Now that we’re over a month past my birthday and already
past the autumn equinox—cue The Kinks’ “End of a Season”—I’ve been visited of
late by some nostalgic twinges about this time of year in other years. It’s not just the immediate fall-out of
turning another year older, I insist, but is rather due to another fact about
me and August: I tend to move in that month, when I do move, and that means
that September, with its golden days (cue Lou Reed’s cover of Kurt Weill’s
“September Song”) mellowing fruitfully into October, has often been a season of
newness. I’ve got a thing for fall,
y’all.
Central Park, NY, 9/14/13 |
The years I find myself reflecting on are: 1979, 1983, 1989,
1994, and 1999. Kind of regular intervals,
huh? Yeah. And I guess it’s the loooooooong time since I
got me new digs that sets off this wistful recall bit. It could also have to do with my feeling that
time stopped around 2000—I used to call it limbo—and only, maybe, started to
get going again around 2009. I used to quip, “Connecticut is Purgatory—I
can’t leave until I atone for my sins, but I had no idea there were so
many.” I stopped saying that somewhere
along the way—once, on a return from where I’m from, in 2010, I realized that
New Haven just seemed like “home,” for all intents and purposes (except those
that make me wish I were far, far away…or at least in New York), and that’s
been that, since then.
If all this sounds like I’m watching the clock too much, so
be it. What can ya do? I’ve always been attuned to that “long
withdrawing roar,” knowing, one of these days, I’m gonna ride out of here on
the outgoing tide—and I don’t just mean New Haven. Beyond that—let’s call it temporal
sense—there’s the fact that I like to spot-check my memory of things against
“the times” themselves, though not in quite so generic a fashion as that may
sound. One’s time is always one’s own,
to a certain extent, regardless of what the real world is doing. Or, at least, that’s how it’s been in my
lifetime—in 1979 I turned twenty and in 1999 forty, and after that year there
have been some big changes in the world, so maybe that’s what I’m reminiscing
about too…
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In the fall of 1979 I’d just moved to Philadelphia with the
woman who would eventually become my wife.
I remember this as the time of getting to know the city, which meant a
lot of wandering about as the days got gradually cooler, feeling, maybe for the
first time since I graduated high school (1977), that I wasn’t losing something
with the loss of summer. Everything
seemed rather open-ended at the time. I
attended poetry readings and read poems in public for the first time, making
friends who shared writing and reading.
Mary and I were living in a building that was less than elegant, but it
had a great location immediately behind the Public Library on the Parkway, and
my oldest friend from DE, Tim, lived in an upstairs apartment. A major family event that fall was the marriage
of my older brother.
Frazetta's The Barbarian |
I still worked in oil paints at the time, even still did
Frazetta knock-offs for cash, but also did a freaky self-portrait I kinda wish
I still had. Off-and-on, I was working
on a “poetic prose” work, a kind of metaphoric autobiography. So much was still ahead! I hadn’t read the entirety of Ulysses yet, nor any Proust, nor finished Gravity's Rainbow. I did read the Beckett trilogy at that time,
and got into Henry Miller. I wrote all first drafts by hand and had an
electric typewriter.
It was also, very definitely, the end of the 1970s, which
was a transitional point I still return to.
The affronts to classic rock that came with disco and punk,
respectively, meant a “new wave” was needed, and that was getting
underway. Looking back, one also knows
it was the end of the Democratic party’s brief little run with Carter—as a
response to Ford—and that the era of Reagan and Thatcher was about to dawn, big
time. So, in a sense I feel privileged
to have been old enough and young enough to enjoy the world before those two
tireless workers for the enriching of the upper class and private corporations
(and defense contractors) took the helm.
Pope John Paul II visited the U.S. and spoke to the masses on the Ben
Franklin Parkway, right around the corner from where we were living (that's the public library on the right-hand side facing into the circle, and the art museum way at the end of the parkway, at 11 o'clock).
The Pope of the Parkway |
Rittenhouse Square |
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In the fall of 1983, I was back in New Castle, DE, where I
grew up, in an apartment only a few blocks from the family homestead—which
meant plenty of grandparent care for the daughter I’d had by then. In fact, what I remember best about that fall
was going into the Wilmington Public Library and taking out books to read to
Kajsa. It was the start of that odyssey
of reading aloud to her that took up many of those evenings, and
even continued after she was in college.
If I’ve got someone to listen to me read aloud, I’m pretty much a happy
camper, folks. And Kajsa was a captive
audience. The Halloween of that fall is
also well-remembered because it was the first one—she was not yet three—she fully
took part in.
Kajsa, Halloween '83 |
It was a great fall, as I recall, full of deep melancholia
and nostalgia simply due to the fact that I was back in those environs
again. I had hoped I’d left them for
good. The return caused a lot of
ambivalence—there’s an example of great understatement. I was ostensibly continuing with a novel I’d
begun the previous spring, but, with the first of five parts written and work
begun on the second, I went off the rails—I blame it in part on the suburban setting,
and on a certain over-ambition in the project, but mainly I think it was due to
increasing intellectual curiosity about things I knew nothing about.
Until that point (I was now 24), I’d gotten
by with essentially a DIY autodidact approach to things—my heroes being people
like Dylan, who didn’t go to college, and writers who lived before post-secondary
study was common—but with my increasing enthusiasm for the likes of Joyce and
Pynchon (I’d been reading and re-reading Ulysses,
Gravity’s Rainbow, and even Finnegans Wake since 1982), I began to
see the limitations of being a “know-nothing” novelist. I was still working my way through Proust’s Recherche and a clear image of that time
for me is the apartment furnishings we had in Philly transposed to New Castle,
where I sat reading it. By Thanksgiving we had actually bought a living-room
set. Clearly the bourgeoising had
begun!
Mary, Thanksgiving '83 |
In 1983, American media was beginning its love affair with
the Reagan administration. The tide was
turning—as was pointed out wonderfully in a song of the period by The Kinks called “Young Conservatives.” The children of the
hippies wanted no part of counter-culture—they all wanted in on mainstream
culture, and the former rebels were, for the most part, becoming enamoured of
money and leisure, at the cost of whatever ideals they once had about changing
the world. It was all business as usual,
only more so. The movie of the moment
that fall, which caught some of that pretty well, Hollywood-style, was Lawrence
Kasdan’s The Big Chill, in part
because its characters were believable versions of the elders we younger Baby
Boomers could see going through their changes.
The Cast of The Big Chill |
Dylan came out of his “Born Again” period with one of his
more prickly LPs, Infidels, which had
a great sound for the time, thanks to Sly and Robbie, Mick Taylor, and Mark
Knopfler, and took a rather dim view of the current state of things, while
manifesting some ostensibly pro-Israel sentiments and a feel for Old Testament
justice that seemed to put aside all that “turn the other cheek” stuff. But the music I got wind of that fall that would soon
captivate me was produced by a quartet of guys around my age from Athens, GA: R.E.M. had released
their debut album, Murmur, and pushed
aside, somewhat, my allegiance to the Brit music I’d brought with me in the
return to DE, things like Shriekback’s Care,
Bauhaus’ Burning from the Inside, and
Echo & The Bunnymen’s Porcupine. Elvis Costello’s Punch the Clock, which came out in spring of ’83, was still a
touchstone with songs like “Everyday I Write the Book,” “Invisible Man,” and “The
King of Thieves”—all of which worked wonderfully as commentary on my state of
mind, in a manner of speaking. A song
“about” the loss of Philly as my stomping grounds was The Psychedelic Furs’
“Goodbye.” Music that immediately
recalls the sound of the time is New Order’s “Age of Consent” and “Your Silent Face.”
R.E.M.: Berry, Stipe, Buck, Mills |
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Six years later, in the fall of 1989, I had a double degree
in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Delaware, had
learned to read French and German, and Latin, sorta, and had moved the family
to Princeton, New Jersey, where I was to begin studies as a Mellon Fellow in
Comparative Literature. It was a very
rainy fall, very wet and humid, and I remember walking from campus to the grade
school, where Kajsa was in third grade, on afternoons that were often heavy
with clouds or full of after-the-rain sun.
My most beloved car parked by our grad student family barracks |
When school started—is there anything quite as bittersweet as the “Back
to School” period of one’s children?—my wife was still commuting to her job at
DuPont’s Experimental Station in Wilmington, DE, before she dumped it for a research
assistant job in the Psychology Lab at PU. After all the time spent on the interstate in
Delaware, the easy walking distance of everything we did regularly in
Princeton, with its air of genteel suburbia, was a welcome change. I guess I would say things were good. All I had to do was read a lot and talk about
books. And I was still reading aloud to
Kajsa; that’s when we began The Lord of
the Rings, the first time.
The music of the time was Dylan’s Oh Mercy, which was something of a return to form for him, after
several years of lackluster stuff; and I visited for the first time in any
depth the early songs—the Asylum years—of Tom Waits, who had been on a roll
since 1983, on Island. Probably if I
really want to bring back those early fall days of 1989, I should put on Don
Henley’s “End of the Innocence” or The Rolling Stones’ “Mixed Emotions”—songs
from two albums I bought at the time but don’t have much occasion to play. It’s
always the stuff you relegate to the past that works best for recalling that
past.
You watch too many movies. |
I’m hard-pressed to remember any
film of that exact period—I know I saw Woody Allen’s masterful Crimes and Misdemeanors when it opened
in October—because we were well-launched into that parental thing of not seeing
movies till they came out on VHS (it was still VHS, kids), and it wasn’t till a
little later that we started borrowing tapes of classic films from the
Princeton Public Library—we didn’t do that until we’d been demoralized utterly
by the kids’ fare at the local video stores.
Our in-car tapes—approved by Kajsa, 8—for the 90 minute drive each way
to DE (for grandparent visits), were things like a compilation of the Eagles, The Who’s original Tommy recording, and some old Marty
Robbins songs my brother gave me (music I listened to when I was in grade school). You
could say that I wasn’t discovering new music so much as re-discovering old music
with my kid.
Kajsa, the playground at Riverside Elementary School |
The end of an era, 1989 |
What did I read that made a difference? That fall semester of 1989 was the first time
I read Don Quixote. It was the first time I read any Walter
Benjamin or Mikhail Bakhtin. It was finally reading some major pre-nineteenth-century fiction with Thomas Pavel, and starting to explore theories of narrative. It was a semester of
revisiting my early enthusiasm for Nietzsche—in Princeton, professional
home of his translator/commentator Walter Kaufmann—with Alexander Nehamas' course on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Good times.
Anne-Lise, a fellow first year, made a big impression on me by assigning the Coda to Harold Bloom's Poems of Our Climate, and that set off the reading of Anxiety of Influence, which was pretty major, still. My extracurricular writing was taken up by a series of poems—the first
one was awarded an Academy of American Poets prize by Denise Levertov my last
semester at UDE—based on the 22 trumps or Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. I was deep in Agonville, in other words.
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I guess we could say I lost the agon. With 1994 we move to a more depressive state
of affairs. In September, though, we
weren’t there yet. That was the month I
went back to Princeton—having moved to Hamden, CT, in August—to defend my
dissertation on “supreme fiction” in Proust’s Recherche, the novels of Joyce, and the novels of Pynchon. On the one hand, that event—the awarding of a
Ph.D. for my extended essay on those three fixtures of my personal pantheon—was
the culmination of ideas that had been in play since…1983 at least.
Background: East Pyne, Princeton University |
And that’s part of the problem—I hadn’t
learned well enough how to employ the discourse of academia at the time. I was still operating by my own lights, as
though what I were after was not gainful employment in the world of
postmodern-postcolonial-poststructuralist-Anglophone teaching, but rather the pursuit
of some kind of personal clarity about the art of the novel. Old hat, passé, and my only
defense of trying to understand something called “aesthetic experience” in
fiction was the fact that I’d studied art as much as I had literature and
wasn’t particularly interested in the novel per se, but only in novels of
stylistic challenge. This was not a
useful approach in the time of literature as soft science, sociology, and
identity politics. So it goes.
In moving to CT, I achieved one dream anyway—to get out of
the mid-Atlantic States and into something more like New England. That was fine, but I wasn’t overjoyed about
being in a suburban town like Hamden. We
chose it because we were told that was the school district we should be in—I
don’t even remember by whom—and so we settled down in a townhouse right behind
the school (with more space than we’d ever had, three floors’ worth, including a huge basement where Kajsa did artwork) and soon realized that the only culture to be had
was via the oasis of Hank Paper’s Best Video store.
Thus began my daughter’s familiarization with the best that cinema has to offer, on tape. That and my record collection were the basis for instruction, and still quite a bit of reading aloud—like Austen’s Emma, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. One of the best albums of the year was Tom Petty’s Wildflowers—possibly his best ever. I had a tape of it that I listened to on a Walkman while exercising—missing greatly the path along the Raritan canal in Princeton—and I still remember being drenched in melancholy by “Wake Up Time.” Other big albums for me at the time were Neil Young's Sleeps with Angels, and Willie Nelson's Across the Borderline, and new groups were The Cranberries (remember them?) and Counting Crows whose debut from 1993, August and Everything After, still got a lot of play from me. If I really want to recreate the fall with a blast from the past: here. And a song that “said it all,” from Nirvana (Cobain was already gone).
Hank Paper |
Thus began my daughter’s familiarization with the best that cinema has to offer, on tape. That and my record collection were the basis for instruction, and still quite a bit of reading aloud—like Austen’s Emma, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. One of the best albums of the year was Tom Petty’s Wildflowers—possibly his best ever. I had a tape of it that I listened to on a Walkman while exercising—missing greatly the path along the Raritan canal in Princeton—and I still remember being drenched in melancholy by “Wake Up Time.” Other big albums for me at the time were Neil Young's Sleeps with Angels, and Willie Nelson's Across the Borderline, and new groups were The Cranberries (remember them?) and Counting Crows whose debut from 1993, August and Everything After, still got a lot of play from me. If I really want to recreate the fall with a blast from the past: here. And a song that “said it all,” from Nirvana (Cobain was already gone).
While you might think earning a
doctorate in five years on a prestigious fellowship at one of the top three or
five graduate schools in the country should be cause for celebration, I
actually felt more down than I ever had before—the promise of those five years
had shortsighted me, in effect. If I had
my druthers, I would’ve stayed on there, but, having entered the job market the
previous year and gotten nary a nibble, I didn’t see much in the way of
prospects. It was inevitable that I’d move to where my wife got a job and try
to make do.
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale |
That meant, in the
short-run, a nominal post-doc at Yale that gave me library privileges and the
ability to sit-in on courses. But I’d
been in courses for 8 years, undergrad and grad, with a year and a half of
dissertation writing. I wanted to keep
writing, but what? I wrote maybe two
poems that fall that I still like. And
read a lot about allegory in an effort to do the ol' conversion of diss into first book bit (I pause for a moment to recall the old Cross Campus Library at
Yale and “machine city”), and I entered the job market—one of the rituals of
fall that could always be counted on
to make anxious and bitter my favorite season.
In 1994, Clinton—the first candidate I’d voted for—had been
President for a year, and the Republicans were pissed because a moderate but
effective Democrat is the worst thing they can face. I don’t remember a single thing memorable in
world politics that season, except some stirrings in Iraq that would later become a much
bigger deal. The main change was that the internet was becoming more and more
the inevitable means for every idea. I
was still using an IBM—in DOS—as if it were just a souped-up typewriter and was
mainly irritated by having to sign on to my wife’s little box-like Macintosh to
go “online.” Somewhere around this time
I began reading all the novels of Don DeLillo, in part because Pynchon’s novel
of 1990, Vineland, hadn’t exactly
wowed me.
You could say I wasn’t really satisfied with anything at the time, not even with what Emerson calls the sanctity of one's own mind. I was still dipping into Ashbery: the Selected (finally read “A Wave”), Three Poems, and Flow
Chart, as about the only reliable “finding of a satisfaction.” Dylan wasn’t
up to much but he did play a fine show at the 25th Anniversary Woodstock
concert. The main thing—and Clinton was
emblematic of this—was that the Baby Boomers had come into their own. Gone were old man Reagan and old man Bush;
gone was Thatcher. It was the time for
those born in the ’40s to take the helm, and that meant a lot of reliving or
reconfiguring of what “the legacy of the Sixties” was all about. And I suppose that’s the kind of thing I
found myself explaining to my teenaged daughter. The book you had to read was Fredric
Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), and the must-see movie—my friend Joe
dragged me to see it down in New Jersey, against my skepticism due to all the
hype—was Pulp Fiction, released in
October.
Jules announces his decision |
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1999. 40. And for the first time, ever, I was living
alone. Not totawy awone because my
daughter was only away at college—in-coming Freshman at Maryland Institute,
College of Art—and my wife was only away in Collegeville, PA, helping out with
the care of Ryan, her firstborn grandson, who entered the world in June. So, there I was, on my own, enjoying a
respite from family life, a quasi-bachelor and a busy Teaching Fellow, thanks
to a great guy, Michael, who was Director of Undergrad Studies in English at Yale, and a
dearth of grad students at the moment to take on section duties. I was the “pinch instructor,” in other
words. Not a tenure-track spot, and not
my own courses, but that meant all I had to do was show up and talk about the
book of the week. Or selection of
poems. Or whatever. And read and grade. I was now living in New Haven, in an apartment in a Mock Tudor mansion, without a car, and that meant I got to walk a lot, and a walk
into campus was about 20 minutes. This
is a great way to live. No parking concerns, no public transportation
concerns. In a pinch, the Yale shuttle
stopped mere steps from my front door. Groovy.
Apart from a lot of campus activities, the other thing I put my time into was devising a series of
fictions that would resume and revise that novel I was working on when I left
Philly at age 24. You see, all
that time spent reading Proust had convinced me that the translation of life
into fiction required the transforming effects of the passage of time, sort of
what I’m doing in miniature—and biographically—here. Which is a way of saying that there exists,
at least in my imagination, a “different story” to the one I’m tracing here,
and that, in fact, this story is rather boring because I can’t make just
anything happen, as I rehearse here the limits of my abilities and the tests of
my patience, and my grasp of inspirations, and all that. The fictive voice is different, has to
be. And I started working on that again
in 1999.
For a long time I’d been a regular maker of mix tapes. My own “Saga” began in February 1978 with the
purchase of a Teac and continued to my 40th birthday. I made a big deal of “concluding it” on my
40th birthday, as though “putting away childish things”—in fact, the main
reason for making tapes, for some time, had been to disseminate my associative
grasp of my collection to Kajsa, since 1994, and to my two younger brothers,
since 1984. But now, with more solitary
time on my hands, I resumed tape-making for myself with a vengeance, and
somehow “free” of a certain rationale that dictated the tapes of the Saga. I might be hard-pressed to define that
rationale, or not, but in any case, it might take a full essay to do that
“work” justice. Suffice to say, I had
beaucoup de cassettes to stimulate my retrospective mood.
My daughter sent along new, older music to me such as Vic Chesnutt’s About to Choke—“Disintegrate” captures the mood—and I went back to the oldies of my youth (work on the novel meant revisiting the era of my teens) with the rediscovery of prog-rock. Interestingly, prog-rock had seemed to find its answer in some newish bands Kajsa got into, like Elf Power and The Flaming Lips—this was the time of The Soft Bulletin, a discovery we’d made by seeing them live at Philly’s Electric Factory. At that time Cutler’s used CD bins were supplying eclectic new recruits to the collection, like The Best of Nilsson, which I will always associate with this time.
Sleeping with your devil mask? |
I know I must’ve seen some new release movies, but all I fondly
recall from 1999 are The Matrix,
released in the spring, and Eyes Wide
Shut, released in the summer.
Without transportation to Best Video, I relied on NetFlix, a new,
internet thing that mailed you discs. I
remember seeing L’Avventura from
Criterion on my Sony and reflected that I’d never seen it so pristine. It was the time for widescreen viewing on the
little screen.
The old portal |
And it was the time of finally having a computer that was
connected to the internet, albeit via dial-up: Song lyrics! Amazon! Napster! Google! Porn! AOL Chatrooms! IMs! Trivia! There was
no wikipedia or YouTube yet, but there were other things you could surf, especially with a
link through Yale, like online academic journals, much better than creeping
around the musty stacks…or not. And, of
course, the art of email, still an acquired taste after all these years, as it’s
rare to find someone who knows how to make the most of it, was yet to be
discovered. Back then, it was still
relegated to work-based stuff, with students and colleagues mostly. Email with one’s intimates seemed kind of
alienating, somehow. It was the time of start-ups, the time of fabulous
wealth through computers—we were all now and forever enthrall to Bill Gates and
Steve Jobs and those guys who made Google.
Y2K fears were stirring, but that would be as nothing to the rough beast smirking toward Washington—by way of election chicanery in Florida the following year—to be borne…for
8 bleak years.
Fells Point, Baltimore |
Kajsa has long since left Baltimore for the Boroughs and work in Manahatta, and (hear wheedling voice of Catherine O'Hara mimicking the aged Katherine Hepburn), “I'm still here,” and maybe I’m reminiscing about Septembers because I’m
aware of something that has changed recently, or because I’m in hopes of some
change ahead. In either case, it’s part
of the fall’s yield to take stock of such things, I suppose.
November, 2012 |
2 comments:
This is really wonderful, Donald, and beautiful writing. Thank you for it!
Thanks, John. I guess retrospects bring out the best in me...I'm always happy to be thinking about an earlier time!
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