J. S. Bach the Rebel

Ted Gioia, "J.S. Bach the Rebel," Lapham's Quarterly, October 16, 2019 [excerpted from Music: A Subversive History by the same author]:

I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip he billed the church eighteen groschen for beer, enough to purchase eight gallons of it at retail prices—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or had a reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology. They don’t know about Bach’s sex life: at best a matter of speculation, but what should we conclude from his twenty known children, more than any significant composer in history (a procreative career that has led some to joke with a knowing wink that “Bach’s organ had no stops”), or his second marriage to twenty-year-old singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke, when he was in his late thirties? They don’t know about the constant disciplinary problems Bach caused, or his insolence to students, or the many other ways he found to flout authority. This is the Bach branded as “incorrigible” by the councilors in Leipzig, who grimly documented offense after offense committed by their stubborn and irascible employee.

Sgt. J.D. Salinger

Nicolaus Mills, "Son of Sam Cop Pays Tribute to Army Buddy Sgt. J.D. Salinger," Daily Beast, November 11, 2019:

“He was brave under fire and a loyal and dependable partner,” Keenan [John, NYPD Chief of Detectives, in a sympathy letter written to Matt Salinger after his father’s death] observes. “On many occasions in the course of an assignment, although pinned down by artillery, machine gun or small arms fire, he did what had to be done.” But for Keenan, what was most telling about Salinger was his refusal to let the brutality of the war harden him. “Did he tell you,” Keenan asks Matt Salinger midway into his letter, “how he saved a group of wounded German soldiers from being executed by understandably fired-up GI’s?”

[...]

Salinger had insight into what a Nazi victory would mean as a result of living in Austria less than a year before Germany annexed it, and during the war he got a firsthand view of Nazi death camps that never left him. In her memoir, Dream Catcher, Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, remembers him once telling her, “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
Salinger’s horror at what he and the Fourth Infantry Division had seen was enough for him to briefly check himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945. “I’ve been in an almost constant state of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane,” Salinger wrote Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had become friends earlier in the war when Hemingway was a correspondent for Collier’s.

Elizabeth Bishop, Lonely and Dedicated

Scott Bradfield,"It’s Always a Good Time to Revisit the Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop" (A Review of Thomas Travisano, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop), The Washington Post, November 8, 2019:

• Her loneliness: “When you write my epitaph,” she once told her lifelong friend, Robert Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
• Her talent: James Merrill once claimed she “had more talent for life — and for poetry — than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
• Her secrecy: It is hard to think of a major American poet who revealed so little about herself while revealing so much about the human world we inhabit. Through about 100 poems published during her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop — in her compact, reticent, nearly invisible way — contained multitudes. [...] “You know what I want?” she once asked her friend, Richard Howard. “I want closets, closets, and more closets.” There was something secret about every poem she composed, like a private space that you only slowly found your way into. And one that never made you eager to leave.
• Her literary method: Most of all, Bishop never lacked the luxury of time, working for years and even decades on individual poems until she got them just right. There was a dogged pertinacity to the way she composed poems, relentlessly hunting down every perfect word and nuance, often assembling her lines on a large bulletin board over her desk, like one of those serial killer-hunting detectives in a television series.

Christian Dietrich Grabbe

Ladislaus Lob, "Christian Dietrich Grabbe," Encyclopedia of German Literature [Konzett, Matthias, ed.], Routledge (2015), p. 362-3:

In German cultural history, Christian Dietrich Grabbe's work coincides with the Biedermeier period, the transitional phase between the end of classicism and Romanticism on the one hand and the rise of realism on the other. In the context of German political history, it falls into the "Restauration" or Vormärz" era, which began with the defeat of Napoléon in 1815 and closed with the revolutions of March 1848. Sigmund Freud described Grabbe as "an original and rather peculiar poet," Heinrich Heine called him "a drunken Shakespeare," and Karl Immermann saw him as having both "a wild, ruined nature" and "an outstanding talent." Although his image as a flawed genius lingers, he is now also hailed as one of Germany's major experimental dramatists, and the irregularities of his plays are regarded as an integral part of their originality.
The only child of the local jailer, Grabbe felt oppressed and alienated in his provincial hometown of Detmold where, as he wrote to Ludwig Tieck, "an educated person is looked upon as an inferior kind of fattened ox." Physically frail and psychologically unstable, he seemed the archetype of the dissolute bohemian artist, oscillating between sullen shyness and aggressive self-assertion, imperiously demanding recognition but refusing to please or to conform, performing erratically in his duties as army legal officer, staying in a destructive marriage, and precipitating his fatal decline by excessive drinking. While it is uncertain to what extent his "bizarreness" was natural and to what extent it was cultivated to shock his middle-class contemporaries, the "Grabbe myth" soon become confused with, and has often overshadowed, his work.
After his death, Grabbe was condemned to oblivion by classically oriented criticism, until both the nationalists and naturalists of the late 19th century rediscovered him as a kindred soul. In the 20th century, the Expressionists celebrated him as a fellow outcast of bourgeois society, the Dadaists and surrealists welcomed him as another rebel against rationality, the Nazis exalted him as a prophet of "blood and soil," Brecht placed him alongside Georg Büchner in the "non-Aristotelian" tradiiton leading from the Elizabethans to his own Marxist "Epic Theater," and more recent commentators have stressed his affinities with postmodernism.

[...]

By consesus Grabbe's supreme achievement consists of his innovations in historical drama. Unlike the historical plays of Schiller and his followers, which were classical in style and idealistic in character, Grabbe's historical plays are prosaic in language, episodic in structure, and realistic in outlook. Above all, they present history as determined not by abstract ideas or outstanding personalities but by mass movements and the contingencies of time, place, circumstance and chance. [...] Speaking of Napoleon, he rightly claimed to have accomplished "a dramatic epic-revolution," although he might well have included his other historical plays in that remark.
Grabbe's "revolution" in historical drama was accompanied by a revolutionary approach to drama in general. Once dismissed as signs of incompetence, capriciousness, or a sick psyche, his methods now seem eminently modern. Full of incongruities and distortions, deliberately avoiding any appearance of harmony or beauty, his disjointed actions, ambiguous characters, dissonant dialogue, and tragicomic moods not only reflect the social, intellectual, and aesthetic tensions of his own age but also anticipate the "open" form and "absurd" content favoured by many dramatists in ours. Long before the cinema was invented, he also foreshadowed many of its techniques.

    
Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801-1836), lithograph by W. Severin after a drawing by Joseph Wilhelm Pero (1808-1862)

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NB: Christian Dietrich Grabbe's life was dramatized by Hanns Johst in Der Einsame [The Loner] in 1917. Brecht wrote Baal in response the following year.

Fassbinder Is Baal Is Fassbinder

Dennis Lim, "Baal: The Nature of the Beast," Criterion, March 20, 2018:

From today’s vantage, this nearly lost film opens a window into a formative phase of the New German Cinema. Schlöndorff could not have known its documentary value at the time, but among other things, Baal stands as a remarkable record of the young Fassbinder. The Fassbinder persona as we have come to know it is fully present in his incarnation of Baal: the heedless pleasure-seeking, the improbable magnetism, the sly awareness and skilled exploitation of power dynamics. Brecht moved from the relatively free-form provocations of Baal to the Marxist principles of epic theater. But for Fassbinder—who died at age thirty-seven, leaving behind more than forty films—this scabrous vision of doomed and destructive genius would acquire an air of uncanny prophecy.

"I Hope the World Lasts for You..."

Postmodernist Pirate Jokes

From: Alex Baia, "Postmodernist Pirate Jokes," The New Yorker, November 9, 2019:

How come nobody played cards with the pirate?
Because he was standing on the deck! The other pirates had no universal moral perspective from which to criticize him, so they stared at the ocean and contemplated God’s absence.

What did the pirate say when his wooden leg got stuck in the freezer?
“Shiver me timbers! Me entire life is this sentence, composed by some writer for a cheap laugh.”

How do you piss off a pirate?
Take away the ‘P’!

What did one pirate say to the other?
“I SEA you!” But it was just a joke, for no pirate is ever truly seen.