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.  

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.