JOURNALS

Over break, Daily Themes students were to keep a journal, then select five entries to turn in for discussion. Journal week is one of my favorites in the course because it's such a free-for-all. I don't care how formless the writing is, how notational, how slice-of-life: the more slice-of-life the better! The point of the journal, the task of the journal, is to "be yourself" in prose. Those who can do that, who can register an actual dialogue with themselves, get the point. It's not composition, it's not creative writing, it's not argument. It's life in words. It's thought in action.

That's not to say that students can't compose entries about specific events or pursue an argument. The point is that the journal is whatever you make it be. But the entries I like best are the ones that give me the sense of being in someone's head while whatever is going on is going on. Or just after. It's that immediacy that makes it interesting. If I write an entry on Monday, I have no real idea of what will happen between then and Friday. On Friday I know that, but I don't know what the weekend will bring. The incremental nature of our lives in time is on display in a very vulnerable way.

Looking back at journals I kept when I was the age of my students, what I like best is when I comment on something that's happening right then, that day. I never took the time to describe people because it seemed somehow arrogant at the time, to give a description of someone I saw regularly made it seem like I was in command of some higher perspective, or maybe that I was making a real person "a character." Which wasn't the point at all. Eventually that changed when I began to be interested in writing fiction. But initially, writing a journal had nothing to do with "material." It was simply about what went on. About responding in writing to whatever the feeling of the day was. And keeping it brief. Beginning the year I turned twenty, I kept it up daily for about two years, then intermittent for another ten or so.

Of course there's a tension about students turning in journal entries for someone to read. I don't know what I would do about that if I were them. The journal is a private monologue. I often tell students that anyone reading mine would think I was a very negative person because the journal is a great place to gripe in ways that you would be ashamed to do in front of even your best, most sympathetic friends. And horny, because the other private thing is how aware one is of sexual provocation. Something one has to downplay in daily dealings, particularly if one is in a committed relationship. So the student entries I identify with most have some negativity and some horniness because those things go with the territory. It's like looking at the letters of famous writers: what are the two topics that dominate? Health and wealth. Every writer talks about health issues and about not having enough money. In journals it's more about getting even and getting laid.

Then there's blogs. Some bloggers treat them like journals, public journals. But that's a contradiction in terms. The journal can never be public, the blog (unless it's blocked to every reader) can never be private. A journal can be published at some point, of course, but it wasn't written to be published. A blog is sorta published as soon as it goes online. But blogging, for me, does fill up some of the void that keeping a journal used to do. So maybe that's why I began it as more of a daily record, only to find, as with the journal, that mostly my thoughts aren't on what is happening day to day.

That's ok, though. I still think developing a relation to oneself in writing is supremely important.

Like many writers, I often find starting the working day a discouraging prospect, one I spend much energy avoiding. Four years ago I was reminded of an injunction Stendahl gave himself early in life: Vingt lignes par jour, génie ou pas (Twenty lines a day, genius or not). Stendahl was thinking about getting a book done. I deliberately mistook his words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page. Even for a dubious, wary writer, twenty lines seemed a reassuringly obtainable objective, especially if they had no connection with a "serious" project like a novel or an essay.
--Harry Matthews, "Preface," 20 Lines a Day

THROUGH THE YEARS, 12

25 years ago: March, 1982

Shoot Out The Lights was the final album by the husband-wife duo Richard and Linda Thompson. At the time it was compared to Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975), another album expressive of the demise of a marriage. The album was my introduction to both of these artists; my interest in Richard Thompson took off from here -- into his solo albums of the '80s, '90s and his three most recent studio albums of original material, Mock Tudor (1999), The Old Kit Bag (2003), and Front Parlour Ballads (2005), which are the best of his career -- and also back to his time with Fairport Convention, 1968-70. Recently I picked up a remastered re-issue of an earlier R & L Thompson album: Pour Down Like Silver (1975), which is dark, moody and comic in the classic Thompson manner. It may be that his guitar playing was more powerful in the '70s and '80s than it is today -- there's nothing on those last three albums to equal the harrowing guitar on "Sloth" from Full House (1970), his final album with Fairport Convention, or the foreboding guitar on "Night Comes In," from Pour Down, or the bristling, aggressive guitar on the title track here -- which puts me in mind of Neil Young on "Danger Bird" from Zuma (1975).

Thompson is a song writer with a range of moods and topics. I think what attracts me to him most is that, like Ray Davies and Elvis Costello, he can be wonderfully sardonic -- see "Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed" (co-written with Linda) and "Wall of Death" -- but also, like them, he can tell the stories of characters not himself, not even temperamentally. "Backstreet Slide" is a cranking, lively number that captures the outlook of the down-and-out denizen of London -- something Thompson returns to again and again ("now slander is a loving tongue / they speak your name to everyone"). And the title track, in its figure of a criminal from the criminal's point of view (a metaphor for the angry husband's mood), presents the kind of use of character that is a staple of Thompson's writing -- and, from the days of "Crazy Man Michael" on Fairport Convention's masterwork Liege and Lief (1969), the point of view songs tend to imbue their subjects with a kind of tragic grandeur. Unless the opposite effect is aimed for, in which case the speaker of the song is given enough rope to hang himself -- in tongue-in-cheek manner.

The songs that earned the Blood on the Tracks comparisons are in the tradition of songs that tell it like it is about the stress of remaining a couple when the reasons for being together are hard to find. "A Man in Need," sung by Richard, gives the man's point of view -- a spritely feeling of being unsatisfied and looking for a way out, but "Walking on the Wire," sung by Linda, could be said to give the woman's point of view (both songs were written by Richard) and is more emotionally wrenching, if only because Linda's singing is more emotional, better able to crystallize the sense of endured pain, and of that agonized waiting for the other shoe to fall. But my favorite track sung by Linda is "Just the Motion," which offers some respite from the battle of words -- melancholy, yes, but in its chorus it looks at what "being together" feels like: "under the ocean at the bottom of the sea / you can't hear the storm, it's as peaceful as can be / it's just the motion." Her "mmm-hmm, it's just the motion" really clinches it.

Finally there's the opening track which I remember my friend Peter, who played this album for me back in '83, singled out for its choice of words: "Don't Renege on our Love" -- he loved the twist of "renege," that language of contracts, deals, negotiations entering the bedroom. It's a good example of Thompson's way with words. If someone you know -- or you yourself -- should be going through a divorce, here's an album you'll want to have around..

Now hunger is hunger
And need is need
Am I just another
Mouth to feed?
When the game is up
Well, don't renege on our love
--Richard Thompson, "Don't Renege on our Love" (1982)

BIG BOOKS, FEW BLOGS

It seems that undertaking to read rather lengthy books -- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day -- serves to cut-down on my interest in day-to-day occasions for commentary. If it weren't for my idea of cataloguing albums of four different years month by month I'd have nothing to write about. This situation is exacerbated by a recently begun "book" (ok, so far it's more like a 1/4 of a chapter) on TP's output that, if I manage to stay on point, could be the project to overcome my critical-academic writing block. Too soon to tell.

I'm halfway through Infinite Jest and, since I'm also reading TP and thinking about his work and writing about V., a point of comparison with Pynchon occurs to me. Pynchon is a nerd who, thanks to the '60s and drugs and cool friends like Richard Fariña and living in Mexico, etc., became cool -- of course, the child being father to the man, much of his nerdiness remained in play, but it got channeled into this incredible prose writer. Kind of like Proust -- sure, he was a dilettante and a dandy and a neurotic but somehow he managed to put those qualities, generally drawbacks, at the service of fascinating prose and the story of how a dilettante became the great novelist of the era.

I'm less convinced that DFW has converted his nerdiness into the stuff of greatness. The guy is a nerd with a vengeance. From now on when I hear the phrase "Revenge of the Nerds" I'm going to think of David Foster Wallace. Particularly as they say that writing well is the best revenge. There's segment after segment (and the novel is really a collection of segments) that reads to me like revenge-via-verbiage.

DFW's a cool nerd, but that doesn't help. He reminds me of guys I knew in HS who would get stoned and do calculus problems. The nerdiness is only intensified by the substances. What this means in effect is that there's no process of selection and discernment going on. His sense of detail reminds me of a scene in Wonder Boys where a student tries to caution her teacher, a respected writer, about his endless opus, mentioning how the characters' dental records and the horses' genealogies might be overdoing it. I think DFW was the model for that aspect of the character.

The point of Infinite Jest seems to be to go on ad infinitum. If a scene can last for 5 pages, why not let it last for 10? Why not footnote every drug reference with complete pharmacological details? Why not obsess about competitive tennis in every possible permutation of nerdy obsessed athlete psychology? Oh, so that might be a bit elitist? I mean, how relevant do we find competitive tennis? So let's find something more accessible. What about AA meetings? Let's render the varieties of substance abuse in all their variegated detail ... and then return to it again. Then more tennis. Then more recovering addicts. Ever wonder how many kinds of physical disfigurement there are? Betcha I can use them all in a paragraph, or six.

And then there's the anal retentive complexity of the sentences and vocabulary, usually an end in itself, but occasionally a cop-out, as when a new AA recruit delivers an appalling tale of how she delivered a stillborn partial child while smoking crack. Well, that tale might be unbearable if she were allowed to tell it herself, so our narrator chooses to render it in his usual zonked-out but oh so articulate and hyper-verbal manner, so instead of an instant of abyss-like bathos and pathos (which we're told it was for all her listeners) it becomes a kind of voyeuristic "take" on human misery and stupidity, a bit too calculated in its effects. When Pynchon does this sort of thing, it quickly moves toward camp, sometimes chilling camp, but, though I detect some camp here, what comes across more tellingly in DFW's performance is the dressing-up for literary effect.

What DFW is incredibly good at is rendering what I can only call the "processed speak" of our time. The way information access permits everyone to speak like walking 'droids with media-ized prose instantly beamed into their brains. And the relentless language of diagnosis -- whether physical, mental, political, economic, you name it -- as the means by which we understand that we don't understand what's wrong. He can also render demotic speech remarkably well, when he chooses to. And he's also got down that flinty mastery of the non sequiturs of conversation -- especially deliberate non sequiturs between people who are dodging each other as in two brothers, Orin and Hal, on the phone -- that I associate with DeLillo. DFW, though, is rarely as funny (to me) as DeLillo and forget even getting close to TP.

TP tests limits too, but they're imaginative limits. In Pynchon, the detail with which unbelievable or highly fanciful things happen is unparalleled. And the tendency to make a literal fact become a metaphor or to let a metaphor take on a life of its own can make TP frustrating for those who want to know what's "really" happening, but otherwise you can just go along for the wild ride. DFW's imagination, having set up the basic scenario of the world of his novel, seems to be bent on simply replicating endless riffs on that scenario. I've read about 520 pages and I can't say the story is going forward, nor that any of the characters will surprise me. If there is a story unfolding (occasionally we're teased with the notion of one, sorta), it's seemingly more important to impede it with more segments than it is to tell it.

Remember in Ulysses when Bloom goes to the sink and turns the tap and the question is posed, Did it flow? And the answer gives us the specifics on where the water comes from. Or when the question is posed, what did Bloom, water-lover, admire about water? And the answer takes over a page of dense prose to render all the loveable qualities of water. That's what huge sections of this novel read like. Though rarely do I find myself admiring the prose the way I love the sound of that water passage in Joyce.

Oh well. As Beckett always sez: I can't go on I'll go on.

THROUGH THE YEARS, 11

30 years ago: March, 1977

Sleepwalker was the first Kinks' album I bought when it was released. Though not a remarkable album for Ray Davies and company, it was distinctive to me because on it The Kinks finally sounded good. All the previous albums -- and there were some great albums and even more great songs -- used to appall me with their production. Granted, not everyone can have at their disposal the equipment and engineering savvy that The Beatles and The Stones could command, but why did the Kinks' albums of the '60s always sound muddier than the likes of The Who or Pink Floyd, or even early Bowie? The Kinks Kronikles, a double album of stand-out tracks released in '72, was my reference point for the early Kinks ('66-'70 -- which was not the earliest Kinks, because their landmark song "You Really Got Me" dates from August of '64) and it took awhile to warm to it because of those wimpy drums and arrangements that, for all their panache, sound as if all instruments were recorded on one track with the vocals on the other. Possibly so.

The RCA albums of '71-'76 were better, production-value wise, but after Muswell Hillbillies (their best -- and first -- for RCA, just as Arthur was their best, and last, on Reprise), Davies went off into his vaudevillian mode. I got an earful of this in the late '70s because my older brother was one of the few people, it seems, enamoured of Preservation Act II (1974). I'm still partial to it, but it's like Jesus Christ Superstar or Tommy: you're listening to songs that comprise a musical and so, unless you like your songs coming to you in character, it's a bit off to the side of the usual rock album experience.

Sleepwalker ended all the concept stuff and just delivered a batch of songs with, on Arista, recordings that sounded like they belonged in the late '70s. In fact I don't think Dave Davies' guitar ever sounded better: so fucking muscular! "Mr. Big Man", for instance. And brother Ray's vocals are strong and solid. "Stormy Sky" and "Full Moon" are some of his best singing. The latter is my favorite song on the album -- it manages to be kinda creepy and also funny and, well, "if the face in the mirror isn't you at all..."

It was on their tour for this album that I first saw The Kinks play live, at The Tower Theater in Philadelphia -- a reconstituted movie theater, fairly intimate. Indicative, in the sense that the other '60s bands I'd seen perform -- Tull, Floyd, Zappa -- were in larger venues. The Kinks were never big in America, being I think "too British" in some not quite definable way (oh well, maybe somewhat definable -- if you hear a song that hails village greens, billiards, "the St. George Cross and all those who were awarded them," it's pretty clear it's not aimed at the average American six-pack or bong-head Joe). In any case, it was so very good to see rock legends in spitting distance and to have a great time with Davies' hammy stage presence. Songs by The Kinks have been covered by the likes of The Jam, The Pretenders, Yo La Tengo, Elvis Costello, Big Star, Van Halen (!), and their sound is audible to me in some of Blur and in the latest album by The Shins -- so it's clear that Davies' legacy is healthy. He put out his first solo album in 2005 and it's refreshing to hear again his sardonic take on the world we're all stuck with.

We used to always say that Davies could write a song about anything. Check out "Sleepless Nights," about the guy who has to live underneath his ex-girlfriend and hear her get it on with his replacement. If there is "a theme" to the album, it seems to be the things that keep you up at night.

Haven't you noticed a kind of madness in my eyes
It's only me, dear, in my midnight disguise
--Ray Davies, "Full Moon" (1977)

READING ALOUD

For some reason I was thinking about my love of reading aloud. One of the great advantages of having younger siblings or children is that you can usually persuade them to listen. Spouses can be trickier, but if s/he is willing to do the driving on long trips, you can provide the entertainment. In the early days with my wife I didn't even drive, so per force she did the driving and I did the reading. The situation obtained for some time. Long drives with our daughter with my wife driving were the occasions for much of my reading -- as in regular trips back and forth, Princeton, NJ, to New Castle, DE, or to Philadelphia, PA, and later CT to DE. There were also a few occasions of reading aloud, round-robin style, with friends, but that was restricted to Joyce and Pynchon. Reading aloud was also a pastime when my wife was making something with fabric or my daughter was doing art for college courses she took in junior high and high school. Often only one or the other was the audience; for instance, my wife heard Love in the Time of Cholera; my daughter heard 100 Years of Solitude. Of course, there is no way to list all the innumerable bedtime books of her childhood and the frequency with which they were read. I've listed those whose authors I recall.

To the best of my memory, these were the books read, to various listeners...

Alexander, Lloyd: The Chronicles of Prydain (5 volumes)
Austen, Jane: Mansfield Park; Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Northanger Abbey
Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451 [twice]; Something Wicked This Way Comes [twice]; The Martian Chronicles
Brown, Donald: Between Days [as mp3s]
Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [twice; +on tape]; Through the Looking-Glass [twice; +on tape]
Cather, Willa: O Pioneers!
Cleary, Beverly: all the Ramona books; The Mouse and the Motorcycle
Conan Doyle, Arthur: various stories; The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dahl, Ronald: James and the Giant Peach; Matilda; Witches; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations [twice]; David Copperfield [twice]; Oliver Twist
Disch, Thomas M.: The Brave Little Toaster
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Fagles, Robert: translation of The Illiad
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, Robert: translation of The Odyssey
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Franzen, Jonathan: The Corrections
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gottlieb, Gerald: The Adventures of Ulysses [multiple times]
Grahame, Kenneth: The Wind in the Willows
Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises
Hinton, S.E.: The Outsiders [twice]; That Was Then, This is Now; Rumblefish
Hobsbawm, Eric: The Age of Extremes
Irving, John: The Hotel New Hampshire
Jackson, Shirley: The Haunting of Hill House
James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; What Maisie Knew; Washington Park; Portrait of a Lady
Joyce, James: Ulysses [twice]; Finnegans Wake [twice; +portions on tape]
Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth
Kerouac, Jack: The Subterraneans
Key, Alexander: The Forgotten Door [multiple times]
Kundera, Milan: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Lewis, C. S.: The Chronicles of Narnia (five volumes)
Lodge, David: Small World
Maddox, Brenda: Nora
Morrison, Toni: Sula; Song of Solomon; Tar Baby; Paradise
Orwell, George: Animal Farm
Poe, E.A.: various stories
Pym, Barbara: The Sweet Dove Died; Quartet in Autumn; Some Tame Gazelle; An Unsuitable Attachment; Excellent Women; A Few Green Leaves; No Fond Return of Love
Pynchon, Thomas: Gravity's Rainbow [twice; +portions on tape]; Vineland
Randall, Florence Engel: The Watcher in the Woods
Roth, Philip: The Human Stain
Russo, Richard: Straight Man; Nobody's Fool
Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar; Macbeth
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein [twice]
Simpson, Eileen: Poets in Their Youth
Snyder, Zilpha Keatley: Black and Blue Magic [twice]
Stevenson, R.L.: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [twice]
Thackeray, William: Vanity Fair
Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit [twice]; The Lord of the Rings (three vols.) [twice]
Twain, Mark: Tom Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Prince and the Pauper
Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat's Cradle; Timequake
Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man (twice)
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray

There are many other books I'd like to read aloud, but it really only works with someone listening. And some books just don't go over too well for the listener no matter how much I enjoy reading them. Modernists tend to suffer in this regard: Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce (unless you've got the text in front of you). I've heard from those enamoured of books on tape that there is a very good quality Ulysses out there, but I haven't looked into it. I'm not interested in listening.

Book after book
I get hooked
Everytime the writer
Talks to me like a friend
--Marc Bolan, "Spaceball Ricochet" (1972)

MARCH MADNESS

The Ides of March have come . . . and gone. It's snowing here now, supposedly going to accumulate in the 6 to 10 inch range. We'll see. But that prediction, during Spring Break, causes me to pause a moment to reflect on the month of March. When all's said, it's probably one of my favorite months. October, in the northeast at least, wins out -- the colors, the temperatures, the air and light. But March is so unpredictable and changeable. Earlier in the week was a taste of Spring -- the favorable Spring, not the muggy, over-heated Spring that too often mars April. A good April is probably as good as it gets. But in my Connecticut years I've come to appreciate winter's last stand, and that usually occurs in March. It's got the Vernal Equinox, it sometimes has Easter, it's the month of my wedding anniversary (today) and my daughter's birth. At Yale, it also features a two week break. And it's the month of some notable births that I failed to note at the time:

March 1, 1917: Robert Lowell
A poet who meant a lot to me in my youth. What Lowell represented to me, c. 1981 when I read him consistently, was the poet who, coming immediately after that major generation that included Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams, et. al., tried to meet the challenge, and was poet enough -- in terms of talent and skill and original perspective -- to make a go of it. It always amazed me how he began with the trappings of Hart Crane (another major but flawed figure) and then moved toward the clarity, brio and subdued but trenchant diction of Life Studies and For the Union Dead. I still have the copy of those two, in one volume, that I bought back then. One of my favorite books of poems then and one that I still feel is often emulated but not surpassed by the so-called "confessional" mode of poets. And Lowell's craft is always crafty. Check out "Crossing the Alps."

March 2, 1942: Lou Reed
I wrote about Lou for his 1982 album The Blue Mask, so I needn't go on at length about him. He is one of the real rock'n'roll survivors and while he lacks the ability to completely reinvent himself that makes me prefer Dylan and Bowie, Lou is such an original I can't accord him enough respect. I consider him a songwriter of limited skills -- both lyrically and musically -- and with almost no range as a singer. Yet: look what he accomplished! Rock, as I experience it, would be unthinkable without the Velvet Underground, which was Lou's baby and which, for all its posteuring, strikes me as a genuine breakthrough in the possibilities of the rock song. And, as I already mentioned, his '80s output was quite good for about 3 albums and his surfacings since have continued to elicit some interest from me. 1996's Set the Twilight Reeling is a good example of the mature Lou. And his collaboration with John Cale on Songs for Drella (1990, in honor of Andy Warhol) might just be the greatest 'concept album' of them all. Then there's Berlin. Look on my works ye mighty and despair!

March 3, 1926: James Merrill
Let me appear here now in my philistine glory, insouciant even, as I confess that I haven't read James Merrill -- reason enough to be ignored in those hallowed realms where his words are ambrosia, his boyish smile the light of heaven. It may be, if I live long enough, that I will read him and become enamoured. I will say this: there's a period in one's life when one looks at poets hopefully, wanting to be seduced by them into states of awe and rapture and fascination. And that period passes with youth. There's also a side of youth that is skeptical, dismissive, hard-to-get. Merrill didn't seduce me back then because he seemed so terribly precious, so comfortably Edwardian somehow. Had I world-enough-in-time or dough-enough-in-bank, James! But I also think that, like Pound's Cantos which I resisted the blandishments of until I was old enough (past 30) not to be overwhelmed, Merrill's reach and grasp is so extensive, so "world unto itself" that the day I get more than a toe or a foot wet is the day I plunge in to experience the rapture of the deep, of the "over my head but it sure feels nice" surrender to . . . the greatest poet of his extraordinary generation?

March 6, 1928: Gabriel Garcia Márquez
It's a commonplace that the late '60s produced no great, enduring novel. TP's novels of the earlier '60s, V. and Lot 49, are each in their own way great, but aren't the greatness that will emerge from him in '73. And The French Lieutenant's Woman, entertaining and insightful as it is, occupies a kind of holding action, it doesn't surprise us as wholly original. Nabokov's Pale Fire is early '60s and not as great as Lolita, though more resolutely Nabokovian, and Ada (1969) is generally not well-regarded even by Nabokovistes. Mailer manages Armies of the Night which is a great '60s book, but not a great book. Gaddis doesn't even publish in that decade. Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo don't get into print until the early '70s. No, to find the great enduring work of the '60s you have to forget about the English language. Give up Britiain and the U.S. and, yes, even Ireland. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the real deal. It may be the greatest novel of the second half of the twentieth century if only because it's the one novel of that era that doesn't wear it's attenuated, postmodern, Baudrillardian surfeit of simulacra-ese on its sleeve. My personal favorite is, of course, Gravity's Rainbow but I recognize that there is something parochial about it -- no better place to find how "small town" U.S. aspirations to world dominance are! Márquez's novel is the real deal because it's "new world" without impoverishment when set against modernity. It's both pre- and post-modernist. And it's mythic in a way that was barely possible, in our world, for Melville at the time of Moby Dick. Hats off.

March 9, 1942: John Cale
Lou's sometime collaborator, sometime producer of Patti Smith and The Modern Lovers and Nico, sometime collaborator with Eno. Yeah, yeah. The usual bio of John Cale is fraught with better-known names so as to grant him some importance. But John Cale is so unique, so quirky and odd that it's a disservice to present him though such a lens. Cale is the man who wrote and recorded Vintage Violence in 1970, an album on which each song is a "mini-album" -- which is to say, each song seems to "belong" on a different record, each song has a fully distinct feel and sound. Sure, there are overlaps (my favorite songs -- "Charlemagne," "Please," "Big White Cloud' -- all clearly "go together"), but listening through it is to be transported song by song. And on the "follow-up," Paris 1919 (1973), that's even more the case. The songs seem much longer than they really are because they are so 'worked-up' somehow. I attribute the uniqueness of these two albums (and the first side of 1974's Fear) to a brilliance for arrangements that even the mercurial Eno couldn't come close to. It takes classical chops and Cale's got 'em. Then there's the Cale who gets dubbed "godfather of New Wave": the second half of Fear and the two albums of 1975: edgy, passionate, menacing, somewhat unhinged in their willingness to inhabit a dark conceit in which the singer is criminal, paranoid, and, now and then, serene as only the abuse of superior substances can make one. The '70s is the phase of Cale that I discovered c. 1977 and which dominated my listening throughout the following year. I saw him play live several times in March 1979 in Brooklyn, Philly, D.C., and NYC. I'm proud to say I shook his hand.

March 12, 1922: Jack Kerouac
Without any particular training or background, this patient, just prior to his enlistment, enthusiastically embarked upon the writing of novels. He sees nothing unusual in this activity.--from the Navy's file on Kerouac while enlisted. The entire document is a sketch of Kerouac: nutty, grandiose, anti-social, self-involved, haunted. I never subscribed to the awed admiration of Jack that animated many would-be writers of my acquaintance, and in teaching On the Road in my "GR in context" course ("a book I still believe is one of the great American novels," TP sez) I'm always a bit apologetic. There's something so non-literary about Kerouac, which is what I admire as his strength, his sincerity, but it also causes me to wince a bit the way some truly musical people wince when they hear Dylan sing. The self-invention of Bobby and Jack (no, not the Kennedys) is much to the point: they arrived at a performance of themselves. We identify with a version of them that they created for us. What it would take me much longer to work out is why the personae they arrived at are so intrinsic to so many people of a certain bent. The DIY ethic, the "from down-and-out to supreme seer" mystique, the self-made man, hip-Horatio Alger thing, the enfant terrible, the great unwashed, Huck Finn makes good, the barbaric yawp gone mainstream, sorta. All that. And then the "voice of the generation" thing. Kerouac's On the Road, with Naked Lunch and "Howl," are the documents of the Beats that deserve to live on, and do. Required reading for '50s, '60s America, and for so much that came after. Did you never let Jack Kerouac wash over you in waves?--Richard Thompson.

THROUGH THE YEARS, 10

35 years ago: April 1972

Big Star isn't a band I heard of at all in the '70s. I didn't even know who Alex Chilton, the leader of the group, was. Sure, I knew the song by The Box Tops, Chilton's initial band, called "The Letter" but it was made dated, in my middle school years, by Joe Cocker's frenetic version. So it wasn't until Big Star started showing up on lists of all-time favorite music compiled by the likes of Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Paul Westerberg of The Replacements, two front-runners in the mid-80s "bands of my generation" sweepstakes, that I took notice of the previously overlooked Big Star. And, as they say, I'm glad I did!

This is the first album and it's imbued with an "essence of the '70s" that is hard to place, since it wasn't part of my consciousness during that decade. I think that's one reason I'm so fond of this band. When I think back on the '70s I think of the prog-rock I actually listened to; I think of glam, which I grudgingly accepted; I think of heavy metal, which was a passion for a brief time; I think of getting to know the past work of '60s greats now absent or in decline. But it's an album like #1 Record that provides a glimpse of the spirit of a cooler version of the '70s. I know it was there in the '70-'72 period in CCR and The Kinks and The Who and The Stones -- it's rock that has fully come into its own: a pop sound with harder edges, a bit of country twang here and there, a sense of the "happy trails" era giving way to grimmer, more stressed psychic vacations. Chilton and Chris Bell, his collaborator (on this album), give Big Star equal parts of kick and contemplation. Like Badfinger, another band of this period which pinpoints the feel of the times (and I did have a few of their 45s), Big Star has a sense of melody that is crisp and never cloying. But for some reason there aren't any hits here. That has something to do with what I see as Chilton's calculated "underground" persona. Having scored big hits (to become a "big star") with The Box Tops while still a kid, Chilton seems to be highly ambivalent about going down that road again. But that's probably just hindsight. At the time there was no reason why #1 Record shouldn't have hit the way The Eagles' first album did (released the same year).

Big Star fuses Byrds-like harmonies with the kind of power-pop riffs that The Kinks originated. Probably their best known song these days is "In the Street" which I'm told was the theme song for That '70s Show -- "wish we had / a joint so bad," yup -- but songs like "The Ballad of El Goodo" (maybe a bit too existential for AM) and "Thirteen" (which sums up young teen love without condescension or sappy nostalgia) and "Give Me Another Chance" and "Try Again" give us a taste of the introspective Chilton who will eventually create Big Star's Third / Sister Lovers, one of the greatest albums of the '70s. Period. Big Star's gifts are subtle -- it's in the arrangements, of voices especially -- and when #1 Record rocks ("Feel"; "Don't Lie to Me") it doesn't go for the kind of cranking riff-rock that could be found at the time in the likes of The Guess Who or Free or Foghat; it's the kind of music I can imagine the more discerning teen heads listening to, the kind of guys that know a bag of good stuff from run-of-the-mill and would pass on the latter.

It's an image I can't suppress when listening to this album: '70s rec-rooms and multiple sibling bedrooms where, surrounded by the trappings of middle-class suburbia, the kids would get blitzed and float away on serene voices and hard guitars. As one who was only thirteen in '72, this album pre-dates my actual exposure to such scenes, but it registers my sense of things to come, in more ways than one.

Tell your dad, Get off my back
Tell him what we said 'bout 'Paint It, Black'
Rock 'n' roll is here to stay.
Come inside, well it's OK
--Bell and Chilton, "Thirteen" (1972)

SOUND

The last Daily Themes assignments read before the break were for Sound, which sounds like a category for an Oscar. And the award for best achievement in Sound goes to...

It's a week I generally like because the writing moves closest to poetic effects without becoming verse. In fact, it's the week that reaffirms my commitment to prose as the more supple, the more expansive, the less precious form of writing. My preference for prose as the medium with which to do justice to the world we live in began to take root when I first became enamored of the prose of James Joyce in Ulysses. The sheer brilliance of that novel as prose (to say nothing of what it achieves with characterization or with verisimilitude or with symbolism) convinced me that few performances in poetry would ever come close to being adequate to the modern world in the way that Joyce's novel was and is. Of course there aren't many prose creations that come close to it either, but I think there are some that mine particular areas of the field that Joycean prose helped to lay out.

The assignment for Sound in prose that was the most difficult and the most interesting calls for creating aural textures with words that aren't intended to replicate sound but rather other textures or sensations. Food was a popular choice, but there were also a few that worked at achieving aural equivalents for interiors or landscapes, both of which seemed well worth trying.

In lecture, part of the following passage from Ulysses was cited for illustration:

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

And this, from Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:

Life with you was lovely--and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering 'l.' Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if I were dead too.

Though it wasn't included in lecture, I'll log the following:

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we're all their gangsters. Hadn't he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had her seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor's bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be. Northmen's thing made southfolk's place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan.--Finnegans Wake, I.8

THROUGH THE YEARS, 9

40 years ago: March 1967

I didn't hear any of this music until 1970, when my older brother bought this album and introduced it into the household. Fateful. Dylan would subsequently become the most important musical figure in my life. It didn't happen right away, but gradually. On this album, the song that fascinated me was "Like a Rolling Stone": I remember, in sixth grade, playing the song verse by verse, over and over again, until I got all the words right. Not just to understand them, but to memorize them. Then, the following summer, before going on the yearly week visit to the shore in Maryland, I found myself listening to "Mr. Tambourine Man," hypnotized, transported.

This album is the compendium of the various sounds of Dylan up until the motorcycle accident, after which his career went off toward country and what is called these days "roots music." Even in 1970, only four years after the latest stuff on the record, some of this music sounded incredibly dated, from a time and place one couldn't quite identify. At the time I knew nothing about the musical tradition Dylan was drawing on, and more or less reinventing through his participation; eventually I realized that some songs he wrote were sprinkled among all those traditional songs The Brothers Four sang. We had some of their albums around the house. I was never sure where they came from, I suppose my dad, who liked country, folk and "real singers" like Mario Lanza and Barbra Streisand. Dylan he abhorred. And I think my mom hated him even more.

I wasn't too sure I "liked" him either. After all, I was listening to this record at the same time that my brother's venture into heavy metal had brought the first three Black Sabbath albums into the house -- and which made me "cool" briefly in sixth grade when the resident hip kid/street tough was amazed to learn that I knew the song "Hand of Doom," knew that it was about OD'ing on heroin, and could quote it correctly from memory, but that's another story. But maybe not. That quoting from memory talent is probably what drew me to Dylan. So many words! It was clearly an act of considerable memory for him to sing the songs, much less for an adolescent to sing along, matching him word for word (not, I regret to say, note for note).

But what about the Dylan voice anyway? It's what made him the scourge of my parents' ears. Note: they hated him more than they hated heavy metal! I think it's because you could learn to ignore the repetitive riffs and the sledgehammer beat, but you can't ignore Dylan's singing. It bites into your brain, like the bird outside your window that starts screaming at dawn and won't stop. Listening to him now, after decades of familiarity with every instant of these songs, I'm always impressed by how various his voice is, how carefully he crafts the tone of the voice for each song. "Blowin' in the Wind" is meditative, almost defeated. "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" is sing-songy in that way that is most often parodied in Dylan mockers, its tempo somewhere between an anthem and a nursery rhyme. "It Ain't Me, Babe" was a song I found very difficult to listen to back then. It seemed far too naked for professional singing. I felt embarrassed for him. Even though, as I later learned, it was one of the famous Dylan "put-down" songs, it seemed incredibly sad, each "no, no, no" not defiant at all but an admission of inadequacy. I was much more comfortable with the put-downs Dylan sang once he got a rock band behind him.

"Like a Rolling Stone" is a song aimed at us all. Recently, in reviews of the film Factory Girl, about Edie Sedgwick, reviewers trotted out the old chestnut: she was "the subject" of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Oh, wow, that explains it! I'm quite willing to believe that every song has a catalyst, some person that makes it "necessary" to write that song (as when Dylan says, in the song "Sara," addressed to his wife: "writing 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you"). "Rolling Stone" -- like The Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" or The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home" -- is a song that encapsulates a state of soul. I won't even say it's just "for the time" because it seems to me that "that time" occurs again and again. That every generation hits it and recognizes themselves in the song. What "Rolling Stone" does that those other examples doesn't is imbue the song's lyrics with scathing commentary rather than wistful melancholy. Sure, it could read as a put-down of Warhol Factory fodder, but, as Dylan remarked about "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "it's a song you can sing to yourself sometimes." "Rolling Stone" is like that. The part about the mystery tramp and alibis and asking to make a deal used to floor me as, emotionally, the crux of the song and in some ways the place to stop (especially since 'the mystery tramp' -- whether I listened to the song as aimed at "me," or with Dylan as the "you" -- was death).

The third verse always seemed to me weaker than the first two and was often dropped from live performances of the song. But the fourth verse is a corker; it could offer solace to "you" in as much as "Napolean in rags," whose language so amuses, is actually the singer. "Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse . . . you're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." If this is imagined as a loss of self, secrecy, and defensiveness through some all-including love, then fine, a positive assertion. I can imagine this being Dylan's intention, reaching out, as he does in "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," to the bird with a broken wing. But, if Napoleon is a third presence, then that trustfulness is probably naive, and this figure is another emissary from the life of serial delusions "you" is doomed to (if it is "about" Edie then Andy seems a good candidate for Napoleon here). And all the secrets are exposed because the singer, cruelly, lovingly (perhaps) has just exposed them.

I won't go on to comment on "Mr. Tambourine Man" which, because of the beach imagery at the end, long stood for that feeling of being on the edge of eternity when in front of the ocean. But a later insight into the song was when I identified Dylan as himself "the ragged clown" in the following lines, which became for me the emotional crux of the song (in a verse often left out of live performances of the song):

And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing
--Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (1965)

CHARACTERS

This week's tasks in Daily Themes had to do with the creation of characters. I like the assignments: to characterize a person through a habit or trait; to observe a stranger and imagine facts about him or her (which, more often than not, illumines something about the observer); to describe someone you dislike, while removing your own point of view (which is to say, the enmity, so that, if it works, the person's behavior is justified by its own logic, no matter how infuriating it may be); to characterize someone through likely actions or unlikely ones; to describe how someone matches or doesn't match their own personal ad's list of attributes.

What's unfair about the assignments is the more interesting or complex a character is (especially when based on someone the writer knows well), the more difficult it is to sum them up in the required number of words. If one considers Henry James' dictum that "plot is the revelation of character" then it becomes obvious that "character" will not be revealed except through action and interaction within a plot. This becomes quite obvious when "a type" has to distinguish itself somehow.

Character is something that is best manifested in layers of time. This is even more the case if one feels, as I do, that character is the most fluid of attributes, unknowable except in terms of what the person has done, can do, or will do. Why plot is necessary: so that the character will have some incentive or catalyst that makes it knowable. People, I maintain, aren't anything, in and of themselves. This is not the same as saying that they are simply the sum of their actions and influences, since even if we knew their entire past and everything that matters to them (as we presumably do about ourselves), we still don't know for a fact what they (or we ourselves) will do, or, quite often, even what we're capable of, until some situation presents itself.

Of course the real meaning of James' dictum is that it's trying to explain what plot is. A plot has no purpose except to reveal character. Something has to happen. The basic version of this idea is that two characters are a dialogue, three characters is a plot. This I would say indicates the basic building block of the plots I conceive of writing: triangles, sometimes interlocking with other triangles.

Let's put some mountains here,
Otherwise what are the characters going to fall off of?
And what about stairs?
--Laurie Anderson, "Big Science" (1982)