Film Notes

In the early 1980s I spent an afternoon hanging out with nuns.

Explanation? On a visit to London, I was told by an English first cousin that her aunt (not related to me) worked as an Irish nun in a French prison. Perhaps I could visit her?

So arrangements were eventually made and I went to see Sister Mary at the women’s prison at Fleury-Mérogis south of Paris. An elaborate luncheon had been laid out, and I spent a pleasant few hours chatting with the sisters about their life in the prison and my life on the Left Bank. Much wine was consumed.

The nuns hailed from Portugal, the Philippines, and Ireland, but, given their work among the convicts, everyone was fluent in French.

When we finally rose from the table Sister Mary, or rather Sœur Marie, suggested that we take a tour of the place. We were accompanied by a pretty young novice, who had recently arrived from Lisbon.

We walked through corridors, past cell blocks and infirmaries before at last arriving at a large window that looked out over an exercise yard. There were about a dozen or so women walking about in a desultory manner, smoking, talking, killing time.

Suddenly Sister Mary grabbed the novice’s sleeve, pointed at one of the inmates and quickly said something that I did not catch. The novice nodded, obviously impressed

As we were away from the others, I ventured, in English, “What did you just say, Sister?”

She turned to me, her Dublin face alive with excitement. “That woman out there,” she said in a whisper, “was Mesrine’s girlfriend!”

The Problem

It’s not Valentine’s Day, but it still makes the world go round, even at the close of a hot, tiring August. The word ferraille comes from fer (iron) and means scrap metal – just in case your French is… rusty.

The poet is Jacques Prévert.

Pour toi

Mon amour

Je suis allé au marché aux oiseaux

Et j’ai acheté des oiseaux

Pour toi

Mon amour

Je suis allé au marché aux fleurs

Et j’ai acheté des fleurs

Pour toi

Mon amour

Je suis allé au marché à la ferraille

Et j’ai acheté des chaînes

De lourdes chaînes

Pour toi

Mon amour

Et puis je suis allé au marché aux esclaves

Et je t’ai cherchée

Mais je ne t’ai pas trouvée

Mon amour

Avoid to the Wise

“I hear that writers…” the bartender paused… “develop avoidance strategies. So that you don’t actually have to sit down and write.”

I lifted my glass and made an expansive gesture that took in the dark room.

She smiled. “But that’s so clichéd.”

True, it is sort of an old stand-by, the sozzled scribe with his pint of plain. And I had noticed that, recently, I have developed some entirely new strategies. Procrastination is the mother of invention. And who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Let me share ten of my latest batch, fresh from the Oven of Avoidance:

1) Spending a ridiculous amount of time at the farmers’ market looking for the Platonic Ideal of a tomato.

2) Watching flashmob dance videos from start to finish, then re-watching them.

3) Googling old obsessions like Tonya Harding to see what they’re up to these days.

4) Hand-drying the dishes, instead of just leaving them to dry in the rack.

5) Reading junk mail. Actually reading it.

6) Looking out the window and theorizing about new, green ways of creating electricity. For example, if we could somehow hook up a lightweight portable generator to the swishing ponytail of that young woman jogger out there… you get the picture.

7) Taking free-trial online Arabic lessons.

8) Renting and watching movies set in the Middle Ages.

9) Riding, tending, oiling, cleaning a bicycle.

10) Blogging about avoidance strategies.

Birth of a Woman

On a recent road trip that culminated in a Quebec City emergency room (see: “Je me souviens” below), our first stop was in a town about an hour or so west of Albany, in upstate New York. I was with my daughters: the younger, eleven; the elder, a couple of months shy of fifteen. On the long car ride from Providence, they had been reading aloud for me the first book in the Harry Potter series.

Nice family moment, a touching example of daughterly solicitude for their father’s inner life.

Just off the Thruway, there was a strip of motels. The Best Western. No vacancies. Days Inn. No rooms.

We were told there was some sort of gambling convention in town. We might not find anything.

Desperate, we pulled into a ramshackle place called Happy Journey, half-hidden by a highway overpass and a sign announcing “Only $50 a Night!”

Sitting in the lobby’s sole folding chair was an unhappy, stringbean of a fellow, in a filthy t-shirt and soiled jeans. He was barefoot, and his feet were not pretty. Some sort of infection. In his hands, he held a cob of corn, which he toyed with as he watched us wordlessly.

The clerk emerged from a back room and came to us at the desk. He was south Asian – Pakistani or Indian – and the whites of his eyes were the color of cherry tomatoes. And around his left eye was a dark and angry bruise, as if someone had landed a good punch there not so long ago.

As he fumbled to find us a key, a large middle-aged black man came into the lobby. He was way too happy, he was flying. “I’m looking for my daughter!” he explained with a laugh. “Anyone here seen my daughter?”

By this time stringbean had left and we had our key. We walked across the lot and saw stringbean go into a room. At the window a disheveled woman looked out from the darkness. He did not turn on the light.

Our room, a few doors down, was lit by a naked lightbulb. There was a lumpy double bed, draped with a greenish-yellowish coverlet, a couch of a similar color, and a tv on a stand. The walls were slightly stained. Obviously, the place had not had a deep cleaning since about 1964. And in the bathroom, a pipe protruded from the wall above the bath. There was no shower head, just a pipe.

I sighed and tried to make the best of it. Look, I started saying, it’s only for one night. We won’t bring in all our stuff. We’ll just go to sleep and get up early. It’s already late and we don’t want to drive around all night trying to find a room. You heard them say at the other places that everything’s booked up around here…

I looked searchingly at my younger daughter’s face. Sure, Daddy, she said. We can do that. It’s fine.

Then I turned to the older one.

She looked into my eyes. The look she gave me was not the one of a daughter to a father. I recognized that instantly. No, this was something entirely different, something as timeless as the Garden of Eden.

At last she spoke: “I am not staying here.”

Une femme est née.

Freedom Fried

It is, perhaps, of little consequence elsewhere, but the vicissitudes of French political life can often be instructive. Not terribly edifying, but instructive.

One of the constants of French politics concerns the parties of the Right. Whenever they slip in the polls, in advance of an election, they fill the airwaves and newspapers with fear of crime, what is called there l’insécurité, and with exaggerated claims of immigrant skulduggery. It happened time and again in the 1980s and 1990s – if you believed the right-wing press, you were probably too afraid to go out at night.

Recently French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the most buffoonish European leader of our day (after Silvio Berlusconi, of course), went after the headscarf and the burka, which, he said, were threatening French national identity. He was, by no coincidence, very unpopular with voters at the time, the French economy having tanked spectacularly. By focusing on a visible minority, a minor irritant, he managed to change the subject.

On July 30 of this year, Sarkozy gave a momentous speech in Grenoble, the gist of which is that the French government should be able to strip French citizenship of anyone who has been naturalized less than ten years and who is guilty of certain crimes. He also said that automatic citizenship at age 18 for some children of foreign parents – the French Right got rid of birthright citizenship in the 1990s – should be re-examined.

In another forum, Sarkozy stated that “everyone should practise their religion with a humble discretion that attests… to the fraternal respect he bestows on the neighbor with whom he wishes to live.” The Swiss minaret ban had just passed a few weeks earlier, so everyone heard the dog-whistle contained in the words “humble discretion.”

All of these positions are faithful echoes of the platform of the Front National, a rabid and openly racist (and anti-Semitic) party of the Right that has plagued French political life for more than three decades. In effect, Sarkozy has mainstreamed many of their extremist views, all in the service of changing the subject away from his incompetent governance.

He is playing with fire.

Other politicians, in other countries and states, would do well not to follow Sarkozy’s example.

Know what I’m saying…?

Je me souviens

Last week I found myself in the hospital emergency room of the Université Laval, in Quebec City. There was a certain irony to the proceedings as I had attended that university more than three decades previously, and this was the first time since then that I had been back to the lovely citadel city of the St. Lawrence.

My eleven-year-old daughter was choking. Not exactly choking, but in extreme discomfort. A piece of steak had lodged itself in her esophagus – thankfully not her windpipe – and she couldn’t swallow anything. Worse, she had to spit up saliva about once or twice a minute.

Her sister and I had tried everything. Sticking fingers down her throat. The Heimlich. Giving her a hot bath… Nothing doing, so here it was, one in the morning, and we were in Laval’s emergency room, a clean, spacious, efficient place, a monument, in fact, to socialized medicine.

The nurse who received us was a standard-issue French-Canadian sexpot. She sized up the situation, and before checking us in, told me to go to a vending machine and buy a Pepsi. Sometimes Pepsi works on these kind of things, she explained.

Now, for those of you not up on the arcana of intra-Canadian hostility, “Pepsi” is a very derogatory term used by Anglo-Quebecers to demean French Canadians, since the latter are supposed to have a love of the stuff. (The French, it should be said, give as good as they get: tête carrée, literally “square-head” or blockhead, is a term of non-endearment used for Anglos, in part due to their uptight, play-by-the-rules, straight, boy-scout, boring demeanor as viewed by the Latin, loose, sensual, fun-loving Québécois.) There are a lot of other epithets hurled back and forth between the two sides, but let’s not get Belgian here.

So the nurse told me to get a Pepsi for medicinal purposes. As cultural stereotypes run, this was akin to going to a Dublin hospital for psoriasis and being told to go buy a bottle of whiskey.

I spent a loonie and bought the Pepsi, chuckling. It didn’t work. Eventually a doctor came by and with breezy ease managed to induce my brave little daughter to upchuck. All was then well with the world.

Immediately, we then left the world of medicine and returned to the world of Quebec, which is to say, language: how is it, the doctor asked, clearly curious, that you three Rhode Islanders all speak French? Two nurses, obviously having bitten their tongues over the same question, came over to hear the answer. All three of us looked like week-old ratatouille – it was two-thirty now – so I skipped most of the biographical details and explained our connection to France, where both my children had been born and spent time in school.

It was the third time we had heard that question in two days. Ah, Quebec. And now, thanks to the doctor at the Université Laval, an unbidden memory came back to me.

When I was student at Laval, Quebec was living interesting times. A separatist government had just been elected, causing panic elsewhere in Canada and sparking the corporate stampede from Montreal to Toronto, which subsequently replaced Montreal as the country’s most populous and most important city. At the time, politics were dominated by two brilliant French Canadians: the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who shoved bilingualism down the throats of a recalcitrant English Canada, wrote a new constitution and repatriated it from Westminster and, in a nifty cosmopolitan move deplored by many traditionalists, switched the entire country to the metric system.

The other great figure was the dimunitive, chain-smoking, plainspoken, charismatic René Lévesque, the leader of the separatists and the premier of the province of Quebec. With these two dynamic Québécois in charge, la merde was invariably going to hit the fan.

So there was a referendum on Quebec independence in 1980. Then a federal referendum in 1992. Then another Quebec referendum in 1995. These campaigns and the French-language-only laws enacted in Quebec sucked all the air out of Canadian political debate; weary Anglos called the whole business: the neverendum. In both Quebec votes, the indépendantistes were defeated, but only very very narrowly. The hinterland, and Quebec City, voted yes in massive majorities, but the city of Montreal, with its Anglos and other ethnic communities, and, most important, the majority French-speakers worried about jobs and the cosmopolitan nature of their home town, voted no.

But all that still lay in the future when I was at Laval. At my time there, the entire country was walking on egg-shells, waiting for Lévesque to make his move. Hope and yearning could be seen elsewhere, on the larger stage: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were meeting at Camp David (speaking English, the Quebec press sourly noted), so perhaps, it was thought naively, this was an era of sea change. Perhaps Quebec would, indeed, become its own country.

As a tête carrée, I kept a low, timid profile. My French was good enough to understand lectures and do the required reading, but my Anglo trap remained firmly shut in classes where all the other students were voluble Québécois. Only once, I should say here in fairness, was a beer poured over me for being from Ontario.

In January, I had a meeting with my professor of a Nouvelle France history class, a very prominent French-Canadian historian who, for reasons that shall soon become clear, I will not name. He was a youthful forty-something who rather bewilderingly led our conversation toward the founding charters of the Université Laval. He reminded me in florid French that Laval was the second-oldest university in North America (after Harvard), but, he added, its charter had been amended many times.

What the hell is he talking about, I thought.

Eventually, it became clear. Laval was officially a bilingual university, he said meaningfully. I want you to hand your essay into me… in English.

What the…?

It took some hemming and hawing, but eventually he issued a version of the professorial complaint that has echoed through the halls of academia since professors were first invented. His variant: I want to see if you, an English-Canadian, write as wretchedly in your mother tongue as my French-Canadian students do in theirs.

And, he warned conspiratorially in this Trudeau-Lévesque egg-shell time, you mustn’t let the other students know you’re writing your essay in English.

In the emergency room, as my saved-from-strangulation daughter finished off the warm Pepsi, I even remembered what the subject of the essay was: mariages à la gaumine. These were a ploy that frustrated the Catholic Church in New France. All that was needed to make a marriage legitimate was the blessing of a priest. So, canny, penniless peasants working the farmland of seventeenth-century Quebec, who were unwilling to shell out money to the church (and were anticlerical, in any event), would stand up at the end of Sunday mass, just as the priest turned toward the congregation and blessed it, and then hurriedly recite their marriage vows and – voilà! – they were wed.

What’s not to like?

So as we got into the taxi outside the hospital, I thought about how I had researched that paper. I loved the subject. To hoots of disbelief, I told my friends about it. They were all Senegalese exchange students, as foreign to the Québécois of that time as I was. I spent a lot of time with my African pals, hanging out, drinking O’Keefe beer (we called ourselves les philosophes O’Keefe), eating couscous, and talking, when women weren’t present, about women. There were lots of cultural hilarities: “Stephen, is it true that at the sports center locker room, the men walk around completely naked (tout nu)?” Yes. “C’est pas possible!”

Another arose from the weather. Some time in mid-January, I realized that my Senegalese friends had, since early December, not gone outdoors. An explanation is required here: although I hailed from Ottawa, the second-coldest capital city in the world (after Ulan Bator, Mongolia), even I was shocked by how absolutely polar a Quebec City winter coud be. The Senegalese, like most of the student body, kept to the asbestos-lined tunnels linking all the buildings of Laval’s windswept suburban campus. They didn’t dare go out.

But one evening, at their dormitory, we knocked on doors and moved up and down floors, in a scavenger hunt for hats, gloves, scarves and coats. The Québécois who lent us their clothes laughed and, none too discreetly, admired the stunning Dakar beauty who had been wisely delegated as our spokeswoman.

So a dozen of us stood in the lobby at midnight, all bundled up, a kaleidoscope of wool and color. It was a starry, moonless night, perfectly still. The temperature was about thirty below zero. I warned my companions to take shallow breaths only. And to feel the hairs in their nostrils freeze. That’s when you know it’s really cold.

I took them outside. A white plain stretched before us. Eyes opened wide, incredulous. Brilliant white smiles. Peals of laughter. “C’est pas possible! C’est pas possible!” The beautiful girl took off a glove and ran her hand over a snowdrift. And then shouted in triumphant disbelief. Her friends gathered around her and did the same.

They might as well have been on the moon.

And we were all of us so utterly foreign, in this strange and wonderful place.

The taxi flashed by the main campus of the university. My daughters were slumped together in the back seat, already asleep. We arrived at our hotel.

A few days after the moonwalk, the professor came over to me after class in the hallway. There were a few shaggy students hanging about, smoking listlessly (this was back in the day, remember), casually appraising us.

“Remember, Monsieur O’Shea,” he said in French. “In the language of Sadat and Begin.”

I nodded and he smiled. The others looked on, uncomprehending.

Vive le Québec.

Our Days Are Numbered

How is 2010 like 1210? Let’s get medieval on yo' ass…

In 1210, there was an ongoing crusade against heretics, that is, people who choose to see the divine differently. The Greek at the root of the word heresy means “choice.” In what was to become the southwest of France, the authorities decided that there would be no freedom of worship. No heretical sanctuary was allowed at Toulouse, which was, for pilgrims departing for Santiago de Compostela,... Ground Zero.

In 1210, there were jurisdictional disputes, the keystone of the Middle Ages. King’s courts versus bishop’s courts versus baronial interests versus town charters. You couldn’t, say, try a priest in a lay court, no matter what his crime was. And you certainly couldn’t raid a conclave of clergymen in the Low Countries looking for pedophiles.

In 1210, a move was afoot to form special courts, secret courts, where customary methods would be jettisoned in the service of getting convictions. Torture would be used. The rack, the thumb-screw and waterboarding. Within a generation, the inquisition was born.

In 1210, the schools of the eleventh century were forming themselves into universities. More money, more order, more control. The great book burnings began in 1240.

In 1210, the barons of England were increasingly dissatisfied with royal rule. They were soon to draw up a Magna Carta, which, depending on how you look at it, was a babystep toward the establishment of Parliament or an affirmation of local rights and customs against central authority and taxation. There was no tea served at Runnymede, but everyone had the right to bear arms.

In 1210, Western merchants were busy peddling precious items looted in the Crusader sack of Constantinople six years earlier. The king of France would erect the Sainte Chapelle in Paris to house some of the stolen goodies. The traffic was discreet yet frenetic. A similar trade, this time in looted Mesopotamian antiquities, would spring up many centuries later, but only after a similar shock-and-awe attack on another eastern capital.

In 1210, being a warrior was considered a noble calling, a type of service. And the use of mercenaries was on the rise.

In 1210, scapegoats were sought and usually found for the calamity du jour. Preachers and marketplace demagogues already had a long history of using fear to stir up hatred.

In 1210, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the elites and their botched crusade of 1204. In 1212, thousands of young men and women, unlettered and exalted, would march in what came to be known, misleadingly, as the Children’s Crusade. They were idealistic and spectacularly delusional: the sea was supposed to part for them and allow them to slam-dunk the liberation of Jerusalem. Instead, they boarded ships at Marseille and Genoa – and were turned over to slave-traders. Those that survived became a underclass, far from home, betrayed. Those that didn’t, died.

1210, 2010, 1200, 2001… when we live is a lottery.

And some of the prizes remain the same.

OMG!

I was waiting for my daughters to emerge from the international arrivals gate at Boston’s Logan. From a London flight, out comes a Muslim family. He, with an extravagant beard, sticking straight out of his chin, perpendicular to his chest. She? Well, it’s hard to say. She was clad head to foot in a black burka. And, to add poignancy, she held the hand of her cute six-year-old daughter, dressed in the usual little girl garb because, presumably, she’s not old enough to excite lust.

But soon she too will be wrapped up like a central Asian burrito.

So sad.

Among the crowd of greeters was the normal cross-section of American humanity. As it was a hot day, the women, young and not so young, wore shorts and skimpy tops, lots of tanned skin on display. And lots of mysterious straps crisscrossing bared shoulders. The West, god bless it. No one gave a damn. If anything, the casual buzz of beauty and pleasure in being alive made the wait bearable. Dignified, even. Human, certainly. The burka woman passed through us, ostentatiously invisible. I think we all felt bad for her, and, especially, for her little girl.

The extremes of religion observance are always cringe-inducing, whether it’s a ringlet radical waving his Uzi on the West Bank or a red-faced televangelist humping his call-boy. But are they extremes? Perhaps they are the most explicit, the most honest expression of a religious tradition.

Maybe not.

The burka made me think about the current bout of hysteria concerning Islam. I have spent some years with that tradition, having researched and written Sea of Faith. Certainly, the burka has nothing Islamic about it. It is the expression of a depressingly timeless and deep-seated fear of female sexuality, or rather the male’s supposed inability to cope with it. Thus the wig an orthodox Jewish woman wears, to hide her hair from the eyes of all men who are not her husband. There’s no point in reminding them where else she has hair; civilization might come screeching to a halt. The irony, of course, is that in any society where half the population has to hide its entire body, is precisely where civilization has come to a halt.

And Islam, being a highly social religion, actively encourages interaction and, thus, civilization.

One wishes that the Prophet Muhammad, who was no stranger to friendship with women, incidentally, would come back for one day and tell the bearded fellows with the burka wives that they are contemptible misogynists who have misinterpeted his message.

Am I being disrespectful to different traditions? Okay, let’s bring back slavery.

And torture and the death penalty.

Oops.

While he’s here, the Prophet might also want to talk to some Americans. The thought of an Islamic civic center being built in lower Manhattan has driven some of them out of their minds. In my opinion, this is precisely where such a center should go, to promote tolerance and encourage intercultural outreach in a very high-profile location. It is precisely the message that should be sent to the entire world, including the young man in some slum of Cairo who is drawn to harebrained Islamist rhetoric about this country’s hatred of him. At the moment Predator drones and I.E.D’s seem to be the preferred form of dialogue, which, of course, is even less civilized than the burka.

The name of the project, Cordoba House, evokes the splendor of Umayyad Cordoba, where Muslim, Christian and Jew came together to build a civilization of jaw-dropping sophistication and beauty. Of course, Camelot it was not – Christians and Jews were second-class citizens – but, hey, for the years 750-1010 it was astounding for its multiconfessional nature.

The Islamophobes don’t see it that way. A congressman from Arizona (state motto: “Hate Is A Phoenix”) sees the name as evocative of Cordoba’s mosque, which was built on the site of a Christian church. So Cordoba House is religious imperialism, QED.

One: the Cordoba mosque, or the Mezquita, is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

Two: when the Christians took over in the Middle Ages, they built a church smack dab in the middle of it, a project which was criticized even then (by the Spanish king, no less).

Three: the Visigothic church the Muslims appropriated for their mosque in the eighth century had itself been built on the site of a Roman temple and re-used its pillars for a Christian purpose.

So, Congressman, people who live in glass houses…

Or glass loony bins. He also said that congressional interns who are Muslims should be investigated. Not that he has anything against Islam.

And, finally, as is to be expected of invincible ignorance, this rep from Arizona also referred to Allah as the Muslim god. I’ve got news for him. Allah is a word meaning god in Arabic. Period. Arabic-speaking Christians pray to Allah, too. Pick up a book, idiot.

Newt Gingrich, that great American solon, said Cordoba House, which includes a mosque, should not be allowed until they allow the construction of Christian churches in Saudi Arabia. I’ve got news for Newt, too. We don’t live in Saudi Arabia. We live in the USA. We have other traditions, one of which is religious freedom. I became a citizen of this country just last year. What? Is the party over? Damn!

Gingrich also said that sharia law must not be made the law of the land. Okay. I’m down with that. But he spoke of sharia as it if it were a single, established thing, as opposed to several schools of thought in Sunni Islam, with variants in Shia Islam. When you open your mouth to say something inane, Newt, at least google it first.

The Anti-Defamation League came out against Cordoba House. This is absolutely disgraceful. You would think that this is the one organization that would have drawn lessons from the past.

Others have said that Ground Zero is “our Auschwitz,” drawing a parallel between Cordoba House and the Carmelite Convent at that death camp. Ground Zero is not Auschwitz. And Pearl Harbor is not Pompey. And apples are not oranges. A church in Florida is organizing, for the next anniversary of 9/11, a mass burning of Korans.

I do hope the Anti-Defamation League is happy with the company it’s keeping.

It’s at times like this this, as a secular person, I get tired of religious people. Look, the Enlightenment happened, and we won. At least for the moment.

It is obvious what is needed at this juncture of history: outreach, dialogue, understanding. When religious people interfere in this, I almost feel that we seculars should play hardball in return. Lift the tax-exempt status on church, mosque and synagogue. Tax the hell out of them. Is that tax exemption in the Constitution? And if they’re going to investigate Muslim congressional interns, then I say we should investigate the Air Force Academy for its evangelical Christians. Does believing in their Allah trinity impair their judgment? I don’t know, but shouldn’t we find out?

Seriously, now, the only argument against Cordoba House that holds some merit is that it would be offensive to the families of the victims of 9/11. Perhaps. But…

One: presumably, the families of the 9/11 victims are not a monolith, all having the same point of view.

Two: is it not possible for them, and most of us, to view Cordoba House as an olive branch, a gesture of respect? Why think it triumphalism, when, at least from what I’ve read, it is patently not that?

Third: and this is hard to say, but the hypothetical feelings of a group of citizens does not trump the Constitution. Mayor Bloomberg was right in his remarks in front of the Statue of Liberty, when he said the State had no business interfering with the perfectly legal activities of the Cordoba group.

But there are some people who just want to get their hate on. Some people truly hate Islam, even when they know next to zilch about it. And I would say that the people who hate Islam the most are those who use its teachings to promote violence and terrorism. Osama bin Laden is an Islamophobe.

So the two types of Islamophobes should all go to an island somewhere and have a tea party.

Because the children of the Enlightenment are getting mighty fed up with y’all. And you know who the children of the Enlightenment are? The professors in the universities? No. The priests in the pulpit? No. The generals in the army? No.

They are the crowd waiting at Logan, relaxed and respectful of each other – even of the guy whose wife they can’t see.

Dialectic 101

Writing is hard because you have to think.

Writing is easy bcs u dont haf 2 txt msg evry 5 fkn secs.

Writing is hard because you have to make decisions.

Writing is easy because you don’t have to listen to a colleague complain about his girfriend.

Writing is hard because you have to figure out what to leave out and what to leave in.

Writing is easy because you don’t have to pretend to be interested in whatever your boss is saying.

Writing is hard because you always have to sacrifice your favorite phrase since it invariably screws up the paragraph.

Writing is easy because you don’t have to hear about someone’s expensive car repairs.

Writing is hard because you wonder if anyone is ever going to read the damn thing.

Writing is easy because you get to turn off the telephone.

Writing is hard because you miss people.

Tadzio! Tadzio!

Magic moment.

Yesterday evening Providence held another Waterfire, a strange civic ritual which involves lighting several scores of wood-filled braziers anchored in the waters of a river downtown. Thousands come through the darkness to the blazing river, to watch and be watched in the flickering light as dozens of hidden speakers scattered throughout the streets play eerie mood music.

This time there was live music. The Rhode Island Philharmonic occupied a stage set up in a plaza just off the river. To their back was a fine old office building, reminiscent of New York’s Flatiron, its apex draped with long scarlet banners shifting slightly in the warm breeze. The irregular square and its radiating streets were filled with hundreds and hundreds of chairs, all of them taken. In other spots hundreds more stood at vantage points to the rear, our backs to the river on fire. There must have been two or three thousand people gathered in all.

At the outset the event was annoying. Given the informal setting, many of the bystanders forgot that they were at a concert. Conversations, some of them loud, were kept up. Someone had moved to Boston and was just back for the weekend. Someone speculated that Cindy might have had a boob job. There’s this great new bar in Newport, you should really check it out.

The usual.

Then the Philharmonic bowed into the first few strains of the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. To those who have seen Visconti’s Death in Venice, the brilliant film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella, this beautiful music will be familiar, as it played throughout. Indeed, the Philharmonic’s choice of this bit of Mahler may have been a Venetian wink at Waterfire’s gondolas, which circulate silently on the river, laden with wood to fuel and refuel the braziers.

Whether it was or not, the effect of the music was miraculous. Conversation stalled, then stilled. The cries of the violins swooped and dived through the square, the tall buildings seemed to sway with the shifting banners until, at last, the searing crescendo was reached.

There was not a sound from the crowd. The river behind us burned. A woman beside me was in tears.

Then it was over.