By Stuart Mitchner

I believe that if people would learn to use LSD’s vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonder child.

—Dr. Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)

Lately it’s all about winning and losing, baseball and politics, the Phillies roaring into the World Series with seemingly unstoppable momentum and losing it in six games while across the state in Pittsburgh, the Pirates are losing 100 games for the second year in a row. Three days later as America goes to the polls, Pennsylvania Republicans are rolling down the yellow brick road to Oz, until a giant in a hoodie blocks the way. He’s from a town near Pittsburgh, half a year this side of a stroke, his communication skills may be flawed, his control can be concerning, but in pitching terms, he’s still got good stuff, plus he’s come back from the brink and when he says he stands for anyone that ever got knocked down and got back up, it means something. And when he says health care came through for him and should be there for everyone who needs it, he knows because he’s been there. Meanwhile, the Dr. Oz express is spinning its wheels as the yellow brick road turns to dust and the vision of the Emerald City Senate vanishes, leaving nothing behind but a Mar-a-Lago mirage fading in the Red State sky.

The  Fox

A fox crossed my path twice in broad daylight on Election Day. He looked to be a thoughtful, modest, easygoing, philosophical sort of animal the way he moved, like the word philosophical come to life, a five-syllable fox, a serious word-fox. Although I only saw him for a moment, both times, having slowed instinctively, no need for screeching brakes, no cause for alarm, the sight of a fox trotting across Harrison Street left me feeling stupidly, irresponsibly hopeful, something I remembered later that night when the Dems rallied nationwide. After doing some cursory online research about foxes and omens, I found a website — aboutspiritual.com — that says seeing a fox is not only a good sign, it may indicate “the appearance of a new perspective in your life.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabelle Lee

—Edgar Allan Poe

Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had…

—Stevie Nicks, from “Dreams”

Asked in a publisher’s Q&A what inspired him to write Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks (University of California Press 2022), Princeton professor Simon Morrison, a scholar of Russian music and dance, says he got the idea about six years ago while talking with people who love her song “Dreams” — “just because they do, without needing or wanting to explain the love.” Morrison says that while he feels the same way, writing about the song and the singer “meant thinking about that love” rather than “leaving it be.” His plan was to write about Nicks by “exploring her creativity and immense power as a performer” while “focusing on her process, her sources of inspiration, and the bond she has created with her audience as a truth-teller.”

“Poe, Edgar Allan”

The Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor briefly channels “Dreams” in her memoir Rememberings (2021), writing, “I’m like Stevie Nicks. She keeps her visions to herself.” After reading O’Connor’s response to the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 (she was 11: “I need a new father now that Elvis is gone”), I searched for Presley in the index to Mirror in the Sky, where I found “Poe, Edgar Allan” and discovered that when Nicks’s Senior English teacher at Menlo-Atherton High asked the class to analyze Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” Stevie turned the poem into a song that she, in Morrison’s words, “held close for decades,” finally recording it “once she had exorcised the demons of the past, the bad loves, the toxic habits.” Composed when Nicks was 17, “Annabelle Lee” rises gloriously from the undead almost half a century later in her solo album In Your Dreams (2011).

Having heard the wonders Nicks and producer Dave Stewart achieve in “Annabel Lee,” — Morrison quotes Stewart on “Stevie’s obsession” with Poe — I’d like to think that Vladimir Nabokov’s “Divine Edgar” would be entranced by Nicks’s rapturous singing and the majestic orchestration. Nabokov shares her obsession with Poe, having based the first incarnation of Lolita on “Annabelle Lee.” As someone who once claimed he was “as American as April in Arizona,” Nabokov would no doubt have been delighted to know that Nicks was born in Phoenix and that as a child paid frequent visits to a grandmother who lived in a town called Ajo. more

By Stuart Mitchner

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights.

—Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

I had other plans for this column until I realized that Friday, October 21, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 250th birthday. On October 26, 1900, Henry James and Edith Wharton began a correspondence, a “marriage of true minds” that lasted until James’s death (“the distinguished thing”) on February 28, 1916. Having already set things in motion for a piece about Wharton and James, I had to make room — lots of room — for Coleridge.

All it took was a few clicks of the Microsoft mouse to confirm that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” not only stirred Wharton’s imagination in childhood, but returned full force during her mid-sixties in her account of a young writer’s moment of discovery:

“Oh, what beautiful, what incredible words! What did they mean? But what did it matter what they meant? Or whether they meant anything but their own unutterable music? …. It was a new music, a music utterly unknown to him, but to which the hidden chords of his soul at once vibrated. It was something for him — something that intimately belonged to him …. He sat with his head between his hands, reading on, passionately, absorbedly, his whole being swept away on that mighty current.” 

The passage is from Hudson River Bracketed (1929), in which Wharton’s protagonist writes a novel reimagining the dreamscape of Coleridge’s Xanadu in the Hudson River Valley. I knew the same thrill of discovery the first time I read the poem, in my teens, excited to know more because the vision was unfinished, penned upon Coleridge’s waking from a laudanum dream. Much of the poem’s allure is that he presents it as “A Fragment,” with an introductory paragraph in which “the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, … the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.

—W.G. Sebald (1944-2001)

As far as I know, King Charles III and Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) have nothing worth mentioning in common other than the fact that the author of Religio Medici was knighted by Charles II in 1671. A gap of 337 earthly years separates Charles II, who died in 1685, from Charles III, who acceded to the throne on September 8, 2022, after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned a mere 353 years after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, speaking of gaps.

Then consider Browne’s dates — born October 19, died  October 19, which is today, give or take three and a half centuries. What other literary luminary lived out a perfect birth-death span? None other than the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, born April 23, 1564, died April 23, 1616, at which time Tom Browne was a lad of 11.

October 1982

A mere 40 years ago I was absorbed in the 1982 World Series pitting the St. Louis Cardinals against the Milwaukee Brewers, still an American League franchise at the time. On October 19 the series turned in the Cardinals favor with a 13-1 sixth game victory. On October 20, the deciding game was saved by future Hall of Fame reliever Bruce Sutter, master of the split-fingered fastball, who died just five days ago, October 14. Shortly before his induction into the Hall, Sutter said, “I wouldn’t be here without that pitch.” When he was pitching relief for the Cubs in 1977, bumper stickers around Chicago read “Only the Lord Saves More Than Sutter.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

…little boys playing baseball in the rain …

—Randy Newman

… it starts with a game of catch.

—Adam Wainwright

New York Mets fans will remember Adam Wainwright as the lanky rookie pitcher who struck out Carlos Beltran with the bases loaded, sending the St. Louis Cardinals to the 2006 World Series. Randy Newman fans may remember his song, “Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America,” especially the verse that begins, “Americans dream of Gypsies.”

Baseball Anniversary

Eleven years ago my wife and I were having dinner at the Swan in Lambertville and spending our 45th wedding anniversary night up the road at the Black Bass Inn, where I watched the pitcher’s duel between the Cardinals’ Chris Carpenter and the Phil’s Roy Halladay, one of the great playoff games, won 1-0 by the wild card Cardinals on their way to the 2011 World Championship. I had to muffle my cheers because my wife had gone to sleep in the seventh inning.

Now it’s another anniversary, the wild card Phils are playing the Central Division-winning Cards, we’re in Lambertville again having dinner at the Swan Bar, and the Cardinals are facing elimination after the previous day’s ninth-inning debacle. more

By Stuart Mitchner

…our enemies are way too numerous, all of the dangers are beyond our powers of calculation…
—Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

…imagining the inferno that would descend on his social and even his most personal mileu just a decade and a half after his death was not in his power ….
—Reiner Stach, from Kafka: The Years of Insight

Stach is referencing the fact that “in the early years of Kafka’s worldwide renown, his work, his achievement as a writer, was insistently categorized as ‘prophecy,’” and that this was “the primary reason for his overwhelming resonance.”

Kafka’s reference to “dangers beyond our powers of calculation” is from “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” written three months before his death. I read it after watching the Ken Burns PBS series, The U.S. and the Holocaust. I had never read it before, and at the time I didn’t know it was the last story he ever wrote. When Stach speaks of the inferno’s descent on his “social” and “most personal milieu,” he means the deaths in the gas chambers of all three of Kafka’s sisters, as well as friends, lovers, and other family members.

Imaginings

Describing Kafka’s “sharp and skeletal face” as it appears in a photograph from 1924, Philip Roth says that skulls “like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens” and that had he lived, Kafka’s “would have been among them.” Rather than assume the worst, why not imagine at least the possibility that had he lived, he might have emigrated to Palestine and opened a little coffee house in Tel Aviv with his last love, Dora Diamant (a playful fantasy they shared), or why not go all the way and imagine a powerful secret admirer among the Nazis who would have made sure that he was spared? Nonsense, of course, but then Kafka is an infinitely interpretable figure.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

We do onstage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance to somewhere else.

—from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

When the director Jean-Luc Godard died, an “assisted suicide,” five days after Queen Elizabeth’s monumental passing, I took a YouTube tour of the “most cinematic” images from his work. Accompanied by Georges Delarue’s warm, richly romantic soundtrack for Le mépris /Contempt (1963), the result was an uncharacteristically humane, borderline sentimental memorial for a director who set out to attack “all civilized values” in the 1968 Rolling Stones film One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil. Godard’s version of doing “onstage the things that are supposed to happen off” was to punch the film’s English producer in the face onstage at the 1968 London Film Festival.

Stoppard’s Scoop

The onstage/offstage lines are spoken by the one of the players visiting Elsinore in Sir Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Grove Press 1967). The notion of the play as a “scoop” came to mind  as I read Maureen Dowd’s September 7 New York Times profile of Stoppard, which opens with the teenage journalist who “loved wearing a mackintosh and flashing his press pass, operating in the spirit of a British contemporary, Nicholas Tomalin, who wrote: ‘The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability.’ “

Call it what you will, a coup or a scoop, it took a world of cunning and more than a little literary ability to become the first playwright to claim the untold story between and behind the lines of two of the most fascinating and well-spoken minor characters in Shakespeare (although Gilbert and Sullivan had a shot in 1892 with a farce that ends with Rosencrantz marrying Ophelia). Hamlet’s Wittenberg classmates are clearly on a higher theatrical level than sycophants such as Osric of Elsinore (“Dost know this water-fly?”), who are mercilessly mocked, or slain onstage, like Goneril’s servant Oswald, his last words (“oh untimely death”) recorded for all time in the closing seconds of the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus.” Besides holding their own bantering with Hamlet as “the indifferent children of the earth” who live in “the secret parts of fortune,” they put in play phrases like “the shadow of a dream” and “a shadow’s shadow” that suggest how much there is to be imagined or discovered offstage. Jump ahead four centuries and Stoppard’s Guildenstern is speaking of the “half-lit, half-alive dawn” wherein a man was “just a hat and a cloak levitating in the  grey plume of his own breath.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

I’m always collecting things. I don’t consider myself materialistic, but things do make me feel good. Reassured. It’s easier to know them than people, because objects accept you as you are.

—Bette Davis (1908-1989)

The mystery guest at Friday’s Friends and Foundation of the Library Book Sale might say the same for collecting books. Bette Davis’s first husband, Harmon “Oscar” Nelson, knew from experience. The stated reason for the divorce, according to the December 7, 1938 New York Times, was that she “read too much.” Nelson claimed that she read “to an unnecessary degree…. It was all very upsetting.” As for accepting her as she was, it was at his insistence that she had two abortions, which probably saved her career, as she admitted to Charlotte Chandler in the 1980s during interviews for The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, A Personal Biography (Simon and Schuster 2006).

When Chandler asked Davis what she thought of the title, based on Groucho Marx’s reason for taking two girls to a party (“Because I hate to see a girl walk home alone”), she said, “Absolutely. I want that title. That’s me. That’s been the story of my life.” The “girl alone” title somewhat softens the image of Davis as the straight-talking cynic who says “What a dump,” as she surveys Joseph Cotton’s apartment in Beyond the Forest (1949) — the additional emphasis added by Elizabeth Taylor, who played Martha to Richard Burton’s George in the film of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966). Bette desperately wanted to play Martha but the two-time Oscar winner who was once Hollywood’s top box office star couldn’t compete with the mid-sixties media magnitude of Dick and Liz. more

By Stuart Mitchner

Although Colm Tóibín is the featured reader in “The News from Dublin,” Friday’s Fund for Irish Studies event, the fact that he’s being introduced by Fintan O’Toole gave me this reading opportunity. For months now, my wife has been urging me to dig into We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (Liveright), so last week I took her copy from a small shelf of “keepers” and have been reading it ever since.

Making Connections

Connection is the operative word in We Don’t Know Ourselves. As the author puts it, “The desire for connection was given meaning by the reality that there was still something to connect to, traditions of music and singing and storytelling and language that had their own highly distinctive texture.”

O’Toole makes his first connection in the first sentence of the first chapter, in which wedding photographs of his parents remind him “of a frontier town in an old western.” The film he has in mind is High Noon, where “a respectable wedding” is “threatened by the dangers of a frontier town.”

Why were American westerns “vastly popular in Ireland”? Because “they probably seemed like social realism. In economic terms, Ireland was a vast cattle ranch with a few cities and a lot of small provincial towns attached.” A study on economic development conducted by a New York firm  began with the line, “In the Irish economy, cattle is king.” O’Toole recalls: “In my childhood, it was not unusual to find a stray bullock grazing in the back garden.” His way of bringing everything together to make a point both playful and profound is evident in the conclusion of the chapter, “Comanche Country.” After contrasting the general perception of life in the country (“we were denizens of a no-man’s-land that was barely a place at all”) with the “grittiness and depth of history” in “the old city slums,” he writes: “But we drew our water instantly from taps and made it privately in a little indoor room with the door closed. That didn’t feel like Siberia, or the Wild West or Comanche country. It felt modern.”  more