Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Loop

I've been reading Jacques Roubaud.  It's not simple; he's a mathematician, a poet-- a member of the Oulipo group, along with Queneau and Perec, who use restrictive writing techniques and exercises to create their work.  But he's also an obsessive observer and among the literary labyrinths and obstacles, there is this awareness of life that dazzles.  Walking, he says, decades before cellphones and technology were portable, is a conversation with time.  

My habits of running and distance-walking evolved as a kind of therapy for the grief I experienced in 2020, after the death of Alan. I'd circle the park, cover the half-empty city streets, and count to myself... as though the intimacy of numbers had some message for me... like a non-verbal language.  The way mathematicians think about numbers is beyond my simple comprehension, but there are patterns and colors somehow, that belong to certain sequences... and most poetry has always kept a certain musical count-- its rhythm, its meter.  

Photography, according to Roubaud, is a conversation with light. This, too, obviously way before the massive daily output of digitally cheap images. And also linked with time... the shutter speeds, the slowness, the developing. There were exactly three photographs of my Grandma in our house; only one vague image of her parents, posed formally and sepia-toned with a sort of monogram scratched into the corner of the paper. 

I confess I watched some minutes of the Academy awards... enough to see Billie Eilish whose delivery I have begun to find affected and pretentious.  I don't find her song 'winning' and her effort to avoid a body-image statement has resulted for me in a fashion overload.  It's like a doll with make-up and too many outfits.  I don't get it.  What is amazing is the technology to deliver an audio performance of breath... a far cry from the dive-bar culture where one sang one's throat out over loud guitars-- no earphones or monitors... sometimes nothing but amplifiers as a sound system.  And still, there is nothing I hear on these recent award shows that dazzles my ears like Mama Say Mama Sah Mama Coo Sah... or whatever he meant.  

Competing with the award show was a 60 Minutes piece on Jeff Koons-- a contemporary of mine whose financial success is boggling. Even his eyebrows were so artificially groomed I found it hard to look during the head-shots.  The factory, the Warhol comparisons-- well, simply... not not not.  The complete lack of imagination and the grandiosity of kitsch is no longer funny or amusing or artistic... it's just, especially in the world of today-- of war and violence and disparity-- a hideous lead-balloon tasteless joke. 

Walking rush-hour streets in the rain this week it occurred to me how few people observe the umbrella etiquette one used to find so natural in London... whether it's awkward tourists, or entitled women-- it seems there's little rain-chivalry and plenty of umbrella competition.  I often feel I no longer belong... block after block of shops that display but don't speak my language-- things that are strange and overpriced and even the ordering process of a simple coffee is overwhelming, as is the payment.  The doormen and groomed security guards outside buildings who look at people like me with haughty disdain.  Not the city into which I was born.  

I still circle the reservoir at sunset-- despite the crowds these days, it's still spectacular.  But last week some mediocre violinist set himself up with a loudspeaker that was enough to provoke a duck migration.  That woman who assaulted the subway cellist-- a criminal act, but I suddenly understood her.  Our privileged solitary moments-- our conversations with time--  are difficult enough without intrusions. So little silence in a city... musicians especially should be sensitive to the space between. 

So I guess I prefer to bury myself in a French novel and to sense the time it takes to walk from the West Village to Harlem-- sometimes with Coltrane in my headphones, sometimes Morphine or John Lee or even nothing... to speak occasionally with a man in a wheelchair who sits outside the projects with a boombox playing old R&B and tells me Pain might be his only friend now.  I could cry.  Worthy of an Albert King song.

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Thursday, February 29, 2024

Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.

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Sunday, February 18, 2024

Crossing Delancey

Convalescence, as frustrating as it is, brings with it a few perks.  No guilt about lying around watching films on occasional nights, and there is something truly innocent about any New York movies made pre-1990's.  Especially the 70's-- the Woody Allens, the Elliot Goulds and Scorceses-- anything that gives us a glimpse of our city before it was 'glammed'.  Apartments were human-scaled, not massive and blingy.  People made phone calls from a booth, or waited home for a message.

At 3 AM the other night I watched Crossing Delancey-- something I'd probably shunned at the time, in my  post-college snobbery.  But there was Amy Irving-- Mrs. Spielberg, at the time, working in a bookshop-- navigating life as a single woman-- relatable, fallible.  It occurred to me I'm now closer to the age of her Bubby, lol.  And how I married the British writer asshole/flirt she was lucky enough to escape.  The LES-- populated by pickle stores and shops in the days before even Dean & DeLuca...  the bars, women waiting at tables... women sitting home eating Chinese take-out watching television. Does anything work out? She was Mrs. Spielberg, and then she wasn't. It must have hurt.  The last time I crossed Delancey I was on my way home from an Alan Merrill gig-- exactly four years ago-- his birthday, I think;  it seems like yesterday.

These associations have become permanent emotional fixtures... the way 2024 will be the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl.  She has done much for football, especially among young teenage girls who will not remember the winning touchdown but the color lipstick Taylor wore.  Tonight I remembered going to MOMA as a schoolgirl to look at the Jackson Pollocks.  In those days, museums were fairly uncrowded.  On that afternoon Joni Mitchell came in with Graham Nash.. they were dating, wearing sheepskin coats and furry boots... looking buoyant and in love and the three of us studying the paintings... it stayed with me.  A perfect cultural collision. 

The novel Septology is forever entwined with my January mishap, the way Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ helped me process the post-9/11 sorrow. How I tried hard last week to get into Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport but realized the voyeurism innate in following her personal associations, however close they are to mine-- was just excessive.  I have my own.  Time is limited and one must weigh carefully available literary projects. 

There was a night I had food poisoning and watched a Tarkovsky film.  I will forever associate the visuals with vomiting; somehow I think Tarkovsky would have approved.  And a boy named Billy who pulled me out of a bathroom at a screening of Warhol's Trash which was a little much for my teenage sensibilities.  He called me a hypocrite and it stuck... I swore I'd fight my failure to accommodate things that were difficult... 

I remember the store where I bought my first Henry James novel-- The American-- 60 cents for which there is no longer a character on my laptop.  But the smell of the place-- the paperback display, the style of the covers... and the feel of the pages as I read.  I was simply entranced.  Professor Lange reading Goethe to us... how sacred these moments... the associations and relationships, in a time now where influencers will link themselves with pretty much anything that will pay them a fortune.   The greed-- the athletes and their branding-- the endless commercials, the ruthless marketing of vaccines and reverse mortgages by familiar faces which may not even be the people they represent.

Trump will surely bail himself out of debt with his golden sneakers... I wonder who made this suggestion-- which of his smarmy children or associates came up with yet another get-rich-quick scheme, and extort from people who can little afford these things.  Contrast the effort it takes for someone like me to sell a single book.. it's just baffling. 

And yet the rest of us-- we seem to spend so much effort running away from ourselves, styling a persona we think is presentable or desirable.. even desperate hipsters painting themselves with signs and attitudes. Are we not enough? 

Navalny.  The closest to a hero in these times-- a true hero who was unafraid and committed... I've been obsessed with the documentaries and the daily reports... there are few epic films, besides the Christ stories.. the martyrs and POWs... to rival his story.  The fact that Taylor Swift has many more followers than Navalny.  

The near future feels a little bleak, and I have come to know the deep comfort of a kind of pain.  Jon Fosse reminds me that the winter is like a lover you know you must leave, that God is somewhere in these February chills. Fuck the groundhog-- we are wrapped in the God of winter, Whose hidden-ness is what we know. The clanking radiators remind me I am here, and perhaps God abandons us because His absence is sacred.  The devil in the details, but God, in His absolute loneliness, in the shadows.  Amen.

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Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Handicapped

I recently overheard my neighbor and his friends discussing their golf handicaps.  I've heard this term used re: horse racing and it always confused me.  When I was young, the phrase 'Hire the handicapped' was bantered around. There were also ranks of parking spaces designated exclusively for these so-called unfortunates with the wheelchair icon painted on pavement.  More recently the word has been designated insulting.  Even 'disabled' is used with great care. 

It's a weird word. I remember reading somewhere it came from 'cap in hand', a reference to street beggars in older times who often displayed (or faked) disabilities to collect alms in a hat.  Whatever. It's become distasteful.  It's used with a kind of irony among my friends who are suffering the indignities of illnesses and aging.  One friend not only copes daily with the devastation of a brain tumor, but has lost the use of her hand.  Another has not quite recovered from hip surgery... another wrist surgery; then there are musicians' hand issues, drummers' spinal woes, general anxiety and depression... cardiac problems. We are an aging generation... we have used and abused ourselves in various ways.  

I am sympathetic; I've been lucky to survive and recover.  Two weeks ago I had an accident-- not life-threatening but enough to limit my usual freedoms. I've become, in a temporary way, handicapped, as my friends joke... and it's jokable, not permanent, unworthy of a special parking space or license plate-- or hopefully not.  

But I've been watching a good deal more television.. football, taking in the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce phenomenon which I'm sorry to say makes me less fond of the Chiefs.  I'd like to see an underdog in the Super Bowl, despite the political and social media feeding frenzy this celebrity serendipity has caused.  I mean, if she changes the election, like Oprah did in 2008, well and good.  But for me it's enough-- the money, the endless athlete's endorsements and influencing... the massive payments in addition to the fortune they are paid to play which makes the heroes of my era look like middle-class losers. 

And these endless boring game shows-- with second-rate celebrity hosts and guests and absurd criteria and rules... who is watching this stuff?  It just seems desperate and forgettable.  

I'm reading Septology-- the seven-part masterpiece of this year's Nobel-winning author, Jon Fosse.  He's quintessentially Norwegian and for the last decades I've considered Scandinavia my second home. I've left my heart there-- a couple of times, not to mention a beloved bass guitar waiting for me to tour again. Anyway, it's a wonderful winter read. The snow... the small towns of Norway-- the fjords, the boats, the childhood reminiscences. The narrator is a painter-- a loner who has suffered losses, but manages to find a kind of redemption in his work which I can almost see, somehow.  And his quiet obsession with religion, his daily coming to terms with what is God-- in his art, in his simple way of life.  It's sublime.

My temporary injury and this novel remind me of what has been lost-- and how we go on, we find our lives and our meaning day by day, reinventing our path to accommodate the normal indignities of age, the diminishing exterior 'light' of our presence as the years pass.  And still, we find some spirit-- some determination-- we befriend the present and reintroduce the past like an old boyfriend who was amazing but no longer serves.

For many of us, this reveals and highlights our so-called handicaps. Some of us become defined by this alone.  But for others, we begin to see the less inspiring narratives of our culture as the true handicapped-- the banal, silly, petty, appearance-obsessed, botox and Wegovy-dependent overpaid housewives, non-achieving but omnipresent celebrity image-makers whose contributions are well celebrated but are anything but world-changing. 

Today I pray for my distressed and disabled friends.  For me I have the blessing of choosing the option of rehabilitation-- of acceptance, of continuing to exist with some kind of muse pulling me along, coaxing and cajoling.. a deepened sense of what remains, of God in my small universe, whatever that means... of life... cap in hand not for pity but for reverence and awe. With grace I intend to recover from this small setback and shine as I can in this flawed and aging skin I've been so generously granted, God willing. 

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Tuesday, January 9, 2024

The Vanishing

 I've always been subject to a little claustrophobia. It could stem from a series of early childhood experiences locked in a closet but that's maybe too simple.  A couple of malfunctioning elevator episodes didn't help.  But the root of it feels deeper-- almost genetic. I've mentioned before that my father kept a packed suitcase in the closet at all times.  As for me, in the deepest, most tender sweet spot of a promising relationship... at the very crux of mutual intimacy, I get the urge to run.  It's a serious flaw; it's caused pain to others and I've paid a price. 

Analyzing, I used to pout as a teenager and warn prospective boyfriends not to wall me in with their expectations.  I even tried a psychiatrist who had the usual theories and a few more, but no cure. Of course, raising a child on my own, I easily laid aside my angst and put his priorities first.  But these days there's nothing I love more than the sense of a new day like a blank canvas-- no calendar, no appointments-- just a wide open time-field waiting for my footprint. It's a sense of security for me-- perhaps a small reassuring exercise in personal freedom.

Last night, at the close of a fairly non-scripted day, I watched a late-night film called The Vanishing-- the one from 1988, in Dutch, based on a book called The Golden Egg in which the heroine suffers from a recurring nightmare of claustrophobia.  In the film, she is part of a couple on a trip-- driving. They argue a bit; she vanishes at a gas station where she is abducted, unobserved, by a villainous character and never seen again.  Newspapers publicize her disappearance, her boyfriend spends years trying to figure it out.  But eventually the abductor begins to contact him.  He will reveal the mystery, he says, if the boyfriend agrees to the very same fate. The obsession for truth overcomes him and he agrees-- is chloroformed and wakes up in the dark where his lighter reveals he is in a coffin, buried alive.  Absolute horror.  Double horror.

For anyone prone to claustrophobia and film-empathy, this makes for a sleepless night.  Coupled with that, I learned of the death of a friend.  In grief, I cannot help but explore afterlife theories.  At least one member of the deceased's family is a devout Catholic and takes great comfort in the assurance of a heavenly transition. I, on the other hand, am not sure, have entertained all possibilities.  

My mother who was interred above my father in a double grave feared burial and begged me to have her cremated. My older sister thought otherwise.  Still, after six years, it haunts me.  Although we know logically the dead do not think or feel, I regret that I was outvoted and could not give her this simple last relief.  

In case we choose to ignore our age, the mailbox periodically reminds us with funeral options, cemetery real estate offers and hospice information. It's wearying and worrying... and while the ultimate choice remains to our heirs, I wish I could make some kind of peace with my ultimate destination.  I find funerals-- while comforting in a way, also appalling.  One of my friends was given a wake with a dramatic presentation in an open coffin. I kept hearing her implore me to tell people to fuck off and stop looking at her.  Some of them she openly disliked.  It was so unfair...  as though here is our final worldly act and we don't get the last word.  

My father the emotional claustrophobic had spent much time in the trenches during WWII.  In the end he lay in his simple coffin, draped with the American flag as a hero, and seemed to embrace his fate in the same manner. It was as though death had been a kind of relief to a life as a 'tough-guy' with its anxieties and unvoiced issues.  For us who have been raised with at least the illusion of free choice, the nightmare is being overruled-- told what to do-- held against our will or tied down or up.

I often wander through the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum.  I must say, the custom of buryng the dead with their possessions-- with some space-- is appealing.  Not practical for us Americans here.  Even to name a fraction of a bench in Central Park for my Mom was impossible. They are taken... no waiting list for the dead... they are permanent.

Anyway, I will continue to struggle with my philosophies and ideals-- to weigh logic against belief, to pray for my friends, to deeply speak to God, to thank Jesus often, and nevertheless to wake up periodically in a nightmare of captivity, of immobility.  Imagination? We get up, walk around, open a window, breathe.  For now.


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Saturday, December 30, 2023

Past Imperfect

It's the time of year when I start interviewing prospective Freshmen for my alma mater.  As I get older, the age gap grows.  I am aware that turning the 'page' of another year means a great deal more when you're 17.  

I just came uptown from the last 2023 gig on a crowded 6 train. There were two very young couples next to me-- at that age where kids are 'turning' from young teens to old teens-- hormones raging, and they've not quite mastered their 'personae'.  Maybe their first time out without chaperones... it made me a little more sympathetic to these eager students that try so hard to make themselves memorable in a one-hour conversation-- on the brink of so many things, these kids.

We musicians so often worked on New Year's Eves...  were paid decent money for the most part to celebrate with packed rooms of drunk customers.  We made them dance, forget their problems... and by the time we packed up and went home, the page had already turned for us.  We didn't have to plan, consider, arrange... and then suffer the disappointments and hangovers that plague so many partiers on this night. 

Tonight I miss my mother-- her well-wishes for her children, our annual ritual of the last call of the year.  And the ones I've crossed off my list-- each December we take inventory and find more names in the 'missing' column. Most of the 21st century parties were all about Alan Merrill-- the ultimate singer of classics, R&B-- a partying and soulful bandmate whose Pogues-esque version of Auld Lang Syne was incomparable and now, besides YouTube clips, a thing of memory only. 

One of the kids I interviewed told me he's writing his autobiography. At 17, I can't imagine how this will end... or if it will... and then I remember Jackson Browne's 'These Days' written at 15 or 16... and think again about judging the wisdom of a teenager.

I've seen New Year's Eve fireworks and sunrises in tropical countries-- the Northern Lights from an airplane and heard revelers from inside the walls of a hospital Emergency Room with a sick child. When I was in the 6th grade, I got to sleep over in the attic room of the Hoffmann family behind our house.  Three sisters and I blanketed in a double bed beneath a skylight where the winter starlight seemed to promise us every possible miracle.  I had a crush on a Judge's son who'd gone to Las Vegas for Christmas and brought me a matchbook signed by Frank Sinatra.  We giggled and confessed and the night air in those days smelled crisp and starry with the faintest hint of woodsmoke and hot chocolate.

Teenagers were always inclined to keep diaries-- journals-- a place to confide one's dreams and safely keep secrets.  It was useful-- especially during those difficult weepy nights when we'd page back and reassure ourselves we could survive our sorrows and failures. Lists were equally useful-- things we needed, songs we loved, boys (in descending order), books, TV shows, movies, bands. 

The internet has disturbed the quiet solace of diaries; it also affects memory.  My son often forgets his preschool teachers or friends; I remember all of this-- not just mine but his-- although there is surely coming a day when I won't. 

It occurred to me today the blessing of this night is memory-- the lists and sequences and growing pile of these through which I can leaf and uncover... the sadnesses and joys, the popping cork injuries and the mistakes-- the bad weather and the bandstands... the tuxedos and dresses, the masked balls and the sloppy punk dive bars.  The various nights that were, that weren't, that have been and should have been-- the past perfect, the pluperfect, and my favorite-- the past imperfect.  That grammatical term for me has always opened doors and windows of poetry-- like the translation of some Proustian chapter or the unclaimed title of my unwritten autobiography-- my life as a reel, as an unedited mass of tangled film... what remains, perhaps, eventually, to be forgotten.  

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Sunday, December 3, 2023

Sowing Oates

It occurs to me today that this is the quintessentially perfect Sunday... the relentless comfort of nonending rain, like a kind of temporary seascape, because we all seem to inherently believe the blue-sky reassurance will resume-- the status quo. Weather optimism doesn't exist for me; I prefer the grey interludes, wish that they would extend.  There's a fishing port in Vestland, Norway where precipitation is near-constant; the mere thought comforts me. 

My neighbor who hates discarding things has been leaving her New Yorker issues outside my door.  While it's hard for me to turn down reading opportunities, I generally avoid magazines-- just so many books here wagging their paper fingers, reminding me of countdowns and lost hours.  So this morning I read the recent Joyce Carol Oates profile.  I can't seem to get enough of JCO biographical although I suspect she might have disliked this one-- at least the ending.  She is the single most prolific writer in a present which seems unprecedentedly chocked with distraction. 

JCO is an odd, quasi-Goth personification of the dark and odd and not pretty.  And yet, she has had a life of rarely paralleled literary productivity and not one but two enviable marriages. I'm never sure which of these accomplishments I admire more, although a statistic was mentioned-- that one needs to write two pages daily to rack up a lifetime total of 100 novels. Remarkable the time one wastes.

One tends to compare one's life to that of these exemplary people. While JCO is a sort of flawed human, I have always admired her for what I assumed was her frank self-assessment and her lack of self-pity.  So much of excessive compassion and charity is time-consuming.  I am not just guilty, but guilty of the guilt-- one of those bleeding-heart characters who cannot sleep after a global tragedy, who absorbs the suffering of others and cannot turn away from a depressed friend. It is a choice, I know, and it has affected my output, although this, too, is a human choice. I try to dispense with regret the way JCO seems to have little patience for practicing empathy, except maybe with respect to her cats.  And children-- well, not in the equation.

Of course I am not qualified to judge.  Her novels are excellent, although, admittedly, I have never granted her the status of literary genius.  She has her critics-- Truman Capote was harsh, Michiko Kakutani as well, and personally I have found myself arguing both for and against her talents.  I am also not sure whether acknowledgment helps those few who have their own standards of excellence.  We see them rarely in this polluted sea of celebrity and fame where social media followers fill virtual stadiums for performances that would otherwise remain where they belong-- inside a phone. 

I have known some famous writers... through dates, acquaintances... I even babysat for one or two.  When I moved to this apartment I was quietly stalked by one who lived on my block.  He showed interest in my work; I was flattered.  He even came to a couple of my solo gigs, wrote me literary postcards and gifted me small stacks of books and proofs for discovery.  Years later, I realize he probably just wanted to mark me off as one of his many conquests, but I felt 'considered' sitting in his library, listening to his startling confessionals, being called late at night for an opinion on an essay he was writing.  

It also occurs to me that I could have written a profile of this writer; others have done so, and the time we spent was more than any random interviewer might have received. Journalists craved his dialogue, and he seemed to shun publicity at a time when the act of doing so only solicited more curiosity. And yet while I coveted and collected our time together, I feared his disfavor more.

As happens so often with one's mentors, his 'disciples' were distinguishable by the stylistic choices on which he insisted.  The women often slept with him; one stalked him noticeably, kept a jealous eye out.  He openly spoke of his sexual encounters and the preferences and oddities of his writers.  Not wanting to become one of his anecdotes, I kept a distance.  After a while I began to tire of his editorial preferences; I could predict where his crossouts would come, how he would leave maybe three lines untouched in a long poem. 

One day I wrote a sort of nasty piece which obviously featured my writer-neighbor in an unflattering character.  He never again spoke to me.  All our intimacies, our 'back-and-forths'-- the postcards, the gifts, the phone-calls-- they stopped.  Dead.  I went on to continue writing in my own way, without the critical 'eye' of my neighbor's editorial penmarks.  It felt freeing. After a year or so, I apologized.  I still deliver copies of my books; he does not reply. 

I saw him on the street yesterday; he's old, but still commanding in a way.  He's rich and a little powerful and has plenty of help and the kind of academic reverence an old writer merits.  He doesn't like the work of Joyce Carol Oates; I know this. I'm not sure he likes his own work, at this point.  He dislikes biographical pieces and yet collects them. He has written his own-- some as literature, and they are fairly brutal and quite good. I have a shelf of them-- most inscribed to me from several years ago, when I seemed to matter in his life, and it mattered to me that I did. 

On these days when my reading matters more than any writing I produce, I conclude that an artist, in the end, is considered so when his output exceeds input in significance.  By sheer number, Joyce Carol Oates has set in stone her reputation. Whether or not she will receive her Nobel prize, or be considered worthy by her peers, might matter or not. My neighbor will be written about, I suspect. As for me,  I will never know whether it was my poetry, my bass-playing or the length of my legs that engaged him and deceived me into believing, for a time, in my own merit. And I suppose two pages a day is manageable. 

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