Joshua Bell Busking in a D.C. Metro, Circa January 12, 2007

That morning Jushua Bell was in jeans and a cap, with his 3.5 million Stradivarius and a case on the ground for donations. Bell was busking (1850s word: to play in public for money) for a Washington Post experiment. The idea was to see if early morning commuters passing through the Metro would stop to listen to a famous violinist play difficult pieces by J. S. Bach on an extraordinary instrument.  Did Beauty have a chance against haste and daily routines?

Of the 1,097 persons who passed by Joshua Bell, only seven stopped. One woman recognized Bell, wondered why he was there, and put a $20.00 bill in his case. That morning Bell earned $32.00. I’ve not forgotten anecdotes from the Post article after this experiment. One boy wanted to stop, but his mother pulled him away. A proprietor of a nearby business came out and complained the noise was disturbing her lottery customers. A man on a higher level in the Metro, a musician, recognized the violin as extraordinary, as was the violinist.  Reporters asked people outside the Metro if anything out of the ordinary had happened inside that morning.  Bell and his Strad could not be said to have been noticed.

What meaning in this?  A personal one for me. I would have stopped because Bach was being played.

I play no instrument, had one music class at Napa Community College in the early 1970s because I could use it for points with the school district. But I loved the course and began to buy classical albums and soon realized that if I listened to Bach his music elevated my spirit. Call it musical levitation. I’ve often thought if I wanted to do myself in, I would only need to listen to the Brandenburg concertos and chuck the idea.  Allegro, five of them in 4, 5,6, and something so hopeful and celestial, in which I am joyfully and melodically taken out of time.

Note: If you have never  seem The Red Violin, it’s a compelling movie and Bell plays the soundtrack.

A special Thanksgiving to all from Gail and Ilona. Back in early December…

A Dismal Literary Weather Report this Saturday

Poet Stanley Kunitz cautioned to “live in the layers, not the litter.”  Today I will write about the latter, while trying to remember the layered joy I felt last Saturday with Puccini’s La Bohème, transmitted to movie theatres everywhere from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. (Thanks to the Neubauer family, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Rolex for this.)

La Bohème

This Saturday, November 15^th, I’m listening to Puccini, his beautiful arias in my ears as I dissect a book recently given to me. A book for writers, supposedly: Opacities, with a plural form of the noun. The book has 174 pages, but only 45 of them are full pages (and those with wide upper and lower margins). And believe it or not, 58 pages have only one to four lines and then white space to the bottom of each page. But 45 pages have words on a fourth of the page or a third.  Within the book, ten pages are blank. I mean to say, “a whiter shade of pale,” they are.  Then at the end of Opacities are pages 159 to 179. These cite all the material borrowed from famous writers and others apparently known to the author. That’s twenty pages of words belonging to someone else.  This could be AI, its thieving vectors without heart or soul, gathering data for the writer.                 

The back book cover of Opacities claims the book is about “the necessary opacity to identity.” I flew to my unabridged two-volume OED for a good definition of opacity: “an insistence on being in shady dimness, not reflecting light, a lack of transparency.”  Or as George Orwell quipped, “being a cuttlefish with words, squirting ink for camouflage.”  Orwell is one of my literary mentors, along with E.B. White and William Zinsser, all three alive and well in my library. I sit here imagining what they would think of this concept held up as a truth for writers, a purposeful opacity. This book of 179 dubious pages is from Soft Skull in New York and sells for US $15.95 and &21.00 in Canada. Soft Skull, indeed. Is it all a joke on the reader?

The other dismal literary weather report?  A friend told me her grandson is having to read in his English class, Mrs. Dalloway. What a choice in 2025!  Absolutely brilliant for not promoting literacy among high school students. Dear Virginia, jealously borrowing ‘stream of consciousness’ from James Joyce but not the flesh and sex. The students should be reading 1984 and Brave New World, not have to struggle with poor Septimus and wander the streets of London while his wife frets about flowers. Post World War One in Woolf.  Meanwhile, over 100 years later, weapons being sharpened for a war against Venezuela. Que mundo, as the Spanish say.

Yet I had the good luck right now to open an old green ledger and find in it, “Joshua Bell and his priceless violin one morning in a D.C. Metro station.”  Layers and litter to be continued next week….

A Personal Story Related to Being Poor and Fat

Anyone who has read my last book, Tennis Talk of a Nobody, will understand that I feel gratitude toward my father, Robert Theron Wilson. His desire that I play tennis accounts for the life I’ve led: a life of mysterious circumstances and connections, all related to the sport of tennis.

But something I did not mention in the book was my father’s decree when I graduated from USC.  I was supposed to be an elementary school teacher and support myself after four years of college.  Instead I wanted to earn a master’s in English and eventually get a Ph.D. and teach in college.

“Fine,” my father said.  “But it’s on your dime, not mine.” So off I went to San Francisco with the money I saved my senior year by taking night classes, living at home, commuting to USC in Los Angeles, and teaching tennis in Fullerton. But that first semester at SF State, I realized I could not support myself through a two to three year program. So in winter 1966, I entered a year-program to earn a secondary credential (8-12 certification). The program made it difficult to earn money the way I had earlier: babysitting, taking inventories, working at night for Joseph Magnin department store.

Then a move had to be made for cheaper rent. I could no longer walk to San Francisco State and took buses from Webster Street in the Marina. I remember bars with free spaghetti and my hope that someone would buy me a drink. My shoes wore out and I couldn’t replace them. No thrift store world then. My family wasn’t rich. Nor were we poor. Which is why I could not get a student loan in those days.

Why do I thank my father for cutting off financial support? Because I began to see the face of poverty in the Fillmore, where my bus stopped and I had to catch another. It shocked me that the Safeway there was more expensive than the Safeway in the Marina. How could that be? The poor spent more for food than the rich? I felt hungry all the time and yet I gained weight. The poorer I was, the fatter I got.  I am only saying this because of Now.  November 2025, and the continuing shut-down of the government. Forty or fifty million in our country, food insecure, as it is said. And now without their benefits.

I keep hearing comments from women who don’t have food for their children. We see them on television being interviewed. Many are overweight and look as if they eat a lot. But personal experience tells me they eat food with sugar, fat, and salt. That’s what I did to assuage hunger. Then in 1966, it was possible to buy a large bag of chips for what an apple would cost.

And buying all the ingredients needed for spaghetti or a pot of homemade soup involved an outlay of cash I did not have. I grew up with a mother who fixed real meals. I had been taught to cook. But I didn’t cook that semester in the Marina, living in a basement.

Yet my luck was to move to another apartment where three of us (all students) fixed dinner each night. And one of them did not need the $500.00 loan she was given that semester and offered it to me. Then in January 1967 I was hired to teach in Los Angeles; and given that I now had a job, my father helped me out and loaned me some money. I needed to pay back my room-mate the $500.00.  I also needed a downpayment on an apartment in Southern California. But I was able to buy a VW ‘bug’ on a loan through the L.A. Schools. I remember my first week of teaching at Dodson Junior High and how I bought a T-bone steak that Friday night, after surviving the first week of teaching. I cooked the steak for myself and no longer felt poor. Yet that experience in San Francisco marked my life in the best of ways, thanks to a father who said to me repeatedly, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Next week:  A book I could not have written without teaching “bus kids from San Pedro” that year of 1967-68 in Los Angeles.