First off, let me advise my readers right up front that I love Broadway.  I’d much rather go see a bad Broadway or even off-Broadway play than watch any reality (far from it) show on TV.  In fact, if I were rich and had the energy, I’d be in NYC every week.  Both cost and energy keep my attendance down, whereas I won’t watch reality TV even if you paid me to do it (well, I suppose I do have my price—something like the last Megamillions jackpot would be nice).  I even enjoy regurgitated Disney schlock like Mary Poppins and The Lion King. My favorite show was the off-Broadway classic The Fantasticks, although I saw Phantom twice, once in NYC and once in Boston.

That said, last Friday I was struck by a segment of ABC’s Good Morning America where they had the cast from the revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes doing the musical number “Anything Goes.”  This music is so old that I played it in dance band in high school.  Right after or just before there was an ad for the new Broadway show The Book of Mormon, written by the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, with music by Robert Lopez.  This is new, very new.

There’s no denying Mr. Porter was a creative guy.  We still listen, play, and sing along to his songs—they have stood the test of time.  I have yet to see Messrs. Parker and Stone’s opus, although I suspect it will be uncouth, irreverent, and bordering on blasphemous, but still exceedingly funny.  A different kind of creativity, I’m sure.  The doorbell on the ad is also a clever mnemonic.  Not so much here, but when I lived in Bogota, our doorbell was worn out by proselytizing pushers of religious fervor, from Pentecostals to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormon Hardy boys in their white shirts and ties, as stereotyped in The Book of Mormon.

These proselytizers know their stuff, but they’re in the wrong profession.  They should have been selling ice cream makers to Inuits.  Instead, they would ring my doorbell.  If I had time, I would let them in and we’d have a nice debate about religion.  I usually steered the discussion into deep questions about the existence of God and his omnipotence.  With the Mormons, I would try to convince them that the famous lost tribes in their famous biblical sequel were really pre-Colombians, notably the Pijao, the only cannibals among the Native American pre-Colombians.  Since my first wife, a Colombian, had some Pijao blood in her, that made her Mormon by my reckoning, but the original kind, not like the two blond-haired and blue-eyed missionaries graduated from BYU.

I’m off track here, so let me put the train back on, and set it for derailment.  I contend that both Anything Goes and The Book of Morman can be entertaining.  Mr. Porter’s is a classic (= old, and still entertaining) while Messrs. Parker and Stone’s is not yet a classic (= new, entertaining, but lasting?).  They represent two extremes of American film and theater—the revival or remake and the original.  Hollywood, for example, suffers recently from too many revivals and remakes—there is not much original or creative coming out of Hollywood these days.

I remember when I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard.  Sheer genius!  Every time when I read Hamlet as a kid, I was not only attracted to these poor guys’ weird names, I wanted to know what happened to them.  Tom answers that question, sort of.  While Hamlet is a tragedy and oft used by me as counter to some critics that say I kill off too many characters in my novels (in Hamlet, most everyone is dead at the end), Mr. Stoppard’s play is a comedy, an ironic and irreverent take on existentialist philosophy.  If only I had seen it before debating the Mormons.  R:  Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?  G:  No.  R:  Nor do I, really.  It’s silly to be depressed by it.  I mean, one thinks of it as being alive in a box.  One keeps forgetting to take into account that one is dead….

I contend, though, that I’d rather see new creations than old revivals or remakes, no matter how good the actors are, either in theater or film.  It’s amusing to consider how this translates into the book world.  Someone once categorized the different possible stories in fiction (an enterprising reader can remind me what they are—I forget)—this is the kind of stuff they teach in MFAs, I suppose.  I know one was the road trip, for example.  C. M. Kornbluth’s sci-fi classic Not This August is this type—so is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (no surprise there).  Yet new and creative fiction appears all the time, more now than before with the digital revolution in full swing, even if you can classify every story written as one or more of these classic plots.  As a reviewer for Book Pleasures and an avid reader, this wealth of creative new work enriches my life.  Probably yours too, if you’re into fiction.

Unfortunately, revivals in the book world are now mostly used to bludgeon English Lit and Fine Arts students.  Sure, your friendly neighborhood bookstore or Barnes & Noble books and coffee warehouses have “the classics,” but few people are mobbing these stores or crashing on-line servers in order to buy these books.  “The classics” are read by students forced to read them and snooty people who like to show they’re educated, not people who want to really be entertained.  The liberal arts programs in our colleges and universities have as their lofty goal “civilizing” the students that walk through their gates, but my own small statistical sample showed me long ago that there are three things wrong with such programs:  (1) their courses are often taught by professors whose lectures put the students to sleep faster than Father O’Shea’s sermon; (2) they often result in producing graduates that are indifferent to literature at best or hate it at worst; and (3) they close students eyes to creativity, not just in the arts, but in all sorts of academic pursuits.

You see, even if you’re in physics and studying advanced field theory, you have to be creative.  A theoretical physicist, who is going where no man or woman has gone before, is creating.  True creativity is as much a part of science as it is art.  Science and mathematics are both arts in this sense.  Whether your eyes glaze over or not, you probably appreciate that there is something creatively beautiful about a new result in physics or a new result in mathematics.  Other sciences are also beautiful in this way.  You can’t deny that the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick wasn’t creative and that the DNA solution to nature’s information-theoretical problem isn’t beautiful.

I was lucky, I guess.  One of my English professors was N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa-Cherokee writer from Oklahoma.  He made his love for poetry a contagion he released on his students because he emphasized the creative side of the poets.  I’ll never be a poet, but he taught me to love poetry, especially Irish poetry, and inspired me to continue with my writing, even though math and science were my first choice early on to make a living (the Sputnik scare had a lot to do with that, plus the fact that I personally knew writers and other artists who were starving).  However, with this love for writing, I still appreciated the new more than the old.  Even more so in science.

Sure, there are revivals.  Chaos theory is, in effect, a revival of mechanics.  Quantum information theory is a revival of quantum mechanics.  But, in the new, you find creativity, something affecting our present.  The old is past history.  Only historians care about epicycles, for example, but old Ptolemy was quite creative in inventing and using them.  An introduction to quantum mechanics is taught in all our major colleges and universities via the historical story of the “early years”—boring, boring!  Did you know that to understand quantum entanglement you only need to understand the rudiments of simple vector algebra?  No infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces or Sturm-Liouville differential equations are needed.  Yet, ye olde natural physicians keep teaching history, not physics!

New writing intrigues me.  Even if an author clearly has adopted one of those classical story arcs used in fiction, or a mix of them, if he or she makes the reader stop and say, “My, isn’t that a clever plot twist” or “Gee, I never thought of that in that way,” the author is being creative.  Even if you just finish a novel and say to yourself, “That was a damn good read,” you are acknowledging the creativity of the author.  I am constantly amazed at how the old in writing (that list of possible stories) continues to become the new.  Books are not like plays or movies—they’re much better.  A new book cannot be boring.  If it is, no one reads it.

Style is something else.  I’ll commit a minor blasphemy here and say that anyone reading the King James version of the Bible is choosing an old cow path riddled with potholes instead of a smooth new highway.  Pick up a modern version.  Style is everything.  The Sermon on the Mount is still beautiful in modern English—maybe more people would understand it too.  Yes, I know, literature students read Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales in the original vernacular, but the old Anglo-Saxon is a little hard to stomach.  Even if you just compare Dickens’ style and language to Faulkner’s, you will see that style even affects our perception of works only a century apart.  This is true in almost any language.  You don’t help keep something alive and vibrant if you use old and dead language.

Do we care about the classics?  I suppose we do, at least historically.  But to me the language and style of Shakespeare are irrelevant at best and intrusive and ugly at worst.  Hamlet is just a damn good story, period—so good that it has been repeated in a variety of contexts, even in sci-fi and fantasy.  Yet old Will missed a bet by not recognizing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are crazy names for characters that need their own stories and their own stage—and that left room for Stoppard to throw out his new wrinkle on an old story.

However, with new and fresh The Book of Mormon, I don’t imagine that the ex-gov of Massachusetts will be seeing it—not because he’s Mormon, but because he’s too busy trying to convince conservatives that Obamacare is not the MA Romneycare in particular and that he’s not a Rockefeller Republican in general (well, maybe, because he’s also Mormon).  Maybe he and Mr. Marco Rubio, that young Tea Party fellow from Florida, the other GOP guy with the full hairdo, will both be ringing my doorbell for the 2012 elections.  I don’t think I’ll let them in—it’s easier to debate religion, not politics.  However, I often wish that there were some modern Pijao around that would have political leaders from both parties over as dinner guests.

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 6:49 am and is filed under Medical Coverage Crisis, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.