Exiles in Prague

Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll

Rock ‘n’ roll music isn’t important anymore.  I mean—it’s not really important.  It’s nearly irrelevant.  Download a song, a bunch of ones and zeroes for a buck.  (Do people know the names of the tunes or just the playlist number? ‘Play number five!’) It isn’t changing the world; wars are not stopping, cultures are not shifting seismically, freedom isn’t expanding, lives are not being changed and revolutions are not happening because of music—not like they did back in the day.  At least not like the way we like to think it all did.

So.  Anyone for a play about the Czech experience between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989?  Here’s a play that it is tightly woven with the threads of the music—played at concert level volumes no less—of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa and a nonconformist Czech rock group that was at the centre of Czech society—the Plastic People of the Universe.  Here’s literature that counts, a play that pokes and prods the comfortable and callow in the West—saying, wake up!  This music can change the world and like that Beatle song said—you don’t know how lucky you are.

I saw my first play by British playwright Tom Stoppard (Jumpers) in Washington DC in the winter of 1974—the winter of the beginning Watergate’s final denouement when revelations of presidential plumbers in dark and inappropriate locations where coming hard and fast—an American president was about to resign in disgrace. There were long lines of cars waiting for expensive gas, inflation was rampant and the economy stunk.  Grim times. And on top of all that, an ever present and low-level sense of doom was draped over us thanks to Soviet ICBMs aimed at the invisible targets painted on our young longhaired heads.  There was a sense of things running down—fear, loathing and deterioration—entropy. Love that word.

Tom Stoppard--rock 'n' roll star

And just as it’s true that rock ‘n’ roll always sounds best played in a dump of a joint, the music in those dark times was sounding good; rock ‘n’ roll music was at the center of American culture—it was kicking holes in the bland beige walls of what had been a comfortable dumbed-down society and new records were like letters from the front lines of the avant garde.

Stoppard’s latest is Rock ‘n’ Roll and I saw it at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago a few months back.  Like all of his work, it is an explosion of ideas, wordplay, puns, allusions to history, literature and obscure bits of philosophy–you gotta be on your toes.  Loosely based on the experiences of various Czech dissidents of the time—Vaclav Havel included—the play traces the lives of a young Czech student, Jan, studying at Cambridge in 1968 and the family of a beleaguered English Marxist professor who’s as Red as Red Square who says things like, “I’m down to one belief, that between theory and practice there’s a decent fit—not perfect but decent: ideology and a sensible fair society, it’s my double helix and I won’t be talked out of it or done out of it or shamed out of it.  We just have to be better.”

But young Jan is the focus—he goes back to Prague in 1968 after the Soviets crushed the reforms of the Dubcek government, he goes back to look after his mother.  He’s a lovable longhaired kid who pores over his vast collection of albums and studies and quotes them as thoroughly as Max quotes Marx.  Later, in 1969 says:

“You can’t face life without a guarantee. So you convince yourself everything’s going to end badly.  But look—when the Russians invaded, you would have bet on mass arrests, the government in jail, everything banned, reformers thrown out of jobs, out of the universities, the whole Soviet thing, with accordion bands playing Beatle songs.  I thought the same thing.  I came back to save rock ‘n’ roll, and my mother actually.  But none of it happened.  My mum’s okay, and there’s equipment held together with spit.  I was in the Music F Club where they had this amateur rock competition.  The Plastic People of the Universe played ‘Venus in Furs’ from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.”

As the play ends in August 1990, as Jan and Esme—the beautiful and now grown-up rock ‘n’ roll nymph of ’68—go to a free Rolling Stones concert in Prague, following the bloodless Velvet Revolution overthrowing the Communist regime, Jan is happy yet gently laments the loss of his old world, replaced by a new one where the central question is “Who will be famous?  Who will be rich?”   Esme says, “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.”

And the stage goes black as Keith Richards and Charlie Watts kick off the thunderous and exhilarating guitar and drum driven opening to You Got Me Rocking—it reaches down to your spine and you shudder to the yes of rock ‘n’ roll and know that the music is important.

Keef rips this joint in Prague

Air

Yeah, all those new Beatle reissues have been out on the street for a while now.  I bought some.  And I’ve been asked what differences there were with these new discs.  Like a lot of folks, I’m pretty skeptical when I hear those people with golden ears talk about how this instrument or that amplifier breathes so much more or has so much chime and shimmer in the upper mids or something like that.  You know, like audiophiles used to do with high-end stereo gear.  Remember the guy with the biggest stereo, those monster speakers?  Yeah.  Anyway, I’m not one of those guys but I do hear things in these new Beatle remasters that, for me, make it all worthwhile.  And I think it has to do with air.

It’s like they took the sound of a given record and expanded it, stretched it out, allowing more space for each instrument…and yes, giving it room to breathe the air of the Abbey Road studio and I think you can hear it.  You can hear the pluck of a guitar string as it emerges from one of those old dusty Vox or Fender amps or the air around the thump of a drum and the scrape of the horsehair of some string player’s bow over a cello string.  And the vocals are there, like a faint scrim has been lifted.  And then there’s the packaging.  First rate, along with new notes/pics etc accompanying each album.  Each one is like a little well-made book.

So, yeah.  If you’ve got a favorite old Beatle album, go buy the new one and I think you’ll like it.  Great stuff.

Studio 1 at Abbey Road

A strange black light…

Sway by Zachary Lazar

It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway. (M. Jagger/K. Richards, 1971)

It’s become conventional wisdom to accept the notion that the 60’s officially ended at Altamont—the free concert near San Francisco in December of 1969 that resulted in the deaths of at least four people. In Zachary Lazar’s wildly creative novel Sway, any bright flowering of peace, love and positive creativity hardly happened; the Beatles, not mentioned by name, are just “a band from Liverpool, of all places.”

Lazar has twisted (woven is probably not the right word) three tales in a dark braid, threads sometimes intersecting but mostly not; a purely fictional, speculative narration of the early days through the zenith of the Rolling Stones; a tale of Bobby Beausoleil, a young man fatally under the influence of Charles Manson in the brown grassy hills of southern California; and the tormented underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Lazar has found a way to shine a strange, new black light on this decade, a still festering contemporary heart of darkness (or light, depending on your point of view) that won’t go away. With little and non-descript dialogue, minimal plot and not much characterization, it is the novel’s visuality; its attention to the sensual details of the depiction of music in both its creation and its performance, and the novel’s strong sense of place that make Sway a remarkable success.

The early Stones, like any garage band, have an endearing clunkiness, making it up as they go. Lazar shows an image that is a far cry from fan club hagiography. This is no guitar hero;

“Onstage, they are all awkward, all except Brian. His face is almost feminine, pale and wide-lipped, but his hands are large, blocklike, and they handle the guitar like a shovel. He attacks the strings with wide up and down sweeps of the wrist, forms the chords with wide stretched fingers, making his playing look more difficult than it is.”

Guitar players have always been interested in making it look difficult—girls are impressed. But the Stones seem to have to fight there way out of every gig, tough joints in working class England.

The song Sympathy for the Devil , Lucifer making his pitch, is one of the novel’s central motifs. Recorded in early June 1968, just as Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, the description of its transformation from a few simple chords to finished masterpiece;

“It would take them three nights to put the song into its finished form. In those three nights, it would change from a folk song to a psychedelic song to a soul song, and then emerge something raw and percussive, like the voodoo music of Haiti….It would start with a yelp, a monkey screech, and a flat patter of bongos, a resonant thud of conga drums, a locust-like hiss of maracas. It would become a wild celebration of everything it had started out lamenting.”

The song predates MTV, of course. And it is a tune one may have heard hundreds of times, perhaps even performed it, but Lazar’s account of its percussive hoots, hollers, screeches and voodoo-hoodoo drives a mental picture that is indelible.

Rock and roll is visceral in nature, its thumping of a bass in the gut felt even in the cheap seats of Madison Square Garden. Lazar nails it;

“It was a series of vibrations amplified through electric circuits, a current of sound the crowd could feel on the skin beneath their hair, in the cavities of their chests, in their rectums and their groins. It registered in their bodies, in the pulse of the blood, but also in their minds, the part that was always changing as senseless and illogical as a dream.”

The sensual, visual choice of words—cavities, chests, rectums, groins and blood—strong, uncomfortable and sexual—are hardwired in this music, this voodoo gumbo of rock and roll—enough to make any parent uneasy.

Lazar makes economic but effective use of poetic devices. His alliterative word selections are worthy of Cavafy and his Alexandria, presenting a vivid image of Marrakech—earth, eggshell, electric, souks, scraped, sand and city, burned, busier and bright;

“He had lost Tom Keylock somewhere in the fabric souks a few hours ago and now he was looking through the window of the cab, at the dense wedges of building, earth-colored or eggshell-colored, which appeared as if they’d been scraped together out of sand. A few electric lights burned like flares along the busier streets, bright orange or neon green. They made the city of Marrakech look more and not less ancient.”

Marrakech is foreign, alien and indeed ancient—far from Keith Richards’ mental map of America. For him, America was foreign, but familiar, young and romantic. He studied an actual map as a kid, memorizing “the shaded areas of their mountain ranges, the pale blue contours of their shorelines and lakes…He knew it was out there, a physical reality, not a dream. He had the maps, the names, the border and geography.” He was in love with a place he’d never seen. So he and his friend Mick internalize that map, synthesize the music of the records they find, painstakingly move the needles back and forth over the black grooves and produce Sympathy For the Devil, a song that becomes one of the symbols of their coming-of-age decade. “The decade will pass, forty years will pass, and maybe you’ll hear a snatch of it through a car window, the sound of it still a surprise over a stranger’s radio, the old song sent around the planet in waves that never end.”

That time still has us in its sway. And Sway makes us see it.

Dizzy, Bird and Jack

Third set at the Onyx Club on 52nd street, two in the morning on a winter’s night in New York, 1947 or maybe ‘48. It’s a little smoky jazz club and to some there, the music is chaotic, bewildering—stuff that sounds nothing like swing, the music of the Thirties or the War. But the hipsters remain, drinking, smoking, listening—something new is going on. A tune called A Night in Tunisia is blowing off the little bandstand, played by well-dressed musicians—the leader, a trumpeter named John Birks Gillespie blows hard and fast and wears a black beret. He smiles a lot and his cheeks balloon with every furious run of notes from his horn—unconventional, rule breaking, risk taking. Unlike conventional jazz musicians, Gillespie though cool, gives his music a driving, hot physicality.

 

Dizzy, 1948

 

The tune has vague Latin percussive elements—the drummer, in order to keep up with the unusual speed of the music, has adopted a new style—playing a high-hat cymbal pattern on the ride (top) cymbal and he doesn’t play the bass drum on every beat as do most other jazz drummers of the time. He plays a combination of off beat punctuations on the bass and snare drums—dropping ‘bombs’, physical, percussive beats in unexpected places, like a heart murmur that somehow made new sense—or a poet slipping in an anapest in a string of iambs.

Dizzy blows long sheets of notes and then steps back allowing a saxophonist named Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker to step forward and unleash an unbroken improvised, risky stream of sixteenth notes; furious and stunning, breathing only at the end of lines, like a line of verse, a natural break end-stopped with a comma, a breath mark; he hits accents at the top of long phrases, going off the fast beat and coming back just in time to touch the downbeat, back in the chorus with Dizzy, another solo, chorus and then out. Later, Bird would say he’d “never be able to make that break again.” Despite being a junkie, hooked on heroin, horse, he did make that break again, and again.

Dizzy Gillespie said, “We played a lot of original tunes that didn’t have titles…I’d say ‘Dee-da-pa-n-de-bop’…and we’d go into it. People, when they’d wanna ask for one of those numbers and didn’t know the name, would ask for bebop.” To most mainstream listeners in the mid to late ‘40s, bebop was chaotic—odd harmonies, ‘wrong’ notes, weird, bewilderingly fast music with a core of drive energy, undeniably rhythmic; a kind of prosodic jazz.

A young Jack Kerouac, a good-looking kid from Lowell, Massachusetts might have sat down at the bar of the Onyx Club that night, one of the many jazz joints then on 52nd street. Kerouac had been in New York City a few years, hanging out with a strange crowd orbiting in and around Columbia University, dropping off the football team, taking courses, writing. He’d first heard A Night in Tunisia a few years earlier on a radio broadcast. Allen Ginsberg said, “Kerouac learned his line from—directly from Charlie Parker and Gillespie and Monk. He was listening in ’43 to Symphony Sid and listening to “Night in Tunisia” and all the bird-flight-noted things which he then adapted to prose line.” Kerouac’s joual world, his New England-French Canadian line of words had intersected with a different kind of language.

Sitting in jazz joints or listening to the radio Jack Kerouac perceived, at a gut level, a certain poetic language of the ear, music, that he wished to transfer to his writing, something new, not grey-faced or hide-bound. His goal was to inspire a physical reaction in his reader, not just a placid pleasurable sense. It was the “sound of the mind” that he was after—an intersection of mediums—words and music.

 

Kerouac reads...

Rip this joint…

In 1972, the Rolling Stones, about to begin a larger than life, full-blown rock and roll journey across America, released what became one of their most important records—Exile on Main Street.  A mythic American landscape unreels in the music, like a deafening low-flying crop duster veering from one end of the continent to the other, a classic road trip worthy of Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty; one song alone referring to nine locations—points on Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richard’s romantic mental map of the country.  Documenting the tour, along for a photographic ride on an always out-of-control tour jet, was an older man, eastern European in appearance, Robert Frank.  In 1956, he had published an important book of black and white photographs of an America few had seen in the placid postwar 1950s—The Americans.  Jack Kerouac wrote that book’s introduction.  He described Frank as “Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America and on to film…to Robert Frank, I now give this message: You got eyes.”   Kerouac is the subterranean taproot between these two strange, savage trips through America.

Torn and frayed

Kerouac’s novel, On the Road was, like Frank’s book, a sad poem and his spontaneous prose, a rhythmic “bop prosody” that is, like the best poetry, sound captured on the page. He told his Viking Press editor and early champion Malcolm Cowley, “If it isn’t spontaneous, right in the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised…the requirements for prose and verse are the same i.e. blow…let the writer open his mouth & Yap it like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence.”  He took a lot of heat on spontaneous prose.  Truman Capote called it “typing, not writing.”  And indeed, a continuous pouring out of words and sounds, the conviction that “you’re always a genius” has its risks.

But by using simple, sturdy words, athletic and free-flowing, Kerouac produced passages like the following, that but for the insertion of line-endings, is aural, visionary excellence:

“We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen. Port Allen—where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River?—a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out.”

That paragraph would not have been out of place during the first public reading of his friend Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.  The percussive riffing; Port Allen, Port Allen, the alliterative river’s rain roses, down along, down along and the incantation of towns and cities, strung out like train stations on a beat up map, echoes forward to the Stones’ dope and tequila-sunrise fueled tune, a five hundred mile-an-hour race through the American continent, Rip This Joint.

Improvisational speed is another aspect of Kerouac’s sound.  Like the sad, beat Hudson driven by Dean Moriarty, Kerouac’s prose feels improvisational where involuntary thoughts, start-stop crazy notes, urgent gut-reactions form into velocity-driven sheets of word-sound:

“Now, man, that alto man last night had IT—he held it once he found it: I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long” I wanted to know what “IT” meant.  “Ah well”—Dean laughed—“now you’re asking me impon-de-rables-ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind…and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it.  All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries.  Time stops.”  Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.”

Kerouac stood at the top of that passage’s slope and skied the steep mogul-strewn path he heard in his head without poles, fast, new thoughts and impulses appearing like big bumps in the snow. But he sacrificed a standard “grey-faced” narrative strategy when he turned up the volume of his jazz-driven improvisations.  Narrative causality took a back seat in the Hudson as plot progressions are limited to mood changes, tension and release and the ups and downs of narrator Sal Paradise. 

Other than east, west, north and south, plot direction was of little importance.  Sound, and the search for an authentic new unconstrained hipster voice were what mattered. As Dean Moriarty said, “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”  “Where we going, man?  “I don’t know, but we gotta go.”

You got eyes.

 

Broken shards of a cliff dweller

Re: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow.

Mr. Sammler is homeless.  While New York is the ideal and only place for this novel—it is the heart of Jewish America, then and now—he belongs nowhere.  He is still European in aspect and outlook, troubled by the callow youth of the day and his own money-grubbing progeny:

“The children were setting fire to the libraries.  And putting on Persian trousers, letting their sideburns grow.  This was their symbolic wholeness.  An oligarchy of technicians, engineers, the men who ran the grand machines, infinitely more sophisticated than this automobile, would come to govern vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered, and “whole.”  He himself was a fragment, Mr. Sammler understood.”

And New York is decaying:

“Then a right turn, downtown on Broadway.  The street rose while the subway was lowering.  Up, the brown masonry; and down, the black shadow and steel tracks.  Then tenements, the Puerto Rican squalor.  Then the University, squalid in a different way.  It was already too warm in the city.  Spring lost the touch of winter and got the summer rankness.  Between the pillars at One hundred-sixteenth Street Sammler looked into the brick quadrangles…The old-time poetry of parks was banned. Obsolete thickness of shade leading to private meditation.  Truth was now slummier and called for litter in the setting—leafy reverie?  A thing of the past.”

But, in the end, death rewards.  The early death of his nephew and benefactor—nearly the only sympathetic character in the novel—prompts Sammler to utter one of the most moving prayers in American literature:

“Sammler in a mental whisper said, “Well, Elya.  Well, well, Elya.”  And then in the same way he said, “Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner,” he intones, while honoring Elya for his willingness to meet his human contract–”terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it–that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” 

Like a broken shard, a fragment of a lonely cliff-dwelling 20^th century Lear found on the hard sidewalks of New York, Sammler redeems himself and we can then quietly replace the novel on the shelf among its brethren novels of modern dignity.

Mr. Eastwood’s Planet

Some thought Saul Bellow’s deeply pessimistic Mr. Sammler’s Planet to be the work of a tired, cranky old man upon its release in 1970.  Was Saul Bellow a misogynist and a racist?  And depressed?  Geez, there’s a negro pickpocket right there at the beginning ripping off the white folks on a Broadway bus on the upper West Side and then the guy whips it out, brandishes it like a burning spear mere months before Mel Brooks and Cleavon Little scare the entire cast of Blazing Saddles amidst great hilarity—and Cleavon’s Sheriff Bart didn’t even…whip it out! 

Though Bellow’s thief was terribly well dressed, presenting a black man as a confirmation of mugging stereotype prompted limousine-John-Lindsay-liberals (show of hands, please?) of the early ‘70s squirm uncomfortably. And then we see the elegant, old Mr. Sammler, a Holocaust survivor—which automatically grants him all kinds of slack, he’s got very serious scars and gashes from his horrific past—railing on about the young and his various wastrel nieces, nephews and other spoiled, upscale New York characters.  And the reader nods and can frequently see his point.  Not unlike Lawrence Black on a Daily Show rant.  Well, maybe not.

Those were times when things were indeed thought to be going to hell in a hand basket; the system was running down, kids and black folks wild in the streets, burning bras, the War, Kent State, entropy running wild.  But in yet another one of this blog’s cinematic references, I am reminded of The Enforcer (1976), in which Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callaghan carries on with the revenge fantasy of “normal folks.”  To a bunch of scary black militants (of the shadowy group known as Uhuru), Harry thanks them for some small courtesy, muttering “thanks, mighty white of you.”   Zing! 

Of course, the movie posters with Clint’s monstrous .44 Magnum under your nose in near 3D add to the fun—like Eldridge Cleaver’s contemporary real man pants which featured large, dangling black cotton-stuffed penises.  Like the pickpocket’s phallic tool—a tool that, like the Magnum, could blow your head clean off—we have an unsubtle hypertext to Bellow’s equally pessimistic vision.  Even one of the lonely upbeat events of the time, the Apollo moon landing couldn’t snap him out of it—the moon shots and Govinda Lal’s learned lunatic texts, only add to the despair.

The Dirty Harry movies were very much period pieces, carved out of the law-abiding silent majority middle class resentments that got Richard Nixon elected in 1968; a reaction against the out of control youth and black folks who, I guess, were expecting too much.   Bellow’s novel is carved out of something more complex than that.

The Zig of DFW…

The great Modernists (Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf) zigged away from tradition and rewrote the book. Depth over surface.

David Lodge, in Consciousness and the Novel, wrote about a literary shift, a zag, that occurred in fiction with the late Modernists (early postmodernists?) to more extended  dialogue, more surface work–something that wouldn’t have happened without the influence of cinema.  

Novelists like Waugh, Greene, Orwell and others represent the reverse of “modernist privileging of depth over surface…a striking readjustment of the ratio of dialogue to narrative, of direct speech to the rendering of characters’ unspoken thoughts.” 

And:

“The emphasis on dialogue and external appearances in these novelists, leaving thought and feeling to be implied, was not the only effect of cinema on the novel.  It also brought story back into literary fiction.”

So those writers tossed a grenade on their elders’ desks and zagged away from the older zig; zagging back to more traditional forms, but filtered through new technologies; the adaptation of cinematic narrative techniques in fiction.

The accelerating century produced another great literary zig with postmodernist writers like Vonnegut, Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon who tossed smoke bombs that haven’t yet been completely snuffed–though folks like John Gardner did throw themselves over them in a reactionary realist zag.

Consider Infinite Jest.  Certainly the chapter-length continuous dialogues and other lunacies of DFW would not have been possible without film, TV and more recent technologies.  Since he was writing Infinite Jest at the dawn of the world wide web V 1.0 (‘94-’95) his wild use of endnotes would seem to hypertextual—click here and zoom off to some other place. (Imagine a footnote here with a discussion of the idea of place, textual maps that help fuel non-realist fiction.)  Just make sure you’ve kept an analog finger bookmark so you can navigate your way back.  Then dog-ear your favorites. Infinite Jest is a thicket of its own webs with low-hanging branches that might knock your head off.

And in our increasingly circuit board flat world, with much of our fiction routed through strictly realist filters I am zigged to see an unruly Pynchonian horn being tooted.

Epic preposterousness…

Infinite Jest.  Most excellent fancy.  It’s like a Terry Gilliam movie directed by Ralph Steadman—psychedelic and distorted and fundamentally humane.

“I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.  My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.  This is a cold room in University Administration, wood walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. de Lint and I were lately received.”

Heads and bodies.  Could be Brazil.  Or a mescaline-fueled drawing from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Or an album by Frank Zappa like Freak Out (1966). In the liner notes Frank cites his influences, from Edgar Varese (“the modern composer refuses to die!”) and Igor Stravinsky to the Surfaris (Wipe Out).  No, I made that up.  Frank didn’t include the Surfaris, but he did include Elvis and Brian Wilson and the Beatles.  But the point is that the range is wide and all over the map.  Highbrow, lowbrow. 

Here’s a snippet of dialogue between 18 year old tennis prodigy and brilliant student Hal Incandenza and his older Arizona Cardinal punter brother Orin.  Hal answers the phone:

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

‘A proviso up-front Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’

‘And not every Dickinson poem is singable to ‘Yellow Rose,’ O.  Sorry to disappoint you.  For instance like “Ample make this bed—make this bed with awe” isn’t even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’

‘Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine’s consideration.’

A practice to be encouraged.  This particular theory’s unfortunately a dink.  Plus I don’t think you quite meant proviso.’

‘Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though.  Picture this.  Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band.  So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’

‘You know I hate these Strategy calls.’

‘Also of course works if you really do happen to be married.  In which case you’ve got a ring already.’

‘I’m sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’

‘The object being to present yourself to the Subject as married….’ 

Note: Emily Dickinson and the Yellow Rose of Texas.  I’ve always believed that all of her poetry can indeed be sung to that tune.  Sadly, Hal busts that myth.  And it isn’t even iambic.

Note: Juxtaposition of high and lowbrow; iambs and dinky seduction strategies.  Pomo.

Note: DFW’s dialogue flings open a window that had been painted shut.  A) Two brothers talking but not necessarily on the same wavelength.  Each line doesn’t necessarily follow and direct response isn’t necessary.  E.g. “You know I hate these Strategy calls.”  B) Orin ignores the comment.  These are two intelligent characters out-smarting each other, very brotherly.

Note: “Mmyellow” is Hal’s trademark phone answering device.  I never thought about how you’d actually write that.

Note: This bit of dialogue appears in Endnote #110, page 1007 to be exact, which happens to be 18 pages long—nearly all of it unattributed dialogue as above.  Yet, the reader is not left backtracking trying to find the sequence.  Each character’s consciousness is vivid and recognizable.

            Subnote: Dialogue innovation further along in the above conversation and throughout the novel:

                        ‘Can you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking phone?’

                        ‘…’

                        ‘Or what?’

                        ‘…’

                        ‘I’m sorry, O. I apologize.’

                        ‘Think nothing of it.  I know you didn’t mean it.’

            First time I’ve ever seen this—a fabulous way of conveying a moment of silence, perhaps an uncomfortable non-reply or somebody simply ignoring somebody else.  I have already stolen this device (see this month’s episodes).

Note: Sometimes endnotes behave as complete chapters, interchangeable, as in the above.  Also, the endnotes have endnotes.  The result of all this is a disruption to the linearity of the whole thing—which would have driven Gardner crazy—but it seems to me that the narrative is not disrupted.  It adds to the extravagant sense of addled consciousness that pervades the entire novel.

Which brings up the question of who’s in charge here?  Anybody?  There are a few passages in the first person (Hal), but the rest seems to be in a very close, present tense narrator—sometimes close to Hal, sometimes close to Gately, (the Ennet (halfway) House resident AA counselor and purported chef) and sometimes I don’t know who.

Here’s Gately:

“Chef-wise, he offers up an exception-less routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles; ominously dark, leathery Shake ‘N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; and hamburg-sauce spaghetti whose pasta he boils for almost an hour.  None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately’s big face hovering lunarly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy chef’s hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn’t got, his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyones’ full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal dish, except this bride’s hands are the same size as the House’s dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seem to need no oven-mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from searing.”

Forgive me.  It’s a long passage.  But the set up for Gately’s big face hovering lunarly above the steaming pan is worth it.

 

Surrounded by heads (from Terry Gilliam's Brazil)

 

 

Notes to self

Notes for proposed blog entry for John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (LITFH).  Refer to strange self-referential, fiction-that-investigates-fiction bit; discuss snarky, grinning Barth shining screwy curved mirrors in reader’s kaleidoscope eyes (see ref to High Sixties below) while sitting in tenured chair at Johns Hopkins…check that, he’s long since retired.  Recall nifty story (anecdotal probably apocryphal) about how he tangled with John Gardner back in the early ‘80s…yes, perhaps cite demise of experimental fiction, giving way to realism.  Or something. Yes, mention that.  Martone. Could do that in a footnote, but don’t know how to footnote on this blogsite.  Complain about lack of intuitive interface.  Ask Martone for clearance to “’quote’” or cite.

LITFH as remnant, artifact of swinging sixties.  Cite Barth 1987 intro to latest edition.  In the interest of ‘full disclosure’, reveal that anything having to do with the “High Sixties” (please note that “Italics are also employed, in fiction stories especially, for “out-side,” intrusive, or artificial voices, such as radio announcements, the texts of telegrams and newspaper articles, et cetera.  They should be used sparingly.  If passages originally in roman type are italicized by someone repeating them, it’s customary to acknowledge the fact, Italics mine.”) is swell thing.

‘Discuss “quotation marks.”  All those nested quotes, particularly in The Menelaiad get pretty crazy.  Who’s voice?  Who’s who?  No matter.  Must press on.  “On with the story.  On with the story.”’

Focus on LITFH story itself.  Note that after tale of swimming sperm (Night-Sea Journey)(could have been half the length for reader to get joke?) and oddball relatives involved in naming episode (Ambrose His Mark), LITFH is relief.  Note that have been to Ocean City, M.  Nice place.  Old memories dredged up.  Lost in souvenir shop.  But maybe not mention that, might “‘distract”’ from the vivid and continuous dream of blogging.  Check Gardner’s book for mention of that.  Italics Gardner’s.

Discuss Gardner’s metafiction and jazzing around section in Art of Fiction.  Well, maybe not discuss, but mention. Gardner says, “the appeal of metafiction may be almost entirely intellectual. If we laugh, we do not do so heartily, as when we laugh at or with an interesting lifelike character; we laugh thinly, with a feeling of slight superiority, as we laugh at wisecracks, or wit.”   Draw comparison to 12-tone music, e.g. Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez et al.  How long can you listen to it?  Listenable?  Readable?  Requires sense of intellectual duty? But there is something there.

Some exclamation of disagreement here. Inclination to defend crazy Barth and his clever jazz.  State that one purpose of lit is to provide pleasure bursts (epiphanies not always req.)  Can’t explain.

Note that Barth always comes right before Barthelme on bookstore shelves.

Close blog with quote from book.

‘“The reader!  You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction.  You’ve read me this far, then?  Even this far?  For what discreditable motive?  How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall…can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off?  Where’s your shame?”’

Print-oriented bastard!  Back to the story.