Ulysses: A Glorious Voyage

THE MORE IN TOUCH YOU ARE with your inner monologues, the easier it is to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Easier, but still not easy. An autonomic ease informs those fragmented thoughts and abrupt subject changes, but putting them into written words reveals a terrifying jumble. Song lyrics and other quotations; the distraction of a passerby; guilt, anger, hope, regret – each of us is the sum of a culture absorbed. Make that the culture of Dublin in 1904, add more characters whose heads we inhabit, follow them through that city over the course of a single day. That’s “Ulysses.”

Scott Shepherd and Cast
Photo by Maria Baranova

A high-school teacher advised me simply to launch into the book and not allow myself to be dismayed. A half-century later I took that advice, although I had the massive Cambridge Centenary edition in hand. It reproduces the 1922 text and surrounds it with essays and annotations. I was inspired to take on this task in anticipation of seeing a version of the story on stage. By the time I was in my theater seat, I’d gotten halfway through.

New York-based Elevator Repair Service has won an excellent reputation for adapting classic works of literature for the stage. I saw “Gatz,” their version of “The Great Gatsby,” at EMPAC in Troy, NY, in 2008, two years before its acclaimed debut at New York’s Public Theater. Improbably set in a shabby office building, it opened with Scott Shepherd as a frustrated office worker who finds a paperback copy of “Gatsby” in a desk and begins reading it aloud, thus taking on the character of narrator Nick Carraway and soon drawing his fellow-workers into performing the story. Including every word of the book, “he said”s and “she said”s included.

The Rockwell goes MAD

I DON’T REMEMBER when I discovered MAD, but I know which piece of theirs first shook me out of my suburban complacency. Titled “The National Safety Council's Holiday-Weekend Telethon,” written by Dee Caruso and Bill Levine, drawn by Mort Drucker (one of his earliest pieces), it presented a TV telethon in the Jerry Lewis tradition, although with a Dean Martin caricature instead, and it begged viewers to drive recklessly in order to add fatality numbers to the tote board in order to meet the Safety Council’s quota. The piece ran in the January 1959 issue, when I was not yet three, so I must have discovered it in one of the endless reprints that MAD issued over the years. Laughing at the macabre proved liberating.

Parody Triple Portrait
by Richard Williams

“What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine” is an unprecedented exhibition now running (through October 27, 2024) at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., bringing together original artwork and other related items chronicling the history of our most influential satire magazine.

MAD was created in 1952 when writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman persuaded EC Comics publisher William M. Gaines to launch a humor book – giving Kurtzman a break from the highly popular “Two-Fisted Tales” series he’d been exhausting himself creating. MAD was a four-color comic at first, where talented artists like Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, and, especially, Will Elder were given the liberty to be as crazy as they wished. It worked.

Five rooms at the Rockwell Museum are devoted to the magazine’s artists and pages, which also means that it’s capturing over 60 years of American cultural history. But how odd it is to see those pages – some of which I recognize quite well – enshrined, as it were, as oversized wall displays with careful lighting and dignified info cards. Somebody thinks this is art!

The American Way

DRUM CRASHES OPEN THE PIECE, giving way to the low brass and a rising figure then picked up by the strings. It seems to dissipate in some filigree from the winds, but almost immediately the brass is back with another portentous figure. Orchestral texture is a key to this piece, titled “1920/2019" and written by Joan Tower. She has a long history with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, which means that we know her work through this local connection and welcome each new example of what she’s writing.

The Albany Symphony has been championing music by American composers – and new music in general – for far longer than I’ve been writing about them, which itself takes us back some 40 years. May we therefore conclude that it’s not some kind of gimmick? In fact, it’s what should be the mission of every classical-music performing group. It’s easy, both as listener and performing entity, to get mired in the popular repertory, but the purpose of this kind of music has long been both to entertain and challenge the listener. And this is what the ASO accomplished nicely in the pair of concerts I attended during their annual American Music Festival.

The Albany Symphony Orchestra with
flutist Brandon Patrick George.
Photo by Gary Gold

The full orchestra performed on Saturday, June 8, offering a well-contrasted array of works in the acoustically benevolent EMPAC Concert Hall. Tower explained, in a pre-concert intro, that the title of her work salutes the year in which women got the right to vote and the year the saw the height of the #MeToo movement. “But the title really has nothing to do with the piece,” she concluded in a characteristically humorous way.

Don’t take her joke seriously. There is a vigorous sense of empowerment as the piece builds to its finish. The big moments are gloriously big, the small – as when a solo violin muses over the throb of some winds, or a clarinet is mocked by a trumpet – have a nervous intimacy. But each of these episodes flows into the next with a sense of inevitability, a sense that builds to a satisfying finish.

What Is So Rare?

AN APPOINTMENT BOOK sits open on my desk, its two overview pages for the month of June staring back at me with pencilled appointments filling many of the squares. “Many,” in this case, being a vague term, as vague, in its way, as “most,” but my gut feeling is that the latter term might even more appropriately apply.

I’m pushing 70, “pushing,” in this case, being a vague term that nevertheless feels entirely apt, and because I’m also fat and sedentary, many of those appointment-book squares are filled with medical appointments. There turns out to be a fractal quality about elder health care, as each specialist I consult tends to send me to a sub-specialist to deal with an aspect of my condition I didn’t know was there yet which will demand a blood test and/or MRI and add yet another medication to the daily pile I swallow.

A handful of social events fill other squares; rarely now are there rehearsals and performances, but they do occur and even those can seem burdensome when nestled on those pages.

It’s only the start of June, yet the month already feels oppressive. I’m well familiar with the phenomenon that can make the anticipation of an event more annoying than the event itself – it’s the curse of many a nine-to-fiver – but even with that in mind, I can’t shake this sense of dread. Why?

Let’s try a little exercise. (This is me talking to myself. You don’t actually have to do this.) Imagine that all those appointment squares are blank. Is there a particular event you’d prefer to see listed?