The Pleasurs of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, part Twenty-one: Mark Rich

 

Readings 2024

by Mark Rich

 

         

   Now that many of my friends and peers are retired, retiring, or worrying the thought of it as do dogs their stuffed toys, I have taken a job. Being paid to work for anyone besides myself makes me itch. This job, though, pays nothing, except indirectly. I am clerking in an antique shop where Martha and I have things for sale.

 Yet I have retired in one sense—from working in silence. For decades I have gone without listening to music. At the shop now once or twice a week, my day starts with early-Baroque consort music, moves on into the Baroque, and around three p.m. sometimes leaps centuries to Bebop and Swing. My selections started out scant, since some of my old CDs play only the graphic tune, "Disk Error." Lately, some thrift-shop finds have let me stay in the Baroque until closing time, if I so choose.

 My frustration at having little time to read has become worse, now that I have found a new way to work for nothing. So far, anyway. I chose a midweek day to be at the shop, thinking business might be slow enough to slip in some idle reading. I even placed a copy of Frost's poems among our books for sale, in case I wanted to do some memory-refreshing work with them, in odd moments. Some miscreant bought the book before I was back the next week.

The job may turn out to be only suited for random re-reading. Of the books I did read this year, three are already candidates for this treatment. Two I respect for their clarity and directness: Maria Lydig Daly's Diary of a Union Lady, 1861-65, and Henry Adams's Democracy, subtitled "An American Novel," written in 1880. Adams's portrayal of Madeleine Lee might well have been written expressly for our own time when so many, who presumably started into adulthood with bedrock intellectual, moral, or emotional verities beneath them, now live in straw-built piggy-houses sold to them by their friendly neighborhood wolf. In the novel, the call to social power that threatens Madeleine's principles takes the form of a corrupt Senator who hopes to marry her.

I had already longed to re-read The Education of Henry Adams, the narrative of which falls, in part, over the same years as Daly's diary. Maria Daly is cogent, insightful, and catty ("I had quite a pleasant time, having heard some ill-natured things and said some myself"). She was married to a judge whose opinions influenced and aided the government of the North; and if her personal nature and social situation led her to favor the Union while feeling some distaste for Lincoln and the notion of racial equality, her heart seemed genuine and her capacity to learn ample. If they exist, her journals from the years of Senator Blaine and President Grant would tempt me. Those years gave rise to Adams's novel. I suspect the real Maria Daly and the fictional Madeleine Lee might have shared many attitudes.

           

Not only concision and sharp perception prompt my desire for re-reading time, apparently. For I wish I could re-read Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage. Months ago on social media, Eleanor Arnason posted her observation that the use of adverbs was declining. "And quickly!" I responded, facetiously. Soon thereafter, in Holmes, I found a passage so weighted with modifiers I was tempted to post it to her page. The passage conclusively made it ringingly clear that the elusive reason for my having been paging doggedly but dazedly through the book, while woefully sensing that desirable facts had wiggled eel-ishly from my usually eel-snatchy hands, was that its author, with slippery intent, slap-dashedly dulled the murderous steel of Mr. Savage's notorious sword by coyly coating even so pointed a fact with emotional slanting, guesswork, and, to my mind, unreliable logic. I did sometimes see the statement, "Now, what I think was happened was this." I gained the impression that more often he slipped his opinions to the reader concealed in modifiers; and I learned, at the end, that I had learned little. Far from having obscured it in a London fog of pedantry from which one emerges misted and mystified, Holmes put his scholarship in plain view, but all too often prettified, uglified, or dramatized it in a way that made me start distrusting even the facts.

All the same, I may revisit Johnson's London and its characters as Holmes presents them — if, after bracing myself first with a splash of Henry Adams, I can just dash through the book.

 For hours each day I pretend to re-read things — by which I mean I pursue memory-work in Bach's preludes and fugues. Last year I memorized the odd-numbered preludes of Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier — one per month. By each month's end I could falteringly make it through one prelude completely — only to forget it completely in working up the next. The exercise mainly clarified for me aspects of Bach's phrasing. At some point late last year, finding my memory of all these pieces more or less gone, I retackled prelude No. 17, then its fugue — wondering if I could put the whole into more permanent storage, in the way that I seem to have, for instance, Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality."

Around January or February of this year I learned that a villain had snuck into my life: Maria Sofianska, who in her time was, no doubt, a delightfully skilled pianist. I had followed some of her fingerings in my early work on No. 17. Yet in two passages in the fugue, I found that with Sofianska's fingerings my hands had no option but to present Bach's writing as textural music. Individual voices contributed to the texture, but with their contours — essentially their meanings — made indistinct and confused. Of these two passages, one falls mid-fugue; the other, more disastrously, at the end. As a monumental concluding texture, musically that ending does work for the ear. Yet the monumental texture makes the main voice disappear. The primary melody is not in the soprano. It also makes the supporting voices lose their reasons for moving in the way that they do.

It took me some three months to fully dispense with the hand-memory of one fingering and replace it with a new one that let the different voices play their parts. To this day, in trying to get these passages right, I not uncommonly stop midway, to re-start them.

When asked about how his works were to be played, Bach said, "As they are written." To read such writing can be daunting. Yet if one has time to work through all the impatient, inattentive, and inaccurate ways to read Bach's writing, one has at least a chance at rising to the measure of the measures.

This ending evidently occurs to me because I am presently reading Sidney Poitier's The Measure of a Man.

 

 

 

 

In 2024 poems by Mark Rich appeared in Poem, The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, Quiet Diamonds, and Penumbric.com — which seems remarkable to him, since although he writes poems regularly he almost never sends them out into the world. He lives in western Wisconsin with antiquing-and-life partner Martha Borchardt, the Scotties Callie and Hutton, and the constant thought of getting back to both prose-writing and guitar.