10 Temmuz 2012 Salı
8 Temmuz 2012 Pazar
Where we've slept recently
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Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012— IT OCCURS TO ME I've written nothing about the hotels. We've stayed in a lot of them, these last three weeks, and there wasn't a one I wouldn't go back to, though one or two would have to adjust its price first. Nearly all of them offer wi-fi, though not always dependably in the room; nearly all have websites. Except for the first, which was chosen for us — and splendidly!— I booked most of them through bookings.com, which has a good iPhone app but also works well online. For information on the nearby restaurants we chose, see Eating Every Day (http://eatingday.blogspot.com). If you don't mind, I'll just mention them in the order we found them:
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
Violin concerto
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I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED eccentric violin concertos, by which I mean those somehow standing aside from the standard repertory. Mozart's, of course; and the Sinfonia Concertante. Harold in Italy. The neglected ones by Schumann, Dvorák, Goldmark, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lou Harrison; the familiar but still fascinating ones by Sibelius and Berg. In many of these concerti, it seems to me, the soloist stands somewhat apart from the orchestra, the composer's (and the performer's!) strategy for dealing with the differences between the collaborators in terms of dynamic and tonal range and, especially, potential weight. One doesn't like to attribute too much "meaning" to music, but it's hard to escape the thought that the soloist-orchestra dynamic recalls that between Self and Society, or — better, in my opinion, and certainly more representative of my own attitude — Self and Nature.
From the middle 1960s forward for about twenty years I was absorbed in an operatic "version" of Marcel Duchamp's great painting La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même. The painting, on two sheets of glass, measures about nine feet high by nearly six feet wide, was begun in 1913, and was abandoned ten years later. (It's currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where, the last time I saw it, many years ago, it seemed to need a fair amount of restoration. Several replicas have been made, and are in collections of museums in Tokyo, London, and Stockholm.)
Duchamp preceded the actual laying-out of the painting, on its sheets of glass, with fairly elaborate verbal notes and drawings. The most elusive of these was a full-size drawing done in pencil, as I recall, on the plaster wall of an apartment he was living in in Paris in 1912 or so; it has disappeared. Others, though, on various scraps of paper, were carefully retained, and have been published in several editions. Of these perhaps the most important was the Green Box,translated in 1957 by George Hamilton and published three years later in an elegant small-format edition which I bought at the time and began making my own notes in, setting various pages to music. (I've written about all this in a lecture, How I Saw Duchamp, available as a booklet from Frog Peak.)
I was fascinated by La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même for the same reason that years before I had been fascinated by James Joyce's marvelous last novel Finnegans Wake, currently in the news thanks to a fine first-person reader's account by Michael Chabon, published in The New York Review of Books. Both of these masterpieces of Twentieth-century Modernism took their authors years to produce, and were even before their undertaking themselves products of further decades of what you might call internal preparation, in terms of contemplation of the position of man (and Artist) in the context of that epochal time.
And both La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même and Finnegans Wake have grown, since their creation, considerably beyond even that, incorporating huge amounts of critical commentary and subsequent work (in many media) by artists they have influenced. It's as if they — and other similar masterworks — were originally the product of some kind of fertile, prolific mycorrhizal organism. Or, to consider a less alarming, inorganic analogy, as if they were regional testimony to very extensive geological formations, only occasionally becoming visible through such surface evidence as hills and valleys, watercourses, presence of characteristic vegetation.
(Indeed, Man Ray's photograph of a section of Duchamp's painting, Dust Breeding, treats La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même as precisely that sort of phenomenon: the glass, onto which Duchamp had been gluing lead wires outlining the Chariot region of the work, had been stored flat under his bed, gathering dust; the resulting photo suggests an aerial photograph of the Nazca Lines in the Peruvian desert.)
MUCH OF MY CONCERTO was composed in Europe: we used to spend a month or two there in alternate summers, taking leaves of absence from our jobs, sometimes touring by car or rail, on other vacations renting a house for a few weeks, or house-sitting when we got the chance. In the late 1970s we spent a couple of weeks on the Ile d'Arz, in the Gulf of Morbihan, near the alignments of Carnac, and there I spent a lot of time thinking about the center section of the opera I was writing to Duchamp's painting. At the center of the opera would be a long ballet, with some singing, which would in some way "depict," or at least somehow comment on, the actual workings of La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, as Duchamp described (or at least considered) those workings in the notes published in the Green Box.
At the back of my mind, too, was Alban Berg's wonderfully eccentric Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments. I knew I wanted the dancers in this ballet to move among musical instruments. Two wind quartets and two string quartets would be on stage; also the piano. The lower half of Duchamp's painting — the "Bachelor Region," with its prominent central "Chocolate Grinder" — was probably the inspiration for my imaginary mise-en-scène; the Grinder suggested the piano.
Above, the painting represents the "Bride Region," with the Bride's "Halo" along the top, surrounding its three empty squares, and the "Hanging female thing" at the left. The lowest part of this Pendu femelle irresistably suggested a violin bow: very well: a violinist would be somehow levitating downstage center above the piano and its surrounding accompanying quartets, the rest of the orchestra in its pit between stage and audience.
Bride: violin; Bachelors: wind instruments; Grinder: piano.
The two concertos would be interleaved, movement by movement, only occasionally superimposed. A fair amount of the music was sketched that summer on the Ile d'Arz and elsewhere, and in 1985 I extracted the violin concerto component from the opera score so that it could be performed separately. Unfortunately, the first movement of the violin concerto, which depended heavily on two wind quartets whose music was notated graphically, resisted all my attempts at a conventionally notated realization, so it is omitted from the stand-alone version, and the second movement has been broken into two sections to provide the conventional three movements of the concerto form. (Perhaps one day I'll solve that notational problem.)
(As for the Piano Concerto, it has yet to be extracted from the opera score. The solo music for the piano has been, however: it's available as the Sonata: Bachelor Machine, completed in 1989; one movement of the piece can be seen, performed by the estimable Eliane Lust, here.)
In 1987, I think it was, the Cabrillo Music Festival approached me asking about any not-quite-finished orchestral pieces I might have, and I mentioned the Violin Concerto. Fine, they said, they'd like to see it. I handed it in, as it then stood, not quite filled out, and the original first movement still missing. After a few weeks I heard that they were intrigued by its "spareness," and that they wanted to give it a concert reading on a program devoted to new pieces perhaps not yet quite finished.
I had heard the San Francisco violinist Beni Shinohara, who had been playing chamber music with Eliane, and had been greatly impressed with her musicianship, tone, and intellectual curiosity. She agreed to take the project on, and somehow persuaded a friend, the pianist-conductor Joan Nagano, to help, by improvising a condensation of the orchestral accompaniment for solo piano, thereby extending the concerto's mycorrhizal network into a sonata for violin and piano — which I have neither seen nor heard.
The Cabrillo connection suggested a little joke to me, and I incorporated the snare drum part from Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra into my own score. Lou was a fixture at the Cabrillo Festival; I admired him and his Koncerto, as he preferred to call it; and it had itself been inspired by Alban Berg's violin concerto. So I lifted the snare drum part, exactly as it sounds in his concerto, at the original tempo and loudness and pacing. (This of course required my completely re-notating and thus considerably complicating Lou's original "spelling" of the music.)
Beni played beautifully, and it didn't hurt that she looked splendid, too. Much of the actual concert was a mess, with inept conducting and inadequately prepared orchestral parts, not to mention uninteresting composition. Daniel Carriaga referred to all this in his review in the Los Angeles Times:
After the performance Beni asked me what the piece was about. I'd refrained from any such discussion while she was preparing it, but was willing enough to hint at things now. The violin is Duchamp's "sex-wasp," I told her. I was a little embarrassed: well, it’s about the Bride being ready, and the Bachelors never quite engaging. I thought it was something like that, she said. (Beni's husband Katsuto is a respected urologist, who some years later, coincidentally, I was to meet in a professional capacity.)
I ran into Lou, too, who seemed intrigued by the piece, and I confessed I'd stolen the snare drum from his Koncerto. "Better you'd have lifted the violin part," he replied.
I wish I could share with you the recording made from the radio broadcast of the concert. The piece has not been performed since its premiere — all too often such premieres are in fact dernieres as well. I've finally got around to publishing the score, though, and you can now buy it online, and perhaps, if you're very clever, synthesize another performance — or even convince another orchestra to schedule it. I'll supply the orchestral parts!
I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED eccentric violin concertos, by which I mean those somehow standing aside from the standard repertory. Mozart's, of course; and the Sinfonia Concertante. Harold in Italy. The neglected ones by Schumann, Dvorák, Goldmark, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lou Harrison; the familiar but still fascinating ones by Sibelius and Berg. In many of these concerti, it seems to me, the soloist stands somewhat apart from the orchestra, the composer's (and the performer's!) strategy for dealing with the differences between the collaborators in terms of dynamic and tonal range and, especially, potential weight. One doesn't like to attribute too much "meaning" to music, but it's hard to escape the thought that the soloist-orchestra dynamic recalls that between Self and Society, or — better, in my opinion, and certainly more representative of my own attitude — Self and Nature.From the middle 1960s forward for about twenty years I was absorbed in an operatic "version" of Marcel Duchamp's great painting La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même. The painting, on two sheets of glass, measures about nine feet high by nearly six feet wide, was begun in 1913, and was abandoned ten years later. (It's currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where, the last time I saw it, many years ago, it seemed to need a fair amount of restoration. Several replicas have been made, and are in collections of museums in Tokyo, London, and Stockholm.)
 Marcel Duchamp: La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même |
Duchamp preceded the actual laying-out of the painting, on its sheets of glass, with fairly elaborate verbal notes and drawings. The most elusive of these was a full-size drawing done in pencil, as I recall, on the plaster wall of an apartment he was living in in Paris in 1912 or so; it has disappeared. Others, though, on various scraps of paper, were carefully retained, and have been published in several editions. Of these perhaps the most important was the Green Box,translated in 1957 by George Hamilton and published three years later in an elegant small-format edition which I bought at the time and began making my own notes in, setting various pages to music. (I've written about all this in a lecture, How I Saw Duchamp, available as a booklet from Frog Peak.)
I was fascinated by La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même for the same reason that years before I had been fascinated by James Joyce's marvelous last novel Finnegans Wake, currently in the news thanks to a fine first-person reader's account by Michael Chabon, published in The New York Review of Books. Both of these masterpieces of Twentieth-century Modernism took their authors years to produce, and were even before their undertaking themselves products of further decades of what you might call internal preparation, in terms of contemplation of the position of man (and Artist) in the context of that epochal time.
And both La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même and Finnegans Wake have grown, since their creation, considerably beyond even that, incorporating huge amounts of critical commentary and subsequent work (in many media) by artists they have influenced. It's as if they — and other similar masterworks — were originally the product of some kind of fertile, prolific mycorrhizal organism. Or, to consider a less alarming, inorganic analogy, as if they were regional testimony to very extensive geological formations, only occasionally becoming visible through such surface evidence as hills and valleys, watercourses, presence of characteristic vegetation.
 Man Ray: Dust Breeding |  The Nazca plain |
(Indeed, Man Ray's photograph of a section of Duchamp's painting, Dust Breeding, treats La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même as precisely that sort of phenomenon: the glass, onto which Duchamp had been gluing lead wires outlining the Chariot region of the work, had been stored flat under his bed, gathering dust; the resulting photo suggests an aerial photograph of the Nazca Lines in the Peruvian desert.)
MUCH OF MY CONCERTO was composed in Europe: we used to spend a month or two there in alternate summers, taking leaves of absence from our jobs, sometimes touring by car or rail, on other vacations renting a house for a few weeks, or house-sitting when we got the chance. In the late 1970s we spent a couple of weeks on the Ile d'Arz, in the Gulf of Morbihan, near the alignments of Carnac, and there I spent a lot of time thinking about the center section of the opera I was writing to Duchamp's painting. At the center of the opera would be a long ballet, with some singing, which would in some way "depict," or at least somehow comment on, the actual workings of La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, as Duchamp described (or at least considered) those workings in the notes published in the Green Box.
At the back of my mind, too, was Alban Berg's wonderfully eccentric Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments. I knew I wanted the dancers in this ballet to move among musical instruments. Two wind quartets and two string quartets would be on stage; also the piano. The lower half of Duchamp's painting — the "Bachelor Region," with its prominent central "Chocolate Grinder" — was probably the inspiration for my imaginary mise-en-scène; the Grinder suggested the piano.
Above, the painting represents the "Bride Region," with the Bride's "Halo" along the top, surrounding its three empty squares, and the "Hanging female thing" at the left. The lowest part of this Pendu femelle irresistably suggested a violin bow: very well: a violinist would be somehow levitating downstage center above the piano and its surrounding accompanying quartets, the rest of the orchestra in its pit between stage and audience.
Bride: violin; Bachelors: wind instruments; Grinder: piano.
The two concertos would be interleaved, movement by movement, only occasionally superimposed. A fair amount of the music was sketched that summer on the Ile d'Arz and elsewhere, and in 1985 I extracted the violin concerto component from the opera score so that it could be performed separately. Unfortunately, the first movement of the violin concerto, which depended heavily on two wind quartets whose music was notated graphically, resisted all my attempts at a conventionally notated realization, so it is omitted from the stand-alone version, and the second movement has been broken into two sections to provide the conventional three movements of the concerto form. (Perhaps one day I'll solve that notational problem.)
(As for the Piano Concerto, it has yet to be extracted from the opera score. The solo music for the piano has been, however: it's available as the Sonata: Bachelor Machine, completed in 1989; one movement of the piece can be seen, performed by the estimable Eliane Lust, here.)
In 1987, I think it was, the Cabrillo Music Festival approached me asking about any not-quite-finished orchestral pieces I might have, and I mentioned the Violin Concerto. Fine, they said, they'd like to see it. I handed it in, as it then stood, not quite filled out, and the original first movement still missing. After a few weeks I heard that they were intrigued by its "spareness," and that they wanted to give it a concert reading on a program devoted to new pieces perhaps not yet quite finished.
I had heard the San Francisco violinist Beni Shinohara, who had been playing chamber music with Eliane, and had been greatly impressed with her musicianship, tone, and intellectual curiosity. She agreed to take the project on, and somehow persuaded a friend, the pianist-conductor Joan Nagano, to help, by improvising a condensation of the orchestral accompaniment for solo piano, thereby extending the concerto's mycorrhizal network into a sonata for violin and piano — which I have neither seen nor heard.
The Cabrillo connection suggested a little joke to me, and I incorporated the snare drum part from Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra into my own score. Lou was a fixture at the Cabrillo Festival; I admired him and his Koncerto, as he preferred to call it; and it had itself been inspired by Alban Berg's violin concerto. So I lifted the snare drum part, exactly as it sounds in his concerto, at the original tempo and loudness and pacing. (This of course required my completely re-notating and thus considerably complicating Lou's original "spelling" of the music.)
Beni played beautifully, and it didn't hurt that she looked splendid, too. Much of the actual concert was a mess, with inept conducting and inadequately prepared orchestral parts, not to mention uninteresting composition. Daniel Carriaga referred to all this in his review in the Los Angeles Times:
…Saturday afternoon, five works from the California Composers Project were unveiled by the Festival Orchestra.For my concerto, though, the violist and assistant conductor Ken Harrison had accepted full responsibility, had learned the score perfectly, and conducted gracefully and effectively. The orchestra, too, seemed intrigued and appreciative. I remember the first trombonist, for example, thanking me for writing for alto trombone, an instrument far too neglected. (Its solo injections, i.e. at m. 35 in the second movement, owe something to Ravel's Bolero, to continue the thread of musical cross-pollination.)
The players' patience was sorely tried with this event. Only Charles Shere's spare but gloomy Concerto for Violin and Harp, Percussion and Small Orchestra (1985) deserved such a showcase.
Shere's brooding and intense concerto, an essay in small, telling musical gestures, occupies its 15 minutes engagingly. It was performed sensitively by violinist Beni Shinohara, solidly accompanied by the orchestra led by Ken Harrison.
Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1990 (retrieved July 7, 2012)
After the performance Beni asked me what the piece was about. I'd refrained from any such discussion while she was preparing it, but was willing enough to hint at things now. The violin is Duchamp's "sex-wasp," I told her. I was a little embarrassed: well, it’s about the Bride being ready, and the Bachelors never quite engaging. I thought it was something like that, she said. (Beni's husband Katsuto is a respected urologist, who some years later, coincidentally, I was to meet in a professional capacity.)
I ran into Lou, too, who seemed intrigued by the piece, and I confessed I'd stolen the snare drum from his Koncerto. "Better you'd have lifted the violin part," he replied.
I wish I could share with you the recording made from the radio broadcast of the concert. The piece has not been performed since its premiere — all too often such premieres are in fact dernieres as well. I've finally got around to publishing the score, though, and you can now buy it online, and perhaps, if you're very clever, synthesize another performance — or even convince another orchestra to schedule it. I'll supply the orchestral parts!
7 Temmuz 2012 Cumartesi
Where we've slept recently
To contact us Click HERE
Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012— IT OCCURS TO ME I've written nothing about the hotels. We've stayed in a lot of them, these last three weeks, and there wasn't a one I wouldn't go back to, though one or two would have to adjust its price first. Nearly all of them offer wi-fi, though not always dependably in the room; nearly all have websites. Except for the first, which was chosen for us — and splendidly!— I booked most of them through bookings.com, which has a good iPhone app but also works well online. For information on the nearby restaurants we chose, see Eating Every Day (http://eatingday.blogspot.com). If you don't mind, I'll just mention them in the order we found them:
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
5 Temmuz 2012 Perşembe
Where we've slept recently
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Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012— IT OCCURS TO ME I've written nothing about the hotels. We've stayed in a lot of them, these last three weeks, and there wasn't a one I wouldn't go back to, though one or two would have to adjust its price first. Nearly all of them offer wi-fi, though not always dependably in the room; nearly all have websites. Except for the first, which was chosen for us — and splendidly!— I booked most of them through bookings.com, which has a good iPhone app but also works well online. For information on the nearby restaurants we chose, see Eating Every Day (http://eatingday.blogspot.com). If you don't mind, I'll just mention them in the order we found them:
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.
•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.
•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.
•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.
•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.
•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.
•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.
•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.
•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.
•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.
•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.
•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.
Outhouse
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WHEN WE BOUGHT our place here on Eastside Road, hence the name of this blog, we found twenty-eight acres, a horse, three sheep, a blue two-storey house built in 1872 by Lindsey Carson (Kit Carson's brother, an itinerant carpenter who seems to have built the same house on a number of Sonoma county locations), two and a half barns, an oil shed, a machine shed, a chicken house, and a long-since disused outhouse.
The last item was early on converted into a doghouse of sorts, or perhaps the intent was to make it a playhouse. I'm not sure. I didn't participate in the conversion, which was effected simply by shortening the building, probably by turning it on its side, on blocks or sawhorses, and cutting off the bottom three feet or so, and then setting it up in a new location.
After it had served its new purpose we dragged it onto the El Camino and hauled it up the hill to the site of the new house I was building for Lindsey and me. (Until then we'd occupied a room in the big house, where our oldest daughter lives with her husband and, until they grew up and moved out, their two daughters.)
Ten or twelve years ago my brother Timothy and I set it up on blocks, and since then it's served as a casual dumping place for twogallon gas cans, the string trimmer, a bucket of wooden stakes, a family of rats, a big plastic bag full of big empty plastic bags, a box of grapevine cuttings for the grill, and whatever else drifted in.
On the corrugated-iron roof, fourteen or twenty iron T-posts left over from an early fencing project, a plumber's snake, a couple of lengths of iron pipe.
It was an eyesore, of course, and not particularly useful. Lindsey was not happy with it. So for the last week we've been working at a project of architectural restoration. I set a couple of posts in the ground, and added a couple of concrete piers on the downhill side, and built a floor with redwood two-by-fours and half a sheet of plywood.
Then came the tricky part: how to restore the bottom third of the building? I settled on three two-foot panels of plywood screwed to two-by-fours extending beyond, which met the stubs of the corner posts in the shed, and scabbed them on with extensions, also two-bys. Then it was a question of setting the thing upright onto the floor.
We did that the old-fashioned way, levering it up until it reached a tipping point, then swiveling it on the floor until correctly oriented. More recently I've been installing shelving. Later we'll cover the plywood sheathing with scrap weathered redwood siding from the fallendown barn, and add a door.
It'll be a good place for poisons, sprays, gas cans, and garden tools. It'll still look like an outhouse, of course; not much we can do about that. Well, maybe that's okay. Maybe one day the septic system will fail here, and I'll have to readapt it to its original purpose.
WHEN WE BOUGHT our place here on Eastside Road, hence the name of this blog, we found twenty-eight acres, a horse, three sheep, a blue two-storey house built in 1872 by Lindsey Carson (Kit Carson's brother, an itinerant carpenter who seems to have built the same house on a number of Sonoma county locations), two and a half barns, an oil shed, a machine shed, a chicken house, and a long-since disused outhouse.The last item was early on converted into a doghouse of sorts, or perhaps the intent was to make it a playhouse. I'm not sure. I didn't participate in the conversion, which was effected simply by shortening the building, probably by turning it on its side, on blocks or sawhorses, and cutting off the bottom three feet or so, and then setting it up in a new location.
After it had served its new purpose we dragged it onto the El Camino and hauled it up the hill to the site of the new house I was building for Lindsey and me. (Until then we'd occupied a room in the big house, where our oldest daughter lives with her husband and, until they grew up and moved out, their two daughters.)
Ten or twelve years ago my brother Timothy and I set it up on blocks, and since then it's served as a casual dumping place for twogallon gas cans, the string trimmer, a bucket of wooden stakes, a family of rats, a big plastic bag full of big empty plastic bags, a box of grapevine cuttings for the grill, and whatever else drifted in.
On the corrugated-iron roof, fourteen or twenty iron T-posts left over from an early fencing project, a plumber's snake, a couple of lengths of iron pipe.
It was an eyesore, of course, and not particularly useful. Lindsey was not happy with it. So for the last week we've been working at a project of architectural restoration. I set a couple of posts in the ground, and added a couple of concrete piers on the downhill side, and built a floor with redwood two-by-fours and half a sheet of plywood.
Then came the tricky part: how to restore the bottom third of the building? I settled on three two-foot panels of plywood screwed to two-by-fours extending beyond, which met the stubs of the corner posts in the shed, and scabbed them on with extensions, also two-bys. Then it was a question of setting the thing upright onto the floor.
We did that the old-fashioned way, levering it up until it reached a tipping point, then swiveling it on the floor until correctly oriented. More recently I've been installing shelving. Later we'll cover the plywood sheathing with scrap weathered redwood siding from the fallendown barn, and add a door.
It'll be a good place for poisons, sprays, gas cans, and garden tools. It'll still look like an outhouse, of course; not much we can do about that. Well, maybe that's okay. Maybe one day the septic system will fail here, and I'll have to readapt it to its original purpose.
The post office
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THE POST OFFICE BUILDING is for sale.
The sentence seems absurd, ungrammatical. How could a post office building, ordained and constructed and maintained for a century by The People, as valid a res publica as any item in the Constitution, be "for sale"? It's as if you were to say the Washington Monument is for sale, or the Mississippi River, or the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Constitution provides for the post office. Article I, Section 8, paragraph 7: "The Congress shall have power to establish post offices and post roads." (The establishing of an army and a navy comes a little further down.) I don't see anything in the Constitution granting power to disestablish post offices.
The Post Office I'm concerned about at the moment is the one in Berkeley, a fine Beaux-arts monument to civic pride. I have a particular fondness for it, I suppose, because I worked there for a couple or three years, in the late 1950s. I remember thinking at the time that the Postal Service was in a way the federal government's way of subsidizing creative artists and intellectuals; many of us clerks — I can't speak for the carriers; I never associated with them — were perpetual students, or closet novelists or poets, or musicians, painters, philosophers, content to work at a humdrum job, sorting mail and cancelling stamps like automatons, the hands and eyes busy but the mind free to roam.
I worked the face-up table, where several men stood around the perimeter of a huge polished-steel table whose long edges were bordered by troughs with fast-moving belts at their bottoms. Mail fell onto the table, dumped from an invisible source above, and as quickly as possible we grabbed up envelopes, two at a time using both hands, and dropped them into the troughs, stamp down and to the left, sending them at great speed to the cancelling machine.
Envelopes to thick to pass through that machine were quickly thrust into overhead pigeonholes, along with "flats" — large envelopes or the occasional magazine or newspaper — and any small package that might have found its way into the mix. The job was dusty and noisy, the cancelling machine clattering away. I never was able to let my mind wander at the face-up table; rarely even able to lift my eyes from the constant supply of envelopes to enjoy the sight of the physical dance of all those hands and arms grabbing, turning, flipping or dropping, suddenly shooting upward to the pigeonholes.
When the mail had all been faced and cancelled, though, and we returned to our cases, then the mind could wander. We sat-stood on high tilted stools, one foot on a footrest, the other steadying our stool, grabbed a cancelled envelope from the right end of the tray in front of us at waist level or a little lower, quickly glanced at the city named in the address, and shot the letter into the correct pigeonhole. The several "zones" of Berkeley were centered on our cases: Thousand Oaks, Downtown, Station A, North, Temescal, and of course the University. Just surrounding them were the nearby big towns like San Francisco or Oakland or Richmond; more distant or smaller cities were distributed around them; in the far corners were remote destinations, or catchalls: Arizona, or San Diego, or Portland, or Chicago. "Speedies" — Special Delivery letters — we put in on edge, so we could tie them to the top of a bundle.
When a pigeonhole was full, too full to slap another letter into it quickly, you pulled out all the mail with your left hand, grabbed the end of the twine that fell from a spool above you, and wrapped the mail once lengthwise, again crosswise, tied a quick square knot, and cut the twine with the little knife-ring on your little finger; then you tossed the resulting bundle into a small bin.
Those bins went to the Postal Transport Worker, who had a similar job except that he sorted bundles of letters, or flats, not individual pieces. He faced a rack of canvas sacks bound for different destinations: by truck to Richmond, or San Francisco, or Oakland, or beyond; or by rail to various points on the Coast or Valley trains; or — if it were a bundle of Air Mail — into an orange nylon pouch which would soon be sent to the Airport Mail Facility, where I'd also served a stint, from 1958 into the following year when we moved to Berkeley.
I remember a few of my colleagues fondly. Kenji, small and Nisei, who ran the cancelling machine. Austin, ponderous and sober, a specialist on Russian liturgical music. Charles, black and scholarly, who introduced me to Negro bars. Charlie Dorr, ancient, bent, and good-humored, a constantly optimistic leftist. We didn't associate with the carriers, who sorted mail to Berkeley addresses over on the Cityside cases.
As a Postal Transport Worker I had never learned the assignment of mail by carrier routes, so I never had to go Cityside. My expertise was in the Stateside "scheme": I'd laboriously memorized the locations — and, more important, the means of supply — of all of California's post offices. (Lindsey's help was inestimable, quizzing me from flash cards, as she'd quizzed me in Latin when I was cramming for finals — at about the same time, come to think of it.) When there was no other mail to sort, I'd be sent to the basement to sort parcels.
The Berkeley Post Office looms big in my memory for other reasons than work, though. It, the YMCA, the Library, and J.F. Hink and Son formed the public center of my awakening civic and social consciousness when I was a boy. Shattuck Avenue, with its sleek F Train and its rattling traffic, was Business and Excitement; Hink's was the ultimate expression of this attractive though somewhat forbidden aspect of mysterious adult social life. The Library was still social, but allowed for introspection and daydreams. The YMCA was for handiwork and weight-lifting and swimming classes.
The Post Office was quite a different slice of public adult reality. Here people were engaged in transactions, consigning personal matters to an unseen but very perceptible collective and public network. Even as a small boy I was aware that transportation and communication stood behind this network, enabled it; and that if this was possible it was only because men — I didn't think of women being involved in this sort of thing — had agreed to work together, all across the land, for a common good. Not simply for individual livelihood, like the Jewel Tea man who brought tea and coffee and spices to the front door every now and then; not for a Store like Hink's, as the elegant, slim, remote Mrs. Shirley did in the knitwear department downstairs: this was something more like the Fire Department, but on an unimaginably grand scale. Maybe even like the Army and the Navy.
I don't know when I began to think of the Building. I mean the Main Post Office, of course; but I also mean the Library, my grandparent's Church, ultimately the buildings on campus. Whenever that was, that was when I began to think of such buildings as standing for something beyond mere physical shells housing public or civic or social institutions: they were also both symbols and rally-points.
Societies ordain and construct public buildings as metaphors of public agendas. This has been going on since the Pyramids, the Greek temples and theaters, the great Mounds in the American midwest. Such buildings are a testament to the indispensable civic qualities of stability, permanence, capaciousness, propriety, foresight, care.
I am certain this was clear to me when I was a little boy, though of course never stated or formed in any articulate verbalization. You didn't read about such things; grownups didn't talk to you about them. They were truths you absorbed through observation and example, through repeated rites, as regular and unremarkable as the newspaper delivery — or the twice-daily mail. They were neither internal, part of your own secret or at least inexpressible growing consciousness, nor purely external, known but of no concern: instead they were the cement, or part of it, that bound your own internal life to the society beyond family that you knew instinctively you were a part of.
Well, hell: these days, it's all for sale. These days the only language seems to be Economics. Our society has become like that fellow who Oscar Wilde said knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Letters are sorted by machine; it's more efficient; never mind that scholars of Russian liturgical music, or students of English literature, or unreconstructed leftists will have to fall back on waiting tables, or making espressos.
Not that there's anything undignified with that. But I wonder what will happen to bonhomie, and civic awareness, and the cement of personal-societal interface.
And I wonder if the politicians who decide to sell the post office buildings, which they do not own because it is we the people who own them, can't be reminded that they have sworn to uphold a Constitution which empowers them to establish, but not to destroy.
Read about the sale of the post office here.
The sentence seems absurd, ungrammatical. How could a post office building, ordained and constructed and maintained for a century by The People, as valid a res publica as any item in the Constitution, be "for sale"? It's as if you were to say the Washington Monument is for sale, or the Mississippi River, or the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Constitution provides for the post office. Article I, Section 8, paragraph 7: "The Congress shall have power to establish post offices and post roads." (The establishing of an army and a navy comes a little further down.) I don't see anything in the Constitution granting power to disestablish post offices.
The Post Office I'm concerned about at the moment is the one in Berkeley, a fine Beaux-arts monument to civic pride. I have a particular fondness for it, I suppose, because I worked there for a couple or three years, in the late 1950s. I remember thinking at the time that the Postal Service was in a way the federal government's way of subsidizing creative artists and intellectuals; many of us clerks — I can't speak for the carriers; I never associated with them — were perpetual students, or closet novelists or poets, or musicians, painters, philosophers, content to work at a humdrum job, sorting mail and cancelling stamps like automatons, the hands and eyes busy but the mind free to roam.
I worked the face-up table, where several men stood around the perimeter of a huge polished-steel table whose long edges were bordered by troughs with fast-moving belts at their bottoms. Mail fell onto the table, dumped from an invisible source above, and as quickly as possible we grabbed up envelopes, two at a time using both hands, and dropped them into the troughs, stamp down and to the left, sending them at great speed to the cancelling machine.
Envelopes to thick to pass through that machine were quickly thrust into overhead pigeonholes, along with "flats" — large envelopes or the occasional magazine or newspaper — and any small package that might have found its way into the mix. The job was dusty and noisy, the cancelling machine clattering away. I never was able to let my mind wander at the face-up table; rarely even able to lift my eyes from the constant supply of envelopes to enjoy the sight of the physical dance of all those hands and arms grabbing, turning, flipping or dropping, suddenly shooting upward to the pigeonholes.
When the mail had all been faced and cancelled, though, and we returned to our cases, then the mind could wander. We sat-stood on high tilted stools, one foot on a footrest, the other steadying our stool, grabbed a cancelled envelope from the right end of the tray in front of us at waist level or a little lower, quickly glanced at the city named in the address, and shot the letter into the correct pigeonhole. The several "zones" of Berkeley were centered on our cases: Thousand Oaks, Downtown, Station A, North, Temescal, and of course the University. Just surrounding them were the nearby big towns like San Francisco or Oakland or Richmond; more distant or smaller cities were distributed around them; in the far corners were remote destinations, or catchalls: Arizona, or San Diego, or Portland, or Chicago. "Speedies" — Special Delivery letters — we put in on edge, so we could tie them to the top of a bundle.
When a pigeonhole was full, too full to slap another letter into it quickly, you pulled out all the mail with your left hand, grabbed the end of the twine that fell from a spool above you, and wrapped the mail once lengthwise, again crosswise, tied a quick square knot, and cut the twine with the little knife-ring on your little finger; then you tossed the resulting bundle into a small bin.
Those bins went to the Postal Transport Worker, who had a similar job except that he sorted bundles of letters, or flats, not individual pieces. He faced a rack of canvas sacks bound for different destinations: by truck to Richmond, or San Francisco, or Oakland, or beyond; or by rail to various points on the Coast or Valley trains; or — if it were a bundle of Air Mail — into an orange nylon pouch which would soon be sent to the Airport Mail Facility, where I'd also served a stint, from 1958 into the following year when we moved to Berkeley.
I remember a few of my colleagues fondly. Kenji, small and Nisei, who ran the cancelling machine. Austin, ponderous and sober, a specialist on Russian liturgical music. Charles, black and scholarly, who introduced me to Negro bars. Charlie Dorr, ancient, bent, and good-humored, a constantly optimistic leftist. We didn't associate with the carriers, who sorted mail to Berkeley addresses over on the Cityside cases.
As a Postal Transport Worker I had never learned the assignment of mail by carrier routes, so I never had to go Cityside. My expertise was in the Stateside "scheme": I'd laboriously memorized the locations — and, more important, the means of supply — of all of California's post offices. (Lindsey's help was inestimable, quizzing me from flash cards, as she'd quizzed me in Latin when I was cramming for finals — at about the same time, come to think of it.) When there was no other mail to sort, I'd be sent to the basement to sort parcels.
The Berkeley Post Office looms big in my memory for other reasons than work, though. It, the YMCA, the Library, and J.F. Hink and Son formed the public center of my awakening civic and social consciousness when I was a boy. Shattuck Avenue, with its sleek F Train and its rattling traffic, was Business and Excitement; Hink's was the ultimate expression of this attractive though somewhat forbidden aspect of mysterious adult social life. The Library was still social, but allowed for introspection and daydreams. The YMCA was for handiwork and weight-lifting and swimming classes.
The Post Office was quite a different slice of public adult reality. Here people were engaged in transactions, consigning personal matters to an unseen but very perceptible collective and public network. Even as a small boy I was aware that transportation and communication stood behind this network, enabled it; and that if this was possible it was only because men — I didn't think of women being involved in this sort of thing — had agreed to work together, all across the land, for a common good. Not simply for individual livelihood, like the Jewel Tea man who brought tea and coffee and spices to the front door every now and then; not for a Store like Hink's, as the elegant, slim, remote Mrs. Shirley did in the knitwear department downstairs: this was something more like the Fire Department, but on an unimaginably grand scale. Maybe even like the Army and the Navy.
I don't know when I began to think of the Building. I mean the Main Post Office, of course; but I also mean the Library, my grandparent's Church, ultimately the buildings on campus. Whenever that was, that was when I began to think of such buildings as standing for something beyond mere physical shells housing public or civic or social institutions: they were also both symbols and rally-points.
Societies ordain and construct public buildings as metaphors of public agendas. This has been going on since the Pyramids, the Greek temples and theaters, the great Mounds in the American midwest. Such buildings are a testament to the indispensable civic qualities of stability, permanence, capaciousness, propriety, foresight, care.
I am certain this was clear to me when I was a little boy, though of course never stated or formed in any articulate verbalization. You didn't read about such things; grownups didn't talk to you about them. They were truths you absorbed through observation and example, through repeated rites, as regular and unremarkable as the newspaper delivery — or the twice-daily mail. They were neither internal, part of your own secret or at least inexpressible growing consciousness, nor purely external, known but of no concern: instead they were the cement, or part of it, that bound your own internal life to the society beyond family that you knew instinctively you were a part of.
Well, hell: these days, it's all for sale. These days the only language seems to be Economics. Our society has become like that fellow who Oscar Wilde said knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Letters are sorted by machine; it's more efficient; never mind that scholars of Russian liturgical music, or students of English literature, or unreconstructed leftists will have to fall back on waiting tables, or making espressos.
Not that there's anything undignified with that. But I wonder what will happen to bonhomie, and civic awareness, and the cement of personal-societal interface.
And I wonder if the politicians who decide to sell the post office buildings, which they do not own because it is we the people who own them, can't be reminded that they have sworn to uphold a Constitution which empowers them to establish, but not to destroy.
Read about the sale of the post office here.
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