Repeat fifty times and go slowly insane. And what did it trigger? This:

It’s the horn call from the overture to Oberon by some guy named Weber.

Okay, that’s all. Oh, wait: here’s another version of “Welcome Table,” from a Smithsonian collection:

The melodic line is a bit more nuanced. I don’t know which version is more common.

Okay, now we’re really done. I’m gonna sit at the welcome table …

Why? Let me put it this way. The Homer Simpsons and Montgomery Burnses and Mayor Quimbys and Kent Brockmans have been in charge forever and have managed to make a pretty good mess of things. It’s long past time for Lisa Simpson to have a chance to run the show.

Do you find Lisa Simpson insufferable? A bit of a know-it-all? Sure, we all do. Do you prefer Bart’s high jinks and dirty tricks? Homer’s lovable incompetence and intellectual laziness? Mayor Quimby’s comfortable if predictable blasts of hot air? Can’t help admiring the undeniable cleverness and longevity of Mr. Burns? Can’t get enough BS “news” out of your TV screen? Stick with the guys, then. They’re totally screwed up—in a sometimes entertaining, sometimes destructive way.

No, I didn’t vote for Clinton just because she’s a woman. But it sure didn’t hurt.

Links for the incurably curious:

• eriposte at The Left Coaster on preferring Clinton (quite a lot of detail I wouldn’t have had the patience to compile)
• Stanley Fish categorizes the responses to his blog entry on “Hillary hatred” (not just from the right, mind you)
• The castration fears of Chris Matthews (speaking for his cohort)
• Paul Krugman on the “Clinton rules” (and boy did some of his erstwhile admirers turn on him)

As Jimmy Durante used to say, “I got a million of ‘em!”

Spring and Fall:
to a young child

Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh, ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The accent marks have to do with Hopkins’s concept of “sprung rhythm.” I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. But you don’t need to understand sprung rhythm to love his poems.

“I don’t know the story, though,” she said, with a tang of worry, knowing that it helps to know the plot in advance to help you through the archaic language. (She had read Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and maybe some other Shakespeare* in high school, but not Hamlet.) So I launched into my CliffsNotes® version of the action. When I get to the part where Hamlet arranges to have the traveling players re-enact the murder (as described to him by his father’s ghost), my kid says, “Oh, yeah, they pour poison in the king’s ear.” I say, “I thought you said you hadn’t read it.” She laughs sheepishly. Suddenly it hits me. “Let me guess: you saw it on The Simpsons.”

Because this isn’t the first time it’s happened. This past summer we were watching an episode of The Twilight Zone, the one where Billy Mumy plays a kid who is all-powerful and gets very cranky when people express, or even think, unhappy thoughts, and my apparently clairvoyant daughter says, “He’ll send them to the corn field.” And sure enough, he does (where they die, of course). And sure enough, she got that bit of prescience from The Simpsons.

It turns out I’m not the only one who’s experienced this odd reverse allusionizing in the younger generation. In a recent issue of The London Review of Books, Joanna Biggs opens a review with this anecdote:

I watched The Godfather for the first time with my little brother. I’d been worried he was too young for it, but that was before we got to the notorious scene in which the camera starts out hovering over Jack Woltz’s pool, climbs into his bedroom, then crawls up his sleeping body, finally pausing at a smear of blood at the top edge of his blanket. At this point, my brother announced that there would be a horse’s head under the blanket. I found it hard to believe that a ten-year-old who’d never seen the film knew what would happen next. I turned back to the screen. Woltz wakes up and, noticing the smear, starts drawing back the blanket to reveal a pool of blood. He pulls the blanket back further, and discovers a horse’s head at the foot of the bed, its glossy brown nose facing us, glassy eye to the ceiling. I turned back to my brother and asked him how he’d known. “The same thing happened in The Simpsons,” he said.

It’s a strange thing to recognize something backwards. When you see that episode of The Simpsons, you’re supposed to chuckle wryly in recognition. But what if, like my brother, you’re seeing it for the first time? When you see the imitation without knowing the original, how odd it must seem. And when you finally see the original knowing the imitation, what’s supposed to be a shock is now familiar, almost expected. The advantage is that you can be one line ahead of everyone else.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily an advantage, but it’s definitely weird. And I single out The Simpsons because I don’t know if there’s another example of pop culture that makes such extensive use of “artsy” allusions (in addition to the plethora of political and popcult references). When kids nowadays read The Oddysey in high school, they think, “Ah, Homer!” And I’d bet good money (it has to be a bet, since I’ve seen maybe 10% of the Simpsons oeuvre**) they’ll encounter scenes that are quite familiar, albeit painted in bright cartoon colors rather than the stark sun-drenched monochrome of the other Homer.
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*Sorry—I meant de Vere.
**And enjoyed it immensely. So why do I watch the show (reruns) only when the kid is around? Hm.

Today was lobster day with the well-preserved 1970s-era Julia (now in “living color,” as they say). Her delivery was smoother, though she still had that touching way of looking at the camera (cameraman?) expectantly every time she shifted to another counter or table. She had broad selection of lobsters—one pound up to “Bertha the Behemoth.” You want the lively ones, she said, as the one she placed on the counter played dead. She continued talking about the different sizes, and soon she had one that actually moved. “This is what you want,” she exclaimed, as she got the thing to curl its tail.

We all know you have to boil lobsters alive. Did you know you should put them in head first? Yes. It’s only humane. That’s the easy part, in a way. It’s eating the things that is so darn disgusting. To me. Julia showed how to do it—the tools you need, the techniques that work best, what to eat and what to throw out. I thought: yech. She kept saying how indescribably tasty the meat is, the meat from the legs and the meat from the chest and so on, each tasty in its own way, and having tasted lobster I could understand her point if not her enthusiasm, but still I thought: yech.

Enough about lobster. On to meat in general. Often as I head out to hunt for a lunch that frequently consists of a blackened-chicken burrito or gyro, I think: would I eat this stuff if I actually had to kill the animal and prepare the meat myself? How many people nowadays would? Could I casually wring a chicken’s neck, like our great-great-grandmothers might have done; or shoot an elk, skin it, gut it, and so on?

I suppose if I were living in an African savanna, my empty stomach gurgling, I might chase down a wild animal and dispatch it. But here I am, in modern America—dozens of other people do all the dirty work for me. I get my meat in a very pretty form, on a plate or between slices of bread. Sometimes it doesn’t really look like meat—like those nifty round things you find on pizzas. It certainly never looks like an animal, unless it’s a fish.

There’s a passage in Berlin Alexanderplatz that comes to mind whenever I think about this. The author describes the activities of a slaughterhouse in language that varies from bureaucratic to elegiac, brutally anatomical to ironically poetic. It’s an assembly line of death, but for the men it’s all in a day’s work.

A man in a linen smock ambles through the corridor, the pen opens, he steps in between the animals with a stick; then, once the door is open, they rush out, squealing, grunting, and screaming. They crowd along the corridors. Across the courtyards, between the halls, he drives them up, those funny bare creatures with their jolly fat hams, their jolly little tails, and the green and red stripes on their backs. Here you have light, dear pigs, and here you have dirt, just give a sniff, go ahead and grub a while, for how many minutes longer will it be? No, you are right, one should not work by the clock, just go on sniffing and grubbing. You are going to be slaughtered, there you are, take a look at the slaughter-house, at the hog slaughter-house. There exist old houses, but you get a new model. It is bright, built of red brick, from the outside you might take it for a locksmith’s workshop, for a machine-shop, an office-room, or a drafting room. I am going to walk the other way, dear little pigs, for I’m a human being, I’ll go through this door, we’ll meet again, inside.*

I do the text an injustice by excerpting it, because the effect builds over fifteen pages (with a brief interlude). It’s horrific on many levels, and in the context of the book it raises the question of the effect of such mechanized killing on the persons who perform it and on society as a whole. At any rate, the passage by all rights should have made me a vegetarian. Clearly I lack the courage of my convictions.

The American Indians, from what I’ve been told, would thank an animal before killing it. Because they do not make a sharp distinction between other animals and themselves, the last line in the quoted passage above would not make sense to them. Their world is not divided into one where bison live and another where human beings live. The spiritual “economy” of humans and animals is fundamentally different from the European model we have inherited. An animal that allows itself to be killed and used for food or clothing is making a gift of itself, and attention is paid to all the proper spiritual aspects of gift-giving and gift-receiving, including the responsibilities of humans toward their fellow creatures.

How much of this is true and how much I dreamed up, I can’t say. But I’d like to remember it more often when I eat a hamburger.
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*Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Tr. Eugene Jolas. New York: Frederick Unger, 1983, p. 175.

It seems history has overtaken Solzhenitsyn. He was the calf who butted an oak (see the title of his nonfiction account Бодался теленок с дубом), but it turned out the tree was rotten and went down too easily.

As Igor Mitin wrote in Literaturnaya Gazeta,* after noting that В круге первом was begun in 1955, was distributed in a “distorted” version in 1964, and found its final form in 1968:

One needs to know these dates in order to realize that the novel was conceived and written at a time when the Soviet system and the Soviet state seemed absolutely powerful and unshakeable. As the director of the film, Gleb Panfilov, admitted, when he read the novel for the first time he thought it might be possible to transfer it to the screen in 300 years, perhaps … That is, in dealing with such an invincible and hopeless hulk, it was possible in one’s unmasking hatred to not match its power and reach, not think of the consequences, since it would take a hundred years for them to appear.

But life, as usual, delivered a surprise to all the prophets, and now we live in completely different times. The Soviet totalitarian machine, created and fine-tuned by Stalin, has been ancient history for some time now. And this invariably alters and corrects the way we now perceive both the book and film.

Here’s just one citation from the novel:

“And so I’m sick of both Ostrovsky and Gorky because I’m sick of how they expose the power of capital, family oppression, the old marrying the young. I’m sick of these battles with ghosts. Fifty years have gone by, a hundred, and we’re still flapping our arms, still exposing what’s long gone. And as for what actually exists—you won’t see any plays about that.”

The mole of history roars continuously. And now the power of capital is no longer the distant past but the harsh present, and Solzhenitsyn himself speaks of it with dread and pain. So how do we now assess the behavior of Innokenty Volodin, who decided to try and impede the development of the atomic bomb in the Soviet Union? That is, impede the creation of the parity in the world that helped preserve peace for years and years? Today we know very well what the self-confident and self-satisfied superpower America has turned into—bombing Serbia, occupying Afghanistan, making war in Iraq …

Likewise, you won’t surprise us nowadays with the standard, caricatured protrayal of Stalin and his henchmen, the details of zek life and manners that pounded at our brains and our imagination when we read the novel for the first time. Today, when every film has heroes that talk like they’ve been in prison [когда у нас что ни фильм, то зона, когда все герои только и делают, что «ботают по фене»*], the stuff has lost its effect.

So the film’s creators and, especially, the director faced some serious dangers: to be gripped by what is widely known, has been said many times. But Panfilov being Panfilov, he knows that no ideology, trend, tendentiousness, no details of the time can save you without great artistry. Only art is capable of breaking the circle of problems of that time and expose what is necessary and important in them for those living today.

And only then will the contemporary audience understand that what they’re seeing is not a battle with ghosts, not the exposure of what disappeared long ago, but of that which is. The first installments of The First Circle lead one to hope that this is the case.

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*Broken links replaced 2007.07.30.