Steiny Road to China: Step 2

On Thursday September 10, 2009, the Poet spent two hours in the language lab trying to nail down how to read pinyin, that's the Romanized phonetic spelling of Chinese which was developed by a government committee in the People's Republic of China and approved by the PRC in 1958. She used the expanded second edition of Integrated Chinese, a popular text book for teaching Americans the Chinese language. However, the Montgomery College Bookstore ordered the wrong edition and next week, the Poet will have to go back to the store and get the third edition. What's really frustrating is not having the CDs that go with this text book.

Her laoshi (teacher) Xiaoli Zhang now says it would be better to have the third edition but that the class should listen to any Chinese recordings to help their ears get tuned up. Yesterday the Poet listened to the CD she bought in Chinatown Philadelphia when she went by bus to hear poet Nathalie Anderson's and composer Thomas Whitman's opera A Scandal in Bohemia. She's about to jump out in the rain and do the same in a few minutes.

She is telling you these ponderous details because learning Chinese and working in the field of new opera are fraught with obstacles. The Poet is OK with this as long as there is some return on the investment.
Here's my ROI from last night's class:

1) The Chinese character for 'hao' is a combination of the characters for woman and child. Hao means OK, fine, good. You greet another human being by saying, 'Ni hao' meaning 'Hi, are you good, are you OK?' Have a look at the character for woman. The Poet had already gotten this character into her subconscious memory in the first class because this is how she is going to find the Ladies Room when she gets to China! Is this not extraordinary that well being engages around the creative act involving a woman with child?

2) Changcheng (the Great Wall) means long city/fortress and Chang Jiang is the name of the longest river, the Yangtze.

First on the Steiny Road to China

The Steiny Road Poet has rarely taken the easy path. For years, the Poet has been meaning to learn Chinese. Well, at least learn enough vocabulary to get by as a traveler. Over the years, she bought flashcards, cassettes, workbooks, and CDs. Today she is officially on the books at a local college for Chinese 101. The first class was Tuesday evening.

The Poet walked in the class late because she was caught up in a line trying to register for the class. Wow, the majority of the 20 or so students were Asians. The laoshi (that’s Mandarin pinyin – phoenetic spelling—for teacher) greeted the Poet with “Ni hao!” Lucky for for the Poet, she knew this is how you say hi and so she returned the “Ni hao!” By the way, the pinyin she is using here is missing all the accent marks. Sorry but she doesn’t have that character set.

First up is to learn the four tones—the flat tone into infinity that is Ma as in mother (open your mouth wide), the rising tone (like a question) of Ma that means flax, the rollercoaster tone of Ma that goes down and then up and means horse, and the descending tone Ma that means scold or criticize.

And tones are not the only sounds that need to be heard and internalized. There are also the sounds that require different positioning of the tongue. The idea is to spend hours in language lab to nail down the sounds and tones. So the Poet went to check out the lab and got totally confused. The confusion stems from the fact that different versions of the text book and workbooks are being sold and used. So for example, the Poet had the 2nd edition of the text book, while her laoshi had a 3rd edition. Laoshi Zhang said it didn’t matter. Oh but it does, the Poet is now muttering to herself. Guessing where her laoshi is reading from wastes time. When the Poet was in the lab she tried to follow the CD lessons in the workbook but that didn’t work. Wrong version? The Poet had a 3rd edition workshop but the CD said 2nd edition. Now she thinks the CD plays to the text book and not the workbook. To quote her Yiddish bubbeh, Oy vey!

So for now the Poet will concentrate on learning her numbers. This is something she started to teach herself from YouTube tutorials before she decided to go to a formal person-to-teacher class. What she didn’t realize is that the numbers say a lot about learning the tones and the characters are pretty simple to grasp.

Learning Chinese is like learning to identify instruments in an orchestra. The Poet likes the musical aspect of learning this language. By the way, the Poet thinks in another life she was Chinese.

Avoiding the Deadly Undertow

Yesterday, the Steiny Road Poet received an email from composer John Supko who has been germinating an opera project with the Poet. His message read, how about changing the name of the work from the storytellers of Tangier (actually Raconteurs in Tangier) to an actual story title by Paul Bowles. Paul and Jane Bowles are the focus of this work. While the question from the composer wasn’t put to the Poet in exactly that way, she is now thinking after a walk along the Potomac River this is how the conversation has evolved.

One of the things that the Poet liked about this suggestion is how intimate the composer is with the literary side of Paul Bowles. For those who don’t know PB, he was both a writer of words (fiction and poetry) and music. More importantly, John’s suggestion took the Poet outside of the box she had created for herself. While she was OK with Raconteurs in Tangier, she knew deep down that it wasn’t the most evocative title because while raconteur is a word used in English, it’s not familiar to most people.

“How Many Midnights,” the story title that John is suggesting, comes from Paul’s collection The Delicate Prey. In “How Many Midnights,” the main character June (surely modeled after Jane Bowles) is engaged to be married to a very private man named Van. For some period of time, she has been focused nightly (midnight) out her bedroom window on where he lives. She is much younger than Van and she still lives with her parents. Finally, Van makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives her a key to his apartment. The trouble is the first night she goes there by herself, he never comes home from his book store. The story deals with privacy, the threat of suicide, and abandonment. Paul Bowles was the master of suggestion.

While the libretto the Steiny Road Poet wrote never mentions midnight, there is a suggestion that midnight could be the timeframe during which the anchoring characters Paul and Jane's Moroccan lover Cherifa are rehashing Jane's life. (She has already died when these two unlikely smoking partners get together.) So now the quandary is whether to insert the phrase how many midnights somewhere in the libretto. The Poet is thinking, why make the audience for this opera work so hard on how the title connects, especially if they are unfamiliar with this particular story by Bowles. The gift of its connection to PB's short story should stand out of the way and only go to the Paul Bowles aficionado.

So that’s it on a Labor Day weekend from the Steiny Road Poet who went for a walk along the C & O canal and learned today about an enticing dam across the Potomac River that kayakers might like to run. Well, the only rapids this Poet will run deal with the creative process. How wonderful to have a creative partner who can set the Poet free without sending her into a deadly undertow.

Deep Plunge into Making of Americans

So where has the Steiny Road Poet been lately?

Mostly with her nose in a book this summer. She read Karen Leick's Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity and then she took the big plunge -- she began reading The Making of Americans up at Toad Hall in New Hampshire. Currently she is over 700 pages deep and that's pretty close to the end of this 900 page plus novel by Gertrude Stein.


Here are some images from Toad Hall.

The Hungry Monster that is Opera

“Opera is an omnivore and can eat everyone alive.” Anne Bogart at VOX 2009

At VOX 2009, I had the pleasure of hearing George Steel, the new general director of New York City Opera, moderate a panel of prestigious artists involved with the making of new operas on May 2, 2009. Steele, who seems to be embracing new American opera with culinary gusto (he said he had just consumed Elise Kirke’s wonderful reference book American Opera), started the discussion with the preternatural question, What is opera?








Who were the panelists? Let’s start there.

Mark Adamo is composer librettist of Little Women and Lysistrata.

Eve Beglarian, characterized as post minimalist composer. Her work has been performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and others. She approaches music from all timeframes and styles and is considered in your face, outrageous, and intellectual.

Anne Bogart is an award-winning dramatic director who made her debut directing opera through the work of composer Deborah Drattell.

Carlisle Floyd is composer librettist of many operas including Susannah, Of Mice and Men, and Cold Sassy Tree.

Nico Muhly, known as a wunderkind composer (he was born in 1981), he is working under commission from the Metropolitan Opera on his first operatic project with Craig Lucas.

Quotable lines from this panel discussion:

“Performing arts is about changing time.” Anne Bogart

(I agree and think that is why any artist pursues his work – to get some control over the speed at which our lives go by and to help our audience experience what is happening right at this moment.)

“We listen faster (in opera).” Mark Adamo

(The operatic experience brings life into warp speed so that we can experience the full compliment of activities from birth to death. Yet the performance of opera can make time slow down so we can take in a whole life time.)

“The operatic story is ruled by the emotional content of the music.” Carlisle Floyd

(The music helps clarify and deepen a story.)

“In opera, the story has to be the right size.” Nico Muhly

(Everything in the arts is a question of balance.)

“Don’t worry about whether it is an opera. Anyone asking doesn’t matter.” Nico Muhly

(There is a lot of debate about what constitute an opera. Muhly’s advice to a question from the VOX audience was if the creators say the work is an opera, it is an opera.)

According to Floyd, the libretto contributes 60% to the success of an opera. He also said you would think that the playwright is the artist best suited for writing opera libretti but he thinks that poets can better adapt themselves to the job.

Because I am weighing the idea of creating a new libretto based on the same source text for existing music, the panel seemed a timely bit of counsel. I will add that Carlisle Floyd was skeptical that one could effectively rework the music to good effect because he feels the libretto provides the inspiration. Another Steiny Road challenge for me.