Southern California isn't just nature. UCSD is home to the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, which take on incredibly ambitious things. My parents loved their performance of the Bernstein "Mass" here last year. Today we heard Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" (in its San Diego premiere). It's a piece I've heard once before (in Vienna, with Bryn Terfel one of the soloists). Since then I've been to Dresden, firebombed in retaliation for the blitzing of Coventry (now they're sister cities). I learned in the Catholic Hofkirche that the War Requiem was performed there when it was restored.
Hearing this shattering but in places hauntingly beautiful piece of music here in California in 2010 was a new experience again. It wasn't about the pity of World War II, or even about Europe's bloody 20th century, but about the pity of wars more generally. Steven Schick, director of the La Jolla Symphony, mentioned our own wars in the program, Afghanistan and Iraq. As Wilfred Owens' words were sung I thought of those on the other side of our conflicts. I thought of child warriors in Africa. I thought of a war nobody mentions anymore, which was as trench-fully wasteful of human life in its way as WWI, the Iran-Iraq war.
But what struck me most of all was how absent war is from my consciousness. I know nobody who died in uniform, in any generation: the past generations of my family were by fortunate accident so spaced that nobody was of draftable age in 1914-18 or 1939-45, for Korea or Vietnam ... and more recent wars have been prosecuted without a draft, without bringing the war to each family. I can't really imagine what it would be like to have war experience in the family, let alone to have lost family or friends in wars. I can't really imagine the sense so strong in the aftermath of WWI that many good men, perhaps the best, did not return. That we owe our freedoms to their sacrifice - or (if one follows back the German side of the family) that they died for nothing. "War Requiem," the work of a pacifist, isn't about anything but the senseless loss, and the hope - less believable in 1962 than it is perhaps now - that a future without war might be possible somehow...
I was delighted when the US Postal Service put out its sheet of American Expressionism stamps in March: Hans Hoffmann, Mark Rothko, Clyfford 
Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell. They're gorgeous and, for stamps, huge. But something definitely goes wrong when the stamps are used, as this postmarked Rothko I got in the mail shows. (I suppose it could work for Jasper Johns, perhaps!)
I head back to New York tonight by the overnight flight. Every few years I take a red-eye, vow never to do it again, and then forget... Arrived!
Splendid Mariposa Lily
Prickly Pear
Scarlet Larkspur, Torrey Pine
Lanceleaf Dudleya
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Witch's Hair (Dodder)
Coastal Locoweed
Biscuitroot
Nuttall's Snapdragon, Bush Mallow, Deerweed
Three-Spot
Yellow Pincushion
Sand Verbena
St. Jerome likened Job to an eel, a muraena:
This year, this season, the park is awash with that most fabulously freakish of native local succulents, the lanceleaf dudleya (lanceleaf live-forever) - enough for a body to notice that there are in fact several kinds. Some grow in solitude, others in clusters. Some stems are red, some green, some bicolor. Some fork into two curlicues, others into threes or more. Some flowers point up, others point down. Some buds are round, some triangular, some trapezoidal. Some flowers are one color, some two, some even three! And all of them look to be straight from the work of one of our local artists, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)!
I'm working on the chapter of my Job book devoted to midrash and allegorical readings of Job; its main foci are the "Testament of Job," the interpretations of Job in the "Baba Batra," and Gregory the Great's "Moralia in Iob." These are all texts we covered in my recently completed class (hence the hyperlinks), and I'm finding having read and discussed these texts with a room of smart students was very helpful. But it's quite a different thing to offer texts in a seminar - "so, what do you make of this?" "do you really think it's right/wrong?" - than to have to provide your own account of what's going on in them! And discussing one of these texts one week and another the next, letting each have its time in the sun, is dramatically different from choreographing a way for them to share the stage of a single interpretation. Because, of course, they did not share a stage. Of course this is one of my main points: Jews and Christians didn't just read Job differently, but didn't even really read the same text. (Here's why.) I suppose it was naive to imagine I could dodge the "who's right, then?" question by this move, not least as each explicitly or implicitly asserts that the other is not just wrong-headed but headed towards perdition. Oy. Actual religious history is no seminar.
