Coyote Canyon Press

Michael Nyman doesn’t like the Royal Opera House

The Publisher — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:53:41 +0000

Michael Nyman's work for the Royal Opera House was rejected.

Composer Michael Nyman is using Facebook to carry on a grudge against Britain’s Royal Opera House. Nyman, widely known for the scores for the movies “The Piano,” “Gattaca,” and “The End of the Affair,” told fans about the dispute on his Facebook page. The reason for all this drama? Nyman proposed to stage a work in Covent Garden only to be rejected. Simple as that. But according to Nyman, it’s a little more than that: one of his Facebook posts claims that the opera company has flat-out refused to produce any of his future operas.

The British composer wrote that he learned the Royal Opera “will never commission an opera” from him. “Maybe I should withdraw my tax from supporting such public institutions in ‘my’ country! . . . They are continuing to pay for new work, but not my work. . . . [The Royal Opera] offered me the possibility of writing an opera to be premiered, haha, in 2018.” Not that it mattered since the company ultimately withdrew the offer.

The Royal Opera House issued a response in the British press:

Having given serious thought to [Nyman's] suggestion, and listened again to his operatic music in depth, we have decided that for us his musical language is not what we want to pursue in our next commissions.
This is not a dismissal of Michael Nyman as a composer in general, nor a statement about the quality of his music, as such things can, of course, not be discussed objectively. In the end, it is a question of taste.

Nyman’s idiosyncratic musical style has divided audiences for years, often combining minimalism with chromaticism, occasionally borrowing motifs from the Baroque.

In June, Long Beach Opera will stage Nyman’s 1986 work The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, based on Oliver Sacks’ book.

David Hockney: Living His Own Way

The Publisher — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:45:12 +0000

David Hockney, the subject of Christopher Simon Sykes' biography, A RAKE'S PROGRESS

Christopher Simon Sykes’ David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress — The Biography, 1937-1975 has garnered quite a number of good reviews, especially from art critic Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. According to Knight, the timing of this well-sourced book couldn’t be better.

With the deaths last year of Lucian Freud and Richard Hamilton in September, David Hockney suddenly catapulted into position as England’s leading painter. Although the cultivated image of a dandified English schoolboy in white pants, mismatched socks, polka-dot bow tie and beanie is long out of date for an artist who, at 74, is identified with iconic ‘60s paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools, the thought is a bit of a shock. Still, the timing couldn’t be better for this enjoyable and well-sourced book, which — like Hockney’s own work — is both conversational and perceptive.

Play Me, I’m Yours – Coming to an End

The Publisher — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:01:40 +0000

It’s been a real treat these past three weeks for public piano playing here in the Los Angeles area. Thirty pianos, designed and decorated by artists, musicians, and community groups, have been displayed publicly across Los Angeles County for everyone to play. The event has been billed as a celebration of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra‘s conductor Jeffrey Kahane’s 15th anniversary as LACO music director. A souvenier poster can be downloaded here.

Santa Monica Pier

The official last day of the installation was yesterday. Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will begin removing pianos today, May 4, and continue through Tuesday, May 8. Our understanding is that not all the pianos will disappear at once, but the last of them will be removed on Tuesday, May 8 2012.

Stephen King wants to pay higher taxes

The Publisher — Tue, 01 May 2012 03:43:49 +0000

The filthy rich writer Stephen King scolds himself — and Mitt Romney — for not giving their fair share, and warns of an apocalypse if Americans fail to address inequality.

In an expletive-laced essay at The Daily Beast, writer Stephen King scolds wealthy Americans for not paying their “fair share” of taxes. Time is nigh, King believes, before civil unrest spreads throughout the United States.

Do you agree with King’s self-serving screed? His essay especially takes aim at Presidential candidate and fellow wealthy elitist Mitt Romney. Read for yourself:

Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fu**ing-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

Kindle Fire taking over Android tablet market

The Publisher — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:57:50 +0000

A customer tests out the Kindle Fire tablet. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

The Kindle Fire is burning up the tablet competition — on the Android side.

Amazon.com Inc.’s tablet computer is catching fire on in a big way, having grabbed 54.4% of the Android tablet market during February, the fourth month it was on the market, according to new data from comScore Inc. That represented almost double of the Fire’s Android market share since December.

The Kindle Fire is in warp drive — far outpacing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (15.4% of Android), Motorola Xoom (7%), the Asus Transformer (6.3%) and others by Dell, Lenovo and Sony.

But the tablet market leader remains Apple’s iPad, which, according to the market research firm IDC, owned about 55% of the tablet market at the end of 2011. Android tablets accounted for about 45%. This is all great news for Amazon, meaning about 30% of tablets currently shipping are Kindle Fires, making the Fire a close second to the iPad.

Despite efforts by Apple, dismissing the Fire is increasingly difficult to do so. In February, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook dismissed tablets like the Kindle Fire as inferior:

A cheap product might sell some units … But then [consumers] get it home and use it and the joy is gone. And the joy is gone every day that they use it and they wind up not using it anymore.

No one knows for sure how much use the Kinde Fire is getting, but consumers certainly are buying it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Publisher — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:16:28 +0000

Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Francis Holl after George Richmond c.1855. Stipple engraving

She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.

When Harriet was young, the family moved to Cincinnati, where they found themselves at the border of the North and South, East and West, and at the center of an increasing antislavery sentiment. Here she began to write for literary and evangelical periodicals.

When she was twenty-five she married one of her father’s colleagues at a theological seminary in Ohio, Calvin Stowe; and when he was appointed to the faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, she returned to New England. It was during services at the Brunswick Congregational Church that she was inspired to write her most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she penned at her kitchen table.

She married the Reverend Calvin Ellis Stowe — they had seven children. She wrote to help support their family and was drawn to the moral, political, and ethical issues surrounding the slavery question. She was neither by nature nor by influence of her upbringing content to sit on the sidelines as her country marched toward civil war.

This Coyote Canyon Press anthology contains Harriet Beecher Stowe's short story "The Ghost in the Mill"

She felt moral revulsion at the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), which required residents of free states to return fugitive slaves to their rightful owners. Her plans to write a “moral epic of negro bondage” came to her in a vision in a church in Brunswick, Maine. Eventually she came to believe that she was simply God’s instrument for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Like many literary ladies of the nineteenth century, she turned to writing as a means to make money. She struggled to write, raise her children, and help her husband, who suffered from depression. The income she made from her writing was used to hire the domestic help she needed to avoid being “a mere domestic slave.” Yet she succeeded in shaping the history of and standards of her age. Her antislavery writing helped bring about the Civil War, and the morality of her fiction helped break down nineteenth-century barriers to novel-reading and theater going — an affirmation of her husband’s observation: “God has written it in His book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God?”

First published serially in the antislavery periodical the National Era, the novel was published in book format in 1852. It was an historic event in publishing: it sold 10,000 copies the first week, over three hundred thousand the first year, and by the outbreak of the Civil War, that number had soared to beyond three million. The book was translated into thirty-seven languages. Several years later, when the petite Stowe met the tall President Lincoln, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Lincoln was expressing the view of many that her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), as an antislavery manifesto, moved the North to embark on a military crusade against the slave-holding South.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not typical of her work. A second antislavery novel, Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856) was highly praised, but much of her best work has nothing to do with slavery at all. New England village life is the subject she began with and returned to often throughout her career.

The historical significance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused it to obscure the significance of her other literary works: The Mayflower (1843), The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), and Oldtown Folks (1869), a book of sketches which she considered her masterpiece — “my resume of the whole spirit and body of New England.”

Her work eventually totaled sixteen volumes, but little of what she wrote ever surpassed the quality of her descriptions of the humble lives of New Englanders, in which she presented the descendents of the Puritans as willful, self-righteous, and content to live lives of aesthetic and emotional starvation.

Whether writing bestsellers or polemic essays, sketches of New England or letters to friends, Stowe wrote readable prose. Her local-color fiction, according to the literary critic Edmund Wilson, constitutes “a kind of encyclopedia of old New England institutions, characters, customs and points of view.” She wrote at least one book a year between 1862 and 1884. In many respects, her novels anticipated the local-color realism of Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, who acknowledged her indebtedness to Stowe.

Sadly, her later years did not turn out well.” One of her children died from alcoholism, another from drug addiction, a third from drowning, a fourth from cholera. She received none of the foreign royalties due her from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, one of America’s most famous preachers in the nineteenth century, was caught up in an adultery scandal. And her friendship with Lady Byron — and her exposé in the Atlantic of Lord Byron’s widely rumored but unspeakable affair with his half sister — almost caused the magazine to fold, and cast her in the eyes of many as a spiteful gossip. She died in 1896 after years of senility. Her coffin was draped in a wreath from a group of Boston African-Americans, which read, “The Children of Uncle Tom.”

RIP: Harry Crews

The Publisher — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:45:54 +0000

Harry Crews (1935-2012)

Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”

The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Times obituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”

Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,

His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.

“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”

After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.

He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

The Publisher — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:23:33 +0000

This Coyote Canyon Press anthology contains Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of the deadliness of Beatrice, and inevitably of Giovanni himself, accumulate with a horrid insistence.

Beatrice’s father is Professor Rappaccini of Padua, who raised her from childhood among deadly plants and flowers of his own creation in order to endow her with “marvellous gifts against which no power or strength could avail an enemy.” Giovanni, a young student, unaware of the secrets of the garden, is deeply attracted to her extraordinary beauty and her intimate tending to the beautiful plants. Gradually he becomes aware of the deadliness of the garden, and despite the warnings of Rappaccini’s rival, Baglioni, Giovanni continues to pursue her until he eventually takes on her deadly power. When he finally realizes the extent of his contamination, he urges her to drink with him the antidote prepared by Baglioni. She drinks it first, and “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death.” The story ends with Baglioni’s horrified yet triumphant cry: “ ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?’ ”

Trailer for the German musical “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

Five Great Dialogues of Plato

The Publisher — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:45:59 +0000

Front cover of Coyote Canyon Press edition

At the time of his trial and execution in 399 BC, Socrates had reached the age of seventy. He had lived through the Periclean Age when Athens was at the pinnacle of Imperial power, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and Athens’ defeat in 404. He did, however, live to see the restoration of democracy. For most of that time he was a well-known character in the streets of Athens, speaking to anyone who’d listen to his philosophy of life. His mission, which he explains in the Apology, was to expound the idea that man was responsible for his own moral attitudes.

To satisfy the need for education in the 5th century BC, there arose numbers of traveling teachers known as the Sophists. They taught rhetoric, a powerful weapon, since all the important decisions were made by the assemblies of adult male citizens. Socrates was often confused with the Sophists, but their differences are vital: the Sophists professed to teach their students how to be successful, whereas, Sophocles claimed nothing of the sort; his dialogues aimed at discovering the truth, the understanding of life and its values that he believed were the basis of philosophy: that is, philosophy as a moral as well as intellectual pursuit. Thus his celebrated paradox: when men do wrong it is because they don’t know any better. This is not to say that Socrates ignored the will. He believed that educated man would choose the right because they cannot choose the wrong.

Benjamin Jowett’s translations in this volume give Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial and death. Euthyphro is a kind of introduction to Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech to the jury in his own defense. Crito gives the account of how Socrates could have escaped into exile but refused. Meno shows Socrates debating Meno on the nature of human virtue and questioning Meno’s slave boy on a question of geometry in order to prove the preexistence of the soul. Phaedo gives the account of Socrates’ last discussions with his friends on the immortality of the soul.

Ambrose Bierce: “Chickamauga”

The Publisher — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:58:59 +0000

This Coyote Canyon Press anthology contains Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Chickamauga”

“Realism” is an element of some of Abrose Bierce’s short stories (particularly those concerning the Civil War), but the term is of little value when discussing his often fantastical imagination. In his essay “The Short Story” he writes: ‘Probability? Nothing so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs . . . Everything being so unearthly improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the audacity to relate anything all.’ ”

Bierce’s stories can be roughly divided into three categories: those about the Civil War, horror and the supernatural, and comic or “tall” tales. Though his plots are mostly contrived, he writes with great economy and vividness, and his stories often have a caustic, almost misanthropic edge to them. The shot story was clearly an ideal medium for him.

His contrivances of plot include reordering of the time scheme such as analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward), exploration of dreams and the surreal, and a preoccupation with the vagaries of perception. Through these techniques, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to record how humans record experience before organizing it conceptually.

In his most horrifying war story, “Chickamauga,” a deaf-mute child witnesses the retreat of the Confederate soldiers after the eponymous battle and wanders out toward the battlefield and encounters men crawling away from battle. The child thinks they are playing a game and tries to ride on the back of one of them, but the soldier flings him to the ground and then

“turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.”

The child retreats and then drawn by a great fire, leads the men as if into battle with his toy sword. Soon he recognizes the burning building as his own home, his mother lying dead before him, and he utters “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries — something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey — a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.”

The reversal of physical orientation is complete and serves as an emblem of the reversal of the story: war as a matter of youthful enthusiasm and heroism revealed as bloody horror.