First, get a fan. I like this Lasko fan. It pivots. It comes with outlets built in and it has one bitchingly thick power cord. This fan don’t play. You can angle the breeze so that it blows directly up your keister, should you wish. Or you can do what I do and position it in front of you, so that the hair I still have blows like I’m singing in an 80s music video. Don’t fool around with a box fan. Please use my years of box fan failure as your guide. Those things are top heavy, and they take up too much room. Yes, these Lasko fans are pricey, but that’s a realization that comes with middle age. Sometimes the nicer things cost more money. I don’t care if it’s conspicuous consumption. I’m about to have a heat stroke out here.
Second, forgo alcohol. Forgo anything that’s not straight water. Stop drinking Gatorade! You’re not a child. You don’t need Death Water, or whatever the rebranded water is called. Are electrolytes even real? Just get a bunch of regular water. You don’t need a cocktail. You don’t need that IPA. You’re not celebrating. You’re working. Is the event staff drinking? No. Are they doing illicit drugs in the van? Well, maybe. But that’s their choice. You’re a responsible adult, and you’re not going to do any of that foolishness while you’re working outside in the elements.
Relatedly, don’t eat too much. Eat a third of what you want to eat. Don’t go hungry during the gig, because then you will eat too much when they save you a plate of barbecue. Again, let my mistakes guide you. Instead, a banana is your friend. It’s too hot for much more. You can eat a decent meal later at home under calmer conditions. If the idea of finishing that plate and then running around the block seems like a bad idea, then step away from the plate. Because when you’re gigging outside, you’re running on the inside, if that makes sense.
Fourth, compromise is a part of adult life. Remember you can’t spell travel without disappointment. And you can’t gig outside without being uncomfortable. It’s like camping. I mean, I don’t camp so this analogy might not track. I’ve got friends who go camping with the inflated air mattress and fan systems and a battery pack for their CPAP machine. I don’t get it. I don’t choose hardship. But sometimes gigs happen outside. People love to put the band outside. I think they’re afraid of the sound. People want live music. It’s like a vestigial desire to see actual fire. It feels primordial. But then, as soon as the band sets up, you can see the mother of the bride’s eyes go wide at the size of the PA. And I get it. We’ve all been at events where the volume was just excruciating. But the answer is to tell the band to turn down and then not hire that band next time, rather than hire live music and then put them out back, behind where the staff parks the golf carts. The solution isn’t just to hire DJs. God knows they can be too loud, and no one needs that much bass.
Five: remember that everything sounds different outside. Do your drums sound deep and pleasing, thickly warm and exuberant to the touch inside your house? Well, they’re going to sound like wet grocery bags outside. An unamplified acoustic guitar just disappears outside. Amplified it sounds like chopsticks chewing on pine straw. The electric guitar player is going to turn up even more. The only thing that still sounds semi-okay is an electric bass. Everything else sounds like hell. It’s okay. You’re not a DJ! You’re a bunch of human beings creating music on the spot. You’re not robots. You shouldn’t sound like them, especially when perched in a gazebo that’s held together by spiders.
Remember the fundamental riddle of live music performance: what you hear is never what the audience hears. We try to affect but ultimately don’t control what happens in the outer dark.
Hats are your friend. As is sunscreen. Don’t be a child. Put on sunblock. Your mother was right about all that stuff. You’re not less of a man by copping to all this quality knowledge. It’s a cliché for a reason. Screw getting a good tan. What you want to avoid is a difficult conversation with your dermatologist, the one that ends with you getting cancer boogers cut off your face. Do you really have time for that? Getting tan is for teenagers and professional models. Everyone else should know better. An adult with a tan line is an adult who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.
An extra shirt is your friend. If, again like me, you’re going to sweat like a halfback while unloading the trailer, and you are then supposed to play for a wedding, sometimes it’s prudent to bring a change of clothes. In Mississippi, it’s too hot to wear pants nine months out of the year, and that’s if you’re just sitting there. Throw in some speaker cabinets and it gets grim. But also, you’re not in the Pips. Let’s not be too precious. What’s the gig? Are you being paid enough to bring a change of clothes? If not, just wipe your face and truck on.
Screens disappear in the sunlight. You’re not at work in your cubicle. You’re not at home on the couch. I know that contemporary middle class society has rather rapidly disappeared almost entirely into a touch screen interface. Look, I can control my monitor levels with my iPad! While also reading my Tweets! Sure, that’s great, but first, as soon as you get that backlit screen anywhere near direct sunlight it becomes essentially invisible. (This goes for those little clip-on tuners, too.) Second, you know how annoying all that technology is to use in the comfort of your own home? That place is perfectly climate controlled with very little chaos energy, the exact opposite of an outdoor gigging situation. Remember all the precious crap that you haul to the gig is going to get rained on. Not if, but when.
If there’s a 10 percent chance you will be cold, bring a jacket and a hat and don’t leave them in the car. Put them right next to you, perhaps underneath the floor tom so they can be donned at a moment’s notice. Again, I know whereof I speak. Last April we played outside, and everyone in the crowd was fine. They were under those propane heat contraptions, vibing. Mingling generates warmth. Meanwhile I was behind the drumset, arms folded in a pretzel knot of rage between each song. It was awful. And I had a jacket. I just left it in the car like a moron.
And remember cold and heat are relative outside. I maintain that ideal conditions to gig outside are somewhere between 74 and 77 degrees. Everything else is just a version of intolerable and necessitates the aforementioned fans and water and layers. If it hits 77, you have to start thinking about the dew point. If it gets below 74, any kind of wind at all can be brutal.
Also, if there is a piece of gear that the wind knocks over, that means you don’t need that cymbal, or whatever it is. That’s the hand of God saying you brought too much crap. Listen to Him/Her.
If the conditions are extreme, treat it like an out of town gig: ask for double. Sometimes you have to vote with your wet frozen feet.
Discomfort is a part of life. There’s no real comfort in the world. Sorry to be a downer. There are momentary pockets, but something will interrupt the comfort before long. The dog will vomit on the rug. The roof will begin to leak. Something. Why should gigging outside be any different? Why should it be less troublesome than sitting at home watching yet another series on Netflix? Once you embrace the inherent discomfort and disappointment of life, then everything becomes a little more tolerable. Is this depressing? It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be comforting. I just think that everyone would be happier if we lowered our expectations about, well, pretty much everything. I don’t want everything to be crappy all the time, but I don’t want to cruise through life with the illusion that everything is going to be like a commercial with beers and footballs and hot pockets being thrown at my face all the time. Sometimes life is just waiting in line. Sometimes life is trading yet another email with the insurance agent. And rather than these disappointments and logistical aggravations being assaults against my existence, I am instead trying to recognize the ineluctably harsh grain of life. Every day is a winding road, all that.
So: Playing music outside is like eating outside, inherently ridiculous. And there’s a reason bagpipes sound best outside. They’re designed to frighten the enemy.
Category Archives: essays
Place of Safety
I try to avoid the discourse. Writing online has for the most part turned into a game of takes, and the stakes of the takes are always rising. Who can write the fastest on the scandal floating through the air that day? Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were already living through a takes pandemic. They go viral, after all.
But here I am anyway, conscripted briefly into the culture war. At least I’m not writing about that kidney-donation-short-story-litigation disaster.
I was talking with a friend about what books could still be assigned to students and whether certain books, though historically significant, were now so far out of intellectual fashion that they should be replaced by better, different, more appropriate books. We were talking high school, that is, students who are still deemed children. But then, concurrently, out popped articles about Bright Sheng, the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, who was teaching a music composition course on opera in which he showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in which Olivier portrays the hero in blackface. His students were “shocked” and quickly expressed their dismay to the powers that be. As a result, Sheng has stopped teaching the class and has written two public apologies.
I don’t want to argue for or against Sheng’s showing of the film in his class. I don’t know anything about music composition, opera, various versions of or depictions of Othello, or the history and implications of blackface, aside from the obvious contemporary point that it’s connected to race relations in America and is thus absolutely radioactive in current polite society. What was Sheng’s pedagogical reason for showing the film? Should he have used a different depiction to better prove his point? Should he have provided a more thorough scholarly context for it? Should he have simply “known better”? I don’t know. I do think that a professor’s selection of course materials is a specific site of pedagogical dominion and an implicit articulation of importance, and that the course itself becomes an arena to debate the very inclusion of its own material. To use Shakespeare as a convenient example, any Shakespeare course, aside from its more top-level focus, is on a sedimentary level an argument that Shakespeare is worth studying and these works in particular are worth studying. Do you agree? Well, by the end of the course, if you’ve done the reading and participated in the class, you should have a fully developed opinion. But aside from that kind of 16-week long digestion, I don’t know if Sheng is right, wrong, careless, careful, or not. Perhaps I’m being too English major-y. I tend to take the teacher’s side in these matters under the assumption that the teacher chose the material on purpose, and it’s their class. I don’t question the tools my plumber uses when he’s working on the pipes at my house, because I don’t know anything about plumbing, and I want to be able to flush my toilet again, and as a result, I operate from a premise of respect toward the plumber.
What I am more interested in is a quotation from one of the students:
“I was stunned,” [freshman Olivia] Cook said. “In such a school that preaches diversity and making sure that they understand the history of POC (people of color) in America, I was shocked that (Sheng) would show something like this in something that’s supposed to be a safe space.”
Here I would like to stand on firmer argumentative ground: the college classroom is not a safe space, nor should it be. I mean, it should be a safe space in the way that all societal spaces should be safe; you should be safe from assault, battery, etc. But that is not the sense in which the student uses the term. The college classroom should not be a safe space for the students’ feelings.
An important premise: the college students are purportedly adults and present of their own volition. But after that caveat, did seeing this movie hurt the students’ feelings? Impinge on their sense of propriety? Jump the tracks of a contemporary political taboo? Offend their decency? It doesn’t matter, because their feelings are not to be spared in the college classroom.* Why are they attending college? To learn an academic discipline? To obtain the credentials to get a job and secure a middle-class adulthood? To be immersed in the best of what has been thought and said? Whatever their reason, anytime that students learn about a discipline, they will be necessarily exposed to the history of that discipline, and by virtue of it hailing from the foreign country of the past, it will not comport with their current view of the discipline or society as a whole. Of course the students were shocked. They should be shocked. The film was released 56 years ago — three of their lifetimes. It’s so far out of current performance fashion that it now seems odious to the wide majority of society, and yet covering your eyes and insisting that the professor not show that movie does not make it go away. The bogeyman of the past is still out there killing innocents. Ignoring past cultural artifacts that are now deemed offensive doesn’t make them go away and doesn’t obviate why they were deemed important in the first place. Ignoring Olivier in blackface might make you feel more comfortable in the present moment but it does nothing to address current racism or to understand past racism. All it does is prolong one’s own ignorance of what actually happened. “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear” is no way to learn. It’s difficult to learn anything without having your feelings hurt, because learning is a form of conflict. And you only win that game if you do the reading.
When I lived in Alabama and tornados were a routine part of existence, the weatherman would come on the screen and say, “It’s time to go to your place of safety.” This was a handy new euphemism for basement. It sounds poetic and cozy but it also makes sense. And for tornados, it’s accurate. When the storms are descending on your street, you can better protect yourself by getting to that un-windowed hallway. But intellectually, there is no place of safety from the ravages of the past. Of all the lessons an 18-year-old composition student might learn, this one could be the most valuable.
*Their feelings are important, but they are less important within the context of the classroom.
Time Hex
Sometimes I think about not wearing a watch. Sometimes in fact I don’t wear a watch. But mostly I wear one. I feel odd without it, naked, though I’m obviously not naked. I thought about communicating this to anyone I met in a given week, and thinking of no one who actually wanted to hear me moon about this topic, I have decided to tell you, dear reader.
I am currently wearing a Timex Weekender 38mm Fabric Strap. Before this it was a Casio Men’s Digital Illuminator Sport Watch in navy blue, a Target find and my preferred watch. But the rectangular bitlet strap-holder broke. I keep wearing these vestigial devices though I, like everyone else on the planet, also carry a little supercomputer in my pocket, a remote control for life, a psychological fidget spinner. I also stare at a clock located on my regular computer at work. And there is a clock in my car. And there are multiple clocks around my house, not synchronized but close enough. I’m never without the ability to check my time. Why should I keep wearing a watch?
For some men, it’s a piece of jewelry, covert or not. I’m fascinated by high-end watch culture in the same way I’m fascinated by snake handlers or scientologists; there is a belief system there that I recognize but don’t follow. Spending several thousand dollars for a watch that you have to hand wind seems bizarre and potentially reckless, even though I adore certain outmoded forms of technology whose relevance seems purely sentimental (hello, typewriter collection). I mean, the watches look good, if a little big. There’s also strange terminology which I admit I don’t understand. Bezel? It’s like when photographers talk about bokeh. What? I realize these are actual terms, but they give off the whiff of nonce words, secret passcodes kids invent for the game of the day. Or simply boys being boys.
I do not wear a smartwatch and I take an absurd amount of pride in this. Their presence on my contemporaries is steadily increasing. It’s an object that began as an avant-garde class marker and that quickly devolved through ubiquity to a marker of civilization, a declaration not of money or advanced taste but of reasonableness. It’s just what people wear. It’s the fleece jacket of wrist-wear. But I can barely function as it is with my little supercomputer singing sweetly in my pocket. I don’t need to know anything that a smartwatch could tell me. I realize it could keep track of my heart rate and notify me that I’m not moving around enough, to which, duh. Part of me wants to keep the watch, qua device, and do away with the smartphone. Checking work email away from work was a Rubicon I didn’t know I was crossing lo those so many years ago. And now there is always a social trap one could check; they fill so quickly! And now texting people is so woven into my daily existence that the thought of not having a good texting device seems unthinkable. Device-less, I would surely be less addled, but I would be lonely. Or lonelier. Or even lonelier.
So I wear a watch but with the effortful thriftiness of wearing a cheap watch. It is convenient to check the time so relatively inconspicuously. You can fish the phone out of your pocket to check the time during a conversation, but it signals you’re bored and want to look at your phone rather than continue the conversation, which may be true, but still. Whereas looking at your wristwatch, while insulting, is somehow less insulting to your fellow conversationalist, speaking at least in current terms of the evolution of our personal technologies.
Part of this affection for cheapness is that I’m hard on watches. Briefly in my twenties I wore a Karim Rashid–designed watch from Alessi. It was a single band of chocolate brown polyurethane that housed a raised, square-ish time piece that contained hands but no numerals. It was like a stylish miniature piece of furniture on my wrist, a small gesture toward the Design Within Reach standards that were still yet out of my reach. It was once glancingly admired by a dentist and self-professed watch guy. But I slowly destroyed it by clipping the face against doors, drawers, cars. I am clumsy, unaware of my bodily proportions; I regularly pinball through jambs. Even my current low-profile Timex gets whacked weekly. And then there is the wrist sweat, the slow corrosion of being exposed to my body’s excreta. After a week in the Mississippi heat my watch smells like Satan’s jockstrap. Dear Hodinkee, I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.
Perhaps my ambivalence has to do less with my crippled sense of fashion or my showy sense of thriftiness and more to do with my sweaty grasp on time itself. By which I mean the concept. I know enough about time management to know that I am terrible at it — as if time were easily organizable and not in fact fluid, always expanding or contracting with no attention to one’s dominion. Time changes with the activity. You try to save time, you try to capture it, blowing air into a balloon, and you come back an hour later, and the balloon is geriatric on the floor, its face wrinkled. That time you saved was no good floating around unused. It’s worse than an opened champagne bottle. Time flies, yet feels interminable. Is there anything slower than a bad play? But go on Twitter and an hour vaporizes. The brownies are burnt. I have some place I need to be. Is it over already? I am constantly 5-7 minutes late to everything and yet I hate waiting around for stuff to start. I’m always cramming more tasks into those small envelopes of time prior to departure, time I realize too late I should have used for driving. It’s called a deadline because it functions like miniature death. Remember there were goals you wanted to accomplish before you died? Way back when you did not think you were actually ever going to die, but now that you’re old enough to have a fleeting notion on your own mortality, you’re too tired to remember what they were, much less do them. There’s no time for that. You’re worn out. It’s time to go. Lunch hour was supposed to be a half hour ago. Perhaps I don’t want to wear a watch because I don’t want the constant reminder of how time whips me.
I realize this is all totally meaningless, and yet these are the kind of branching thoughts I chew throughout my day. Plus there is the desire to simplify. There is so much detritus that can’t be avoided (papers home from school) or won’t be shunned (Twitter), so much physical and mental lint, that any personal kind of trimming of the sails makes one feel, makes me feel, slightly more intentional about my progress through what is admittedly a fairly unintentional landscape. Maybe Tuesday would feel better without a watch. Would it even still feel like Tuesday?
Clothes Mask the Man
Another day and I’ve got to decide what to wear. It’s the first of many mini crises of my own making, obviously not an actual crisis but enough of a pain that it takes decisional energy. It’s not just an outfit. It’s a representation of myself to the world. It’s enough of a speed bump in my morning that it invites self-analysis. You’re going to wear that? Again?
As a child I wore a uniform. First through fourth grade, I wore a white polo shirt and navy pants. Then, for fifth and sixth grade, I wore a strict variety of pastel polos (pink, blue, lime) with khakis. Finally in seventh I was able to wear normal clothes, and I remember the terror of having to tight-roll my jeans in the then-correct manner. Back then the jeans to have were the Girbaud brand, which had an alluring label right on the zipper. You could tell who was wearing the right jeans by glancing at their crotch, an adolescent detail which seems a little too symbolically on the nose.
Now of course I’m purportedly an adult and free to wear what I want. Whenever there is a social function (back when there were social functions) and I ask my wife what I should wear, while staring into the void of my closet, she gives me the Look. It’s a look of primordial exhaustion. It’s admittedly a dumb question because I always wear the same thing, a personality trait that’s conveniently sanctioned by being a male. I can wear the same outfit over and over and no one notices, comments, or cares, whereas being a female, at least according to my admittedly inexpert anecdotal research, entails a much more fraught relationship to clothing and context. Except for perhaps weddings and funerals, I can basically wear this same ensemble every day for the rest of my life.
That ensemble being khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. I have essentially been wearing the same outfit for twenty years. Sometimes the shirt is blue-ish. There is often a plaid or check pattern, but it reads as blue. And okay, there are a couple of non-blue shirts in the closet. I have an orange plaid and a red flannel, but these minor deviations underline the relentless sameness: button down and pants. It’s the slightly more adult version of my school uniform.
And yet, every morning, I think good lord, what am I going to wear today, even though the spectrum of choice is so narrow as to be meaningless. All of it matches, as if anyone cares. All of it is the same level of moderately decently presentable. It’s as if I have subconsciously chosen a uniform in order to alleviate the anxiety of dressing but every morning I somehow forget.
I will be the first to admit that the reason I am attracted to uniforms is because they lessen cognitive load. Here I’ll name check that President Obama anecdote about how he only wore grey or navy blue suits in order to lessen his then-momentous decision making itinerary. I don’t have nearly that amount of decision making to do in a day. Obviously. And I am aware that absolutely no one on the planet cares what I wear to type on my Dell except for myself. And so this is a non-decision decision. And yet. Whenever there is an article about a writer or celebrity or just some public person who wears a uniform, I am eager to read it and access their gestalt. I am a sucker for any kind of simplifying system. The writer Molly Young for a while only wore white. She said it made her look like a large glass of milk and that getting dressed each day was like assembling an easy piece of Ikea furniture. I read this nodding sagely while also thinking: that last bookshelf took me four days. Tom Wolfe rather famously wore all white, but I think even in these polarized times we can still agree that Tom Wolfe was a pretentious clown. The writer Gay Talese doesn’t wear a uniform per se but always wears tailored suits. But his father was a tailor and Talese was born in 1932. Of course he wears bespoke suits. It would almost be a sacrilege not to. The suit as uniform is tempting, an even more formal, even more adult, in some ways easier uniform than what I have helplessly devised. But suits are too out of fashion as far as regular everyday wear. I’m not a banker and even the lawyers now wear those weird leather shoes with the glued-on white sneaker soles. One wants to wear a uniform but one doesn’t want to wear a costume. The distinction seems to be a set of clothes that doesn’t adversely trigger my self-awareness reflexes.
Shouldn’t I be wearing something different? Shouldn’t I try harder? What are other people wearing? Maybe I should just dress as if I were George Clooney. But this is ridiculous. George Clooney is beautiful and I am not. He can wear anything. Insert the conventionally beautiful person of your choosing. My point is that people like Clooney can get away with wearing ridiculous stuff. It’s like when Brad Pitt grows a gnarly beard. Instead I should investigate what the sharply dressed but average-looking people are up to. But in this sense, too, we are a polarized nation. We have the beautiful people and then we have the average masses, unimpeachably wearing leggings and jeans and some sort of shirt thing because it’s comfortable and easy, and what are you, some kind of big shot? Just put on your jeans and grab that pizza. There is another population, the intentionally well-dressed, the forum-goers, the guys who know what “worsted” means, the fellows who have particular thoughts about the differences between the 511 Last and the 65 Last. These guys go from being well-meaning and detail-oriented to stricter than a military cotillion in about three paragraphs. Fashion, which might be the most blatantly arbitrary of signaling environments, quickly becomes codified. And it turns into dudes talking evangelically about gear, which is just Dad Shopping.
(Sometimes I think that the majority of our current problems in the world are caused by the existence of internet forums. The Gamestop bubble and the Capitol riot could be thought of as examples of forum-logic bursting into the real world. Or the “real world,” if you prefer.)
It’s not that I don’t want to be noticed, thought well of, admired for my good taste and sophistication. It’s not that I don’t want to be appreciated. It’s not that I am un-vain. I am as self-absorbedly preening as an adolescent moonwalking with a selfie stick at Disney. But I am also painfully self-conscious. I remember the first time I heard a recording of my speaking voice. I’ve never fully recovered. I admire people who can dress well, trying hard without seeming to try hard. I admire them the same way I admire people who can juggle or do higher level math. What I want really is the most absurd control freak fantasy. I want to be noticed but on my own terms.
I won’t ever wear a Rolex watch, not because I don’t like wildly fancy things or think one shouldn’t spend money on such, but because wearing such a noticeable device would give me fits. It would be like wearing a bat signal of personal wealth, taste, and sophistication. What I want, I’ve decided, is the equivalent of the Honda Civic of everything, not too hot, not too cold. Think of it as normcore as a way of life. When normcore became a brief fad, I believe it meant young, fashionable people wearing white sweatpants and Reeboks ironically. But immediately I felt it as a system after my own dadland heart. I don’t want selvedge denim, shell cordovan double monk straps, a Pappy Van Winkle neat, a Porsche 930, a Klon Centaur. I want the Honda Civic of tennis rackets, running shoes, beers, refrigerators, sweaters. There are too many choices and the differences between them are small enough to be essentially neurotic. I just want the mild-mannered, generally reliable, historically trustworthy choice that I can choose and then run until the wheels fall off, not out of some larger sense of thrift but because using said object until the wheels fall off forestalls yet another painful decision matrix of existential despair. Sing me those 501 Blues, deliver me the Dell Inspiron, the Bass Weejun, the Gibson Epiphone. Mr. Coffee makes it fine enough for me.
But perhaps my uniform is more like military fatigues or camouflage than I’ve realized. A uniform that’s meant to blend me into my current background. I am not in the jungles of Vietnam or in the Kuwaiti desert. Obviously. I remember when soldiers started wearing the seemingly pixelated tan camouflage. The current background I’m blending into must be generic male with job. It’s a corporate jungle of parking decks and overbuilt planters, VPNs and magnetic identity cards. Read the runes in the whorled cubicle wall. I have been conscripted but in ways I can’t fully perceive. The uniform both is and isn’t a representation of my true self. Today it’s cold and I am wearing a sweater over my blue shirt. There is a man riding a horse swinging a polo mallet embroidered over my left breast. The fact that this grey sweater has this icon is both meaningful and not. I myself have never cared much for horses.
Bass guitars & Barry Hannah
Update #1
It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s time for a new essay. Consequently, I’ve got a new essay out (or is it “up”?) at The Collapsar. It’s called “The Bass Guitar as a Mode of Being,” and it’s about that wonderful activity of playing the bass guitar. You might think there’s not much to say about playing the bass, but you would be wrong.
After the essay went up, a friend notified me of this old Kids in the Hall bit, which I hadn’t seen before (which is probably for the best; their jokes are better than mine).
And then, last week New Yorker writer Matthew Trammell had a piece about the musician Thundercat, and Trammell has some interesting things to say about the bass as well.
And finally, finally, though I am not in the market to acquire a new bass (sadly), if I were, and if I were dishing out bass-buying advice, I would first watch this video and then I would buy one of those Sire basses.
Update #2
I’ve also got a review in the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation. It covers Michael Bible’s novel Sophia, which I enjoyed, and which I sorted into the long line of literature that trails Barry Hannah. As a premise for the review, I argue that there is a Hannah tradition now. Hannah seems like one of those writers whose large, almost overbearing influence isn’t acknowledged in current literary criticism, while being constantly acknowledged among writers. Though perhaps there’s tons of discussion of this and I’m just not reading in the right places.
There wasn’t room in the review to mention Padgett Powell, but he is the preeminent Hannah writing today, perhaps even eclipsing Hannah himself. His sentences are beautifully ugly and create their own vernacular; he manages to write eloquently without slipping into a fussy, overly self-aware mode of high writing. I don’t know how he does it. It sounds like someone speaking but not in any way anyone has spoken before.
Another stray thought: the original Hannah was probably Beckett.
P.S. Adam Dorn is awesome.
Mirrors, carried down roads
I’m happy to report that I have a new essay up at Open Letters Monthly. It’s called “My Disappearance” and it’s about teaching creative writing, David Foster Wallace, the idea of mentors, being turned into a fictional character, and John Barth. And so much more!
Well, not really: that’s actually what it’s about, but you know, spooled out into many more words and riveting anecdotes. Anyway, please go check it out. I can’t think of any pithy, meta angle to take on this piece; it’s already fairly meta as it is.
Okay, I lied: here are two meta-bits. In the essay, there’s some stuff about funhouse mirrors, à la Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and this has gotten me thinking about weird mirror effects. I’ve only taken a few selfies thus far in my life, which probably tells you more about my age and disposition than I care to admit, but one of them was in an elevator, alone, just as the doors closed. It was one of those elevators whose door interior was all reflective, and I had two competing reflections of myself sliding toward each other on each half, except that when they met and sealed me in, my head disappeared. The rest of my wide body reflected, but my noggin was erased. And that’s the photo I got. I’m not sure where that photo is at the moment, or I would post it. It’s lost somewhere in the ever-expanding junk drawer of digital documentation. Someone should become the Marie Kondo of data storage.
Second, Graceland. Everyone should visit Graceland, not just because Elvis lived there but because the combination of irony and sentiment and kitsch whirs together into something that ends up feeling like pathos. But one of the many great moments in Graceland, when you take the tour, is when you walk down the stairs into Elvis’s basement. The walls and the ceiling of the stairwell are completely covered in mirrors, and the panoramic reflection of yourself and the rest of the tourists is overwhelming. If there is a heaven, Elvis is there, giggling.
Coincidental Religion
I originally wrote this over on Medium a while back, but for reasons too boring and idiosyncratic to go into, I wanted to post it here as well.
Last spring I finished Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel that imagines the unfolding of the JFK assassination. I read it in disjointed chunks, covering the first half over a couple of months, the second half in one huge gulp. Consequently, the emotion it contains was held somewhat at arm’s length, as if I were growing myopic while reading.
But then, the following Thursday, I came home and followed the police chase of the Tsarnaev brothers in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I followed the mayhem — this incident seems actually to earn the word — via Twitter: journalists on the ground, galloping after Cambridge sirens like hounds; police scanner DJs, EQing the static; and the real-time TV critics, embroidering (and eviscerating) the ongoing cable news coverage.
I’ve often thought that Twitter is the ultimate Modernist novel: an ungraspable fragmented mound of human utterance, revealing the consciousness of a culture in the crevices between tweets. And here, during this unfolding terrorist incident, was one of Twitter’s “best” moments, at least in terms of generating (spontaneously, collectively) a real-time Modernist thriller. The event was large enough on a national news-crisis level to magnetize and collate the million shards that is Twitter.
All of this unfolding meta-reality added a ghostly echo to finishing Libra. One of the key formal distinctions of the novel is the way that it unfolds in two simultaneous time frames: the slow accrual of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the much-faster unfolding of the plot to assassinate the president, orchestrated by former CIA operatives, disgruntled after the blundered Bay of Pigs. It’s a weird narrative tango for the first hundred pages or so, but you eventually adjust to the rhythm and by the end of the novel, you see what DeLillo is up to: how Oswald is both the agent of his own destiny and simultaneously a cog within a vast plot machinery, how the JFK assassination is an uncanny collaboration between circumstance and the will of various individuals.
And that is what the Boston Marathon and its thrilling boat-in-the-backyard finish felt like — a story of personal grievance that fits within the larger Narrative that None of Us Control.
It’s a cliche at this point to say that DeLillo has predicted what life feels like now. I haven’t read enough of him to argue about this sufficiently. However, I can say that DeLillo is a master of the List: the agglutination of seemingly disconnected, often repetitive detail. Here’s an example from the consciousness of Win Everett, a former CIA analyst forced into pseudo-retirement after the Bay of Pigs and one of the principal architects of the assassination. Here he’s imagining creating someone like Oswald:
An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of a deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.
What’s fascinating, on a simply novelistic construction level, is how dense the novel feels, how fortified it is with matter, both “real” and invented. One reads the novel with a growing admiration not just for DeLillo’s vision in tackling the material but simply his relentless diligence with the detail.
There’s also a novelist figure within the novel itself — Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who has been tasked (again here the weird verbed word seems earned) with writing a history of the assassination. He sits in his home office, under daily assault of data sent by the Curator:
Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can discard as irrelevant or out-of-date. It all matters on one level or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.
I bought Libra last January during a trip to Boston. It was one of those rare brief spans of time where I was unencumbered by work or children or the little horizonal clouds of impending obligation, just a free afternoon in a strange city covered in snow, walking until my feet got sore, ducking into shops for warmth.
When the bombings occurred, their location made immediate sense. My winter walking had unknowingly encircled the blast site. One floats into coincidence, both historical and trivial, like a kid swimming in a river, as unseen pockets of coldness envelop your legs briefly and then drift away.
There were too many ironies and coincidences. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million. Yes yes yes yes.
Relevant tweets picked up speed when Boston police released the suspects’ photos after 5 p.m. ET on April 18. A time zone and several states away, I began following the tweets intently via my phone, on the way home from work, while letting the dog out to pee, while prepping my children for bed. After dinner, I checked back in, and there had been a mysterious shooting of an MIT police officer. I followed the tweets for the next few hours, giving up shortly after midnight and the climactic Watertown shootout.
Various journalists get re-tweeted from the scene and are subsequently followed, like Seth Mnookin. What gets reported is ad hoc, invaluable, flawed, riveting. You can feel the exponential unknowability of the moment, the JFK-ification of historical record.
Was it three shots or four? Was there one shooter or two? Did Oswald act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy? The answer to each is both. And (so it seems) it will always be both, the gears grinding against one another, the friction of data generating narrative heat. A definitive event occurred, but we will never be able to define it, and the more information we accumulate about it, the more unknowable it becomes. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is this way.
He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.
When people discuss — I admit few people discuss this — the future of the novel and what comes next after post-modernism (itself a highly dubious term), I think: there will be no next step; the authorship and reading of such a novel has collapsed into the same individual. We are all Nicholas Branch now, all connected to some Curator who is constantly sending us more data to process, and we are all fashioning our own disparate and repetitive novel from the data of the day. Sometimes these factoids magnetize around an event, and sometimes it’s just the ongoing flow — endless and contradictory, collected and composed by us, individually and collectively, simultaneously, every day. Each day we renew the personal conspiracy theory that is our own Twitter stream.
Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight.
Crack that whip
I’ve got a new essay out in the world. “Portrait of Bullwhip” was published yesterday over at BULL Men’s Fiction. Yes, I realize that the essay is actually not fiction, but there is more to BULL than meets the eye.
Anyway, the essay is about Indiana Jones, and bullwhips, and trying to be manly. Well, sort of.
In addition, BULL has conducted one of their one-question interviews with me, which you can read here.
My Life as a Mannequin
Dear friendly people of the Internet,
Are we still capitalizing “Internet”? I refuse to hyphenate “email” and feel increasingly gooby capitalizing “Web.” Surely all linguistic acceptance leads toward lowercase.
Anyway, I have a new essay out in the world. It’s called “My Life as a Mannequin” and it’s about Philip Roth, getting lost, Washington, D.C., good bookstores, and more Philip Roth. It’s in the latest issue of Open Letters Monthly.
I originally read part of this essay at the Roth@80 Conference in Newark, NJ, this past spring, an event that was put on by the Philip Roth Society in honor of Roth’s 80th birthday. You can read more about the extravaganza in this New York Times’ article.
Do I feel smug linking to a New York Times’ article? Yes, I do.
Anyway, this essay wouldn’t have made it out of the gate if it weren’t for Roth scholar extraordinare and friend and all around badass David Gooblar. If you want to know more about Roth, you should read his book, The Major Phases of Philip Roth.
p.s. For the extra diligent, here is David Remnick’s recap in the New Yorker of the same Roth event.
p.p.s. The essay in Open Letters features perhaps my second favorite Roth photo of all time. My first favorite is the Hot Dog Photo, which I can’t find in my preliminary internet searching (little “i”), but which was definitely included in the recent photo exhibit in the Newark Public Library.
All the Rage
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
Geoff Dyer
Picador, 2009
Dyer and his brand of blurrily personal nonfiction is much in the ether lately, or at least the certain subsection of slightly literary inclined internet ether I breath, for better and worse. But more than the chatter overhead, Dyer has been urged on me by a well-read, much-respected friend, and I have finally buckled against my own inability to take reading suggestions and have read Out of Sheer Rage, his book charting his failure to write a sober, academic study of Lawrence.
I thought the book was almost an undiluted joy. Like much of Nicholson Baker’s writing, the book sounds unendurable when subjected to brief description: it’s a book which chronicles the author’s inability to sit still and write about D.H. Lawrence, a writer he both admires and who has penetrated his life to a cellular level. But also like Baker’s U & I, the book manages both to avoid its way into its subject, to be both about the author’s own interests, obsessions, tics, neuroses, while also being about Lawrence, and teaching me–a Lawrence neophyte–a great deal and making me want to read Lawrence desperately.
It also makes me want to read more Dyer. I’m not sure if Dyer’s brand of nonfiction–novelistically pliable and complex and yet learned without being fusty, essayistic without mooning into abstraction, curling into scholarship, or shedding its style into reportage–is indeed the Next Wave, but he is one of those author’s who, as I think Martin Amis said somewhere, you discover with muffled enthusiasm, realizing as you read that you’re now going to have go read everything the man has written.
But I do have a quibble. And for better and worse, quibbles are easier to write about than straight praise: I wished the book had a bit more novelistic furniture, especially toward the end. When discussing Milan Kundera in the middle of the book (pgs. 118-122 in my paperback, where he mounts his quiet assault on the novel), Dyer says, “After reading Immortality what I wanted from Kundera was a novel composed entirely of essays, stripped of the last rind of novelization.” And while I find this idea fascinating and while what I liked about this book of Dyer’s was its associative leaping from idea to idea, I found myself still wanting a little more rind. There are personal, scenic-like details that crop up repeatedly–Dyer’s girlfriend Laura is a wonderful foil, for instance–but these ingredients raise certain expectations that go unfulfilled. For example, Dyer buys a flat in Oxford, England–Dullford, he calls it. And it occurs at a point in the book where this seems like the most reckless action he could take, and yet he doesn’t really go into the why or the how of the purchase. He doesn’t pay it the same kind of narrative attention I was expecting. He thinks about so much in this book, but he doesn’t really allow himself the room to think about this. And it seems less like an interesting narrative maneuver than it does an avoidance of his responsibility as a narrator. In a novel, we would just call this an example of an unreliable narrator, but in a work of nonfiction, does this not just become an author’s mistake?
And while it’s his book, his life, his aesthetic, and while I realize he wants to rid himself of these kind of well-made novelistic restrictions, and while I’m not sure if this fault is either his or mine, I still wanted to hear more about that stupid flat; I wanted to see him besotted by all that paperwork, signing his life away. This is a problem with personal nonfiction of this sort, in that it’s personal only up to a point. It is open but shields the true, fully honest self off from the reader. So, paradoxically, a novel feasibly becomes a more honest way to communicate with a reader because an author isn’t always deploying these invisible firewalls between himself and the reader while maintaining a facade of jocular openness.
Does this reaction make me hopelessly old-fashioned? I feel suddenly like an old man at a concert, complaining about the volume.