The Boothby Review, Vol. 1 Spring 2022

The Boothby Review Vol. 1 Spring 2022

Time

A Journal of the Faculty of Metairie Park Country Day School

The Staff

of The Boothby Review

Editor in Chief

G. Howard Hunter Copy Editor

Erin Walker Layout Design

Shay Steckler Jack-Of-All-Trades

Sean Patterson Production Assistant

Jennifer Marsiglia

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In This Issue 6

Through the Belly of the Fish: An Artistic Exploration of Grief, Pam Skehan

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Jean Pierre Léaud, King of the Nouvelle Vague, Mike Miley

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The Falling Trees, Erin Walker

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Vindicating the Lost Cause: New Orleans Women and Confederate Monuments, Howard Hunter

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Rethinking Malice in Jekyll and Hyde, Betsy Kern

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Puttin on the Spritz: Vintage Perfume Commercials, Ranked,

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Photograph: New Orleans, L.A. Reno

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Stepping Back to Look at a Face: A Portrait of Stephen Sondheim in Ten Lyrics, Sean Patterson

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Photograph: Haiti, L.A. Reno

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The Past Colliding with the Present: A Bob Dylan Retrospective and The Dylan Twenty, Justin Gricus

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Dignity, 1; Pony, 0, Erin Walker

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For the Soul of France Book Review, Howard Hunter

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The Proust Questionnaire

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The Crossword Puzzle, Sean Patterson

Robin Heindselman

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From the Editor’s Desk Teachers care about ideas so much so that we occasionally write about them. The Boothby Review, named after the founding headmaster of the school, is our way of bringing those ideas to the public. This collection features papers presented at academic forums as well as essays written specifically for the journal. Our purpose is not to discuss pedagogy or school life as such, but rather to create a platform that supports intellectual engagement for its own sake.

The articles cover varied subject matter, but they all touch on a common theme — time. Scholars maintain that in the 19th century time became independent of human experience with the advent of the railroad schedule and factory whistle. Nevertheless, humankind has always had a past, present, and future to contend with, and how we interact with time defines our essential being. In this issue we see a French actor forever stuck in the late 1950s New Wave, Confederate women using the past to serve the needs of a post-bellum South, eminent Victorians oppressed by the speed of change, adumbrating our fears of AI, and the artistic act as a deliverance from memory and grief.

We also include period pieces, for example how perfume commercials of the 1970s form a whimsical pastiche of the era or musical lyrics of a time that can also transcend time. For good measure we added a crossword, a creative work of non-fiction and books and music reviews. We hope you enjoy.

Young Man At His Window Caillebotte, 1876

G. Howard Hunter, Editor in Chief 5

Bass

Skehan, 2021

Through the Belly of the Fish:An Artistic Exploration of Grief Pam Skehan

Grief is a mysterious beast that surfaces unexpectedly and has a mind of its own. Globally, we are coping with grief and loss, personal or otherwise. The climate is shifting, the economy flailing, the pandemic raging on. This summer I sat by a lake and watched a fish emerge from murky waters, flipping frantically on the line, doing more damage in an effort to survive. I picked it up, held its mouth open, and stared down its spiked throat. The spiny cave appeared to go on forever. The fish to me perfectly embodied grief–venturing into the

Jonah and the Whale,

Pieter Lastman 1621

unknown and the abyss with hopelessness, humor, strength, and resiliency. Inspired by my fateful meeting with that largemouth bass, I embarked on a visual exploration of grief.

Before beginning my series, I researched other artists who have used fish imagery and stumbled upon Pieter Lastman’s Jonah and the Whale from 1621. This painting conveys the biblical cautionary tale of man daring to take on the will of nature.

Jonah is swallowed by the fish, held for three days, and ultimately pardoned by God and spat back out, living to tell the tale of what happened when he dared to challenge God’s will. This painting was made during the Dutch vanitas period. There was a national obsession with death, and the painting is intended to evoke the horror of nature’s power over man, but the aesthetic feels more like The Creature from the Black Lagoon; the effect is almost farcical. This tragicomic energy also feels accurate for grief.

Grief brings about an element of drama that clashes with mundane daily life — breaking down in tears in the grocery store, fleeing a casual conversation in panic. This conflict can feel uncomfortable if not absurd. Waves of grief strike at random and resurface over an indefinite period of time. Finding humor and lightness in the intensity is essential to enduring the nonlinear grief timeline.

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I began by painting the view down the throat of the largemouth bass (Bass, 2021).

I was mesmerized by the shiny surfaces, bioluminescent rainbows, and concentric rings of bone and flesh. Its beady eyes get lost behind the gaping jaw, which forms a perfect ring when held wide, locking into place. The mouth is allencompassing and feels impossible to overcome, exerting force over the viewer. I painted it on a red-orange underpainting so that the greens and blues of the fish would vibrate against their

Diver,

Skehan 2021

complements. Then I painted shades of blue to represent the abyss, the bottom layer of the ocean, the deepest low one can possibly sink to. The painting serves as a physical reminder that grief is a visitor. Creating a work of art allows one to purge difficult emotions and give them a physical form. It horrifies and humors.

I shifted my attention to figure painting to represent humanity facing grief (Diver, 2021). I thought of Jonah preparing to enter the body of the fish. I wondered how a modern Jonah might equip himself for this journey. Swimmers wear protective gear to keep water out of eyes and hair. The gear can create a false sense of security as water seeps in through the edge of the goggles and the swim cap.

I thought of the healing and destructive properties of water while adding a tsunami pattern in the background, a common print used in Japanese design. I was in Japan through the 2011 tsunami, and it was my first major experience with a natural disaster. This print symbolizes the range of characteristics found in waves, tumultuous and serene. The light on the figure is intensely bright and almost painful, as though the diver is staring into the sun. The high contrast signifies the drama of the moment in this person’s life. Deep shadows are cast across the face, and glistening highlights hit the nose, mouth, forehead, goggles, and fringe of the swim cap. The identity of the diver is masked by the protective gear, and the steps she is taking to armor herself may be in vain. The expression is calm; she has yet to grasp the peril that lies ahead.

While a sense of self is lost through the dive, the painting is overall bright and whimsical, suggesting there is hope that the person will reach a deeper understanding of self through the process.

Anger is an unwelcome but prevalent phase of grief, and it felt important to address. Through expressive drawing, I depicted rage, panic, and loss of control as a sea bass leaping out of the water (Sea Bass, 2021). The mouth is open, and the fish is turned

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Sea Bass

Skehan 2021

to the side, making eye contact with the viewer. The deep shadows of the scales are built-up layers of alizarin crimson, ultramarine, and forest green. The highlights have silvery blues, fleshy pinks, and pops of neon orange. As the fish breaks through the surface, the lines become chaotic and unpredictable, unraveling around the edges of the paper. An orange glow radiates around the deep blue rim of the gaping mouth. The surface of the fish’s body glistens and reflects the light around it. The surrounding lines are the same fiber the fish is made of, but they are rearranged, chaotic and unrecognizable. The fish is trying to move through this phase as quickly as possible.

The next image that emerged in my series is carp circling a feeding area in a pond (Feeding, 2021). Their magnificent bodies display bright patterns of orange, black, Sea Bass, 2021 yellow, and peach. Some flow gracefully through the water while others desperately plead at the surface. Resources are limited, and they battle for attention — yearning, needing, and floundering. Depleted, not destroyed, carp are survivors. Chinese legend says they are strong enough to swim upstream, and a select few even make it above the waterfall at the mouth of the river. Part of the grief-healing process is to rely on others, to seek out and accept their support. This process can feel strained during a global crisis when everyone’s bandwidth is low. However, finding connection in the chaos is necessary. Through adversity, relationships form and bonds strengthen. While we must look out for ourselves, ultimately, all we have is each other. Circumstances vary for each individual, but we are all in the same pond.

My artistic processing of grief is a work in progress. I am currently building on my narrative and experimenting with ways to expand my imagery. As history unfolds, and I process the chain of events, I study the perspectives of those around me and seek ways to reframe my thoughts. As circumstances evolve, my focus ebbs and 10

flows between humor, humility, horror, the colorful range of experiences that surface through grief. The creative process has been profoundly healing, much like a cool, cleansing, shocking dip in the water.

Feeding

Skehan, 2021

Jean Pierre Léaud, King o Mike Miley 12

of the Nouvelle Vague 13

Jean-Pierre Léaud has been a fixture in French cinema since he was 14 years old, and he’s worked with some of the greatest directors in film history.

The mere mention of his name or a glimpse of his inimitable features conjure an entire era of cinema in the viewer’s mind. His image contains something greater than himself. He is, as Philippa Hawker claims, “New Wave Cinema incarnate.”

Reading a list of the directors he’s worked with reads like a condensed history of world cinema: Assayas, Bertolucci, Breillat, Cocteau, Eustache, Godard, Kaurismaki, Pasolini, Rivette, Ruiz, Skolimowski, Truffaut, Tsai, Varda, the list seems endless. It’s hard to imagine how someone could work with such an esteemed group of filmmakers over the course of their career and not be thought of as the greatest actor of his time. What makes these filmmakers seek him out? It’s not for his bankability or sex appeal. It’s not even for his talent, prodigious and underutilized as it may be. It’s for what he represents. Directors use him “to explore or employ the history he carries with him” (Hawker). This symbolic status, however flattering it may be, is quite a lot to pin on his 5’7” shoulders.

Simply put, Léaud became a symbol for modern French cinema. This status not only haunted him throughout his career, but it also obscured him and his tremendous talents. However, Albert Serra’s film The Death of Louis XIV understands the haunted quality of Léaud’s career and uses it to add real gravity to the film. While Louis XIV may not have actually said “L’état c’est moi,” he is the only person in France who could have. Similarly, I’d argue there’s only one person who can say “La Nouvelle Vague, c’est moi,” and that person is Jean-Pierre Léaud. In fact, understanding who Léaud is makes The Death of Louis XIV a better film because it allows us to see the road he traveled to create a role that simultaneously defines his career and is defined by it.

Cover Photos: Still from The 400 Blows, 1959 Jean-Pierre Léaud Cannes, France May 22, 2016 Photograph by Andrea Raffin

For the uninitiated, the Nouvelle Vague was a cinema movement led by a group of young, mostly male, movie buffs and film critics who “seized the rare chance to not only challenge the old guard and reinvigorate French cinema, but also simply to launch themselves into the world of film under their own flags” with dynamic, inventive, and most of all, personal films that emphasized the presence of the director and the filmmaking apparatus in a joyful, swooning way (Saint-Cyr 178). These films influenced other movie-mad young people all over the world to pick up a camera and use cinema as a tool of personal expression, and its success has cast a long shadow, “serv[ing] as a standard of comparison for the numerous other new cinemas that have appeared all over the world” (Saint-Cyr 173). If French cinema must reckon with the Nouvelle Vague, then it must also reckon with Jean-Pierre Léaud, who became the movement’s literal poster child when he starred as Antoine Doinel in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959.

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How fitting that a movement named the New Wave begins on a beach! Léaud’s face frozen at the end of The 400 Blows is one of the most universally recognized, iconic images in French cinema (Neupert 161). More than Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, or Jeanne Moreau, Léaud came to function as “the mascot of the New Wave, the incarnation of its nervy youthful fervor,” and Michel Marie claims “the unbalanced, disjointed acting style brought by the New Wave has never been better illustrated than in the gestures, embarrassed smiles, and fake laughs of Jean-Pierre Léaud” (Darke; Marie 117). These qualities are on full display in his audition for The 400 Blows.

Léaud would play Antoine Doinel four more times over the next 20 years, expanding the role as Doinel, Léaud, and Truffaut aged. Many child actors struggle to move beyond their child star persona, and in many ways Léaud was no exception. He “spen[t] much of the rest of his career trying to expand beyond” Antoine Doinel; however, this role and its affiliation with the Nouvelle Vague was “a totem that would haunt Léaud for the rest of his acting life” (Darke). In this light, this scene from Stolen Kisses, the third film in the Doinel cycle, is downright prophetic.

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The scene tells us next to nothing about Antoine Doinel and everything about Jean-Pierre Léaud. No matter how hard he tries, he can only see Doinel, hear Doinel, speak Doinel. But there’s an even earlier scene that predicts the difficulties Léaud will face, and it comes in the film that made him a star. There is, of course, the freeze frame at the end of the film, preserving Léaud as Doinel, the troubledbut-irrepressible youth, but there’s also this moment when Antoine plays hooky and visits an amusement park.

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Even in his rare moments of freedom, Doinel is pinned to the spot. Similarly, despite Léaud’s attempts to break free, the public and even filmmakers could not look at him without seeing Antoine Doinel, Truffaut, Godard, and the entire French New Wave. Truffaut must have sensed the symbolism of this moment, for it is the last thing we see in the entire Doinel cycle.

No matter how old he gets, the camera is going to yank him back to his younger self.

He is truly trapped, spinning aimlessly in place.

Not unlike the careers of Orson Welles or Tennessee Williams, Léaud’s career peaks remarkably early, with his “extraordinary precocity” matched only by the “subsequent bitter disappointment” that was the rest of his career (Reader). Léaud was dependent on the Nouvelle Vague and Truffaut, sometimes literally. Léaud lived two floors above Truffaut’s production company office in an apartment paid for by Truffaut. Truffaut also paid for his schooling, supplied him with a monthly allowance rather than paying him per film, and even reviewed every project offered to Léaud (de Baecque and Toubania 232-3; Darke). This made Léaud’s typecasting go further than simply being Antoine Doinel: he became, in effect, Truffaut’s adopted son and alter-ego both onscreen and off. Truffaut may dedicate his film The Wild Child to Léaud, but ultimately Truffaut cements his role as Léaud’s director, manager, teacher, father (Rugg 116).

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Increasingly, Léaud’s image as “Truffaut’s son” became “a cruelly inescapable joke” (Golub 172). 1972-3 were decisive years for Léaud because they mark a moment when he simultaneously rebelled against and capitulated to his Nouvelle Vague legacy. Sadly, in trying to escape it, Léaud only winds up connecting himself with it more, making his entire body of work an expression of “inadequacy, failure, and despair” (Hawker). First came the release of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in October of 1972 where Léaud plays a withering caricature of the French New Wave. Bertolucci himself was so inspired by the Nouvelle Vague that his films increasingly became desperate and violent attempts to liberate himself from its tremendous influence, and Last Tango in Paris is the last and most overt of these films. As with Truffaut, Léaud becomes a surrogate for the director, a symbol of cinema authorship itself. The difference in Last Tango in Paris is that Léaud is not a symbol of who the director is or wants to become but what he must get away from in order to find his own cinematic voice.

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Bertolucci exposes Léaud’s naturalistic persona and the New Wave as a whole as opportunistic manipulation, the height of fakery rather than authenticity.

Léaud’s elevated inauthentic performance is meant as a foil to Marlon Brando’s, who engages in a similar confrontation with and flight from his image and persona in the film. Where Brando seeks authenticity through anonymity, radical honesty, and debasement, Léaud seeks it in complete artificiality. Like Bertolucci, Léaud is trying to ecape the people who created him. Unlike Bertolucci, he cannot succeed because Bertolucci’s artistic freedom depends upon leaving Léaud and all that he represents behind.

Léaud suffers similar fates at the hands of his directors of his next two films, Truffaut’s Day for Night and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore. Both films premiered in May 1973 at Cannes and, combined with Last Tango in Paris, serve as epitaphs for the Nouvelle Vague. Day for Night is Truffaut’s love letter to the agonies and ecstasies of filmmaking. Truffaut himself plays the director, relegating Léaud to the role of the hopelessly romantic and high-maintenance actor. Léaud, who has generally been Truffaut’s on-screen persona, displays all of Doinel’s foibles and insecurities while possessing none of his virtues. Those all belong to Truffaut in the film, who stoically soldiers on while everyone around him falls apart, particularly Léaud.

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Whether intentional or not, Day for Night represents a breakup of sorts for Truffaut and Léaud. Truffaut sets himself above Léaud, presenting himself as a mature figure while keeping Léaud eternally childish. Truffaut may take this split one step too far by giving Léaud’s character the same name as Antoine Doinel’s child in Bed and Board. Truffaut makes his message quite clear: we may both be creatures of the cinema, but I’m the director, your father. I gave you life, and you belong to me. After Day for Night, Léaud only appears in one more Truffaut film, as Antoine Doinel.

But the saddest of Léaud’s roles is also his most powerful performance in Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore. If “Léaud fully incarnates the discomfort of the pre-1968 young French man,” as Michel Marie claims, then he also captures the utter despair and defeat of the post-1968 young French man in this film (118). Bereft of any political or ideological momentum and stripped of their revolutionary spirit, the children of May 1968 descend into self-destructive and empty love affairs that offer them nothing but a reminder of everything they’ve lost.

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Léaud’s role in the film is once again self-conscious: 1) his performance is so naturalistic and well suited for him that many assumed him to be improvising or simply playing himself, and 2) in casting him, Eustache uses Léaud and his New Wave affiliations as a stepping stone to propel himself to the same level as Truffaut and Godard, perhaps even surpass them (Katzman 32). Again his reputation obscures his incredible talent and elevates his director.

By May 1973, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s screen persona is so legendary that it is parodied, trivialized, and inescapable. In a little over a decade, he has gone from embodying exuberance to embodying exhaustion. He is not yet 30 years old.

Apart from 1979’s Love on the Run, Léaud has a handful of bit parts and cameos and few major roles. In the desire to move on, the New Wave filmmakers largely move past him. Truffaut’s death from cancer in 1984 leads to a decade of depression, breakdown, and psychotic episodes for Léaud. His appearances in Godard’s Detective and Grandeur et Décadance present us with a radically transformed Léaud, no longer a plucky adolescent but a defeated adult.

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But the story doesn’t end there. Olivier Assayas also used Jean-Pierre Léaud to overcome the influence of the Nouvelle Vague on his own work. Assayas’s rise is not unlike that of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. He, too, got his start as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, but for him being affiliated with Cahiers is a problem because it places him too much in the shadow of the Nouvelle Vague.

In order to distinguish himself as a bold new voice, Assayas has to confront the Nouvelle Vague directly, and like many a filmmaker before him, he does so via Jean-Pierre Léaud in Irma Vep, in which Léaud plays Rene Vidal, a washedup French filmmaker who has been hired to remake the classic silent film Les Vampires. Léaud’s character is “paralyzed” by the remake—he cannot find a way to reinvent or improve upon the past because he cannot imagine a future. He, too, is a creature of the past, a dinosaur (Sutton 28). Vidal’s dilemma is that of French cinema, unable to move past a movement whose greatness has long since faded.

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Vidal’s paralysis, however, is not shared by Assayas because Assayas projects his filmmaking fears onto Léaud. Like Bertolucci did 20 years earlier, he must cast the avatar of his artistic heroes in his film to exorcize their influence over him.

Like Bertolucci, he chooses Léaud. Léaud’s character “is creatively exhausted by his fidelity to the past” and has a nervous breakdown, leaving Assayas free to blaze his own trail that is inspired by the New Wave but is not an imitation of it (Sutton 28-9, 30). In some respects, Assayas is le vampire, and Léaud his victim, exploiting Léaud’s advanced age and diminished relevance to direct audiences toward a new young man in French cinema—himself.

And thus we arrive at Léaud’s fate: as a symbol of a bygone era treated with either pity or nostalgia. Where Assayas opts for pity in Irma Vep, Bernardo Bertolucci chooses nostalgia in The Dreamers, his ode to the spirit of ‘68.

Bertolucci has Léaud play himself in The Dreamers, even going so far as to intercut archival footage of 24-year-old Léaud alongside 59-year-old Léaud’s reenactments. Who else could play young Léaud but Léaud?

Oppostie Page: Still from Love at Twenty: Antoine et Colette, 1962

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He may be 35 years older and several kilos heavier, but we almost can’t see it— refuse to see it—because when we look at him we still see that young man of 20.

It seems almost as though a grownup Léaud is inconceivable to cinema, like the cinema of youthful exuberance would cease to exist if it lost its representative youth. Bertolucci’s gesture is touching, but it also neglects the decades Léaud has been stuck impersonating his younger self. In The Dreamers, it seems he surrenders, becoming the mascot everyone wants him to be.

Ironically, in order for audiences to break out of this trap, we have to watch him die.

For a film movement as devoted to the expression and dissection of the cinema and its forms as the Nouvelle Vague, it’s only fitting for The Death of Louis XIV to dissect its mascot, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and therefore itself. Yonca Talu calls The Death of Louis XIV “a symbolic conclusion to the Antoine Doinel series” and “represents the last stage of Léaud’s development, weaving together and immortalizing the image of the old man and that of the child” (28). In this film, Léaud sheds his symbolic status that has hamstrung his career since its inception by merging with an even greater symbol: Louis XIV. Over the course of his career, Léaud has stood in for the director, he has played a director, he has played an actor, a producer, an audience member, and now a king. In doing so, Léaud not only represents the people who make cinema, but us as well, the people who love it. He is the self that we all, both behind the camera and in the theater, project onto the screen, the conduit through which the entire world connected with a vibrant new form of cinema that has changed the way films are made, watched, and discussed (Rugg 3-4).

To paraphrase what his character says in Masculin Feminin, his life on screen is the movie of our dreams, the total film he carries inside himself, the film we would have liked to make, the film we wanted to live. Now it’s time for us to connect with him and see him for what he truly is and has always been: not a mascot but a king.

This paper was originally delivered as a lecture at the 2017 New Orleans French Film Festival before a screening of Albert Serra's film The Death of Louis XIV. 26

Works Cited Assayas, Olivier, director. Irma Vep. 1996. Performance by Maggie Cheung, Fox Lorber, 1998. DVD. Baecque, Antoine De, and Serge Toubiana. Truffaut. New York City, Knopf, 1999.

Bertolucci, Bernardo, director. The Dreamers. 2003. Performance by Michael Pitt and Eva Green, Fox Searchlight, 2004. DVD. ---, director. Last Tango in Paris. 1972. Performance by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Twentieth Century Fox, 2013. DVD. Darke, Chris. “Jean-Pierre Léaud: LORD of THE LEFT BANK.” Sight and Sound, vol. 16, no. 10, 2006, pp. 36-39,1. Research Library Prep, www.proquest.com/magazines/jean-pierre-léaud-lord-leftbank/docview/237115934/se-2?accountid=41521.

Eustache, Jean, director. The Mother and the Whore. Performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud, 1973.

Godard, Jean-Luc, director. Masculin Feminin. Performance by Jean Leaud and Chantal Goya, Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD. Golub, Spencer. “The Remains of the Day for Night.” Discourse, vol. 24, no. 1, 2002, pp. 167-184,188.

Research Library Prep, www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/remains-day-night/ docview/212451322/se-2?accountid=41521.

Hawker, Philippa. “Jean-Pierre Léaud: Unbearable Lightness.” Sense of Cinema, no. 8, July 2000, www. sensesofcinema.com/2000/jean-pierre-leaud/lightness/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2022.

Katzman, Lisa. “The End of the World.” Film Comment, vol. 35, no. 2, 1999, pp. 30-37. Research Library Prep, www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/end-world/docview/210264274/se-2?accountid=41521.

Leaud, Jean-Pierre, performer. “Jean-Pierre Leaud Audition.” The 400 Blows. 1958. Directed by Francois Truffaut, Criterion Collection, 2003. DVD. Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Translated by Richard John Neupert, Malden, Blackwell Pub., 2003.

Neupert, Richard. “The New Wave’s American Reception.” Cinema Journal, vol. 49, no. 4, 2010, pp. 13945. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40801487. Accessed 22 Feb. 2022.

Reader, Keith. “THE MOTHER THE WHORE & THE DANDY.” Sight and Sound, vol. 7, no. 10, 1997, pp. 28-30,3. Research Library Prep, www.proquest.com/magazines/mother-whore-amp-dan dy/docview/237091341/se-2?accountid=41521.

Rugg, Linda Haverty. Self-projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2014.

Saint-Cyr, Marc. “The New Wave and After.” Directory of World Cinema: France, edited by Tim Palmer and Charlie Michael, Bristol, Intellect, 2013, pp. 172-82.

Sutton, Paul. “Olivier Assayas and the Cinema of Catastrophe.” Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, edited by Kate Ince, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2008, pp. 22-29.

Talu, Yonca. “THE SETTING SUN.” Film Comment, vol. 53, no. 2, 2017, pp. 24-28. Research Library Prep, www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/setting-sun/docview/1880696292/se-2?accoun tid=41521.

Truffaut, Francois, director. Day for Night. 1973. Criterion Collection, 2015. DVD. ---, director. The 400 Blows. 1959. Performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Criterion Collection, 2003. DVD. ---, director. Love on the Run. 1979. Performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Criterion Collection, 2003.

DVD. ---, director. Stolen Kisses. 1968. Performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Criterion Collection, 2003. DVD.

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The Falling Trees Erin Walker

A student recently told me that he knows that TikTok is keeping him up at night, yet he can’t seem to stop the nocturnal scrolling. In addition to lost sleep affecting his ability to focus, he also claimed the perfectlypackaged clips were destroying his ability to pay attention to anything longer than 30 seconds: “It’s like I can feel my brain changing, but I can’t stop.” This student is not wrong. This technology is, indeed, changing his brain. But technology’s power to influence thought, and its wary critics, is not new.

When writing began to replace the oral tradition, thinkers in Ancient 28

Greece believed this would be the beginning of the intellectual end; our capacity to store large chunks of information would erode, and with it, our thinking. Why memorize The Iliad when we can read it? According to Socrates, the written word meant people “will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves,” claiming that those who rely on the written word will be “tiresome company” who possess “the show of wisdom without the reality.” You can imagine stinky, old Socrates, waving his righteous fist in the air, yelling, “Those damn kids today with their phonics and script!

It’s rotting their brains.”

Like writing, another technology we rarely think about as technology — the clock — revolutionized the way we interfaced with our work and society at large. Cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The clock changed the way we experienced the world.

Nicholas Carr, author of The

Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, explains that while the invention and subsequent utilization of the clock in factories brought us wonderful scientific discoveries, “it also took something away… In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” It is difficult now to think of the clock as cutting-edge technology to be lambasted, but its impact was prodigious. In “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind,” the famous Restoration poet and celebrated libertine, the Earl of Rochester, critiqued how the new-fangled contraption forced us to ignore our appetites:

Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat; Perversely, yours your appetite does mock: This asks for food, that answers, "What’s o’clock?”

Our internal clocks and appetites, like the ability to memorize long swaths of information, were outsourced. As the clock began to determine our reality, our understanding of how the brain worked also changed. When the clock standardized how we experience time, we adopted a new metaphor (or simile); things now run “like clockwork.” Our brains, seemingly, should follow suit.

Similar to writing and clocks, the mechanization of our world during the Industrial Revolution altered the way we lived and thought.

Charles Dickens and a few of his contemporaries, like Ruskin and Carlyle, understood that industrialization changed more than landscapes and factories; it changed how we think. The metaphor of the machine, prevalent in Dickens’ Hard Times, elucidates the pervasive mindset that workers are not only a part of the machine, they should respond to their world around them as machines: emotionless, calculating, and self-interested. Mr. Gradgrind, a school superintendent, is described as “a man of facts and calculations…with a ruler and a pair of scales.” Coketown is a “town of machinery” where the streets, the people, and the buildings are “all like one another.” The utilitarian, square structures of Coketown factories are

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reflected in the schools, which are also seen as educational factories. I imagine their school motto: “Putting the fact in student factories since 1854.”

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The most powerful examples of how the mechanical metaphor hurts those who live by it are Mr. Gradgrind’s children, Thomas and Louisa. The Gradgrind children have only learned facts and figures. Both have been “trained to mathematical exactness.” Imagination, the life of the mind, was seen as a waste of time and energy. Without the fostering of an emotional and moral intelligence, Louisa and Thomas fail to thrive.

Louisa makes a hasty, ill-matched marriage. Gradgrind’s son, Thomas, who can spout statistics about crime — “So many people are employed in situations of trust; so many people, out of many, will be dishonest” — becomes a criminal. Thomas gambles then robs a bank to pay his debts.

Knowledge, Dickens asserts, without the capacity to feel for others, leads to, at best, an empty life, and at worst, a life of dissipation. In the end, Thomas suffers exile and an early death; Louisa never re-marries or has children of her own. Dickens, like Carlyle, to whom he dedicated the book, understood “when metaphor becomes reality…when the standards of industrial efficiency replicate themselves throughout society,

clothed in other garb, until our institutions and even our thoughts are mechanized, expect trouble.”

Today, we’re in serious trouble, but not in the way Dickens imagined.

In the twenty-first century, we walk around with our machines, but the machine itself is not the problem.

We are not factories producing goods; we are the goods. In the attention economy, our minds are the products. We scroll through our lives, consumers of content, an endless stream that we’re unable to focus on for more than a few seconds at a time. Data about what we pay attention to is collected, so users experience a fractured, curated world in 30-second clips. I’m worried about us. Our world requires sustained focus; we need to agree on basic premises; we need to have the attention span to hold people in power accountable and to solve complicated, systemic problems.

What if citizens in other countries are paying attention while the rest of us lip-sync Celine Dion songs and master complicated dance challenges? TikTok is owned by the Chinese company, ByteDance. Recently, the Chinese government enforced limits on its own technology usage for minors, calling gaming and social media sites “spiritual opium.” Interestingly, the

Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, does not allow young people to use it for more than 40 minutes per day.

They also created a 10 p.m. curfew to encourage healthy sleep patterns.

As an American, I recoil from the government regulating how we use our free time. However, I don’t want a generation of zombies, slackjawed and scrolling, minds filled with trivia, but sorely lacking facts.

Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that we do not need to fear 1984-style tyranny. We should fear the dystopian vision of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World: “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’”

Perhaps I am just another Dickens, Socrates, or Rochester, railing against the inevitable, but I’ll risk the censure of future thinkers because I believe this technology is different. Writing,

time-management devices, and industrialization had many costs as well as benefits. We can share knowledge through time (writing), on time (clocks), and in relative order (industrial processes). But I’m not sure the benefits of this technological paradigm outweigh the costs, specifically when what we’re losing is a generation’s ability to focus for more than two minutes at a time. You know the old adage about the tree falling in the woods: If no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I’m worried that trees are falling all around us, but we’re too distracted to hear them fall.

Vindicating The Lost Caus New Orleans Women and Con Howard Hunter

© Barry Kaiser

The 1929 convention of the Louisiana state chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy grew contentious, perhaps even disorderly, when Mrs. Jefferson Davis Weir of New Orleans introduced a resolution to censure any child that participated in a memorial or activity honoring Abraham Lincoln. Chapter historian Mrs. W.B. Kernan seconded the motion remarking that Lincoln was “not the fine Christian gentleman he is said by partisan historians to have been….”1 The spirited discussion, as the press described it, concerned a school trip, when Miss Ellen Gardner, principal of the local Jackson School, took a group of school children to Gettysburg where it was rumored the students were duped into reciting the Gettysburg Address. As a daughter of a Confederate veteran, Miss Gardner’s credentials should have been beyond reproach, but her Vassar education made her suspect by some of the more strident members of the UDC. While presumably the nature of the punishment entailed a harsh letter of

rebuke, cooler heads prevailed when a majority decided that a formal opprobrium would hardly win converts to the cause, especially when the war was fast becoming a distant memory.

Vindicating the Lost Cause by this second generation of Confederate women was essentially the price the rest of the country had to pay for reconciliation, as Karen Cox has so ably made clear in her work Dixie’s Daughters.2 While veterans quickly reconciled with the gallant foes in their shared call to arms, women’s organizations in particular, the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy would only reconcile on their own terms, which centered around the conceit that Confederate soldiers were in fact 1 Times Picayune, May 10, 1929.

2 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The

United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, (Gainesville, 2003), Chapter 8.

se: nfederate Monuments 33

American patriots. While lacking the zeal of other Confederate cities during the war, New Orleans became a Confederate stronghold by the latter 19th century, to a large degree as a result of these women’s organizations. The monuments themselves are a reflection of local women who led the efforts to make sense of bereavement, defeat, and by the 1880s, hold up the war as a just, noble cause.

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As historians have established, there is irony to New Orleans becoming a bastion of Lost Cause ideology. The cosmopolitan nature of the polyglot before the Civil War with its significant populations of immigrants, white and black Creoles, and a Northern-born merchant community made it unlike any Southern city. While elites tended to support secession and war, the majority remained ambivalent about the whole business. After federal occupation in 1862, a viable Unionist movement of foreign-born and Northern-born professionals gained political ascendancy while Federal occupation saved the city from the destruction suffered by Atlanta, Charleston and Richmond.

Nevertheless, after Appomattox, Confederate veterans streamed into the city in order to find work, and white elites, formally tied to the Confederacy, gradually gained

control over social and political institutions.

Women’s groups all over the South, created rituals and symbols for veterans to grieve the loss of comrades. In New Orleans the Ladies Benevolent Association, comprised of Confederate wives and widows raised $20,000, a considerable sum in 1866, for artificial limbs, the care of widows and orphans, as well as for the interment of 600 bodies from throughout the state to Greenwood Cemetery on the edge of the city. They commissioned a monument to mark the graves, a lone Confederate sentry dedicated in 1874. The sentry stands on top of a grass pyramid with busts of generals Albert Sydney Johnston, Leonidas Polk, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee at the base. The inscription reads, “In commemoration of the heroic virtues of the Confederate soldier, this monument is erected by The Ladies Benevolent Association of Louisiana.”

In 1894 the Ladies Benevolent Association changed their name to the Confederate Ladies Memorial Association to more accurately fit their mission. During Reconstruction occupying general Phil Sheridan had banned any allusion to the Confederacy, but with the end of Reconstruction and the

© Barry Kaiser

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© Barry Kaiser

Lost Cause in full sway, women’s organizations could act as shock troops, not only in vindicating the Confederacy but also in purging school textbooks of any mention of slavery or Yankee military prowess.

In 1905 Confederate women’s groups called for the removal of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic from the public schools as it had “no place in the musical education of Southern children….”3 The United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded as a national organization in 1894 organized a New Orleans chapter in 1896. The profile of women in both associations fits the pattern of turn-of-the-century service groups i.e., women firmly entrenched in the middle and upper middle classes with the means and time to make their respective organizations viable.

Jefferson Davis’s death in New Orleans on December 6, 1889, a transcendent event for women’s organizations, provided an opportunity for them to assume a leadership role in securing Davis’s place in the pantheon of Confederate heroes. William Preston Johnston, son of the fallen hero of Shiloh, Davis’s former aide-de-camp, and president of Tulane University, took charge of the funeral arrangements.

The Ladies Confederate Memorial Association assisted "in preparing

the mortuary chamber in City Hall, where for three days the honored remains of the South’s martyr President lay in state.”4 The Memorial Association chose a warrior motif with flower arrangements of swords, guns and two brass howitzers guarding the catafalque. Roughly 70,000 people passed by the bier to pay their respects.

After a funeral service led by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy, the funeral cortege stretching a mile and a half made its way to the Army of Northern Virginia tumulus in Metairie Cemetery.

The Ladies Confederate Memorial Association proudly assumed their place in the procession along with 14 Confederate generals, eight Southern governors, Confederate and Union veterans, police and firemen, city officials and fraternal organizations including the Odd Fellows and the First Battalion of the Uniform Rank of Knights of Pythias.5 Two days after the funeral the Picayune called for a Jefferson Davis 3 Times-Democrat, March 15, 1905.

4 Confederated Southern Memorial Association, Catherine Behan ed., (New Orleans, 1904), 182.

5 Charles McCain, New Orleans Magazine, “A President’s New Orleans Funeral,” Vol. 15, No. 5, (1981): 80.

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Monument. Yet Richmond was also attempting to honor Davis with a monument, and locals felt that Richmond deserved first dibs. A committee organized by William Behan raised $1800 for a Richmond Monument in 1891. Behan had served in the Washington Artillery during the war, an outfit of New Orleans elites that fought in both Virginia and Tennessee theatres. As a young major, he surrendered with Lee at Appomattox. After the war he became wealthy in the grocery and sugar business, served as Fred Ogden’s second in command of the White League at Liberty Place and later General-inChief of the Louisiana National Guard. As mayor in 1884 he accepted the Robert E. Lee Monument from the Lee Monumental association on behalf of the city.

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Behan’s wife, Catherine “Katie” Walker Behan, used her husband’s record to become a national power in the Confederate memory industry. Born to successful Irish immigrants in 1847, Katie had what the newspapers called a life of privilege, which did not change with her marriage to William Behan in 1866. Yet hers was not a life of leisure — she pursued the Lost Cause with fervor only matched by her support of the Catholic Church and its charities.

In 1900 Catherine Behan took over as president of the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association from Sarah Polk Blake, daughter of Leonidas Polk, Episcopal bishop of Louisiana and Confederate general, killed outside of Atlanta in 1864. At the United Confederate Veterans convention of 1900 in Louisville, Southern memorial associations sent representatives to create a national organization, the Confederated Memorial Association of the South and they elected Catherine Behan president.

She immediately became a national figure, working against Congressional legislation to reenter Confederate dead at Arlington Cemetery, even unsuccessfully lobbying Secretary of War Elihu Root for bringing the bodies South where she felt they belonged. But the United Confederate Veterans supported the bill, and the Spanish American War made reconciliation all the more exigent.

Yet Mrs. Behan did prevail in her efforts to have Secretary of War Jefferson Davis’s name placed back on the inscription of Cabin John Bridge in Maryland. This was the first in a series of efforts to champion the memory of Jefferson Davis whom she described as a “soldier, statesman, patriot, hero, Christian gentleman and martyr of the Southern Cause.”6

At the meeting of the Confederated Southern Association at Memphis in 1901, Mrs. Behan reminded the convention that “we endorsed a movement to erect at an early date a monument to Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of our glorious but short lived nation.”7 In 1904 she published an historic compilation of all the memorial associations of the South (History

of the Confederate Memorial Associations of the South) the

proceeds of which supported the creative design and building of a Jefferson Davis monument in Richmond, giving a public address at the unveiling in 1907.

The depression of 1893 hit New Orleans hard and it had not recovered by the turn of the century.

When Mrs. Behan took over as president of the Jefferson Davis Monument association in 1906 only $300 sat in the coffers. With extraordinary alacrity she raised $15,000 through theatricals, life memberships, subscriptions, and lectures. In 1908, the year of the Davis centennial, the cornerstone was laid in front of Audubon Park across from Tulane University.

As was customary at Confederate ceremonial occasions, public school children sang, local clergy gave the Benediction, and Mayor Martin Behrman attended with the Audubon

Park commission. Justice Charles Erasmus Fenner, who had given the panegyric at the Lee Monument dedication in 1884, delivered the official oration. Like all monument dedications the American flag flew along with the stars and bars.

When the city made it evident that its contribution to the Davis monument would be in land rather than money, Catherine Behan moved the site to the corner of Canal Street and Hagan Avenue, which she deemed a more suitable location, cornerstone be damned. She convinced the city council to rename Hagan Avenue Jefferson Davis Parkway. At the same time Mrs. Behan refused to be taken in by the charm of Alexander Doyle, one of the most prolific of Gilded Age sculptors and the principal artist of both the Lee monument and the equestrian statue of Albert Sidney Johnston in Metairie Cemetery. A New Yorker and heir to a limestone quarry, Doyle could claim over 50 public monuments around the country. No doubt he felt a particular entitlement when it came to New 6 Daily Picayune, June 4, 1901, introduction to a speech at Memorial Hall by Charles E. Fenner, June 3, 1901.

7 Minutes of the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, May 28, 29, 30, (New Orleans, 1902), Collection 78, Behan Family Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University.

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Orleans monuments since he had habitually snowed design committees made up of men. But when he upped his fee to $30,000, Catherine Behan quickly dropped him and went with Edward Valentine, who had sculpted the Richmond statue. As early as 1907 Valentine wrote to her, “I had the advantage of having known Mr. Davis and making measurements of his face which I used for the [Richmond] statue.”8 She talked him down to $5000 for the bronze sculpture, and she contracted a local firm Albert Weiblen Marble and Granite Co. to construct the pedestal for $6000.

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Like the Lee dedication of 1884, the 1911 ceremony took place on February 22, Washington’s Birthday, to reinforce the link between Southern and American patriotism.

The statue was draped in cloth and festooned with Confederate and American flags, while 576 schoolgirls each clad in red, white, or blue were deployed to form a living Confederate battle flag. On account of freezing temperatures, speeches were brief, but the theme centered on Davis’s life in what Father Leslie Kavanagh called an “object lesson in patriotism.”9 Louisiana Governor Jared Sanders proclaimed no part of the United States is “more loyal than Dixie Land,” but that would not abjure their “sweet love and

reverence for the dead and gone Confederacy.”10 Having one’s cake and eating it too comes to mind, and as James Gill surmised, “Almost a century after the Civil War, the metamorphosis of Confederate rebels into American patriots, at least in Southern minds, was complete.”11 After the dedication, Mrs. Behan continued to preside over the Jefferson Davis Parkway Commission. She was taken ill while serving as Chair of Branch No. 8 of the Red Cross in 1918, seeing to the needs of American servicemen stateside and on the fields of France.

On her death the flags at City Hall, Memorial Hall, and the Pickwick Club all flew at half-mast.

Catherine Behan lived in an era and a milieu whereby women of her class had limited choices if they were to transcend a life deeply constrained by the social norms of the day. Yet

8 Letter from Edward Valentine to Catherine Behan, February 19, 1907, Louisiana Historical Association Collection, 55 M, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University.

9 Daily Picayune, February 23, 1911.

10 Ibid.

11 James Gill and Howard Hunter, Tearing Down the Lost Cause, (Jackson, 2021), 88.

the Lost Cause provided women of means an opportunity to amass power and influence, a position that defied the usual auxiliary status assigned to women by men. The fact that Catherine Behan and her counterpart on the UDC Mary Vaught, who raised the money for the Beauregard monument, were both instrumental in defining a Civil War memory that became official civic ideology raises questions about gender and class that historians have yet to fully engage. As we grapple

with the role of the Confederacy in the history of New Orleans, a broader lens at this point is in order, if not essential.

Vindicating the Lost Cause: New Orleans Women and Confederate Monuments was a paper originally

presented at the Louisiana Historical Association on January 17, 2020 and is based on the bookTearing Down the Lost Cause by James Gill and Howard Hunter.

Louisiana Rsearch Collection, Tulane University Behan Family Papers 55FF

41

Rethinking Malice in

Jekyll and Hyde Betsy Kern

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde brought us the famous, if not overused, trope of the perils of a double life. “Jekyll and Hyde” has become shorthand for one who might act in two ways: like Jekyll when they are good and Hyde when they are bad. The popular takeaway from the story is that one person has the capacity for both good and bad.

For what could be more frightening than one person who is “not truly one, but truly two?” The idea that we all might contain this capacity is what has traditionally been so terrifying and controversial about this tale. Yet, in re-examining Jekyll and Hyde nearly a century and a half after its first publication, I find that what terrifies us about this story is not so simple and clean. True, excess is writ large through Jekyll and Hyde, from drug use to sexual perversity to murder sprees. In Hyde, Stevenson mounts a rather obvious challenge to the primacy of the ideology of free will, exposing what the Victorians most feared: that pleasurable 42

consumption cannot be controlled.

Hyde represents everything that is ugly and detestable in society, from addiction and criminality to xenophobia and the working class.

Naturally, the honest doctor Jekyll is himself the antidote. Put simply, when someone or something is evil and bad: Hyde. When someone or something is good: Jekyll. However, reading more closely, I find that Stevenson’s most profound critique of man’s capacity for evil is not through the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, but through a third (and certainly lesser known in popular culture) character: John Gabriel Utterson, the novella’s hero and mystery solver. Utterson might seem unimportant on the surface, but his involvement in the case of Jekyll and Hyde is as much a threat to the social order in 1880s London as Hyde’s bad behavior. Through Utterson’s various transgressions, Stevenson cautions against the indulgence in individual desire in a much more subtle yet profound way. As a source of evil, it turns out Hyde is not too difficult to

locate and extinguish. He’s the obvious and accessible antihero.

When Utterson, the other “good guy,” allows himself to be governed by personal desires, the entire social order is at risk of collapsing.

For Jekyll and Hyde to be a successful story, Stevenson needed to construct a proxy of the ideal Victorian gentleman through which the readers encounter the horrific events. Spoiler alert: it is not actually Jekyll who acts as proxy. From the start of the novel, Stevenson establishes Utterson as the paragon of Victorian masculinity and professionalism through which readers receive the story. The opening lines describe Utterson as “a man of rugged countenance” who is “backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary.” Yet for all his austerity, Utterson is not callous — there is “something eminently human” that makes him “somehow lovable” to friends and clients. As a lawyer and executor of wills, he appreciates helping others, sometimes marveling with envy at their intriguing endof-life predicaments, and frequently finds himself as the “last good influence” on men in their final days. Although his personal and professional pursuits might expose him to interesting people and stories, until this point, nothing has ever “marked a shade of change in his

demeanour.” He has thrived in delineating the personal from the professional and maintaining rigid boundaries.

Yet as the story begins, readers discover that Utterson is not beyond the bounds of desire, a dark realization that shakes the foundation of the social order, perhaps more profoundly than Hyde’s misgivings. Following Utterson’s unraveling, he — not

Spoiler alert: it is not actually Jekyll who acts as proxy.

Jekyll and Hyde — is the focal point upon which the rest of the story hinges. After all, the novel is Utterson’s “strange case”: it is his curiosity that ignites the plot and his narrative that readers stick with most closely for most of the novella. The collapse of Utterson’s professionalism and his indulgence in personal desire begins one day when his cousin Enfield mentions witnessing a strange occurrence in which a disfigured man attacked a child. Utterson presses Enfield about whether he inquired 43

about who lives at the house from which this man emerged, but Enfield reverts to his professional code of conduct: “No, sir: I had delicacy …

I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.” Utterson is quick to agree —“A very good rule”— but latches onto a curiosity that will soon engulf him.

Upon learning that the disfigured madman, Hyde, shares a name with the inheritor of his friend and client Dr. Jekyll’s will, Utterson’s previous snobbish dismissal of the document is transformed into disgrace. Before hearing Enfield’s story about Hyde, Utterson was merely “offended… both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life” that Jekyll would pass down his property to some unknown, unclassed entity by the name of Edward Hyde. He thought it a strange and undignified arrangement but had no reason to act upon it. With the new knowledge that Hyde is the “definite presentment of a fiend,” Utterson lies sleepless in bed, tossing and turning over this information while his mind “[toils] in mere darkness…besieged by questions.” By the following morning, “his imagination was also engaged or rather enslaved” with the problem of Hyde. His curiosity turns into obsession in a cinematic dream-

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scape in which he fantasizes seeing Hyde’s face, a pivotal scene in the novella ending with its most important line: “If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.” More than just a clever pun, this line marks a shift away from Utterson’s embodiment of the Victorian professional gentleman, an overriding hegemonic influence that is supposed to retain the status and function of authority in times of moral panic.

Utterson’s obsession with making sense of Jekyll’s moral failings leads him to transgress the boundaries of professionalism in such a way that is just as egregious, if not more, than Hyde’s criminality. However, for all of Hyde’s overtly bad behavior, Utterson’s is more subtle. Stevenson’s novel does not rely on mystery; it is not a “who done it” story that ends with a big reveal. It becomes obvious to the reader early on that Jekyll and Hyde are one in the same. What the novel does hinge on is the lengths that Utterson goes to in order to expose this. To Utterson, Hyde is a primitive, destructive creature who needs taming. At the same time, as the inheritor of Jekyll’s will, Hyde has transgressed social boundaries and risen above his natural social position into the possibility of power.

National Prtg. & Engr. Co, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. [Chicago: National Prtg. & Engr. Co., 188-?] Photograph.

Retrieved from the Library of Congress

To combat this, Utterson begins acting strangely, roaming around London at night in search of Hyde.

In a clear violation of professional conduct, Utterson even attempts to convince Jekyll to change his will, a move beyond reproach for any good lawyer. The climax of the novella and of Utterson’s indulgence in his individual desires comes when he demands entry into Jekyll’s laboratory after the highly publicized murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Before breaking down the door, Utterson yells: “I demand to see you…I give you fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see you…if not by fair means, then by

foul—if not of your consent, then by brute force!" In taking up the ax and intruding on Jekyll’s lab, Utterson has become utterly unrecognizable from the man described in the novel’s opening lines. One must wonder if his transformation from staid lawyer to obsessional sleuth is as egregious as Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde.

I argue yes — Utterson has upset the social order just as much as Hyde has. Though his transgressions are not quite so sensational, they are just as cancerous. By centering the novel on Utterson, Stevenson is arguing that indulgence in personal desire in any form is a threat to the extant social order.

One piece of evidence that potentially undercuts my assertion that Utterson’s contraventions are the focal point of Jekyll and Hyde is the novel’s abrupt ending after the written accounts of Lanyon and Jekyll. Stevenson’s keen focus on Utterson suddenly evaporates, denying readers any information about what happens to him. The

I believe the power of the novel remains just as compelling today. written accounts are a marked shift in the novel’s narration, which has heretofore followed and privileged Utterson. Instead of returning to that mode of narration, the silence at the end of the novel virtually absolves Utterson from suffering any consequences for his actions. Hyde is scapegoated as the source of society’s evils, and once he is taken care of, there is nothing addressing Utterson’s behaviors. However, importantly, there is also no praise for his 46

heroism. Utterson may have solved his “strange case,” but in the process, Stevenson demonstrates that characters wreak havoc on themselves and on the social order when they step outside their bounds. Although Utterson might not lapse into moral failure in the material sense through the abuse of drugs, sexual exploits, or crime, his obsession with Hyde overtakes the course of his life. Therefore, Jekyll and Hyde is an indictment of excessive personal desires, whether the resulting damage is obvious or less conspicuous.

For all the nuances and intricacies of the explorations of personal desire in Jekyll and Hyde, why the novel form?

Why did Stevenson choose this literary form for his critique instead of, say, an opinion piece in a literary magazine? What is it about the novel that singularly and uniquely accomplishes his goals? The Victorian novel hinges upon disruptions to reality, typically in the form of naturalizing otherworldly gothic tropes. For a period in which so much change occurred so quickly, the social order was comparatively rigid. Mobility was increasingly an option for those who had money or property, but rapid, radical movement, such as in Jekyll and Hyde, was rare. But in the imaginative world of the novel, with the stroke of a pen, an individual

could be effectively dislodged from his or her social position and thrust into the realm of possibility. Fiction allows authors to use character identities to locate important social questions.

pass us by, but being active spectators who examine, question, critique, or champion such movement in characters in such a way that makes us hold a mirror to our own circumstances.

In Victorian England, fiction permitted one to move out of the hierarchy and into the field of social possibilities. In the case of this novella, in a relatively short period of time, Jekyll and Utterson transcend their prescribed positions in the social milieu.

It is the journey itself that is subject to critique. In fiction more than any other genre, the radical reformulation of the individual via a series of displacements sets the stage for social commentary. Stevenson dislodges and rearranges characters, defying social norms, in order to explore what happens as a result of that very movement. Through no other means but the novel can he so effectively achieve this revolution.

Rethinking Malice in Jekyll and Hyde was orginially written for a graduate course at Tulane University in 2020.

I believe the power of the novel remains just as compelling today. Although our social order is comparatively less rigid than the framework of Victorian England, novels are the key to worlds in which characters can move beyond their circumstances. Luckily, readers have a front row seat to this movement. Ultimately, the delight of a novel is not letting it 47

Puttin' on the Spritz: Vintage Perfume Commercials, Ranked

Robin Heindselman Paloma Picasso rang me up on my 50th birthday and demanded I put together a listicle of perfume commercials that had the biggest impact on me as a child growing up in the late ’70s to mid ’80s. One doesn’t say no to Paloma Picasso.

So I thought hard and willed myself back to the headspace of a TV-glutted, Disney-besotted girl who covertly arranged her Barbie and Ken in all kinds of compromising positions. Perfume ads offered visions of grown-up ladyhood that were full of intrigue, romance, risk, chance encounters . . . reader, I positively ate them up. Looking back on these commercials as a person who has long since acquired grown-up ladyhood, I can appreciate them in all their absurd, gorgeous, surreal, dated, lying, innuendo-soaked glory.

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Peter Match y a b

l li be

Windso ng #10

This is what I came up with, Paloma.

Click on the perfume Bottle to see the commercial!

“Did you tell Richard you’d be here?”

“No.” “Well, he’s here.”

“Oh, waiter—” The perfume spritz on the datebook page delivered to the “gentleman right over there” was the ‘80s version of the booty call. EVERYONE used to do it.

#8 C

“Cie is me. Maybe it’s you too.” In 1978, I was six years old and didn’t know who Candice Bergen was, but I did know that dropping your ice cream wasn’t “wonderfully unpredictable”—it was a terrible thing to happen!

However, Candice did make a strong case for catching a chartered jet, laughing with friends by the campfire in a white turtleneck, riding a horse on the beach in a different white turtleneck, and completely messing up your opponent’s shot at an elegant billiards party. To date, I have done none of these things, but there is still time.

ild Musk W y ot

#9 C ie

“Use it before you stalk.” Musk was kind of a big deal in the ‘80s. This TV spot is pure carnality, featuring two goodlooking kids meeting for the first time at what appears to be a Paleolithic-themed high school dance. The papiermâché set, the jungle-synth score, and the ultra-humid blankness of the youths make for an amusing 29 seconds.

The boy always reminded me of Christopher Atkins from The Blue Lagoon, and not in a “good way.”

#7 Babe

by bergé Fa

“You’re one of the boys, but you’re a real girl, babe.” This story of a white lady living her best life to a Blaxploitation soundtrack features an early example of what Gillian Flynn later dubbed the “cool girl.” In reality, Margaux Hemingway had a short, sad life, but here we get to see her enjoying the world’s most amazing ski trip—hitting the slopes, ice fishing, and delivering an upright, fully trimmed Christmas tree by snowmobile (as one does).

Aspirational fragrance wearers could do worse.

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#6 O b ses

Calvin

K

n lei

by is on

“In the kingdom of passion, the ruler…is Obsession.”

Look, no one ever knew what the hell was going on in these ads. At the center is a soul-destructive manic pixie nightmare girl who hangs out with a recurring quartet: a besotted young man, an equally besotted middle-aged man, an older romantic rival whom she physically abuses, and a Neutral Good tomboy who seems to represent the girl’s salvation. Prominently featured are stairs, shadows, chess, and bad slam poetry, The End.

“The 8-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman.” This ad is interesting as an artifact of “having it all” second-wave feminism, but the fantasy it was selling always seemed so labor-intensive to me: you have to earn money, run the household, raise your kids, cheerfully put out for an ego-fragile husband on demand, and reapply your perfume three times a day. No thanks!

#4

J

até N n ea

50

njoli by C

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of the Ritz les ar

E #5

“Between Jean Naté and you, there’s nothing you can’t do!”

Emmanuelle meets National Velvet. These supercharged Jean Naté ads were like an espresso shot to the imagination of an 11-year-old girl. Unlike Enjoli’s anxiety-provoking celebration of the domestic juggling act, Jean Naté’s message was simple: Get on that horse and ride, baby! A couple years ago, seized by an irrational desire to smell like my babysitter from 1983, I bought a big bottle of the splash at Walgreens, but come to find out they changed the formula. Crushed.

#3 Chanel

#2 C ha

y Revlon b e rli

N

5 o.

“Share the fantasy.” Of the three Ridley Scott–directed ads for Chanel No. 5 in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, this one is my favorite because the Ink Spots + trains. All three ads have certain key images in common—a strong phallic symbol, an airplane casting a shadow, and a dark, handsome man who probably doesn’t exist. It’s all classy as hell, and seeing it again makes me want to go out and buy a (tiny) bottle of the (expensive) stuff, except that it will probably remind me of some posh lady from my childhood, and I won’t be able to figure out who.

“Kinda young, kinda now...kinda free, kinda WOW.” No one ever made an entrance like Shelley Hack. Perhaps a few of us have danced at a piano bar, but who has ever danced into a piano bar? And who would dare? Well, Shelley would.

Watch as she tosses her hat to the door attendant and choreographically flash-flirts with an array of eligible men before one of them literally swings her into a booth across from her very lucky date. Meanwhile, Bobby Short, who wrote the (perfect) jingle, is right there at the keys, totally selling it.

Just a great evening all around.

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#1 Jo va

n

sk by Coty u M “What is sexy?” This superhot ad, directed by Adrian Lyne, is way sexier than any of his famously overwrought movies. (Does anyone still think the elevator scene in Fatal Attraction is sexy?) It’s a lightning-cut montage of beautiful young people caught off-guard, conjuring thoughts of backstories begging to be told. My favorite shot is the flashlight invasion of the prom couple’s limousine makeout sesh. Is it the police? Is it one of the bros pranking in on a private moment? Is it her dad?!

The couple at the end intrigues me too. The gal looks unmistakably peeved as the guy leaves the bed—lackluster morning quickie?—but in the next shot the guy, shirtlessly wielding the hose he sprayed her with at the top of the ad, pulls her in for a kiss as if to say, “Sorry I’m a jerk sometimes, I love you.”

Will he skip the wax job and make it up to her?

There’s just so much to unpack here.

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Photo by L.A. Reno New Orleans, LA 2019

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STEPPING BACK TO LOOK AT A FACE: A Portrait of Stephen Sondheim in Ten Lyrics Sean Patterson 54

Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who passed away in November 2021 at the age of 91, had a career in the American theatre that spanned more than sixty years. He earned early heavyweight credibility as a lyricist for superstar composers before crafting both the music and the lyrics himself, as he would do on nearly every other show with which he was involved. He forged powerful collaborations with librettists as notable and diverse as Arthur Laurents, Burt Shevelove, James Goldman, Hugh Wheeler, and John Weidman, not to mention visionary directors such as Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, and James Lapine.

Sondheim’s words and music, and the shows they serve, helped redefine the Broadway musical form in the latter half of the 20th century.

While Sondheim’s music is distinctive and challenging (Mark Eden Horowitz’s 2010 collection of interviews with Sondheim,

Sondheim on Music; Minor Details and Major Decisions, published by Scarecrow Press, is an indispensable

look at his compositional craft), his lyrics are what linger. Sondheim uses words as a master jeweler uses gemstones, setting them with precision and skill so that they sparkle to maximum effect. His lyrics, much like Shakespeare’s verse, are always about the human

condition, whether they’re spoken (or rather, sung) by witty urbanites in the Manhattan of the 1970s, Chekhovian romantics in collapsing love triangles in fin-de-siècle Sweden, or aging showbiz hasbeens in their last glimpse of the limelight in an old theatre slated for demolition. This universality in his lyrics makes them timeless.

The lyric samples featured here are taken from musicals that premiered on Broadway and for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics. Through Sondheim’s lyrics, we can trace the timeline of not only his own trajectory as an artist, but also the development of the American musical across a wide swath of Broadway history. What’s more, we can get a sense of how songs function in musicals and why certain songs are written the way they are. Finally, we can also get an impression of the artist himself. The title of this article comes from “Finishing the Hat,” a song in Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1984 musical: Studying a face, Stepping back to look at a face Leaves a little space in the way like a window, But to see--It’s the only way to see.

Stephen Sondheim- Couch, Nancy Lee Katz

Retrieved from the Library of Congress

“Free” A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, 1962 Book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

When a Pseudolus can move the universe shakes, But I’ll never move until I’m free!

Such a little word, but, oh, the difference it makes!

I’ll be Pseudolus, the founder of a family.

I’ll be Pseudolus, the pillar of society.

I’ll be Pseudolus the man, if I can only be….

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was Sondheim’s

first Broadway show as both composer and lyricist, although he had previously written lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story in 1956 and Jule Styne’s Gypsy in 1958, both of which were wildly successful, landmark shows. For Forum, librettists Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove reimagined the plays of Roman playwright Plautus through the lens of early-twentiethcentury burlesque; and Sondheim supplied a witty, tuneful score to match.

The enduring hit of the score is undoubtedly the bravura opening number “Comedy Tonight,” a metatheatrical march that welcomes the audience and lets them know what they’re in for; but the real standout is “Free,” sung by the main character Pseudolus, a Roman slave in service to the lovelorn son of a wealthy family. “Free” is a classic “I want” song, a song in which a focal character plainly states the motivation that drives the plot.

Pseudolus wants his freedom and will do anything to get it. Sondheim builds the lyric on the foundation of dizzying wordplay on the meaning of freedom (“Can you see me as a poet writing poetry? All my verse would be…free!”). As Pseudolus plays this

word game, the stakes grow in intensity: Pseudolus rises to the awareness that he can change the world (“When a Pseudolus can move, the universe shakes…”); but he needs to be freed first, and he needs to be freed now. The want is desperate, but it’s also funny.

“Free” is a galvanizing comic turn that puts the audience squarely on Pseudolus’s side and positions him as the undeniable star of the show. No wonder the role has attracted such heavyweights as Phil Silvers, Nathan Lane, and Zero Mostel, who played it first and whose performance is captured in the recording above. The legendary original Broadway production won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Book, but Sondheim’s score inexplicably failed to snag a nomination.

Original Broadway Poster

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“Anyone Can Whistle” ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, 1964 Book by Arthur Laurents Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Anyone can whistle, that’s what they say, easy.

Anyone can whistle, any old day, easy.

It’s all so simple: Relax, let go, let fly!

So someone tell me why can’t I?

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For his next project, Sondheim reteamed with Arthur Laurents, book writer for both West Side Story and Gypsy, on this satirical look at nonconformity and psychoanalysis.

As one might expect from the subject matter, Anyone Can Whistle is an esoteric, three-act musical that’s infatuated with its own cleverness.

In describing this collaboration, Sondheim once compared Laurents and himself to smart-alecky schoolboys mocking not just their fellow classmates but also the teacher.

The show drew the ire of critics and audiences alike and closed after 9 performances.

Sondheim’s score is full of clever pastiche and intricate rhyme schemes, but the title song is the simplest and perhaps most satisfying. In a show full of frenetic energy and extended musical sequences, the song is a rare moment where time slows down a bit. A plaintive, searching ballad sung by one of the show’s romantic leads, the lyric is gentle and conversational, free of the gimmicky artifice elsewhere in the score. Sondheim’s restraint here allows his character to express vulnerability and deeply felt emotion, and it’s a technique he’d employ frequently in later works. The clip above is an audio recording of actress Lee Remick, who sang the

song in the original short-lived production.

Sondheim would follow the stinging flop of Anyone Can Whistle with one final Laurents collaboration and a one-time return to writing lyrics for someone else’s music---in this case, the great Richard Rodgers, former collaborator of the late lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who had been a family friend of Sondheim’s. The resulting show, Do I Hear a Waltz?, was also not a success, running for a mere 220 performances; but Sondheim and Rodgers did earn a Tony nomination for Best Score.

Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury, Harry Guardino and Herbert Greene backstage, 1964

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“Getting Married Today” COMPANY, 1970 Book by George Furth Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Listen, everybody, I’m afraid you didn’t hear, Or do you want to see a crazy lady fall apart in front of you?

It isn’t only Paul who may be ruining his life, You know, we’ll both of us be losing our identities.

I telephoned my analyst about it, and he said to see him Monday, But by Monday, I’ll be floating in the Hudson with the other garbage.

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After a brief foray into writing a short-form musical for television (the Twilight Zone-ish Evening Primrose, in 1967), Sondheim returned to Broadway with Company. Based on a series of one-act plays written by actor-writer George Furth, a longtime friend of Sondheim’s, Company was a jaundiced look at contemporary relationships, centered on a group of married Manhattanites celebrating the birthday of their bachelor friend. The show also marked Sondheim’s first collaboration with producer-director Harold Prince, an association which would last the decade. Company was the epitome of the “concept musical,” a loosely plotted show driven more by theme than narrative; and Prince’s production, with its set of metal scaffolding and moving elevators, was as much about New York itself as it was about the people living there.

Nearly every song in Sondheim’s score has become iconic, perhaps none more so than “The Ladies Who Lunch,” originally performed by the inimitable Elaine Stritch.

But for sheer virtuosic writing, the patter song “Getting Married Today” is breathtaking…literally.

Written as a trio, the song is actually a comic scene set on the morning of a wedding. After richly romantic passages from the wedding singer

and the groom, the song focuses on the bride Amy, who is in the midst of a full-tilt panic attack.

Featuring one of the fastest verses in Broadway history, with nearly 70 words packed into about 10 seconds, it’s a devastatingly funny nervous breakdown set to music.

The video clip is taken from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Original Cast Album: Company, which chronicles the audio recording session with the Broadway cast.

Actress Beth Howland, the original Amy, feverishly articulates the rapidfire syllables in close-up, in character, and on pitch; and she nails it. For his score, Sondheim won two Tony Awards, for both music and lyrics, due to a one-time split of the Best Score award by the Tony committee.

Elaine Stritch, Hal Prince, and Jane Russell celebrate Broadway's Company, 1971

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“I’m Still Here” FOLLIES, 1971 Book by James Goldman Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

I’ve run the gamut, A to Z. Three cheers and dammit, c’est la vie.

I got through all of last year, and I’m here Lord knows, at least I was there, and I’m here Look who’s here, I’m still here!

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A reunion of former showgirls at their soon-to-be-demolished theatre sets the stage for this deep dive into failed relationships, missed potential, and broken dreams. Inspired by the real-life story just such a reunion featured in the New York Times, Sondheim and his Evening Primrose collaborator James Goldman had focused originally on what the showgirls were like in their youth, until producer-director Harold Prince recalled a photo in LIFE Magazine of actress Gloria Swanson dressed in an evening gown and standing in the wreckage of the thenrecently razed Roxy Theatre. Prince felt that there was a much more interesting story in having the older Follies performers in the present day looking back at the past with either rose-colored glasses or a jaundiced eye.

This concept musical uses the reunion as an opportunity for the characters to revisit their old material and reopen old wounds. Throughout, they wrestle with bitterness and regret as they’re haunted by the ghosts of the people they were back then. Sondheim’s score leans heavily on period pastiche in recreating revue material from forty years earlier, but his songs for the characters in the present are incisive and insightful, particularly for the

two romantic couples at the heart of the story, four damaged people who come to the shattering realization they’ve married the wrong partners.

But in this long, dark night of the soul, there are glimmers of light. One particularly bright moment is “I’m Still Here,” an aging diva’s triumphant cackle in the face of death, the war cry of someone who’s been at the party too long but is still having a helluva time. Written for actress Yvonne De Carlo (Lily from TV’s The Munsters), this list song is much more than a trip through pop-culture touchstones from the 1920s through the 1970s; in Sondheim’s capable hands, it’s a portrait of strength, spirit, and survival. In the video clip here, De Carlo does the number on a 1971 episode of The David Frost Show, about a month after opening.

It’s a thrilling performance, made all the more authentic by a momentary lapse of the lyrics. Follies won seven Tonys, including Best Score, Sondheim’s third.

Yvonne De Carlo and Fred Gwynne in The Munsters, 1964

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“Send in the Clowns” A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, 1973 Book by Hugh Wheeler Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Just when I’d stopped opening doors, Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours, Making my entrance again with my usual flair, Sure of my lines, No one is there.

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Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night was the inspiration for this confection, Sondheim’s third partnership with Harold Prince and his first with book writer Hugh Wheeler. A mature, thoughtful work, A Little Night Music is the story of a handful of intertwined romantic couples. At the center of the tangle is glamorous (and somewhat promiscuous) actress Desiree Armfeldt and her one-time lover Fredrik Egerman, who is now married to Anne, a much-younger woman about the same age as his son. Desiree realizes that while she is finally ready to commit to Fredrik, he is hopelessly infatuated with Anne; and she dissects the cynical, bitter irony of being left alone in “Send in the Clowns.”

This is Sondheim reaching the height of his talent, and “Send in the Clowns” is his best-known song. Sondheim wrote the song specifically for Glynis Johns, the original Broadway Desiree, who had an expressive vocal style that was charming but unsuited to long sustained notes. To feature her in the best way, he constructed the lyric as a series of short phrases, mostly questions ending in consonants, which allows for a crisp delivery that underscores the astringent irony in the words. Throughout, Sondheim

writes in the vernacular of an actor: “making my entrance,” “sure of my lines,” and later, “losing my timing.”

Because he knew the dramatic moment and the performer so well, he knew instinctively what was needed; and he wrote the song in two days. Prince, for his part, directed Johns to deliver the number seated and gave her instructions not to move, to let all the emotion come through her face and her voice. It’s a powerfully effective choice, as one can see in the video clip of Johns on The Tonight Show about two months after opening.

Although uniquely suited to the situation and tailored to one performer, “Send in the Clowns” was so specific that it paradoxically became universal. It also became a huge hit, thanks to popular recordings by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins. A Little Night Music brought Sondheim another Tony for Best Score, and it was the third consecutive year he won the award.

Sondheim photographed in 1972

by Bernard Gotfryd

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“Someone in a Tree” PACIFIC OVERTURES, 1976 Book by John Weidman, with additional material by Hugh Wheeler Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Without someone in a tree Nothing happened here I am hiding in a tree I’m a fragment of the day If I weren’t, who’s to say Things would happen here the way That they happened here?

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The creative partnership between Sondheim and Harold Prince was a spectacularly fruitful one, and together they pushed the boundaries of content and form in the Broadway musical. An especially audacious effort was Pacific Overtures, a dramatization of the 1853 opening of Japan to the Western world.

Prince staged the show in the style of traditional Kabuki theatre, with male actors playing all roles, including female characters; and Sondheim based his score on Japanese forms infused with Western harmonies and tonality. Lyrically, Sondheim found inspiration in haiku, in contrapuntal forms (where two or more sections are sung against one another but “fit” musically), and in playing with perspective. Physical and temporal perspective form the basis for Sondheim’s favorite of all his songs: “Someone in a Tree.” The song is a mini-Rashomon in which the signing of a treaty between the United States and Japan is witnessed by two unlikely observers: a boy in a tree who can see everything but can hear nothing, and a soldier hidden under the Treaty House who can hear every sound but can’t see a thing. Together, they assemble the puzzle of what really happened in an otherwise secret moment. The song also challenges the durability of memory, as the boy in the tree is now

an old man, who is singing what he remembers and being corrected by his past self. The song is a staggering achievement, and it’s easy to see why Sondheim loves it.

The video clip is taken directly from the original production, and the Kabuki-influenced aesthetic is clearly evident in both the staging and the actors’ presentation of the material.

Unfortunately, the show, however ambitious and beautiful, was not a popular success, closing after 196 performances. While Pacific Overtures was heavily Tony-nominated, including Sondheim for his score, it won only for Best Scenic Design and Best Costume Design, losing nearly all other categories to the massive hit of the season, A Chorus Line.

Sondheim at his desk, 1993

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“A Little Priest” SWEENEY TODD; THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET, 1979 Book by Hugh Wheeler Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim For what’s the sound of the world out there?

(What, Mr. Todd? What, Mr. Todd? What is that sound?)

Those crunching noises pervading the air?

(Yes, Mr. Todd! Yes, Mr Todd! Yes, all around!)

It’s man devouring man, my dear, And who are we to deny it in here?

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While in London in 1973, Sondheim saw a production of Christopher Bond’s play Sweeney Todd, based on the gruesome popular story from Victorian penny dreadfuls. Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of the title, was originally a humble and innocent man. But, targeted by the vicious Judge Turpin, who claimed Todd’s young wife for himself and subsequently drove her mad, Todd was sent away to prison. Years

later, he returns to London with a new identity and a thirst for revenge.

Bond deepened the psychological backstory of the well-known folk antihero of Todd, and Sondheim felt on seeing the play that that added depth could be further enhanced by music.

Hal Prince, though initially cool on the idea, found in the story a metaphor for the effects of the Industrial Revolution; and setting the story amidst the machinery of an abandoned factory, he gave the rather intimate story a monumentally mythic status. Sondheim matched the epic scale of Prince’s concept musically, crafting a score that is almost completely sung-through, at times approaching opera in its vocal demands and marked by the continual juxtaposition of nightmarish violence and pitch-black humor. Many consider it the pinnacle of his career.

The first act ends with Todd, who has already killed one person who threatened to blow his cover, being thwarted in what seems to be his only chance to kill his intended victim, the despicable Judge Turpin. As his landlady Mrs. Lovett, who runs a struggling meat-pie shop, attempts to console him, he explodes in rage at the society that allows wickedness to prosper and resolves that far more men than Judge Turpin deserve to die. It’s one of the most powerful

moments in the score, undercut almost instantly by Mrs. Lovett, who reminds Todd that he already has one body to dispose of; what are they going to do with more? Then, she has an idea to bake the bodies into pies, which leads to “A Little Priest,” a gleefully comic fantasy of how that macabre plan might play out.

The song title refers not to the stature of said priest, but to a portion of the pie that contains him (“It’s priest. Have a little priest.”); and what follows is pun after pun about various occupations being served as the special of the day. Todd swings from the pit of despair to the heights of mad euphoria as he revels with Mrs. Lovett in the joyous potential of their enterprise. It’s an exhilarating highwire act, and Sondheim nails it.

The audio clip above is taken from the original Broadway recording with Len Cariou as Todd and Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett, both of whom would win the Tony for their performances. (Angela Lansbury’s brilliant performance is preserved in a video recording of the North American tour, with George Hearn as Todd. Get a glimpse here.) Sweeney Todd was a deliciously wicked epic, popular then and now with audiences and critics alike; and it earned Sondheim his fifth Tony Award.

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“Color and Light” SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, 1984 Book by James Lapine Music by Stephen Sondheim Dot Dot sitting Dot Dot waiting Dot Dot getting fat fat fat More yellow Dot Dot waiting to go Out out out But no no no George Finish the hat finish the hat Have to finish the hat first Hat hat hat hat Hot hot hot it’s hot in here 70

The hitmaking Prince-Sondheim partnership came to an ignominious end in 1981, with the failure of Merrily We Roll Along, based on an unsuccessful play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart that tells its story in reverse. As Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim’s score has earned a cult following over the years, but the show is rather famously problematic. Though Merrily We Roll Along has been frequently revived, perhaps in attempts to rescue it from its doomed structure, it remains a largely unsatisfying work. The original production ran a mere 16 performances.

Blistered by the negative experience of Merrily…, Sondheim threatened to quit theatre. He was lured back by director James Lapine, who had enjoyed some recent success OffBroadway and was looking for a new project. Sondheim and Lapine found their inspiration in French pointillist painter Georges Seurat’s 1884-1886 masterwork A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The resulting show, Sunday in the Park with George, explores not just the characters within the painting, but also the artist’s temperament and the very nature of art itself.

Sondheim interprets Seurat’s signature pointillist style in his score,

translating dots of paint into musical motifs of repeated staccato notes and lyrics dominated by single-syllable words. The effect is dazzling, as the score mimics not just the physical creation of a work of art but also the mind of the artist as he creates, turning chaos into order through composition and harmony. In the video clip of “Color and Light” from the Broadway production, George (Mandy Patinkin) paints as his paramour Dot (Bernadette Peters) primps for an evening out.

The song interweaves their internal monologues, as we see George struggle to work as thoughts of Dot creep into his mind. It’s a stunning moment, and it is also perhaps the strongest example of Sondheim’s use of language as a tool. Here, he uses those words to reveal how George works, and the effect is astonishing.

Sunday in the Park with George, a

gorgeous work of art in its own right, shows us how art endures, how it allows us to revisit the past through the lens of the present, and how our relationship with art changes over time. While it lost the Tony for Best Musical and Best Score to La Cage aux Folles, Sunday in the Park with George did win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Sondheim the second composer-lyricist to earn the honor.

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“Children Will Listen” INTO THE WOODS, 1987 Book by James Lapine Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Careful the spell you cast, Not just on children Sometimes the spell may last Past what you can see, And turn against you.

Careful the tale you tell That is the spell, Children will listen...

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Lapine and Sondheim continued their collaboration with 1987’s Into the Woods, which combines several familiar tales and characters from the Brothers Grimm, among them Cinderella and Little Red RidingHood, along with an original storyline of a poor baker and his wife desperate to conceive a child.

Sondheim and Lapine took their cues not just from Grimm but also from Bruno Bettelheim’s 1976 treatise The

Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,

which considers the construction of fairy tales as well as their moral and psychological underpinnings. The first act of Into the Woods essentially tells us the story we know, and the various intersecting stories culminate in a happy ending. The second act, though, is darker, exploring the “after” in “happily ever after” and forcing the characters to wrestle with the consequences and repercussions of using wishes and magic to manipulate their fates.

Into the Woods also considers the

relationship between parents and children, the ripple effects our actions can have across generations regardless of our intentions, and the responsibility we have to the communities we claim. As with Sweeney Todd and Sunday, Sondheim experiments with repeated motifs in his score, as well as various

musical styles, including rap. His lyrics, as always, are so specific to the characters and situations that they are hard to separate from the material, but that doesn’t stop him from creating something that he had not yet achieved as a composerlyricist: a breakout anthem. In the Act II finale, the Witch—who has suffered as much as any of the other characters in the show, including the loss of her own child— sings “Children Will Listen,” a warning to the surviving characters, and to the audience, that the things we tell our children will shape their worlds, for better or for worse. Soon, the other characters join in, including the ghosts of the ones along the journey.

It’s a beautiful moment of clarity and wisdom; and it reminds us that the things we say and do in the present will live on as a legacy to the younger generations that follow.

The video clip above is from the opulent original Broadway production and features Tonywinner Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s Wife and Bernadette Peters as the Witch. Because of the show’s appeal to children, Into the Woods is among the most performed of Sondheim’s works, and it earned Sondheim his sixth career Tony Award for its score.

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“I Read” PASSION, 1994 Book by James Lapine Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

The more you cling to things, the more you love them, The more the pain you suffer when they’re taken from you...

Ah, but if you have no expectations, Captain, You can never have a disappointment.

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Sondheim took his inspiration for Passion from Ettore Scola’s 1981 film Passione d’Amore, an adaptation of the 1869 novel Fosca by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti. On seeing the film, Sondheim immediately began to imagine the piece musically; and he turned again to James Lapine to write the libretto. The protagonist of the story is Giorgio, a handsome young captain who is romantically involved with a beautiful married woman named Clara. They are separated when Giorgio is reassigned to a remote military outpost, and they are able to communicate only by letters.

At the outpost, however, Giorgio meets Fosca, the cousin of the doctor assigned there. Fosca is a homely woman, stricken with unspecified illnesses and prone to emotional seizures and hysterical outbursts.

Giorgio is drawn to her, out of curiosity at first, but then by growing desire as Fosca manipulates her way into his heart. Eventually, Giorgio drifts away from Clara and becomes more deeply involved with Fosca, with dangerous repercussions.

Sondheim’s score is lush and evocative, but it is unique among his works. While most Broadway songwriting is based on a traditional 32-bar structure, nearly all of the songs here defy that construction.

Sondheim continually pushed the boundaries of traditional structure

throughout his career, but his complete subversion of it here is unusual, particularly in his lyric writing. Rhyme, for example, such a hallmark in Sondheim’s oeuvre that he’s considered a master of its application, is largely absent, as is his signature wordplay. The lyrics are naturalistic, much more poetic than conversational; and there are only a handful of songs that register as songs. Instead, the music tends to cast a kind of hypnotic spell, perhaps mirroring the way Fosca draws Giorgio into her web.

One song that does register is Fosca’s introductory number, “I Read.” In discussing a Rosseau novel that Giorgio has lent her, Fosca tells him that she reads to escape the harsh reality of her life. She has no expectations, she says, because the limitations of her physical condition do not allow to look far beyond the present. While Sondheim may avoid traditional form and rhyme here, the lyric is not without structure. One device Sondheim uses throughout is repetition, particularly anaphora and epiphora, or repetition of beginning phrases and ending phrases, respectively. These rhetorical devices make Fosca’s emotional declaration into more of a philosophical argument, suggesting that there is much more rationality to this woman whom many have branded irrational.

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One might go so far as to say that Fosca’s aria is actually meticulously calculated, as it’s in this interaction that she sets the trap into which Giorgio will hopelessly fall.

Passion, while critically admired,

failed to catch on with the public.

The character of Fosca was thought to be too polarizing, and many felt it strained credibility that someone who looked like her could romantically lure someone who looked like Giorgio. There was also a feeling that, despite its title, Passion was beautiful but cold, too austere to really capture audiences. The run lasted a mere 280

performances; nevertheless, it stands as one of the most deeply personal of Sondheim’s works.

The video clip is from the original Broadway production, recorded shortly after it closed; and it preserves the incandescent performance of Donna Murphy as Fosca, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Sondheim won his last competitive Tony for Best Score, his seventh. He would be awarded his eighth and final Tony, a special award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, in 2008.

The Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West 43rd Street, New York, NY

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Photo by L.A. Reno Jacmel, Haiti 2017 77

The Past Coll

A I first saw Bob Dylan perform live in October of 1995 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, GA. I was a freshman in college and had only recently begun to appreciate the significance of Bob Dylan’s influence on popular music over the last thirty years. In early high school, I had learned of his storied career as a young folk singer in New York City in the early 1960s and his controversial move to go electric a few years later, but I was not all too familiar with the rest of his music catalogue beyond that decade.

In college, I would learn more of the breadth of Dylan’s career as he continued to renew and transform himself throughout the subsequent decades. As he made his way to Atlanta for this leg of his tour, Bob Dylan was indeed an icon, but his legendary status had been marred by the lack of any significant original material in close to ten years. He had put out a couple of acoustic albums consisting of a collection of compositions from the public 78

domain, traditional songs from the American, Irish, and English folk traditions of songwriting. These were mostly well-received by the public and critics alike, and a far cry from the 1990 Under the Red Sky, which was viewed as another underwhelming album from an artist who many argued had peaked long ago.

In 1995, Dylan was fifty-four years old. Three years earlier, a collection of his musical peers including Tom Petty, Neil Young, Lou Reed, and Tracy Chapman, had performed their own versions of his songs at Madison Square Garden at his 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration.

It was a farewell event, a thanks-forthe-memories show bidding a master farewell as Dylan gradually faded into musical history while the world forged on without him. Likewise, watching Dylan perform on that October evening in Atlanta felt like a concluding moment. It was possible that my first time seeing Dylan could also be my last.

liding with the Present:

Bob Dylan Retrospective Justin Gricus

Since that concert in ‘95, Dylan has gone on to record ten more studio albums and has played well over 3,000 shows. He is now eighty and in the midst of a tour that, according to his website, will continue through 2024 (though dates have only been announced through June of this year). When I bought my ticket to Dylan’s March 19th, 2022 show at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans, I thought back to that first concert and recognized the similarities of the moments. There could be plenty of other opportunities to see him in the years ahead, but I wondered. A friend would later convince me to join him for the April 7th show in Mobile, Alabama. “He is eighty,” he said. “I mean, you just never know.”

For this second leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, both the setlist and the order of the songs have remained the same for each concert, and the New Orleans show was no exception. The first chords of the 1971 “Watching the River Flow” resounded precisely at 8 PM. The

lights revealed an older, slightly frail Dylan, adorned in black pants and a black jacket, bent behind a piano where he remained for the majority of his performance. There were no spotlights overhead. Dylan and his five band members, which included guitarists Doug Lancio and Bob Britt, multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Charley Drayton were all lit by lights on the floor of the stage. Performing in front of a red curtain reminiscent of the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, Bob Dylan’s approximately ninety minute setlist covered songs from five decades of the singer’s career and focused heavily on new material. Nine of the seventeen songs came from Dylan’s most recent release, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways.

After a boisterous and spirited rendition of "Most Likely You Go Your Way” from the 1966 classic Blonde on Blonde, Dylan premiered the first song from his new material, the softer “I Contain Multitudes.”

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The song’s title is lifted from a Walt Whitman poem, and the lyrics include numerous other references including Anne Frank, the Rolling Stones, William Blake, and Indiana Jones. Much of Dylan’s new material is dotted with these allusions as the artist looks to find his place among the historical and mythical figures who have dotted our cultural landscape throughout the years.

Dylan’s opening lines of this song (“Today, tomorrow, and yesterday too/The flowers are dying like all things do.”) reflect the night’s underlying theme of eras concluding and cycles coming to their close.

There was a certain urgency to Dylan’s delivery of these lines and others that night as if these were songs that the world needed to hear.

The driving, bluesy riff of “False Prophet” also from Rough and Rowdy Ways had Bob growling to the audience that he’s the one “who go[es] where only the lonely can go.”

For sixty plus years, Dylan's fans have expected him to keep traveling and bringing them to these sacred places, and here he was once more, now an old drifter on this neverending tour that’s finally running out of dates.

Dylan’s new material tells these stories of wanderers and vagabonds, 80

rovers and outlaws, and throughout these tales, Dylan contemplates his own mortality and place as an artist as his own career comes to a close.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the mournful, brooding “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” where he sings of an aging marauder making his way to the edge of the continent “beyond the sea, beyond the shifting sand."

The poignant accordion underscored this story of a search for some mythical place of peace and salvation (“Key West is the place to be/if you’re searching for immortality”).

As has been typical for this tour, Dylan did not speak directly to the audience until the end when he introduced his band members before sliding back behind the piano to close the show with one of his classics from his gospel era of the early 80s. Another song about coming to terms with one’s finite time on earth, “Every Grain of Sand,” ended an emotional performance.

“Then onward in my journey,” Dylan sang, “I’ve come to understand/ that every hair is numbered/like every grain of sand.” Dylan finished singing, stood briefly at the center of the stage, and then walked down the stairs to the right disappearing into the shadows.

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Not satisfied to hear just one concert from this tour, I traveled to Mobile, Alabama for another performance a few weeks later. I had attended the New Orleans show with a mix of friends from various decades of my life, an old college roommate from the year before Time Out of Mind was released (1996), a former colleague and good friend from the year before Together Through Life (2008), and two current colleagues and friends I met a year and half after Triplicate (2017). In Mobile, it was just me and one Triplicate friend and a theatre filled with fans from various places and times, pasts colliding with presents, futures yet to be determined.

As compared with New Orleans, the Mobile crowd was more polite and attentive with less chatter between the songs and appeared to be far older, a swath of people approaching the same stage of life as the artist himself. They, too, had come to catch one last show with this man who had guided them through the various epochs of their lives.

“We came down from Hattiesburg, but I’ve seen Bob all over the place,” the woman seated next to me said.

“I’ve already seen him a few times on this tour. He sounds terrific!” Her middle-age son on her left agreed.

This past October he took her to see New York City for the first time.

“New York was tremendous,” she said. “So was Bob. At the Beacon Theatre. We saw him in Shreveport, too.” She and her son were also at the show in New Orleans, and we all agreed that his voice sounded better on this tour than it had for years. “Yeah,” she said as the stage darkened, “He’s going out in style, isn’t he?”

...it was just me and one Triplicate friend and a theatre filled with fans from various places and times, pasts colliding with presents, futures yet to be determined.

Dylan highlighted his piano playing more in this concert and the looser, less restrictive arrangements of some of the songs led to more improvised 81

solos on the keys. Just like in New Orleans, after some particular rousing performances (“Crossing the Rubicon,” for instance), Dylan would step gingerly from the piano and stand behind the mic stand, one hand on the top of the piano, one hand poised on his right hip like a gunslinger shamelessly posing after another victorious battle (“The Dylan Stance,” one of my friends coined it).

Before the show began, the woman from Hattiesburg had told me that she has always loved seeing Dylan

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live, yet there was one aspect of his shows in recent decades that troubled her. “I just wish he talked to the audience more. Anything. Just acknowledge us. I mean, I've been sticking up for him since 1965 when all the rest of my friends were busy listening to the Beach Boys,” she said.

“Just a few words here and there. I’m not asking for much.” After every few songs, she would rise to her feet and emphatically yell, “Bob!” imploring him to answer. As the night continued, her “Bob"s got louder, sharper, and more pronounced, as

she continued to cry for just one short exchange between Dylan and his followers.

I was reminded of the John Updike article in The New Yorker when he wrote about Red Sox great Ted Williams and his final game at Fenway Park. Williams hit a home run during his last at bat and refused to take a curtain call, stubbornly sitting in the dugout as the crowd begged him to emerge. “Gods don’t answer letters,” Updike wrote. Near the end of the show; however, this one did. He thanked the crowd and mentioned playing here in “the birthplace of Mardi Gras” and then made an indecipherable reference to New Orleans. A few songs later, he introduced his band and concluded again with “Every Grain of Sand.”

The crowd made their way back to the exits, connected one more time with a performer who has anchored them through their decades. I’m sure I was not the only one wondering if this was the last time we would be heading to the stark sidewalks after a Dylan show, walking hurriedly into the night, stepping out to the places where only the lonely can go.

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The Dylan Twenty

(in chronological order) In anticipation of seeing Bob Dylan perform live in New Orleans, a few of my friends and fellow Dylan fans thought it would be a good excuse to compile a list of our top twenty Dylan songs with liner notes. Dylan’s career spans over sixty years and includes thirty-nine studio albums, not including a large selection of bootleg and live recordings. It was a daunting task, but after a week of deliberation, I was able to make the difficult, but necessary decisions to whittle down my original list of fifty to the twenty songs you see here. In chronological order (ranking them seemed far too challenging), here is The Dylan Twenty.

1. “Song to Woody” Bob Dylan (1962) One of two original compositions from Bob Dylan’s debut album, this song features a twenty-year-old Dylan writing a song to one of his musical idols, Woody Guthrie.

This guy knew he would be selling out shows when he turned eighty.

2. “One Too Many Mornings” The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) In looking over the chosen songs, I wonder if perhaps there’s too much mournful harp on my list. No, there can never be too much mournful harp.

3. “Boots of Spanish Leather” The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) A song about opportunities, people, experiences — all those dreams that have drifted away for good. The speaker mourns the end of his relationship with a girl who leaves him during her travels abroad. Time, distance, loss — it’s all here. “Is there something I can send you to remember me by?” she asks. (“Take heed, take heed of the western wind/take heed of the stormy weather/And yes there is something you can send back to me/Spanish boots of Spanish Leather”). An evocative song that, at its conclusion, often leaves me more distraught than the speaker. The speaker gets a new pair of boots at the end. The listener? Just those forlorn last lines and sorrowful chords.

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4. “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind” The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-91 (1964) “Maybe it's the color of the sun cut flat/An' coverin' the crossroads I'm standing at/Or maybe it's the weather or something like that/ But mama, you’re just on my mind.” Perhaps the best first verse of a Dylan song.

5. “To Ramona” Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) “Everything passes. Everything changes/ Just do what you think you should do/ And someday maybe/ Who knows, baby/ I'll come and be cryin' to you.” There’s something so unforgiving in this final verse. My favorite last lines from any Dylan song. Top 10 Dylan first lines? Top 10 concluding Dylan lyrics? These lists could go on forever…

6. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” Bringing It All Back Home (1965) Somebody give the anarchist a cigarette.

7. “Desolation Row” Highway 61 Revisited (1965) I really do need to make a top 10 Dylan list of songs over 9 minutes.

8. “Visions of Johanna” Bootleg Series, Vol. 4 (1966) If I had decided to rank my songs, this would be Top Five. I remember hearing this version before I had ever heard the original from Blonde on Blonde. It’s almost too painful when it’s stripped down to just a voice, guitar, and a harp. Tremendous.

9. “Girl from the North Country” Nashville Skyline (1969) I grew up in Northern Maine. By the beginning of November, the trees were bare, the ground was frozen, and a thin layer of ice covered the puddles in the potholes.

This is what it sounded like.

10. “Billy 4” Pat Garret & Billy the Kid (1973) There are a number of people who have always criticized Dylan because of his voice. In the early 1960s, the Missouri folk singer Mitch Hayne compared Dylan’s voice to that of “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire.” To the ones who agree with this assessment, may I suggest this song. It may change your mind.

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11. “If You See Her, Say Hello” Blood on the Tracks (1975) “Buckets of Rain.” “Simple Twist of Fate.” “Meet Me in the Morning.” “Idiot Wind.”

I don’t know how to choose one or two from this album. I guess it’s the last line of this song that makes the cut. I love the vulnerability and the lack of conviction in those lyrics. “If she’s passin’ back this way/I’m not that hard to find/Tell her she can look me up/If she’s got the time.”

12. “Mozambique” Desire (1976) Salt Life according to Bob Dylan.

13. “Every Grain of Sand” Shot of Love (1981) I’ll admit it — this probably wouldn’t have made the final cut if not for the most recent show. The song becomes even more moving within the context of his most recent tour (see previous article).

14. “Brownsville Girl” Knocked Out Loaded (1986) If there’s such a thing as some sort of afterlife and assuming I make it, I hope it somehow includes me stretched out on the grass, an 80-degree sun overhead, at the main stage at Jazz Fest listening to Bob Dylan and this horn section playing “Bronwnsville Girl.” If I could hear this live with that backup band and those singers, I’d be content. I wouldn’t even mind paying $8.00 for a Miller Lite.

15. “Delia” World Gone Wrong (1993) My one cover song on the list. This is a traditional song that has been performed by many throughout the years. It was inspired by the murder of Delia Green, a 14-year-old African-American girl killed by her jealous 15-year-old lover. It features another acoustic guitar with the heartbreaking harp and the haunting refrain, “All the friends I’ve ever had are gone.” It’s hard not to get teary-eyed listening to this, and most of my friends are still alive. This will be a tough listen when I’m eightytwo.

16. “Not Dark Yet” Time Out of Mind (1997) Twenty-five years ago I thought this was Dylan’s farewell song. He was only a little over ten years older than I am now. Moving on…

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17. “Mississippi” Love and Theft (2001) The song works because it doesn’t quite tell you enough. What happened on that last day in Mississippi? Someday I’ll figure it out.

18. “High Water” Love and Theft (2001) A song marked by obscure references, lyrics stolen from old blues and folk songs, a grizzly voice singing about a great flood, about the end times, the apocalypse, Vicksburg and Clarksdale, Fat Nancy, an Englishman, a Jew. And what the hell is Charles Darwin doing out on Highway 5?

19. “Tempest” Tempest (2012) A chilling retelling of the historic sinking of the Titanic complete with an Irish accordion, a stirring refrain, and a nod to the famous Leo in his final hours sitting on deck with his sketchbooks awaiting his final destiny.

20. “Key West” Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) Like many of the Rowdy Ways songs, “Key West” is a song from an 80-year old artist thinking about his place and legacy as he heads off to the “horizon line.” “Key West is the place to be/if you’re searching for immortality.” I could almost picture this being played at my own funeral. What a nice closing number. A few moments of melancholy reflection before I’m lowered down. Of course, by the time the song ends, I’ll be over at the Fairgrounds listening to “Brownsville Girl” and drinking an $8.00 Miller Lite.

"THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'!"

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Dignity, 1; Pony, 0 Erin Walker

Steve, one of my three bosses, hiked up his khakis and sat on my desk. He had not been to the front desk in quite some time and took a moment to take it all in. I was the admin assistant, the receptionist, the office bitch at a job placement agency in the Loop. When I was hired, a handsome Englishman told me that I was to be the “Director of First Impressions.” I smiled brightly, reminding myself that the beauty of temping is how temporary it is. At the end of my three-month trial run, I was told that, if I were lucky and hardworking enough, I could be hired permanently. My three bosses were shocked to hear that I was walking away from this opportunity. Steve was there to change my mind.

“What do we need to do to get you to stay?” Usually, our interactions were through an intercom. With Steve, I preferred the buffer technology provided. On the phone, he was gruff. In person, he was disarming. Someone must have told him in business school to maintain eye contact at all times. His bloodshot blue eyes locked onto mine aggressively. He leaned forward and smiled briefly, letting me know that I was on his team. I noticed that his Bluetooth was still in his large red ear.

“I appreciate it, but I need to move on to other things.” This is a lie. Like many in my generation, I was told student loan debt was “good” debt. I had a nice scholarship, but that only covered half my tuition, so I graduated with a B.A. in English and negative money. I hated this job, but I needed to save some money and pay some loans before I could even consider grad school. The truth is I didn’t have any prospects. But the thought that this could become permanent, like a record or a scar, propelled me to jump without a net. Waiting tables was better than this mind-numbing clerical work.

“Is it money? We have it. We can get you more money,” said Steve, undeterred.

“You mean you could have been paying me more?” I asked, innocently.

“Well, no, but I mean, not until we decided we’d like to offer you the permanent 88

position. We’ve been through four admins this year, and we finally found the one we like.” I’m the one. Where’s my rose, Steve? Where’s my rose?

I didn’t take the bait. “Again, I appreciate it, but I can’t.”

“Is there something else we can do?” Steve looked around for something to occupy his hands.

His eyes narrowed on the one thing I didn’t want him to touch, my treasure, my giant rubber band ball. His pink beefy hand picked up my raison d’être. It was the size of a Chicago-style softball, 16” around. Somehow adding rubber bands to the ball made my sad, manila-folder of a day a little brighter. It’s how I marked time. The bigger it got, the closer I was to leaving. Some people buy stress balls; I made my own, and Steve was manhandling it, tossing it between each hand, talking to me about how I can possibly work my way up in the company. Maybe even a sales rep position.

A note about the sales reps: All of them were men in their mid 20s-early 30s. Redbull cans littered their desks. They liked to drop off resumes for me to edit five minutes before my shift ended, as they walked out the door, no doubt meeting the boyyyzzz for IPAs or running to a Crossfit class. Their leader, the sales division head, recently had me run around the city to print a “very important poster” for a meeting. It was last minute, so I had to go to four copy places to find one that could print it in time. I lugged a giant poster board back to the office, through wind tunnels, and discovered the poster wasn’t for work, but for their fantasy football party that night. And then there’s the sexual harassment that reached Lifetime movie levels.

It was so gross and blatant that I initially assumed they were being ironic, poking fun of Don Draper types from a bygone era. When I complained to the man who hired me, he said he sympathizes and asked me out for a drink. But I digress. The point is: 89

I didn’t want to be a sales rep, and I’m positive that Steve didn’t want me to be one either. “…so if you stay on that would really help us out. And later, we can help you out.

Just tell us what you want.” This conversation needed to end.

“A pony,” I replied.

“Excuse me?” His bushy eyebrows shot up his ruddy forehead.

“You heard me.” Résumés were piled on my desk. I started to sort through them. “Oh, a pony? Ha. I get it.” He didn’t. “How about a raise instead? I can bump you up one dollar an hour.” Steve stopped tossing my rubber band ball.

Negotiations require laser focus. “Nope.” I did not look up from my filing.

“Two dollars,” he said, his voice dropping a decibel. I leaned towards him, matching his volume.

“One pony,” I repeated.

Steve looked around, exasperated, hoping to catch someone’s eye, as if to say, Is she for real? Without backup, he stayed the course.

“Seriously. The truth is we really don’t want to train a new girl, so final offer, three dollars? What do you say?”

I paused. I did need the money. I lived in an 800 square foot garden apartment with a friend and could barely afford the rent. What is a year more? I could put up with the inappropriate comments, the three moody bosses, the inane conversations about working out and the barrage of Will Ferrell movie references, but then I looked at that dumb rubber band ball. Imagine how big it would be in a year. The dull pink, beige, green bands stretched as far as they could go before inevitably snapping.

“Thank you again, but no pony, no stay-y.” I turned around and pulled up Google on my computer. Steve got up and stood there for a second, shifting his weight from side to side. This did not go as he planned.

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“Well, if you change your mind…” He started to walk away, his face redder than normal.

“Oh, Steve?” I called. He turned around, hope in his eyes. He thought I was playing hardball.

“Can you please not steal my rubber band ball?” He looked down, surprised to see himself gripping it.

“Oh, sorry.” He placed it on my desk, lightly.

“Thanks, you’re a champ,” I said with my back to him, a $21,000 pony named Horseradish for sale on my screen. When I can afford him in 48 years, I’ll rename him Dignity.

Dignity, 1; Pony, 0 was originally written for a graduate school course, Reading Nonfiction, at the University of New Orleans, 2015.

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For the Soul of France Book Review Howard Hunter It is in our DNA to search for analogies in order to make sense of our own era. The right side of the brain, according to author Iain McGilchrist, seeks to contextualize. But what can we say about a period fraught with political polarization, irrationality, crazy conspiracy theories, mob violence, and bigotry with fascist overtones thrown in? Well, I would say start with France during her fin de siècle.

In his brilliant work For the Soul of France, Frederick Brown takes the reader on a cultural/political romp through Paris from 1880 through about 1910. He sets up the paradigms that fuel the culture wars of the day — Catholic and royalist resurgence after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, economic failures due to corruption of a major bank and the aborted Panama Canal, the failed putsch of General Boulanger, and Gustave Eiffel’s 300-meter tower that pitted modernists against traditionalists in a battle over aesthetics. By the time Captain Alfred Dreyfus faced a military court-martial in 1894 for selling secrets to the Germans, France was already deeply divided between a secular and anticlerical Republicanism and a conservative Catholic nationalism suspicious of democracy.

The political/cultural right used anti-Semitism as a rhetorical weapon to discredit the opposition, and no institution was more Catholic, royalist and anti-Semitic than the army.

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That Dreyfus was convicted because he was a Jew is beyond dispute. The real traitor was Major Esterhazy who was in debt for gambling and keeping a mistress. When it became obvious, the army tried to cover it up and later claimed that Esterhazy and Dreyfus conspired together. As the Dreyfusards (like Emile Zola) pressured the Republican government to reopen the case, the French general staff convened to reinforce the party line; as one general said to the other, “What do you care that that Jew is on Devil’s Island.” But the case started to unravel; intelligence officer Colonel Hubert Henry, who had fabricated evidence, put a bullet through his own head. When Dreyfus went before a second military tribunal in 1899, he was again found guilty, but it was such a sham that he received a pardon from the French government, and shortly thereafter, an appeals court fully exonerated him. In 1906,

Photo by Shay Steckler

Dreyfus was reinstated with his military rank and back pay. He served in the Great War with distinction as a Lieutenant Colonel.

So why does this book resonate beyond a good period piece? First of all, the Dreyfus case was based on a lie, and the more the army went with innuendo and fabricated evidence all within an anti-Semitic echo chamber, the more certain they became of Dreyfus’s guilt (think: charges of stolen election). Secondly, right-wing and Catholic newspapers kept raising the specter of an international Jewish Syndicate (think: charges of deep state). Finally, nationalist mobs always threatened to disrupt the proceedings, and during the trial, there was an actual cabal to overthrow the government that failed. Dreyfus’s lawyer Ferdinand Labori was shot in the back in an assassination attempt during the second trial.

Brown has written award-winning biographies of Flaubert and Zola. He knows the period and the characters well. Nevertheless, I would have liked to have known Alfred Dreyfus the man better, who appears more as a pawn than a developed character. Yet that is small change for a fine and important work that makes one realize the Belle Epoque was hardly that Belle. Perhaps these kinds of historical studies are what we need in order to press on, to know that humanity can prevail even in the bleakest of times.

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The Proust Questionnaire with

Mary Beth Ellis

This now infamous questionnaire was inspired by French writer Marcel Proust.

Who better to kick off our inaugural volume than Metairie Park Country Day School's longest tenured faculty member and French Department Chair Mary Beth Ellis? And to boot, Madame Ellis is indeed one of the few faculty members who have read Proust in the original French.

What do you consider your greatest achievement? Getting to the ashram I

was searching for in India

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Reading all day and playing with

my Dobermans

What is your current state of mind? Extremely happy and calm What is your favorite occupation? Teaching literature to students who

love ideas

What is your most treasured possession? My 2 Dobermans What or who is the greatest love of your life? My spiritual search What is your favorite journey? To India What is your most marked characteristic? A bit spacey When and where were you the happiest? In India What is it that you most dislike? Negativity What is your greatest fear? None What is your greatest extravagance? Books Which living person do you most despise? Can’t think of any What is your greatest regret? Not staying in India longer Which talent would you most like to have? Playing the guitar Where would you like to live? Probably India What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Not understanding that

we create our reality

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The Crossword Puzzle Click anywhere on the crossword to print. Enjoy over a favorite beverage or dessert.

Solution (should you need it) on p. 97.

Hall of Academe ACROSS 1 A Musketeer 6 Raced 12 Jamaican precursor to reggae 15 Dextrous leader?

19 Round bread 20 Luisiana, por ejemplo 21 Ballet step 22 Fight at ten paces 23 Speak aloud 24 Sly 25 Almond liqueur 27 With 53-across, a hallowed institution 29 Romeo's in-laws 30 Bona _____ 31 Poet Silverstein 33 Attacked 34 Penn, Payton, or Patterson 38 A name for Saint Peter 42 Finnick of the Hunger Games 44 Cogito-sum connector 45 Of the largest continent 47 It starts with two all-beef patties...

52 Prevaricated 53 See 27-across 57 Classic hat style 59 U.S. gov't agency 60 Long time follower?

61 Humorously humble response to praise 62 Everyone's doing it, for now 63 Ages and ages 65 Brief spasm 67 Airport schedule abbr.

68 Version before revision 71 Where one went to school 74 Pillars that flank a Greek temple entrance 76 Pirates like a bottle of this with their yo-ho-hos 77 Behold in Latin 79 Whence secret admirers admire?

80 Life sci.

Sean Patterson 81 Certain black birds 83 A kind of tag?

86 Cobb and Burrell, among others 87 Sign up 91 A certain one ends with "...and a sense of humor."

94 Where David slew Goliath 95 In pain 96 Intense and violent, colloquially 97 Genesis maker 98 "Me, too!"

101 Where Mount Carmel really is 105 Gumbo is basically this 106 "For real" alternative 110 Pleasant inflection or tune 112 Musical symbol 114 Indulges 116 Founding head, circa 1929, and this journal's namesake 124 Stylish footwear 125 Audrey Tautou title role 126 New Orleans novelist George Washington _____ 127 Preposition of interest?

128 Anonymous surname 129 Southern poet Sidney (or a beloved Ms. Watson) 130 Industrial aluminum corp.

131 Broadway gas 132 Shorter albums 133 State as fact 134 Respond to a joke DOWN 1 "I coulda been a contender" instead of this 2 Carry 3 Jabba's kind 4 Olive genus 5 The end of a letter?

6 Choose 7 Not up 8 Procedural unit 9 "____ Nagila" 10 German river

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11 Silly fools 12 Distanced 13 VP Harris 14 "Pronto!"

15 "Hello" singer 16 Brass mufflers 17 Davis or Midler 18 The winner wouldn't say this 26 Grading guide 28 Ocasek of the Cars 32 1953 John Wayne title role 34 One's essential identity 35 Great Lake 36 Like mature cheese 37 You might do this in a class or meeting 39 Victorian cab 40 Former name of Kazakhstan's capital 41 Hitchcock title 43 "Peer Gynt" playwright 46 Objectivist Rand 48 Letters on the 4 button 49 Choral music piece 50 Heart artery

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51 Orange ghost in Pac-Man 53 Rogue 54 Without function 55 Slander 56 A trip around the sun 58 Give stars to 64 Scottish "wee" 66 Acquire 68 Thespian's pursuit 69 Written in ancient letters 70 Pennsylvania sect 71 Open _____ of worms 72 Where T comes?

73 "Lion King" director Julie 75 At least 78 Dancing shoes 80 Wager 82 Gov't assistance stipend 84 Online shopping 85 Joplin tune 88 "_____ a Song Go Out of My Heart" 89 Wise spice?

90 Melt 92 Sulking

93 At the end of the week, they might precede F 99 Music genre edgier than Top-40 100 They're not hits 102 More sore 103 Highest peak in the Rockies 104 Midsummer sun sign 106 Bad situation 107 Sheepish?

108 100, in Italy 109 A noble gas 111 Song syllables 113 Kind of point that's the center of attention 115 Assistant 117 It's Latin "you love" 118 Camera part with a cap 119 Barre bend 120 Moana's Gramma 121 Morehouse or Howard, e.g.

122 Web journal 123 Enthusiastic affirmative

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Contributors and Staff Justin Gricus's first concert was Queensrÿche live in the Bangor Auditorium in Penobscot County, Maine. He once caught a pick at a Springsteen performance, and one time he was escorted out of a Guns ‘N Roses show. He fears his glory days have inevitably passed him by.

Robin Heindselman was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in karaoke last year but withdrew her name in protest of the enduring popularity of "Don't Stop Believin'."

She currently divides her time between Château Marmont and the Country Day senior lounge.

Howard Hunter was born in Touro Hospital in 1957. Except for obligatory sojourns out to Old Metairie he has not really left the area. He is currently ideating on how he can overcome his own ontology by taking deep dives — usually in water.

His essay “The Proustian Morass: Jerry Lewis and the Madeleine (why can’t it be called lemon cake?)” will be published next month.

Betsy Kern prefers luxuriating indoors in the air conditioning with a steady drip of caffeine. She can be found there indulging in a wide range of interests, from Victorian literature to celebrity pop culture of the early aughts and today. She can talk for at least two hours about Jane Austen or Britney Spears with equal fervor.

Take your pick.

Jennifer LaCorte Marsiglia loves rainbows and sunshine, a cup of hot coffee and a warm cheese bun (not necessarily simultaneously) and is perpetually cold. She enjoys music all day yet can't sing to save her life.

Mike Miley wholeheartedly subscribes to Francois Truffaut’s claim that the ideal existence is watching three movies a day and reading three books a week.

Sean Patterson sadly never had the chance to meet famed composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, but it's probably for the best, as he once spent the day with legendary comedian Mickey Rooney and nearly killed him with a hot dog. Sean is a sucker for perfect rhymes, witty repartee, and fussy British murder mysteries. He 96

can easily be lured into mischief with the promise of free nachos and bottomless coffee.

Linda Reno was born and raised in the American Midwest but early adulthood brought her way down below the Mason-Dixon line, and she has never looked back.

The sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and culture of the Global South inspire all her work. Throughout all her endeavors, it is this visceral sense of culture that she seeks to both reveal and revel in.

Pam Skehan is a self-taught angler with several hours of experience. Her first catch was a half-pound bluegill with stunning coloration of blue and yellow stripes caught from a dock, which she painted in gouache. Her personal best is a twopound bass caught off the side of a bridge and captured in acrylic. She has dabbled in the art of gyotaku, Japanese fish-printing. She admires the intricate sculptural skills of fly fishers and is hoping to learn how to tie lures.

Shay Steckler likes to spend lengthy, scrumptious afternoons at cafés on Île Saint Louis, Place du Tertre, or Rue de Buci though she prefers Île Saint Louis because of the view of the water. Shay is mesmerized by vast expanses of water and would like to watch the ocean from a Nancy Meyers-inspired kitchen. She prefers the scent of gardenia, joie de vivre, and going out for dessert and feels that most conversations are improved with a well-timed jazz hand.

Erin Walker avoids direct

sunlight, but she is definitely not a vampire. She's more like a cat than a dog and more like a circle than a square. People pressing the elevator button when it has clearly been pressed makes her irrationally angry. She will tell you if you have broccoli in your teeth and support your decision to wear white after Labor Day. 97