the president sings Amazing Grace

Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (Mariner Books, 2022)

We all know about how President Obama, speaking in 2015 at the memorial service for the victims of the Charleston shooting, wowed the congregation by seguing from talking about grace into actually singing the hymn "Amazing Grace." And Zoe Mulford wrote a song about it, "The President Sang Amazing Grace." I wrote about the song and linked to Joan Baez's recording.

So I'm browsing in the public library and find this memoir by Obama's chief speechwriter at the time, and think, "I bet he has some interesting background information on that." He does. First is that the speech preparation is embedded in a week of utter chaos, as the president and his staff also wait for the Supremes to issue rulings on the ACA and marriage equality, and the speechwriters have to prepare speeches in advance for every possible way those could go. Then there's the challenge of a white guy writing a sermon, basically, for a Black president to deliver in a Black church (actually in the basketball arena down the street, because it was larger), which he handles by intense collaboration with the president and by a lot of consultation.

So they've just finished reacting to the Obergefell decision, Obama reads the good-news speech and calls Obergefell to congratulate him, and then rushes off to fly to Charleston. Keenan, as keeper of the speech and manager of any changes to be made to the text, is at the president's side for the flight, and as they get into Air Force One, this happens:

He stood up, ducking under the ceiling as he buttoned his coat. "You know, if it feels right, I might sing it."
Halfway through stuffing the pages into my backpack, I froze and looked up at him. I was pretty sure I'd just heard him say he might sing "Amazing Grace" during the eulogy. ... But I wasn't about to tell him that singing was a risk. I knew he thought of himself as a good singer.
He was looking at me, waiting to see what I thought ... Bone-tired, all I could come up with was a phrase he'd recently told me Sasha was fond of.
"You do you, man."

When they arrive at Charleston, the Obamas go to the arena while Keenan, the pressure off because it's out of his hands now, relaxes on the plane. He sends an e-mail to his staff back at the White House.

"P said he might sing 'Amazing Grace' in the eulogy."
"Um, what?" Terry replied.
"OMG," added Kristen.
"That would be the greatest thing ever," Ben wrote. "Such a good idea. People will love it."

Keenan watches the speech from the plane on TV. He gives a detailed report from a professional speechwriter's perspective: how the speech is going, the reaction of the extremely responsive Black audience, the particularly moving passages, where Obama had written the text himself and where he improvises while speaking. Then we get to it.

Now he'd outdone himself, stepping up to turn the text into a script ... A Black president, backed by Black bishops, eulogizing a Black victim to a crowd of mostly Black mourners. A Black church service on national television. How often did America see something like that? How often was something like this a quintessentially American event? ...
He'd long since grown into being president. We were watching him make the presidency bigger in real time. And there was one act left ...
"If we can find that grace ..."
"Uh huh ..."
"... anything is possible."
"My my."
"If we can tap that grace, everything can change."
Fewer than a dozen people in the world knew what was about to happen.
"Amazing grace."
He paused, then repeated the words for good measure.
"Amazing grace."
Obama looked into the distance, looked down at the text, and shook his head in awe.
Eleven seconds went by. It was a moment of genuine drama. Was he making up his mind? Was he going to take the leap of faith?
I wondered what people who were watching must be thinking: Had he lost his place?
Then he began to sing.
After the first two syllables, "Ah-maaaay," one of the bishops laughed in astonishment. But it was too early for most of the world to know what Obama was dong.
Obama leaned into the next two syllables - "ZIIII-iii-iiiing graaaaaaace" - to make damn sure they knew.
The choir leaped to its feet ... By the time Obama hit "how sweet the sound," the whole arena was singing with him. ... Obama's bet, that he wouldn't be left alone, had paid off.

On the flight home, he explains something:

"What was with the pause? [asks Keenan] Dramatic effect?"
"No, man. You know what the thing about 'Amazing Grace' is? ... You gotta start low. Or by the time you get to 'a wretch like me,' you're in trouble. Your voice cracks."

Later, Keenan marries his co-worker Kristen. A week after Joe Biden is elected, they have a daughter. They name her Grace.

Tolkien's yahrzeit

Saturday is, as one of the Oxonmoot speakers pointed out, the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death. To think I first read his work when he was still living ...

I heard several papers online today. I haven't got everything, though, as the program they're running the schedule on causes most past events to disappear from the list even after you press the "show earlier events" button. But all of these were very fine.

1. The noble Jeremy Edmonds traces the history of the assumption that "the Authorities" who mysteriously rule on the legitimacy of Bilbo's "What have I got in my pocket?" riddle (in the Prologue to LR) are the Valar, and concludes that yes, that was Tolkien's intent, regardless of scholars who can't believe the Valar would spend their time on something so trivial. Regarding the One Ring? Maybe not so trivial after all. Remember also that the riddle game is a mighty matter of lore in Norse mythology ... and often includes, as a legitimate riddle, a question to which only the questioner knows the answer.

2. Christian Trenk on Galadriel and Celeborn as a power couple. He's not a cipher as sometimes thought: he's the home affairs guy, welcoming the visitors and seeing to their comfort. Galadriel is the Foreign Secretary. Of course, when Celeborn says that if he'd known about the Balrog he wouldn't have let them in, that doesn't speak well of his immigration and refugee policy.
This paper was apparently inspired by the "They're taking the hobbits to Isengard" video (the only form of the Jackson movies I actually enjoyed), which contains Celeborn saying, "Tell me where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him." In the book it's Galadriel who says that, and she says "tell us." Christian thought there was a paper in that, especially when he brought Tolkien's drafts in.

3. The redoubtable John Rateliff on writing to Inklings (Owen Barfield, Robert Havard, David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, some others). He undertook this in the late 1970s and early 1980s, figuring they'd not be around forever and the worst they could do was brush him off. Actually they were very friendly and he met some on trips to England. He showed some letters on screen and read from them and others. The main thing he learned is something I've been trying to put across for some time: that the Inklings were an amorphous, loosely-knit group, not a tight club. Many didn't know each other or their work very well; some didn't consider themselves Inklings at all. (They weren't the only ones.) I took notes.

4. Cameron Bourquein, very illuminating on a character history of Sauron across the history of the legendarium. Most people there knew he started out as an evil monster cat in The Book of Lost Tales, but there were also a wizard and a demon in that book that went into the oft-mutating and many-named character. (Wizards and demons and cats? Oh my!)

5. Hannah Emilius on anthropocene environmental issues in Middle-earth. Yeah, I should say so. Sorry I missed most of this paper as my internet connection kept fritzing out.

queer theory and Tolkien

Last night began the online Oxonmoot conference from the Tolkien Society, which since it's there and I'm here meant much of the most interesting material was on in the middle of the night. Fortunately I'm often up in the middle of the night. There's been a lot of work recently applying "queer theory" - the deconstruction of standard gender and sexual identities - to Tolkien, and in the middle of last night I found two outstandingly excellent papers exemplifying the genre.

One was by Mercury Natis on Bilbo and Frodo as leaders of a "chosen family." LGBT people are often ostracized by their biological families and build up social support networks that become their families of choice. Bilbo is unmarried and without close relatives, he's estranged from his closest, his cousins the Sackville-Bagginses, he's considered odd and crazed by many of the neighbors (the word "queer" is actually used in this context), so he makes his friends among his younger cousins when they begin to grow up, even adopting one of them, Frodo, as his heir. Frodo was another isolate, an orphan, a Baggins in Buckland, a Brandybuck in Hobbiton. He needed the family Bilbo could provide, and in turn follows Bilbo's pattern, making his friends, like Merry and Pippin, among his younger cousins. When Merry says they'll follow Frodo on his quest because they are his friends, he's understating the case: they're taking on a really awesome responsibility because they're his family.
Did Tolkien intend this reading? Maybe to an extent: he too was an orphan and needed in part to build up his own family, so he understood. But whether he intended it or not, this is a reason so many queer readers love his book and identify with the hobbits so closely.

The other was Sara Brown on Eowyn and Dernhelm. Brown's main point, her queer-theory reading, was that Dernhelm was not a disguise, a false front that Eowyn puts on in order to fight, but is the masculine part of her. Brown described the repressed background that put Eowyn in this situation - Gandalf's lecture to the clueless Eomer in the Houses of Healing is a major source text here - and Tolkien reinforces this by always using the masculine pronoun to describe Dernhelm, and at the moment of revelation penning the definitive sentence, "Eowyn it was, and Dernhelm also." They're both real people within the story, and yet both the same person.
Brown goes as far back as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to draw a distinction between physical bodies and sexual identity. You're born with a female body but you have to become a woman. And she had several more theoreticians making the same point. And I was thinking, "Here's the exact argument that's being made by supporters of trans rights, decades before the current discourse arose, the argument that the 'X and Y are the whole story, the end' crowd refuse to accept." I've not seen these earlier writers cited in defense of trans rights, though I suppose they must have been. Anyway I'd like to see it more often.

to Marin

I didn't tell you what I did after leaving the Gravenstein Apple Fair a couple weeks ago, did I?

It was 2 pm, I wanted to rest up before heading home, and a perfect place to take a break would be a public library. Chairs. Air conditioning. Books.

I'm not GPS equipped, and I didn't have maps with me, but most cities have little directional signs on the streets directing you to the library. (As also the nearest hospital, etc.) But it took me four towns before I could find the library that way. The first two I saw no signs. In the third, there was a sign on the main street pointing straight ahead, and I drove slowly down a mile and a half to the end of the street, then turned around and came back. No sign of the library.

When I got home I checked a map, and discovered that to get to the library, I should have turned right at an intersection soon after the straight-ahead sign. But there was no turn-right to the library sign.

I visited the city's website to find out who to complain to, and found an online form to fill out trouble tickets. I filled it out. A few days later a city worker phoned me! But all he wanted to do was argue with me about exactly where the straight-ahead sign was located.

I said I'd go back and check again, but I couldn't do that for a couple of weeks. (By then my car was in the shop having the dents pounded out.)

Tuesday was my day to go back. But I wasn't going to drive all that way just to check a sign. So I made a day of it. I had lunch at a highly-regarded bbq joint I'd seen a review of. It was tucked in to an exceedingly yuppie mall. The meat was extremely good, the sauce less so. (The trend now is to have two sauces, mild and spicy. The spicy = mild + nasty.) I drove past Skywalker Ranch, or where it's supposed to be: I didn't see anything. I drove out to Bolinas, a wildly funky town on the coast where I'd never been before, and came back over Mount Tam. On the way out there, in the ranch country, I stopped at the farm store for a cheese factory. They make only French cheeses, brie and camembert, which are not my style, so I didn't get any cheese. There were other things to gobble in the store, though, including soft-serve chocolate ice cream from Straus Creamery, a nearby mfr whose pints are a feature of some of my regular grocers, and their chocolate is their highlight. Oh, that was good.

And I went to the missing library, and talked to the clerks on duty, and picked up a mail-in comment form addressed to the director, and I may fill it out in case the city guy doesn't return my call.

corroborative detail

One odd side-effect of spending time in the company of The Mikado is that one begins to notice the holes and other odd points in the plot. For this, I'll revert to the standard text, as you won't have access to the Ducato version.

Ko-Ko, Pooh-Bah, and Pish-Tush seem more flustered by the letter from the Mikado than they ought to be. Yes, his threat to reduce Titipu to the rank of a village is surprising and dismaying, but the reason for it - that there have been no executions for a year - is, it ought to be mentioned, something they deliberately engineered. Go back to Pish-Tush's song, "Our great Mikado, virtuous man." Executions for flirting seemed excessive to the Titipu town fathers, so, the last verse explains, they short-circuited the process by appointing Ko-Ko as Lord High Executioner, because he was "next to be decapited." No other executions can take place until after his, and he can't execute himself, so the whole chain is held up.

But now they're talking about whether he could execute himself, which if he could would have eliminated the reason for appointing him.

Also, we've apparently forgotten that finding a victim shouldn't be a problem. Ko-Ko's got a little list! He's got a little list! Why don't they turn to that? Well, it appears elsewhere that "flirting is the only crime punishable with decapitation" (Ko-Ko to Nanki-Poo, Act 2, just before "Here's a how-de-do"), so the entire little list is meaningless. But this isn't said; the list is just dropped as if it didn't exist.

It's essential to the plot that Nanki-Poo wants to die, he doesn't mind being executed. In a farcical comedy, this brushes aside the depth of the despair he must be in. We had last seen him exiting sorrowfully after the sad duet with Yum-Yum "Were you not to Ko-Ko plighted" and when he comes back he's about to commit suicide. He must want Yum-Yum desperately.

This brings up the question, how much does Ko-Ko want Yum-Yum? He objects to Nanki-Poo marrying her for a month, and had already said "To think how entirely my future happiness is wrapped up in that little parcel!" But he also says, "Really, it hardly seems worth while." And when the Mikado is about to arrive, Ko-Ko gives Yum-Yum up to Nanki-Poo without any hesitation at all.

Speaking of despair, note that Katisha has not one but two soliloquies about her sadness and loneliness ("The hour of gladness" and "Alone, and yet alive / Hearts do not break"). Gilbert is often accused of mocking her, but he does also give her a say and reveals that she has feelings too. What the production I just saw showed is that if you have a really really good singer in the role, she can pull these often-ignored laments off effectively.

Going back a step to the revelation that, when a married man is beheaded, his wife is buried alive. Yum-Yum raises her opposition to this in a most hesitant manner, as if she fears she has no right to object, but Nanki-Poo is in entire agreement with her. Ko-Ko, however, seems to think she's some sort of hypocrite for objecting to being buried alive. Why? That wasn't in the contract she'd agreed to, or Nanki-Poo either. The song "Here's a how-de-do" is about the dilemma the two are in - "I must die without a wedding" - but Nanki-Poo had agreed to be executed on condition that he marry Yum-Yum first; this new and unacceptable condition voids the contract. That would leave Ko-Ko without a victim, so it ought to be he, not the others, who's in a dilemma (as he amusingly is at "The flowers that bloom in the spring").

The most exquisite moment of comedy comes when Ko-Ko, Pitti-Sing, and Pooh-Bah are told that the man they've executed is the heir to the throne. It's all the funnier because they haven't actually executed him but they can't say so. The Mikado insists that he's "not a bit angry" about it; he should be played so that this is true, and he usually is. It's already been established that he's completely without familial affection, having already ordered Nanki-Poo to marry Katisha "or perish ignominiously on the scaffold," and Nanki-Poo, telling Yum-Yum this, compares his father to Lucius Junius Brutus, the Roman consul who executed his own sons for rebellion. So it isn't just Katisha who's "just a little teeny weeny wee bit bloodthirsty."

going Ducato-wards

I did it. When I saw the Lamplighters' Il Ducato on its opening weekend two weeks ago, I was so delighted that I determined to go see it again on the closing weekend, though that was further away from home.

I was not expecting how much of the freshness had been due simply to not having seen this production before, and the performers, rather than inhabiting their parts more fully as I've been told happens during theatrical runs, seemed a little tired, and even went up on their lines a couple times. To be fair, they'd already done a matinee on the same day as the evening performance I saw.

But it was also clear that they conveyed the cleverness and wit both of the original and of this production. The audience was rather small but it was tightly bunched in the auditorium and very responsive to the performance. At the meet and greet afterwards I got to tell Lawrence Ewing, the lead performer as Coco (Ko-ko), that I'd enjoyed it so much the first time I had to come back for a second.

recasting oneself

A few years after the ending of my last professional posting as a librarian, I finally acknowledged that I wasn't a librarian any more, and changed the job title on my tax return to "writer/editor" which was my new career starting up just about the time that my library career was winding down.

I've found that somebody else in a slightly parallel situation did the same thing.

At the time that W. invaded Iraq, a US diplomat in Greece made a 40-minute wonder on the news by resigning in protest. This interested me in particular because he'd been a high-school classmate of mine: not that we were personal friends, but I had known that he'd gone into the foreign service and I'd casually wondered what he thought of the events.

Later he published a book about it, which I read. He still considered himself a diplomat, and encouraged young people to go into the foreign service, but he also wondered what was to become of him now.

I just happened to look him up again. He's still living in Greece, which he loves, but his bio page says he's "returned to scholarship" as an ancient historian/archaeologist - which is what he studied in grad school before joining the State Department - "after a twenty-year detour working as a diplomat." That's the word he uses, detour. Despite what he thought at the time, it's not what he really was, it was something that distracted him for a while.

That's awfully parallel, and in fact I spent the same 20 year period as a librarian that he spent as a diplomat. But I dunno if his conclusion applies to me. There's a part of me that will always be a librarian, that decided when I was about 13 that that was the career I wanted. But an alternative double career as an editor of Tolkien scholarship and a reviewer of classical music concerts wasn't really an option, though if it had been I might have taken it. It's what I'm doing now, though: not to earn a living, since I'm retired and the income is nominal, but it does occupy my time in much more agreeable circumstances than a lot of my library work did. So that's what I am.

noted

1. I got my car back, one or two days early, which is better than late. All the bumps and scratches on the bumper are gone, even the ones the driver who backed into me had nothing to do with. They also vacuumed out the interior and left me a mint life-saver candy.

2. I did not watch the Republican debate. I am not interested in anything these people could possibly have to say.

3. A man found a group of people stealing his car's catalytic converter in the middle of the night. He confronted them. They shot him. In the leg. Then they ran away. This was a few blocks from here. He'll be OK, but watch it out there.

a touch of life

So there's a point in the movie Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret where Margaret, who's almost 12, goes with her mother to the store to buy her first bra. She puts it on in the changing room, and this happens:

MOM: How's that feel?
MARGARET: I cannot wait to take it off.
MOM: Yeah. Welcome to womanhood.

It was at this point that the movie convinced me it was for real, because at least one woman I've known intimately enough to discuss bras with feels the same way.

looking for Richard

At last, our little play-reading group, having puttered its way through Shakespeare's history cycle in between other things, has arrived at Richard III. I've been assigning the big meaty parts in the earlier history plays to the other members so that I could save up this one for myself. I remember famous Richards I've seen on stage or screen and let their readings of individual lines leave inflections on my own. I remember Ian McKellen saying "But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks" or Kevin Spacey, you should excuse the expression, saying "What though I killed her husband and her father" or Al Pacino's bone-chilling rendition of "I'll have her, but I will not keep her long."

We had a little sprinkling of rain today. No wind. That is what it's like living on the far, far edge of a tropical storm.