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. 

Grey Flannel

As part of my adaptive reading program, I just finished Mosquitoes-- a much criticized early Faulkner novel which, while flawed, still rewards with unpolished and sometimes erratic youthful exuberance of description. Another claustrophobic August narrative for me-- dank, humid and overripe with the disappointment of human relations. But well worth the effort.

Late last night after a day or two of uncharted sleep-deprivation, I made the mistake of flipping television channels.  Besides my go-to film stations, there is quite a bizarre array of lameness across the board: flimsily-premised game-shows, re-treaded bad 'reality'... it's as though everything has been done... and redone, or the interesting actors have taken a hiatus and left us with the dregs of low-level celebrity who for the likes me are not just unremarkable but unrecognizable.  

Friends of mine are visiting New York, and ask me for suggestions. I'm not in the least tourist-ready, as I once was-- brimming with passion and lists of competing activities and shows... primed for inspiration and  ripe to be dazzled by some fantastic band or gallery exhibition.  It's not just seasonal malaise but a general thing. I mean, my books, most of whose authors are dead, do not fail me.  They also remind of my creative mediocrity and the distance between where I am and where I might have been.

And there are those among my Facebook acquaintances who still post and gush and selfie at myriads of openings and gigs and events-- dress up and do their hair and socialize.  It is a reminder of why the Stones are still touring... for those of us who have found little else to replace what used to be a common and easily-accessed quality music scene. 

Around 2 AM, there was a Nashville songwriting hour program, featuring three young artists.  One had guitar skills, but the songs were utterly cliche'd... another I recognized from the club scene here twenty years back... here he was on television, with his talent yet to sprout... and a third-- the daughter of an old and extremely good songwriter... she-- whom I'd met as a baby-- seemed exhausted by life; her songs, too, were old and not memorable.  I felt a kind of pity for her performance, especially conjuring her father whose genius was undeniable despite extreme stage-fright in his early days which he battled by facing away from the audience.  It was charming because he was brilliant and undeniable. But where am I, I was thinking?

I happened on a brief clip of a Townes Van Zandt memorial songwriter's circle-- with all the best Nashville celebrities from the 1990's... with each performance of a song more heartbreaking than the previous.  I watched and I wept.  Townes was an occasional visitor to New York and the sheer pleasure of having once spent an evening with his humble sense of humor and utter boy-charm was thrilling.  He was a consummate and sad artist.

There are of course a few lights in the August tunnel-- the Os Gemeos murals on West 14th Street, not minding the occasional soaking of a passing rainstorm... the pale moon, translucent over the twilight river sky.... the perfect pitch of a little morning dove who visits my bedroom windowsill nearly every day... just inches away behind the glass.  And what I call the 'grey flannel' days- those occasional weather-anomalies of chilly rain, reminders of the autumn to come, and of those homesick summer camp mornings when we were forced to pull these scratchy uniform components from the bottom of our steamer trunks and wait out the sun dressed like soldiers.  These days make me grateful to be an adult-- to have freedom of time and wardrobe and activity-- privileges we aging seniors take much-too-much for granted.

This morning I woke up with one of those vivid memories one occasionally pulls out of a deep subconcious hat... of a late August trip with an ex to the Jersey Shore.  Difficult to get away without children in those days, but we managed to rent a car and have a couple of unpremeditated days exploring roads I knew from college and he knew from songs.  We were surely at the end of some journey as a couple, although we had some fun... including a night in a cheap depressing motel in Neptune we booked out of desperation-- in the days when one had to drive from place to place to inquire about vacancies: it was after midnight and the desk attendant was annoyed and smelled of cheap whiskey. We swam in a small, sort of fetid pool and then slept poorly in a damp ground-floor room where the air conditioner was ineffective and one felt like a mushroom. 

Anyway, at least the ex got a decent song out of the trip.  I came home with the desolation of another failed relationship, and that deep sorrowful mix of nostalgia and regret and impending loneliness that comes when one distinctly chooses to put something precious behind a line which marks past from present.  There was some love there, or had been... and surely it was I who destroyed it-- I was very good at that.  Although now, so many years hence, I suppose the song still exists, and between us, the thing that replaces everything in the end-- what we had, what we had not, a kind of distance through which we see things both less and more clearly as we log yet another season.

Forever 2021

On the way uptown today some vintage music was wafting out of a restaurant storefront, serenading the couples gathering at sidewalk tables... 'This magic moment...' I heard, and thought,.. who is listening to this now in late-pandemic 2021?  It just seemed so incongruous with the masked people looking at their phones, texting their cocktail orders... 'so different and so new... will last forever....' the song said.  

I wondered if any of these couples was having any sort of 'magic moment'-- not sure with online dating and hook-ups whether they have these 'pregnant' moments... whether they even heard the Drifters singing 'till the end of time'.  It didn't seem so.  Me-- I remembered hearing this one on the car radio on the way to primary school-- the way old rock and roll seemed like a world I could not quite penetrate.  

Years later I hung out with Doc Pomus the composer at the old Lone Star... a girthy man in a wheelchair,  he always seems in memory to be wearing the printed shirt he has on in that famous shot with Bob Dylan.  He laughed a good deal... just didn't look the part of the lonely romantic songwriter.  Obviously he did not last forever; he passed away at 65... I will remember him most for the line...'my room it has two windows and still no light shines through' or some variation of it... the heart of a bluesman who knew failure as his most constant lover.

Around the time the Drifters were on the charts, a neighbor-boy gifted me a pile of comic books-- Archie, Superman... it was kind of a romantic thing for a 2nd grader... and while the strips bored me, I was utterly fascinated by the advertisements on the back cover. Realizing some of the items might have caused a parental fit, I ordered a safe pack of 1000 postage stamps for a single dollar.  

They arrived in a plastic-windowed envelope-- fell out everywhere like tiny treasures.  I was elated.  Faces, portraits... maps, creatures... landscapes.  They were from countries I'd never heard of-- in strange languages... each one a little world.  I became something of a collector-- typically seeking out the most picturesque.. or the ones from museums and libraries... famous authors, paintings... not for value but for looking.  One of our neighbors moved to Egypt and sent letters with amazing stamps; sometimes she visited African countries and slipped in extras.  I began to find pen pals... in Mexico, France, Italy... just to greet the stamp when the post arrived; letters were secondary.

My father gave me a stitch-counter-- a kind of magnifier with a light and this opened up the little world even further; the engraving was so fine and delicate-- the coloring-- the paper they were printed on. Of course there were the new editions-- I'd go to the Post Office with my mother and pick out our Christmas and Easter stamps-- it was my job to lick and stick them on holiday cards along with a festive seal. But US stamps never had the appeal of the ones from overseas that were suffused with a kind of exotic presence.  And they'd come so far... on ships, on airplanes... from leather sacks carried by men and women who spoke strange languages.  

Once a week I'd take my little wagon to the local library-- load and unload my weekly 'read' which was impressive in those days when any escape from domestic claustrophobia was welcome.  I discovered I was eligible to borrow the enormous Scott Catalogues-- well-fingered huge volumes covered in plastic with thousands of ultra-thin pages of identifying images.  I lay on the floor and pored through these, looking for stories and details.  I fell asleep with them.  

My son inherited many boxes and books of stamps-- some in glassine envelopes, alphabetized by country-name, some of which no longer exist... we briefly had a 'moment' when he was maybe 12... until sports and girls replaced hobbies.  Some nights I take one out, and mentally roam the world a bit-- the Doc Pomus world of the Drifters... when these tiny squares and rectangles gave me global headroom... or when Doc and his peers sweated out inky lyrics on rumpled paper in smoky rooms on the Upper West Side.

It's sadly rare these days that I send actual letters; the quick appeal of my laptop is just too compelling, my handwriting is creaky and unreliable.  I visit the post office occasionally to send out books... and while there are all kinds of stamps-- with rockstars, astronauts, poets-- they are pre-glued and digitally printed; there is no magic here, no nostalgia or vintage connection.  These are coded money-units-- not for saving in scrapbooks but for currency.  Most of the first class stamps, to accommodate the quick obsolescence of postage, are now ironically marked 'forever'... not the Doc Pomus/Drifters forever-till-the-end-of-time forever but the cheap internet/ guaranteed money-back kind. 

It's also rare in 2021 that I find anything in the mailbox with a true stamp-- occasionally from France or Sweden.  In March I sent an old photograph to one of my childhood friends.  I pasted on a forever stamp I'd had since December (Christmas forever) and included a poem.  It never arrived.  So much for forever... lost in dead letter purgatory?  Who knows?  But tonight I wanted Doc Pomus to know I honor him every damn time I post a letter.