It
was the orderliness of the whole thing that got to me every once and a while. I
sat in the same chair in the library or at my desk in my room and read
precisely sixty pages an hour, that is, four novels from world literature week
after week for four or five semesters. I ate dinner at six o'clock mostly with
the same students, got to bed around twelve every night, went regularly to most
of my lectures and precept classes and partied every weekend. Every once in a
while something had to give.
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Saturday, November 30, 2013
Friday, November 29, 2013
The Taste of Blue. John von Daler
Karen #Blixen loved the color blue, especially the light Nordic blue that rises out of
the great Greenlandic ice floes (which incorporate it together with a mystical
touch of turquoise in sheet after sheet of frozen water), then appears in the
Swedish flag and finally finds a permanent home in Danish royal porcelain. She
uses it in the eyes of a beautiful figurehead on a ship out of Elsinore and in
the porcelain that a poor, old lady spends her life buying up, just to find the
color of the sea around the boat where she had spent two weeks as a young girl
alone with a young sailor after a shipwreck.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Pjerrot Speaks. By John von Daler
#Tivoli
in Copenhagen is one of the few places where you can see genuine "#Commedia
dell'arte" in Northern Europe. Every evening these half-hour "dumb
shows" are performed at least twice in the old amusement park. For many
decades these performances were accompanied by an orchestra playing in the pit
in front of the old two-towered pagoda theater. Lately the shows have been
accompanied by taped music - not nearly as much fun as the good, old days.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Boredom and Claustrophobia 2. By John von Daler
The
theater for the Warhol movie was packed. We saw one picture where this guy did
nothing. I do not remember whether it was a moving
picture or not. As an audience watching a man do nothing, we did nothing unless
it was getting asphyxiated. In Denmark they are not big on air systems.
Sometimes they cool the air for you, but it really is just the same old air:
recycling of your neighbor's carbon dioxide.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Boredom and Claustrophobia 1. By John von Daler
Everybody
wanted to see Andy Warhol's movies. Me too, but God knows why. They were not
interesting or sexy or beautiful or anything really but "in". All of
Copenhagen had stood in line to see these two films, about a man sleeping or
someone looking out into space or somebody eating. We got mashed into the little
art theater like herring in a barrel. Not only that, but it was a double
feature with a break: one film before and one after an intermission.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Under the #Mask. By John von Daler
I stood in my underwear and a great chesty coat in the costume room at the theater. The coat was buttoned in the back, with long, heavy, hairy, black arms sticking out of the green shoulders. On my head, the seamstress had placed a huge helmet, also green with protruding eyes and large, grotesque feelers. In my right hand I held my violin and bow while my left hand was making forays into the jungle I was within, working through the hair, the knobs, the extended insect arms, trying to find out what it was like outside this great costume. I was to be a huge violin-playing grasshopper in a total-theater production of Faust. But this was an unhappy grasshopper.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
The Cut. By John von Daler
#Tulsa,
Oklahoma, about 1950. Dad and I entered the large, light room with mirrors all
along two opposite sides. White tiles covered the floors with a small, black
pattern without any meaning. Small piles of hair were continually being swept
up across the pattern. We took seats along the wall.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Oars in water. By John von Daler
"When
I walked through northern Europe in the early thirties, men were scarce..."
The old storyteller took a sip from his Bulgarian red wine; this was not a big
enough occasion to break out the French bottles. Then he took a bite of
pheasant liverpaste on a piece of French bread. He took his time; he wanted the
point to sink in. I needed no pause in which to think it over. I had heard his
tales before; I knew his methods; I took a drink too.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
The Untold Story. By John von Daler
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Praising #Agee. By John von Daler
Inspired by
The New York Review of Books, let me join in, not to sing the melody of praise
about James #Agee's "Now Let Us Praise Famous Men", which I own but
have never read, but to hum the bass line of a much deeper counterpoint:
"Agee on Film". Read it. Just read it.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Ich bin ein. By John von Daler
I
had discovered the place by accident: taking a walk by #Savigny Platz I passed
an open door through which the scent of elegant sauces wafted onto #Kantstrasse.
An elderly woman stood in the door doing what I suppose my Viennese grandmother
might have called "taking the air", such as it is in Kantstrasse. I
could not really see in the kitchen, so I tried to find a front entrance to
what had to be a restaurant. Finally I found a small, fairly dark entranceway
and walked inside two tiny, dark, adjacent rooms, one long with a bar and the
other square with maybe eight or ten tables. The place had a feel of
masculinity about it, as if the owner had decorated it with just a few not very
well-placed pictures of people and places he liked and said who cares what
anybody else thinks. It had an irresistible charm about it that appealed to me.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
The Wrong End. By John von Daler
"Twenty
dollars", says the realtor with a chuckle, "You could have bought
this place for twenty dollars back then!" We are looking at a colonial
house in Connecticut.
In
corresponding situations I have always thought, and what's so funny about that? I would not have had twenty dollars
back then and I don't have the price you are asking now!
Saturday, November 16, 2013
I vote for Jan. By John von Daler
I
commute between the extreme dictatorship of art that I work with and the
extreme democracy of the society I live in. Keeping these two areas separate
seems imperative if you think, as I do, that art usually worsens when everyone
has a say, while society often improves. So I have chosen to live in Denmark
where I create various forms of thought, artifice and artifacts.
Friday, November 15, 2013
A Piece of Cake. By John von Daler
Ever
since my kind and diligent Danish doctor peered over the tops of his round and
rimless reading glasses and pronounced, "#Diabetes 2. You've got diabetes
2", I have been nobody's sugar daddy. With the exception of four teaspoons
of marmalade every Sunday, plus the portions of sugar that fruit and vegetables
may smuggle into my blood, I am as sugar-free as Lady Macbeth.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
A Coincidence. By John von Daler
In
the Vienna of the last Habsburgs my great grandfather lived and worked. His
passion was to collect good paintings, fine glass and beautiful artifacts. Once
some work of art had been through his hands you could read all about its
history and trust its genuiness; M. Strauss was both a fine lawyer and a
meticulous art collector. Being the son of an award-winning and successful
manufacturer of silk, he new the quality of the exquisite and could afford to
track down and systemize some of the best art of his time.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Great Expectations. By John von Daler
It
was the Cub Scout in me I guess. I just did not fit in well with the #sixties.
Too punctual, too proper. These qualities were great for a musician, but in my
private life they often presented problems. The worst part was that I got tired
of myself. So I decided to do something about it.
Monday, November 11, 2013
A close brush. By John von Daler
Second
drawer from the top. Left-hand side. I knew the sound of the drawer opening by
heart. Seeing it there, bristles up, you would not suspect that it had other
uses than lightly stroking long strands of freshly washed hair. Turning it
over, though, you could see that the oval back of redish wood, lacquered and
smooth, might also be used as an intimidating weapon if needs be.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Memento 1. By John von Daler
#Deserted
would be the one, all-purpose word. Deserted as in abandoned. Deserted as in a
desert with hardly any visible growth.
Deserted as in empty of people. You choose it.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
The Wings of Song. By John von Daler
The
band had invited wives and girlfriends to come to the Danish provinces. As if
in response the summer had turned friendly and gray skies and choppy winds had
rolled back out to sea revealing quiet, blue and yellow days. The land was covered
with deep red poppies and bright golden mustard, the two colors of saffron.
Friday, November 8, 2013
His Mother's Tongue. By John von Daler
Having
spoken the Danish language for four decades, it feels invigorating to come back
to English. Writing it again gives me new vantage points. I feel creative and
inventive. Here are some examples of my rediscovery of the language I was born
with:
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Touching. By John von Daler
"Somebody
touch me!" the old man would exclaim when he arrived at our place in
Denmark. My wife would give my father a hug and offer to do his nails. This meant
holding his hand and dipping it in warm, soapy water; with his wife now in her
grave, he needed attention. His clothes were not ironed very well, his always
clean-shaven face now showed stubble at various spots, his usually slick hair was
fluffed up like a baby chicken. Here with us he could thaw up after those cold weeks
alone.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Two Heroes. By John von Daler
Monday, November 4, 2013
Audible #Eros. By John von Daler
On
the way home from the drive-in movie, The
Seven-Year Itch with Marilyn #Monroe, my prairy mother, riding shotgun, uttered
a sharp admonition that her frontier predecessors would have applauded:
"That woman is just tasteless. Why, in five or ten years women will be
wearing a décolletage in the back of
their dresses!" My father in the front seat and I in the rear remained as
silent as cookie thieves with bulging cheeks. Neither of us in our obvious guilt
could stammer out even one small syllable of feigned agreement.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Drawing a #blank. By John von Daler
Ah,
all the writers who fear blank pages! Karen #Blixen loved them. She recounted
how a certain cloister in Portugal cultivated fields of flax to make into
sheets for the wedding nights of brides of the nobility. The morning after the great event the
sheets would be returned to the cloister to be framed and hung up in a gallery
so that the great and the rich could see evidence of the virtue of their women.
Karen Blixen goes on to say that the most interesting of all the displays was of
course the blank one.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
By hand. By John von Daler
If
you look at them now, they have small wrinkles around the edges like the folds
at the waist of a sitting woman by Vermeer. The skin that they call white, is
made of hardly any color, just layer upon layer of tissue reminiscent of the
strata hidden in an iceberg in Greenland, but these are almost crimson: all of
the layers taken together give a kind of soft, pale red glow. Maybe these are
the fires of life that soon will soften, become embers, lose heat, crumble and
finally turn white.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Splinter. By John von Daler
Usually
the younger generation tries to shock its parent generation. Faulkner knew this
and often let his fictional children build up emotional connections with their
grandparents. While they antagonized their parents, they empathized with those
parents' parents.
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