WHATCHA READIN?, 5

9. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (American, 1973)

An English teacher in my high school, who later became a friend and was known for being something of ‘a freak,’ hearing I’d read a bunch of Vonnegut and had recently made it halfway through Ulysses, told me about a crazy book, published a few years before and deemed ‘unreadable’ by the Pulitzer committee, that featured a character who goes down a toilet bowl. He offered it as perhaps the most challenging work of recent fiction.

Not much later, I accepted the challenge. The trip down the toilet didn’t put me off, but I do remember one morning in homeroom reading the infamous Brigadier Pudding shit-eating masochism scene and feeling a bit peculiar in my first few classes that day. I kinda let my reading of the book drift a bit after that, which was spring of 1977. The next time I remember reading the book at length was at the beach in June of 1978. That return was in part inspired by picking up a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in May of ‘78 (see 'Whatcha Readin? 6'). But even then I didn’t get through GR.

It wasn’t until September 1980 that I finally got through the final third of the book: the end of 'In the Zone' and 'The Counterforce,' and it was then, living in Philadelphia, that I got to know other readers of the book. And every time I crossed paths with someone who had “been there,” who could recall some improbable, baffling, hilarious, inspired, mind-expanding scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, there was a starry-eyed high, a contagious elation. Yes, it’s true, it’s really there because someone else has read it too!

Given my feelings about literature as a field of study (as expressed via Rimbaud in 'Whatcha Readin? 4'), I must’ve needed to find a living literary hero I could believe in. And Pynchon, in his weirdly insular refusal to be a public person, to be, basically, unseen and unheard of since sending a comedian to accept the National Book award for him in 1974, was the ideal figure. In addition to Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, a book I was in love with in those closing months of high school was Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). The deregulation of the senses, capiche? Pynchon’s novel, like nothing else I’d ever seen, felt like the wild imaginings of someone completely outside or beyond the rational norms, the parameters of conventional thought -- whether of history or of narrative or of literature or of myth. The book was paranoid and psychotic, but absurdly so, pushed to the point of clairvoyant vision, or to where that vision must break down before the unprincipled rationales by which the world is run and governed.

Pynchon wasn’t a person. I couldn’t care less about what the guy who perpetrated this did with his days and nights or how he had gotten this incredible thing produced and published. Pynchon was prose, or, even more, 'Pynchon' was the name given to what was going on in my mind while reading this prose. Then I read his previous two novels and saw something else: it’s not 'Pynchon,' because that author has written two other books that, no matter their merits, don’t do what GR does. So, it was the narrator of GR, that unique and unrepeatable performance itself, that was the mainline. And the only place to find that was in GR.

Thus began a love affair that lasted for another four years, or until Slow Learner’s Intro (1984) introduced a guy named Thomas Pynchon who was a writer and who had the proprietary rights to GR (even though he said nothing about that book in the SL intro). And this Pynchon was going to go on with his career, write blurbs and reviews and produce more novels. Fine. But that guy isn’t the narrator of GR. To be a fan of GR was like, oh pick your own example, being a fan of Blonde on Blonde and having someone put one of Dylan’s ‘80s albums on... or of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and someone puts on 'Silly Love Songs.' Or Kind of Blue, Miles with Coltrane, and now you’re hearing Miles with Chick Corea. There’s a wide difference, not just a difference in the perpetrator of these things, but in the times themselves, in what was possible or imaginable.

It’s here, perhaps, that the point of this exercise of '15 Books That Stayed With You' becomes clearest to me. Because Pynchon is the first person on this list who still has an ongoing career, and so he becomes the best example for how definitive it is, that moment in which a book finds you -- in your own life (I’m insisting on pre-30) -- and in its life. GR found me in the first decade after its publication when it simply made every other work of fiction published in that period feel like an also-ran, written by someone who had largely missed the point of what the decade previous to its publication -- from the assassination of JFK to the impeachment of Nixon essentially -- was 'like.'

Pynchon got it, and he translated that feel into a vast cinematic retrospect on the era --World War II -- he was a child in, and which we all, post-WWII brats, grew up teething on. In other words, it was as timely and as necessary, to my conception of things, as any work of fiction could be. It has been hard for me to imagine ever since how any mere novel could beat its time.

The CDs: Badfinger

Take a look at these guys: the carefully coiffed hair of the post-Beatles pop-rock band. Badfinger were under the wing of the former mop tops from the get-go. Their first hit was a McCartney composition: ‘Come and Get It.’ And they were signed to Apple Records. On the only album of theirs I own, 1972's Straight Up, George Harrison produces 4 of the 12 tracks and adds his trademark All Things Must Pass era slide to the hit single ‘Day After Day.’ Harrison was supposed to do the whole thing but had to split to help save Bangla Desh, so in the end early ‘70s hit-meister Todd Rundgren took the helm. On the re-mastered CD, six of the tracks are also presented in versions produced by The Beatles’ sound engineer Geoff Emerick.

So, yeah, the sound of Badfinger on Staight Up is as close to The Beatles as you can get at the time. At times, particularly with some of the vocals sporting the husky tone of McCartney’s singing in the later Beatles’ releases, and with the harmonies modelled on the Fab Four, you can almost believe you’re hearing demos of unreleased Beatles material.

Why demos? Because Badfinger never manages the full panoply of The Beatles sound; if you compare this record to Abbey Road, Straight Up is a bit thin. There’s none of the heaviness that The Beatles, largely due to Lennon, mustered for every album. The musical ideas here are serviceable, and what they did rather well, in 1972, is sound just reminiscent enough to give an extra poignancy to radio songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Day After Day,’ 45s that were part of my transition to early ‘teens. The songs have a certain melancholy grandeur I always liked, and still do: ‘looking out of my lonely room / day after day.’ It’s in the ringing sound of the voices and bright guitars chiming so well together.

Hearing the hits in situ with the other tracks, when I first got this CD a few years back (in the beginning of my ‘relive the ‘70s period'), was a bit revelatory. The whole record is satisfyingly listenable, even if --- to sustain my listening -- I have to accept the CD as an album of the period, in a way I don’t for those albums of earlier eras that manage to convince of their intrinsic worth decade after decade. A song like ‘Name of the Game’ is an exceptionable track, standing out because of its anthemic tone. But too much of the stuff tends to blend into a vaguely Beatlesque sound that, one feels, the band simply congratulated themselves on attaining.

After all, this was the early period after The Beatles went their separate ways, and many were still pining for some type of musical reunion. Badfinger, of course, didn’t have the skills to be heir apparents, but they did have enough of the sound to make them, briefly, ‘the poor man’s version.’ At some of the stronger moments on this record, one might believe they could emerge from that founding shadow, but if they dropped the Beatleisms, what would they be? The Joey Molland tunes, as opposed to those by Beatlesque Pete Ham, suggest a kind of lighter Bad Company. And who needs that?

In any case, there they remain: remembrancers of that time when everyone wanted to be The Beatles, except The Beatles themselves.

WHATCHA READIN’?, 4

Yesterday, Oct. 20th, is Arthur Rimbaud’s day of birth, so, in honor of that, it’s time to do the next book in my list of '15 Books That Stayed With You.'

8. Complete Works, by Arthur Rimbaud (French; trans. by Paul Schmidt, 1976)

Previous to Schmidt’s version, the only complete English Rimbaud, I believe, was Wallace Fowlie’s, which I had gotten from the library sometime earlier in high school, after coming across the name a few times, notably in commentary about Dylan songs like 'Desolation Row.' But Fowlie’s volume, which was bilingual, offered English language versions of the poems that were too stilted, too dependant on the originals. A good way to go if you’re trying to parse what the French says and just want to look at the English for guidance, but it was rare for the English version to read as if it could stand alone. Even the prose sounded too dated. Which of course it was, since Rimbaud wrote the originals of these works from 1869-73, or from age fifteen to nineteen. Try as I might to get into Fowlie’s versions, it just didn’t happen.

Then, in the spring of my senior year of high school, age seventeen, I picked up Schmidt’s version, and fell in love with it. Here were rhythms and locutions that sounded contemporary -- or contemporary enough. Which is to say: contemporary verse, i.e., what was being written and published in 1977, didn’t interest me at all. What I wanted was older stuff that could still fire my imagination with some idea of a great poetic past. And that’s precisely what concerned Rimbaud. In A Season in Hell, written in the most poetic prose I’d ever encountered, he was mourning the end of a poetic past that had occurred sometime before his late teens. Ah, there’s the rub, indeed. That was exactly how I felt too, Arthur. My imagination was much better before I knew it was merely imaginary, so to speak. As a child, in other words.

But there was more to my infatuation with Rimbaud. And I call it that because from about seventeen to twenty-one, when I gave a public reading from Schmidt’s translation at The Painted Bride Art Center on South Street in Philadelphia, A Season in Hell dominated my imagination to a degree that no work of literature had done before or since. Or rather: Hamlet would be the only contender, but it wasn’t the play Hamlet, it was the character Hamlet. And Rimbaud went one better than that because he wasn’t a character. He was a French kid born in Charleville in 1854, and what he wrote, the voices and personae he created, made claims for poetry that were wholly unworkable, but which, for that very reason, were filled with the rapturous grandeur of the poet as eternal teen.

That might well sound insufferable. Everyone likes to denigrate teens, and everyone likes to smile smugly when they recall themselves as teens (if they’re willing to at all). But Rimbaud was no ordinary teen, or maybe he was the quintessence of what the notion of teen should impress on us: no longer a child, but still able to recall what it meant to be a child, what it felt like. Not yet aged into anything like acceptance of the blandness and drudgery of life, still able to experience the mind, the passions, the appetites, the senses, language itself as uncanny presences that simply surge up, that have a logic or an intention all their own, not yet scripted to coincide with some 'purpose' to life, some 'given' or situation in which one must abide and thrive.

Not even writing poetry and having a literary career could qualify as such a purpose for Rimbaud. And that’s probably why I loved him most. He knew it was all bullshit. Parnassus was home to stuffed gods. It didn’t matter that they were technically brilliant, that they were fêted and celebrated and had great accolades and numinous careers. Big fucking deal. They hadn’t re-made poetry, they hadn’t insulted Beauty, they hadn’t dreamed the impossible and then tried to describe it. They persisted with well-made poems placed in respected journals. Quel fucking bore.

But, unlike many an arrogant teen who might thumb his nose at his elders and become a rebel, Rimbaud was truly gifted. He didn’t just contain chaos, he had an amazing facility for making that chaos appear -- for sounding its depths, with a pristine lucidity that probably only a French teen could hope to have.

Rimbaud was thoroughly extravagant, a word I’d rather use than decadent, though he was that too. But decadence too readily conjures the senescent, the too-much-ness of feeling, a satiety that turns to disgust. These indeed were some of Rimbaud’s tones, possibly his favorite pose. But what got to me was his sheer energy. It was like Hamlet berating himself in endless speeches, going on while no one’s listening or, as he says, while he is so 'dreadfully attended.' That’s the feeling I got from Rimbaud too: that challenge: do you get it? Hey, clever poet guy, hey, Mr big name critic, hey, know-it-all scholar, hey, seen-it-all libertine, yeah you. Do you get this? Can you begin to see where it takes you? What it demands of you? No, probably you can't.

Rimbaud runs through the whole vain pageant of what it means to have creative genius -- and then drops it into the ocean. Throws it overboard. Signs off as the winds of change push him toward his twenties. Because sooner or later you’ll have to stop making such faces. You’ll have to join the human race. Rimbaud knew it was an absurd, inescapable fate. And again unlike Hamlet, who couldn’t ever stop being the prince, son of a murdered father, Rimbaud could simply stop being a poet, and he did.

But he left us the purest expression of talents beyond the ability of the person to bear them. The great curse of the poète maudit: to be too much, to have too much to be taken seriously, to be great not simply because one wrote great poems, but because one saw the poet’s fate to be forever cursed, outcast for not cleaning up the act, for daring to insist that poetry can’t really exist and still be poetry. It becomes, as Rimbaud’s mentor, lover, friend, and nemesis Verlaine said, 'literature.'

The difference? As Rimbaud made me see: poetry is the fire of extravagant imagination. It’s something you keep away from people because it will drive them mad. Literature is something you can teach in school to help people think and understand themselves and other people and the human condition, and other humanistic, liberal-minded panaceas ad nauseam.

Hard to get with that program once you’ve spent a season in hell.

FALL REPORT

So what have I been up to? Well, apart from nursing a very bad back that decided to play havoc with my life late in August, which includes lots of physical therapy and even acupuncture, I've been attending local events and writing about them. Here's me on "Listen Here," a series of readings from short stories by well-known writers at New Haven coffeehouses, and here's me on local collegiate drama: the Yale Cabaret's show of Euripedes' "Orestes," and two one-person shows, called Alter/Egos, and, here, on a multimedia show at the Cab and a production of a Tony Kushner play at the Yale Dramat. There's also a poem of mine from grad school days up at The Dirty Pond, a new online journal established to showcase New Haven locals. 

With a back this bad, going any further afield than "local" doesn't seem likely any time soon; thankfully, there's some interesting stuff close to home. I just checked and it's been over a year since I posted anything about my dear CD collection -- which has grown a little since -- and I really should do something about that soon. Badfinger, The Band, Bauhaus, Syd Barrett ... how long before I get to The Beatles? 

And then there's that "Whatcha Readin?" series which I really should finish before the year does. This year there's no Cinema at the Whitney as a regular, weekly occasion, so no posting about film-going from me. Gee, when's the last time I saw a new release film? But I did have an opportunity to write about the upcoming showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at Yale, in honor of its 40th anniversary, and in honor of the fact that its director, George Roy Hill, Yale '43, donated materials about the film to his alma mater. I'll post the link when that's up.

But I've also been watching a lot of films at home from the 1970-72 period. I have this somewhat ambitious plan of trying to write commentary on the '70s: films, music, novels, poetry. No drama? Nah, for that I'd rather talk about what I actually attend. The advantage of those other forms -- two I consider narrative, the other two lyrical -- is that one can always return to them at will. And that, at present, is what I'm most willing to do. My working title is: Wish You Were Here: the '70s Revisited. 

As Dr. Seuss might say: I'll make a list, it will grow and grow, will I ever write it? I don't know.