Let the magic happen

After lunch I turned off the computer and noticed that there was a tickle in the back of my throat, the sort of irritation that makes you think of wet sandpaper being the universal standard for raw flesh and blues hysteria. My throat felt the way Tom Waits sounds, amplified aggravation in the center of the soft tissue, red and familiar like a bully's smirk before he knees in the nuts and bitch slaps you more time when you try to sneak out of school via the custodian's entrance. There was nothing I could do about the damn condition at the moment, but I did have a half bottle of Tussin , some generic syrup for the alleviation of sore throat, cough and yet manly enough to expel the grubbily greased mucus from the deepest of chest resonating chambers. I drank it one gulp, a semi sweetened version of the cruel cures your grandmother used to force down your throat with a funnel and the business end of a high heel shoe. It was awful, and all at once the store room started doing jumping jacks, my stomach declared itself a sovereign nation, my eyes saw through the thickest walls of the building and could the lips of cops writing crime novels behind billboards when they weren't getting hummers from bums who need one more dime for some Blue Nun. I was stoned on something, and suddenly the phone rang, or I thought I did. All I remember, really, was that I answered something.

"Gewekeekek" I said into the receiver.
"Hi, I need a  red rubber octopus..."
I paused.
"Don't we all" I answered.
And then the sun exploded.

Recollection at lunch time

I was reading an  piece by Peter Whitmer about Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro"  while on the bus coming to work this morning and noticed that the day so far had the hue of a dingy wash rag. I lifted my eyes from the twitching pages I was trying to read to see someone standing at the bus stop where the bus had paused to pick up new passengers, spying a guy in a grey hoodie standing on the side walk  looking into the bus, straight at me where I was seated.


Alien twelve tone gangster movie theme songs emerged from my pocket just then, my cell phone was ringing. I answered, staring into nothing but an interface crowded with blurred icons. "This is me" I answered, "Who are  you?"

The voice didn't bother with an explanation  or an introduction or a confession of any kind, Rather , he issued a command,

"Let me talk to the other guy" he said. There was a burst of static, a high whistling shriek. And then the phone became very hot in my hand.

Later this morning

Later this morning there is a mood of subdued insanity as each of  us smile tightly, the corners of our mouths jagged like upended hangers, boomer rang creases pushing the eyes and eyebrows into the leering slant of a deranged carnival clown. Everything is fine and all of are going to heaven in a white boat with Black sails, that seems to be what we are dreaming while awake, a promise of deliverance tempered with an omen for perpetual disaster. Free floating anxiety that wakes up ten minutes before you do and starts pressing the proverbial buttons on the control center that constitutes your dreaming self. Oh dear, oh my, the worst has already happened, although neither the West nor the East coasts have slithered into an angry, boiling ocean. That boiling sound is more of a gurgle, the coffee maker that has stopped working, producing scratchy gurgling noises ; it gave me half a cup this morning and did nothing else other than engage that death rattle. Another fine day to begin the day, especially on a Sunday. And now here I am , wondering,

what? What am I wondering?

This morning

There is little else but ill will circulating through the tubes of the internet this morning, general grousing, gripes and jeremiads about little of consequence, although I would have to lend credence to the notion that alot of anger is generated by site specific fears of losing one's financial security. This means that a good number of us in the work force, from upper management, mid management and the guys who wash out the the trash dumpsters in the back of the stores we can't afford to walk into are worried that they might be invited into the boss's office and asked to close the door behind them. Not a fun way to start the morning, so I force myself to think only happy thoughts.  La la la la la la is what I sing to myself, and I imagine pink ponies with ribbons and rainbows and smiley faces all over the landscape. Next I turn to my  Facebook page where one of my friends posted a video of Brit punk band The Exploited doing the least ambiguous song I will hear all month: FUCK THE USA.

The rainbows evaporate,the pink ponies eat some tox ragweed and fall over and die. Red robins drop from the sky. The smiley faces are now flipping me off.

Great.

Dig your tunes or get buried by them

Talent in any form will trump attitude day of the week with me, but first I have to ask what the the talent is for. "Bad attitude" can be a talent by way of a trait some might think cool and alluring from afar, "chronic depression" seems to go a long way for other listeners to ignore the calculable merits of melodies, vocals and lyrics and wallow in the sepia-toned aura of guitaring cave dwellers whose talent inhabits a dampened set of neurons. Likewise, a punk with a torn black t-shirt, crud-encrusted jeans and a spoke through an upper lip doesn't require a discourse in harmony or theory to justify the inherent value of his or her choice of belligerent tone warping. What it represents is the value, the noisy symbolism of rage, which means the niceties of song construction don't even enter the discussion. Attitude and persona only get you so far, though, and many are left scratching whatever body part that itches, wondering what the hell? So I go back to the songs themselves and weigh their characteristics--no mystery here, it's melody, vocal, lyrics again, along with musicianship, production, and a host of other niggling details--and make a judgement based on an floating scale as to how the ingredients succeed or fail in doing what songs are supposed to do, which is to kick ass, make me sad, make me rage, rant, pant, behave or go crazy in the head, or, in worst case scenario, turn off the damn noise off. Standards and demands on good songwriting are in constant flux, of course, and you need to have the proverbial big ears to assess material's worth against not just the history of pop music in general, but also within the genre the artist writes within. Standards within standards can make this a no win proposition for someone trying to create an objective criteria, but we're all aware of the most rigorous test: does the music grab you , make you bob your head with your eyes closed, cause your hands to beat time with the flat of your palm, force you to improvise solos composed of   non words and advanced variations of clearing the throat, all of while enthralled with melody , a snappy drumbeat, a sweeping crescendo, some manner of melody that has sneaked under the barriers around your sense of propriety and seduced you beyond this moment's repair? The first reaction is one that can't be faked with faux theory and revisionist contextualization along sociological rather than musical lines. You are either moved in a visceral , immediate way, or you are left there formulating a more intellectualized response. Considered, thoughtful, critical responses are legitimate too, in their place, but there's a lot of fakery going about the net and print media. But that riff, that drum beat, that whoop of aggression that gets your legs moving, fist pumping, jaw jutting? Priceless commentary on the music coming forth, without the vocabulary to obscure, cloud and confuse the experience. It's not a necessarily an accurate gauge of a song's value and worth in the scheme of recorded music , but its value lies elsewhere, in a rare moment in the week where you're responding to something that needn't , for the moment, be classified, catalogued and critiqued like it were a virus that science is trying to destroy

REMARKS ARE NOT LITERATURE, NOR ARE THEY CRITICISM

There is an amusing story in Slate where the editors queried numerous noted critics about what they individually considered the most overrated novels they had the misfortune to struggle with. The responses from a group including Amy Bloom, Stephen Burt, Tom Perrotta among others presented some dour words over a fine selection of iconic texts. The idea, it seems, was similar to that of the collection edited by rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Kill Your Idols, where he asked a significantly younger generation of pop music critics to write devastating reviews of what was basically the Rolling Stone Magazine canon of the Greatest Rock and Roll Albums ever made.

Without going into detail, I will say that the anthology was a great idea that landed on the sharp rocks by one negative review after another. Virtually no musician or band was as good as older scribes had claimed, a conclusion you expected given the title of the collection, but the sensibility was put down and sarcasm, cheap insults, a strained irreverence that , with the repetition of one review after the other, sounded practiced, more inauthentic than the alleged phoniness of the albums under review. It was a bad writing contest, the contestants vying to produce the most wretched Lester Bangs impersonation. Bangs, though, would have none of this; he bared his soul, he argued his reasons, absurd or irrational they might have been. He was a great writer. The point is that the Slate article is merely a chance for some payback: tired of the praise Joyce receives, have you had it with Salinger’s name sucking the air from the room, do you think Pynchon is all sizzle and no steak? Here is your chance to put these elevated middlebrows in their place. What we get are smart people, good critics, staying in the shallow end of the pool. It’s interesting that virtually any touted book that does not hold my attention beyond the first 200 pages instantly gets reassigned to the 'overrated" section of my book table, that stack of tomes I will give away, donate, sell as the opportunities arise. “Overrated”, though, is as overused a term as , say , “brilliant”, “masterpiece” or “groundbreaking”; hasty dismissals and instant praise without a cant-free discussion about why these judgments were rendered exposes the opinions as being as inflated as the book one seeks to bury . Or to raise. Time was when book reviews, even the reviews available in middlebrow magazines like Time, made you believe, even feel, the sluggish pacing and torpor a bad stretch of prose could have on a writer. These days the field is dominated by wisecracks that are suitable for photo captions.

Remarks of this kind are fine for the chit chat that comes with book group debates about the relative merits of emerging authors or the swan songs of authors who have died or seem about to; to disguise a selection of rhythmic grumbling as an article is something else. Our critical discourse is cheapened and reduced to something you can read while going to the refrigerator for another O’Doul’s. It’s not that I’m against subjecting a work to critical examination, it’s just that we seem to live in a time of instant opinions. Much of what passes for a critical debate these days sounds like a gaggle of disenfranchised booksellers vying to see who can produce the most quotable sound bite, negative or positive. It saddens me that we haven’t another John Leonard on the horizon, someone who could dig deep and give a complex reading of a book , yay or nay, and not leave the personality and heart out of the whole thing. It used to be 200 pages before I continued on with a book or put it down; these days I am in the same 50-75 page ratio of test driving a text. It’s simply that there are too many pleasurable writers to read to waste time trudging through something out of fool’s sense of duty. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that “remarks are not literature”, and to that end I agree: literature is writing at length and writing that seeks to achieve something more remarkable than what the water cooler/coffee pot/ Good Reads cabal of laconic pedants offer as commentary. Even criticism that takes literature apart and inspects the workings of fevered personality taken to extreme graphomania ought to aspire to the level of the best books it takes under consideration. As it goes, though, remarks and not essays are the preferred method of judging new books, old and older. Remarks are not literature, nor are they criticism, but it is what people seem to read as the computers become repulsively more portable. It’s a bad cafe drink: just a rumor of coffee, lots of cream, heaping spoonfuls of white sugar

Received message. I can help you with correcting spelling and grammatical errors. Here is the improved version of your text: There is an amusing story in Slate where the editors queried a number of noted critics about what they individually considered the most overrated novels they had the misfortune to struggle with. The responses from a group including Amy Bloom, Stephen Burt, Tom Perrotta among others presented some dour words over a fine selection of iconic texts. The idea, it seems, was similar to that of the collection edited by rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Kill Your Idols, where he asked a significantly younger generation of pop music critics to write devastating reviews of what was basically the Rolling Stone magazine canon of the Greatest Rock and Roll Albums ever made. Without going into detail, I will say that the anthology was a great idea that landed on the sharp rocks by one negative review after another. Virtually no musician or band was as good as older scribes had claimed, a conclusion you expected given the title of the collection, but the sensibility was put down and sarcasm, cheap insults, a strained irreverence that , with the repetition of one review after the other, sounded practiced, more inauthentic than the alleged phoniness of the albums under review. It was a bad writing contest, the contestants vying to produce the most wretched Lester Bangs impersonation. Bangs, though, would have none of this; he bared his soul, he argued his reasons, absurd or irrational they might have been. He was a great writer. The point is that the Slate article is merely a chance for some payback: tired of the praise Joyce receives, have you had it with Salinger’s name sucking the air from the room, do you think Pynchon is all sizzle and no steak? Here is your chance to put these elevated middlebrows in their place. 

What we get are smart people, good critics, staying in the shallow end of the pool. It's interesting that virtually any touted book that does not hold my attention beyond the first 200 pages instantly gets reassigned to the 'overrated" section of my book table, that stack of tomes I will give away, donate, sell as the opportunities arise. "Overrated", though, is as overused a term as , say , "brilliant", "masterpiece" or "groundbreaking"; hasty dismissals and instant praise without a cant-free discussion about why these judgments were rendered exposes the opinions as being as inflated as the book one seeks to bury . Or to raise. Time was when book reviews, even the reviews available in middlebrow magazines like Time, made you believe, even feel, the sluggardly pacing and torpor a bad stretch of prose could have on a writer. These days the field is dominated by wisecracks that are suitable for photo captions. Remarks of this kind are fine for the chit chat that comes with book group debates about the relative merits of emerging authors or the swan songs of authors who have died or seem about to; to disguise a selection of rhythmic grumbling as an article is something else. Our critical discourse is cheapened and reduced to something you can read while going to the refrigerator for another O’Doul’s. It's not that I'm against subjecting a work to critical examination, it's just that we seem to live in a time of instant opinions. Much of what passes for a critical debate these days sounds like a gaggle of disenfranchised booksellers vying to see who can produce the most quotable sound bite, negative or positive. 

It saddens me that we haven't another John Leonard on the horizon, someone who could dig deep and give a complex reading of a book , yay or nay, and not leave the personality and heart out of the whole thing. It used to be 200 pages before I continued on with a book or put it down; these days I am in the same 50-75 page ratio of test driving a text. It's simply that there are too many pleasurable writers to read to waste time trudging through something out of fool's sense of duty. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that "remarks are not literature", and to that end I agree: literature is writing at length and writing that seeks to achieve something more remarkable than what the water cooler/coffee pot/ Good Reads cabal of laconic pedants offer as commentary. Even criticism that takes literature apart and inspects the workings of fevered personality taken to extreme graphomania ought to aspire to the level of the best books it takes under consideration. As it goes, though, remarks and not essays are the preferred method of judging new books, old and older. Remarks are not literature, nor are they criticism, but it is what people seem to read as the computers become repulsively more portable. It's a bad cafe drink: just a rumor of coffee, lots of cream, heaping spoonfuls of white sugar.

6 ways of looking at a grouchy old man

Wallace Stevens found 13 ways of looking at a blackbird; Ishmael Reed's poem "Scrub Jays" imagines the birds looking back   at the man glaring at them, finding six stanzas of taunts. This is , in essence, a poem about aging, the gaining of some simple knowledge that was formerly obscured by ego and youthful exuberance. Where a younger man could sustain a good battle in protecting what he perceives to be rightfully and exclusively his, his apple trees and the fruit they bare,  running to and from his house with all manner of pesticide, rakes, air horns , convinced that he can make short order of this ordeal and restore the principle of property rights to his personal piece of earth, the body with time grows slower, muscles go soft, bones ache, the awareness arises that no amount of assertion of will can make settle anything permanently. The bird is the old man's inner voice, speaking in mocking tones under remains of the rhetorical veneer that refuses to acknowledge inevitability. It is not this bird, nor even birds in particular that will win this battle.

What good are apples
To old men, anyway
You have lost your bite
You have run out of
 Ladders to climb
Your ultrasonic solar-powered
Animal repellent
The Honda among dissuaders
Might rid your garden of
The capo cats, but
 The bandit raccoons
Within 48 hours  

What good are apples, indeed what good are things that one attaches one's name to and changes their essential nature from being something useful and with a function , or purpose, in a large and infinitely complex system of things and makes them mere trophies, souveneers of a conquest? With the ache of the limbs and the fading of light from eyes that no longer see things crisply, clearly, without ambiguity, the possession of things is an error, a mistake in perception.  Nature, in any event, turns out to be not a particular thing one does battle against, not a personality, a thing, a personality one defines the terms of their existence against. Nature merely is, that condition of existence within which all things exist and , more or less, abide by. This includes the deflating ego of many a strong willed man and woman who assumed their could change the terms of the condition . The tragedy, voiced by Reed in the voice of birds who mock him for his erring presumptions about his cosmology, isn't that we all become bitter old men yelling at kids and critters to get off their lawn, but that we might never realize that we didn't own the lawn in the first place.