I would sadly have to be rude in order to preserve what was left of my sanity.Ĭharles’s obituaries call him a “polymath,” a “scholar-musician ” they laud his “ferocious intelligence,” his “all-around brilliance.” Behind all these epithets lurks the unavoidable and vexing question: Should a musician have a brain? I mean, a brain over and above what’s necessary to move the fingers, eat, sleep, make charming chitchat at gala dinners with sponsors, etc. This eighty-year-old man was outlasting me. At some point the other host explained to me that if I wanted to survive, I had to just get up in the middle of a sentence and flee for the hills. One of the hosts kept trying to get Charles off track by telling filthy Yiddish jokes, which Charles divinely ignored, his expression a mix of pretended confusion and distaste. Well after midnight, there I was, listening in what I hoped resembled rapt attention while he narrated-for reasons that, even then, I couldn’t recall-the plots of several plays by Alan Ayckbourn. It was a dinner that began innocently enough around 7 P.M. When I came across the word “discursive” in one of his obituaries, I laughed: Charles was really a spigot of information that could not be shut off by any normal means.
0 kommentar(er)
