Danielle Dutton's "Wonderful Description" -- of Vulnerability

 A lot of contemporary short fiction seems to take the form of a snapshot in time as opposed to a story -- the latter traditionally having a beginning, middle and end, the end being something that brings all the threads together and ties them up in a neat, satisfying bow. Well, of course there have always been exceptions and especially after Modernism arrived, but I think it is safe to say readers generally expect to know what has happened and why when they reach the end of a piece.

But one might also consider abstract art where the notion often is: "What it means is whatever it means to you." 

Or as I have written previously, the appeal of fiction for an average reader (if there is such a person) may be whether the reader can identify with a character in the piece of writing in question. 

Such thoughts came to mind when I read "My Wonderful Description of Flowers," by Danielle Dutton, in the Nov. 28, 2022 electronic version of The New Yorker. It's basically a snapshot in time in the life of a middle-aged, intellectual woman who seems to find some sort of danger lurking in every corner of her otherwise ordinary life -- ordinary in today's world, Dutton quickly makes clear, by providing her protagonist with a videogame loving, gender non-conforming child who uses the pronoun "their" as opposed to his or her. The subsequent prose is carefully constructed so as to never identify the child by name. 

Well, that's one of several mysteries. The woman's husband, who readers are told never has dreams of any consequence, suddenly dreams his wife has left him. A man the woman may have known in the past persistently seeks to meet her. The woman's husband and child aren't home when they are expected to be and don't respond to calls and texts. All this seemingly happens in a short space of time, although the passage of time is rather vaguely depicted. 

This is a woman whose life appears to be sliding off the rails. Her response: stay on the rails and ride a commuter train past her stop to the end of the line where only one other passenger gets off and, well, there is a bit of a mystery to that person as well. What's out there?  The once-endless prairie, one is told in the usual New Yorker interview. Now more just an idea than a reality. The reassurance of nature, bringing to mind perhaps the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

What will happen to the woman out there as darkness settles in? Not reassurance, but more danger? 

While Dutton says in her interview the story is littered with references to "other texts and media," it basically relies on an age-old literary gimmick to keep readers going: "Something is about to happen: what can it be?"

My guess is that readers who like this story best will be those who can identify with the apparent fragility of Ms. Dutton's protagonist, The attribute that arguably most distinguishes a woman from a man is a sense of vulnerability. That's ever-present in this story.

One last observation: in littering her fiction with references to other works and then, in her books (as opposed to in this short piece of fiction), spelling out the connections in "pages of notes," Dutton is channeling the approach taken by T.S. Eliot in "The Waste Land" -- although initially in his case not by design (the pages of notes that is; not the references themselves.) 

Pacific Northwest Ballet Faces Financial Challenges Ahead

 The other day, my wife and I took our lives in our hands and went to a live performance of the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) for the first time in a couple of years. In times past we had been subscribers and I had been a contributor.

Well, that's an exaggeration of course: we wore masks, had seats where we were unlikely to be breathing much of anyone else's air (there was a decent crowd present, but the large auditorium was far from full) and avoided doing things we used to enjoy -- drinks and some food in the foyer, a post-show Q&A with one of the dancers. 

As live performances of one sort or another have returned, there have been no reports in Seattle of Covid outbreaks at such venues. While we were at the ballet, the Dave Matthews Band was playing in a sold-out arena nearby with no reports of any problems.  But, as a couple of our fully vaccinated family members can attest, Covid remains a significant threat and one senses it is still wise to carefully ration occasions when one is not going to be socially distant, keeping one's priorities straight (family and close friends first) in the process.

The good news: the quality level of PNB's performances remains very high despite a couple of very difficult years including a lengthy stretch of no live performances because of Covid. PNB is one of the few ballet companies in the U.S. with a full orchestra (plus a highly rated school). If the live music ever goes, also-ran status could lie ahead. 

We saw a mixed rep called "The Seasons' Canon" that was a bit of a smorgasbord as mixed reps frequently are: an opening number that served to advertise the company's commitment -- first and foremost it seems these days -- to diversity; then a classic Balanchine offering for the traditionalists, and finally an extravaganza (54 dancers on stage -- how many U.S. ballet companies can do that?) for those who enjoy spectacle -- and "something new" -- first and foremost. The last was a big hit with audiences according to a couple of home-town reviews, neither of which had a single critical word to say about anything.

In my humble opinion, while visually compelling and attractively danced to a version of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," what the final piece had to do with "ballet" was far less noticeable than what it didn't. 

I mention all of this because as a contributor in past years, I became curious about how the company was doing financially, prompted in part because of an email I received from PNB's director of development (fund raising) after I purchased my tickets. The email contained a letter from PNB's Artistic Director, Peter Boal, a distinguished former dancer with the New York City Ballet who has now headed PNB for almost a couple of decades -- generally to great critical acclaim.

The letter began: "We have a very exciting rep in store for you. This is one you will want to see more than once and one you’ll want to recommend to friends, acquaintances, strangers ... everyone!"

Well -- I did see it more than once, the second time digitally for a modest $35. (Because of union-related issues, the digital version was available for only five days after a week or so of live performances ended, which is unfortunate because PNB's digital-only offerings during the height of the Covid lockdowns attracted viewers from around the U.S. and various foreign countries.)

In any event, I'm sure you got the message from Mr. Boal's letter: PNB badly needs more ticket sales.

To understand what's happening, one has to go back to the last time PNB released an annual report (separate from its annual, required financial statement as a tax-exempt entity). That was before the pandemic, for the company's fiscal year ending June 2019.

"This past year was challenging financially. All of us know art can only exist in concert with wise
financial stewardship. We understand the need to present excellence in all we do, but only with
the practicality of our limited resources. When necessary, we make the hard decisions,
evaluating numbers of staff or dancers, adjusting programs, and seeking your help to build
revenue and enthusiasm."  So said Mr. Boal, observing that his role was more than just that of an artistic director. "At times, I'm the best person to find a strategic expense reduction," he said.

More in the way of explanation was provided by Ellen Walker, who had just finished her fifth year as PNB's Executive Director -- in essence, the company's business manager. 

Looking back over the past year, she noted that various external economic and political events had thrown "a disruptive, negative halo over The Nutcracker sales." (More on the critical importance of The Nutcracker later.)  "Sleeping Beauty" sales were on track to earn back a significant measure of that loss when Seattle's February snowstorms brought the region to a halt."  While that elaborate, expensive, somewhat out-of-date, three-act production (thereafter retired from PNB's repertoire) went on as scheduled, "our expected upside upside from ticket sales evaporated with the weather."

About six months after that fiscal year ended, the Covid pandemic arrived. 

In fiscal 2019, PNB Nutcracker ticket sales were just short of $5.7 million, down about 11% from $6.4 million the previous year.  Why is that such a blow?  Total ticket sales for the year (including Sleeping Beauty) were $11.58 million, meaning The Nutcracker alone accounted for just short of 50% of the total. In the preceding year, they had been slightly over 50%.

In the most recent fiscal year, ended June 2022 (the first year in which the company got back to live performances), Nutcracker ticket sales totaled just under $4.9 million (thanks in part by my two granddaughters attending for the first time, in their cute dresses and face masks), or about 49% of total sales.

While PNB and other ballet companies talk a lot about new productions -- and rightly so (what would choreographers and dancers do without them even if they are often not as memorable as one would hope), PNB might be more accurately called The Pacific Northwest Nutcracker Company. Same goes for many other ballet companies, I am sure. 

In contrast to $11.58 million in total ticker sales in the year ended June 2019, expenses for the company and its performances totaled just under $18.4 million. In other words, ticket sales covered just 63%. If administrative expenses of $2.2 million and fund-raising costs of $1.2 million were thrown in, ticker sales covered only 53% of costs.

Now, let's be fair: by the time fiscal 2019 had rolled around, the company had been in operation for about 48 years, and I suspect the ratios for many of those years were even more challenging. Contributions, by far the most important of which (before government support during the pandemic -- more on that soon) were from individuals. Corporate support -- despite the presence of corporate names everywhere -- have been pathetic, and especially so given Seattle's significant number of hugely profitable companies.

Well, if the last fiscal year before the pandemic appeared to be signaling the need for belt tightening, audience building (PNB with the aid of a significant grant has been trying, but it is clearly and uphill effort [thank goodness for all those little girls with ballerina dreams dancing in their heads]) and a search for additional contributions, the current outlook is perhaps even more dauting. 

Where is Makenzie Scott (the former wife of Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame) when PNB needs her?  Hopefully waiting in the wings as she continues to rapidly dispose of her divorce-settlement billions. In quasi-Marxian terms, "her" billions are simply the surplus profits Amazon scooped up from American consumers, in large part, one can argue, by eliminating much of its competition through predatory pricing in its early years. Not so much now: the company routinely advises customers products on its website can often be obtained at lower cost elsewhere, but then there is often Amazon's "free" shipping. In other words, customers have been getting "taken" (to use a polite term) both coming and going.

Why does the appearance of an "angel" donor matter more for PNB now than in the past?

Let's take a look at the most recent fiscal year.

PNB got a whopping (relative to its size) $12 million in support from the federal government, little if any of which is likely to be repeated absent new government initiatives. Of the total $8 million constituted an award from the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) fund, a federal Covid relief effort that ceased accepting new applications in Aug. 2021. 

Fortunately, thanks in part to other federal aid, PNB needed only about $3 million of that to help cover fiscal 2022 expenses and the remainder was set aside to help cover expected shortfalls during the next three years or so. 

The other aid was just over $3 million in Paycheck Protection (another Covid relief program) loan forgiveness and just over $1 million in federal tax credits. Tax credits for an entity that pays no federal tax? It's explained somewhere in the financial report, available online, if anyone is really interested.

All of which leaves one wondering -- at a time when Covid still calls for caution. There are huge billboard ads for The Nutcracker in Seattle at present and hopefully the weather and the pandemic will cooperate. In the first half of 2023, the company is again scheduled to perform it's excellent version of "Gisele" and I'm looking forward to seeing it and especially if I can catch my current favorite ballerina -- Angelica Generosa -- in the title role. 

That's it for now, but I may have one or more posts on the company's recent mixed rep, mentioned above. 

"Hinges" by Graham Swift: When Words Have a Role to Play

 Graham Swift, interviewed about his story "Hinges" in the Nov.14, 2022 electronic version of The New Yorker, says it's a story about words and indeed it is.

The tale leads up to the funeral of a father, to be "done" or perhaps "conducted" by a minister unknown to the family before surviving members awkwardly consult with him about the Order of Service and who will say what -- not that anyone really knows what they might say at that point. This makes what is almost always a ritualistic event -- certain words, certain phrases, safe, expected -- even more stilted than might otherwise be the case.

Moreover, it doesn't appear much actually can be said about the deceased father. He spent his working life in a blanket factory in the north of England and apparently much of his subsequent years, with his wife, in a retirement community located in the southern part of the country. Stock homilies -- "he was a family man" -- are about it.

From start to finish, certain words and phrases associated with death and funerals immediately come to the minds of family members and mainly, in this case, to the deceased man's daughter since the story is told from her point of view. There are roles to be played and lines associated with those roles to be spoken.

That's not quite all there is to it, of course. The daughter both wonders why she and others are stuck with some words and she recalls the mother of a childhood friend who wouldn't play the game. This stirs up other memories -- her first crush, on an older man who it appears her mother -- and other women -- might have found sexually attractive as well. Just a hint or perhaps a figment of imagination. But the man, a carpenter who comes to fix a door ("hinges")  also seems to have been a friend of the father, and that for some reason surprises the then-much-younger daughter.  

"I don't think I'm alone as a writer in seeing sex and death as a sort of inseparable combo," Swift says in the interview. Sex and death, heath and humor, humor and sex -- a wheel of narrative in Swift's view.

Swift is English and there is a distinctly English sense of understatement to the story. Most American writers in this day and age would exploit the potentially transgressive aspects of the tale to a far greater extent than does Swift. He simply intimates there may be a skeleton of one sort or another in a family closet and leaves it at that. Which families don't have something in their background that perhaps comes to mind because it can't be mentioned at a funeral as opposed to because it can?

The bottom line: this is a story with which a lot of readers can probably identify, English or not,

The Bells of St. Catherine’s

  

The bells of St. Catherine’s are pealing at dawn

Voicing their sorrow for souls who have gone

Sounding their sadness at gray break of day

Grieving the shades, I hear them that way.

 

The bells of St. Catherine’s are singing for joy

Chiming with pleasure, such chords they employ

What could have happened this splendor to cause?

Ceasing my reading, I ponder with pause.

 

The bells of St. Catherine’s an anthem they sound

Hope for the world, the bells have now found

Who could be pulling the ropes so intent?

Sipping my coffee my doubts I relent.

 

The bells of St Catherine’s a clatter they make

One cannot but shudder, not music but ache

Signaling trouble, signaling pain

A dreadful foreboding of nothing to gain.

 

The Bells of St. Catherine’s fell silent this year

Thinking it over the message seems clear

Defilement of nature, men do as they may

But the God of Spinoza will have the last say.

 

 

© 2022 Fowler W Martin

Conflicting Directional Arrows for Lethem's Woketariat

 In my previous post -- Jonathan Lethem, "Narrowing Valley" -- I discussed Lethem's view that he could not write the expected conclusion to his New Yorker short story because to do so, he would have to misappropriate the culture of an Indian, or Native American, and, well, as a member of the woketariat (those for whom prevailing political correctness comes first and foremost), that was impossible.

The story is all about a coming showdown between a white family about to take possession of a patch of desert purchased sight unseen from an anonymous "Realtor" and the Indian who presumably actually owns if -- if "owns" is the right word for Native American land.

So, Lethem simply bailed out as the confrontation neared, leaving his readers rather distinctly short changed, but New Yorker editors, presumably also anxious to be politically correct, apparently impressed and, who knows? even relieved.

No Indian appeared in his story so he could avoid getting into trouble for daring to write about a person with a cultural background other than his own.

Now let's look back a couple of years to a post I wrote in June 2020 on a New York Times article on the work of Wallace Stegner.  It was the first in a Times series on American writers "who show us who we are." Stegner, by the way, was once known as "the Dean of Western Writers."

In the course of discussing Stegner's work, A.O. Scott, the author of the Times article, noted that Stegner's work had been criticized by, among other, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a writer and member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, because Stegner failed to significantly address the indigenous peoples of the region or a variety of non-white immigrant groups.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. 

Perhaps Mr. Lethem, who talked in his New Yorker author interview about making political correctness conundrums "teachable moments" at Pomona College where he is a professor of Creative Writing, could horse that one over. Maybe he could even put it up for a vote and let us know what the students decided.