Broken Ing-Lish

It's Oscar night.  I have little interest in watching the award show... diminishing returns for me who at one point, years ago, saw every nominee and felt a kind of excitement.  March Madness has more appeal.  My taste in film seems to hearken back to a high-school-era course which opened my eyes to European and experimental things and blew my moderated teenage mind.

I'm also editing a collection of lyrics.  This is a tedious and maddening process for me; having a quasi-indie label based in another country, there is really no one who can assist. Film editors are essential; they make masterpieces out of footage, make sense of lengthy narrative visuals and prevent the Director and cinematographer from indulgences which might leave an audience bored and apathetic. One must be popular, also.

The fact that I have sat through two showings of the 8-hour Satantango but cannot watch any of the Avengers or Spiderman or even Dune series is baffling to my son.  French New Wave cinema of the nineteen sixties seduced me with what I have called 'movies at the speed of life'.  I can watch documentaries, endless train footage, conversational exchanges à la My Dinner with Andre... but people in costumes brandishing weapons make me cringe.  It's overwhelming.

Long novels have always enchanted me-- nothing like the endless descriptions and loaded sentences of Proust. It takes a writer pages to describe a moment.  Film maybe has the advantage here... and audiences complain when features exceed three hours.  As though they have not spent at least that scrolling through their daily instagram.

Back to the editing.  I know my writing can be improved.  One tends to fall in love with spontaneous inspiration and to resist altering this, as though we might be sacrificing something irrecoverable.  My coming collection of lyrics seems archival more than impressive.  I am unemotionally deleting unnecessary punctuation and making minor layout choices, well aware that my audience is tiny.

Half a lifetime ago, new in my current neighborhood, I was waiting with my little boy in a 1990's bagel shop for an after-school snack. We were approached by a handsome white-haired man who commented on the Jeanette Winterson novel I was carrying.  It was obvious that he was well-read and intelligent. I don't even like Winterson all that much and didn't feel like defending my literary preferences.  But he followed me... he pursued me, in a way. He lived on my block which seemed safe enough.  Later that evening he delivered a pile of impressive and arcane books to me, with scrawled notes.

So I looked him up; he was Gordon Lish who had somehow not been on my personal radar despite the fact that I'd dated a writer via whom I'd met the cream of the city literati, including Joan Didion and William Gaddis (among my favorites). Most famous for editing (or perhaps 'writing') Raymond Carver, Gordon was extremely opinionated.  Under his slightly tyrannic influence, I surrounded myself with Cormac McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, Dawn Powell, etc.  

Sheepishly, I shared some of my poetry.  Maybe because I am a songwriter/bassist, he was vaguely complimentary. I also was warned that he was a major womanizer and most of his protégées were his lovers. He  actually showed up at one of my solo performances after which he called me 'brave'.  Despite the fact he lived two doors away, he mailed me handwritten postcards almost daily.  It was flattering... and gradually I began to sort of temper my writing to please him, as one does.  He bragged that he 'wrote' the best passages of some of the new novels he published which were uniformly minimal, choppy, stark and sort of jarring. It was a style. It seeped into me, in a way... and was compounded by the fact he returned my typed manuscripts with heavy cross-outs and suggestions.  Occasionally there would be only one word worth saving. And it seemed enough.

He flattered me by telling me he was going to start an imprint and publish my poetry. Yes, I was duly flattered... and inspired. Of course this did not transpire and either he tired of the 'chase' or genuinely disliked the fact that I rebelliously continued to allow a modicum of human emotion in my lyrics.  Also, I am a musician; I hear rhythms in words... I'm not sure my rigorous editor was listening at all-- he was so busy deleting.

We had kind of a falling out, some years later.  We're still neighbors; I'm old and he's quite old. I saved a quantity of his postcards, and I cherish the many nights we sat in his apartment and talked until dawn. He's brilliant, and his own writing has a particular masculine elegance that is incomparable. I admire him and in a way regret I was an uncooperative pedestrian writer in the presence of genius. 

Tonight, after the show, I scrolled through the published fashion photographs of actors and directors... some of the outfits are wonderful, but some of them, I chuckle to myself, could use editing-- like Dr. Doolittle 'portmanteau' animals that don't belong together... not everything works. What do I know?  I am badly dressed...but I know something.  I know enough to have had Mr. Lish marvel at my library and the breadth of my reading... enough to have him request my company at screenings and lectures. These things affect us.  

Yes, I'd much rather spend early morning hours watching Tarkovsky or Bergman or Khutsiev.  Is this taste?  Does this permeate my own output?  I read daily poetry from various well-respected platforms... some of these are good... some of them endlessly destroy their own soul with the piling of excess and tone-deaf lines.  They weigh themselves down. And then there are the constant wanna-bes whose verse is so clichéd and cringeworthy one could forever give up writing.  These manage to reproduce themselves  in online posts and memes.  On my own Facebook page, Meta mimics me daily with a horrifying AI version of my own words. 

Okay. Surely I could use an editor, but it's late... one becomes one's own audience, and I could never please Mr. Lish entirely. He began to give me orders, such as forbidding me to have a cellphone.  I do barely use mine... and I have included some of my work without his deletions-- as it were, so to speak.   About to publish a kind of abridged 'songbook', I am a little proud of the melodies and musical architecture which frame these lyrics.  And like most projects, they will have an afterlife of their own... or none at all.  I will (still) continue until I cannot.