Guest post from a victorious canvasser

I'm so proud of Susan Scheid, my good friend from the blogging world - yes, true friendship is possible here and we've met up on this side of the pond. She's been canvassing tirelessly for 41 year-old lawyer and first-time campaigner Antonio Delgado, who's just been elected as Democrat for New York's 19th Congressional District with a narrow (49.8% to 47.6) win over one-term Republican Rep. John Faso. That's Delgado above above applauding staff member Kirstin Horn in the first of three photos supplied by Sue. Sue has been sending regular bulletins about the campaign, but preferred to keep her wonderful blog, Prufrock's Dilemma, clear of politics. So this morning I asked her if she'd let me run one of her missives over here, and she said yes. 

So here it is, the last before the election, from 3 November. Sue pictured centre below between Kirstin (right) and Kirstin's mother.

Today marked the start of GOTV canvassing. The goal is to canvass every single person who has said s/he would vote for, or was leaning toward voting for, Antonio Delgado, and then to make sure, on election day, that every single supporter gets out to vote.

Last weekend, which marked the last round of canvassing before the final GOTV sprint, the Delgado campaign canvassed 40,000 doors—the most doors canvassed by ANY Congressional campaign IN THE COUNTRY. This weekend, from early reports, volunteers came out to canvass in droves. My launch site had over 100 volunteers show up; in nearby Pawling there were close to 250. That’s only 2 of almost 40 launch sites in the district—and these two sites are in a deep red area of the district.

Here are some vignettes from the canvassing trail today:

W (42 M D) reported that he, his wife, and their son will all be voting Democratic down the line. He’s got a rock solid, clear, specific voting plan: “We’re dropping off our dog for surgery at 7:30AM, then we’re going straight from there to vote.”

C (73 F D): I spotted, on the way to the door, that both cars in the driveway had bumper stickers saying 'Vote as if your life depended on it.'  I’m suspecting they’d been put their by C’s daughter, as C said, 'My daughter would be very upset if we didn’t get out to vote. Thank you for your work.'

C (66 F D): C was the mom of another mother-daughter team. When she answered, she said, 'Oh, we’re just on our way out to canvass!' Her daughter came up beside her, beaming. 'I’m so excited to be going canvassing! How is it going? What’s it like?' I let her know I was sure she’d have a good time, then C chimed in and said, 'Oh, we’ve got to get going! We don’t want to be late!' And out the door they went, just behind me, both brimming with excitement.

J (56 F D): J told me she’d been canvassed recently by some young men supporting Delgado, and she was thrilled to see them out there. She wasn’t sure they were even old enough to vote (pictured below, Delgado with volunteers, many if not all of whom are still too young to vote), yet there they were—because they know it’s about their futures. She urged me to speak with her next-door neighbor. 'He isn’t home, but she is—they’re elderly, and such nice people.'

Ordinarily, as J’s neighbors weren’t on my list - and because at GOTV time, particularly, efficiency is paramount - I wouldn’t stop at an unlisted door. I made an exception in this case, as I figured the neighbors would be chatting, and I wouldn’t want J to think I’d ignored her. Well, the neighbor was just as J had said, and then some: 'We’re both registered Republicans, but we’re only voting for Democrats right now. We have got to get Trump out. I keep trying to tell my neighbors who voted for him how disastrous this is. But, you know, some people are just stupid.' (When I got back to the launch site, I reported the address so these two votes could be added for 11/6 GOTV.)

I (43 F D): As I drove up, a little boy stood in the window, arms crossed, looking me over with a stern face. His Grandma, I’m pretty sure she was, answered the door. 'I‘s out for a walk. But I’ll be sure to give her your literature'. She was smiling, and as I turned to go she said, 'Good luck.' I smiled back and said, 'Yes, we all need good luck now, don’t we?' As I got in the car, preparing to go, the little boy took up his station again to watch me from the window . . . only this time, he was smiling.

And then there was P (63 M D), who said, simply, 'I’m a Delgado guy.'

Throughout this campaign, absolutely nothing has been left to chance. Now that the final push is upon us, no one is letting up one bit. On the contrary, the extraordinarily hard work by the Delgado campaign and its legion of committed volunteers gives new meaning to the phrase 'pulling out all the stops.'

This will likely be the last 'Notes' I’ll have a chance to send out. I dedicate it to the magnificent Delgado campaign staff, with grateful thanks for all they do and are. They have and continue to inspire and ably guide us on a daily basis. As Antonio has said, and they are each living proof of it: 'If we have anything to say about this, we’ll win.'

And they did. Hall-e-lu!

Meanwhile in an alternative universe, known as friendly neighbours of Putin, Borat goes tamponing with the mid-terms:

Old-age troubles Tranströmed

I've not read enough on the biographical side about Liszt to know if he died in despair. But his later years were not happy ones, as a clutch of photos including the above underlines. An earlier chasm opening up from the loss of two children must have deepened, and - naturally prone, it seems, to depression - he knocked back the absinthe. But unlike Rossini or Sibelius, he kept on composing, and left us some of the most forward-looking fragments of gloom or despair in all 19th century music.


The suspended or abandoned tonality wasn't exactly new - check out certain Chopin - nor was he first off the line in developing the whole-tone scale (only last week I heard another American academic trotting out the line that it was really Debussy's invention, but of course it goes way back to Glinka in the 1840s and possibly earlier). But I've been hearing these epigrammatic mood-musics this week in compelling recitals by Louis Lortie and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and while Lortie made an epic balance of all-Liszt light and shade, Aimard's all-grey-to-black first half was quite a lowering experience, slipping in though he did neutral Wagner as well as unconsolable early Berg - straight out of Liszt's Nuages gris - and late Scriabin. Here's Aimard's most striking contribution - the one where the whole-tone scale and not just the tritone lollops about - Unstern! sinistre, disastro (only approximately translateable as Dark star! Sinister, disastrous)



So, no consolation for the old Abbe, nothing of Verdi's Falstaff fugue or Strauss's sunset song. By another of those many online serendipities, though, my blogger-ideal Susan Scheid on Prufrock's Dilemma - ie endlessly curious, responsive, encouraging one by an articulate enthusiasm to explore more - introduced me to a poet I'd heard of but never read, the Swedish visionary - and I hope I don't use that word lightly - Tomas Tranströmer. 80 this year, he's just received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sue's informed post was on his attitude to Haydn, the stroke that in 1990 partly inhibited movement down his right side - encouraging Swedish composers to write left-handed pieces to keep his love of piano-playing going - and a real masterpiece of a poem, Schubertiana.


So I sent off for the latest collection immediately. Do read Sue on the essence of Schubertiana, which contains for me the most profound written sequence on what music can do for struggling man, but let me get to my point. Which is that between recitals, I was able to read Sorgegondolen in Robin Fulton's translation. The poem which gives this collection, written in the year of Tranströmer's stroke, its title is centred around Liszt's two pieces both called La lugubre gondola, composed while he was staying in Venice's Palazzo Vendramin between November 1882 and January 1883.


The host was his son-in-law and junior by less than two years, Richard Wagner, whose death on 13 February 1883 the gondola pieces supposedly forecast (Liszt also wrote a musical epitaph, which Lortie included in his Italian journey). Hence the 'two old men' of the poem's first line, 'staying by the Grand Canal/together with the restless woman who married King Midas/the man who transforms everything he touches into Wagner' (Cosima, naturally). Tranströmer intersperses his visions of that Venetian trio with three 'Peep-holes, opening on 1990', counterpointing his own dreams during a more clinical near-death experience. But of course it was the lines on La lugubre gondola which struck me and came in useful for the Aimard review. I hope I'm permitted to quote them more fully, as I did in a message on Prufrock's Dilemma; sadly this format doesn't permit the right indentation.

Liszt has written down some chords that are so heavy they ought to be sent
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meteorites!
too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink through the future right down
to the years of the brownshirts.
The gondola is heavily laden with the crouching stones of the future.

My YouTube choice would have been the interpretation of Krystian Zimerman, but these extremely evocative performances have the benefit of the score put up by the loving poster.





Redemption? I reckon it comes both through how these pieces can be programmed - Aimard was perhaps too austere in his first-half grimness - and how we approach them. Tranströmer does indeed transfigure, and what a contrast in those blue eyes (at least as captured in the cover photo for the New Collected Poems), that unsentimental glimmering optimism, to poor old Liszt. I'm reminded of what another great writer, Stefan Zweig, wrote in The World of Yesterday of another great composer, Richard Strauss, who was 68 when Zweig worked with him on the comic opera Die schweigsame Frau:

At first his face impresses as almost banal...But only one glance into the eyes, those bright, blue, highly radiant eyes, and one instantly feels some particular magic behind this bourgeois mask. They are perhaps the most wide-awake eyes I have ever seen in a musician, not daemonic but in some way clairvoyant, the eyes of a man fully cognisant of the full significance of his task.