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. 

Summer Interlude

July humidity is a uniquely oppressive phenomenon for those who are economically committed to all-urban summers.  Nothing-- animal or material-- escapes its wilting inertia; we slow, perceptibly, like a musical command... and offer an opportunity for things to penetrate. If we took a personal inventory,  I think summer memories would dominate.

After the massive Nersesian novel (thank you, Arthur, who individually thanks an impressive litany of his East Village neighbors at the end), I took up some late Roberto Bolaño who never lets me down, even at his least luminous.  A summer vacation diary-- with deaths and mysteries and World War gaming minutiae... but the heat... the damp, the summer rain.  It stuck to me like my clothing.

And then Soldier's Pay-- to cleanse my literary palate, so to speak-- with early Faulkner.  So many of us read Faulkner in school-- before we were able to absorb his language facility-- well, it's worth going back after all this time.  One wonders where Cormac McCarthy would have been without him.  The imminent summer is palpable... and the way he is truly in love with not just words but the way people speak them... and the descriptions drip vocabulary like wet rain.  He over-saturates but it's young and utterly world-shaking. 

It occurs to me that old writers become more sparse and bitter, as though they are slowed and dulled by their own self-critical ghosts. Maybe, as we age, we spin off enthusiasm and joy like coats of paint-- and we are left, in our later years-- wiser but hampered by our own hesitations.  Rarely does one see a senior kick up his heels on the sidewalk. Later novels tend to be more careful.

Evenings I still circle the park; one of the highlights is the 110th Street drum circle.  Africans of several countries meet here and sing and dance-- some in T-shirts and jeans, some in colorful native dress. Beats and chanting fuse with the denser landscape up there into a ceremonial soundtrack.  There is joy in the circle-- camaraderie and affection... but overall there is this pall of homesickness-- of these transported people into the harsh summer reality of Manhattan... and I feel sad for them.  

Among friends, many are crippled with a kind of depression which seems less justifiable in summer, but nevertheless persists.  I speak to them because they know I'm awake at 3 AM when they are haunted.  I empathize, and I refuse to cross their boundary of despair.  Some of them hide in their apartments-- I, too, am a little guilty of anti-sociability-- but they assume these Facebook Fred personas-- they post and converse on social media... it's an anodyne, I suppose.  Many of them describe and display their surgeries and illnesses-- their recoveries and badges.  It's wonderful-- but what about those of us who toughed it out-- no  addictions, no drugs, no 12-step programs? We changed diapers and bailed kids out of jail.. we did the daily penance with no one but a vague Jesus beside us to listen to our prayers. No award.

Some of us cannot see what we have become.  Some of us work hard at filling in wrinkles and lifting saggy jowls-- at coloring our hair and camouflaging reality.  The depressed and vocal do not see how they have become narcissistic-- a black hole into which they draw their friends and anyone who will listen.  It's like a kind of emotional quicksand.  

As we add more and more to our life scoreboard, the losses ironically mount disproportionately.  Some of the losses are more memorable than the wins, although in this Olympic season, we barely remember even the medalists.  We love doing some things in life... others we dread, but we are glad that we did them.  I thought much about that couple who set out to sail the world and were found dead in a lifeboat.  Even they would not have had regrets; somehow we know this.

At a certain point we begin to give things away-- we realize what we got is not really what we wanted, and conversely, what we wanted is not what we got.  Some things happen to us... and they are not good, but I also often wonder that life has not been even more tragic-- that the good has outweighed the bad, that five mediocre novels do not change the one brilliant one; it is only the writer who suffers.

Tuesday at 5 AM I watched part of Bergman's Island... the original documentary which is Bergman at 80-something speaking about his life, filmed on his beloved Fårö.  He is consciously at his productive end and has always been clear about his films-- their meaning, the brilliant intertwining of his life's personal narrative with his work. But it seemed so simple-- the landscape, the genius himself in his fleece slippers, sitting on his fireplace, looking and explaining.  He was so utterly candid-- so honest.  His fear of death, his failures, his memories. It's extraordinary-- what he accomplished and how he of all people was able to see himself.

Dawn seems to come quickly in summer.  Evenings are slow... I feel certain, on the cusp of August, I will sense the season being sucked from the room.  It's another goodbye.  Whatever the summer has brought, whatever it has meant,  I hate goodbyes.  I will miss my sticky fingers on the keyboard in my unairconditioned apartment.  I will log my summer reading and console myself with the knowledge that these months are a smaller and smaller fraction of my lifespan. But I also think, after all these changes, I do know who I am.  And despite the relentless over-saturated cloud of grief no one measures with daily weather and air quality statistics, I belong here.