Jo,  morgendagen innebærer et aldri så lite jubileum. Spørsmålet som må stilles, er dette: Hva synes vi egentlig om Peer Gynt?

Henrik Ibsens storverk fra 1867 er et lite stykke Norge. Derfor har ”Peer Gynt” har hatt fast plass på pensumlister i norsk skoleverk til alle tider etter utgivelsen.  Peer blir gjerne fremstilt som en gøyal kar, en Espen Askeladd, en variant av typer som Alexander Rybak og Petter Northug.  Det er til og med innstiftet en egen Peer Gynt-pris, som er tildelt mang en kjernekar og -dame.

Så var det neppe Ibsens hensikt med dramaet å skryte av den norske væremåten. “Peer Gynt”  er en ramsalt kritikk av norsk dobbeltmoral. Peer nøyde seg ikke med  ”å være seg selv”.  Han var ikke bare den morsomme eventyreren, men også den kyniske livsløgneren som levde etter trollenes ordspråk om “å være seg selv nok” – det vil si å leve som absolutt egoist eller egosentriker. Først meg selv, så meg selv og så meg selv. 

Professor Vigdis Ystad har skrevet en interessant artikkel om dette.

I morgen er det 15 år siden EU-avstemningen, og hvorfor leder fortsatt nei-siden overlegent? Det har med Peer Gynt å gjøre. Harstad Tidende skriver på lederplass i dag:

15 år siden sist: Vi er rikere, feitere og enda mer tilfreds med oss selv.

Vi er oss selv nok. Vi fortsetter med det så lenge oljen gjør oss til en økonomisk stormakt. Et slikt land går ikke uten videre inn i partnerskap som stiller krav.

Vigdis Ystad skriver i artikkelen jeg nevnte ovenfor,  at Henrik Ibsen var skeptisk til å la ”Peer Gynt” bli oversatt til tysk. Han mente at boken så til de grader var knyttet til den norske tenkemåten som vi nordmenn er rammet av.

 La meg tilføye: Den gang og i dag.

Tittelsiden i manuskriptet til Peer Gynt. Kilde: www.ibsen.net

M.I.D.I  Single!

Well, I have chosen what my “single” will be for “M.I.D.I”! I have selected my rendition of “Peer Gynt”  for side-A of the single and my song “Simple and Free” as the b-side.

The version I play does not center around the main melody (which you all will recognize as the song usually played as a morning song), instead i start off with the orchestra playing the main melody, then go off into my own rendition of it,which consists of any melody you can play using F-Major . I then break off into a play of sound by mixing different tracks into one side of the sound to the other. And then i have the main track(first one i recorded) fade off as I start a fading in End Melody from another track i recorded and end playing the main melody of Peer Gynt.

Simple And Free is a song I made accidentally while fiddling around with the Synth-Sounds on my keyboard. I created a melody, then added the bass, then added more of the same melody, on each have their own sound to them. I made an earlier version before that was only 0:19 (19secs) long. I thought ”I could have made this longer!” so I redid it and made it longer and more complex.

I am quite happy with the way “M.I.D.I” is coming out, mostly because Universal Sound is just a regular old 1930s piano with voices and guitar, and off sound, while M.I.D.I is more complex, more innovative, and much more pleasant.

I have also have named “my band”. I am calling it “The Rubber Band” which is a play on The Beatles album “Rubber Soul”. That and it reminds me of a rubber band. I wonder why

Here is the “album cover” of M.I.D.I

Original Video – More videos at TinyPic

Original Video – More videos at TinyPic

The hilarious 2-Man No-Show dropped in for a surprise improv set at the at Speed-the-Plow Office Party! Fundraiser, a raucous evening that included gut-busting comedic performances from Accidental Company and the Action Slacks sandwiched between musical sets by DJ Adverb and Jason Cochrane.

Cochrane created beats on multiple Nintendo DS systems while revelers enjoyed beverages from our friendly sponsors at Steam Whistle brewing.  Lucky winners took home tickets to August: Osage County, My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, and The Thistle Project’s highly anticipated upcoming production of Peer Gynt.  Also snapped up were a dinner for two at Hair of the Dog and a stay at the luxury suite at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, a $350 value!

A huge thank you to all who donated, attended, and had a great time!  Money raised will go to pay for rights acquisition and production expenses for the play.

Catch Accidental Company and 2-Man No-Show at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival running Nov 10-15.  The Action Slacks at play regularly at the Bad Dog Theatre.

Pierrot Escapes by Jaques Lipchitz (1927)

Materialists without materials

.  Within corporatist liberalism two varieties of “pluralism” (superficially similar either to Federalism or Jeffersonian republicanism) are deployed in fights over the curriculum.  Although they bitterly oppose each other neither faction questions organic formulations of society by positing the legitimacy and value of the dissenting, creative individual above their undefinable, indescribable, irreplaceable “group cohesion”; therefore neither can fully explain either antisemitism or fascism although they may be obsessed with issues of “control.”  For the culture warriors, “the Enlightenment,” like “the world community” or “the West” or “the spirit of an age” is an integrated whole, angelically pure and healthy, or diseased, depending upon its designated genealogy:

 [Aase:] Peer, you’re lying….

[Peer Gynt:]…Downward rushed we, ever downward.

But beneath us something shimmered,

Whitish, like a reindeer’s belly.–

Mother, ‘twas our own reflection

In the glass-smooth mountain tarn,

Shooting up towards the surface

With the same wild rush of speed

Wherewith we were shooting downwards…

[Aase:] Yes, a lie, turned topsy-turvy,

Can be prinked and tinselled out,

Decked in plumage new and fine,

Till none knows its lean old carcass.

That is just what you’ve been doing,

Vamping up things, wild and grand,

Garnishing with eagle’s backs

And with all the other horrors,

Lying right and lying left,

Filling me with speechless dread,

Till at last I recognised not

What of old I’d heard and known!

[Peer:] If another talked like that

I’d half kill him for his pains.

[Aase:] Oh, would God I lay a corpse;

Would the black earth held me sleeping.

Prayers and tears don’t bite upon him.–

Peer, you’re lost, and ever will be!

 [Peer:] Darling, pretty little mother,

You are right in every word;–

Don’t be cross, be happy—

[Aase:]                           Silence!

Could I, if I would be happy,

With a pig like you for son?…

[Peer Gynt:] Shall I write my life without dissimulation,–

A book for guidance and imitation?

Or, stay–! I have plenty of time at command;–

What if, as a travelling scientist,

I should study past ages and time’s voracity?

Ay, sure enough, that is the thing for me!

Legends I read e’en in childhood’s days,

And since then I’ve kept up that branch of learning.–

I will follow the path of the human race!

Like a feather I’ll float on the stream of history,

Make it all live again, as in a dream,–

See the heroes battling for truth and right,

As an onlooker only, in safety ensconced,–

See thinkers perish and martyrs bleed,

See empires founded and vanish away,–

See world-epochs grow from their trifling seeds;

In short, I will skim off the cream of history.–

I must try to get hold of a volume of Becker,

And travel as far as I can by chronology.–

It’s true–my grounding’s by no means thorough,

And history’s wheels within wheels are deceptive;–

But pooh; the wilder the starting point,

The result will oft be the more original.–

How exalting it is, now, to choose a goal,

And drive straight for it, like flint and steel!

                                        [With quiet emotion.

To break off all round one, on every side,

The bonds that bind one to home and friends,--

To blow into atoms one’s hoarded wealth,--

To bid one’s love and its joys good night,-- 

All simply to find the arcana of truth,

                                    [Wiping a tear from his eye.]

That is the test of the true man of science!–

I feel myself happy beyond all measure.

Now I have fathomed my destiny’s riddle. 

Now ‘tis but persevering through thick and thin!

It’s excusable, sure, if I hold up my head,

And feel my worth, as the man, Peer Gynt,

Also called Human life’s Emperor.–

I will own the sum-total of bygone days;

I’ll nevermore tread in the paths of the living.

The present is not worth so much as a shoe-sole;

All faithless and marrowless the doings of men;

Their soul has no wings and their deeds no weight;–

                                   [Shrugs his shoulders.

And women,--ah, they are a worthless crew!

                                   [Goes off....

[Solveig:]…The boy has been sitting on his mother’s lap.

They two have been playing all the life-day long.

The boy has been resting at his mother’s breast

All the life-day long.  God’s blessing on my joy…

I will cradle thee, I will watch thee;

Sleep and dream thou, dear my boy! [Ibsen, 1867].[1]

 [Three Foucauldian feminist social theorists, 1992:] “…events in America and throughout the world have made the body a very contemporary issue.  New medical technologies have made state regulation of the body a pressing concern and raised serious ethical questions for scientists and humanists alike.  In many countries, politics has been reduced to a question of “image,” that is, the most “effective” presentation of a political figure’s body in the media.  In other countries, governmental policies (enforced sterilization, torture and genocide) attack the body and with it, individual freedom.  AIDS, overpopulation, and world hunger all raise difficult political issues involving the body and its protection.

      Such ethical and political issues all have their origins in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.  This period witnessed the creation and elaboration of a host of cultural and political practices which are still with us.  For example, the absolutist courts of the seventeenth century established new norms for bodily behavior, stressing restraint and civility over medieval impulsiveness and spontaneity.  At the same time, philosophers rethought the relationship between the mind and body and created a new epistemology based upon reason and bodily sensations, that is, observation.  With the scientific revolution, biology and psychology emerged as distinct disciplines, and thinking about the body had to be revised.  Twentieth-century discourses on race and gender find their roots in this critical period, and so too does modern political theory.  The emergence of more democratic forms of government opened up new questions about the appropriate extent and nature of the state’s control over the body.  As citizens replaced subjects, individuals wondered how they were to “embody” their new enfranchisement, how they were to act on the new-formed political stage.  The developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries–the scientific revolution, the emergence of the modern state, the birth of political democracy–created new ways of thinking about and experiencing the body.” [2]

      How do we know when we are not fascists?  Or pluralists?  It has been my contention that the scientific revolution bequeathed a method of investigation, not foreordained conclusions about the goodness and suitability of any particular economic system; moreover that the radical puritan (“Hebraic”) interpretation of the Old Testament insisted that each individual had worth and was a potentially rational, creative, and moral creature, capable of self-knowledge and self-management.  I have also argued that the German Romantics and their inheritors appropriated the scientific search for truth and turned it to the service of reaction with the propagation of ethnopluralism and the concept of “the-individual-in-society” seeking equilibrium (a return to the cradle or Momma’s lap?), not enlightenment.  Thus in speculating about reform it behooves the political dreamer  to start with the ideal of the freely developing, cherished individual, then to imagine alternative social structures capable of serving everyone without destroying excellence.  Meanwhile, Adam Smith or Hayek and the Progressives continue to confront one another. For today’s canon warriors the Enlightenment is part of their arsenal; you will find no racists among them, but neither are there many free-wheeling artists, the poet-type that Plato banished from his Republic and that Budd Schulberg evoked in his novel The Disenchanted (1950). 

     He’s not “our” Hitler. The cultural pluralists are class-conscious organic conservatives promoting  “diversity,” creatively coping with “mass society” and its kitsch-culture, and opposing nationalism and racism as obstacles to the global integration of money and markets.[3]  For this group there was one, unitary Enlightenment; it proved that capitalism was rational and politically correct, and they are its inheritors, whereas Hitler, a proto-New Leftist, is their antithesis: like other German Romantics (including Marx), Hitler simply opposed modernity and its intellectual tools.  For Alan Bloom, who assimilated Locke to the idealist tradition, the Enlightenment carried the rationalism ascribed to Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant and Goethe.[4]

      Other “anti-racists”–the “anti-pluralist” cultural relativists, New Left multiculturalists, critical theorists (followers of Adorno and Horkheimer), libertarian socialists and the Foucauldians–are the idealist descendants of Herder and other German Romantics.  For them there was one, unitary Enlightenment and bourgeois, materialist, “extraceptive” Hitler and other Western imperialists, similarly agents of state repression, genocide and ecocide, were its logical culmination.[5]  Thus pluralists and anti-pluralists alike would tend to see Nazi antisemitism as a form of irrational racism and hypernationalism/chauvinism produced by their rivals: for the neoliberals, German Romanticism, or, for some multiculturalists and even poststructuralists, a congeries of Enlightenment philosophers.[6]  For the corporatist liberal social educators/policy-makers I have studied, Nazi antisemitism functioned as “scapegoating”: a projection of exclusively inner conflicts upon the outside world by petit-bourgeois “respectable” authoritarian personalities.  Nazi antisemitism rarely was understood to function as outright robbery, as professional rivalry, or as a pseudo-classical response to fear of the mob. [7]

     Stalinist ideologues, whose vile authoritarian ways were ostensibly rejected by critical theorist “Western Marxists” and “libertarian socialists,” have equated “existing socialism” with its antithesis: “bourgeois society” run by sneaky Zionists/Jews/rootless cosmopolitans that were strangling “the peoples” with their octopus grip.  Zionists were perpetuating commercial fraud and consumerism, the illusion of American exceptionalism, and the Amerikan Big Lie of a Soviet military threat that had pointlessly militarized consciousness by advancing a cynical policy of thoroughgoing mind-control identical to Hitler’s.  For one powerful Soviet general and tactician, the late Dimitri Volkogonov, Nazi antisemitism was totally invisible: Hitler and his imperialist allies were hung up on anticommunism. There was one Enlightenment, and the peace-loving, tolerant Soviets and their anti-imperialist Third World allies were its sole legatees.  This could be Hitler talking; the Zionists control everything:

      [An example of official Soviet propaganda, written by Volkogonov before his conversion:] “The capitalist mass media are greatly influenced by the Zionist circles.  For example, Zionist organisations in the United States control half its magazines, more than half of its radio stations, and a large number of press and radio bureaus abroad.  In other capitalist countries the picture is very much the same.  In addition to that, various Zionist organisations run more than a thousand publications in 67 countries.  This is where the military-industrial complex draws its ideological support.

     The capitalist mass media spread outright lies about socialism, create a climate of fear for the future, of gloom and doom.  The main idea of this vast system of disinformation is to prove that “socialism is bad” and the “free world” is good.

     This is how the capitalist mass media are waging the psychological war against the Soviet people, also against their own people whom the bourgeois radio centres feed with disinformation.  This is how opinions in the West are shaped when people are unable to understand the true state of things, when they think and act only under the influence of the extraneous forces that manipulate them. ” [8]

 And yet, like poststructuralists or new historicists who reject “totalitarian” objectivists, Stalinists were appalled at the idea of an intelligentsia claiming authority while standing apart from state or faction: what middle-class conceit!  We may rest assured that Volkogonov was not a fascist because he says so.

 [At Martha’s Vineyard, 1968, Kenneth Boulding, Professor of Economics and Director, Program in Social and Economic Dynamics, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorador, Boulder, Colorado brainstorms racism and educational policy with other liberal leaders: [9]] “…I must confess that I am deeply, intensively bored with the subject of race.  I think it is the most boring subject in the world.  Unfortunately, we have to go on talking about it.

     My own hunch is that the main problem in this country is not race at all but class.  And we are extremely unwilling to admit this because our ideology says that ours is a classless society.  The brute fact is that we ain’t.  We are a society for the middle class, of the middle class, and by the middle class, and we don’t really care much for the lower class…Talking about attitudes, the main attitude I think we have to change is that of the good liberal white.  I must say that I have been observing with a little sadistic pleasure a number of white liberals exhibiting catatonic culture shock because of the black-power types and the brown-power types–the brown-power types in our part of the country are much more fun than the black-power types….(30,31).

 [Emerging from this conference, a concluding “Agenda for Action”:]“…we recommend…that college and university teaching and research in the social and behavioral sciences, history, the humanities and the arts, and research be made more vital in terms of contemporary social issues and problems, in terms of the need for effective social action and democratic social change.  The concern of the present generation of American college students that their education be made more relevant to society and to racial and social justice should be mobilized in behalf of such a strengthened program…[“Dangers” are noted:] 1. Racial segregation in schools may be temporarily or permanently increased through adoption of tactical and interim efforts to increase quality of education for minority-group children. 2. Compensatory and enrichment programs could obscure the basic issue of the incompatibility between high-quality education for all children and the existence of segregated schools. 3. Decentralization of schools could reinforce the neighborhood-school concept, which is related to the perpetuation of a segregated school system. 4. Remedial and special-admission programs could perpetuate double racial standards for judging academic performance of minority students, thereby reinforcing racial stereotyping and racism in education (158-159).”

 Gemeinschaft vs. Gemeinschaft?  Perhaps the culture wars are something of a tempest in a teapot, a generational conflict, a distinction without a difference, the younger generation acting out the primitivist holidays forbidden to their staid predecessors.  What they share is a view of the Enlightenment and the West as a unitary phenomenon transmitting “rationalism,” an organic entity to be either revered or toppled.  Neither side is capable of a materialist history, hence cannot and will not historicize “fascism,” and unlike some 1930s left-liberals or Trotskyists, neither side distinguishes between organicist and materialist intellectual traditions; instead they blame each other for autocratic behavior.  Modern artists, scientists, and other materialist intellectuals are unsafe in either camp.

      The older pluralists (defenders of The Great Tradition) want to protect their national culture from the assaults of New Left postmodernist crypto-fascist crazies.  The democratic pluralists do not ignore class conflict, do not mystify class with “race”; rather, following Aristotle, Montesquieu and Mosca, a plurality of economic interests are said fruitfully to clash, check and balance each other; its free-for-all unmasking operations leading to truth, rational compromise and thus “equilibrium.”  Democratic capitalism, paradise to the clear-eyed middle-class, offers equal opportunity.  Failures have no one to blame but themselves or utopian romantic rabble-rousers slandering an imperfect but solid system triumphally arched by the neutral state.  Thus revolt can only be diagnosed as an irrational “acting out” or “deviance” or “sentimentality,” the stubborn refusal of adjustment “essential to the maintenance of dynamic democracy imperative for humanity and national stability.”[10]  Of course this same generation of intellectuals (many of whose most articulate representatives are former 1930s Jewish Marxists) supported the war in Vietnam and other imperialist adventures; moreover to 1960s student radicals they seemed unmoved by urban squalor, the nuclear threat and a dangerously degraded environment.  Thus 1930s “scientific” Marxism, purging opposing voices on the Left, soft on the domination of nature and lacking respect for “traditional” cultures (flaws which are conflated in the imaginations of primitivist “deep ecologists”?) seemed part of this tainted “modern,” “Hebraic,” “Western” heritage to the children of 1930s radicals and 1950s conservatives alike.

      The maturing academics who entered the professoriate after their baptism in tumultuous 1960s social movements, movements without linkage to the disorganized and quiescent working class whose members were often understandably resentful of privileged “draft dodgers” and “anti-Americans,” responded indignantly to the claims of “equal opportunity,” the pride of upwardly mobile urban ethnics embracing the tradition of Jackson and Lincoln.  Since women and non-whites were so obviously underrepresented in university faculties and curricula, and since many 1960s veterans were sympathetic to black power and other national liberation movements (viewed as responding to internal colonialism and imperialism), some insurgents accounted for the absence of women and non-whites in leadership positions as symptoms of “white male” or “patriarchal” intolerance/hegemony.  The “multiculturalists” did not argue that the position of women/non-whites in the family and labor force precluded the lengthy period of leisure, privacy, travel and acculturation anyone (including working-class white males) needed to become a scholar; rather their “difference” made their cultures of “the Other” unfathomable to transparently obtuse white males.  The new pluralists settled into ghettoized ethnic studies and women’s studies programs which, by virtue of their particular institutionalization in response to the 1960s black power and radical feminist movements suggested ethnic and gender difference as the most relevant variables, the engines of history for non-whites and women (however often “class” might be dropped into the mix of “class, race, and gender”).  As was feared by the conservative liberals at Martha’s Vineyard promoting the coöptation of black nationalism, race (and gender) had virtually erased class as an objective category.  Not surprisingly the dissenting individual also went the way of all flesh, collapsed into a notion of “individuality” as a feature of groups (race or ethnicity).

      Fitting neatly into the idealist counter-Enlightenment which had promoted the concepts of racial, ethnic and national character, many theorizing young scholars, adopting a pseudo-Marxist, pseudo-Freudian rhetoric and, following the subjectivism, irrationalism, and group-think of Herder and Kant , defined themselves as revolutionary postmodernists, declaring that the categories of race, class, and gender, like literary taste, were all “socially constructed,” historically rooted, and thus “radically Other,” i.e., resistant to empathic readings or universal standards of truth and craft.  These anti-pluralist pluralists, champions of diversity and tolerance, have not been promulgating “hegemonic” Enlightenment or Victorian notions of species-unity (other than Herder’s international yet localist crazy quilt); they have mostly attempted to demolish the rationalism and universalist ethics spawned by the radical Reformation and scientific revolution then borne by the philosophes, “Old Jewry”–radicals like Price and Priestley as they were characterized by a hostile Edmund Burke–liberal feminists, and anti-slavery men or  “Black Republicans” like Charles Sumner.

      The underlying unity between generations is illustrated by their common periodization of Cold War-style repression of civil liberties in “McCarthyism.” Little attention is paid to centuries-old élite resistance to mass literacy and numeracy and the torrent of democratic ideas that followed.  After the brief hiatus of the Nazi-Stalin Pact (1939-1941), American Stalinists dropped that short-lived campaign against American warmongers, once more supporting corporatist New Deal policies against the assaults of “fascist Republicans” or “monopoly capital.”  The prolific Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation and foe to racism and censorship, was impressed by the methodology of Talcott Parsons and other “moderate” top-down planners who, after the war, opposed the arms race as an excessive drain on the welfare state.  Like many of the other corporatist thinkers described here, McWilliams was a regionalist and a populist; whether or not he was a member of the Communist Party as charged, he was certainly never a materialist.  His papers from the 1930s (at UCLA) suggest that he was following the Communist line, switching from a view of the New Deal as “social fascism” to best friend of the working class during the Popular Front (1935-1939).  Like other New Deal social democrats, he wanted to strengthen capitalism by bringing good labor unions and racial minorities into the system to stabilize the base.  After the war, “McCarthyism” was bad because it confused conservative reformers like himself with real communists.

      Writing in the late 1960s, political scientist Michael Rogin denied that populists were antisemites, as neoconservative Richard Hoftstadter had charged in his Age of Reform (1957).  McCarthy was not a populist, Rogin argued, but a spokesman for traditional conservative élites, the selfish laissez-faire crowd of materialists participating in the (bad) American Lockean consensus.  Denouncing white supremacy (hitherto an emblem for Wall Street and the power of Jewish money), proto-New Left radicals like McWilliams and Rogin internalized the Soviet-Tory terror-gothic scenario for the history of the last five centuries: Frankenstein monsters, the unique progeny of crazy scientists, Victorian prudery, and “the culture of narcissism” i.e., the ever unitary Jewish West, have produced genocide, exploitation of the Third World and the colonization of domestic minorities, mind-control by the mass media and CIA, urban snobbery, reification, commodification, luxury, and consumerism.  The radical scholars apparently hate money (commercialism) more than they love the creative, questing individual.  Do these populists resist the market as a coercive, brutal mechanism or, like displaced feudal clerics and aristocrats, would they ban the site of judgment by upstart “consumers” they cannot control?  Or, as anticapitalists and anti-imperialists, have they carved out their own super-moral niche on the market while apparently rejecting it?

 [Kenneth Boulding:] “Suppose we do something like this: We go to a voucher plan.  You give every child $500 to $1000 a year, and he can spend it any way he wants.  And give every Negro child $1500.

[Jerome Wiesner:] But that’s racism.

[Kenneth Boulding:] But I mean I am in favor of racism.  I think racism is important.  Well, they call it discrimination–not the same thing as racism at all.  These are two quite different subjects.  If you want to introduce some kind of counterweight to discrimination, this is where the federal government comes in.  We may see the federal government, the whole taxing-and-subsidizing business, as a total picture weighted toward correcting some of these ills of society.  This seems to me to be its major function (32).

 [Christopher Edley, explaining that his support of black power in the 1950s and 60s did not entail a belief in racism:]  Now some excesses have come to the fore.  There is a danger of black nationalism, there is a danger of black separatism that goes beyond the temporary withdrawal to recoup our strength, to regroup and to seek out the powers that we want–the economic and social powers that seem to be attainable for us as a group only through the use of black identity.  Now I think there are roles that Negroes have to play.  It seems to me that the power structure has only responded to the excessive demands that have been made in the Negro community, and that there are certain Negroes who because they are bold and courageous, because they have little to lose, must demand things of the power structure which are excessive.  And I think that if we–the Ken Clarks and the Chris Edleys and perhaps the Lisle Carters–have a role to play, it is to capitalize on the softening up process that results from the excessive demands… [Black identity and race pride] will enable [students] to band together to overcome the obstacles.  I think that subconsciously they are seeking to get into the melting pot and the mainstream of American life.  I don’t believe that black nationalism will be the major thread…I don’t think that we need condemn [black-power studies], and I think many of us get caught in the situation where we have to think as Americans, as Negroes, and perhaps as something in between.  And I think it is possible to identify rationally the roles that people are playing and to realize that really in the long run they complement each other rather than being antagonistic to each other (71-72).”

    So much for checks and balances.  In all cases, the Romantic Wandering Jew (the Byronic hero, Ahab, Peer Gynt as historian, myself) and our critical apparatus curse the strange diagnostics of democratic pluralists and anti-pluralist multiculturalists alike; s/he totes “the melting pot”[11] that jams Durkheimian solidarities too close to bad Jews, the latter identified in the nineteenth century by one republican theorist with “the moral nature of Anglo-Saxondom, with its virile instincts of right, freedom, and humanity, defending our cause against all comers, with indomitable courage and constancy of faith.”[12] Such troubling figures were revising and reconfiguring the past and present to produce what the “pluralists” regard as protofascist anomie, the alarming switch from homey, heimlich Gemeinschaft to intrusive and alienating, unheimlich Gesellschaft. [13]

 [Untitled poem submitted to London Mercury by an Englishman, Lawrence Binyon (a William Blake reviver of the 1920s):] From the howl of the wind/ As I opened the door/ And entered, the firelight/ Was soft on the floor;/ And mute in their places/ Were table and chair/ The white wall, the shadows,/ Awaiting me there./ All was strange on a sudden!/ From the stillness a spell,/ A fear or a fancy,/ Across my heart fell./ Were they awaiting another/ To sit by the hearth?/ Was it I saw them newly/ A stranger on earth?    [14]

      My estranging romantic Lockean psychodynamics or history would achieve a provisional “balance” through  1. experience and achieved understanding, learned afresh in each generation, not through the inheritance/quick fix of acquired characteristics;  2. tracking the history of the imagination, not völkisch instincts or the stamp of “material culture”;  3. recognition of the historical specificity of “roles” and conflict while comparing analogous structures and processes in other societies;  4. application of universalist ethical criteria, like Freud in The Future of an Illusion, not site-specific opportunism in evaluations of protest movements and tactics;  5. affirmation of species-unity and interdependence with humanity and nature in the never-finished search for truth and justice (legitimate authority), not ethnic or gender “identity,” as the basis for solidarity;  6. comprehensive, detailed description of controversial individuals, societies and policies without the use of buzz words like “moderation,” “excess,” or “extremism” ; and  7. preservation of the achievements of the past without ancestor-worship.  Nor would our “Captain Ahab” admit to (fatal) “subjectivity” as a “participant-observer” or “new historicist” while conducting our sleuthing expeditions, as if “bourgeois” historians/artists had never thought about their biases, welcomed “diversity” or attempted to restore the context of the facts they discover in archives or in other societies and sub-cultures.

                [2] Ann K. Mellor, Kathryn Norberg, Sara E. Melzer, “Constructing The Body,” Clark & Center Newsletter 22 (Fall 1992): 2.  A recent Clark Library conference on “Vitalism and the Enlightenment” (January 1994) continued the anti-empiricist tendency, attempting to rehabilitate German idealism by reversing the usual association of “mechanical materialism” with the Left and vitalism and organicism with the Right.

            [3] See Lewis Coser, “Europe’s Neurotic Nationalism,” Commentary, June 1946, 58-63: “Cultural pluralism–the right of each people to its own culture–is perfectly compatible with unification on the economic and political plane, and it is absurd to pretend that those who favor such unification call for the standardization of European culture.  On the contrary, a diversified European culture is no longer possible except through political and economic integration.  “Balkanization” will mean not only material, but cultural poverty.  The only political, economic, or cultural hope of the peoples of Europe lies in an over-all community that goes beyond the separate nation.”  Coser’s cultural pluralism was asserted against “totalitarianism” resulting from nationalism (gradually transformed from democratic revolution to racism and imperialism).  These thinkers are vigorously “anti-racist,” but have substituted ethnicity as the category to study “the problems of group adjustment” and “real group differences that are the soil and raw material of democratic society.”  See Melvin Tumin, “The Idea of “Race” Dies Hard,”Commentary, July 1949, 80-85.  Cf. the Progressive A.A. Berle, Jr., “The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy,” Democratic Pluralism and the Social Studies, ed. James P. Shaver and Harold Berlak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968): Scorning the “Jeffersonian” sentiments of New Left framers of the Port Huron statement demanding participatory democracy, Berle explained to high school teachers that participation could not exist in a scientific, bureaucratic culture (143); however, “democracy” was time-tested: “Throughout history democracy has been the most effective device for complex societies to coordinate the action of masses of people performing a large variety of complex functions (142).”

     If constitutional checks and balances are obsolete, then there is no basis for unity in this country other than the organic solidarity promised in ethnicity; perhaps “multiculturalism” is a way for technocratic élites to micro-manage “group” (but really class and institutional) conflict.  Ritual obeisances to the Founding Fathers would be used then to create the illusion of popular sovereignty; i.e., both Federalism and Jeffersonian republicanism are obsolete for technocrats.

            [4] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1987).  Note the organicist title; however Bloom distances himself from “the progressives of the twenties and thirties” whom he blends with Stalinists (32) and New Leftists.  For an example of the tug-of-war for the Enlightenment, see Roger Kimball’s review of Todd Gitlin’s book (cited above), “Whose Enlightenment Is It?” New Criterion, April 1996, pp. 4-8.  Kant is favorably cited, suggesting that the neocons are closet German Romantics.  But see F.A. Hayek, Individualism: True and False (Blackwell, 1946).  Hayek places the German Romantics with jacobins, utilitarians, and Marxists in the category of totalitarian thinkers.  His preferred lineage for the true individualist includes Locke, Mandeville, Smith, Hume, Ferguson, Burke, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.  Anyone who claims to grasp the big picture is arrogant and deceptive.  In a fragmented world, only experts can judge other experts.  The placement of Locke in this pantheon is curious since Hayek has rendered rationalism (Locke’s contribution to popular sovereignty) as hubris.

            [5] Cf. Milan Hauner, “The Professionals and Amateurs in National Socialist Foreign Policy: Revolution and Subversion in the Islamic and Indian World,” The Führer State: Myth and Reality, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart:Klett-Cotta, 1981): 305-327, for a discussion of anti-imperialist proposals supported by aristocrats in the foreign service, with similar efforts (1914-18) predating Nazism and opposed by inexperienced Nazis.  (The targets were the imperialist West; Cf. Lukács, 1952).

     Should some of today’s postmodernists and New Leftists be seen as anticapitalist/ anti-statists similar in outlook to the prewar Right (for instance, the Catholic Distributists Belloc and Chesterton, or T.S. Eliot)?  G.C. Webber calls the type “the aristocratic backwoodsman”; his classification of the interwar British Right could be useful today.  Rejecting the Fascist vs. right-wing Conservative division as too crude and non-descriptive, Webber suggests four categories: anticapitalist antistatists, anticapitalist statists (reactionary Tories), capitalist statists (managing capitalism like FDR’s New Deal or Mosley’s BUF), and capitalist anti-statists (like today’s New Right); all were to the Right of the liberal conservatives and of course Liberals and socialists.  See G.C. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1986).

      Frankfurt School theorists reject (bogus) pluralism (as in Marcuse’s theory of repressive tolerance):”pluralism” masks a totalitarian (but fragmented) U.S.; Fredric Jameson argues for an overarching Marxist dialectic as the umbrella to local Marxisms (as there are national variants in late capitalism); this seems to me to be “rooted” cultural relativism, an apology for cultural nationalism; similarly other “historical materialists”/”cultural materialists”/postmodernists are idealists.  See Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, Cornell U.P., 1981): 31-32, 54, 74, 86, 87; Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of “late capitalism”(Durham: Duke U.P., 1991): xx. Cf. Ralph Bischoff, Nazi Conquest Through German Culture (Harvard U.P., 1942): 3, who writes “[Following an argument for unconditional victory as prelude to peace:] It is the thesis of this book that the march of National Socialism to power was in part due to the inborn cultural and blood nationalism of the German people, and the ability of their leaders to reawaken, reemphasize, and re-form certain characteristic traditions and faiths already existent in Germany and other German communities.” (This book was part of the Harvard Political Studies series).  Are these irrationalist portraits veiled arguments for total victory (or defeat), not negotiated settlements?

            [6] See for instance Richard Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro, Vol.3 (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve, 1973): 245-62.  Locke is mentioned 245, 254, without citation for racist statements (as opposed to affiliations). In any case, the racism charge is present-minded.  Locke is included with Berkeley, Hume, Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson, and Kant.  Popkin’s standard for anti-racist philosophy seems to be “egalitarianism and relativism.” I read Locke as opposed to the identity politics I am criticizing here; see Christopher Fox, “Locke and the Scriblerians,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 16 (Fall, 1982): 1-25.  For Locke, identity was fluid and based on (learned) “consciousness,” not (inherited) “substance.”  The violence of rude and barbarous peoples is not inscribed, but learned.  Relativism is supported in recent research supported by the Clark Library (UCLA); see Mario Biagioli, “Civility, Court Society and Scientific Discourse,” Clark & Center Newsletter 21 (Fall, 1991): 2-3: “…what we see emerging from very recent historical work is that the acceptance of the new science rested largely on the ways in which the practitioners managed to present themselves, their theories, their discoveries, their arguments and disagreements, and their experimental practices as fitting the proper cultural (and behavioral) codes.  In short, to gain acceptance and credibility, the practitioners of the new science needed to present themselves as fitting the codes of those who had the social status and power to legitimize their knowledge–that is, princes, aristocrats, and gentlemen.”

      See also Michael Denning, “The Academic Left and the Rise of Cultural Studies,” Radical History Review 54 (Fall 1992): 21-47: “The roots of United States cultural studies lie in the pioneering work in the 1930s and 1940s of such figures as Kenneth Burke, Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and Carey McWilliams…they shared socialist or leftist social-democratic politics, an interest in the popular arts, a desire to rethink notions of race and ethnicity and nation and people, and a concern for social theory.”  But neither Matthiessen nor McWilliams was a materialist; Denning’s imprecision in describing what were many distinct and embattled left and liberal tendencies during this period is typical of the vagueness, organicism, and anti-intellectual populism of the “radical” scholars I am criticizing.  Denning even cites the attacks upon 1890s populist social scientists, etc.”…which grew into the postwar “McCarthyist” purge of the universities.” (33)  Cf. Stalinist accounts of fascism: there was no populist (petit-bourgeois) movement or working-class support, solely the big bourgeoisie, inevitably fascist in decadent late capitalism; both Matthiessen and McWilliams agreed with this formulation.

            [7] See Samuel Gringauz, “Anti-Semitism in Socialism,” Commentary, April 1950, 371-373, misleadingly titled since the author denies that antisemitism is intrinsically found in socialism or any other ideology; it is rather a flexible weapon to be opportunistically wielded against one’s political competitors.  Gringauz follows Hermann Rauschning in viewing Nazi antisemitism as “the product of cold calculation,” relying on Hitler’s alleged admission, “The Jews are a valuable hostage given to me by the democracies.  Anti-Semitic propaganda in all countries is an almost indispensable medium of the extension of our political campaign.”  My reading rests on the assumption that a coherent case for madness can be drawn from Hitler’s writings; however I cannot tell conclusively if Hitler was sincerely antisemitic or a complete cynic; perhaps he veered between these two positions.  The aristocratic Rauschning’s testimony should be viewed with a grain of salt.

            [8] See D. Volkogonov, The Psychological War (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986): 125.  Emphasis in original.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the late Volkogonov, suddenly a Yeltsin supporter, Bukharinite and Menshevik, exposed the horrendous careers of Stalin and Lenin.

            [9] Racism and American Education, A Dialogue and Agenda for Action, Introduction by McGeorge Bundy, Foreward by Averell Harriman (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1970).  Excerpted also in my Pacifica memoir.

            [10] Racism and American Education, 159. Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees.  Mandevillle was an eighteenth-century freethinker who explained that the vices of human nature, eternally the same in all societies, could be switched to the cause of productivity, that the alternative to robust empire was an elusive Golden Age that would contain only material deprivation, that “eutopian” fantasies/self-denial/altruism were only covers for self-love.  The Mandeville was republished by London’s Wishart (publishers of Gorer’s De Sade, excerpted above) and annexed to the Left in 1934 by editor Douglas Garman.  As an influence upon Adam Smith and as a precursor to Freud, his contributions need to be reassessed.

     See Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue (Knopf, 1992) for a typically anecdotal attack on multiculturalism.  Bernstein, a Harvard graduate and New York Times reporter, traces the intolerance of the revised curriculum to Jacobin terror, while not criticizing the fundamental assumptions of ethnic studies; i.e., he is writing in the pluralist tradition of the 1968 conference on racism and education: the strategy has gone sour and the revolution is eating its children.  The “Marxist” multicultural movement is said to emerge both from New England Puritanism and the degradation and disillusionment of the 1960s counter-culture.  Bernstein favorably cites Joseph Campbell and uses Jungian organicist categories throughout while appearing to defend liberalism and the Enlightenment; Washington, not the invisible Jefferson, is the exemplary Founding Father.  While arguing for accurate history, civil rights, individual freedom, individual responsibility and development Bernstein never differentiates between the libertarian political thought of Western Europe (England, France, and Holland) and the rest of the continent.  Others in this faction include Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Nathan Glazer.

            [11] The particular menace of the melting pot is made explicit by the Catholic, Irish Nationalist, pro-Nazi James Murphy, Adolf Hitler, The Drama of His Career (London: Chapman & Hall, 1934): 120-121.  Catholic Centre coalitions with godless Prussians and socialists promoting a secularising Jewish press were similarly disasters for the simple, insightful peasants Murphy defends throughout.  He cites and recommends Hans Ehrenberg, Deutschland im Schmelzhofen (“Germany in the Melting Pot”).

[12]See Charles Sumner: An Essay by Carl Schurz, ed. Arthur  Reed Hogue (U.of Illinois Press, 1951):97. Schurz was referring to the Englishman John Bright, linking his character to Sumner’s.

[13] See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, transl. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001. Originally published in 1887, Tönnies’s book is considered to be a classic work of sociology, but not until after the first world war (xxviii-xxviii) was it canonized. At first seen as a “communist tract,” it was taken up by German “ultra-nationalists,” and in America during the 1930s was read as “an essay in consensual structural functionalism.” The editor of this edition seems favorably disposed to this elusive and mysterious work. Tönnies was the son of a merchant banker, and given his hostility to modernity, one wonders how much of his disgust with the modern world was intertwined with his feelings about his father. In 1892 he “helped found Society for Ethical Culture, the vehicle for his life-long involvement in various co-operative, social reform, and self-improvement movements.” (xxxi-xxxii)

            [14] Lawrence Binyan was an English Blake scholar, and a key figure in the William Blake promotion that followed World War I; the poem is in the J.C. Squire Papers, UCLA Special Collections

Matt Weiner in a former life

Dramatic Literature was my first English credit at college and I remember thinking that it was really fun but totally useless.  When was I ever going to use it?  Apparently, it was a concept waiting for an application.

Decades later, Matt Weiner created Mad Men.  I started watching Mad Men in the second season, just before the episode The Mountain King.  It took me a few days to catch up (continuously down loading from iTunes).  And then I saw the method in his Madness.  Weiner is recreating at least three plays by Henrik Ibsen.  Here is RD’s Ibsen Theory of Mad Men:

Ibsen play #1: Don Draper is Peer Gynt

Run away! Run away!

Peer Gynt is an adventurous dreamer.  He is a creative and gifted storyteller.  But his whole life is one of avoidance.  Early on in the play, he runs off with the rich farmer’s daughter, but then dumps her and becomes an outlaw.  There is a beautiful young woman named Solveig who encounters Peer throughout the play.  Peer’s adventures take him to the home of the Mountain King, a troll,  where he engages in an existential discussion about what separates man from troll.  The Mountain King tells him that man says, “To thy self be true” while trolls say, “Be true to yourself-ish”.  Peer meets a Green Woman who turns out to be the Mountain King’s daughter.  She’s beautiful on the outside but really a troll under her skirts.  They have some kind of relationship.  She says she’s pregnant, he says he never touched her. He returns home and finds Solveig waiting for him.  She says she knows all about who and what he is and she is willing to stay with him warts and all.  Peer welcomes her into the house he built for them.  They are happy for about a split second because the Green Woman shows up dragging a crippled child with her.  The child is the product of their illicit affair.  Peer denies this but the Green Woman curses him and says that the evidence of Peer’s infidelity will always come between him and Solveig.  Peer decides to run away.  He has more adventures, wins and loses fortunes, is pressured to sign some tricky contracts, engages in some shady and disreputable business careers (advertising, anyone?) and in the end is forced to confront his life and whether he has been true to himself.

Ok, I don’t think there is any question that Don Draper/Dick Whitman is the Peer Gynt storyline.  If you’ve been following the show, you’ll see the existential struggle as the main event.  Who is Don Draper?  What kind of man is he?  But the current season focuses on his relationship with Solveig and the Green Woman or Betty and Suzanne.  Betty is the idealized woman to Don.  She is beautiful, sophisticated and pure.  He feels most sexually attracted to her when she pretends to be someone else, as in her flirtation with him when they went to Rome together in the episode Souvenir.  Otherwise, Betty is the mother figure to Don and therefore untouchable, which is frustrating and confounding Betty.

In the last couple of episodes, Betty finds out Don’s true identity and confronts him.  Realizing that divorcing him without clear proof of infidelity might leave her penniless and force her to give up her children, Betty appears to have decided to accept Don/Dick.  The mysterious Don Draper is suddenly starting to make sense to her.   The last few moments of the last episode are the most touching of the series.  Don wakes up after his confession, not knowing what to expect from his wife or life.  She stands in the kitchen, calm, clear eyed and less tense than we’ve ever seen her.  She asks him if she can get him something for breakfast.  He answers no, they look at each other knowingly, he gently touches her cheek but does not kiss her.  She greets him at the end of the day in the same manner, offers him the rest of her hot dog and they go trick or treating with their children.  This is as good as it gets as far as marital bliss.  It is a simple tableau of coming home to warmth and acceptance. They start fresh from this point.

BUT, the Green Woman is still out there.  In Peer Gynt, the Green Woman seems to symbolize eroticism and infidelity.  We’ve seen Don’s struggle with both.  It’s a fight he often loses.  Usually, Don keeps his little forays in tight little compartments.  He doesn’t boff the secretaries and he doesn’t covet his neighbor’s wife.  This time is different.  Suzanne is his daughter’s former teacher.  Early on, she asks him if he really wants to dally so close to home.  Don’s having some issues at work and feels under pressure to sign a contract (ding!, ding!, ding!) and he gives into his attraction to her.  He first sees Suzanne dancing under a Maypole, a symbol of nature and fertility.  But each encounter after that is darker, shadowed.  The sun is eclipsed, he meets her running in the wee small hours of the night, he visits her in her dark, poorly lit over-the-garage apartment.  Could it be that all this darkness is obscuring Suzanne’s true nature?  Does the darkness allow him to touch the animal, erotic nature at the core of the sexual experience?  We can only speculate.  Don appears to see something about Suzanne that eludes the rest of us.

However, one thing is certain.  Suzanne is getting closer to her target.  The boundary between Don’s erotic world and the home that he is trying to protect is being breached.  The Green Woman is moving from public sphere- the school, to neighborhood -as a nocturnal runner, to Don’s public image- encountering him on his morning commute on the train, to right outside his house- when he leaves her in his car to go in to get some clothes for their rendezvous in Connecticut.  There are two episodes left for her to finally physically come between Don and Betty.  The season’s ending is going to coincide with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Weiner says that he will not focus on the assassination.  That territory has been covered. (Update:  He lied.  I guess it was unavoidable.  Nevertheless, he’s gotten it out of the way, leaving the last episode open for the final confrontation.)   But the parallels between the end of Camelot, that perfect tableau of domestic bliss, and the end of the Draper’s marriage are pretty clear.  Peer and Solveig are going to be separated.  They won’t get back together for a long time.

Ibsen Play #2: A Doll’s House or Betty is Nora.

What *do* women want?

Nora Helmer is a woman who has it all.  Three children, a well respected husband, Torvald, and soon the financial security that will allow her the kind of lifestyle her family has waited a decade to enjoy.  Early in the marriage when she was pregnant with her first child, her husband’s doctor tells her that Torvald will die from consumption if he does not spend time in a warmer, drier climate.  Because they are poor, and because her father is dying (or recently dead), Nora forges her father’s signature on a promisory note from a disreputable lawyer.  Women do not have the right to take out loans in their own names so she has broken the law.  But she reasons that she has done this for a noble cause and that if Torvald ever finds out, he will come to forgive her.  After Torvald’s recovery, Nora secretly takes on work in order to pay off the lawyer.  She is almost finished paying back the loan when Torvald is made manager of the bank where the lawyer now works.  Torvald vows to fire the lawyer because of the lawyer’s past transgressions.  Torvald’s tragic flaw is his intense preoccupation with appearances and propriety.  He doesn’t want the lawyer’s past blotting his own reputation.  Torvald also treats his wife as a child.  She is his lark, his little squirrel, his little wife, play acting as a grown up.  When Torvald finds out about the loan, he is immediately concerned with his own reputation and sets about disciplining his wife.  He forbids her from raising her own children.  She finally comes to realize that she has been living in a dream world.  She has been a doll in her father’s and then her husband’s houses.  She has no identity or rights except that which they have given her.  She decides that she is incapable of loving her husband or raising her children because this was not freely her choice.  She decides to leave her family in order to exercise her free will and become the person she is meant to be.

Betty Draper, nee Hofstadt, is a woman trapped by convention.  She is a beautiful, well educated, poised, pampered suburban housewife.  She is also bored out of her gourd.  A couple of episodes ago, we found out that Betty was an anthropology major at Bryn Mawr and she says she never uses it.  But we have seen Betty paying very close attention to the social confines of her world and have even witnessed her knowledge of human nature to manipulate her friends into cheating.   Betty may not be the wittiest person in the world and her emotional restraint, something she blames on her Nordic heritage, makes her appear cold and humorless.  But Betty knows that something isn’t right with the constructed environment in which she lives, which strips all agency from her and other housewives and infantilizes them.  Betty reads.  We’ve caught her reading Ship of Fools, The Great Gatsby and The Group.  It’s only a matter of time before she reads The Feminine Mystique.

Throughout this season, we have seen Betty’s own struggle with identity.  She has dreams of her mother telling her to be happy with what she has and to keep her mouth shut.  But Betty longs for an emotional connection with her husband and an intellectual connection with the rest of the world.  She is conflicted about the birth of her third child (there is some overlap here with Hedda Gabler, see below).  She’s depressed.  She snaps out at her children and can’t connect with her daughter Sally, who shows some evidence of misbehavior due to neglect. Unlike Nora, Betty’s problem is not necessarily that her husband is infantilizing her, although he does make a big deal about “showing her off” as the beautiful trophy wife she is.  It is the culture of the early, pre-sexual revolution 60’s that is hemming Betty in.  It is the obstetrician who tells her she is pregnant and then when he sees she is unhappy about it tells her to let her husband take on the burden of worrying.  It is the small town atmosphere that insists that her conduct remain above reproach.  It is the hospital where she goes to deliver that straps her down during labor and administers drugs to her without her consent.  It is the lawyer who tells her she doesn’t have the right to divorce in New York state unless she can prove conclusively that her husband is an adulterer.  It is the whole construct of the 60’s American experience that has defined the rigid confines of the box she is in, one that she entered into willingly, trained by her mother and her social caste, and which she finds to be artificial and empty.

She has been flirting with Henry, a Republican political operative.  But instead of giving into Betty’s desire to be swept away and rescued, Henry stands firm and tells Betty that she will have to come to him of her own free will.  She will have to decide if a relationship with Henry is what she wants and if she is willing to break with convention to have it.  She is also confronted with her role in Don’s life when she discovers his true identity.  She wants to confront him immediately but he eludes her.  When she has a chance to talk to him, he interrupts her anger and tells her to get ready for a dinner where he is to be honored as a humanitarian.  His respectability in the society is rising and he uses her as a status symbol, much like his new Cadillac.  She is a possession to him.  As she gets ready for the dinner, we see her in her gown in the bathroom, struggling to resume her role in her story, burying her anger, arranging her face.  She knows now that she is a doll and she sees the reality of her world.

What will be the trigger to cause her to reevaluate her life and take control of it?  What will Betty become after Camelot’s brief, shining moment is over?

Ibsen play #3: Joan Holloway Harris is Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler is one of the most complex characters in Ibsen’s repertoire.  I think Weiner has mixed some of Hedda with Betty and some of Nora with Joan.  Betty’s facility with shotguns and fascination with fainting couches come to mind.  Hedda’s complicated interior monologue can be shared with several female characters including Peggy as well.  Hedda is a product of her time.

But does it go with Danish Modern?

Hedda Gabler spent her youth having a good time and then began to realize that she was in danger of becoming a spinster.  The social stigma of becoming an old maid spurs her to find a marriageable partner.  She was once in love with Eilert Loveborg but Eilert, an intelligent man from a good family, is reckless.  He ruins himself with too much wine and women.  On a whim, she marries Tesman.  Tesman is a good man but not the brightest bulb in the pack.  He is a scholar studying for his PhD and hoping to get a position at the university.  It is his intention to give Hedda everything that is good in life: a beautiful villa, servants, horses and financial security.  But he hasn’t secured the position yet.  Hedda and Tesman return from their wedding trip, a trip they took on borrowed money, and live in the lovely villa that Tesman has secured without any visible means of support.  More complications ensue.  Eilert has gotten his act together and has written a brilliant book that makes Tesman’s work pale in comparison.  Also, Hedda *may* be pregnant.  This is not absolutely clear in the play but she doesn’t deny it when others infer this about her.  Eilert is now competition for Tesman for the same position at the university.  It turns out that Eilert has a research assistant, Thea, who was once a schoolmate of Hedda’s.  Thea loves Eilert and helps him reform his life.  She helps Eilert write his book.  Hedda is jealous of Thea’s ability to influence Eilert’s life.  Eilert comes to Hedda and confesses that although he owes a great deal to Thea, Hedda is his only love of his life.  Hedda rejects him and then provokes him to prove he is a man by drinking more than he should over Thea’s protests.  Eilert goes partying with Tesman and some other friends and ends up disgracing himself at a whorehouse.  He loses the second book that he has been writing with Thea’s help.  Thea is upset but vows to help Eilert get himself together.  She goes in search of him.  Meantime, Eilert’s second book falls into Tesman’s hands.  He debates what to do with it but in the end decides to return it to Eilert.  Too late!  Hedda has burned Eilert’s book.  Eilert returns to Hedda in despair over his missing book.  He feels guilt because he finally realizes that it is Thea who is the source of all of his strength and inspiration.  Hedda gives him a pistol and tells him to die beautifully.  He goes out to another whorehouse to drown his sorrows and accidentally shoots himself with Hedda’s gun and dies.  The fact that it is Hedda’s gun make her a target of blackmail.  Hemmed in by her domestic circumstances and the loss of the love of her life, she commits suicide while Tesman and Thea work to reconstruct Eilert’s book.

Whew!  That was long.

Joan is paralleling the Hedda story pretty well.  She doesn’t have Hedda’s confounding personality but her goals mirror Hedda’s.  Joan had her fun in Manhattan and was the person who held the Sterling-Cooper office together.  But in her early 30’s, she looked around for a marriage partner and not seeing one at Sterling Cooper, she married the next best thing- an up and coming surgeon.  She dreamed of a life of ease in the suburbs.  Except, it turns out that her husband, aside from being a rapist, is not a very good surgeon.  He was hoping to become chief resident.  Instead, he ends up losing his surgical residency.  Joan doesn’t know this when she quits her job in anticipation of living her suburban dream with her doctor husband who promises to provide for her.  She finds out about their sudden change in circumstances on the eve of her last day of work.

Meanwhile, Roger Sterling, the dissolute scion of one of the agency’s founders, has divorced his first wife and married one of his secretaries, Jane.  But Roger and Joan were once an item.  Roger clearly loved Joan but was married to Mona at the time and Joan didn’t see a future for them.  Now that Jane is in the picture, Roger seems to be settling down.  Ok, he still does really offensive things, like singing in blackface at the country club.  But in general, Jane seems to be having a stabilizing effect on Roger.  There is no love lost between Jane and Joan.  Joanie is clearly more intelligent and sympathetic.   Jane is too young for Roger and a gold-digger but for some peculiar, unfathomable reason, Jane gets Roger.

Joan’s storyline is the most uncertain.  She has to get a new job.  Greg has joined the army to practice surgery.  He doesn’t see Vietnam in his future but we do and, Ok, we’re kind of hoping he doesn’t make it.  Joan?  She’s gone to the one person she trusts and feels closest to in order to find a job- Roger.  He is trying to hook her up with a friend.  What happens to her after this season is a mystery.  Will she disappear forever?  Will she come back?  Will she end up an army wife?  Is this a suicide or a homocide by Weiner?

Ok, here’s your chance to tell me I’m all wrong about this theory.  Weiner may have never read Ibsen in his life and this is all original material.  Ehhh, even Shakespeare got his plots from other sources but the language was all his own.  If Weiner is going for Ibsen here, it would make perfect sense.  Ibsen was writing in the Victorian era, which pigeonholed the individual into roles for life.  His plays were all about self-discovery and self-actualization against the mind set of the collective, the consensus reality.  Mad Men is a chronicle of the 60’s and how American culture shook off the stifling conservatism and conformity of the post WWII era.  But the forces of conformity are strong.  In a sense, we are back to that era after having passed through a period of social unrest and sexual revolution.  As we learned to our horror last year, women still do not have the same opportunities to succeed as men.  We have watched confident, capable women reduced to charicatures.  They  are bitches or Caribou barbies, aggressive  or bubble headed.  Our country is also going through an identity crisis.  Are we the land of the selfish or the country of the more perfect union, striving for domestic tranquility and providing for the general welfare? Do we want to nourish creativity or harness it to the ruling class? Where do we go from here?

Your turn…

So this first post is from that little key pad on my iPhone, set sideways, using my index finger. Not bad considering I’m comfortable fist timer. So let’s see if I can post a photo.

This shot is of the Guy Harvey special edition Peer Gynt 26′. I took this shot in the Gulf of Mexico off St Pete Beach. Capt. Joe Ierna the designer and builder is at the helm. See more about the boat at PeerGynt-USA.com.

Well there it is. My first post to the free world!

Hade jag varit ljushårig, lite smålockig sådär, haft världens mest kraftfulla ögon och sötaste leende så hade jag velat ha den här klänningen idag: men sålänge så får väl Ann-Sofie fortsätta att ha första tjing;

. Kersti Vitali gjorde kostymen.
Peer Gynt Stockholm Stadsteater. 2007

Dette innlegget ble publisert på E24 på mandag. Det er ment som noen betraktninger rundt kommentaren til Per Valebrokks “Blytung vaktbikkje” i søndagens VG og på E24.no på mandag.
Hvor ligger fremtiden for journalistikken? I en uke har diskusjonen gått frem og tilbake rundt temaer som Twitter, sosiale medier og journalisters privatliv. Som i politikken har det dannet seg to klare blokker – de som ser at fremtiden er her nå og de som tviholder på gamle prinsipper.

I sin gjestekommentar i Søndags-VG setter Per Valebrokk generalsekretær Per Edgar Kokkvold i Norsk Presseforbund, pressens Peer Gynt, grundig på plass. Det er tydelig at det sitter mange ved det bordet; der Kokkvold og andre jamrer sine holdninger til journalistikken.

Valebrokk:«Nei, jeg gjør ei!»
Kokkvold: «Nå, så bann på det er sant!»
Valebrokk: «Hvorfor banne?»
Kokkvold: «Tvi, du tør ei! Alt i hop er tøv og tant!»
Valebrokk: «Det er sant – hvert evig ord!»

Kanskje var Ibsen fremsynt i sin åpning av Peer Gynt, der han på en usedvanlig passende måte klarer å oppsummere Per Valebrokks kulminasjon av Twitter-debatten som har rast den siste uken i Journalisten, Kampanje, E24, en rekke blogger og ikke minst på Twitter selv. En debatt som ble startet med at undertegnede skrev et motinnlegg til Jarle Aabøs ti antibud til bruk av Twitter.

«Det kan i virkeligheten aldri bli mediebedriftenes primæroppgave å tilfredsstille publikums behov,» har Kokkvold skrevet i en kommentar i Dagens Næringsliv. Og han lurer på hvorfor annonseinntektene har sviktet i de trykte mediene den siste tiden?

Får oss på innsiden
I følge Kampanje mener Kokkvold også at pressefolk ikke skal mene noe som helst. Til unnsetning kommer Valebrokk med deilige og kloke motspill som: «Debattfora, blogger og sosiale medier som Facebook og Twitter fører leseren og redaktøren nærmere hverandre», «Twitter er full av pressefolk fordi det er en god mulighet til å gi og få informasjon», «På Twitter betyr raushet og åpenhet alt. Den som gir, den får» og ikke minst: «Twitter handler ikke om å digge seg selv, men det handler definitivt om journalistikk».

Det siste året har nyhetsbildet vært mer fylt av Twitter-stoff enn mye annet. Som Valebrokk så sant påpeker, har denne kanalen i tillegg både vært nyhetsledende og grensesprengende i mange saker. Den har fått oss på innsiden der ingen journalister er eller får tilgang. Det er her «dagens medievirkelighet preges og skapes”.

Kokkvold og hans likesinnede er Peer Gynt i et nøtteskall. En liten porsjon av Gynts kjærlighet Solveig representerer godt Valebrokk (og for så vidt undertegnede). Tålmodighet skal til for å få til endringer. Motsetninger skal til for å få til en god debatt. Som i diktene og eventyrene er det stort sett de som tør å gjøre noe nytt og annerledes som vinner. Så også i denne debatten.

Journalistikken utvikler seg
Derfor er det på tide å løfte den opp noen hakk. Det handler ikke om Twitter. Det handler om utvikling og en naturlig evolusjon av journalistikken og kommunikasjonsfaget for øvrig.

Det er lett å miste perspektivet på hva utviklingen mot dialog på internett nødvendigvis må ha å si for journalister og kommunikasjonsrådgivere. Jeg har skrevet og sagt det utallige ganger de siste årene, men jeg gjentar det gjerne igjen. Det handler ikke lenger om deg, men om dem. Det handler ikke om teknologi, men om kommunikasjon. Sosiale medier er ikke en ropert, men et høreapparat. Og kanskje det viktigste av alt — det er ikke lenger «vi» folk er opptatt av, men «jeg».

Målet er ikke å kontrollere samtalen, målet er å muliggjøre, inspirere, lære og ikke minst engasjere. Dette gjelder i aller høyeste grad også i journalistikken.

Endrer perspektiver
Med dette perspektivet bør nok Kokkvold gjøre seg noen nye tanker om hva fremtiden for faget bringer. Hva skal til for at han kan finne sin Solveig. Det er ikke noe nytt med sosiale medier, sosiale nettverk eller debattfora. Vi har alltid snakket sammen. Men nå er plattformen Internett som kommunikasjonsfasilitator her, tilgjengelig for alle, hele tiden; journalister, bedrifter, organisasjoner, privatpersoner og politikere. Viktigst av alt – det endrer en del perspektiver for alle, enten man vil eller ikke.

Enig blir de nok aldri, Per og Per. Som Martine Aurdal uttalte i Kampanje: «Vi får være enige om å være uenige».

Så avslutningsvis håper jeg Per (Valebrokk) får siste ordet: «Vi treffes på siste korsveien, Per (Kokkvold); og så får vi se om —; jeg sier ikke mer»

Ruller videre
På Dagbladet  har de tatt tak i vitsestorm mot Kokkvold
Kampanje refererer også til samme sak

Peer Gynt, çölde bir başına, beş parasız kaldığında şu sözleri söyler: “Hayat varsa, umut da var demektir.” Biz de Walter Benjamin’in selamını Peer Gynt’e iletelim: “Eğer elimizde umut diye bir şey hâlâ kalmışsa, bu umutsuzluk adınadır.”

Fotoğraf: Ali Güler

Tiyatro Oyunbaz’ın uzun bir çalışma döneminin ardından geçen sezonun sonunda sahnelediği Peer Gynt adlı oyun, 16 Eylül 2009 tarihinde sezonun ilk performansını gerçekleştirdi. 50 yıldır genel izleyiciye açık bir topluluk tarafından sahnelenmeyen Henrik Ibsen’in klasik eseri, orijinal metinlerine göre beş perdelik bir oyun olmasına rağmen, izlenme koşulları gözönüne alınarak, Tiyatro Oyunbaz tarafından iki perde olarak Bilgi Üniversitesi, Dolapdere Kampüsü’nde izleyiciyle buluşuyor.

Bu oyunu özel yapan kaç perde olduğu değil kuşkusuz. Peer Gynt’ün yazarı Henrik Ibsen, tiyatro ve edebiyat tarihi açısından son derece özel bir isim. 1828 doğumlu Norveçli yazar Ibsen, anarşist yazın açısından büyük öneme sahip.

Kapitalizmin teslim aldığı akıl

Gelelim Peer Gynt’ün (Per Günt) anlam ve önemine. Oyun her yıl, dünyanın en önemli tiyatro grupları tarafından sergileniyor. İşin ilginç yanı oyunun ilk performansı 1867 yılında Danimarka’da gerçekleşmiş ve günümüze kadar batı tiyatrosu Peer Gynt’ü hiçbir zaman gözden ırak tutmamış. Oyunun geçerliliğini koruması ve geçen zamanın bu oyunu daha güçlü bir metin hâline getirmesi boşuna değil.

Peer Gynt, hayalperest ve yalancı bir genç olarak yaşam öyküsüne başlar. Önceleri zengin olan ama parasını har vurup harman savurduğu için yaşamını hamal olarak sonlandıran bir babanın oğlu. Türlü kahramanlık öyküsünü başından geçmiş gibi anlatan Peer Gynt, yaşadığı  dağ köyünün insanları arasında alay konusudur. Fakat Peer Gynt, bir gün kral olmanın hayalini kurmaktadır. Gönlü Peer Gynt’te olan köyün en zengin adamının kızı, başka biriyle evlendirilecekken, herkes onunla alay ettiği için sinirlenen Peer Gynt, gelini bir ren geyiğinin sırtında dağa kaldırır ve onunla birlikte olur. Gelinle birlikte olduktan sonra sarhoş olduğunu söyleyerek birlikte olduğu kadını köye gönderir. Artık köylü tarafından dışlanır ve dağda yaşamaya başlar. Annesinin ölümünün ardından köyle tek bağı, Katolik ve dindar bir ailenin kızı Solveg’dir. Solveg düğün gecesi gönlünü Peer Gynt’e kaptırmıştır ve onun peşinden dağa gelmiştir. Fakat Gynt, cinli perili öykülerden kendine kalanı seçer ve Solveg’i dağda bir başına bırakarak Norveç’ten denizi olan ülkelere göç eder. Gemilerle ABD’ye köle, Çin’e put satan bir adam olarak güce ve paraya sahip olur. Bunu da cinlerden öğrendiği yöntemle gerçekleştirir. Peer Gynt’ün hedefi ömrü boyunca “kendi olmaktır.” Kendi olmayı, arzular, istekler ve amaçlarla donatılmış bir yaşam olarak tanımlar. Daha da ileri gider, “Ben kendimim çünkü param var” der.

Kirli yollardan paraya kavuşan Peer Gynt, elde ettiği güce rağmen, vicdanlı ve kötülük yapmayan biri olduğunu kendine ve tanrıya ara ara anlatır. Parası için ona dalkavukluk eden insanların servetini çalmasıyla çöllerde parasız ve şöhretsiz bir başına kalır Peer Gynt. Tek derdi kendine ayırabildiği az bir parayla Norveç’e dönmek hâline gelir. Gemi kayalıklara çarpar, tüm mürettebat ölür. Birinin canını almak pahasına hayatını kurtaran Gynt, nihayet kasabasına geri döner. Hayatının sonunda Azrail’le yaptığı hesaplaşmalarda, Azrail’in ona söylediği söz mühim: “Akıl ölmedi, kendi olmaktan çıktı.” Peer Gynt fakir bir adam hâline geldikten ve gözlerden uzak, dağlarda yaşayan birine dönüştükten sonra, yaşamasına rağmen ölü olarak bilinir. Peer Gynt’se kendi yalnızlığı ve yarım kalmış günahkârlığıyla sürekli vicdani hesaplaşmalar yaşar. Tanrı onu ne cennete ne de cehenneme alır. “Hatalı üretim” olarak kabul ettiği Gynt’ü tekrar dünyaya göndermeye karar verir.

Oyun kapitalizmin yalnızlaştırdığı ve tektipleştirdiği, aklını yitirmiş insanın, kapitalizm yaşadığı sürece mutsuzluğa ve tamamlanmamışlığa mahkûm biri olduğunu 1800’lü yıllarda söyleyecek kadar önemli bir tarihsel değere sahip. Plazadan, fabrikadan eve döndüğünde kendiyle buluşmayı aklına dahi getiremeyecek insanla, dönecek bir evi olmayan Peer Gynt çok mu farklı yaradılışa sahip acaba? Hayrettir ki; modernizmle beraber aklın yoluna girmiş olan insanlık tarihi, bu aklın doğurduğu ilerlemecilik hedefi nedeniyle, aklın iflasına yol açıyor. O gün köle ticareti yapanla, bugün devlet içinde çete kuranların arasında nasıl bir fark olabilir? O gün put tüccarlığı yapanlarla, bugün cemaatçilikle iktidar sağlayanları birbirinden ayırmak mümkün müdür?

Ibsen, döneminde çok eleştirilmiş bir yazar olmasına rağmen hâlâ sözü geçerliliğini koruyan bir anarşist durumundadır. Onun güncel değerini yitirmesi için, Azrail’in bu sömürü düzeniyle yüzleşmesi gerekiyor. Bu yüzleşme gerçekleştiğinde Ibsen de, bizler de aynı insan olacağız zaten.

Peer Gynt, çölde bir başına, beş parasız kaldığında şu sözleri söyler: “Hayat varsa, umut da var demektir.” Biz de Walter Benjamin’in selamını Peer Gynt’e iletelim: “Eğer elimizde umut diye bir şey hâlâ kalmışsa, bu umutsuzluk adınadır.”

Bianet

...lisaks veel Grieg'i "Hommikumeeleolu" Peer Gyntist

Hei,

What a beautiful morning- ärkasin selle peale, et nägin imelikku unenägu ja avastasin, et kell on 11.30.  Muidu nagu kõik oli normaalne, aga sattusin siis  Jay fännilehele ja avastasin nii ilusad pildid, et süda pidi seisma jääma. Nüüd on mu päev kirjas… Ja kui oleks kindel fakt, et igal hommikul võiks näha internetist selliseid pilte, siis ma oleksin ärkvel juba kell 6, ilma et ma mossitaks ja vinguks… ja seda viimast lubadust on muidu raske teostada…

Ilma pikema jututa- hommiku parim pilt:

Ah.GOD! (Drops down dead..DDD)

Ega te ometi Brad Pitti pilte ei oodanud? Pfss…

Geeniustele, kes veel ei tea mis muusikast ma räägin…:

Ilusat hommikut Peerid!

Peer Gynt ved Gålåvatnet har hatt premiere, og Dagbladet legger seg i selen for å leve opp til Are Kalvøs journalist-parodi i Hallo i uken. Jørgen Brynhildsvoll har klart å lage en god puppesak. Mia Tjelta er på scenen i noen minutter som Anitra. Og var “dampende het på en kjølig kveld.”

Dette er Dagbladets dekning. Virkelig framifrå. Tankevekkende. Selvfølgelig helt uinteressant for Dagbladets lesere at den som virkelig markerte seg på premieren, var en annen kjendis, Ellen Horn. Hun debuterte i rollen som mor Åse og tilførte kraft og uberegnelighet som løfter forestillingen. Men hun er iført litt mer enn behå og faller derfor utenfor det som lar seg formidle journalistisk.

Spent an evening in glorious sunshine on the Cathedral Green in Derby last night watching an irreverent, boisterous and energetic adaptation of Peer Gynt. Directed by Pete Meakin, adapted by Peter Roberts, and performed by a sizeable community cast (remarkable given the recent wranglings at the Playhouse) on a glorious stage, it was an evening to revel in.

Peer was superbly delivered by no less than four actors who developed an enigmatic, frivolous and somewhat schizophrenic character that I loved to hate, and loved to adore. Jumping feet first into the 21st century, the script offers a grin-worthy reflection on the explosive times in which we live, and offers a compelling cause for recent troubles: mischief made by ignored trolls!

Telling such a complicated and introspective story whilst managing to keep the audience enthused and amused is a remarkable feat. One word of warning? It’s expletively good!

http://ihatemusic1943.blogspot.com/2009/06/edvard-grieg-es-el-rey-de-la-montana.html

Discovery is invariably fun, whether getting a scoop or stumbling onto something that slipped under the radar the first time out. This definitely falls into the latter camp, having appeared on the market a couple of years ago, but it screams out to become part of the canon, a masterfully recorded, emotionally rich collection of the Nielsen orchestral pieces that you’ve most likely never heard and quite possibly never heard of. The New York Scandia Symphony is simply one of the nation’s most adventurous orchestras, devoting a staggering ninety percent of their repertoire to either United States or New York premieres of works by Scandinavian composers. This cd is characteristic. Nielsen’s most familiar symphony is the widely played Fourth, “The Inextinguishable,” along with the fascinatingly voiced, call-and-response-laden Fifth. Yet the Danish composer wrote several other first-class works for full orchestra, collected here for the first time under the inspired direction of Dorrit Matson (revealingly interviewed here recently). It’s early 20th century romanticism, soaring, bright or lushly atmospheric, occasionally tinged with Eastern and Middle Eastern motifs.

The first three pieces, the Symphonic Rhapsody, An Evening at Giske and the Helios Overture share a robust melodicism that compares with anything Cesar Franck ever wrote. Also included are the crescendoing, darkly stately partita An Imaginary Journey to the Faroe Islands and the subtly uneasy, balletesque Amor and the Poet Overture, written a year before the composer died and inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s doomed infatuation with the popular singer Jenny Lind. But the centerpiece is the Aladdin Suite, based on the iconic Adam Oehlenschlager novel that sought to appropriate the myth as a reaffirmation of early 19th century Danish identity. The Oriental Festival March, the blazing overture that opens it, works off one of the alltime great catchy hooks, right up there with the Peer Gynt themes and the 1812 Overture. South Asian and Arab influences are alluded to if not directly in the suspenseful Aladdin’s Dream and Hindu Dance which follow, the pace picking up with Prokofiev-esque deviousness in the Chinese Dance – like his protagonist, Nielsen gets around a lot here. The high point is the haunting, vertiginous Market Place in Ispahan, soprano vocalese whirling in counterrotation with booming timpani against a shrill choir of high woodwinds. After that, the explosive arabesques of the Prisoner’s Dance are almost anticlimactic. The suite ends in a crashing, demonic blaze of voice and orchestra with the Blackamoor’s Dance. That the ensemble was able to complete a recording-quality performance of such a dramatic work within the boomy confines of New York’s Trinity Church speaks volumes.

In addition to this cd, the New York Scandia Symphony has also released three previous cds: a warm collection of Nielsen concertos; a collection of sometimes generic, sometimes fascinating suites by Lars-Erik Larsson and an album of concertos by pioneering early Romanticist Bernhard Henrik Crusell, whose post-Viennese School adventures are on par with pretty much anything Schubert ever did. The New York Scandia’s summer 2009 season includes an ongoing series of Sunday afternoon quartet and quintet shows in Ft. Tryon Park in Washington Heights.

On Saturday night the three of us went to see Peer Gynt. As I have mentioned, it was a major excursion, because we travelled by tube. It took us an hour to get there and an hour back, and the play was 3 hours, including the interval.

I am ashamed to confess that despite having read the story to my children when they were little, and despite loving Grieg’s incidental music to the play, I didn’t know the story from a bar of soap! Henrik Ibsen wrote the verse drama in 1867 while he was on holiday on the sunny island of Ischia. It was not intended to be a theatre piece, it was intended to be read to be really appreciated. It is the story of Peer Gynt, a Norwegian boy growing up without his father, because the man had squandered his inherited fortune and left as a wandering salesman. Die appel val nie ver van die boom nie. Peer is the personification of narcissism and egotism, a daydreamer and liar, irresponsible and self-centered, making his mother sigh and weep about him. The play portrays Peer’s life from his teenage years right up to death in old age, evading everything we expect of him and want from him and living in a fantasy world of grandiose schemes for fame and good fortune, and we are privy to the vicissitudes of his psyche in scenes like amongst the trolls in the hall of the Mountain King, the Green Girl and the Button Moulder man. This play, staged by the National Theatre of Scotland and the Dundee Rep Ensemble, moves seamlessly between reality and irreality, between continents and time-frames, thus throwing us around to make sense of the whole. Colin Teevan, who adapted the play, asked himself who Peer would be if he lived today, what his dreams and longings would be, his weaknesses, his illusions of grandeur and celebrity, in order to recontextualise the play so that a modern audience could “experience the radical force of Ibsen’s vision in the present, not preserved in Nordic aspic”. He certainly succeeded in presenting the nightmare of a life Ibsen conceived of! The drinking and swearing in the first half really makes you wish Peer would grow up…

Peer tells his mother Aase of the fantastic hunt he was party to

We all agreed that the play could have been shortened radically and still have had the same impact. That would have strengthened it tremendously. It was probably so long because Ibsen’s reworked piece for theatre production was also this long. Ibsen didn’t cut scenes from the original, he merely shortened every scene by a few lines…. It is practically never performed because it is so difficult to stage. In the 1980 play ‘Educating Rita’, the protagonist formulates the challenge when asked to write an essay on the staging difficulties of Peer Gynt by replying: “Put it on the radio.”

Of the entire Grieg suite on Peer Gynt I love Solveig’s Song the best. To me she is the portrayal of the true self, always there, waiting in the wings for illusion to evaporate, and it never happens. It is probably so for each human being, forever longing to be united with truth, embraced by truth, but at the same time forever evading it with a religious fervour, running up mountains and over continents to escape facing it.

Greatly appreciated, Richard and Ilse! I LOVE theatre!

Recunosc cinstit, nu prea ascult muzica clasica. Prefer muzica insotita de text, cu mesaj mai explicit deci. Cineva insinueaza chiar ca atunci cand declar ca imi place o melodie de fapt imi plac versurile. Could be.

Insa Edvard Grieg imi place mult de tot. Si ascult de cate ori am ocazia. De fapt, daca stau sa ma gandesc, pe Grieg nu prea ai cum sa “il ratezi”, cred ca oricine a ascultat macar un fragment din piesele lui, pentru ca muzica sa e folosita extensiv pentru coloanele sonore, fie ca e vorba de Concertul pentru pian si orchestra in la minor, op.16, de Au matin,  de Arabian Dance, sau de Cantecul lui Solveig.

Din Peer Gynt cel mai mult imi place The Hall of the Mountain King. Pe mine ma transpune imediat intr-o lume fantastica, si parca il si vizualizez pe Peer fugarit de troli.

Pentru ca in ultima vreme mi-am facut prostul obicei de a asculta muzica de pe u2be (zic prost pentru ca de cele mai multe ori calitatea sunetului e indoielnica), am constatat ca exista un cover dupa Grieg, The Hall of the Mountain King, varianta heavy metal cantata de cei de la Apocalyptica (numele lor chiar nu-mi place, e prea comercial) la violoncel. 

Marturisesc dintru inceput ca sunt o persoana cu prejudecati legate de cover-uri. Dar sunt capabila sa admit ca sunt si cover-uri care depasesc originalul, insa asta e deja alt subiect.

Am trecut asadar peste prima retinere si i-am ascultat pe cei de la Apocalyptica . Cred ca varianta heavy metal pe patru violoncele şi o baterie e cu totul si cu totul originala. Numai ca mie nu imi place. Sau nu imi transmite aceeasi stare fantastica pe care o am cand o ascult in varianta clasica.Si asta cu toate ca sunt iubitoare de “metale”. Dar  cred ca e un lucru bun coverul asta, asa mai afla lumea de Grieg si de Peer Gynt . Am ascultat si celelalte cover-uri ale lor, dupa Metallica. Raman de asemenea la parerea ca tot varianta originala e mai buna.

Ma bucur insa ca i-am gasit pe baietii astia pentru ca una peste alta chiar daca in materie de cover-uri pe care le canta raman fidela tot “originalelor” am descoperit (tot datorita u2be-ului ) albumul lor Worlds Collide. De pe care pana acum imi plac cel mai mult Worlds Collide si I don’t care (oarecum previzibil, ca ultima are si voce ). Parerea mea e ca ar trebui sa cante mai putin cover-urile si mai mult melodiile lor, ca sunt chiar faine.

How nice it is to be here again in this lovely little house of my children in Ruislip! It is a wonderful teaching tool in living simply, for here in Europe space is at a premium everywhere. They literally have to think where they will put any object in their house before they acquire anything! It is a wake-up call for me who have a thousand specialist utensils I probably don’t use more than three times a year! When at last our house is sold and we have the opportunity to select another abode, it will certainly be much smaller than our current space, and I shall have to start thinking like these well-trained children of ours.

I’m nicely settled into my bedroom – this is indeed a luxury, a spare room! – and I enjoy lying in every morning and reading my Donna Leon whodunnit. I started it in Venice, but soon realised I’m too hard pressed for time for research, homework and other stuff I wanted to read, so that Donna Leon got relegated to the back burner.

The weekend has also been a time of respite from being the photographer. We had two days full of fun, and only two photos – couldn’t resist! Izzie baked her delicious wholewheat bread – you have to taste it to believe it!

Izzie's wonderful bread

She has refined the recipe intelligently until she now has a “staatmaker”, for instance she puts the risen bread into a cold oven to prevent it from caving in, and she puts in a lot of nuts. This one contained pumpkin and sunflower seeds. It is magnificent. Her advice to enthusiasts is to take “best bread” recipes, try it out with the type of ingredients you can get, because if the recipe should fail, it is because your ingredients differ from that of the originator. Adapt, adapt, adapt. It’s a bit like “Listen to everyone’s advice, then follow your own head.”

From the kitchen window

Ilse is very proud of her back garden.

Tulips and Ranunculus

She has planted bulbs, and she’s nursing a fledgling Ceanothus.

Ceanothus

Saturday we spent RELAXING, to each his own. I had a leisurely bath, for after being deprived of my beloved bathtime and forced into showering for 6 weeks, I felt like lying in the bath for an hour! In my second week in Venice Vicky’s husband and son appeared in the school as a surprise to her. They were staying in the Mulino Stucky Hilton, and the next day Vicky told the class she hadn’t had a bath in 2 months. Roberta was shocked! Then Vicky had to qualify that she had not lain in a bathtub in all this time, and on the weekend she had had a luxury bath, complete with bubbles and soft towels. Boy, did I envy her! Well, this bath ended the exile, and I feel like a human again.

Saturday evening we went to a theatre production Peer Gynt, a modern reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama of the same name. More about that later. It was 3 hours long, and we got to the Barbican by tube, which took us an hour each way, so it was a major excursion! We got home just before midnight, so again we fell into bed, frazzled!

Sunday was a new day, a beautiful spring day. Again the operative word was Leisure. We drove to Raoul’s for brunch, but only got there at about 11.30! We had awesome Eggs Florentine made with their signature imported eggs with yolks so yellow that they are deep major orange! Yummy… Once the tummies said amen, the plan took us by tube to Marylebone high street for window shopping. The mind boggles that there can be so many interior shops and awesome delicatessens that make a living cheek by jowl! Across the road from Raoul’s there was a florist that must be the most amazing florist shop I have ever been in. The Old English roses and peonies and other true English flowers all huddled together in vases that defy description, man, I did not want to leave! In Marylebone we walked through shops like the Conran Shop, and many other high end interior stores, until I felt I’m pretty near overload from seeing so much fabulous stuff. It was good to get home again and stretch out on the sofa in front of the TV. The whole afternoon Richard was most patient with the women, doing what interested him and leaving us to our own devices. When we left for home, he wanted to stay and sketch some more, coffee shops being a wonderful place to do so, so Iz and I got the car and drove home. Richard is a very talented artist – what a surprise! He does pencil drawings at the moment, honing his skill in a most admirable way. Watch this space!

Monday Izzie went out to work. Richard works from home. He is the most disciplined employee – I have the utmost admiration for his ability to stick to his work times. He left at 3 for an appointment, and when Izzie got home, she’d had a raw deal returning, because there was a freezing, searing wind afoot, she wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and the bus was VERY late, so she walked home, poor thing! I had to puff her up warmly in a duvet, make her some tea and we watched BBC Food. Soon all was forgotten. I had made some Italian bean soup and she had brought home a ciabatta, and that was just the right thing for an unfriendly day like this! How nice to be with them!

Ibsen var stor! Ingen tvil. Han hr fått en hel nasjon til å like Peer Gynt. Nå opprettes det også ærespriser i Gynts navn. Men, – denne skikkelsen var en skurk. Han eide ikke ansvarsfølelse. Han gikk alltid utenom enhver hindring. Han levde livets glade dager uten tanke for hva det gjorde med andre. Han trampet på følelser. Han handlet med slaver.

Peer Gynt reiste jorda rundt, – uten å komme av flekken. Han lærte ingenting av reisene sine. Han utviklet seg ikke i det hele tatt (Akkurat som mange i våre dager drar på jordomseiling uten egentlig å forandre seg, dermed har de heller ikke lært noe).

Dette innlegget er altså overhodet ingen kritikk av Solskjær som er en hedersmann. Det er bare en undring over at en pris som vil hedre og ære mennesker som tar et samfunnsansvar, og som gjør Norge kjent i utlandet, bærer Peer Gynts navn.

Greifswald. Nicht ohne Folgen blieb die diesjährige Rückbesinnung des Nordischen Klangs auf die Klassische Musik. Das Festivalpublikum dankte es den Machern mit vollen Sitzreihen und üppigem Beifall. Am Donnerstag kamen Liebhaber und Kenner des Genres gleich zwei Mal innerhalb eines Tages in den Genuss von hochwertigen Darbietungen.

Mit romantischer Musik aus Skandinavien und Deutschland begeisterten das FrauenChorEnsemble von St. Nikolai unter der Leitung von Frank Dittmer und das Universitätssinfonieorchester unter UMD Harald Braun ihre Zuhörer. Mit einem deutlichem Schwerpunkt auf das Liedschaffen der nordeuropäischen Komponisten Waldemar Ahlen, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Hugo Alfven, Niels W. Gade und Edvard Grieg. Überraschten von Letzterem die a cappella vorgetragenen „Sieben norwegischen Kinderlieder” op. 61 durch ihren herrlich harmonischen Fluss, so stießen die Peer Gynt Suiten op. 46/ 55 als bewährter Publikumsliebling auf erwartungsgemäß guten Zuspruch. All dies allerdings, nicht ohne den diesjährigen musikalischen Jubilar Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Ihm gedachte das FrauenChorEnsemble von St. Nikolai a cappella mit dem Terzett „Hebe Deine Augen auf” und dem Doppelquartett „Denn er hat seinen Engel befohlen über dir” aus dem Oratorium Elias.

Im anschließenden Kammermusikkonzert in der Aula der Universität Greifswald setzte das Artic Piano Trio den seinerzeit wirkungsmächtigen Komponisten, Dirigenten und Pianisten mit dessen 1. Klaviertrio in d-Moll op. 49 an den Schluss ihres Programms bestens in Szene und hielt mit seinem herrlich spritzigem Zusammenspiel den fast ausverkauften Saal vier Sätze lang in Atem. Selbst das leiseste Husten oder Rascheln blieb beim Umblättern der Musiker zwischen den einzelnen Teilen vor Ergriffenheit der Versammelten aus. Und das nachdem das aus der Pianistin Tiina Karakorpi, dem Violinisten Anders Kjellberg Nilsson und dem Cellisten Johannes Rostamo bestehende Trio für Edvard Griegs Andante con moto in c-Moll und Einar Englunds Klaviertrio herzlichsten Zuspruch erhalten hatte.