Creo, Creare, Creavi

For Z, who was kind enough to ask.

I don't have a child; presently, it's fair to be skeptical that I will. Not because that's how I intended it to work out, but because we're most credible when we view the world as it is. But tonight, I found myself wondering what wisdom I would have to impart. I would not be young for a father now -- not old perhaps, but not young -- older, for example, by seven years than my father was when I was born. When my father was the age I am now, I was seven. The mind reels; I digress.

The occasion of my wondering was my attendance at a lovely performance at the Hard Rock Cafe (of all places) by young pianist Jonathan Biss, alongside PSO Artistic Adviser Sir Andrew Davis -- a cesspool of commodified music misery, with the usual menagerie of outstated rock and roll onesies, guitars, platinum records, and the like, punctured to its core by a Steinway baby grand and musicians worthy of better environs. I learned of the performance only this afternoon near quitting time, and despite my other plans and the event's fund-raiser-esque pricetag, despite my lack of suitable clothing, despite my recent penuriousness and my lack of interest in Biss's weekend program of Schumann with the greater PSO, despite my lack of companion (and whom would I ask these days, really), something about the event called to me. I negotiated the best of my business casual and bike attire, lingered at the office past six, and finally unreined my steed and headed over the Smithfield Street Bridge into the stinking brownfield of Station Square.

I was not surprised to find the event relatively uncrowded, and I was only vaguely unsettled when Sir Andrew and Biss walked in like any other attendees, Biss in shirt tails and corduroy and funky hipster sneakers, Davis in tweed and dungarees, and began to mingle with the distinguished guests. I sat at the bar and minded my beer, my rough and tumble bag stowed out of sight along the bar's footrail. Around me was a smattering of older symphony patrons, who speak as though knowledgeable but I wonder (my own ignorance of the classical canon, admittedly, makes me a poor ombudsman, but my suspicions remain), and younger musicians self-possessed and silent. My $40 bought me a ticket good for some specialty drink involving pomegranate that I refused on principle to accept, preferring to pay cash for a good beer, and granted me access to a buffet of cheese cubes and mustard and fruit. These were the refreshments I was promised in the promotional materials. I spoke to no one, straining to find hidden meaning in the thin literature handed me at the door concerning public radio and TV, and listing the program for the evening, which was as follows:

Sonata in c minor, Op. 13, "Pathetique," first movement, Beethoven;

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, second movement, Schumann; and

The Dolly Suite, first and second movement, Faure.

Finally, a WQED DJ explaining that some delay was in order given a disparity between the number of tickets sold and the number of attendees in the house, I wandered to the front row, where an unoccupied seat beckoned. I tucked my bag beneath it, silenced my phone, and waited.

Biss finally emerged, casually, and with little fanfare turned to his labor. His Pathetique seemed sloppy, but in a most forgivable way. If I'm hearing missed notes, and more than a few, surely you're missing, but Biss's touch was light and vigorous and his pacing was merciless. The performance was riveting, Biss so close to my seat I could contemplate the peculiar irregularities in his breathing and the sound of his left foot thrusting to and fro beneath him in rhythm with the music. If anything, the errors merely served to emphasize the singular intimacy of the performance, the humanness of the performer, the wisdom in my decision to attend. By contrast, I am now listening to the same movement as recorded by Richard Goode, whose entire cycle of Beethoven's thirty-two sonatas I am in the process of moving from CD into iTunes, and it has an almost clinical polish to it that is at once admirable and alienating.

Kreisleriana I found less compelling, perhaps for the same reason I was unmoved by the prospect of the Schumann-heavy program associated with Biss's weekend visit to the PSO. I appreciated the discussion about Schumann's torment that the DJ and Biss engaged in before Biss took up the piece, and so educated I appreciated some of what Biss said about the movement's nascent passion, but overall I found myself nonplused.

For Dolly's Suite, Davis joined Biss at the lower register of the piano, and the two engaged in a playful and delightfully well coordinated bit of play, in engaging this piece for children, the second movement of which, I learned, is aptly entitled on some scores, "Meow."

But this isn't about the music, or at least isn't about the particular performance detailed.

I do this sometimes, wander off to things by myself, and I've written about it here before, though I'm too lazy to hunt down an example. For serious art, really, solitude seems necessary to unfettered appreciation. One can't very well immerse oneself in magnificence while chatting with an idle companion, who more often than not is more or less interested than one is in the work presently at issue. Better to disappear into it, into art, leaving everything behind, trusting in one's return but at the same time indifferent. Should I find myself forever imprisoned in any number of Picasso's blue period pieces, would I grieve? Perhaps -- but I'd look good doing so, hanging on a wall at MoMA or the Louvre, eyed hungrily by a multi-ethnic smorgasbord of jealous onlookers: this is me here, and you there -- have fun getting through customs, coaxing your children to eat strained peas, balancing your checkbooks.

Biss is a third generation world-class musician, son to two violinists, grandson to a noted cellist, inheritor of lifetimes' musical wisdom. With that pedigree, that he is an alumni of the prestigious Curtis Institute (Lang Lang among his handful of classmates) seems almost an afterthought.

I have been reading prodigiously of late, prodigiously for me, prodigiously for law school and post-law school me, as though in preparation for something. Fiction, all fiction all the time, until a recent left turn into non-fiction for purposes of research, but even so still in fiction, immersing myself in others' creations, worlds and psyches alien and familiar, constantly leaning into the buffeting caused by demanding an exit, however temporary, from all of this. The trend goes back further, but since Thanksgiving alone, my reading list includes (but is not exhausted by) the following:

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
Mary McCarthy, Birds of America
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Paul Auster, Oracle Night
Paul Theroux, My Secret History
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Banville, The Sea

In addition, I am currently reading, if reading is the word, Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions.

This is not to pat myself on the back. I could have read far more in that span, and probably should have. Rather, it is in service of a larger point that I enumerate. I haven't just been reading these books, but scrutinizing them, immersing myself at once in their narratives and their manifestations of craft. I didn't consciously choose to do this; it just happened. My readings, thus oriented, may sound in discussion like those of a critic, an academic, and that is my training. But I am reading differently now. I am all technician these days, never affected by a passage that I don't ask, Why? It's a thrilling way to read, an engagement that makes everything else pale by comparison, but it's instrumental as well.

This development coincides with, or arises from, my growing sense that I ought to be writing. Not writing, in the elementary sense -- I do that every day -- but composing, creating, writing with a real sense of purpose, writing like graffiti, writing like those handful of words you'll never forget, whether you found them in a film, a book, a seminar, or crossing a lover's lips in the darkest hour of night. It's thrilling, this sort of reading, ennervating, terrifying.

Which brings me back to where I began. I don't feel terribly wise, or even as knowledgeable as I'd like. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time feeling inadequate to whatever task presents itself, confident in my competence but entirely unconvinced of my excellence, and unsatisfied with anything less. Nothing is more tragic than a lazy perfectionist.

But I know one thing I would say to my child as often as I might, no matter his age or inclination or peculiar ability, my one grasp at wordly wisdom, my sole excuse for myself. I would say, "Create." Make something new. Create. Create.

Create.

If there is a God, a Heaven, a meting out of judgment, surely creation will be valued most high and destruction villified. There's nothing new in this thought, which is surely derivative of any number of sources I might name were I not so weak of memory, but in that, at least, they were right. To create is everything.

And by this I think in larger terms. Snob though I may be, I would not intend that my child should take me to mean that he must create something that would assume a place in this or that canon, only that he create rather than obey, for obedience is not creation, it's survival. I would have my child be proud, and defiant, and undaunted by the thought of the billions who have preceded him, each trying to add something to the human mosaic in one way or another, courageous before the inevitable fear that there is nothing new to add, unwilling to accept mediocrity even if it is -- or precisely because it is -- the rule.

(And then my child, being a child, would sigh and turn on his heel to storm from the room as though I'd insisted that he eat brussels sprouts, but the memory would linger.)

I have been an absentee blogger, and for those who drop by with any sort of regularity I apologize -- not so much for the silence as for the lack of explanation. My dedicated readership may be passing small, but I know you're there, and for all your patience with my erratic maundering you deserve more than implacable silence.

But this is not to announce my return. Rather, this is the explanation I have owed. I have liked a few things I have written here, more than a few perhaps, but the medium does not lend itself to the discipline necessary to the sort of thing I would like to create, at least not in my hands. I lack the patience for revision, here, and it frees me from the complication of sustaining my confidence in the face of creative adversity, which in turn impoverishes the work itself.

I can, in short, do better. And it's about goddamned time.

So I'm retreating to meatspace for the time being, turning my undivided energy to a larger project I hesitate to call a novel but (for want of a better word) might as well, something I've been playing with in my head for quite a while, and toward which I've been researching of late. I don't assume I can do this, that I'm technically adequate to the task or tenacious enough to stay with it for as long as it takes to find out, but I'm so very sick of wondering, of fancying myself something I take for granted but refuse to vindicate in deed.

I won't officially wrap this up, because I'm not convinced it won't serve some purpose as a sort of overflow valve when I've been writing long enough on my own to create some momentum. And those of you who really care for my brand of blather might come back every month or so for a while to see if there's anything new. But this is, if nothing else, a substantial hiatus I'm announcing.

Thank you for reading. Perhaps I'll have something more substantial for you in the distant future. But that's the question when it comes to writing anything with literary pretensions, isn't it -- for how long can one delay gratification before tearing oneself apart, like Van Gogh, like Schumann?

Let's find out, shall we?

Lolita, the Great American Novel?

I hate that phrase: Great American Novel. It's no different than any other attempt to apply abosolute superlatives to art of any sort, and as such it's an intrinsically silly exercise. That's not to say it isn't fun, though.

So who are the usual suspects, generally? Gatsby, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn? Maybe we should throw Roth's Great American Novel out of respect for his hubris?

I submit, and I'm sure a Google search would reveal that I'm not the first, that it's eminent emigre Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's brilliant novel, his third composed in the English Language, Lolita.

I haven't read the book in four or five years, have not in any way been prompted to consider it as a candidate, but damn if it didn't just pop into my head, as I contemplate my own incipient project, that the answer is obvious.

What does Lolita have that justifies the brazen compliment / epithet? Let's consider, shall we?:

We'll begin, out of respect for the author, by noting that it is a celebration of the language, a travelogue if you will of what Nabokov characterized, in precisely this connection, as his "love affair with the English language." That's a healthy start, but of course every author cited above would have confessed to a love of the language, so that's not enough.

What else? Well, the book, textually, contextually, and philosophically seriously games this nation's paradoxical obsession with the prurient, its persistent inner conflict between its baser urges and its puritanical origins, its embarrassed celebration (ongoing) of sex and violence and its latent guilt over its pleasure in same. These factors take it somewhere Gatsby never aspired to reach, somewhere Melville wouldn't have dared to go. Both of those books principally concerned themselves with American striving. And of course striving is a critical ingredient in American-ness, to be sure, but it is only one ingredient, and there are many.

Next (and I recognize this point is debatable, but I'm not a scholar and don't have to deal with peer review), Lolita, better than any of the other novels named, explores quietly the nature of the sort of immigration that forged this nation. Not the refugee aspect so much -- although Nabokov was that, in at least some sense -- but the aspirational sense of it -- give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses -- coming to this nation not to escape appalling oppression or genocide, but merely for capital-O Opportunity, an open-endedness that is peculiarly our heritage, if somewhat more in word, in mythos, than in fact.

Then of course there's the veneration of youth to the point of pathology. Everyone loves their children -- there's nothing peculiar about that. But the celebration of youth, the veneration of it, the singular terror at the thought of aging and the ludicrous lengths we go to forestall and deny it, these things are American, and long before this country succumbed utterly to youth's thrall Nabokov wrote about with brilliant clarity. The book, notwithstanding its censors' protests to the contrary, was no defense or rationalization of pedophilia of any sort -- rather, it was a metaphor for a deep unsettledness most of us share with the thought of aging. And the cycle that reflects is self-perpetuating -- we are terrified of aging because we are all too familiar with our own discomfiture at people aging around us. Reification, to leverage a scholarly sort of term.

Finally, at least among encompassing aspects of the work, there is the on-the-road aspect. No country so celebrates its spaciousness as this country does, and of course in the past hundred years this has manifested in a perverse obsession with the automobile. In this regard as well, Nabokov's sense of this place was ahead of its time. Of course, the road novel aspects of Lolita (and couldn't one argue that his was the first true road novel?) reflects more than mere transience, itself a hallowed American tradition. It reflects precisely the aspirational facet so critical to this culture's sense of itself, the idea of escape and reinvention, which I won't dwell on since it's the subject of too much thought already -- it's become a truism of sorts, and I won't pursue it here.

Then there are more fragmentary aspects of the work that further qualify it for the ridiculous title: the celebrity culture emblematized by Quilty; pop culture refracted through the prism of Dolores, a teeny-bopper entirely in the sway of commercial pop impulses, submerged in the tropes of pop culture that now bombard our children with frightening force and persistence; the preternatural obsession with the One Who Got Away, and so on.

So there -- the case is made and I've persuaded myself. If any novel composed in the English language deserves the title Great American Novel, it is Lolita, by V.V. Nabokov, Russian emigre extraordinaire (by way, of course, of France), who saw us ever so much more astutely than we see ourselves.

Berube on Kubrick's Silence in 2001

While he attends the MLA, Michael Berube has posted, in two parts, his 1993 essay offering a novel explication of 2001 as, inter alia, a political rumination steeped in the Cold War that prevailed at the movie's 1968 release. The point is not the accuracy of the account; I've read no scholarship on the movie, and can't gauge whether Berube was fair to the accounts he sought to correct. I do find his account salutary, however, and it does an excellent job of combining excruciatingly close analysis of the film's very limited dialogue with big-picture consideration of the political context (not just the Cold War, but the space race generally as well as the near culmination of the Apollo missions), as well as an intriguing contrast between the movie as filmed and the novel treatment Arthur Clarke offered as a post hoc explication of the bare screenplay. (Indeed, when Berube's done with this part of the analysis, one wonders how Clarke and Kubrick worked together well enough to bring the film into being.)

Regardless, for those who love the movie and the filmmaker as much as I do, it's a worthy, if lengthy, read.

Stop Ticking!

Tonight found me in Braddock, at a library under renovation, an astonishing building with double-hung windows ten feet on a side, stately woodwork in remarkable repair, a fresco newly restored on the ceiling of an auditorium tiered with a variety of seat I have never seen. The seats sat rest vertically, perfectly upright, until folded down, when the seatbacks drop down to a more comfortable angle. The hardware is pewter or bronze or brass improbably ornate.

A partially dismantled organ console stood just off stage right, a tall panel in the wall above it removed to reveal the wing of the stage, which was gently tilted forward, as though to slide the players to the floor at the foot of the audience. The stage was adorned with the suggestion of a two-story house framed in aged beams that suggested driftwood; a bed, a two-sided vanity, and a miniature of the set on a table toward the rear of the stage like an optical illusion between mirrors; a catwalk from the house's upper story to the balcony above.

I don't really do reviews here. Recommendations, I do. Raves, I do. And this is both of the latter.

The play is Quantum Theatre's production of After Mrs. Rochester, and if a review is something you'd like, try the Times Literary Supplement; locally the Trib offers a piece about the play and the library in which it is staged. Rather, it's the experience that interests me, tonight in particular.

On our way to the theatre, I and my friends talked a bit about Braddock and especially its universally well-regarded Mayor John Fetterman, someone who looks somewhat more biker than Mayor, but sounds all Mayor as soon as he opens his mouth. His left forearm bears a prominent tattoo of Braddock's zip code, someone said. Though I sat next to him at a talk not long ago, I hadn't noticed. As we pulled up the library, though, a very large man stood on the dark street by the library, and offered friendly suggestion as to where we might park. As he gestured with his left hand, the tattoo came into view -- the Mayor was directing traffic at an alternative theatre event. When we walked by on our way to the show, he shook each of our hands and introduced himself; it looks like glad-handing on the page, but it was far too affable, too casual, to be only that.

Once we were situated, I skimmed the program. I knew the play was a sort of biographical piece about Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1960's-era book that purported to serve as a prequel of sorts to Jane Eyre, recounting the life of Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad woman locked in Rochester's attic for most of Bronte's novel. I knew Jean Rhys was a character at two different ages (portrayed by two different actresses), and I knew as well that Bertha was a character.

And now I need to rewind. Quantum's first production this season, last month, was The Crucible, which they staged in Mellon Park in Shadyside (review). It remains arguably my favorite Quantum performance, the classic play so passionately and inventively rendered, so ably performed. In particular, the Proctors, performed by Robin Walsh and Hugo Armstrong, were simply astonishing. Never on stage have I seen such incredible chemistry, both emotional and physical, and within the strictures of Miller's play the latter was especially striking. Quantum did not meddle with the play's origins or let anachronism spoil its clarity; but even within a period-faithful performance, Armstrong and Walsh breathed each others' breath. That's the only way I can think to describe it; they were so utterly evocative as a couple, and their combined performance suggested what is so often lost in period drama, especially on the stage: the fact that no matter where, no matter when, husbands and wives may and do achieve a degree of intimacy like nothing else on earth. Their performances, never overwrought or oversold, didn't imply marriage or signify it: they exemplified it.

And Walsh herself was a revelation: even within her period dress, the restraint and decorum the role largely requires, she exuded a sensuality difficult to put into words. "Hot" sort of works, but it's incomplete. I couldn't take my eyes off her whenever she was anywhere in view. I didn't want to.

After Mrs. Rochester reunites the two -- Armstrong as, inter alia, Ford Madox Ford, Rhys' lover and first publisher, and as Mr. Rochester himself (Jane Eyre, too, appears, evocatively cast with the same actress who plays Rhys' unnamed daughter); and Walsh, brilliantly, as Bertha.

Walsh's Bertha, rendered without restraint in filthy corset and tangled hair, spouting repetitive creole apostrophes and lurking under and against the skin of Rhys at all ages, the demoness whose exorcism from Rhys' psyche limns the narrative arc of the play, is simply incandescent. And "hot" isn't even the word.

Bertha, as insinuated into this play, is the closest thing to Caliban I've ever seen outside The Tempest -- primal, avaricious, and bereft. Walsh injects such physicality into the role, infuses it with so much force and grief, and extracts (evokes is to weak a word) all of the sympathy for Bertha that Jane Eyre simply doesn't afford. Once again, she was impossible to ignore, lurking over Rhys' shoulder, acrobatically moving between the set's "attic," Rhys' bed and writing table cum vanity, at one point climbing a black ladder behind the organ console to lurk laughing in the shadows. Her vocabulary, perhaps a few dozen words, perhaps a hundred, stunted by the simple adamance of her desire for freedom -- from the attic, from England, from Rhys' mind -- and animated by her lust for some sense of a self she has forgotten, nevertheless is made decadent by the breadth of her expression.

Walsh is not young, is not lithe and glamorous (Karla Boos, Quantum's director who cast herself as the elder Rhys (and who acquitted herself well in a most challenging role -- that of a relatively composed narrator who bestrides the chaos about her that manifests her personal and artistic torment), has the shapely elegance of a woman aging well), but her raw animal fervence, deployed to brilliant effect in both of the abovementioned roles but in very different ways, is nothing short of mesmerizing.

On the way out, standing in front of the library on a dark deserted street in Braddock, a police car pulled up as I spoke into my phone. I demurred to the man on the other end: "Yes Officer?" I inquired. "Is everything okay?" he asked nicely. "Yes, fine, thanks -- just leaving the play." A friendly neighborhood police officer politely asking after my welfare. First the Mayor, now this -- in dilapidated, forgotten Braddock, a compelling show of civic pride.

Braddock has its best foot forward. As does Quantum, which has led off its season with two gems. And as for Walsh, well, I do believe I'm hopelessly smitten.

Visit Braddock; see the show; and enjoy it from deep in the depths of the first of Andrew Carnegie's thousand-plus libraries.

Best Times Film Review Ever

You needn't follow the link; Nathan Lee's review of The Covenant follows in its entirety:

WHAT'S THE 411 ON THOSE WITH GUYS?
By Nathan Lee

“Hey, what’s up? I tried calling you last night.”

“I know. I was at a movie.”

“What’d you see?”

“ ‘The Covenant.’ ”

“What’s that again?”

“It’s that movie about these guys who are witches, and they go to this creepy school, and there’s this new kid — Sebastian Stan — who’s, like, the bad witch, and they fight and stuff. It’s super lame.”

“Are they cute at least?”

“Totally. The main guy, Caleb — Steven Strait — has, like, these big lips and sexy eyes, and he drives a Mustang, and everything. And he’s friends with this crazy, like, blond dude, who looks kind of gay, and this motorcycle guy with long hair and some other guy. Actually, the whole thing is kind of gay. I mean, they’re on the swim team, right? And there’s this scene where they’re all in Speedos and everything.”

“Awesome. I think I saw the commercial. That’s the one with a car that explodes and gets put back together by magic, right?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the coolest part. The effects are super cheesy. Like at the end, when Caleb is fighting the evil transfer student, they fly around a barn and throw magic Jell-O at each other. I’m totally serious.”

“Is it scary, at least?”

“There’s this one part, where these spiders crawl all over this girl and go in her nose and stuff.”

“Ew.”

“Super ew.”

“The Covenant’’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The film is violently banal.

"They've gotta cut some good ones, I guess . . . "

. . . quoth the rather large, more or less tone deaf would-be American Idol with the scratches and bruises on her arms from a wrestling match with inanimate objects in a darkened fitting room.

This is why I'll never be a great writer: I simply can never look away long enough to make a note of anything. I stand there, transfixed (yes, that's the third time I've used that word here in a week; it's officially embargoed until further notice) by the trainwreck compulsion. I swore tonight was to be a writing night (I'm working on what I hope will be a much larger project -- not only offline, but in long hand (the ladies in the audience shriek)), and right up to the point I was to sit and write I did everything exactly as planned. Unfortunately, my plate of pasta lasted five minutes too long: Seinfeld, the last ten minutes of which I'd tuned in to pass the meal, ended and there I was still with more food on my plate. AI started, and I was lost.

I assume there are about a billion people blogging about AI, and that sort of thing is most certainly not on the agenda here. I will note, however, that it dawned on me while I watched that the show really embodies two competitions. We are all familiar with the principal competition to be dubbed American Idol. But tens of thousands of people audition, and at least some fraction of them simply must realize that they are competing for something else entirely: to be bad enough in an interesting enough way that their auditions will make the first episode. Which makes each one's indignation at being mocked all the more absurd. But I suppose that's part of the act, too: be a credulous mess in the audition room, then be righteously indignant to the camera on your way out the door, and perhaps in so doing increase the value of your stock enough to stay off the cutting room floor.

Warhol wept.

Cradle to Grave

The first person I befriended exclusively on the internet, Julie, was the friend to whom I was referred by a former colleague of mine because Julie happened to attend a law school in the southwest to which I was applying. My friend connected Julie and me, and she and I enjoyed a long conversation and flirtation via email without once hearing each other's voices, something that began as a sort of accident but became a ritual. In those months we invented an alternate reality, a world with its own religions and myths and superstitions, and we honored them with the same unwavering devotion as primitive farmers do the god of the harvest. Eventually, we met, and I spent a week (sleeping on the couch, alas) in her cramped studio apartment feeling increasingly uncomfortable with my own imposition. Eventually, we drifted apart; she graduated and took a position on the west coast, while I demurred on choosing a law school, and ultimately stayed in Pittsburgh. We probably have not talked in two years. That long story, however, is nothing I need to rehash or you need to hear.

I was reminded of her this evening when I finally worked my way through yesterday's Sunday Times. When we first corresponded, Julie described for me her passion for the Times, the Sunday edition of which she jokingly called her "woobie," and which she carried with her each sunday to her favorite cafe, where she sat and read at a chrome-rimmed formica table over a latte and in spite of the occasional brazen advances of alt-rock undergrads in mop tops and distressed denim with wallet chains hanging from hip to knee. We mused at the symmetry of our respective Sunday rituals, although in my case rather than fending off the importunings of others I espied from behind the Week in Review week after week the same line-up of attractive cafe denizens and crafted scripts in silence for how I would approach, imagining everything from the first clever, knowing, and self-effacing shot I would fire across her bow to our move, years hence, to Seattle, our children in private school, and our proud early retirement, children safely ensconced in the Ivy League and us in our retirement aerie overlooking Puget Sound. Then I would pause to wonder whether Puget Sound was really all that lovely, whether I'd like it, whether I'd find the raw, moist chill an inconvenience as the first licks of arthritis dried my joints. Then, more often than not, my future bride would finish her coffee, look at her watch, politely bus her dishes near the front of the cafe, and leave for the Shadyside street, leaving meaching in my bereavement, the examined life unlived.

But except in this regard, our rituals ran parallel. Julie told me she most enjoyed the obituaries, which struck me as odd. But I have always been nervous that the secret discoveries and preoccupations of others constitute things I'm missing, important things at that, and so I began paying more attention to the Obituary section. And indeed, like some sort of marooned would-be novelist cliche, I found in the enterprising writings of the death notices glimmers of poetry, hints of the aspirations of the authors, as well as fascinating hindsight glimpses into the lives of the memorable but largely unremembered.

Consider yesterday's headlines: Victorio de los Angeles, Soprano, Dies at 81; or how about Elizabeth Janeway, 91, Critic, Novelist and an Early Feminist; or perhaps Danny Sugerman, 50, Fan and Manager of Doors; and finally, Gerald Roberts, 85, Longtime Rodeo Star. Aside from the initial conclusion these obituaries suggest -- that rock and roll is a more hazardous trade to ply than bull riding -- what unites these four obituaries, at least for me, is that I've heard of none of them. Nevertheless, here they are, the four people the Newspaper of Record identified as the most relevant, the most notable, people to die in the prior few days. But get this: Sugerman, aside from being affiliated with the Doors from the age of 14, when he was hired by Morrison to put together a band scrapbook, was married at his death to Fawn Hall, perhaps the most infamous admin ever. And what of Roberts? He stunt doubled for Jack Lemmon, among others. Janeway kept counsel, and indeed kept company, with Betty Friedan. Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millett (though I must confess, if I were reading Millett's obit today instead of Janeway, it would suit my purposes equally well, since I've never heard of her either). Furthermore, Janeway defended Nabokov's Lolita, one of my 'desert island books,' against the censorship it once faced in this country. About de los Angeles, this delightful passage:

To some tastes, Ms. de los Angeles lacked temperament. By her own admission she was not an intellectually probing artist. But at her best she was an exquisite, unmannered, and deeply communicative singer. On stage, with her black hair, gleaming eyes and broad smile, she projected an openness and naivete that, coupled with her creamy voice, audiences adored.

I am woefully ignorant of opera, and so much of this terminology sounds like the rarefied argot of a wine connoiseur. Indeed, I wonder whether the obituary author ever heard de los Angeles sing, or simply worked from notes and the impressions of others.

Regardless, the pleasure in obituaries that Julie revealed to me, their unique lyricism, is not really what grasped me to day. Rather, it was this contrast: I have come to prefer the Sunday Styles wedding notices to the obituaries. The obits provide a usually favorable, never jaundiced view of the subject's life without the inconvenience of any prospect that the subject will deviate from the script; the target is a sitting duck. Marriages, new and old, are moving targets, and yet in the wedding notices one finds the same narrative conceit: a relationship and a nuptial frozen in time, described by reference to two converging trajectories, and informed by the assumption that one trajectory will thereafter suffice to account for both, the wedding vow at its most aspirational.

I'm also fascinated by the choice of feature wedding, the one of a dozen or two profiles that is blown up and described at greater length. I wonder why Judith Slovin and Roger Lowenstein didn't furnish a picture, what the stunning Elizabeth Victory (who eyes the camera with her chin down and her eyebrow almost imperceptibly arched in a lurid invitation) sees in the ordinary looking Scott Anderson (who smiles mechanically, entirely unaware of his new bride's devious leer), and whether Harley Abrevaya, the new Mrs. Andrew Heller, speaks with an accent. Of course, there is the token same-sex couple (rarely more than one), which the Times began featuring religiously a few years back -- today, the middle-aged Dee Mosbacher and Nanette Gartrell, one of whom has odd taste in eyewear, and both of whom could use new stylists.

This week's featured couple is Karen Bonin and Daniel Helmer, who are unusually young for top billing. The main photo attending their write-up, as opposed to the far more cliche second photo of them leaving their celebration under a traditional arch of raised sabers (Helmer being as he is an active-duty graduate of West Point) , is simply breathtaking. The groom's back in dress uniform is mostly toward us, his thick neck embraced in a collar perfectly trimmed, over which his scalp is shadowed by his military regulation hair only marginally more than his cheek is by stubble. His head dips slightly to meet Bonin's, brow to brow, and her left hand, newly be-ringed, is soft-focus as it drapes languidly over Helmer's shoulder. Karen herself is radiant even in black and white, her earring a diamond suspended like a tear from a perfect chain, complimented by what is almost certainly an heirloom necklace. Her mouth is gently open in a smile as easy and guileless as it is untainted by all the dread and fear that surely haunts her while her husband's fate in this time of war remains undetermined. Her clavicle alone is worthy of a poet more talented than I.

So why this preoccupation? Is it because I've never been married or despite that fact? It feels more like the fascination of discovery than any variation on envy. Because the write-ups are biased to the New York area, some of my interest derives from the fact that occasionally someone I know shows up: the daughter of the college professor who taught me how to love Nabokov (I already knew I did, but he provided unerring guidance and thus enhanced immeasurably my pleasure in V.V.N.'s novels); the semi-famous older sister of a grade-school friend who is now an actress and performance artists of sorts (evidently she was in Superstar, who knew?).

Sometimes, especially with the featured couple, the stories of how they came to marry are interesting, fraught with coincidence and redolent of destiny, often tacit aggrandizements of the love-at-first-sight paradigm so cherished by most Americans. About Dan and Daniel, the Times writes:

It was at a party during his senior year of hich school, his acceptance to West Point in hand, that a confidence Mr. Helmer sidled up to Karen Marie Bonin, a student from another New Jersey high school. Winin 45 minutes, he had fallen hard for Ms. Bonin's "perfect figure and passion for everything she does," he said. She recalled: "I was sort of awestruck. I'd never talked to anyone that comfortably."
They had their first date in May 1999. Though the evening ended without even a kiss, "the next day Dan dumped his date for th senior prom and asked me to go," Ms. Bonin said. That was pretty much it."

But let's pause to dissect this passage for a moment, shall we? When he says that a mere 45 minutes led him to fall hard for her "perfect figure" and "passion" for what she does, should we read this to be the Times writer's generous attempt to smooth the rough edges of a jock's crass allusions to his wife's surface beauty? Could they really have covered everything she did in 45 minutes at a high school dance? I mean, maybe; high school kids don't have the most interesting lives, but still. And then there's the whole prom thing: he dumped his prom date in May? How shitty is that? And was she his girlfriend, this date? What was he doing going on a date in the first place if she was? And about the date, am I the only who detects something like incredulity that high school kids would end a successful date without a kiss. I mean, jeez, what prudes!

The article continues with lots of cuteness that is wholly beyond reproach, and I wish the Helmers well: may they prosper, may Mr. Helmer not be yet another unnecessary casualty of our mismanaged war in Iraq, and so on. The same to all newlyweds. But can it ever really be that pat? Maybe that's the relevant distinction for me: that the pat answers of obituaries are somehow inconsequential; for better or worse, that narrative has ended. As a writer, I'm all too familiar with the ache of seeing something in print with my name on it that I would change in a dozen ways were the work out of my reach. And so it is with our lives after we're gone; the ink has dried, for better or worse. The lives of the departed are out of reach, beyond emendation. The lives of newlyweds, on the other hand, are clean slates, and so the same pithy reductive exercise rings dissonantl to me, albeit in delightful and unforeseen ways that never fail to amuse.