Beach Reads

Sister Alice was excited. "We are going to The Shore!" she announced one day to the faculty of Project Link. Sister Alice ran "Link" along with a group of hearty Dominican nuns and a small roster of volunteers, of which I was one. Running a middle school in the heart of Newark in the 1980s required a resolute, but joyful, authority that was very persuasive. The Shore, it is!—home of Springsteen power ballads and--soon-to-be--famous as the haunt of Snooki and The Situation.

As a Midwesterner who had spent many a pleasant afternoon sitting with a book in a shady glade overlooking a lake, I was up for it. I showed up the next morning outfitted for the day: jeans, t-shirt, baseball cap, a backpack containing a bottle of water and a book or two.

When Sister Alice and others raised an eyebrow in the direction of my attire, I explained I was never much for swimming, and I thought I'd spend a pleasant day sitting under a tree with a book. The guffaws I heard throughout the day—nay, throughout the school year—taught me that most saintly New Jersey nuns are not above sarcasm and ridicule.

Which brings me to the concept of “The Beach Read.”

“Look! I’m reading!”

I understand that there are different sorts of books. There’s Samuel Beckett’s Malloy and there is the latest by Nora Roberts. There is Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and there is Andy Cohen’s The Daddy Diaries. But whatever the book—leatherbound tome or tattered paperback, poetry or pablum—I cannot understand why anyone would want to read a book on a beach.

Sure, photographs can sell it. Just look at this carefree gentleman: after a meditative walk along the sand, he is inspired to throw down his rucksack and pull out the copy of Siddhartha he is never without. But think about it. There is sand creeping into the waistband of his Banana Republic shorts. There are fleas crawling into the headband of his insouciant fedora and horseflies hovering above waiting to swoop down for the kill. The sun will soon scald his shins and nose, and his suntan-lotioned hands are leaving oily fingerprints all over Siddhartha’s path to wisdom.

Of course, there is something to be said for varying your reading diet. “To every season,” yes? A time to tackle Tolstoy, a time to cuddle up with Agatha Christie; an Easy Rawlings afternoon or Aeschylus-worthy dark night of the soul. But please! Reading has its place: a shaded park bench, a crowded cafe, the ratty armchair in the windowed nook where you can hear the soft but lively murmerings of the neighborhood. As a Midwesterner of Eastern European skin tone, I’m not quite sure what beaches are for. But they are not for reading.

R.I.P. Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an imaginative novelist, executing outlandish concepts—a story told backwards (Time’s Arrow), a murder mystery in which the narrator knows the story before it happens (London Fields)—with confident brio. Despite his consistently dour headshot photos, he was reportedly quite approachable and loved engaging with the world. I know him via a couple of his novels, but mostly through his dazzling magazine writing (read his best in The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016). His wit—as you could guess from the photo here—was dry and serious. And his cynical observations about the world were often laden with gobsmacking insight. Here’s a sample from a Newsweek essay from 2011:

Martin Amis

Over the course of about a generation, it has come to seem that while the Democratic Party represents the American mind, the Republican Party represents, not its heart, and not its soul, but its gut. The question is as old as democracy: should the highest office go to the most intellectually able candidate, or to the most temperamentally "normative" (other words for normative include "unexceptional" and "mediocre")? In the rest of the developed world, the contest between brain and bowel was long ago resolved in favor of brain. In America the dispute still splits the nation. Things are slightly different, and more visceral, in periods of crisis. Nine years ago, if you remember, the populace looked on in compliant silence as the president avowedly "went with his gut" into Baghdad.

Maximal Minimalism

I’ve been fascinated by the so-called Minimalist composers since the 1980s—one of my first published essays, in fact, featured interviews by Philip Glass, John Adams, and Steve Reich. Members of this trio are now the grand old men of Minimalism, a style that is so influential that it can hardly be called a discrete “genre” any longer.

Itt has come a long way. One of Reich’s latest recordings, Runner/Music for Ensemble and Orchestra, bears his trademark sound—the steady pulse of piano and vibraphone; acerbic melodies; slowly shifting harmonies—but it is also filled with lush and lyrical melodies. It’s not exactly Puccini, but it soars in its own pithy way.

Kris Kristofferson

During some late-night channel surfing recently, I came across an episode of Ken Burns’ expansive PBS documentary about American country music.  It covered the early 1960s, describing the life and careers of Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Merle Haggard. Always great to be reacquainted with that crowd. But the real revelation for me was the show’s profile of Kris Kristofferson.

He led a polyglot life: army brat, recipient of a cum laude undergraduate degree in literature, Rhodes scholar, helicopter pilot, family outcast after his defection from the military to pursue a career in music. He dabbled in songwriting during his college and army years, but got eventually got serious and headed to Nashville. While he worked as a janitor at the Columbia Records studio, he occasionally slipped demo tapes of his songs to Johnny Cash, who ignored them until he happened to listen to “Sunday Mornin’, Comin’ Down.” It is an exquisite song, full of down-on-your-luck longing and dreamy cityscapes, and Cash decided to record it and champion Kristofferson’s career. The rest, as they say, is country music history. Listen to it here, and spend some time getting reacquainted with a great songwriter.

Gospel at Colonus

Every so often you see a stage performance that radiates such intelligence and dynamism that it renews your faith in the power of live theater. That happened to me last week. Chicago’s Court Theatre planned a production of The Gospel at Colonus in 2020, but cancelled it because of the COVID pandemic. It is onstage now—through June 18th—and it is electrifying.

Kelvin Roston, Jr. and Aeriel Williams and cast in The Gospel at Colonus.

Originally staged in New York 40 years ago, Bob Telson and Lee Bruer’s musical adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus reimagines the story of the Greek king’s atonement and redemption as a Black Pentecostal Church service. Tapping into the talent and tradition of Chicago’s gospel music traditions directors Mark J.P. Hood and Charles Newell have reinvigorated this sadly overlooked show with deep feeling and raise-the-roof energy. If Chicago is in your orbit this week, don’t miss it.

Have a good week.