we moved on to the next story. I hope that this does not happen here, but I fear it will: we will say to ourselves, “There, someone said something racist and got what he deserved, so we can stop concerning ourselves with race for a while.” That would be the wrong thing to do.

As for Lott, I’m fine with him staying in the Senate while abdicating his leadership position. I’m a firm believer in letting the punishment fit the crime, and I don’t feel that his comments — stupid and racist as they were — warranted his removal, either forced or by back-room coercion, from the Senate. (Now, his comments might very well warrant his removal from office by the voters, which is one reason why I have always been against term limits for elected officials. A lame-duck officeholder has nothing whatsoever to lose by saying or doing things as dumb as this.) I felt the same way during the impeachment of President Clinton: he did a loutish thing, but it did not warrant his removal from office. In a little more than a month, Trent Lott has gone from salivating over the prospects of leading one half of a Republican-controlled Congress with a Republican President and a friendly Supreme Court down the street; now he’s just one more member of the Senate. That’s pretty far to fall, in and of itself.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

“Icebound Lake Boat”, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)

Charles Burchfield lived for part of his life in Gardenville, NY, a small suburb of Buffalo (now part of the Town of West Seneca). He is one of the premier American painters, and his work reflects the natural world of the Great Lakes region in which he lived. I came to know his work through visiting the Charles E. Burchfield Nature and Art Center, a park in West Seneca that is a mix of nature preserve, art gallery, outdoor sculpture park, and outdoor performance space. It’s one of the places I miss the most in having moved from Buffalo.

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Russian Romantic Composers, part two.

Yesterday I wrote in general about the Russian composers during the Romantic period, in an effort to place some of the artistic context of The Brothers Karamazov. Today, I’d like to discuss a few specific composers and works.

:: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Tchaikovsky is the most famous name in Russian Romantic music, and with the possible exception of Igor Stravinsky he is probably the most famous Russian composer of all time. His music is imbued with the Russian character, and in his music one can most readily hear the qualities that distinguish the other Russian Romantics: sweeping, epic melodies; scherzos that are redolent of folk-dances; dramatic and fiery contrasts; evocative orchestrations. He is perhaps the quintessential Romantic: the tortured, emotional genius who poured all of his sufferings into his art, living a fairly unhappy life as a closeted homosexual before dying young of cholera. Tchaikovsky’s music isn’t strictly Nationalistic, but it is a natural extension of the Russian Nationalist masters who came before him.

His most famous works are the Romeo at Juliet Overture; the Piano Concerto No. 1; the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; and the great ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. I love all of the ballets, and of course no audiophile should be without a blistering, digital recording of the 1812 Overture to display the abilities of one’s speakers. While I’ve never responded much to his symphonies, the Fifth is my favorite while the Fourth is the most Russian in character and the Sixth is the most blatantly emotional.

(The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra recordings of the ballets, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, come in handsome boxed sets with cardboard cut-outs of the characters, folding backdrop sets, and illustrated liner notes that tell the story beautifully.)

:: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). Not much of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music is played today, but more’s the pity as his music is often wonderful. According to Harold Schonberg, Rimsky-Korsakov was the most Nationalist of the Russian Romantics, so it’s a bit ironic that he is primarily known for works that purport to depict lands other than Russia: the Capriccio Espagnol, inspired by Iberia, and the magnificent Scheherazade, which happens to be one of my favorite musical works of all time. He is also known for Flight of the Bumblebee, the Russian Easter Overture, and Tsar-Saltan.

(The best recordings of Scheherazade I’ve heard are the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.)

:: Modest Moussorgsky (1839-1881). Moussorgsky’s most famous work, to regular listeners, is probably Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite for piano inspired by a series of paintings by an artist friend of the composer’s who had died the year before. The work was later orchestrated by Ravel, and this orchestral version has become a standard in the standard concert repertoire. Almost as famous is his tone-poem Night on Bald Mountain, played most often in its form edited by Rimsky-Korsakov. Moussorgsky’s masterpiece is his opera Boris Godunov, a work with which I am unfamiliar.

(The Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain are among the most frequently recorded works in the entire spectrum of classical music. On many CDs the works are paired together. The one I own is performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti.)

:: Vasili Kalinnikov (1866-1901). The history of any art is replete with names of promising artists whose youthful works, while rough and awkward, show flashes of brilliant talent that would never blossom because of a tragic, early death. Film actor James Dean may be the most famous example; in the case of the Russian Romantics, Kalinnikov’s name is notable in this regard. (Mozart is not an example of this phenomenon; although he did indeed die young, his musical output is one of staggering genius with many works of transcendent perfection as opposed to promise of what might have been.) Kalinnikov is known by a handful of works, the best being his two symphonies. These works are loaded with beautiful melodies, powerful orchestral tuttis, delicate sonic structures in the slow movements, and thrilling cyclic constructions. The works have awkward transitions, and occasionally threaten to overstay their welcome, but to listen to these symphonies is to hear an uncommon musical mind at work and to wonder what that mind might have produced had it not perished too soon.

(Kalinnikov’s two Symphonies are available on an excellent Naxos CD, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Theodore Kuchar. And since it’s a Naxos CD, it can be had for less than ten bucks. Naxos rules!)

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I looked at the new proposals for the WTC site, and I was glad that unlike the first batch, these seem to have some vision. What’s separating the two sets of plans is the way the first set was geared around making the new buildings blend into the surrounding skyline of Lower Manhattan, which is something many architectural experts never felt the original WTC did; there was a real way in which the original Twin Towers were not beloved until they were actually destroyed on September 11, 2001. The new plans, though, for the most part call for height and grandeur, which I for one am glad to see. I strongly feel that whatever gets built there, needs to soar.

My favorite is this one, by Studio Daniel Libeskind of Berlin:

I find this design beautiful, elegant and distinctive. Not so, however, the design by the United States’ Meier Eisenman Gwathmey Holl. It seems to me that my first thought upon looking on the Lower Manhatten Skyline should not be, “X gets the square!”

This design is definitely grandiose, but I can’t imagine it an improvement to build something that would clash with its surroundings even more than the original WTC purportedly did.

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I didn’t watch 24 last season, but this season I am completely hooked. This show is totally riveting.

The plot this year involves the government learning of a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, sometime during the “day” during which the entire season’s shows take place. It’s amazingly constructed entertainment, with every plot twist dovetailing together as it goes. One thing that’s been bugging me, though, is the fact that since the entire season takes place in twenty-four hours, then obviously the nuke can’t be set to detonate until the twenty-fourth episode, so I know exactly how much time Agent Jack Bauer has to find it. But last night they may have dealt with this particular problem, by setting things up so that when Jack finds out where the bomb is and gets there barely in time to stop it, the bomb almost certainly will not be there, because of an unexpected crimp in the terrorists’ plans.

It’s going to be hard waiting until May to see how this thing plays out….

(Some clever soul over on the message boards at AICN has dubbed the show “The Jack Bauer Power Hour”. Funny thing, that.)

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Yesterday morning, The Today Show did a brief segment honoring the anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — ninety-nine years ago. The segment was interesting, but it seems to have erred a bit in attributing the dawn of the Space Age to the Wright Brothers’ invention. The problem here is that the Space Age has been dependent not on aeronautics as pioneered by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but on rocketry as pioneered by Robert H. Goddard and the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who had written an article proposing a rocket as a vehicle for spaceflight five years prior to the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Even now, almost a hundred years after the first airplane flight, we are still reliant on rockets for leaving Earth’s gravity, the Space Shuttle notwithstanding (the Shuttle being basically a supersized glider attached to a rocket for launching purposes — in fact, the Shuttle is entirely useless as a flying machine). It’s certainly true that our current technological society is a case of “standing on the shoulders of giants”, but in the case of spaceflight the giants are Goddard and Tsiolkovsky, not the Wright Brothers.

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When encountering a work of art with which I am unfamiliar, I have always found it helpful to place the work in something of a historical context – not only within the milieu of the events of the day, but also within the context of the other arts with which the present work is contemporary. I imagine that most people do this, if they are artistically and historically aware, to the extent that they are able. For me, most often this means that I consider the present work in the context of the music being produced at that time. In the case of The Brothers Karamazov, therefore, I have been considering the music of Russian Romanticism in the late nineteenth century, occasionally even listening to this music while reading Dostoevsky’s novel.

The music of the Russian Romantic period differs from that of, say, Germany in that the Russian composers of the time were not only Romantics but they were also among the first Nationalists. Nationalism in music – the conscious reliance by a composer on his nation’s body of native folk music – became a powerful force in the late nineteenth century, with the Russians forming the most famous “bloc” of nationalist composers. This is what gives the music of composers like Glinka, Balakirev, Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov its distinctively Russian character; even when these composers are not using actual folk tunes in their compositions, their music still carries that folk flavor.

One possible reason why the Russian Romantic composers were also Nationalists may be the fact that Russia was very late in developing its own musical tradition – in fact, Russia was very late in developing beyond a medieval society in the first place. The Russian musical scene up to the mid-eighteenth century was dominated by foreign music, primarily that of Italy. There are no important Russian composers of note from the Baroque or Classical periods. It was not until Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) that Russian music began to blossom on its own, with his opera A Life for the Czar. Russia’s tardiness in musical development meant that there was no musical establishment for Russian composers to follow as the nineteenth century marched on; without the resulting sense of tradition and academic constraints upon the compositional process (Russia had no conservatory of music as late as 1850), the budding Russian musical movement was thus enchanted with the freedom offered by Nationalism, as first displayed by Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin. The Russians were not the first Nationalists, but Russia was the first place where Nationalism truly became a force in music.

I don’t want to give the impression, though, that the music of Romantic Russia is concerned exclusively with folk-songs and ethnic character and not with traditional musical elements like form, harmony and orchestration. Nationalism in music does not necessarily refer to the use of actual folk music, but rather on a character that is folk-like, even while the Russians were using traditional forms in their compositions – symphonies, concertos, et cetera. Leonard Bernstein once put it this way: “Tchaikovsky’s symphonies are German symphonies with vodka substituted for beer.” That’s a good way of putting it.

Tomorrow I will post a bit on specific Russian composers whose music I particularly admire.

(I am indebted to the book The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg for some of the material in this article.)

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Some ISP weirdness led to my absence yesterday. Annoying, but without Net access I actually got a lot done. And this Internet thing is supposed to increase productivity….

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I watched very little football yesterday. Next week is likely to be the last Bills game of the year (at Green Bay) that I’ll be able to watch; I would be extremely surprised if the Bills sold out their season finale against….the Bengals. Who wants to go out on a December Sunday at Ralph Wilson Stadium, a place so windy that they could erect windmills there to power the place if they wanted, to watch the Bills in a meaningless game against the NFL’s worst team? Not me! I expect attendance at that game to total around forty thousand (the stadium seats something like 75,000).

:: I’m glad the Bills won, and a bit surprised — the Chargers had more to play for, and despite the game’s cold climate the Chargers’ game is well-suited to road games in the cold. They’re a power-rushing team that doesn’t put the ball in the air much, and they have an underrated defense. From what I could tell listening to the radio, Junior Seau is still a force to reckon with. Drew Bledsoe had a forgettable game — not a disaster, like his games against the Patriots, but not inspiring, either. The defense seems to have adopted a “bend but don’t break” philosophy, which works sometimes but can drive one crazy.

The Bills’ running back Travis Henry could post the fourth highest total in rushing yardage in Bills’ history this year, eclipsing Thurman Thomas’s best season (1992) and only looking up at O.J. Simpson’s three best years. Henry has 1,312 yards right now, with two games left. I don’t recall the number he needs exactly, but it’s something like 170 yards over the next two games. My question, though, is why on earth Henry is only averaging about nineteen carries a game. A workhorse RB like Henry should be getting around thirty carries a game, which would ease things on the offensive line and Drew Bledsoe, who has been forcing his throws lately in the belief that he has to overcome his own team’s defensive shortcomings.

I got to watch the last two minutes of yesterday’s game, because all of the other games on CBS had gone final, so they offered “bonus coverage”…which was the Bills and Chargers. Thus, I got to see Doug Flutie’s last attempt at magic. I don’t think Flutie has the physical tools anymore to really play in the NFL, but there is no question that he once did. There’s no reason why he had to spend most of his playing years in the CFL.

:: In this “year of streaks” in the NFL, getting hot at the right time — the way the Patriots did last year — could be the key to whichever team ends up going all the way. The NFC race is a thrill, with the Packers, Eagles and Buccaneers all heating up. In the AFC, the Dolphins look like the hottest team right now — but there’s no telling if that will remain the case. In any case, it’s a strange feeling to be just two weeks away from the end of the season, and still not have a single playoff berth in the AFC clinched. Wow.

:: For Christmas, every player on the New York Jets should get a CD containing nothing but seventy-five minutes of Chris Berman, saying “That’s why they play the games….”

:: The status of my Super Bowl picks: the amazing Eagles are not only doing OK without Donovan McNabb, they’re actually fluorishing and may actually win home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. I’m not sure if McNabb would come back for the playoffs then, or at least the NFC Championship Game if they advance that far, but the injury that seemed likely to kill the Eagles’ season now looks like a mere speed-bump on their way to the postseason. The Steelers control their own destiny in the AFC North; they only need a single victory in their last two games to secure the division. However, that may prove a bit difficult: their next game is at Tampa (with the Bucs still fighting for home-field), and they wind things up at home against Baltimore. If the Steelers lose to the Bucs, and the Ravens beat the Browns this weekend, then that game would be a winner-take-the-division showdown, with the loser likely exiting the playoff picture. Of course, if the Steelers beat the Bucs on Monday night, then the game against Baltimore is meaningless except for playoff-seeding purposes, if even that.

:: This season, with the amazing parity in the AFC, reminds me in a way of the seasons ten years ago or so, when there would be no dominant AFC team and an 11-5 record would be good for top-seed in the playoffs. Back then, the NFC was clearly the better conference, as was made plain each year when the AFC Champion would be beaten — most times, badly — by the NFC Champion in the Super Bowl. But then, there are differences: back then there was always a dominant NFC team, either Dallas or San Francisco or Washington, for whom the entire season would be an inexorable march toward the title. That’s not the case this year for the NFC, and a look at the standings reveals that the NFC has seven teams with records of .500 or better, while the AFC sports thirteen such teams. There are only three losing teams in the AFC, and one of those — Jacksonville — could well be a winning team if a few breaks had gone its way. Right now, the three best teams in the NFL are all in the NFC, but the AFC on average seems to be better, and none of those three top NFC teams would be any kind of lock over any of the realistic AFC champions. So here we are, with only two weeks left in the season, and twenty of the NFL’s thirty-two teams still have a mathematical chance at the Super Bowl.

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I haven’t posted much here about my various writing projects lately, so a couple of updates:

:: The novel-in-progress (otherwise known as the damned book, or officially, The Promised King: The Welcomer) is proceeding apace, although I had to take four whacks at a certain scene last week. It’s a scene where one of my main villains meets a person he has seriously wronged face-to-face for the first time in the work. These scenes are very hard to write without having them sound like the standard “James Bond meets the bad guy” type of thing. These characters have history that extends long before the events of the book, and the hard thing to execute is the sense that the villain genuinely believes himself to be the hero. There are contexts in which villains like the evil Queen in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty can work (“You thought you could defeat the Queen of All Evil???“) but my current work is not one of them. Villains have to have reasons for what it is they are doing, beyond “because it’s the evil thing to do”. The most interesting villains aren’t the purely selfish ones; the most interesting villains are the ones who genuinely believe that the world will be a better place when their selfish goals are realized.

Now I’m on to my heroine’s “mystic quest”, which takes place outside the actions in the novel’s “real world”. This is where I can plug in a lot of the weirdness I’ve been saving from all of my readings into Celtic mythology. One item that has me waffling is whether or not to include a passage where she must successfully answer a riddle before she can proceed. I’m leaning toward including it, because riddles are part-and-parcel of Celtic myth and legend, but I also don’t want the thing to end up reminiscent of The Hobbit.

:: My current short story (no title yet; I rarely have titles for my stories at the outset of writing) has been in cryogenic slumber for a while because I had reached the Third Act, and I had no idea what to do at that point. I don’t outline, and in many cases I don’t even figure out the ending of a story before I start writing it. It’s usually been my experience that the ending will occur to me much earlier in the process, when I’m halfway done, perhaps. (And that’s only in cases where I don’t know the ending beforehand; sometimes I do.) But with this story, I was truly stumped.

But, yesterday I think I figured out where to go with it. The key, of course, is the famous bit of advice: Murder your darlings. Basically, I realized that one of my main characters dies in a rather nasty manner. The only thing bugging me is that I’m still undecided on what action my heroine will take once this particular character has expired. She can do one of two things, and the trouble is that both may be in character for her.

:: Three stories went out last week to various editors, for perusal and immediate rejection. Unless, of course, I manage to glom onto some of this guy’s luck and actually sell a story for once.

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