Re: GG: The Ostwald Book -- Being Picky

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer@javanet.com>]

When you come to the conviction that you admire an artist, I think it's important to suppress your curiosity about him/her ... not entirely, not inhumanly ... but in such a way as to insulate yourself from the swarm of gnats that invariably springs up over a great artist. I know how
terribly hard this would be for us with Gould ... if I were to ask what his shoe size was, I'm CERTAIN someone here would know!

"Every whale has its louse." -- Goethe (commenting on attacks on Newton)

J.D. Salinger has had the misfortune to live to old age and, like Garbo, just wants to be left alone on his Vermont farm. Over the last couple of years, a woman who once flang with him when she was very young (but had photo i.d. and was allowed out unsupervised) has made a private cottage
industry of writing Bad Nasty Stuff about this tawdry quarter-century-old episode, and even started auctioning off his love letters to her on her website. ("I need to put my daughters through college," she wrote.) I think the software guy Norton paid this extortioniste and returned the
letters to Salinger.

"Say it wit' flowers
Say it wit' mink
But whatever ya do
Don't say it wit' ink
-a-dinka-doo a-dinka-dee ..."

-- Jimmy Durante

I'm obsessed with THE WORK OF Faulkner. A few years ago I just chanced on a biography ... I slammed it shut like it was crawling with maggots. It was just filled with smarmy details I really didn't need to know. It's one thing to verify that someone like Faulkner or Gould is human and has
recognizable (or even not-so-recognizable) human flaws. But after a point, what is the point?

This is a sick, small age that has taught itself to become terrified of the slightest suspicion of greatness, and has habituated itself to glory in all evidences, demonstrations and proofs that the great weren't great at all, but small -- as small as the people who are so terrified of
greatness. The systematic destruction of the possibility of heroes and heroines must have in particular a very negative and destructive effect on children.

A counter-argument might run that, in times long past, we synthetically and falsely protected and guarded our public heroes, like the philandering dipsomaniac glutton Babe Ruth, or the violent psychopath Ty Cobb, etc. (For those outside North America: These are famous baseballists.) I won't
argue here that we were doing good, positive things by protecting our children from The Truth about people like that. In Ruth and Cobb's case, a private industry was safeguarding its profit and popularity, nothing more noble for the kiddies than that.

But it seems to me every healthy child needs some adult's big poster on his or her bedroom wall -- not a fictional creature, but someone living, or who once lived, of flesh and blood, an astronaut, a tennis player, Einstein, a musical artist like Gould. The hero/heroine becomes a template
that the child, in constructing his/her own independent personality, can point to, however hazily, and imagine that he or she could someday become someone amazing like that.

If today's children reach age 11 convinced of the sophisticated general proposition that no adults are worthy of admiration, that they all are secretly, inevitably tainted with fatal, shrinking ickiness, then I think they must inevitably grow up from that point on with a dark, negative
little hole in their personalities; a part of them can never flower into Amelia Earhardt or Neil Armstrong. It is a guarantee that the future will never know its own greatness.

Perhaps our healthy filter might be: Gould and Ostwald ... which is the whale, which is the louse?

grumble gripe harumph

elmer

"Anne M. Marble" wrote:

> OK, I know it has been in print for a while now, but I
> think it's never too late to mention the Ostwald book.
>
> It seems that every time I go to this book to check a fact
> (or a supposition <g>), I walk away annoyed. Peter Ostwald
> was obviously upset at Glenn Gould because GG had broken
> off their acquiantanceship. (Unlike some of the book's reviewers, I hesitate to call it a friendship!)
>
> Some reviewers have said that Ostwald kept his bias out of
> the book. My reaction is... He did?! Sure, he didn't go out
> of his way to tromp all GG in obvious ways. But in his tone,
> wrapped in his sentences, you'll find plenty of disapproval.
> For example, when he saw GG in the 1970s, GG was talking
> about his writing and his radio documentaries. And Ostwald
> made some kind of statement in the biography about how he
> and Joe Stephens were disappointed that a great pianist was
> putting so much effort into these projects that <gasp> had
> nothing to do with playing the piano. (Well, sheesh, didn't he expect GG to want to branch out?)
>
> It's obvious Ostwald didn't take GG's non-piano work
> seriously, and that's a dang shame. At the Gathering,
> somebody (maybe our own Mary Jo Watts?) said something
> about how a biographer who didn't appreciate the
> Solitude Trilogy wasn't an appropriate biographer for
> GG. (If Mary Jo wasn't the one who said that, she _did_
> applaud the comment. <g>)
>
> Many sentences seem to have a somewhat bitter tone, but they conceal it in subtle ways. While it's not as obvious as the Kazdin book, it's probably even more annoying because with Kazdin, you know what you're getting. But with Ostwald, you're expecting a regular biography, free of bias,
> and often, you don't get that.
>
> Some of these the statements in Ostwald can "insinuate" themselves into your mind before you realize that you're reading opinion rather than fact. (As the notorious Gene Steinberg of the infamous Rockoids flameware on usenetwould say, "It's opinion masquerading as fact." <g>)
>
> Anne M. Marble