Sunday, March 25, 2012

The Wandering Fulbright #2

 
                      Two Brechtian Women
    By some hook or crook, on a dark and stormy night, when I was new to London, I found myself in a strange suburban flat at an even stranger party that I found pretty intimidating.
    I can remember none of the details except my general uneasiness, which became specific when a pair of tough-looking German ladies of uncertain years from East Berlin got me into a corner, scaring me half to death with their grinding, gravelly baritone, broken English gospel of Bertolt Brecht.
    They had that Bavarian swarthiness about them, skinny, muscular, dressed in working-class blacks and ready to make short work of me. I, poor bourgeois bastard that I was-- and sometimes still am-- who as yet knew all too little of the revolutionary Bert Brecht or of his politically and aesthetically explosive drama of and for the working class and world politics. Soon, I was to note, everyone in theatre circles was talking “Brecht”. And I got, as they say, with the program.
     But right now, these ladies made it clear that if I cared anything at all about economic and social justice, to say nothing of art and culture In general, I would hie me back to the United States and carry the Gospel According to Brecht to every corner of the nation. I was being intellectually roughed-up. They made me feel almost childish in what I thought was my own commitment to a new theatre.
     Those ladies were really something. I think they nailed me because I must have looked so pathetically vulnerable, a young (30) American who needed their proselytizing. And they did it to me-- in spades.
                                           ~~~~

By the way: I took with me to London a favorite solid red tie, of the most gorgeous red worsted wool by Wembly. Wearing it one day, a friend at the League  pulled me aside and said that in London only members of the “C P”. (the Communist Party) ever wear solid red ties. I needed to be warned.




Monday, March 19, 2012

To Be Compleat

 
                                      
                            WALTON AND THE REST OF US

    I cannot, this morning, think of anything with as fine or more useful a title of anything than Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler. It speaks to me of what can be the wholeness of the angler, of his style, and his accomplishment-- for whatever he fishes. We angle for many things in our lives. I angle for your favor as I write this.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

TALES OF A WANDERING FULBRIGHT


Dear Friends-- and valued readers of this stuff,
   I have these five easy pieces of narrative drawn from a Fulbright year in London back in the 50s. I’ve dined out on them time and again and now fear that, if I don’t get them out of here soon, they will rot my hard-drive. 
   I hope they are faintly amusing and with just a bit of the troubles of the world in them. They are all about theatre, its comings and goings, for the innocent abroad that I was back then. And I swear they are true-- or as true as I can make them. They tend to bang me up against my betters, against whom I stumbled somewhat. So you might relish the schadenfreude they offer. I give you leave.
   In any case, I must get them out of here and up into the Cloud where everything is fair game.
   I shall post them, every other week, well into the new spring and intersperse them with heaven (the Cloud) knows what.
   Read them if you want; enjoy them if you can. My hard drive will be relieved just to see them gone.       gordon

TALES OF A WANDERING FULBRIGHT

 
          
Dear Friends-- and valued readers of this stuff,
   I have these five easy pieces of narrative drawn from a Fulbright year in London back in the 50s. I’ve dined out on them time and again and now fear that, if I don’t get them out of here soon, they will rot my hard-drive. 
   I hope they are faintly amusing and with just a bit of the troubles of the world in them. They are all about theatre, its comings and goings, for the innocent abroad that I was back then. And I swear they are true-- or as true as I can make them. They tend to bang me up against my betters, against whom I stumbled somewhat. So you might relish the schadenfreude they offer. I give you leave.
   In any case, I must get them out of here and up into the Cloud where everything is fair game.
   I shall post them, every other week, well into the new spring and intersperse them with heaven (the Cloud) knows what.
   Read them if you want; enjoy them if you can. My hard drive will be relieved just to see them gone.       gordon