Squeegee

Not a lot of activity, city-wise. Mostly just walking around locating the groceries and laundromats. Walked all up & down Amsterdam & Broadway looking for a squeegee on a stick - you know, where the soap is stored in the handle. Finally found the last one at a pintsized market on 125th Street. I'm incapable of washing dishes without a squeegee on a stick, so a heavy sigh of relief was breathed.

Having visited New York often in the past, I'm not really feeling the frenzied need to find out what's around every corner and above every subway stop, the way I did when I first moved to Boston. It's more of a relaxed Arthur Fonzarelli feeling. "Hey, I live here now, no hurry."

I do have my NYPL library card already, let it be known. I've got my priorities on straight. I've already ordered a box set of the Bonzo Dog Band & plan on heading midtown tomorrow to pick that up & give this library system the onceover.

The Big Onion

Day one of the New York experiment.

I've been keeping my eye out for signs. Am I on the right track here, was moving from Boston to New York a good idea, have I displeased the deities, have I innocently flapped the butterfly wings that will lead to catastrophic results further downwind, that sort of thing.

So far the unsupervised annoying wriggling kid seated next to me on the Chinatown bus puked up his cranberry juice at my feet. A little got on my bag. It's a classy way to enter a new city with stomach acid scars on your bag. Then there was a flash thunderstorm over Astoria that lasted all of five minutes, while the sun never stopped shining, which gave the effect of one of those old solemn religious paintings. Afterwards venders in the street were standing ankle-deep in water as they grumpily packed up their wares. Finally, back at the pad, a glass of 7-Up spontaneously cracked of its own accord with a sharp "pop," but held its contents. Unsure of what had happened I lifted the glass, resulting in a puddle of 7-Up. I suspect either poltergeists or telekinetic tomfoolery.

We're off to a baffling start.

A Fistful of Ink

Thursday's featured authors at the Brookline Booksmith were Steve Almond and Daphne Kalotay. I came in midway through Daphne's reading, and so missed much of her tale of familial psychosis at a wedding. Steve read from his epistolary collaboration with Julianna Baggott, entitled Which Brings Me to You. The concept is of a series of letters exchanged between a lust-tinged couple determining whether or not to get involved with each other. Steve's excerpt concerned one such letter which the male character penned while in a vulnerable state of inebriation, and a followup letter recapping his comi-tragic exploits in attempting to recover the first letter from the postal service. Pepper spray and a dinner roll were involved.

I've heard Steve read a few times now, both fiction and non (which in his case are not far removed), and he has always been excruciatingly entertaining. And I admire his daring. I plowed through his first collection of short stories called My Life in Heavy Metal, which is much more nuanced than its title might suggest. Emotionally his stories are a punch in the chest. As a writer he has an impulse to charge fearlessly into squeamish territory. And he knows exactly how to defuse tension with humor, which is how he pulls it off. He has no trouble blurting out things which others wouldn't dare mention out of politeness or fear or lack of notice. And there are some withering realizations. "There is a point you reach when you are just something bad that happened to someone else."

Almond has been in the news lately for resigning his post at Boston College in protest of Condoleezza Rice being invited to be the graduation commencement speaker. He addressed this hastily during the Q&A portion of the evening. He'd expected to come under fire from the rightwing, but was disappointed that the leftwing didn't use the publicity as a launchpad to attack Rice and expose her dishonesty. To those who applaud his efforts, his response is "well, thanks, but that doesn't really help the issue."

"Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny."

Tonight guitar legend Allan Holdsworth played a set at Johnny D's. Cover was pretty steep, especially for those in the crowd with their heads craned to watch the ballgame on the corner television. The guys beside me were discussing the span between Holdsworth's thumb and pinkie. Behind me an older fellow in a bandanna was lamenting to a silent father and son how cheap tequila used to be in Mexicali back in his day. Aside from the waitresses, there were no single women in the entire joint.

Here is my relationship to jazz: I love practically everything from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane. After that it gets a little dicey. Mahavishnu Orchestra were really good. And some of Tony Williams' stuff. But by and large, post-Coltrane jazz sounds very safe and sterile to me. There's a certain danger aspect to Charlie Parker hunched on some cellar bandstand struggling not to keel over into the kickdrum from all the heroin in his blood. The sound of those acoustic instruments being emotionally pummeled and sucked into the cheap little microphones gave it such vitality. Once electricity - particularly electric keyboards - were introduced to the equation, it just doesn't seem to contain that same sense of rage and despair. It just contains a lot of notes.

Alright, so Holdsworth. Indisputably a great instrumentalist. But the music never seems to start until he steps on the fuzzbox and starts playing runs. Before that it's nothing more than a string of arbitrary "jazzy" chords. In a way it reminds me of heavy metal in the late eighties where you had a lot of stock guitar riffs (generally derived from Ace Frehley) and throwaway lyrics about boobs and authority, and the musicians in the audience would wait patiently for the interlude, at which point the guitarist would kick the singer aside and whip through his arsenal of heavily practiced twiddly bits. Afterwards you'd think, if that's the exciting part, why bother even having a song around it? Holdsworth is in a class far above all that, of course. I'm familiar with him primarily through his 1985 album Metal Fatigue, which features a placid singer who always made me think of the sort of featureless crooners you find in Holiday Inn lounges in places like Iowa. And the music wasn't too interesting until he was booted aside and Holdsworth took over. There was no such singer present tonight, however. The trio was comprised of Holdsworth, one-time Zappa drummer Chad Wackerman (whose name still makes the adolescent in me smirk), and Jimmy Johnson on bass.

For a supposedly cerebral form of music, the response to showmanship was noteworthy. It seems pretty easy to get a roar out of the audience by using a handful of gimmicks. Usually a lot of fast runs culminating in a high repetitive figure will do it. Sweeping arpeggios high on the neck are also reliable crowdpleasers. The drummer too can get the crowd excited by a lengthy fill featuring a fast circular pattern on the toms. Meanwhile the bassist can grab a lot of attention for himself by deploying a few fleetfingered hammer-ons, especially if done while quickly ascending or descending the fretboard.

I generally found the music to be meditative. I would pay close attention to the intricacy of certain sections, then find myself sooner or later drifting off into abstract thought. I don't think that was the same as being bored.

Smut for Dummies

Circlet Press has just unleashed The Erotic Writer's Market Guide upon an unsuspecting public. It contains plenty of helpful advice about writing erotica, submitting to markets, fighting self-censorship, the use of pseudonyms, tax tips, and of course lists of hundreds of paying publishers and magazines in the field of erotica. (And yes, as a matter of fact I did help to edit it.) Grab y'rself a copy and start getting your homebrewed smut out there to the world. It's doing no one any good hidden at the bottom of your sock drawer.

Might vs Write

The, ahem, best American fiction from the last 25 years has been established for us by the New York Times. Awfully decent of them. Beloved by Toni Morrison comes in over the finish line in first place. Delillo's Underworld and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian come in hot on its heels. And twenty-two ran. I haven't read Beloved, and now I'm strangely tempted not to. Underworld is a good'un, though I think I prefer White Noise. It's more concise, more of a deft rabbit punch of satire. But it's Philip Roth who dominates the list with a total of six novels. I guess that means that while Morrison wins for speed, Roth triumphs for pacing. Or something.

I get awfully uncomfortable when literature merges too closely with athletics. The sight of scorecards in the literary arena makes my neck constrict. I think the urge to determine a first place comes from a bad place in the American psyche. The word "bully" comes to mind.

The Modern Library's list of 100 best novels gives me a similar twinge, although I'll admit I do glance at it occasionally when looking for something new to read. And the discrepancy between the board's list and the reader's list is telling. There's a suspicious amount of Scientology and Objectivism heading the reader's list. And high atop the board's list is Joyce's Ulysses, which, though one of my favorite books of all time mostly because of the sheer magnitude of it, isn't one I'd necessarily recommend to all that many people. Whereas book number two, The Great Gatsby, is more likely to affect a greater amount of readers.

What I'm feebly getting at (I think) is that making a list of the year's best whatevers can be constructive - but numbering the list is not.

Them's Good Grammar

The singular they: I'm all for it. I use it frequently. I've heard no other eloquent alternative suggestions, except possibly to recast the sentence in a way that avoids the need for it. But that isn't always effective. I'm going to continue to use it when I see fit, and I don't want to hear any whining from the Prescriptive wing. I'm not going to gripe that your he or she is about as eloquent as a frog fart, so you can just as well keep respectfully silent when I bandy about my singular they.

Can one be a Prescriptivist and still embrace Shakespeare and Joyce? I'd like to hear someone reconcile that.

I caught a split infinitive in the New York Times today: "While Mr. Jackson began to routinely rotate through different teams of advisers in the 90's..." I don't particularly care - why shouldn't the English split an infinitive just because Latin was incapable of doing it? Out of reverence? I just wonder if this is a case of ignorance or defiance.

I stand in favor of defiance. Why should we be bound by arbitrary rules some ornery schoolteacher came up with three hundred years ago? There's no order to English - it's the result of linguistically raping and pillaging every other language it came across in its spread. Why pretend it was carefully constructed in some germ-free laboratory? Embrace its chaos. That's what makes it such a great playground for writers.

Bang a Jong (Get It On)

Alright, so I just finished reading Erica Jong's seminal Fear of Flying, inspired by hearing her speak recently. I read it once eons ago and considered it a firmly raised middle finger to moral stodginess and a spirited celebration of freedom. This time, while still regarding the sexual and emotional candor as laudable and the Isadora Wing's contradictory impulses well-examined, I found that the actual prose and dialogue became increasingly more frustrating as I read. All the gobs of literary allusions come across like unabashed namedropping - as though Jong is eager to impress us with an inventory of her bookshelves. There must be an average of at least one literary reference per page, and Isadora gets awfully smug when a character doesn't catch one of her referential quips. Not to mention the dollops of self-righteousness where the narrator gets to tell off the assorted pompous characters who engulf her on her journeys. Jong repeatedly sets up straw men in order to knock them down and the whole thing reeks of a rigged fight. Example: the snooty bastard with the docile wife on the train who starts a conversation with Isadora about the collapse of standards in education for no other purpose than to get his feathers ruffled when she vehemently disagrees with him. The scene is conveniently placed in the story to occur exactly when she has set off on her own and needs to prove her newfound independence. It feels staged and I don't buy it.

Another gripe - far too much ink is wasted on her continuing struggle to write. There are few things more tedious than listening to a writer lament about not being able to write. I have very little patience with writers writing about writers writing, or such as in this case, writers not writing. That approach is very limiting in scope and smacks of self-importance - the tortured artist syndrome which is mostly of interest only to fellow tortured artists. It seems like a relatively recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, authors prior to the twentieth century rarely made writers their central characters (Knut Hamsun's Hunger being a singular exception) they just wrote about people.

It's easy to imagine how Fear of Flying burst onto the scene in 1973, kicking down doors which had long screamed for kicking down. And that aspect of the novel is still very potent and reason enough to keep it alive. Isadora Wing is at her best when being brutally honest with herself and at her worst when trying to convince us of how clever she is. It sounds strange to say it, but I think she suffers from having read too much during her formative years. Balance is a healthy thing. Once in a while you really should just put down the book and go outside to skip some stones.