For those of you in the SF Bay Area a couple of live theater events are worth your attention.
Last night I went to see Song of Myself at the Marsh, on Valencia and 22nd. John O’Keefe, an actor and writer of some accomplishment, delivered an hour long, rolling, lifting, falling, eye-ball to eye-ball delivery of the (somewhat edited) major poem from the first edition of Walt’s Leaves of Grass.
“I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul….”
I’d never heard it in all it’s length, nor by such a dynamic reader — leaving aside listening to myself of course! Many is the hour I have snatched into my teeth and chewed on some of the stanzas.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then….I contradict myself;
I am large….I contain multitudes.”
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
I hadn’t remembered the stanzas about God near the end of the poem, which O’Keefe seemed to underline as he ‘sang.’
“And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.
I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.”
So it was good! Better than good, without being all it might have been. I would have had him slow down a bit from time to time, especially between the “jump-cuts” the sudden change of theme Whitman used to such great effect. I would have had him more ruminative, more in charge by use of the voice and less with the movement on stage. One of Whitman’s life-long dreams was to be a great orator — in those times of great orators. He never achieved that plateau though plenty have heard the mighty voice in the words themselves.
For another treat, you could go see Josh Kornbluth, in Citizen Josh at the Magic Theatre. I didn’t see him myself but I have it from a trusted source (my wife,) that Kornbluth was at the top of his form, humorous, engaging and involved in the world (Red Diaper Baby, Ben Franklin: Unplugged, among others.)
Suzanne Weiss at Culture Vulture tells us this:
His riff on the democratic process takes us from the last election, to Ohlone Park playground in Berkeley, with a few stops at the desegregation of an Alabama high school and his radical childhood in New York. The whole thing actually is his senior thesis, delivered 25 years after the due date. Kornbluth went to Princeton and, after realizing he was never going to realize his dream of being a great physicist, switched to political science. Under the guidance of an inspirational professor, Sheldon Wolin, and the tolerance of a kindly dean, he managed to make it through – everything but the thesis. There is another riff on killing time, which seems to have been his greatest talent in youth. He killed so much time he missed the deadline, got to march down the aisle with his class anyway and went home with an empty diploma case.
All these years later, a successful entertainer and a happy husband and father, his disappointment in the Bush-Gore election leads him to track down his old professor. (His cell phone problems are another funny bit). Finding Wolin, still alive and more than willing to be his thesis advisor, he gets permission to fulfill his academic requirement (evidently there is no statute of limitations at Princeton) a quarter-century after the fact. A quick call to the kindly dean, who is still there, clinches the deal. And all this is true.