v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

A Character From a Borges Short Story - Dr. Richard Macksey

It is with great sadness that I heard the news from a close friend of mine that Dr. Richard Macksey, the extraordinary professor from Johns Hopkins, had passed away yesterday. In the 70's while I attended Hopkins as an undergraduate Macksey provided inspiration and intelligence to my soul, guiding me and nurturing my hunger for books and knowledge and, of course, direction. I am fortunate in that I live here in Baltimore so I have been able to maintain a dialogue with this incredible man through the years visiting his great library or going out to see a film, eat at a restaurant and it was always a great adventure to enter a discussion with him as his stories would multiply and would lead us to the most unexpected places. He was a friend to everybody and one of the most optimistic people I've ever encountered. His memory will live on. Here is a memory of him from an article I recently encountered about him:

The lore around Macksey and his library has an air of myth—some alumni describe knocking over a sheet of paper to discover original correspondence with D.H. Lawrence (who died the year before Macksey was born), while others swear there was an original Picasso sketch in his bathroom at one time. Four-foot Chinese scrolls, tiny model skeletons, antique theater binoculars. The valuable pieces are no longer in the house; they have been locked up in Special Collections on campus. One time during class, I myself picked up the nearest book and discovered it was an inscribed advance copy of his friend Oliver Sacks’ book, Seeing Voices. The objects in his house speak to his interests, which is to say he is interested in everything.

That is not an exaggeration.

“When you listen to him talk, he begins in one place, and then it’s as though he’s crossed the room and gone to a different section of the library and pulled out a book on a different topic,” the author Jessie Chaffee (Florence in Ecstasy) noted. “He’ll take you down a path that is surprising, and then another, and another . . . until you realize that they’re all connected.”

He still speaks this way. I asked what he believes is lost in the digital humanities, aside from the physicality of books. “We no longer have to worry about memorizing things,” Dr. Macksey said. “Previously, the mark of the scholar was the ability to quote the text.” Easy for him to say. He is a polyglot with a photographic memory, so he does literally remember every single quote he’s read, and its location in the book, and the book’s location in his library.

“I think a hell of a lot is lost: the ability to see [a subject] as something more than a list of names and themes and topics.” He went on to describe Charles Sanders Peirce, a prominent figure in Hopkins’ history whose theory he finds delightful for applying to detective fiction. “He says, it’s not all induction, it’s not all deduction, it’s rather what he calls abduction, which is a combination of both, which sometimes is just guessing. He has a lot of different names for the notion of abduction.”

Right, but how does this “abduction” relate to scholars not spending as much time with their texts?

“I realize now my reading went from being too fast to too slow, without any good meeting in between. Much of our reading we don’t read the whole word, we see a syllable or perhaps two syllables. We have a context, so again it includes making a guess, a very quick guess. If you don’t read slowly, you’ll miss some of the surprises that are there.” Conversations with Dr. Macksey never cease to surprise, because he’s able to relate things like detective fiction to one’s experience perceiving language, as we’ve just witnessed.

“There was always this rumor that when he was up for his PhD and doing his orals, they couldn’t stump him on anything,” the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, a former student, said. “Finally, exasperated, one of his interviewers decided to ask him about 16th-century French cooking or something and he goes, ‘well that’s great that you should ask that question, because it happens to be one of my hobbies.’”

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A foto from the 70's in Macksey's library- I'm sitting on the floor and Bruce Jaffe to the right of me standing and lecturing on film.  Macksey is in the back with a tie and his legendary pipe.

The Logic of Guilt

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Baltimore MD

The Logic of Guilt

It was true, but I would contest.

The blue car, the red lipstick, the receipt, all were false. Fake.

I was in Singapore. Not in NYC.

There were photographs to prove it. A hotel bill.

There were things that no one notices. The broken lock, her misguide eye, some dirty laundry.

The image was very blurry but I was not there.

I had witnesses, all with good recollections and solid reputations.

They provided their depositions. We had several translators.

They all knew what they thought and what they saw.

My lawyer advised me not to to talk.

It was a simple process.

The evening was getting late, the mountains spoke another language.

The prosecutor obtained some lies from others.

We had some shots of Bowmore No. 1 to celebrate.

But there was more, some stolen jewelry, the perfume spilled in the bathroom, and the missing painting.

The morning afterwards, a walk in the park and some sunlight.

End of story

 

Faure's Infernal Nocturnes

I had not focused on these complex set of pieces until recently when the just kind of appeared on my mix one day as i sat reading a novel. Eventually they cornered me and I had to pay attention. Here is a solid assessment in Gramophone on which are the best versions:

For Debussy, Fauré was a ‘master of charms’, his Ballade as erotic as a woman’s loose shoulder strap, while even Liszt – most far-sighted of critics – demurred before music which offered too few instant returns. At a later date Cortot may have written rapturously about Fauré (the First Impromptu’s ‘stylised coquetry and regret’ or the Third Impromptu’s central calm, ‘like an avenue of fans folding and unfolding’) but much to the composer’s chagrin he played little of his music. In a burst more of sadness than of rage, Fauré wrote to him saying, ‘you allow my music to pile up without actually playing it’. This desertion even included music dedicated to Cortot, including the bleak and unaccommodating Ninth Nocturne. Horowitz once told me that he played the entire piano works of Fauré in private but his public offering consisted of only three works, proof for some that he was primarily interested in the externals of music. For French pianist Michel Béroff, Fauré’s music expresses little beyond a ‘vague perfume’, an opinion that should have earned him chastisement from his long-term two-piano partner Jean-Philippe Collard, who has recorded the complete piano works. Joan Chissell, for long a critic for Gramophone, felt that with Fauré, ‘a little goes a long way’, while a German lady ‘professor’ who I had the misfortune to meet as a jury colleague in France told me that if she suggested such music to her students they would walk out. For such people Fauré’s outward convention and inner audacity, together with the move from what they see as salonish origins to obscurity, is hardly worth the effort or challenge.

And that challenge, too, is considerable, The difficulty in performance is a major factor in Fauré’s neglect. Any pianist who has ever studied or attempted to memorise Fauré will tell you of their often desperate fight for fluency in patterns which rarely lie easily under the hand, and for shot-silk modulations and rhythmic ambiguities that can fox even the most skilled player. And all this in music which, as Liszt hinted, is hardly designed to win easy applause. The public has understandably little notion of the intensive work required to bring such an elusive task to vivid and meaningful life. Regrettably, if again understandably, many pianists dip their toes in Fauré (the early, more accessible Fauré with the Second and Third Impromptus for preference) before retreating into less unsettling, commercially more viable territory for a greater sense of musical terra firma.

Again, and at a more basic level, such a plethora of problems is compounded by record companies whose sleeves and illustrations perpetuate a misleading emphasis and impression. Sylvan woods, garlands of flowers and over-familiar portraits of Fauré as an elderly white-haired prelate hardly hint at the whole story. And it is greatly to Paul Crossley’s credit, for example, that he insisted on having reproductions of the often darkly disturbing paintings of Caspar David Friedrich for his covers. These at any rate suggest paradise lost and hardly regained.

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At the Mitrione's

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Botafogo

You find the most peculiar dreams under the elevator. Once underneath their frame there were very little people living a perplexing debacle. But, of course, you can also go up and down to the big breakfast spread and long blue pool to forget it all. Trapped in a kind of deja vu we called it that summer. But in Botafogo these were considered new and inspiring machines with windows to observe the elaborate gardens once inflated and then disappeared.  Then there was a painting of the Virgin Mary that ran up and down the descent giving the private box a culture all its own experience. After those delirious rides to the rooftop we could begin to observe those little people below. Now they were at the beach or then suddenly starting a fire in the underpass. We eventually turned our attention to the cameras and the interviewer who was learning the mysteries of electricity on the local souls as he described the unique scene brought to us from the North.

In Unison With Yourself

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Monasterio de Santa Catalina Arequipa, Peru

The crux was Aretha repeating her legendary scream over and over. Everyone was prancing by in different directions like in a sophisticated but misdirected musical. You realized then that the future was now in short supply as the native slaves came to serve you local delicacies. You emote a last desperate smile. And then when the sun descends and the parade begins. . .the film we all agree was bad. Realism is not what it used to be. Unfortunately, she said, these reality shows is what TV is all about. They permeate the horizon and your history will be to seduce those watching the puppet show how convincing you can dance and boogaloo (a modern dance to rock-and-roll music performed with swiveling and shuffling movements of the body, originally popular in the 1960s).

Rennovations

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Singapore Botanic Garden

When you crossed the international date line over the Pacific and became a prior self again a sparkle happened. Like the little turtle that you took to the dense green pond in the park and deposited gently among the fat orange fish to start again. Years later we found him bigger and confident running a Chinese restaurant. You always said it was possible if this broken venture fails to set your alarm and hear that mechanical voice reminding you to rise in the dark again and begin to win again.

 

The New Violence

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Chorrillos

The new violence has yet to be identified. Obvious but deception is its ruse. Like the pretty woman coming down the street it invades your mind hours after. Smoke or a smell that permeates the room. I saw it once on television singing happy songs. But it comes at odd hours also. I lost my finger in front of the cashier. Also when we brought out that fish from the sea that was full of sores. The experts and graduate students knew they had finally located its lungs but during the long surgical procedure it infected them. The philosopher in the lobby said its best to understand the map of the city. Coming back to the lost country we need to unwrap that package now.

 

Distant Hope

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Lima, Peru

When I look at the old people like me I can't comprehend how my years traversed faster than light. The young, with firm bodies, and  distracted eyes are the future someone said once. They play the saxophone collecting the distant histories and sing something coherent to my ears late at night. Those are the artists. The business men like always will dress in their contemporary uniforms. Why is their purpose any better than their ancestors? Quickly they will send an army of elegant algorithms through the subway to eat away at our photographs. I think they will leave only something for themselves.

Reverse Will

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 -Singapore

There was a period when I was scared of hurting my father by something bad that I would do. It was a time that my friends were people who liked to break and steal things. Later when I straightened myself out I became afraid of losing my job by losing a lot of their money. That was a long span of time. More recently I would wake up at night and think of our government which was working against me and my children-how did it become to that? Then it evolved to what I was consuming.  Lately I'm worried about those things I've collected. Who will organize them?

It Became Lost in Time

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - In Evolution Garden in Singapore

Sometimes we disregard the detail thinking as it obstructs our bigger picture. We think she was bad or he was just thinking about the money or the weather needs to improve. Always its the red against the blue. Confusing us and twisting the laundry until the last drop of water enters the drain. But everyday its the alarm and then the parade of activities that if one is off life spirals to a stop. Bringing us back to the 6th floor to look for the pill you forgot to take.