Boston – May 3rd

This weekend a water reservoir pipe broke in Weston which supplies water to Boston – culminating in a “boiled water order” for the entire city. What this meant practically for the intrepid tourist was that Dunkin Donuts did not serve coffee for two days, and otherwise one had to rely on bottled water. No big inconvenience, but it did occur to me that this was the first time in my 70 years in America that I had received warning that the water was not safe to drink.

In the morning I worked in Bates Hall at Boston Public Library on my book review due Thursday in San Francisco. This is the most beautiful place to read books I know of, and the BPL, which has a Venetian courtyard to read in when the weather is nice, incorporates the pleasures and responsibilities of literacy more than anywhere else I can think of.

Lunch followed at Durgin Park, and in the evening a great chamber music concert at Jordan Hall by the excellent Borromeo Quartet. They played pieces by Hugo Wolff and Gunther Schuller off laptops (Macs) mounted on music stands, which I had never seen before.

What made this trip especially rewarding was the pure joy of hearing good music inside Sanders Theatre, Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, beautifully maintained architecture from a century or more past equipped with perfect acoustics, probably because no one built in those days with that in mind .

Back to San Francisco the following day, reading the book I was assigned to review on the airplane, after a perfect vacation.

Boston – May 2nd

Two great concerts today. First Bach’s G-major Mass at Marsh Chapel, Boston University, beautifully performed by the Chapel Choir and orchestra. There are some fine moments in this seldom-heard work, for example the fugue at the end of the Gloria at In gloria Dei Patris. I hadn’t been inside Marsh Chapel in over 50 years, and it was also satisfying to see that the place hadn’t changed in the slightest.

But the musical highlight of this trip was a Bach program at Symphony Hall with the Handel & Haydn Society directed by Harry Christophers. Two cantatas, two a cappella motets including the fiendishly difficult Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, a double violin concerto and the Fifth Brandenburg – in reality a trio sonata for violin, flute and harpsichord, with a string ensemble murmuring sweet nothings in the background. (It breaks for an absolutely insane, five-minute harpsichord solo extravaganza in the last movement – not really a cadenza, rather a virtuosic excursus inserted into the piece just for the sheer hell of it. What musicians those must have been at Kothen.)

The performance was absolutely flawless, in the best early music period practice, and Christophers’ direction was a revelation – he organizes Bach in larger phrases of 4-8 measures, which I’d never really heard anyone do before as effectively.

I sang with the H&H for two seasons in 1957 and 1958, when it was still a quasi- Victorian choral society. Now it is a small semi-professional chorus with a period orchestra, as good a Baroque performance ensemble as any in the world.

I was lucky enough to have a ticket in the second row center, placing me almost on stage among the musicians. Where do you get that for $35 in San Francisco!

Boston — May 1st

My second day in Boston found me hiking down Long Wharf to walk off another meal at Durgin Park, and afterwards exploring the 400 block of Beacon Street, where I lived with my parents at No. 468 from 1945 to 1947. Our redbrick apartment building, now given over to overpriced condominiums, is located almost at the corner of Mass. Ave, and Harvard Bridge is still but a stone’s throw away. Not a single one of those buildings seen in my picture above was there in 1945 -- the gold dome of the State House could be seen for miles.

Storrow Drive had not yet replaced a spacious green park that ran along the Charles to Longfellow Bridge; today about half of it remains in the area near Hatch Shell. I remember a big celebration held to celebrate the end of WW II, with fire-boats ejaculating Charles River water skywards while the Boston Pops, awash in patriotic fervor, played with inspiring vigor the Coast Guard march Semper Paratus in the Shell. This is the first music I can remember having heard, and the melody has continued to march around inside my brain ever since.

From those years I remember walking east down Mass. Ave with my Dad. At the bridge crossing over the Mass. Turnpike there were multiple train tracks, and it was great fun to hang your head over the rail as the steam locomotives passed under and shot up a huge cloud of steam and cinders. I remember the smell of the burning coal to this day.

Saturday evening was devoted to a student performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles at Adams House. I wanted to see it because it was one of the few plays by Shakespeare I hadn’t yet seen. Like most student productions the show was oddly hyperkinetic, which provoked a good-spirited and lively entertainment, but at the cost of squelching the hoped-for enjoyment of Shakespeare’s language.

Boston — April 30th

My room at the Hotel Self-Storage, known more commonly as the Huntington Avenue YMCA, proved to be quite hospitable, since it was pleasantly empty. I generally stay here when visiting Boston, because of its perfect location near the things that interest me — 31 minutes on the T to Harvard Square and 15 minutes per pedes to Copley Square or to Museum of Fine Arts, and five minutes to Symphony Hall and two minutes to Jordan Hall. And all for only $50 per night.

I went first to Durgin Park for lunch, walking east from the State House down Beacon St to Quincy Market. This restaurant, my personal favorite anywhere, due largely to the fact that it serves very traditional New England fare, the kind of stuff I grew up with — fresh cornbread with every meal, delicious fish chowder, Boston baked beans, Yankee pot roast, and Indian pudding for dessert. Durgin Park was founded in 1827 and has neither moved nor changed much since. The decor is late 1890’s American proletarian, and the menu is about the same as it was in the 19th century.

In the evening I attended Jim Marvin’s farewell concert at Sanders Theatre. Jim is retiring after 28 years' directing the Harvard choral organizations, most notably the Harvard Glee Club, in my experience the best men’s choir in the country. I’ve been a fan for 50 years. Due in large part to Jim’s commitment to early music performance, the Glee Club has turned into an altogether exceptional performing group and a unique cultural asset.

Prof. Peter Gomes, who seems to have become the University’s toastmaster general, delivered a 15-minute Festrede, and then we were off to the races with two hours or more of the finest choral music imaginable. Ostensibly a concert given to honor its director, it was more like Marvin presenting a showcase of his accomplishments over 30 years, during the course of which he has completely transformed choral music at Harvard. (If you're old enough to remember G. Wallace Woodworth and Archibald Davison, you'll know what I mean.)

You can see a YouTube interview with Jim Marvin here, and a clip of his retirement concert here, albeit it with terrible audio.

Picture of Sanders Theatre/Memorial Hall from Wikipedia, "Annenberg Hall."

Another Hitchhiking Scenario

A couple years later I was thumbing my way from back East somewhere, and I got picked up by an extremely animated and good-spirited group of Jesus-freaks. I had drawn a secret Tibetan mantra on the highway with a piece of chalk to ensure a swift response. En route I enjoyed a pot vision of how the Great Salt Lake must have appeared in the Late Jurassic.


HITCHHIKING BACK TO CALIFORNIA

I drew an OM sign on the highway outside
Salt Lake City with rocks and pebbles
gathered at the side of the road.
A pair of Jesus freaks stopped at once
in an ancient Chevrolet. We rode
across the hot Utah wasteland. Suddenly
the land was transformed in time to some
pre-historic age—I saw the desert
change to green forests, with giant ferns
and tall grass-like plants. At the edge
of vast clear lakes, ponderous dinosaurs
and mammoths moved among titanic reptiles,
gigantean black-winged birds hovered
almost motionless in the sky. It seemed
almost that I was alive on the planet
before humankind existed. Singing hymns
and stopping frequently to pray to Jesus,
we drove through Nevada to Donner Pass,
crossing the Bay Bridge into San Francisco
at four in the morning.

In Praise of Hitchhiking

I was lamenting last week the demise of hitchhiking and its negative effect on American literature, and it occurred to me there are probably not many left who have thumbed their way from one end of the country to the other.

My own hitchhiking adventures were not all that extensive, but they did produce some memorable experiences. In 1959 I undertook my first transcontinental trip, from Boston to Seattle. The 50's were perhaps the last era of middle-class social cohesion, which meant among other things that folks tended to trust each other, and even look after one another in public situations. As a young person, the trick was to dress neatly and do as much as possible to look like a college student, and success was assured.

Hitchhiking around Germany as a grad student in the 60's succeeded easily as well.When the driver noted that I was an American, I also deceitfully remarked that I was Jewish, which activated latent guilt mechanisms. Thus I got dropped off at the very best exits along the Autobahn for further travel.

Later in San Francisco there was for several years a vibrant community of young people recognizable by long hair and colorful costume, which ensured rapid pickups by drivers similarly adorned. So if you needed to go to Berkeley from the Haight, you could appear anywhere on Oak Street with a sign that read BERK, get a ride within minutes, and arrive at your destination, possibly stoned, some 25 minutes later. You saved considerable time getting to the F-Bus at the Trans-Bay Terminal, and met some fun people as well.

Transcontinental hitchhiking wasn't quite as efficient, but worked out fine if you were patient and on a budget. But there were sometimes problems, often involving unforeseen adverse weather, as articulated in one of my journal-poems* from 1971:

HITCHHIKING ACROSS NEW YORK IN JANUARY

I promised myself this would never happen again—

age 31, ten dollars in my pocket, standing

over an hour at an obscure entrance

to the New York Thruway which God Himself

has forgotten and where nothing passes except

an occasional carload of drunk, laughing skiers.

The sky turns leaden grey. At four

in the afternoon it is dark as night. I'm numb

to the bone. I hop up and down to keep from

freezing. Suddenly the wind shifts and

a blizzard begins. In ten minutes I look like

a snowman. Eventually a Volkswagen stops

and offers a ride to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

This represents a deviation of 200 miles

from my planned itinerary, but how can I refuse?

Reacting incompetently to the din of an AM

radio station, I sit for hours with my teeth

clenched, knees to my chin. I promise

myself this will never happen again

* I had the idea in those years to form my journal entries as poems.

Out of Shanghai

I've written three posts recently relating to Shanghai, and I’ll conclude by describing my final departure in 1990 from that fabled city. (I doubt if I'll go there again, as I can't bare to think what's become of the place.)

The overnight boat to the Buddhist island of Putuoshan left its downtown dock on the Huangpu River at the Bund promptly at 8pm. It probably still does so today, since the Chinese concept of a vacation has been since time immemorial to go off for a visit to a Buddhist temple, and Putuoshan is famous as one of the “four sacred mountains” in Chinese Buddhism.

Western visitors and Lonely Planet hadn’t yet caught on to this, so I was the only waiguo-ren on board. I booked passage in the cheapest possible cabin, being afraid that by traveling in steearage I might wake up in the morning to find my gear gone, hard for any backpacker to replace while en route in any developing country.

The boat turned out to be not a modern ferry, but rather a pre-WWII south seas freighter converted into a sort-of passenger ship. My cabin on this floating turd-bucket was a small space whose every surface was composed of rusting white-washed cast iron, except for the small cot with a single worn wool blanket. The interior stank of urine, and the latch and hinges of the single, oval-shaped port-hole had rusted shut years before. The smell of urine and the incessant growling of the ship’s engines that vibrated through the walls made any hope of sleep impossible.

But I was transported mentally. Here I was, reenacting the same scene found in numberless Hollywood movies, travelling in a south seas tramp-steamer along the coast of China. I pressed my head against the dirty port-window and could make out the moon flittering across the waves of the East China Sea. I felt very happy.

The vessel released its human cargo onto the dock at Putuoshan around 5am, sufficient time to race to the Puji Temple for morning service. I put on my Soto zen rakasu and joined in with the monks.

Chinese ceremonies are huge fun, since if it’s a large temple, the monks march around the Buddha Hall in concentric circles, sort of like a Buddhist conga line, and there are wonderful Chinese percussion instruments that punctuate the chanting, sounding occasionally like Beijing Opera. (So much more congenial than the formality of morning services I attended at Ehei-ji in Japan, where kneeling motionless in seiza for 45 minutes or more left you worrying if the circulation to your legs had been cut off permanently.)

I poked around the sacred island, dedicated to Guan-Yin (aka: Avalokiteshvara), for a few hours, but found it the least interesting of the four holy mountains in China, due in part no doubt to my profound lack of sleep. Consequently I took the afternoon ferry to Ningbo, before moving on to Dogen’s temple at Tiantong.

[Picture of Puji Temple by James Johnson. More pictures of Putuoshan by James Johnson are posted here.]

My Shanghai

I first discovered Shanghai in 1986, travelling first from South Korea to Hong Kong, since direct travel to Shanghai was forbidden in those days. It had been only since 1979 that China under Deng Xiaoping had opened to the West, and an infra-structure for tourists was still in its infancy. A whole generation of Chinese had grown up without having seen a Caucasian person in vivo, so that a backpacker hiking about town was an instant sensation. If you paused for even a moment from walking down the street, you were quickly surrounded by a small crowd of curious Chinese who wanted to feel your nylon jacket, or have a look at your digital watch, novel at the time.

Of course no one spoke English, and the streets were full of cyclists on "Flying Pigeon" fat-tire bikes and empty of cars, since private ownership of automobiles was still prohibited—which seemed to me like an intelligent, postmodern solution to the air- and noise pollution problems afflicting urban environments in the West. There was certainly no indication then that the industrialized P.R.C. would become the world's greatest air-polluter two decades later.

Entering Shanghai was like travelling back in time to the 1930’s, since little had changed long before the Communist takeover in 1949. The Bund looked about the same as in the picture above taken in 1928; capitalism hadn’t yet taken hold in China, and the run-down blue-gray buildings lining the Nanjing Road were void of modern shops. It was a city was frozen in time, and the effect was absolutely uncanny.

The two main attractions were the Shanghai Museum, then quite literally the only museum in the P.R.C. dedicated to traditional Chinese art (and funded by the Taiwanese), and the Jade Buddha Temple. The temple furnishings would have been familiar to anyone from San Francisco, since the temple was built in the late Qing period, when temple décor quite unhistorically relied heavily on elaborate red, gold and black coloration.

Best of all, rooms at the famous Peace Hotel at the corner of the Bund and the Nanjing Road were available for a reasonable price. The legendary Peace Hotel swing band, now composed of older men who had somehow survived from the 1930’s, also played from time to time.

The whole experience was like a dream. After an erotic episode at the Peace Hotel, I wrote:


Shanghai

in a city of cold blue stone
we awoke like two Celestials

fallen from Heaven onto silken
bedsheets at the Peace Hotel,

our arms and legs curved into
each other like yin and yang,

later we lay on the bed smoking
and looking up at the ceiling,

listening to bicycle bells,
motor scooter horns and the rain
streaming down endlessly

outside in the Bund

 

Nefta

Located on the edge of the Chott al-Jarid, a large saline lake in southwestern Tunisia occupying about 1,900 square miles, Nefta is a desert oasis community which subsists mainly from the cultivation of date palms, fed by artesian wells.
It is an important religious center for the Sufis, established soon after Muslims conquered the region in AD 670, who were in turn preceded by Romans who had built desert forts there. Mysticism is at home in the desert, and Nefta is one of the most other-worldly destinations I have ever seen.
Nefta borders the Grand Erg Oriental in Algeria, the second largest sand sea in the Sahara. Click on the picture to open my photo album, which dates from 1984.

Nefta

Kairouan

There are certain places and environments on the planet that embody perfection, or as much of it as any of us are likely to experience in these latter days. Two such places are found in Tunisia, and the first of these is the walled city of Kairouan.
It was founded by the Arabs about 45 After Hegira (670 AD) in the Caliphate of Mu'awiya—the first Caliph in the Ummayad Dynasty. During the 9th century it was the center of the emirate of Ifriqya, whose ruler was appointed in Baghdad by the legendary Caliph Harun al-Rashid, of Sinbad the Sailor fame. From Ifriqya Sicily was conquered, before falling eventually to the Normans.
The Great Mosque of Kairouan dates to the founding of the city. The university, consisting of scholars who met in the mosque, became a center of Islamic thought and education in the secular sciences. Today it is an island of holy space in the midst of an almost perfectly preserved medieval Arab environment. The columns and chapters are derived from Roman architecture of previous centuries.
Click on the picture to see the album.

Kairouan - 1984

40th Anniversary of the P.R.C.

Watching on tv the 60th anniversary celebrations of the People's Republic of China in Tianmen Square last week put me in mind of my participation in the PRC's 40th anniversary. I'd arrived in Beijing ten days previous to start teaching at Foreign Ministry's College of Diplomacy. Because foreign diplomats were boycotting the celebration due to the recently and brutally crushed Tianmen riots, we “foreign experts” were rounded up and urged to take their place, which meant we got to sit in the reviewing stands permanently installed over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from which Mao proclaimed the P.R.C. in 1949.


Mini-buses arrived at our institute in the early afternoon to carry us in the evening. (In 1989 there were no private vehicles allowed in China: the few that existed belonged exclusively to the government.) The vehicles were parked in lots that lined the east side of the Forbidden City, and we proceeded through a side entrance to walk down to the entrance gate. That was my first visit to the Forbidden City: viewing those immense courtyards and palaces, empty and absent of any visitors, under moonlight—an eerily fascinating experience.
The viewing stands above the Gate of Heavenly Peace were not large: they might accommodate a couple hundred persons at most, and we “experts” were placed less than a stone’s throw away from China’s top leadership, at the time Li Peng and Jiang Zemin. From there we could look out across the world’s largest public square, which was filled with close to nearly two million people—the largest herd of seething humanity I’d ever seen in one place before or since.
The spectacle began with the obligatory military parade, was followed by throngs of marching flag-waving socialists of one tribal affiliation or another, and climaxed with the inevitable mega-display of fireworks. It reminded me of the triumphal processions and arena spectacles put on by the ancient Romans, and of the huge fireworks show I saw in 1981 from the foot of the Eiffel Tower in commemoration of the 2000th anniversary of the city of Paris. I couldn’t help but wonder if the Chinese socialist state would last that long.

[Photo by Peter Morgan, Wikipedia, "Tianmensquare."]

To Africa

In the early 80's there was a very big hit song called "Africa" by a rock group named "Toto." The song featured a memorable combination of plinky-plunky African instruments, grand synthesizer chords, and vocals which cadenced with a recurring and overlong suspension (dissonance of a minor second) on the words, "I miss the rains in "A-a-a-a-a-fri-ca-a-a-a-a-a-a." The song obviously still enjoys local purchase, since the Immigration Office in Botswana on the border with Namibia was playing it loudly when I presented myself there for inspection.



In the early 1990's I had been living in Java, fairly far up in the mountains in a rain forest area, and I thought I'd experienced there the ultimate in torrential tropical downpours, but this was as nothing compared to my first summer rainstorm in Africa, which commenced an hour after I arrived at Joburg Airport from Cairo and had reached my destination in nearby Pretoria. Such robustious crashes of thunder and blinding flashes of lightning and inundations of rainfall I have never known. One hour later it was gone, but it was already completely clear to me that I was really going to enjoy my stay in Africa.
Before I started my travels, I had been considering the possibility of an overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town. Three factors led me to reject the idea: the impending Iraq war, which might have led to problems passing through Egypt and the Sudan; my lack of medical insurance and contingency resources; and the discovery that Paul Theroux, America's best travel writer, had recently published a book called "Dark Star Safari," in which he described exactly what I was thinking about doing, namely traveling overland to Cape Town from Cairo. I read the book in January and realized I didn't need to repeat his adventures, which among others included getting shot at crossing the border from Ethiopia into Somalia.
So I decided to penetrate Africa from the opposite end, and what better place for the non-initiated Western tourist to do so than in South Africa. This country has got it all: high mountains, stunning sea coasts, big game reserves, brilliant sunshine, good beer and wines, a sizable chunk of the Kalihari Desert to the West, good roads, spacious views and panoramic landscapes familiar to me only from the Western U.S., a terrific system of budget-priced backpacker hostels across the country, and the advantages of a first-world economy at 40% discount, due to a recent devaluation of the Rand.
Whatever the tourist wants, South Africa has, and in surfeit. All you have to do is close your mind to the fact that the domestic crime-rate is astronomical, that 25% of the native African population is HIV+ or suffers from Aids (the Africa average), and that most native Africans in S.A. live in tiny tin shacks thrown together on the periphery of white-built cities, or in one-room huts in the countryside, typically without running water or electricity. Aside from that, everything is just great.

To Ürümqi

I left Beijing in August 1993 at the conclusion of my U.N. job, where for two years I had taught English to students at the Wai Jiao Xue Yuan, China’s school of diplomacy, run by the Foreign Affairs Ministry of the P.R.C. The trip took to me to Urumqi in Xinjiang Province, from there by bus to Kashgar, over the Karakoram into the north of Pakistan, and across the Punjab to Dharamsala in India.
The train trip from Beijing to Urumqi lasted three days, the Chinese version of the Mongolian Express, but without the Western tourists out for a good time. Indeed there was hardly anyone on the train at all, excepting some military officers and local cadres who would get on and ride minor distances and then get off. Most of the time I had a whole compartment to myself, secure in my little bubble since no one spoke English in the provinces in those days, settling comfortably into the well-worn blue cushion seats with little white lace doilies on the headrests. I sank into my usual travel trance, accepting helplessness and tedium the way one does when flying for 14 hours across the Pacific to San Francisco from Tokyo. I roused myself every couple hours when the train service brought round tea and jiaozi (dumplings) and read for awhile afterwards.
We passed through or near Turfan, Bezelik, Jiaohe, places on the northern Silk Road desert I had examined and photographed in detail on previous trips. The train line crosses the Taklamakan Desert, on the north side of the Tarim Basin. The area is not known for stunning desert scenery, but is rather nondescript in most places. It suddenly comes alive in the red sandstone hills in the Tian Shan mountain range near Turfan. They are mentioned in Journey to the West, the marvelous 16th c. Chinese novel which describes the journey of Xuanzang, the priest of Great Tang, who is off to India to fetch the Buddhist sutras, accompanied by Monkey and Pig. What a journey that must have been overland.

Urumqi proved to be yet another grey Chinese city with absolutely nothing to see, despite an ethnic mix of half Chinese and half Uyghur, each side apparently canceling out the cultural accomplishments of the other. There is some fine mountain scenery in the Tianshans near Urumqi: alpines lakes and green meadows populated with nomadic tribespeople living in yurts.

Photo from http://www.synaptic.bc.ca