Category: Books

Kerouac playing football, 1938

I was extruded out the other end of the 2008 presidential election like John Goodman birthing himself from the mud in Raising Arizona. I clawed my way out, hollering, triumphant, relieved — but in the middle of nowhere, wondering "NOW what do I do?"

Much of my intellectual life during the Bush years has been an escape and a rummaging around for some kind of SENSE. 

At the start of Bush's second term, I dove head first into trying to understand every last thing about "The Moonshiner's Dance," a recording from another time — practically from another planet — the main theme of which is alcohol delirium and the razzing of meaning itself.  It had to be sorted out.  Somewhere along the line, I even quit drinking. 

Now, I will have to rejigger yet again somehow.

So with Palin sent back to Alaska, I felt it was time to clear my mind.  Cleanse my palate.  Get a little fresh air and perspective before beginning anew.  It seemed a good time to finally read Kerouac's On the Road.

I'd recently started reading classics I hadn't read before, ones I now think I should've read before getting that Master's Degree in English Literature I have framed on my wall. 

Last winter, for example, I'd finally read The Great Gatsby — oh, so THAT'S the answer to that GRE question! 

Besides, I'd always liked the idea of it.  Kerouac's sad and feverish and lost patriotism, his REAL "real America" Americanism.  It looked good on the menu after nearly two years of 21st-century stump speeches and echo chambers.

One of my many brothers — the one who'd used Kerouac as a roadmap throughout his early adulthood — had given me a copy of On the Road when I was 18 and he was 30.  I must've lost it during a move over the years. 

I bought my current copy a few years ago as a tourist in San Francisco, when my wife Jenny and I stopped by City Lights bookstore.  I knew it was the most obvious purchase to make, felt sheepish handing it over to the clerk. 

I felt the urge to tell him I'd already taken varying-sized doses of Ginsberg, Borroughs, Ferlinghetti, Corso, even Bob Kaufman — just never really Kerouac.  But it would've only made matters worse.

—-

I can't remember reading another book that relies so heavily on the reader to romanticize it, to buy into it.  The presumption somehow gives it the feel of "young adult fiction" — my brother had given it to me at the right time.

At some point, for example, narrator Sal Paradise assures us that this next trip across the country was the gonest, most profound, most epically heroic yet!  Yass yass, whoop, harumph! 

That trip's high points, to my memory, turn out to be getting a speeding ticket, picking up a hitchhiker with one arm longer than the other, getting stuck in the mud, and stealing some cheese. 

Ordinarily a quick read, it took me a month to get through, so evanescent was my romanticization. 

One tension that's supposed to sustain interest is a kind of low-simmer debate — Dean Moriarty: saint or demon?  But today, On the Road reads more like a muck-raker exposing the limited treatment options available to the mentally ill.  It's angering to know there were no good pills for the guy.

Actually, a lot is angering. 

Kerouac wonders faintly at his urge to murder gay men.  The absolute greatest wife they encounter is the one who stays in bed and silently smiles when they rudely wake her up to drink until dawn with her husband. 

"The Beats were single-handedly responsible for feminism," Jenny quipped.  But I think measuring the exact distance from that quip to the unsnarky truth would be a good senior thesis topic, if you're looking for one.

Part 3 Chapter 4 details the performance of an African American jazz trumpet player in San Francisco — how he commits himself body and soul to his performance, transfixes his audience, eventually finds the essence of the global moment as embodied in the room at that instant, and everybody recognizes it.

Moriarty and Paradise get to hang with the guy for a few precious minutes, during which Moriarty wants the black musician to go find his wife and hand her over to them — these drunk white tourists — to fuck.  The musician politely declines and the meeting comes to an end.

—-

My will flagging, I was close to giving up with only 30 pages to go, so Jenny offered to read the next chapter to me aloud.  It turned out to be Part 4 Chapter 5 — the whorehouse chapter.

Wise wife.  If you need to read On the Road, go with someone on a long car trip and take turns reading and driving.

When read aloud, of course, Kerouac's lyricism greases the skids a bit.  His voice is unmistakable in the book's grander passages on the meaning of the land and the night and the road, but the more mundane plot points — how much money we had, who drove, where we found a pay phone — have a rhythm of their own.

And read aloud, the deadpan jokes are funnier.  Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise are idiots, and Kerouac seems to acknowledge this more readily as you roll the language on your tongue. Ask your wife to help you.

"Man," said Dean to me, "ain't this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It's so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?" he cried in Spanish. "Dig it, Sal, I'm speaking Spanish."

When it came out in 1957, this spoken quality of On the Road must've been one of its many startling elements that aren't as startling today. 

As another survival strategy to get me through the reading, I went back to Tom Waits' early stuff, listening to that startle that so animated Waits in the 1970's.  Foreign Affairs, for example, careens between Kerouac and Raymond Chandler — sometimes from line to line. 

Jenny, who is vastly better read than I am, nodded.   She noted that if you go back and read some of the books that got Pulitzers at mid-century, and the books they thought were The Great Novels of the past, they're often horrible.  Unreadable, ponderous, stultifying.  She always keeps some genre fiction around — mysteries, detective novels, horror. 

The Beats and the pulp writers, Jenny reminds me, wrote books you actually want to read.  I think Tom Waits and Bob Dylan before him were beneficiaries of that democratization of artistically ambitious writing.  They also vastly expanded it beyond poetry and the novel.

Allen Ginsberg famously said Dylan took on "an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox. And he proved that it can."  In some sense, it was Ginsberg and Kerouac themselves who had proved it can.  The song "Jack & Neal" from Foreign Affairs is almost like Cliff Notes for On the Road set to music. 

If you wanted to write an album for the ears of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg — one that would actually impress those men personally — you could do worse than Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde.  Then again, those albums have held up better than On the Road over time, so maybe their goal was to surpass rather than impress.

As soon as it hit the streets, On the Road was apparently made to carry more baggage than it could bear — like Kerouac himself, they say. He didn't know what he was unleashing when he typed it out and, like most books, it's better the more you can see it as a gesture made in its moment. It's an innocent thing, On the Road, for all its malfeasance. 

It again brings me face-to-face with the mindset of young people after WWII, possessed as they were by the knowledge that the whole damned century so far had been badly muffed, a gutter ball, and the options looking forward were pretty vapid.

Everybody could see that young people's disillusionment was about to hit the fan, and the Beats were either lucky or unlucky enough to be there, trying to capture where their heads were at.  Though they worked hard to get famous, they were more sucked into their fame by prevailing anxieties.

There are agonies involved in reading On the Road, but the past needs more attention and explication as it recedes, not less. 

The book broke open several crates of valuable material I'd almost forgotten I had — early Waits, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound, Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good, and much else.  My earliest toddler-memory of the public life of the nation pertains to the Funky Chicken dance craze, and I feel a need to revisit the lessons of earlier eras again and again.

It also turns out that Jack Kerouac and Frank Cloutier were born in the same town, and I'm now wondering if, God help me, the next book I read might be Visions of Gerard.

_

… all his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of this statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that has touched his heart.

This is a police detective’s description of H. H. Holmes, the masterful liar and serial murderer of Erik Larson’s book — one of the devils in his white city. The description comes late in the book, by which time it comes off as a wonderfully perverse joke shared between Larson and you, the reader who has by now come to think of Larson in exactly these terms. Larson is a very slippery and hypnotic liar. Like the guards who mourn when Holmes is executed for his murders, you wish Larson could go on lying to you much longer than he does.

Larson’s misdeeds are not serious, and I probably care about them only because of my own struggle to learn the lost details behind Moonshiners Dance. Often, I would sell my soul to the Devil to discover the level of detail Larson seems to have for events that took place 35 years before the subject of my own research.

Early in the book, Larson describes the first meeting between Holmes and one of his victims. As if to torment me personally, Larson places the meeting in a music shop in Minneapolis:

Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks. Holmes was handsome, warm, and obviously wealthy, and he lived in Chicago, the most feared and magnetic of cities. Even during their first meeting he touched her; his eyes deposited a bright blue hope. When he left the store that first day, as motes of dust filled the space he left behind, her own life seemed drab beyond endurance. A clock ticked. Something had to change.

A wonderful passage, but … but DID a clock tick? IS that what the dust did? Did ANY of this really happen? No footnote is provided. It is clear, though, that Larson has studied late 19th-century Chicago much more closely than Minneapolis, which was not “full” of farmers of any description. It was a pretty rough place, and about as densely populated with prostitutes, drunks, businessmen and laborers of all ethnicities as Chicago was. Ask anyone from Lake Wobegon — they’ll tell you about Minneapolis.

More substantial stretches of fiction get footnoted as such. Larson describes Holmes’ tour, with his wife and sister-in-law, of the Union Stockyards —

Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage.

On the same day, they also saw the 1893 Columbian Exposition, known as the White City —

Minnie and Anna rapidly grew tired. They exited, with relief, onto the terrace over the North Canal and walked into the Court of Honor. Here once again Anna found herself nearly overwhelmed. It was noon by now, the sun directly overhead.

The footnotes acknowledge that the description, while long and detailed and vivid, is entirely bogus, except that it traces the SORT of tour that Chicago residents often gave to visiting relatives.

I love this book, and find the paperback edition’s blurbage to be mostly well earned. It is indeed a gripping page-turner, thanks to Larson’s use of every tool in the novelist’s bag. I have enough interest in urban geography to have taken a half-dozen graduate-level courses in the subject while I was in academia (which Larson seems to detest). Reading The Devil in the White City, I often wished I’d had it in grad school to get a much better feel for this Columbian Exposition that everyone thought was so important. Likewise, I grew up in the Chicago area and often visited the Museum of Science and Industry without ever grasping that it was the last remaining structure of a history-making fair [see Comments]. I wish The Devil in the White City had been published in 1976 and placed in my hands then.

As a developing writer of history, there’s a great deal to learn from Larson’s work that I haven’t often found in the, let us say, “less imaginative” histories I ordinarily read. Now and then, I wanted to slap myself on the forehead and say “Of course!” For example, I know very well what the weather was like on the night of Christmas 1924, when the Victoria Cafe opened in St. Paul, but Erik Larson reminded me that — and how — that weather matters.

The Devil in the White City, like any other measuring device, is useful precisely because it goes too far. You can use it to get a fix on how far you’d like to go in contriving history only because Larson’s dial leaves a few more tick marks to the right of your own level. To me, much of the drama in this very engrossing book is in watching as both Holmes and Larson get away with murder, and in following the details of exactly how they succeed so well.

One night in Tucson in April 1988, on a whim, I turned on a TV. I hadn’t owned one for the previous four years, and wouldn’t for another six, so anything I saw that night would have made a strong, if dream-like, impression.

By chance, what happened to be on PBS was the Houston Grand Opera’s production of John Adams’ minimalist opera, Nixon in China.

I remember having no idea what to make of it. I was 23 and had recently seen Koyannisquatsi, with its score by Philip Glass — my first exposure to minimalism. My deepest immersion in opera to that point had been an afternoon at a University of Arizona production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

I no longer have any recollection from that night of Nixon in China‘s music — maybe I couldn’t make enough sense of it at the time to register an imprint. What I do remember was a colossal Air Force One taxiing onto the stage. Now THAT made an impression … which I guess is what Air Force One is for, no matter where it turns up.

Mostly, I recall feeling ill-at-ease with the idea of a grand opera about Nixon’s trip to China. Was the composer a Republican? Was this propaganda? Wasn’t high art a liberal thing? And wasn’t opera supposed to be about the olden times, not something that happened in 1972? I would have had no qualms about PBS airing Wagner’s Parsifal — but Nixon in China?

Today, I’m reading Edward Berlin’s great King of Ragtime, a biography of composer Scott Joplin. It’s not an ordinary bio. Before this book, much of what was known about Joplin was legend and assumption. Berlin conducted and collected the most minutely meticulous research available and his book catalogs the many questions raised by the new information. When Berlin takes a position, it is the most cautious, cool-headed judgment possible. I find the approach intensely gripping and beautiful … maybe it’s me.

Anyway, it turns out that Joplin wrote and staged the world’s first ragtime opera, entitled A Guest of Honor. Its subject was the 1901 visit of African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House, where he dined with President Teddy Roosevelt. (Note: A reader suggests some controversy over the subject of this opera. See comments to this post.)

The visit was politically risky for the President, according to Berlin [euphemism added by me]:

Newspapers in the South condemned the invitation as an unwarranted attempt to place the black man on the same social plane as the white man; Roosevelt’s act put him in a category with Ulysses S. Grant, and he would never be forgiven. The Sedalia Sentinel printed a poem on page one entitled “[N-word]s in the White House,” which concludes with a black man marrying the President’s daughter.

Scott Joplin seems to have had kinder feelings toward the event. That a black educator would participate in that symbolic ritual of advancement, The White House dinner, seems to have meant a lot to the composer, who was then working to elevate ragtime — widely disparaged at the time as degenerate black noise — to a high art form.

In 1902, he named his latest two-step, “The Strenuous Life,” after a phrase in one of Roosevelt’s speeches. He staged the ragtime opera A Guest of Honor in 1903 — barely two years after the events it depicted.

So this was an opera about events as contemporary as Katrina’s landfall is today, in a form about as new as gypsy punk. In comparison, Nixon in China was conservative, portraying events of 15 years before in a 20-year-old music genre.

Working out these comparisons in more depth might bare a little fruit. While A Guest of Honor was probably meant to elevate a “low” form, some might say Nixon in China went the other direction, increasing the public’s (including my own) awareness of minimalism, a high art “descending” into popularity.

And so on … when Booker T. Washington visited Teddy Roosevelt, who was Nixon and who was China?

But, for anyone seeking to compare the two operas, the biggest obstacle would be our collective amnesia — the same universal, maddening, heart-sickening forgetfulness I’ve encountered since beginning my own original research into music history.

Joplin brought A Guest of Honor to less than a dozen stages across the Midwest in September 1903, but — according to the best speculation Berlin can support — the production was robbed of its receipts in Springfield, Illinois. Unable even to pay the bill for the touring company’s stay at a Springfield boarding house, Joplin was forced to leave behind a trunk as collateral. It contained some of his personal effects, including unpublished manuscripts that may have included the score of A Guest of Honor. Those items were never recovered. Although a copyright for A Guest of Honor was applied for, the copyright office never received the customary copies of the score for its files.

In a book full of careful modifiers and provisional judgments, one sentence stands out for its disheartening brevity: “A Guest of Honor is lost.”

Of course, various productions of Nixon in China are available from Amazon and iTunes in a variety of formats. Its memory is safe, despite having been composed in what I think of as our forgetful era. John Adams himself seems on track to be long remembered as one of the 20th Century’s major composers.

Though we’re more likely to learn about him on Antiques Roadshow or History Detectives than on Great Performances, the researcher who stumbles across an overlooked copy of A Guest of Honor would be remembered at least as long as Adams. Like Berlin’s King of Ragtime itself, the thought puts me in the mood to work.

It’s a measure of my laser-like focus on Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe that The Celestial Monochord has gone without any mention of oysters until this month. For you see, not only do I love raw oysters, I’ve also read two — count ’em, TWO — books about oysters since last spring.

The first was M. F. K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. Fisher seems to have been almost a food-focused Dorothy Parker or Edna St. Vincent Millay — you know, a brilliant writer, and an independent, bohemian, bisexual, martini-swilling raconteur. More or less.

Her Consider the Oyster is a beautifully-written, tiny little book — elegant and kind and wickedly funny, if sometimes a bit too silly. Open the book to any paragraph and you’ll see. Here she is early in the first chapter, discussing the early life of an oyster:

He is small, but he is free-swimming … and he swims thus freely for about two weeks, wherever the tides and his peculiar whims may lead him. He is called a spat.
   It is to be hoped, sentimentally, at least, that the spat — our spat — enjoys himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cementlike stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why. [all original punctuation, etc.]

She gives many oyster recipes, and her ability to splice them seamlessly into a great story is dazzling. Writing before 1941 with an intimate eye for detail, her stories are vivid views of all sorts of gone worlds — fancy restaurants in France, roadside shacks in Maine, a girl’s school in Michigan, if I remember correctly. It’s only 76 pages long, and even I — slowest reader on Earth — finished it in a weekend. I’m even tempted to re-read it before the months without R’s begin.

By the way, Fisher says refrigeration had already rendered oysters safe to eat even in Oskaloosa, Iowa in any month of the year. Avoiding the R-less months might help the oyster farmer, since oysters lay their eggs during the warm months, but no season renders them dangerous to eat. Besides, some say summer oysters taste better.

I do recommend the other oyster book I read last year … it’s not Mark Kurlansky’s fault that a world-class stylist got to the subject first, and it’s even less his fault that I read Fisher’s book immediately before The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.

Kurlansky writes those pop history books where some very improbable thing changed the world forever — 1968, cod, salt. Stylistically, he’s as workmanlike and kitchen-sinky as you might expect. But his oyster book did transform my view of both New York and oysters, and made me enjoy the education.

The Big Oyster begins with Europeans sailing into New York Harbor for the first time, which allows Kurlansky to show how beautiful, bountiful and sweet-smelling its waters used to be — how much New York’s very existence was ABOUT those qualities. For me, it was an opportunity to finally wrap my mind around the confounding geography of New York City, and beginning with the estuary in its natural state turned out to be key.

But The Big Oyster has organizational issues, and can feel frustratingly directionless. I frequently thought of the fish in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life — the ones who complain there isn’t much in the movie about the meaning of life. Still, there are moments when your mind spins. Do you know why Manhattan city fathers laid out two hundred streets going from side to side (the short way) but only about twelve the long way (Bronx to Battery)? Because they thought the main flow of traffic would be between the two riverfronts. New York used to know where it was situated.

Kurlansky does leave us much more savvy about oysters than Fisher does. You can read Fisher closely without really realizing that all oysters you’re ever likely to eat have been seeded, grown, and harvested by farmers — and it’s been like this for at least 150 years. There hasn’t been a natural, unmolested oyster bed essentially anywhere for more than a century. If there were, you wouldn’t want to eat oysters from it. Natural oysters tend to get huge, and eating them is like “eating a baby.”

Editor’s Note: Well, here I am! The Celestial Monochord is trying to post an entry every day during the month of February. This here is installment 21 of 28. Whoo-hoo!

(photo from The Bizargrass News Network)

Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson has been telling a story lately in interviews and during her stage show. She wanted to make an opera out of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, written by the notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon:

I wrote him a letter proposing doing an opera based on “Gravity’s Rainbow”. I got a beautiful letter from him saying he’d be delighted, but with one stipulation: that it be scored for solo banjo. Some people have a great way of saying “no way”. At some point I’d like to try again to see if he’s expanded the instrumentation.

Now, I try to use The Celestial Monochord to talk about things I like, in hopes of understanding them better and helping them grow. And I certainly don’t know what Thomas Pynchon may have been thinking — or certainly there’s no good evidence that I know better what he was thinking than Laurie Anderson does. Nor, for that matter, am I certain just how facetious Ms. Anderson may have been in recounting the story …

but … but …

IS SHE OUT OF HER MIND? It seems obvious — at least given the little information I have, which is Anderson’s own multiple descriptions of the incident — that had she accepted the challenge, we would have an opera of Gravity’s Rainbow, written for banjo. How perfect is that?

It’s well to remember that Pynchon is a considered one of the most innovative living artists, but he doesn’t hang with the literary or high-art crowd … for some reason. Perhaps he finds them too closed-minded, too predictable. Some reports have him as some kind of aerospace engineer working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I think it was.

My theory is he was not politely saying “No.” He was saying, “Yes, but only if you make an effort to broaden your imagination. You’ve been doing the same schtick since the 1970’s. Why not try something else?” The fact that Anderson interpreted Pynchon’s proposal as a solid “No” suggests (to me, anyway) that Pynchon knew exactly who he was dealing with and how she would react. I can think of at least a half-dozen brilliant, innovative, and versatile banjoists who should follow up on this signal from the mysterious Mr. Pynchon. I wonder if playwright and banjoist Sean Dixon of BanjoBanjar knows about this …

And Anderson’s a fiddler! She should know better.