LORNA SORE

Today we went to St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue for second installment of “Six Saturdays With Messiaen.”

John Scott (the church’s organist and music director) is performing all of Olivier Messiaen’s organ works. Scott plays the church’s incredible Arents Memorial Organ, a Skinner instrument from 1913. It’s huge.

It is wonderful to be in a church when no one is talking! St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue is so imposing! I love churches and I love organs and when I think about how it felt to listen to the music today I think “it was restorative” and “I felt stoned.”

“Mr. Scott’s powerful account left no question that he had deeply considered every detail of dynamics and pacing, yet his playing gave the impression of spontaneous invention.”

I’m reading SOME INSTRUCTIONS by Stanley Crawford for a class. I had never heard of this book before. It doesn’t look like Crawford has a Wikipedia page. Last month, Bookslut put up this interview and Deb Olin Unferth interviewed him for Powell’s. Crawford and his wife run a garlic farm in New Mexico. The full title of the book is Some Instructions: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood. Dalkey put it out in 1996. Here are some passages:

From “The Weather”

“And here, in these changes, is an ideal topic of conversation between Husband and Wife, for the weather is something that can often be both vague and precise, certain and uncertain, pleasant and unpleasant, useful and useless, and thus is a subject that can never be truly exhausted and about which never enough can be said. No doubt you have noticed my preference for it above all other subjects. What drama lies in the air around us!”

From “The Goats”

“And as it is with the goats of the barnyard, so it is with those of the Marriage, by which I mean the genitalia, which the Husband and Wife must keep confined or penned up most of the time while also taking care to feed them well with daily rations of fodder of the appropriate kind so that they yeild up and produce the protein-rich products which they manufacture out of mere grasses and dried leaves — milk and manure…

…thus the animals of the barnyard, like those of the marriage, must remain in confinement except at such regularly scheduled times when they are led out of their pens to be milked or groomed or fed, and put back into their pens when such tasks are complete, and not allowed to roam freely about the yard. As you and I have our goats, so will other Marriages have their cattle or rabbits or pigeons or doves or even bees. Nonetheless, despite apparent differences, the principles remain essentially the same.”

From “Putting Toys Away”

“Toys are to be played with (imagine what is small and insignificant to be large and powerful, for example) and not to be employed as implements or weapons or anything else; thus a toy left carelessly about, blocking a hallway or a threshold, is likely to seem something else, that is, an irritation or an obstacle or a barrier.”

From “Reading and Writing”

“In the meantime, it would be of help to you to keep in mind this useful rule, which is that for every object in existence there should exist a corresponding piece of paper — no matter how how small, if even just a scrap.”

I was watching a 1997 interview David Foster Wallace gave to Charlie Rose and then this happened:

ROSE: Can you imagine yourself writing a screenplay? Have you tried?

DFW: No, I haven’t tried. I’ve talked a couple times — my best friend writes mysteries and he and I have talked about doing a screenplay. I think — I think I would have a very difficult time writing something that’s a product that other people would mess with. And the amount of money that’s at stake in movies and the amount of — the dispersal of responsibility for the thing — I mean, the director, the actors, the producer — in order to do — writing is very difficult for me and it takes a lot of time and energy. And once I’ve done it, it’s my thing. I can’t imagine putting in the time and energy to do a good screenplay — I mean, something like what David Webb Peoples can do. He’s a screenwriter I think is really, really superb.

ROSE: What’s he written?

DFW: He’s written “Blade Runner” and he wrote “Unforgiven,” the Clint Eastwood Western which –

ROSE: Did you like it?

DFW: I thought — “Unforgiven”?

ROSE: Yeah.

DFW: I thought “Unforgiven” is the first really smart Western since, I don’t know, early Peckinpah.

ROSE: I do, too. I loved it.

DFW: What’s interesting is I don’t know a single female who likes the film. It’s very odd. I talk to all these people –

ROSE: It’s interesting you say that.

DFW: — about “Unforgiven” –

ROSE: It’s interesting you say that because –

DFW: — and females think, “Western? It stinks.” And if you can get them to watch it, it’s not a Western at all. I mean, it’s a moral drama. It’s — you know, it’s Henry James, basically. But it’s very odd.

ROSE: My girlfriend and I — Amanda hates the film and it’s the one film that I just have a wider difference with her than any other film that we’ve seen together.

Later this happened:

DFW: Feminists are always saying this. Feminists are saying white males say, “Okay, I’m going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world.”

ROSE: And you say?

DFW: I — I — if that was going on, it was going on on a level of awareness I do not want to have access to.

ROSE: Do you still play tennis?