Sunday, December 8, 2013

New Yorkers with New Names




My wife has taken a shine to Carole King.  This means that we have heard “Tapestry” about seventeen times in the last two weeks.  At the risk of stating something patently obvious, like “bananas are a great fruit” or “Hagen Dazs vanilla ice cream tastes really good”, “Tapestry” is an absolutely wonderful album. 

I can remember hearing so many of these songs on the radio as a kid, driving around with my mom.  And how as a six year old you’d see the album and the barefoot cool as the posture for every hip teenage babysitter you encountered.  It is such a pleasure to reengage with so many of these songs.  “I Feel the Earth Move” is such a fierce, lusty sentiment.  Elemental like something a character in an Aristophanes play might have howled.  “It’s Too Late” is the message no broken hearted man ever wants to hear a woman say.  It’s unimpeachable.  There’s no way around it.  Deal with it. “Beautiful” is makes me want to cry.  I want to drill it into my girls heads as they march off to school in the morning. “You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your heart.   Then people gonna treat you better.  You gonna find, yes you will, that you’re beautiful, as you feel.”  In print is seems trite.  Sung by her, it’s an anthem.  



There are no overt blemishes on this creation.  The lyrics to “Tapestry” itself are a bit hokey, with toads and wizards, but hey, it was of its time.  I can clearly recall hearing “Smackwater Jack” as a child and dwelling on the lyrics.  “You can’t talk to a man with a shotgun in his hand.”  This all seemed pretty sensible as six-year old.  It’s a basic truism.  You just can’t mess with it.  Born in Manhattan, grew up in Brooklyn, was a hit making machine for other people (The Shirelles, The Beatles, The Monkeys, Aretha Franklin,) and finally came into her own to break all records with “Tapestry” a truly 十全十美[1] creation. I don’t want to hear the album another nine times this week, but it has been a pleasure to reengage with the work and it is fitting an proper that we honor this fine New Yorker and her chrysalis emergence here at the sea and sand crossroads.



I drew reference to another New Yorker yesterday.  Carole changed her name from Klein to King and Moses changed his name from Finkelstein to Finley.  M. I. Finley, the author of the work I’d mentioned yesterday, “The World of Odysseus” was a child prodigy and graduated from Syracuse University by the age of fifteen.  My daughter, who’s school has her doing three years of study in two, appreciated this feat.  In 1952 while teaching as a professor at my wife’s alma matta Rutgers University, he was summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee  and asked if he’d ever been a communist.  Taking the Fifth, he was fired and prevented from working in United States academe.  And as with so many other fine American academics, like the Sinologist Owen Lattimore, he fled to England where he was embraced, took up a teaching career at Cambridge and became a British subject in 1962 and then was knighted in 1979.   Sir Moses' analysis of heroes in Odysseus day could also be applied to himself when faced with the din of the demos  as personified by Joe McCarthy:

Whatever the conflicts and cleavages among the noble housholds and families they were always in accord that there could be no crossing of the great line which separated the aristoi from the many, the heroes from the non heroes.  p. 108.

One of the powerful pieces in Finley’s work, for me, was to reframe another “banana is a great fruit” truism.  Greek mythology is an archaic, simplistic forerunner to the more evolved leap into monotheism.  Believing in gods of thunder and the sea, was what primitive people, the world over did.  More evolved societies assumed a monotheistic posture and more evolved still did away with the need for a god-head altogether.  I don’t know that I ever took Greek mythology as an intellectual leap that allowed for the development of Greek, Roman and therefore Western philosophical traditions in its own right.  Juxtaposing Homer’s contemporary Hesiod, Finley ends his work with the following:

“In the end it remained for a poet who stood outside the heroic world to take the next great step.  In the case of Hesiod we are certain and we can not be for the poet of the Iliad:  It was he who organized the individual gods into a systematic theogany  and made justice into the central problem of existence, human as well as divine. From Hesiod a straight line leads to Aeschylus and the other great tragedians.

In those succeeding centuries the miracle that was Greece unfolded.  Homer having made the gods into men, man learned to know himself.”  p.146.






[1] shíquánshíměi:  complete and beautiful / to be perfect (idiom)

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