"The work" can be a rather loaded phrase, particularly in the performing arts, where one has to be reminded by teachers to do "the work" in order to do "the art," the two being rather more distinct than in, say, writing. Of course, writing can involve research work separate from the work of commiting new words to paper - in fact, it generally does, these days. It was kind of a disappointment - yet a relief - for me to realize that the erudition of some writers was not as off-the-cuff as it appears on the page, but was the product of focused study.
I mention this because I somehow got it into my head that I'd like to write about Enrico Caruso. Not a fictionalized biography or something involving Caruso as a character, but something more like Flaubert's Parrot, talking around the various meanings and incarnations of Caruso in a variety of ways. To that end, I started reading biographies of the man, and have so far finished about 1.5 of them. It began to be rather difficult to face going over the same events multiple times, though I feel now that writing about it here is clearing the cobwebs and I may jump back in. The biggest difficulty is that while Flaubert's Parrot could reproduce some of the most seductive elements of Flaubert exactly as they appear in the (translated) original, the essence of Caruso to contemporary people - the recorded voice - cannot be transformed into words in English or any other language. I can talk about it, and if I am gifted I can talk about it in a moving and insightful way. But I can't offer, as Flaubert's Parrot could, the essence of the genius of the man. It has certainly had me thinking about how much better such a book could be in an appropriate electronic form. Perhaps the platform to create a saleable version of this book is not yet available, though I suppose there are plenty of ways to give away such a hybrid entity.
I recently finished "Born Standing Up," a book more directly about "the work;" in this case, the work of becoming a star standup comedian (aka Steve Martin). There wasn't much striking or revelatory about this book, which never delves into any serious emotional reality beyond Martin's cold relationship with his father. The one thing that struck me was the way that, particularly early in the book, he described his stage act in a sort of and then... and then... and then... style. For instance, he writes about how he would put a prop rubber hand on the edge of a curtain and then walk away from it, and writes something like: "The audience would think my arm was stretching." There's something delightful yet almost distressingly naive in the way he describes the joke's elements like steps in a magic trick (Martin talks about the connection he sees between highly controlled movement of a magic trick and that of a gag, but I don't think even he detects how similarly he imagines the choreography). And his description of the audience is so blank - they don't think it's silly or corny, they don't think it's hilarious or dull, they just think it is so - his arm is stretching. Very curious way of describing it.
After that I read "Letters to a young activist," by Todd Gitlin. I think Gitlin is drop dead brilliant, and I'm never disappointed by how far he's looked into things or how seriously he takes his ethical responsibilities. Emerging from America's last age of idealism, he is the ultimate realist of the left, debunking every one of the countless poses of the progressive movement without every giving up the cause or resorting, as so many such books do, to tired impossibilities when he begins to discuss next steps. He and I are on exactly the same page. I'm going to read his oeuvre, and have already begun The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Good title, no?
