I have just spoken with Paul and asked him if he were getting any exercise. He said, almost none. I also asked if he agreed with me that it was probably not wise for him to go out to exercise alone, given his tendency to have spells of dizziness and falling. He said that he did agree. I then asked whether those who stop by periodically during the day ever take him for a walk and, to my surprise, he said they did NOT do that as a routine thing.

After one of his recent visits to help Paul with his computer Christian Steinhoff remarked that Paul was not getting any exercise and desperately needed to be doing so. I therefore must apologize to all of you there in Berlin for not having brought this need to your attention before now.

Here’s what I’d like to propose.

If you live in Berlin and can commit to doing so, go by Paul’s home on whatever schedule you can spare and take him for a walk while you’re there. He admits to being painfully slow, so you’ll have to take along an good supply of patience and use it liberally. It shouldn’t take the equivalent of the Berlin airlift to organize a dozen or so friends who live close enough to go by for an hour every couple of weeks and get him up out of his chair and walk around with him in the open air for a half hour or so.

We often say, please let me know if there is anything I can do. Well consider yourself notified of how you can help.

If you’d like some compensation for your help, then let me suggest you tell him you’re there to take him out for a stroll down memory lane and allow him to choose the topic he wishes to repay you with. Such strolls down memory lane have formed the bulk of the content of our conversations through the years and those talks are both unforgettable and priceless to me. They are yours for the asking … and the price of going by to take him for a walk.

This is, of course, a limited-time offer as I’m sure you realize.

Please don’t hesitate to comment below and support this effort in any way you choose. Let’s not resort to having to pay someone to do this, when giving a friend a little block of your time returns such psychic benefits and positive karma to the giver.

Thanks.

The other day when Paul and I were talking, I mentioned that I had heard this piece on NPR by Robert Krulwich about the fact that crows apparently can recognize and remember people’s faces and then evidently seek them out for particular scorn. As we talked I reminded him that he had written about an encounter he had had with crows in the park that is just up from his house, and he recalled both the events and also writing about them.

Later I went back and read those several posts again myself, and they are delightful! I mentioned to Paul that such things are really the true value of blogs. Like the cave drawings of primitive man, they leave whatever they contribute for others, whom they may never know, to enjoy or for yourself to review later when you return and re-read them, seeing no doubt all kinds of new things that you never saw before in your own story.

Since Paul is at the moment unable to update this blog and regale us with another of his delightful stories, I thought I’d re-direct your attention to his first post about his encounter with the crows (and the 2nd and 3rd) and then finally to his follow-up post. Enjoy.

[This afternoon at the Komische Oper zu Berlin, the American baritone Kevin Deas sang this captivating little song Aaron Copland adapted as one of his "Old American Songs", and when I got home I emailed him this addendum:]

Dear Mr. Deas,

as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended – and enjoyed – your concert this afternoon at the Komische Oper, and I have a footnote to Aaron Copland’s arrangement of “I Bought Me a Cat” that I felt a real urge at least to tell you about.  I decided against coming uninvited to the party that undoubtedly took place in the house Casino afterwards; I didn’t want to seem like a party-crasher.

In New York half a century or so ago, circumstances involved me personally in the birthing of that meanwhile famous arrangement Aaron made at that time – but when he himself played the piano part and (more or less) croaked the tune, he always, invariably, incorporated a gimmick I’ve never known any singer to use, but to my way of thinking it adds a final fillip that I find considerably enriches the song’s ending.

Oliver Smith had made a fortune in royalties for having designed that goldmine called “Oklahoma!” and he used that money to set himself up as a producer (of hits including another goldmine called “West Side Story”).  He had a plan to outdo “Oklahoma!” and at the same time bring High Art to Broadway.  With that in mind he bought the rights to Erskine Caldwell’s novel “Tragic Ground”, engaged Lynn Riggs (the born Oklahoman whose play “Green Grow the Lilacs” had provided the raw material for “Oklahoma!”) to adapt the book and write the lyrics, and Agnes de Mille, whose choreography for “Oklahoma!” had introduced ballet to the Broadway musical stage, to do not only the choreography but also stage the entire production.  My friendship with both Riggs and Copland got me involved in Aaron’s spiffy setting of “I Bought Me a Cat.”

Lynn Riggs could not read music but his apartment (at 1 Christopher Street) did have an upright piano, so I got turned into a sort of bilateral amanuensis for both him and Copland.  During early planning discussions, Lynn told Aaron that during his Oklahoma childhood he’d grown up with a local ditty Aaron might find worth incorporating into “Tragic Ground” – and proceeded to sing it for him: “I Bought Me a Cat.”  Aaron took to it immediately, and it apparently set itself, for very soon after that Aaron sat down at Lynn’s upright and both played and sang his arrangement’s official world premiere.

Aaron had had Agnes de Mille’s choreography and dancers in mind, so at the very end of each verse, he’d insert a brief hiatus to clap his hands, twice, before continuing with the final “My cat says fiddle-eye-fee”, doing what he intended to have Agnes’s dancers do.  However – and finally here comes the bug I want to plant in your own ear – at the end of the very last stanza (“I bought me a wife”), he’d clap his hands not the two times the listener expected but, all of a sudden, three times, with an emphatic accent on the third clap, and only then go on to the valedictory tagline.

I’ve always found that little built-in surprise a delightful way to startle an audience, and if you do, too, I offer you this tidbit with my compliments and best wishes.  As far as I know, you’d become the first singer ever to perform that captivating little song the way Aaron himself did.

“Tragic Ground” never did get produced – or, for that matter, even finished.  If you have access to Volume 2 of the memoirs Aaron wrote with Yale’s Vivian Perlis, you might find footnote number. . . .  DAMN!  I can’t at the moment find my own copy, but you can easily locate the passage I have in mind by checking the index for “Alone at Night”, the nearest thing to a conventional pop song Aaron contributed, which he optimistically thought (and for financial reasons hoped) just might have a chance to become a popular hit.

With sincere best wishes,

Paul Moor

[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:]

Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music.  During the early years after World War II he quickly attained rank with France’s Pierre Boulez and Italy’s Luigi Nono in the triumvirate that dominated avant-garde music, and half a century later his music remains almost as thorny and problematical as ever.

Time has made Stockhausen ever more reticent to discuss personal matters, so only in early biographical writings does one find details of a cripplingly traumatic childhood.  With few interruptions, he has spent his entire life in Germany’s Rhineland, where his parents came from farming stock.  By Karlheinz’s birth in 1928, his father had become a grammar-school teacher, but five years later (coincidentally the year Hitler’s Nazis came to power) his mother became incurably psychotic, committed to an institution from which she never emerged: the Nazis’ cynically misnamed “euthanasia” program murdered her eight years later.  At 13 he lost his father to the Wehrmacht – also never to return, officially missing in action, reportedly killed in Hungary.  At 13 Karlheinz entered a boarding school run by an institution in Xanten that trained teachers according to Nazi principles, which they undoubtedly force-fed him.

At six he had started piano lessons; in Xanten he also got instruction in violin and played oboe in the school orchestra.  He attended that school until 1944, when he got assigned to a field hospital at the front where he served as a stretcher-bearer until March 1945.  After World War II ended, he became a farmhand, but by the end of 1945 busied himself rehearsing amateur operetta productions, studying Latin at the same time.  In February 1946 he entered a Classically oriented Gymnasium in Bergisch Gladbach, and in March 1947 completed his Abitur (approximate equivalent of a U.S. junior college diploma).  He supported himself partially as a bar pianist, partially as an operetta rehearsal pianist.  At 19 he gained admission to Cologne’s outstanding Musikhochschule (conservatory), where his teachers included Switzerland’s Frank Martin – an influence one would never guess from the music Stockhausen soon started composing.  Simultaneously he studied philosophy, musicology, and German studies at Cologne University. Ever since, Cologne has remained the place most closely associated with Stockhausen and his activities.

   His earliest works date from 1950, his first marriage (which produced his first four children) from 1952, but his first musical epiphany came when he discovered the music of Olivier Messiaen, a devoutly Roman Catholic Parisian organist-composer early recognized as a post-war avant-garde pioneer.  Already Stockhausen had started composing “pointillistic” music, consisting of myriad individual, seemingly unrelated tones.  In 1952 he went to Paris for rhythmic and aesthetic training with Messiaen, also dabbling in the semi-electronic musique concrète composed by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer from material tape-recorded from almost infinitely varied sources.  Already in 1952 Vienna’s Universal-Edition, the uniquely adventurous publisher of a modern élite including Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Weill, et al., had signed Stockhausen to a contract any young composer would almost have died for.

In 1953 he joined the trailblazing new Electronic Studio established by Cologne Radio, which he headed from 1963 to 1977. His first major international breakthrough came in 1965, when he electrified the musical avant-garde with a work he called “Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace”.  Previously he had horrified Pierre Boulez with his expressed hope to compose an electronic mass for Cologne’s cathedral; after administrators there told him thanks but no thanks, that project became the world’s first generally acknowledged masterpiece of electronic music, the “Song of the Youths”.  Ever the insatiable experimenter, he also investigated the possibilities of new music’s aleatory pioneers, who introduced the element of chance into a work’s performance, theoretically making each and every performance of an aleatory score unique.  Between 1954 and 1956 Stockhausen continued his studies in phonetics and communication research with a pioneering professor at Bonn University.

Two avant-garde musical events in postwar Germany set the international pace: a cosmopolitan summer school sponsored by Darmstadt and a jampacked weekend festival in Donaueschingen, which continued a tradition that had called early attention to composers including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.  By 1953, the Boulez-Nono-Stockhausen troika unassailably dominated Darmstadt, where Stockhausen taught from 1953 to 1974.  Universal-Edition added him to the editorial staff of its pace-setting journal Die Reihe (“The Row”, named after Schoenberg’s trailblazing principle of the twelve-tone “row”), a post he held from 1954 to 1959.

The world premiere of his super-aleatory “Piano Piece XI” in New York created a major esoteric musical sensation in 1957, and a year later he gave thirty-two concert-lectures at U.S. universities – the beginning of a more or less constant series of Stockhausen concerts over which he himself presides.  The University of Pennsylvania brought him to Philadelphia as a guest professor in 1965, the University of California at Davis in 1966-67.  In 1967 he married for the second time, the German avant-garde artist Mary Bauermeister, who bore him two more children, the six names of whom include Julika, Majella, and Suja.  (The more conventional others: Christel, Markus, and Simon; four Stockhausen children sometimes participate in paternal performances, most notably Markus, a brilliant trumpet virtuoso.)

Japan’s 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka brought Stockhausen’s finest hour to date when the Federal German government, then in Bonn, government sent him as its official cultural ambassador, climaxed by the global auditorium built to his own specifications for the performance of his own music.

Since 1977 Stockhausen has concentrated on the seven-part cycle he calls “Light”, subtitled “The Seven Days of the Week” – a heptalogy which when finished will dwarf its most massive predecessor, Richard Wagner’s tetralogy “The Nibelung’s Ring”.  By 2002, the date Stockhausen has set himself to complete “Light”, it will consist of seven full-length operas comprising some twenty-four hours of music.

Although a Biblically-based religion pretty much his own has never ceased playing a dominant role in Stockhausen’s life and music, he today marches to his own drummer.  Years ago he answered my question about him as a Roman Catholic with “I try to be”, but he divorced his two wives and today shares his life with two of his main expert performers: Clarinettist Suzanne Stephens (born in Waterloo, Iowa), who teamed up with him in 1976, and Flutist Kathinka Pasveer (born in Zaandam, Holland), who in 1982 made it a menage à trois.  Stockhausen has composed more than forty works for Stephens, plus a number of Pasveer, not to mention quite a number for both ladies together, one of which (“Ave”, a 23-minute duo for basset horn and alto flute – a scene from the “Monday” instalment of “Light”) formed half the birthday program in Cologne’s Philharmonie Monday night [in 1998].

From the beginning, Stockhausen has burned with a hard gemlike flame, with two adjectives – arrogant and messianic – applied to him with noticeable frequency.  He has a massive, handsome head, and large, burning eyes of an intensity many find intimidating. Two vertical furrows frame the bridge of his nose in an almost uninterrupted semi-frown perhaps indicating perpetual deep thought and total seriousness.  He has never suffered fools gladly – a tendency intensified by age, success, fame, and what long since became international cult status.  Even before Woodstock he had captured the attention and admiration of at least half the Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney), who included his portrait in the montage of their personal heroes on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” LP.  Others on the record as Stockhausen fans include not only deadly serious young composers all over the world but also David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa.

Stockhausen’s acolytes hang upon his every word as the divinely revealed truth, slavishly carrying out his every instruction, no matter how seemingly incomprehensible.  In 1970 he began composing what he calls “cosmic music”, with an almost hour-long “Mantra” for two pianos, percussion, and electronic tape he describes thus: “The unifying construction of Mantra is a musical miniature of the unifying macrostructure of the cosmos, and it is at the same time an enlargement into the acoustic time-field of the unifying microstructure of the harmonic vibrations within the tone itself.”  That typifies Stockhausen in one of his simpler, more lucid descriptions.  Stephen Hawking’s book A Short History of Time enthralled him; so did the Hubble space telescope, which from space has yielded photographs Stockhausen calls “the most beautiful I have ever seen as stars – and for me, tones are stars.”

In 1971 Stockhausen composed a large outdoor work he called Sternklang (Starsound), and in its text referred to inhabitants of other stars, other galaxies, and his wish “to bid them welcome”.  As a gift to the USA for its 1976 bicentennial, the West German government commissioned a work Stockhausen entitled “Sirius”, an electronic opus involving four soloists, and since then Sirius – the brightest star in the heavens at certain times – has figured in writings both by and about Stockhausen.

Berlin Critic Volker Straebel quotes Stockhausen as claiming to have received his musical training on Sirius, cautiously adding that “such utterances soon made him suspect for intellectual discourse”.  Another Berlin critic, Gottfried Krieger, who opened his 70th-birthday laudatio with the question “Is this man crazy?”, lists some of the epithets frequently applied to him: a charlatan, a sect priest, characterized by traits associated with fascism, anthroposophy, and what hip Germans call Esoterik – the equivalent of the USA’s “New Age” movement.  Krieger continues: “Small wonder for someone who gives Sirius as his homeland.” Working on “Light” has led Stockhausen to a sort of overall plan he describes as a “superformula”, and once he has the days of the week polished off, he talks – always with his customary all-out enthusiasm – about going on to compose the individual hour, also the individual minutes, into what Krieger calls “a sort of structure in which the listener can assemble the most varied sonic seconds.  If that is crazy, then Stockhausen is surely crazy.”(Few writers go that far in even hinting at Stockhausen’s genetic maternal heritage.)

In 1969, Stockhausen broke away from Universal-Edition and set up his very own publishing house in the hilltop house he and his family occupy in little suburban Kürten, a forty-minute drive away from Cologne.  Its catalogue manifests awesome marketing techniques of not only printed scores but also compact discs, some in multi-disc sets – even Swiss-made music boxes: Stockhausen, long fascinated by not only legitimate astronomy but also the Zodiac, has composed a little sort of jingle for each sign, and for his 70th birthday Suzanne Stephens arranged a numbered Swiss music-box edition limited to forty of each, bearing the master’s notation of the tune with his signature, available until the end of 1998 for 495 Deutschemarks (c. $275), after that for 560 (c. $310).

[Here, dearly beloved, endeth our Stockhausen text for today.  Shall I continue? - because I can. . . .]

This afternoon I actually started a bloggery, skimming the cream off the many times over the past half-century when Karlheinz Stockhausen’s path and mine crossed, but eventually I gave up on it for what I’d originally thought of as a casual stroll down Memory Lane unexpectedly touched off such an avalanche of recollections, from locations including (inevitably) not only Donaueschingen and Darmstadt but also Warsaw – that I finally simply threw in the towel, unexpectedly swamped by all those still vivid recollections.

But I do want to turn loose one nifty, primarily because it contrasts so strongly with the oh so serious way Karlheinz almost ostentatiously took himself – and I hasten to make clear that I in no way intend this as chipping away at the monument he took such an important part in erecting to himself as – unquestionably – one of the most influential, if least enjoyed and enjoyable, composers of his time (1924 – 2007).

During his early glory days, his activities focused upon the Rhineland metropolis Cologne, for more than one reason.  He came from that region, as any aurally informed ear noticed as soon as he opened his mouth.  Of all the Federal German regional radio/television centers, the affluent industrial Rhine-Ruhr area’s de facto capital Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk had the most money, and WDR pampered Karlheinz even during his early years like an especially favorite native son.  If he suddenly one day (so to speak) r’ared back and proclaimed that for some new opus he had in mind he needed unprecedented electronic recording tape with not the customary two tracks but five – which automatically meant manufacturing such tape with an unprecedented width, not to mention the electro-mechanical apparatus necessary to record and play such tape back – Karlheinz got it.  WDR established its pioneering Studio für ektronische Musik primarily for him, and he in turn made it world-famous, starting with his trail-blazing Gesang der Jünglinge im Feuerofen (Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace), which interpolated a single, sonically “white” boy soprano’s voice, bereft of overtones, with accompanying sounds otherwise exclusively electronically generated.

Cologne’s thriving avant-garde scene in those days included not only Karlheinz, as its uncrowned king, but also a collage artist named Mary Bauermeister, who from the beginning took an exceptional shine to him personally.  Remember “Never underestimate the power of a woman”?  Well, the first step towards her displacing his first wife Doris and becoming the second lawfully wedded Frau Stockhausen came when she cunningly asked whether she, the collage artiste, could study with him, the composer, actually take lessons from him. 

During her premarital period she occupied a reportedly spacious studio that provided house-room for various sporadic avant-garde happenings (remember happenings?) of significant esoteric importance.  I never attended one, but my favorite will live forever in my memory on the basis of several vivid conversational accounts, some of them first-hand.  The serious artist of the evening in question had said the elaborate nature his happening necessitated an advance rehearsal, and one high point of that rehearsal came when he wound up and hurled an egg at the vast expanse of plane glass providing the studio’s primary daytime illumination, with the egg’s innards dribbling down the pane in fine serious-artistic fashion.

Like perhaps most serious artists, this gentleman had an evil-minded rival in the area, who got himself briefed about that rehearsal and then fiendishly set out to sabotage the main event, with the vicious intention of making a monkey out of the evening’s guest of honor.  He somehow snuck in and snaffled the designated egg away, replacing it with a reasonably accurate facsimile he had carefully pre-boiled to stone-like consistency.  The climactic moment for the scheduled hurling came . . . and Mary Bauermeister’s enormous plate-glass studio window shattered into a thousand shards – at a time when plate glass in Germany cost so much as to classify almost as a luxury item.

I never did manage to obtain any conscientious reporter’s obligatory confirmation that the serious artist reacted to the prevalent risibility greeting this development – mistaking it as part of the serious artist’s own planned happening – by turning upon the uncouth guffawers and denouncing them one and all as “Faschisten!“  I also can’t tell you whether Karlheinz himself attended that uniquely memorable event; I offer it here only as a peripheral descriptive footnote to the Stockhausen period in Cologne at that time.

(Incidentally, my eagle-eyed Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson has jogged my memory to remind me that during an earlier phase of this playpen I’d reported another serious artistic event – in the air over the German town of Braunschweig – that did indeed personally involve Karlheinz, and in his accustomed stellar role.  Typing his surname into the Search window up at the very top of all this will lead you to those earlier bits of Stockhauseniana.)

Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and returned to New York (where I’d previously spent a teen-age year at Juilliard until the money ran out) armed with a letter of introduction from another Aaron, the university’s Prof. Schaffer, Ph. D., chairman of the Department of Romance Languages, whom Copland identified to me as a lifelong friend and the first person to whom Copland as a mere boy had confided his ambition to become a composer.

My birthplace El Paso, Texas, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, afforded rather restricted access to “classical” music of any kind, but the indulgent staff of the Tri-State Music Company contributed to my musical development more than any of them could ever know by permitting me to spend hours and hours in one of their two listening rooms, where I subjected their 78-rpm recordings on the Victor Red Seal label – the only label with an El Paso outlet – to the punitive friction of that era’s steel needles. Those life-sustaining treats included a two-disc album containing Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony recording of El Salón México, a title that immediately found resonance in me since from El Paso you could go to Mexico by simply walking across the bridge over the pusillanimous trickle bearing the grandiose Spanish name for Great River.

Since I knew nothing about that piece’s composer except for a mention I’d read somewhere of one of his earliest piano pieces, “The Cat and the Mouse”, I looked at the two syllables of his surname and for some time after that thought of him as the man with the funny name that combined Cop and Land. After our friendship years later got off the ground, I asked him one day how come people didn’t at least pronounce it the way it looked. He said he had no idea how that had happened, especially in view of its original pronunciation in Russia before the arrival of his immigrant parents. He then told me that story – which I’ve never, anywhere, seen in print, so this little footnote on the most recognized of all American composers of “classical” music might well qualify as a modest world premiere.

Both his parents had come from their native Russia – and heaven alone knows how his father came by his American name Harris Morris Copland, but probably through the same primitive linguistic Americanization that gave birth to that odd surname Copland.

They arrived, conventionally for that day, at Ellis Island, bearing the only documentation they had – naturally in Kyrillic letters, which might as well have confronted the Immigration official who processed them with similar documentation in Arabic or Chinese. He got it across to them that he wanted to know their surname, then wrote down, for all time, what his American ears heard: cop + land. Only some time later did it transpire that by rights he ought to have given them American documents with the correct transliteration Kaplan. One can only speculate as to whether a Jewish boy from Brooklyn named Aaron Kaplan would have had the exalted career Aaron Copland did.

At Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso, my beloved music teacher Miss Congdon had a small collection of rolls for the upright Duo Art player piano that included one that introduced me to the American pianist George Copeland (1882 – 1971), an early champion of Debussy and the rest of the French school; over and over and over I listened in fascination to the pathetically inadequate Duo Art roll of George Copeland’s playing a piano transcription of Debussy’s orchestrally opulent “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’”. Naturally I eventually asked Aaron Copland whether any kind of family tie connected him with the considerably more famous pianist, and that question yielded me another biographical footnote.

In Aaron Copland’s early thirties, he had become fascinated by Mexico and the other Latin-American countries, and had also acquired considerable fluency in Spanish. When Washington belatedly woke up to the practical strategic importance of its southern neighbors and initiated what it called the Good-Neighbor Policy, with Nelson Rockefeller in charge, the prominent American artists they sent down there understandably included Copland.

He said that in one of the South American countries he visited, he had found himself received with noticeable apprehension, and after a certain amount of discreet prying he found out why. The pianist George Copeland had preceded him there, on a concert tour, and had run afoul of the local fuzz on what those days’ terminology euphemized as a morals charge. Once Aaron Copland convinced them that the two surnames did not coincide even in their spelling, they eventually relaxed and that State Department assignment proved one of quite a number of valuable diplomatic successes.

I cannot conclude this mini-memoir without adding what Germans call a drop of (presumably dry) vermouth. During those hideous years when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pathological fear of communism held the entire country in thrall, Henry Luce’s second magazine “Life” published a two-page compendium of what it carefully called “Communist Dupes and Fellow Travellers”, punctiliously avoiding calling them flat-out communists, since New York state law made such unsubstantiated labelling punishable unless the accuser could prove actual Party membership. Those pages included tiny mugshots of such dangerous limbs of the red Soviet Satan as Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, and . . . Aaron Copland.

The next time I saw Aaron after that, I asked him what effect he expected that to have for him in practical terms. With a rueful smile he said only that he hardly imagined the State Department would send him on any more of those wonderful junkets – and, as far as I know, it never did.

Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript.  Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him to have bowdlerized the lingo he’d found himself personally immersed in would have largely castrated his powerful novel.  The publishers finally reached a triumphant compromise by merely replacing two letters with one and turning it loose in that only slightly castrated form – hoping and praying that even that wouldn’t land them in legal hot water.

According to the story I heard from Jerry Robbins – himself at that time (the late 1940s) a fairly new celebrity due to his smashing successes as choreographer of the ballet On the Town (expanded into the full-scale musical Wonderful Town), who in due time compounded his success and fame by taking an idea of his to Leonard Bernstein, who’d composed the music for both those works, who then collaborated with Jerry and a few more such exceptionally bright contemporaries (Betty Comden and Adolph Green plus Arthur Laurents, who wrote the script) in transplanting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into one of the tougher neighborhoods of that day’s Manhattan as the worldwide smash hit West Side Story.

As Jerry Robbins told it, Norman Mailer’s introduction to Tallulah Bankhead inspired one of her more memorable off-the-cuff ad libs: “Ah, yes – you’re that funny little man that doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”

Back during the period when German television strove mightily to adopt and adapt the lucrative magic formula that had created such American advertising bonanzas as the pioneer talk shows of Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, et al., I once with stricken eyes watched Cavett’s interview, conducted in Cologne by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s chief honcho Werner Höfer himself, when Yaleman Cavett insouciantly set German-American relations back a notch by blandly proclaiming: “In America we say the thinnest book in the world has the title The Best of German Humor.”

Well, consider the brief news-agency story that’s just landed in my virtual lap from Germany’s eagle-eyed dpa (short for Deutsche Presseagentur, which manifestly comes close to marking the sparrow’s fall), about an international competition that took place down in Bavaria last week with unfairly little fanfare.

According to dpa, this avant-garde “International Bottom Championships” competition gingered up life down in Munich last Wednesday.  The dpa account salutes Bulgaria’s Kristina Dimitrova, 19 and female, and Romania’s Andrei Andrei (sic), 24 and male, as the gala event’s winners, each of them taking home a prize of 10,000 Euros ($14,400 in what proud American shoppers abroad back in better days used to call “real money”), not to mention an insurance policy that also came as an additional part of their prize package.

Munich, the beer-guzzling capital of the onetime kingdom of Bavaria and for many years now a Freistaat (Free State), has a widespread reputation for stumpfsinnige residents and daily routine.  Well, make up your own mind.

You can read dpa‘s unabridged report by merely clicking here.

When a day begins with one unexpected pleasant surprise, it has the same effect upon me that William Wordsworth’s rainbow had on him.  When two further unexpected surprises bless the day, that rare benison gooses me into at least mental writing – in this event into what involuntarily took form between my ears during a long walk I took this afternoon.  Gertrude Stein got it right when she observed (in the caption she wrote for some book’s photograph of her in affectionate converse with her dog) that “Real writers write all the time, everywhere.”

Germany’s radical, even revolutionary “student movement” during the late 1960s totally dumped – forever, let’s hope – the long traditional stiff-necked authoritarian German methods of child-rearing that gave the world, among other calamities, Adolf Hitler and his unprecedentedly murderous Third Reich.  At that time, during the 1960s, revolutionary trends among those wonderfully courageous students sometimes swung a bit far in the opposite direction, but one lone book changed German attitudes towards education in a totally benevolent way: Summerhill, by England’s maverick educator A. S. Neill.  He’d adopted as his own personal guru Sigmund Freud’s most radical disciple Wilhelm Reich, the title of one of whose books will tell you a good deal about that (quite literally) mad genius: The Function of the Orgasm.  Under Reich’s dominant influence, Neill founded in England an unprecedented school for children who’d proven such behavior problems that their parents, finally at their wits’ ends, had literally no place else to send them for schooling that would even touch them with a bargepole.  One basic sentence suffices to sum up the sole rule Neill imposed upon his nippers: total – and I do mean total – freedom, as long as that unbridled freedom didn’t violate the rights of others.

One salutary offshoot of those yeasty days here in the 1960s’ Berlin (which fell well within my own first quarter-century sojourn here, from 1956 to 1981) took the form of what became known as the Kinderladen – literally “children shop”: parents sufficiently interested in shielding their kids from those horribly destructive traditional authoritarian methods joined together in groups and simply rented cheap empty storefronts (to use the American term), and in them housed newly created private kindergartens, with carefully selected teachers who shared their views about teaching during those early formative childhood years – in turn an echo of one of Freud’s primary fundamentals of psychoanalysis, which recognises the first six or so formative years of a young human’s life as uniquely important for what that human will then in time develop into.

My apartment building in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf borough has had such a Kinderladen nextdoor since before I moved into it immediately after returning to Berlin twelve years ago.  One little boy there attracted my psychologically educated attention the first time I saw him: pallid complexion, dead eyes, withdrawn manner – he immediately evoked my limited experience with that still puzzling psychological phenomenon called autism.  From time to time, when my Dachshund boss Maxe walks me, I pause for brief conversations with the two young women in charge of the place, and when I asked one of them about this obviously far from happy little boy, it came as no surprise when she told me: “Er ist Autist.“

Returning with Maxe from our first walk this morning, I saw ahead of us, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of my building and the Kinderladen, those two women’s considerably younger new assistant, whom I’d noticed a few days earlier because of his clearly harmonious relationship with a group of the kids coming back from the spacious playground in the aptly named Volkspark – People’s Park – a short walk away.  This morning, as I approached, I could barely believe my eyes to behold that autistic little boy actually smiling – something I’d never before seen him do.  That behavior had an obvious reason: that young assistant had taken him – and him alone – out to play with him, on a tricycle on our stretch of sidewalk.  That sight so gladdened my heart that I spoke to him and complimented him on his clearly manifest expertise in dealing with all those kids.

The day, which had begun with unseasonably sunny weather, seemed to cry out for me to make the most of one of our last fair days before the temperature will force me to caparison myself with such things as gloves, so since Maxe’s exceptionally attenuated spine (his first X-ray revealed that Maxe – the world’s champion dog by anyone’s genuinely disinterested, truly objective standard, has one more vertebra than nature intended for even a Dachshund to have) precludes his making longer walks than necessary, I set out alone.

Crossing the Bundesallee (the pre-war Kaiserallee) on the overhead footbridge, I first came upon the spacious enclosure where dog-owners have official permission to let their mutts run free, and I paused for a few minutes of fond regret.  When Maxe took charge of my life about twelve years ago, I tried taking him there every afternoon to let him wear himself out by trying desperately, on those truncated legs of his, to keep pace with longer-legged dogs, but he soon proved, to the surprise of no one with the least experience of this most headstrong of canine breeds, so anarchic that in order to re-leash him, when time came to go home, I had to enlist one or more strangers to help me corner and overwhelm my recalcitrantly headstrong mutt.

Continuing on my way eastward this morning, I passed another spacious enclosure, this one for young bipeds.  Does anyone reading this recall Cat Stevens’ poignant song about modern city life “But Where Do the Children Play?”  My beloved Berlin has certainly long since answered that vitally important question – in every neighborhood of this huge city, twenty-five miles across at its widest diameter – once and for all.

At the easternmost end of my walk I came to the building that had once, soon after World War II ended in 1945, housed what every German at that time knew as RIAS, the acronym for Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor – Radio in the American Sector of that era’s four-power city ruled over by the victorious Allies: Britain, France, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and the USA.  RIAS (pronounced REE-ahss) became one of the most implacably persistent thorns in the Soviet authorities’ Communist sides, and it remained that until 1989 brought Germany’s reunification and RIAS got absorbed into today’s RBB, Rundfunk (literally circular spark, a term that also includes television) in Berlin and Brandenburg, the federal state that completely surrounds the city-state Berlin.

When Maxe got me home, one of the two ladies in charge of the Kinderladen happened to tarry outside its entrance, and I seized the occasion to zing in a good word for their young new assistant Johannes.  I told her that his noticeably excellent wave-length with his young charges, in particular with that little autist, had made it a surprise when he told me he’d studied foreign languages but had no actual specific training as a Kindergärtner.  “No,” she said, “he’s only twenty-eight and he’s going this job as his” – here she used an abbreviation new to me, something I recall as Zivi (pronounced Tzee-vee), obviously short for Zivildienst, a catch-all term for various kinds of public service available to all young Germans as an alternative to going into uniform as legally required by my adopted country’s “universal” military service.  How wonderfully sensible, I couldn’t help thinking, that such young Germans today (another of them: a newly married young physician I’d first photographed, the son of friends, at the age of less than twenty-four hours, who with his lovely fellow-physician pregnant wife had graced the party given for me a month or so ago to celebrate my naturalization) have available this possibility to serve today’s Germany – my Germany – truly pro bono publico.

And then several hours ago, what should fall into my lap but yet another story, this time actual news, of the kind I especially enjoy distributing for two reasons: it seems to me characteristic, even typical, of the Germany I so sincerely and gratefully love, and because its kind of story about my own today’s Germany so often simply remains unknown abroad.  Instead of my even partially summarizing it for you, I’ve instead made it available in its entirety to anyone reading this bloggery who can work up the energy merely to click here.