June 21, 2011: What I Chose to Read at Last Night’s Naropa Alumni Reading
I brought these three pieces to last night’s reading at the Laughing Goat in Boulder, but only ended up reading the second piece below, the one from the Paris Metro. R
Italian Restaurant, NYC (for Ira Cohen)
I walk to far end of the restaurant and take a seat facing the front door, across from an elderly couple who are already sitting in the booth next to mine. He leans across the aisle and stage-whispers to me, as if he is telling me a great secret, “Get the pasta special—it’s a good value. It’s probably the best deal in the city. We come here about every two weeks, my wife and I, just for the pasta special. I don’t know if you like pasta?” “Well, we’ll see,” I smile and return to the menu.
Looking it over, it is a good value, and it was what I probably would have ordered anyway, so I order the pasta special. It comes with coffee, salad, and a dessert. When the waiter leaves, I lean over and say to the couple. “Thanks for the tip. I ordered the special.” “Ah, wonderful. What did you choose, if you don’t mind my asking?” “I got the shrimp fettucini.” “Oh, I’ve never heard of that. That sounds good. I get the spaghetti. My wife gets the salad and we share dessert. She gets a Coke, I drink the coffee, and we both eat for under twenty bucks. It’s the deal of the century.”
The coffee arrives cold. The wife is unhappy that I’m not eating the quarter head of lettuce that remains of my salad. She tells me, “You could take that salad home—it’s a whole meal in itself!” When the main course arrives, the elderly man leans across the aisle and asks, “So what kind of pasta did you get, if you don’t mind my asking?”
They’ve just come from a film and they’re trying to decide if they’ve ever seen it before. She doesn’t remember seeing it but he says he swears he remembered certain scenes, just not the details, and he often knew what would happen next.
His wife is trying to catch the waitress’s attention. She’s ready for the check and would like her Coke wrapped to go. When the waitress returns with the check and her Coke transferred to a Styrofoam cup with a lid—she takes it out of its brown bag to show her, warning her to carry it upright–takes several bills from the old man’s hands and counts it out for him, showing him the bill, telling them to wait for her until she returns with their change. After she leaves, they stand up and begin organizing their packages. “I could carry that,” he says, but then he has trouble zipping up his jacket. He holds the zipper in one hand and doesn’t have a clue about what to do next. “Maybe I can’t carry that. Can you carry part of it?” Then she remembers they haven’t gotten their change and they take off their jackets and sit down again.
The waitress leaves before he can count out the change. His wife yells after her not to forget about her Coke to go. “That’s what you’re holding, sweetie!” she calls over her shoulder, not slowing down and waving goodbye without turning around. “Oh,” the old woman says, looking at the bag in her lap and recognizing it. He asks his wife, “What did I give her, a five?”
They stand up together. “I could carry that,” he says, but has trouble zipping up his jacket. He can’t seem to remember how to make the zipper work. “Maybe I can’t carry that. Can you carry part of it?” He sees me watching him. “What did you order, young man, if you don’t mind my asking? The special? That’s what I had too! What kind of pasta? Shrimp fettucini? That sounds interesting. We always get the spaghetti. She gets the salad, and fills up on bread. We come here about every two weeks, don’t we honey? We eat like kings for less than twenty bucks. It’s the best deal in the city. So what kind of pasta did you have, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Journal Entry Paris
This morning a long Metro ride to Ecole Militaire from Reuilly-Diderot for the Rodin Museum. A few stops in, a guy with an electric guitar and an amplifier gets on and stands near the door. At first I groaned inwardly, remembering the accordion player who got on my car two days ago. I was riding from south-east Paris to the Pompideau, sitting for most of the ride across from an old Eastern European woman who was wearing a black wool winter jacket with a caul over her head. She was bent over at the waist, her forehead near her knees. She was holding a rosary and praying almost out loud. She was definitely over-dressed for such a hot and muggy day.
A man of about forty got on with an accordion and he pushed numbers into a Casio beatbox until he got a shuffling samba beat and began a polka on his shiny red tortoise-shell Vox accordion. No one was in the mood for happy accordion music at 7 in the morning, and when everyone turned their backs to him, he slammed the Casio off and walked up and down the crowd with one hand extended and the other continuing to play a polka I didn’t recognize and that didn’t seem distinctive at all—just a bunch of notes on a polka beat. When everyone (including me) ignored him, he stopped playing mid-song and went back to his machine and slammed it off. He crossed his arms over his red Vox accordion and stared us sullenly until we reached the next station.
Anyway, this guitarist had a beatbox too and began by playing “Rawhide,” which I thought was a surprising choice for the Paris Metro. Nothing fancy, but each note clearly and precisely defined, with a nice attack and more or less tremolo added to each note to give it that little bounce or depth.
I was sitting across from him on one of those fold-down seats in the landing of the car beside an elegantly dressed man with a briefcase and a young Japanese woman in a red and white flower print dress.
I didn’t want to look up. I didn’t want to get involved. But I liked what he was playing, and I wanted to see his fingerwork. Plus, who was this guy playing “Rawhide” in the Paris Metro?
He was wearing black hi-top Keds with white laces, black pegged jeans, and a reddish-brown Seattle-plaid shirt, that looked freshly laundered. He was playing a vintage black Stratocaster, I’m guessing pre-64, a thousand-dollar guitar if you can find one. He was playing with a white plastic pick, and he held the guitar close to his body, and swayed back and forth, a little hunched over, gazing at his own reflection on the silver floor.
When he became aware that I was watching his fingerwork, he palmed his pick and began to fingerpick, playing freestyle. His fingers moved from string to string, precisely attacking each note and leaving it reverberating as his fingers went on to the next string.
His fingernails were long on his picking hand, and rounded and short on his left. He didn’t slide, or hunt and peck, he drummed the strings, stretching and striking them against the fretboard the way a piano player touches the keys with deliberate delicacy or force, depending on how much vibrato or clarity they want in each note.
During one intricate passage, the turned to look over his shoulder at the stone tunnel slashing past. He had short blond hair, clean-shaven. A little weathered to be so young, but healthy and bright-eyed.
He was playing a song he was listening to in his own imagination, and it was uncoiling through his fingertips as he listened. He never pushed himself, he didn’t attempt to play outside of what his fingers could actually accomplish. Each note was precise with lots of air and space around them.
I could almost feel the force of his concentration, but his playing seemed effortless and fluid, very much in the air but also taking shape from something deep inside of him. Or perhaps he was gathering it from the air, listening to the notes he was hearing as he was forming new notes and remembering was disappearing replaced by surprise, and then with whatever comes next, replacing that with what comes next, listening and playing at the same time. And sometimes he’d hit a note that would make us both laugh and he’d turn to stare at his reflection in the window and wait for some way to re-enter the song.
Then he returned to the basic rhythm of the song and waited for the melody to come around again, resting his right hand on the soundboard, turning his index finger over and grabbing the white pick, darting out a flurry of angular off-kilter endnotes.
As they continued to reverberate, he bent over, adjusted a knob on the Casio, began playing the bright beats of “Samba Pa Ti” and I laughed out loud and he looked up and we shared a laugh, although he couldn’t possibly know what I was laughing at. Then he rested his right palm on the pick-guard, palmed the pick, and began playing the melody with just his fingertips, brushing the strings firmly. Then his right index finger hammered out a counter melody, and then with the fingers of his left hand he echoed it after a few bars with a triplet melody until he created a fugue out of a samba. And then he took a breath and returned to the melody, but extending and bending the notes and dropping in unexpected and discordant noise, launching short and then longer runs and fills around a steady drone from his right thumb. By now the businessman and the young Japanese girl had also stopped whatever they were doing and were listening as intently as I was.
Then in a gentle way, he began to ascend away from the melody entirely, soaring above it, overlaying a brace of crisp notes in the air, the descending notes guttural, reverberating like stones dropped in a deep well, the upper register bright and glistening, and the third theme played with his left hand coming together in single note that he maintained longer than anyone could possibly imagine, until he raised it and sharpened it higher and higher until he hit a pitch that was like the ice of a thousand windows shattering into gold.
A British Novelist Gets Released by His Publisher
Konaki Greek Restaurant, London, England, in Publisher’s Row,
a block across from the main entry to the British Museum
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make a joke at your expense. I was only trying to make light of the situation. It just sounded like the set-up and payoff for some classic joke: “How did the editor who fired you get into publishing?” “There was an opening.” But they’re right, it’s easier to make a thousand people laugh in an auditorium than ten in a small room. Maybe people feel less inhibited when they’re in a large group, more anonymous. Maybe in a small room they’re afraid to be the only one laughing, or maybe they’re too self-conscious. But even though I know all that, I still find myself making jokes in the most awkward circumstances. I got a joke once from Isaac Asimov about the relationship between editors and authors that almost always works. I should have gone with that one instead.
I worked for your last editor at one time, early in my career. It’s a shame he retired. Since he’s gone I write for one or two friends. That’s more than enough for me now, but I was lucky that when I was starting out there was a real literary reviewer at “The Times.” You could tell that he’d actually read the book, and he’d thought about it before he began writing, and that he considered it a public service to report on the book and not just tell people if he liked it or not. I don’t think he ever mentioned himself in a single review. He wasn’t the star, he had a job to do, and a responsibility not only to the book, but to literature itself. He chose the books he reviewed, and he’d choose them based on his sense of their importance, not on their popularity. Now books don’t even get the kind of attention that sports gets in the papers.
I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but I had my time. I feel lucky I was writing when I was. I appreciate that I had the chance of having my books thought about and considered. I wouldn’t like to be starting out now.
Recently the BBC rang me up and asked me to write something for “This Is My House.” Have you ever heard of it? Me neither. I didn’t know at the time that it was a series. I wasn’t even sure what they were asking for or why they were asking me. I thought “Why are you ringing me up? It doesn’t sound like you’ve even read my books.” They wanted some stories from the war. I have dozens of stories from the war—the collapse of the shelter at Brighton, the rations, the nightraids, the calmness between the bombings, weeks without a full night’s sleep. The uncertainty, the comradeship one felt for everyone still alive in the morning when you went out to survey the rubble, what had been destroyed, and check on friends and family. But is that who I am? Is my life more interesting than what I’ve written? Is that what I want to do, tell stories about things that happened sixty-five years ago? They weren’t interested in me as a writer, they were interested in me because of when and where I was born—things I had absolutely no control over. I said no. I didn’t want to start thinking of myself as only interesting because of what I’ve lived through. That’s something I’ve seen in writing over the last half-century—it’s less about the writing than about the writer. But when did I stop being a writer and become a character?
The first thing you need to tell someone who’s achieved a modicum of success is “it’s not going to last.” Except if you’re Shakespeare or Beethoven, and theirs didn’t outlast their lifetime either. It’s all about timing. If you lose the sense of that and think it’s about you and the book, then you’re in for a rough road. But if you can go all the way over into becoming a newspaper cartoon, there’s a kind of immortality in that too.
Well, I’m luckier than most. I had a few novels published, by prestigious publishers, and was fairly reviewed. I’ve even had one made into a film, although that was less than a satisfying experience. Someone at my publishing house had an idea and they wanted someone to write a thriller and I’d known Ian for ages and we talked about how he wrote those Bond books, and Max was enthusiastic, so I took it as a challenge and had a fair bit of success. But I owe it all to Max’s wife. She read the manuscript and told me to add all that spicy stuff. Later they made it into a film and it was hideous. But they put another story in front of me. I read the treatment and it was awful and I was writing Omnibus at the time so I passed on it and they gave it to someone else. Of course it’s the one that became a huge bestseller, then a franchise. But the writing in that book never cast a shadow. I mean, humor me. For the first book, he deserved all the attention he got. He traveled, he did original research, he really worked on that book. But since I read the original version of this second manuscript, I know who made that book. His editor just poured sugar over the whole thing. My sympathies go out to her.
And they swallowed the whole thing, didn’t they? There’s nothing new about Christ having an affair. This has been talked about for centuries, and not just by Christian mystics and Jewish scholars. If you didn’t know all this stuff it must have come as quite a revelation. I was totally astonished by its success. But mostly it just proves that it’s a matter of luck if a book becomes a bestseller or not—it’s not a matter of blood. It’s all totally unpredictable, but if there’s nothing sensational about it, it just goes under the radar. It’s not about the writing or what it gives you to think about, it’s about what happens, it’s about the story. Well, that’s my excuse, at any rate.
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