Songwriting: Happy to be under the influence

Little fits of snow a-fallin'
and I'm tired and cold and ready for spring
Bigger changes are a-comin'
and it's time to let them come on and sing . . .

I'm ready for spring. I'm tired of shivering all the damn time. To speed things up, I gave myself a Southwestern moment for midday meal and made gluten-free (brown rice tortilla) chicken and three-cheese quesadillas. Something I haven't made since I went mostly low-carb, so about a year ago now. Very satisfying.

And as I ate I sat there reading a long article about songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Lots of younger folks only know him as an actor, but it Nashville he's revered as the songwriter who had an impact on how to write country songs the way Dylan did on other kinds of music. Yes, that important. Didn't know that, did you? Kristofferson changed everything, starting with what you could write ABOUT in a country, making things a lot more honest and realistic than they had been at the time.

I put Kristofferson's songs up there with any of the best of the twentieth century. Some of them you already know, although you might not know it because some of them were hits by other singers first. Kris was good friends with Johnny Cash, who had more than one hit from a song written by Kristofferson. So did Janis Joplin.

I will champion Kristofferson as a songwriter forever. I have learned a great deal about writing songs from him. See, he always wanted to be a writer first, which is why he went out and lived a lot of different kinds of life, in order to feed his writing. Back before MFA programs, that's how you became a writer: The Jack London School of Doing a Lot of Jobs and Gathering Experience. It allows you to write with conviction, honesty, and experience. It's still a better way to learn to become a writer than going to school. School has its value, don't get me wrong, including going to school for writing, but it can also be pretty inbred.

So today I think I'll listen to Kristofferson songs, and things like that. And then I think I'll sit down and write something. Maybe a new song. If there's an influence there, it's one I would be proud to acknowledge.

Songwriting: Wisdom from Willie Nelson

I've had a rough few weeks since getting home from the last roadtrip out West. First of all, I was sick for the entire second half of the trip, which is never any fun, and it really wore me down. Secondly, after over a year and a half of writing music and words and music for Heartlands, including the time in the middle of all that for surgery and recovery, I've been experiencing some post-partum depression: the "what next?" depression that follows the completion of any great project. That's something I'm prone to, and I know that I always have been. Sometimes the bigger the gig, too, the harder the fall afterwards. I know that Heartlands was a big success for me as a composer/lyricist in part because of how depressed since I got home from Denver and the Southwest. And since I got home I've been laying mostly fallow. I haven't made much art, I haven't really written anything, or worked on many lyrics or poems or sketched much music. I don't mind lying fallow, because I know that crop rotation is essential in both healthy farming and in my creative work. I just worry if it goes on too long, or gets tangled up with that post-partum depression. I finally hit bottom a few days ago, and lost an entire day to despair, depression, and weeping. Again, that's just something that seems to happen, part of my pattern.

And this past month, with the long drought here in southern Wisconsin farm country, punctuated by occasional torrential rains although we're still in a rain deficit, has been awful for anyone like me who's allergic to ragweed, hay, grass pollens, dust and molds. It's been a memorable allergy season for many here, along with the memorably dry and hot summer. Of course according to the political idiots who like to ignore scientific data when it doesn't serve their ideology, climate change isn't really happening. But I digress.

I'm writing in a conversational stream-of-consciousness mode because I've just been reading a book written that way.

I spent a couple of hours this morning reading Willie Nelson's 2002 book The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes. It's a breezy oral history, full of conversational asides, comments about touring on the road, growing up, and full of anecdotes about the music business, friends, and songwriting. It's much more than a book of collected lyrics, which are woven into the book in between rambles. I read the book in about two hours (I'm a very fast reader) in part because reading song lyrics on the page is faster than listening to the recorded songs.

The first album of Willie Nelson's that I can remember really getting into was Stardust, which is still a classic (and has been reissued as such on CD, in an expanded version). That was my discovery and entry point. I was still mostly listening to classical and jazz at that point in my life, but I was impressed by Willie's way of performing old standards and jazz songs. In fact, and I'm probably letting out a secret here, the way Willie sings is from jazz singing: always behind the beat, giving it that trademark laid-back feel, but arriving on time at the critical moments and the end of a phrase. That laid-back feel in the music is similar to way he writes this book, and lives his life. The important things in life are worth getting passionate about; almost everything else isn't. He does mention his Farm Aid activism in the book, quite passionately, and is passionate about the things and people he loves, and what has influenced him in life. And then there are all the dirty jokes laced throughout. A contradiction? Not really, just pieces of the whole cloth.

As many who know me know, I have strong opinions about lyrics printed on the page: they rarely stand up as purely poetry. Many poets, and fans of various songwriters, make the claim for their favorite songwriters as being pure poets, and often cite lyrics as poetry when discussing them. The problem is, if you really know the song, you're not really paying attention to just the words, as if you know the song the music will be playing in your head as you read. My point is that songwriting is words-and-music, not just words. Lots of poets, and fans, get hung up on the lyrics and forget that songwriting is synergy: words-and-music in perfect symbiosis, each synergizing the other to a higher level.

Several of Willie Nelson's song lyrics printed in this book are to songs that I didn't know (several early songs) or knew on;y slightly. So I was able to read several lyrics on the page as poems. I learned a little bit more about the craft of songwriting from this: both in terms of metric form and when you can really make a phrase stand out by not rhyming. Most songwriting uses older poetic forms, notably ballads and blues, most of which are metric forms with end-rhymes. These patterns are inherited and evolved from folk music—country is the descendent of old-timey mountain folk music, as is bluegrass, and is in turn descended from the music brought to the Appalachians by immigrants from the British Isles for the most part. (Blues and its many related and branched descendent forms were brought to Turtle Island by African-Americans.)

What Willie often does in these songs is stick to a simple rhymed metric form, then break it for effect. Outlaw that he is, he also invents forms, often in songs with very short and simple lines, using fewer words for song than many other songwriters. They're striking to read as lyrics on the page. You constantly trip over your own running feet. There's real gold in breaking away from couplets and quatrains, and other classic song-forms that on the page often look like rectangles of text; these songs rarely look like rectangles on the page.

What makes Willie a great songwriter shines out in this written ramble of a book of collected lyrics and anecdotes and memories: he's an excellent storyteller, period. Of course, I also love his attitude. Actually, I've always loved his attitude. He knows how to laugh at himself, and make you laugh along. There's also a very serious man under all this, and always has been: it's the serious artist, always observing, recording, and telling us stories. That's pretty much the old Viking definition of a skald, or bard. Willie is certainly one of our own bards. Plus the man can really sing.

What leads me to book reviewing The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes more formally is a long passage Willie writes about the power of song itself, for the writer and the performer as well as the audience. I found this passage very wise and telling. Willie includes the lyrics to two early songs that I didn't know about, "No Tomorrow in Sight" and "Sad Songs and Waltzes." He comments in an aside between giving the lyrics of these two songs: I wrote that way back in the early '60s. Very few people have even heard it because sad songs and waltzes weren't really selling that year.

Then Willie follows this up with a very telling commentary:

Both of these songs put together probably sold about four copies. That's not the important thing. To me, just getting the words out of my head and onto paper was an exercise worth performing. Those kinds of thoughts left bottled up inside can do more damage than good, and can probably cause everything from cancer to heart break. Sometimes just saying the words can cause some kind of healing to begin. But if you sing those songs every night year after year, I believe you can also prevent a total healing because you're always opening old wounds.

So what's the answer? Who knows. If you have a hit with a sad song, just remember when you wrote it, it was for you. When you sing it over and over, it's for the benefit of the listener. Don't let it spoil an otherwise good night. Attempt to sing the song for the audience, and try not to get involved in it yourself. It's a very thin line, and a lot easier said than done.

Sometimes I believe the reason a lot of country singers and writers have gone off the deep end was because they could not find that thin line, and could never fully recover from the evening that caused them to write the song in the beginning. Hank Williams, Floyd Tillman, George jones, Lefty Frizzell, and myself included, could in some ways be victims of our own words.
—The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes, p. 186

I find this to be incredibly timely and useful advice. Coming out of a post-concert/concert/roadtrip/concert depression, more aware than ever that you just have to keep going, even if you don't want to, this kicks me to keep on going.

Willie also gets at something that's perhaps at the heart of his endurance as an artist, and at why some artists crash and burn. This gets into the toxic myths and stereotypes (usually promoted by non-artists, although some artists buy into them as well) of the Starving Artist, the Drunken Writer, the Suffering Artist, the Lonely Poet, the Underapppreciated Songwriter.

That entire awful cluster of stereotypes that circle around the idea that "I'll be rich when I'm dead," plus the core devaluing of all the arts that goes on in our culture. People want to be able to download all the music they love for free, even though it means the singer they love goes broke. People will pay hundreds of dollars to go see their favorite athletes throw little balls around various kinds of grassy fields, but they balk at paying 99 cents to download a song? Get real. I lost all remaining shreds of sympathy for professional sports players the year the baseball players went on strike: essentially that was millionaires going on strike against not being able to be double-millionaires. Any one of those undereducated professional athletes could have taken their already-inflated salaries and funded the entire educations of ten artists or dancers, or more. (Although dancers are in fact better athletes overall than any sports stars. They have to be: it's a whole-body art.) But I digress.

The truth is, life is full of so much suffering as it is. You don't need to go looking for it.

What a lot of people who recycle those toxic stereotypes miss is that the art isn't the result of the suffering, isn't caused by the suffering, and you don't necessarily make better art because you have suffered. The artist's first response to all of life's experiences, both positive and negative, is to make art about it. That's what artists do. Just that. Full stop. An artist makes art. All of life is fuel for the artist, good and bad alike. In fact, making art is often the best way to cope with whatever life is throwing at you, good and bad. Artists do make art as a form of self-therapy: just getting the words out of your head and onto the paper is worth doing.

But it doesn't stop there. Afterwards, you go on with life. You're not supposed to dwell on it, you're supposed to let it go, and continue on. Don't stop, don't wallow, just get back on the road and keep moving on. One of the best quotes I ever heard coming from an artist was that the secret of life is to do the next thing.

"On the road again. . . ." I don't know where Willie Nelson learned his enlightened Zen detachment, but it's the real thing. And it's a good role model for all other bards to heed.

•

Here are some other brief quotes from the book that caught my eye as I was reading, and made me stop and think.

‎Success and failure—same number of letters.

Puts worry and despair in perspective.

I believe that you can't lose if you don't give up. Even if you die, you'll die fighting.

Another good reminder to never give up. I needed to hear that today.

Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.

Which means you will never ever run out of material.

We authors deal in words. You can't tell a songwriter he ain't any good because he knows better.

A comment on artistic stubbornness that I can agree with. It's certainly true that almost every poet knows that he's right and you're wrong.

If you ain't crazy, there's something wrong with you.

Words to live by. If you're a sane person living in an insane world, others might judge you as insane, but really, you're not, they are.

Improvisation in Art & Life

I was referred to an article on All About Jazz: Louis Sclavis: Maps of the Mind. Sclavis is an improvising multi-instrumentalist and composer, a prolific jazz musician who rarely repeats himself, and is always exploring new directions, ranging from tightly-composed pieces to free jazz. I first discovered his work via ECM Records, a favorite recording label that I have discussed before. ECM hosts a large stable of brilliant improvising musicians, of which Louis Sclavis is a prime example, with his nine albums recorded with the label.

Here's the paragraph that caught my attention:

In an interview with All About Jazz in 2009, [free jazz pianist Craig] Taborn—one of the most fearless of contemporary improvisers [and one of Sclavis' creative collaborators]—described improvisation as the willingness to face the possibility of failure. Sclavis has his own take. "Everybody has their own thinking about improvisation," he says. "For me, it's simpler; since I started learning clarinet, improvisation has been something completely natural, like eating, drinking or walking. I don't always improvise in the same way, though, it depends on the musicians. It's like breathing. I cannot think more about this because it's what I am."

I've often thought of improvisation from Taborn's perspective: In various groups that mostly played free, in various styles of music, we often talked about playing without a safety net. Spontaneous music with no guidelines or rules, and the risk of crashing. We did sometimes crash, but it was always something to be learned from. Facing the possibility of failure is really the risk all artists take, all the time. Everyone does, really: risk is part of life.

I find Sclavis' definition of improvisation to be resonant with my own experience as an improvising musician, too: that naturalness, that effortless simplicity. You just do it. It's not something that you think about; it happens before rational mind, before analysis. It arises from a part of the self that is often pre-verbal, even non-verbal: that deeper place from where most art arises. Granted, that place arises from long practice, from self-confidence, from knowing through experience that you have something to say, and the skill to say it on your instrument. But once you have that experience, and the self-confidence that goes with it, it becomes as easy and natural as Sclavis describes.

improvisation in art and life.

That's something I find I do all the time. We all do, although we don't all think about it this way. It's not that one only improvises within the frame-of-reference of "this is improvised music." It's that we all are making it all up as we go. Life is neither a rehearsal nor is it scripted. We might develop plans and strategies, but in life as in music, these are neither universal nor, ultimately, completely possible. Living in the present moment is what we have, as much as we like to believe otherwise. We make plans, and we improvise, and which after all is more real, more true to the nature of life?

John Cage Centenary

John Cage's 100 birthday will be in September 2012. I intend to celebrate with a marathon listening session, just letting his music and text-sound poetry and spoken word recordings play in my studio and house for several days. To get ready, here's some required listening:

John Cage works available at UbuWeb

John Cage & Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings
Two composers sit down in 1966-67 to talk about music, art, life, politics, and many other topics, providing us genuine insight into their unique creative processes, and exemplifying how making art is itself a joy.



And some required reading/listening:

Indeterminacy

Diary: How To Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

An essay about Cage's piece 4'33"

The official John Cage website and blog.

RIP Ray Bradbury

One of the grand masters of fantasy and science fiction, Ray Bradbury, has just passed over at age 91. It's all over the literary news, although I doubt many who aren't readers or writers will notice. Bradbury was a writer's writer, revered by writers and readers alike, who impressed and captivated everybody from generations of science fiction fans who later became writers themselves, to Christopher Isherwood, who thought Bradbury to be one of the most original writers he had ever read.

One mark of a great writer is that you can go back to their books years later and still have the same experience, be immersed in the same feelings and images, that you had the very first time you read them. They endure. The list of writers I can honestly say this about, that each time I read them is like the first time, is a very short list; it includes, among a few others, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury.

For me, there have been only a few writers who ever successfully conveyed the experience of being a young teen boy in small-town Midwestern towns in summer as well as Bradbury did. His novel Dandelion Wine is one of the best novels I have read more than ten times, each time as fresh as the last. Something Wicked This Way Comes was a novel that actively terrified me when I read it as a teenager; and it remains compellingly scary. His essential short novel for young adults, The Halloween Tree, is a great adventure story that also is a detailed history of the roots and origins of the festivities of All Hallow's. Many people know Bradbury best for his themed collections of short stories, many of which have been made into movies, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. And then there's Fahrenheit 451, an Orwellian novel about a repressive future society in which literacy itself is banned.

Bradbury has often been ahead of the literary curve, writing in styles or exploring subject matters that other writers only came to decades later. His short story "A Sound of Thunder," about the dangerous changes in history that can be caused by tiny careless mistakes made by time travelers, has been adapted into more than one movie, has turned up in the literature again and again, been the premise of TV shows, and even has a connection to the origins of chaos theory and fractal mathematics. The principal known as the butterfly effect is what I'm talking about here. This is so common a theme in speculative literature now that it's become an archetype itself.

When I was a young reader, already having read lots of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and other "hard SF" writers before encountering Bradbury, and already having had some science training myself, I was at times put off by Bradbury's relaxed interest in accurate scientific detail; he openly admitted that he was interested in the human stories first and foremost, and often skated on the technical details. But my initial doubts about the details of his stories were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer intense and powerful beauty of his language, and I was quickly won over. What Bradbury was, was a master storyteller. Sometimes his stories were set amidst the trappings of science fiction, such as rocket ships, and trips to other planets, but they were always human stories. He made you think, and his stories remain in memory long afterwards. I can think of several of his stories that are clear in my memory still, in many different genres.

Dandelion Wine is technically magical realism—written long before that term was coined to apply to Latin America authors such as Garcia Marquez; so in a way Bradbury invented the style—but what is so incredibly engaging about Bradbury's novel is how emotionally real it is. It is incredibly personal. You know people like the characters in Dandelion Wine. Perhaps you've even been those people, at some point in your life. The episode in the novel, that was originally published as a short story called "The Sound of Summer Running," is one absolutely vivid in my imagination, because it perfectly conveyed the total experience of getting new sneakers at the beginning of summer, and what that meant to a boy just freed from school for the season—right down to the smells.

So I'm feeling sad tonight. I will miss not seeing more new stories from Ray Bradbury, who wrote every day for decades. I will miss Bradbury not only for his fiction but also for his commentaries on life. His book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, is essential reading for every writer. It's one of the most genuinely inspirational books on writing that I've ever read.

Finally, I will let the master speak for himself. Here is an excerpt or two from Bradbury's Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER:
Why do you write science fiction?

RAY BRADBURY:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

INTERVIEWER:
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

BRADBURY:
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

RIP Maurice Sendak

This wild thing, for one, feels sad today.

One thing I loved about Maurice Sendak was that he aware that childhood has a dark and scary side, which shouldn't be suppressed. His books were often attacked by adults who would prefer that children would be innocent and pure, even though they're not. As Sendak himself said, "Children know everything." But children themselves loved him, for understanding them better than most adults, for knowing their terrors and nightmares and silly playful joys alike. It's another example of the critics being moralizing and clueless about an author, while the author's readers understood far better what was really going on. I know plenty of sane, mature adults who recall fondly their childhood encounters with Sendak's books. So where was the harm?

When I was an adult myself, working in a publishing company, I had access to many children's books that I had missed as a child, since I grew up in another country. A lot of classic children's books that many of my peers recalled fondly I had never heard of. But I knew about Sendak. One of the first children's books I bought for myself while working in book publishing was Where The Wild Things Are. (Probably the second one I bought for myself was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst and Ray Cruz.) The wild things still speak to all of us: the book has never in fifty years been out of print. (Speaking as someone who has run press and pre-press, I stagger at thinking how many times the printing plates have had to be remade during that tenure.)

That wildness is still in us. We often try to deny or suppress it, to make it conform to some manicured suburban ideal, but it pops up relentlessly. Better to embrace it, to have a bad day, to go howl at the moon and trees, then resume our routine. Wildness is necessary. It's part of us, and we deny it at our peril. It's the deniers who end up dancing the insane tarantella of repression and obsession.

Of course Wild Things is only the most famous of Sendak's many books, illustrations, and designs. I enjoyed his art whenever and wherever I encountered it.

•

A couple of essay assessments available online (hat tip to Frank Wilson and Dave Lull):

NY Times article

Bloomberg article

May Sarton

Born May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and a naturalized U.S. citizen from the age of two, she remained something of an outsider, which no doubt made her a better observer. That's probably one of the reasons I have always appreciated her: a perpetual outsider, not always a happy one, occasionally caustic, but with an eye for detail that missed little of what was around her. Nobody sees what's actually there better than a stranger. Her poems were usually compressed lyrics, often reflective of the universal within the particular, often full of those details that an outsider sees. Sarton didn't follow any poetic fashions or schools, and was not a self-conscious literary experimenter like many of her generation. In her novels, which I would also call lyrical, she had a fine ear for the subtleties of relationships and human family drama. Some of her very best fiction is about love, insightful and funny and harrowing and profound all at once.

Sarton considered herself first and foremost a poet, with more than a dozen volumes of poetry published, but she also published nine volumes of journals and nineteen novels. It seems likely that her journals and memoirs will be what she is most remembered for, as they remain her most popular books. They continue to inspire new generations of readers. There is an honesty, even in edited form, about the difficulties of reconciling life and art. Journal of a Solitude is still one of the most often read of the journals, a story of living alone on the Maine coast, mostly cut off from others, with the occasional visitor: such an occasion as makes an artist go within and examine one's own darknesses and shadows.

In 1965 she published her tenth novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which describes a woman’s quest to belong in the world as an artist and a lesbian. After that novel was published, to some controversy even though her reputation as a novelist was already well-established, her later journals were more revealing about her own love for women. In Journal of a Solitude she wrote, "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing . . . a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality. . . ." Eventually she admitted what many readers believed, that this novel was autobiographical in spirit, if not literally so in every detail.

Nonetheless, she always insisted that she wanted to known as a poet and novelist, not a lesbian novelist. Some of that of course was the more circumspect times, and the generation she belonged to. There was some critical backlash against Sarton after that, but she has always had a devoted and dedicated fan following. I find this interesting because it means she was always a success to her readers, even if some of the critics were not supportive. What artist doesn't feel sympathy with that?

That double assessment continues to this day. Every so often I still get comments on my blog post here about the day I spent in Nelson, NH, where Sarton lived before Maine, and where she is buried: May Sarton at Nelson, NH. Yet two years after Sarton died in 1995, Margot Peters published May Sarton: A Biography. I read it a few years ago. It's thorough, discusses her entire life, her most important friendships, the places where she lived, and what she wrote. It's also a hatchet job, a biography that is biased towards depicting Sarton as an impossible person who was hard on her friends and angry all the time. Well, she was indeed restless, tempestuous, and strong-willed—but to be a woman artist in her times, one needed to be strong-willed. She doesn't paint herself as perfect in her journals, she doesn't pretend to be without fears or hard times. Nonetheless the journals contain moments of exceptional beauty, of near-awe, of pathos. Any artist who struggles with making a living and making art can sympathize; that many readers do just that speaks highly for her relevance. Plant Dreaming Deep, her first mature memoir, a series of short pieces about her house and friends in Nelson, set a new standard for memoir and journal writing; it remains a lucid and engrossing book, in some ways exceptionally brilliant. So I didn't like Peters' biography very much; it felt quite unbalanced. I think we're still waiting for a more balanced, definitive biography.

Adrienne Rich as Bard

This past week and more I have been reading through what I have of Adrienne Rich's poems and essays, reading some things again, reading some things for the first time. At one point I was talked into getting rid of all my Rich books, and convinced that as a political poet she wasn’t any good. That was wrong, and I’ve changed my mind. I now value her poetry highly, and some of her prose essays are fundamental to 20th C. thought about LGBT issues, about poetry, about how to live in a war-torn century and refuse to be complicit with its compromises and losses in public life.

In fact, I like Rich’s anger now more than ever, her rock-hard determination, her use of language to get at the roots of life, partly because they reflect my own, but also because they have come to seem necessary. Too much ground has been given in to the bullies, and that must stop. Her refusal to give in to those who would destroy her, and me, is more essential than ever.

The freedom of the wholly mad
to smear & play with her madness
write with her fingers dipped in it
the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom
you have, walking on Broadway
to stop & turn back or go on
10 blocks; 20 blocks

but feels enviable maybe
to the compromised

. . .

Madness.       Suicide.       Murder.
Is there no way out but these?
The enemy, always just out of sight
snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

In a snowy blur, abominable snowman
—at once the most destructive
and the most elusive being
gunning down the babies at My Lai
vanishing in the face of confrontation

The prince of air and darkness
computing body counts, masturbating
in the factory
of facts.
—Adrienne Rich, from “The Phenomenology of Anger”

What other poet uses such a vocabulary lately? So many are content to speak only of lovers' dramas set in urban living rooms, or play with words till nothing means anything any more. What other poet tells such stories of the world’s tragedies, and our individual ones? They’re the same, of course.

This is bardic, in the old tradition of the poet at the king’s fire, telling the news. This is the voice of the lineage of ancient Jewish prophets, telling the truths no one wants to hear. Contemporary Jewish mystic Rabbi Abraham Heschel once wrote, A prophet is one who interferes with injustice, and that is what we have in Rich’s writing. Can a poem change the world? Perhaps not. But it does have the power to make a reader think about starting to change the world, even if only in their own backyard. Poetry does have the power to inspire. It's only when we treat poetry as a pretty decoration, like a doily on a sewing table, that it does not. If we resist letting poetry become purely decorative, than there are things we can still say with it.

Even more than the poems themselves, I keep returning to Rich’s ideas about poetry. The poems are thick and muscular, pared down to the limits of language, forceful commentaries on life, what wounds us, on engagement with the world, personally, politically, socially, spiritually. What she wrote about the act of making poetry, the art of the vatic word, is just as muscular.

I keep coming back to what Rich said that poems are meant to be:

Today, I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials acrrording to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it.

Rather than being about an experience, a poem should be an experience. I wholeheartedly agree. I find myself, every time I make a poem, wanting to make it an experience for the reader. I want the poem to recreate for the reader the experience that the poet had that led to the making of the poem. I don’t want to tell about what I experienced, I want to make you share the experience.

Sometimes the closest I can get to that is haiku. I keep making the attempt, even if it often fails. I feel like some of my more experimental poetry, like the Theokritikos series of poems, approaches what we want to do. Having a conversation in a normal tone, but with the heightened language of poetry, that’s what I try to do in the Letters poem series. Other bodies of work have different styles and forms. I’ve talked about cinematic poetry, a poetry that builds a narrative not through conventional grammar and storytelling but through sequencing images in strings that ignite into images in the mind. I think sometimes of Chris Marker’s beautiful and terrifying film, La Jeté, which is a film made up of B&W still photographs, that tell a huge and complex story using very simple means. Poems can be like that, if we allow them the grace to make the attempt, if we let go of our clinging to the words themselves and aim for what lies beyond and behind words.

And how we represent our lives as metaphor. I’ve had the experience of being in the desert just as described by Rich:

Every drought-resistant plant has its own story
each had to learn to live
with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
after the thunderstorm
each could do without deprivation

but where drought is the epic then there must be some
who persist, not by species-betrayal
but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study
of the price of continuity
a steady bargain with the way things are
—Adrienne Rich, from the poem “The Desert as Garden of Paradise”

•

Other recent articles on Rich:

Poems Good Enough to Eat

Adrienne Rich: Moral Compass

And disabled writer Kenny Fries reflects on how important Rich was to the disabled community:

How Adrienne Rich Taught Me to Drive

RIP Adrienne Rich

March 28, 2012

Poet, prophet, original thinker, essayist, writer, provocateur, feminist, LGBT icon, lightning rod for those who hate to hear free and prophetic voices. Mystic. Poet of consciousness, life, death, suffering and rebirth. There's more I could say, but I'll let her own words speak for her.

•

In creating a situation in which they could nurture and rear infants safely and effectively, women became the civilizers, the inventors of agriculture, of community, some maintain of language itself.

. . .

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

. . .

The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.

. . .

a touch is enough to let us know
we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep

. . .

Language cannot do everything—
chalk it up on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums.

. . .

You played heroic, necessary
games with death

since in your neo-protestant tribe the void
was supposed not to exist

except as a fashionable concept.

. . .

I had been trying to give birth to myself, and in some grim, dim way I was determined to use even pregnancy and parturition in that process.

•

Update:

Here's the New York Times obituary, which says in part:

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets. . . .

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

•

And here is a short section of a longer poem, "Letters to the Young Poet" from Rich's 1999 collection Midnight Salvage, which I find to be typically fierce and forthright, honest, both present-moment and timeless:

3

Would it gladden you to think
poetry could purely

take its place beneath lightning sheets
or fogdrip     live its own life

screamed at, howled down
by a torn bowel of dripping names

—composers visit Terezin, film-makers, Sarajevo
Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses

    ineluctable

if a woman as vivid as any artist
can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

would it relieve you to decide     Poetry
doesn't make this happen?

Tony Levin on Stick

This past weekend I went to see a concert in Minneapolis, in a small, intimate club, of some of my favorite musicians on the planet. Stickmen, featuring Tony Levin, opened for the Adrian Belew Power Trio, and both groups joined forces for a third set of long and often brilliant covers of King Crimson songs. Which is only appropriate, since three of the people onstage were past and/or present members of King Crimson.

This the first major progressive rock concert I've been to in a few years—the last one was King Crimson, in St. Paul—and while I know I keep saying lately that since my surgery everything is new and for the first time, again i saw and heard things at this concert that sorted out my thinking as if for the first time.

I've seen Tony Levin play Chapman Stick many times before, live and via video, and each time I watch him play I learn something. It's like getting a lesson. There are so many ways he plays both Stick and bass that I find directly influential. This concert was no different. At the same time, it was validating and affirming as never before, for me, as a Stickist. I'll get to that a bit later. But first, a sidebar.

Within the Stick players' community, there's sometimes a strong pressure felt to be a solo artist: to play all the parts on your singular instrument. That's entirely possible, and there are great players who do just that. The seminars I've attended, along with many solo concerts, I've been quite impressed with some players, and musically uplifted by others.

But I like playing in a band, with other musicians. I like the give and take of live improvisation with others. I like playing bass in a band, and I like playing Stick to play the bassist role. I also like playing a "guitar solo" on Stick, which I did more often in an improvising prog rock band called ƒUSE I was involved with when living in California a few years ago. Doing a "guitar solo" on Stick makes you think in ways, and produce lines, that a guitarist might not.

The afternoon before the concert, I spent some hours with my musician partner in the duo Wind, Sand & Stars, Eddie Estrin, laying down tracks and elements and musical ideas. We hadn't played together for awhile, but the session was inspirational, and we've agreed to make music together more often again, starting soon. (Several previous WS&S sample tracks can be found on my website's Music page.) After jamming for awhile, we had a light meal, then went to see the concert together, along with another musician friend. At the show, I might add, we met several other musicians we knew.

One cardinal virtue of the Stick is that you are able, like on piano, to play all parts at the same time: melody, bass, and chords. The Stick is played with two-handed tapping technique, a technique pioneered by the Stick's inventor, Emmett Chapman. The technique came first, when Emmett was playing guitar; he invented the Stick in order to have an instrument with which to maximize the possibilities of his two-handed tapping technique. The Stick is set up for tapping, not strumming and plucking. It's not a guitar, and it's not really like a guitar. (So stop thinking like it is one.) Emmett is not a musician who performs, or lives, in a rut. He is one of the most original thinkers I've ever met, and enjoyed conversing with. I've said more than once that Emmett doesn't "think outside the box," for him it's more like, "There's a box?"

We all get into ruts sometimes. It's good to break out of ruts. But at root most ruts are conceptual, not actual.

One does meet Stickists who have a hard time getting out of their conceptual and motor-skills source or background boxes. It actually seems easier, based on observation, for a pianist to take up Stick than it is for a guitarist: the tapping technique is very pianistic (also very similar to how one plays small frame drums) in terms of motor skills. The fretboard theory required—in other words, learning where the notes are—is straightforward and logical, unlike the guitar's historical and idiosyncratic standard tuning (descended from oud, lute, and flamenco practice).

I never liked guitar precisely because I never liked its tuning, which on one level was designed to be easy and natural for chording but on another level requires contortions of the hand to get away from any music not tonal or chordal in nature. The players who tend to push that envelope are often players who use alternative tunings, including open tunings. At this point in life, learning guitar for me would be like learning to build a bridge: a long learning curve at the end of which I would only be competent at a skill in which others are demonstrably brilliant. Why invest the time in learning a skill that only makes you ordinary? I'd rather invest my study time in ways that find for me a voice unique and different, and notably my own.

I recognize and acknowledge there are great players on all instruments, and they are often inspirational to me as both a listener and musician. I've learned a lot about melodic form and improvisation from players on instruments other than my own. Honestly, I've learned less from my fellow Stick players than I have from two or three radical and brilliant guitarists (Julian Bream, Robert Fripp, Sonny Sharrock, to name a few guitarists in my very small pantheon), a few equally radical and brilliant bassists (Dave Allen, Charlie Haden, Bill Laswell, again to name only a few), and even from trumpet and trombone and saxophone players. Jazz phrasing isn't limited to voice or instrument: it's about feel, about timing, and the way you end a note or phrase that brings it life and dramatic intensity. It all begins and ends with the breath; even string players know to breath with their phrases. Breath is life.

And this leads me back, after a long sidebar, to my impressions of Tony Levin playing Stick at the concert the other night. What I mostly was reminded of is how powerfully he plays, the way he chooses his notes, the style of playing he does on Stick. A lot of two-handed bass playing. He's not trying to play the instrument as a soloist, and as a result in a band setting he does not overplay, he plays just the right amount of notes. When he plays a melodic solo, he often stays on the bass side of the instrument, using the upper ranges; this has a distinctly different tone color than simply moving over to the strings on the treble side of the instrument, and makes it sound more like a hyper-bass solo.

I watched and listened and—returning to my own everything is new perspective mentioned above—realized anew how strongly Tony Levin has influenced me as a Stick player. I play a lot more like Tony than I do any of the solo Stickists. I realized all over again how strongly he influenced me. After all, my route to this music was: first, I discovered the Stick; then I discovered Tony Levin; then I listened to the bands he was playing with, notably King Crimson and Peter Gabriel. That was my route to listening to King Crimson in a nutshell: because I was interested in Tony Levin.

So I feel pleased and validated and reassured that my Stick playing is just fine. It's in the Tony Levin vein, which is a very valid, mostly band-oriented rather than soloistic vein. That encourages me and affirms my commitment to playing Stick the way I want to play it. I have attended more than one Stick seminar where I left feeling like I was being told I lacked something, since I wasn't playing Stick like everyone else was, or wasn't playing enough solo stuff, or wasn't playing things inside the box. Where I didn't feel encouraged to play Stick the way I wanted to play it. Watching and listening to Tony play live again, and in a small club, close up, where I could see everything close up, was a validation that I'm doing just fine, thank you very much. I'm going my own direction with my music, and not playing like a lot of other guys play—which is another reason I like Stick, for its endless possibilities. While that's nothing new, sometimes you feel a little ostracized for being different.

I left the gig feeling very inspired and full of ideas. Days later, I still feel that way. I have ideas in my inner ear for a whole new set of Stick pieces. I've been wanting to start up the recording work again, maybe begin work on a new album, now that I've recovered enough from illness and surgery, and this concert inspires me to get busy right away. I've already laid down a couple of test tracks, one for an almost-Steve-Reichian piece, made using just Stick and delays. I hear a potential bass line mixing in; I can hear Tony playing it in my inner ear; the musical territory between Steve Reich and King Crimson is potentially convergent, after all. I'll see where I can go with these ideas soon.

But that's how I play Stick. Thanks to one of the greatest living bassists and Stickists I have ever seen and listened to: Tony Levin. My sincere gratitude.

Straw for the Fire: Theodore Roethke

The other day I was at the used book store, selling off some books I no longer needed. While they looked over my treasures, I browsed their poetry shelves. In the end, they offered me enough store credit for me to take home a treasure to add to my own poetry collection: a collection of late, posthumous, and excerpted writings by poet Theodore Roethke.

Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63. When he died in 1963, Roethke had left behind almost 300 spiral notebooks full of aphorisms, poetry fragments, notes about teaching poetry, commentaries, entire poems either unfinished or early versions of published poems, and more. He wrote in these notebooks for twenty years, letting his mind rove freely; there are poems in many stages of completion, including many versions he worked on of poems now well-known, worked over till he finished them. Roethke was very much a re-writer, a reviser, a shaper. This is partly because he was primarily a formalist poet, working in forms both old and invented, and was very careful about his word choices, his craft. At heart, though, Roethke was a poet of inspiration, even of lyrical mysticism. His poems all mean something, The collection is edited by poet David Wagoner, who was first Roethke's student, later his colleague at the University of Washington.

This is a fantastic collection of material that I had not seen before. I have all of Roethke's books of poems, including the final Collected Poems. I have long known his poetry. I have heard it set to music, and brilliantly set, by one of my own professors in music composition, William Bolcom. (Seek out the song cycle "Open House" and you'll be impressed.) The collection shows a poet's mind at work. The fragments and aphorisms about poetry, and also about teaching literature, are worth the price of admission. The first half of the book, though, is poems, both complete and in fragment, many never seen before this publication. A short example, very much typical of Roethke's mature poetic voice, as follows:

She moved, gentle as a waking bird,
Deep from her sleep, dropping the light crumbs,
Almost silurian, into the lap of love. . .
She moved, so she moved, gentle as a waking bird,
The bird in the bush of her bones singing;
Woke, from a deep sleep, the moon on her toes.

I'm not much on metered rhymed poetry, nor on neo-formalism, which is more often reactionary than visionary—but Roethke's voice is unique, always more visionary than not. Roethke has a perfect, light touch for rhyme. It always makes sense, never clumsily chiming on the ear the way lesser formalists often do. It's not all about end-rhyme, for example.

The most interesting part of Straw for the Fire for me, however, is the second half of the book, the prose section. I always like to read poets writing about poetry, about how they work, about how poetry is a way of life. Roethke gives us many sublime insights, over a range of topics. Wagoner has arranged the book into topical sections, with time-ranges based on the notebooks they were excerpted from. This arrangement gives focus to otherwise random thoughts covering much time and many topics. Some of what Roethke writes is very close to my own thinking, and when we diverge he is still worth considering. Roethke is a poet who always needed to deal with transcendence, with things mysterious and beyond the ordinary. He was a constant, skeptical explorer. His internal poems, his psychological poems, are among his best.

Like many poets who are his disciples, he is considered at times to be a philosophical poet; unlike many who imitate him, the philosophical force of his poetry is real, and profound. Roethke can write in the abstract, about Big Ideas, but he compels your attention, your desire to follow in thought where he is leading. He does not dull or become intellectual; he remains sharp and visceral. This is a poet who, even when he writes of the life of the soul, does not bore.

Here's a bit of poem from the book, to bolster this point:

Outside time
Beyond the focus of this dark,
Give me one pulse of that heart,
One push from those lungs,
One touch of his ribs,
And I'd dive into the bright
Heart of the night, I'd take on
With the thin bones of my hands
Every weak weed of my life. Their petals fall
To the ground before his imagined shadow.
I am neither near nor far, nowhere in time,
O now nothing but hasps and needles,
With a young snake's tongue to rise an inch from his face:
Only that air he breathes,
With the flaming heart
Of a heart. . .

Here are a few excerpts that I bounce off, from the Prose half of the book. I will spend some time thinking about them, and they will draw out responses in both thought and poems. There are many more that I could also quote here, but a small sample will suffice for now.

§

A poet: someone who is never satisfied with saying one thing at a time.

•

The things that concern you most can't be put in prose. In prose the tendency is to avoid inner responsibility. Poetry is the discovery of the legend of one's youth.

•

Dangers:
Substituting words for thought.
The sneer is easy to master, and usually the mark of the adolescent.
Beware when you think you have found what you want.

•

It is hard to be both plain and direct and not appear a fool to contemporaries fed on allusions, sybilline coziness, hints and shadows.

•

It's the damned almost-language that's hardest to break away from: the skilled words of the literary poet.

•

A poem that is the shape of the psyche itself; in times of great stress, that's what I tried to write.

•

The poem that is merely painful revelations: my impulse is to tell you everything—which may destroy everything.

•

When you roar, make sure it's from a true disquietude of the heart, not a mere temporal pitch. . . In the end, if you aspire to the visionary's toughness, you not only have to chew your own marrow, but then must spit it in your neighbor's eye.

•

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

Benjamin Britten: An Appreciation

There was a period in my life as a composition student when I studied the music of Benjamin Britten intensively, not least because of his eclectic approach to composition. He himself was open to influence from many sources, including ancient musics from his own English tradition, and also including musics he encountered in his travels around the world as a composer and conductor.

As some few examples of his wide-ranging and eclectic style: Britten wrote a powerful setting of "The ugly Duckling" for boy soprano and piano; he wrote a chamber opera for liturgical performance, "Curlew River," based on the Japanese Noh drama "Sumidagawa," he wrote his important operas, of course, the best of them based on literary masterpieces of the 19th C.; and the sublime "War Requiem," which incorporates poems by Wilfred Owen, is a masterpiece of 20th C. artistry in response to the pity of war.

And I was attracted to Britten because, like me, he was a gay composer. His life-long partner, tenor Peter Pears, was often the important voice in many of his greatest works, including the "War Requiem" and the operas. Pears was both lover and muse to Britten, and many works were written specifically for him to premiere.

I have performed on more than one occasion his famous Yuletide work "A Ceremony of Carols," for chorus and harp. I first performed that work in high school, and several times since. It was one of a few works I encountered at the end of high school and beginning of college that led me towards an in-depth study of Medieval music; especially medieval English carols, which I made a special study of while in music school. I cheerfully thank Britten for being one of the composers who pointed me towards Medieval music, therefore, which has been very important to my musical life, and remains so to this day.

I'm certain Britten has influenced me directly, at least on some subconscious level, as a composer. There are a few 20th C. composers—Britten, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, etc.—whose works I have performed and studied, who all had the gift of writing amazing, memorable melodies. I know that's been an influence on me.

As a composer, I often focus more on melody, and interwoven contrapuntal and heterophonic melodies, than I do on harmony or tonality. Melody, whether it's song or instrumental, is the core of the music i write. In analyzing my own musical habits, several years ago, I realized that melody is at the heart of everything I do as a composer; sometimes it's tangled up, sometimes it's quite dissonant, but it remains central to what I hear and what I write.

I have a permanent soundtrack in the back of my mind, which is always playing something, or making up something. Melody is at the core of what I hear with my inner voice, that permanent soundtrack, which I dip into, which I listen to, when I am writing music. I recognize certain patterns that evoke a particular feeling or nuance for me, that are melodic, sometimes based within a complex chord, sometimes very simple.

I can recognize some aspects of the musical context around the melodies I write—the modal forms, the complex chords, the occasionally dissonant backdrops—as having been influenced by Britten, as well as by Messiaen, Harrison, Takemitsu, and some others. The patterns and structures are not imitative, not obvious in any way, beyond the "flavor" or "feel" of the music. I do tend to write modally rather than tonally, as most of these influences on me also did.

Here then are three quotes from Benjamin Britten, the great 20th C. British composer:

•

There should be no such profession as criticism. Musicologists, of course, are quite different, and this is a sadly neglected profession in this country—but there should definitely be no regular critics. To go through life living off other people's work clearly has too degrading an effect.
—Benjamin Britten, essay "Variations on a Critical Theme"

I like here the distinction he makes between musicology, which is the study and appreciation of music, and criticism. Musicology, which I minored in, in music school, is the study of music, its history and forms, its aesthetic and artistic response to life, and so forth. In graduate school, I majored in ethnomusicology, which is the anthropological, ethnographic, and fieldwork-based study of the music cultures of foreign cultures from all around the world. (Ethno also includes the study of our own music culture, but from an anthropological and social perspective.) Music criticism is best done as narrative reporting, a description of a concert or other performance. Music criticism at its worst is ideological, prescriptive, and tends to dictate aesthetics rather than respond as an enthusiastic reviewer.

Or, as Duke Ellington said, in a similar context: Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they really did.

•

Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener.
—Benjamin Britten, (speech) On Receiving the First Aspen Award

Britten is speaking here of the necessity for active listening, as opposed to passive entertainment. I agree strongly with this. The listener needs to be not only intellectually, but viscerally engaged with music. Music is not an intellectual art, it engages the feelings directly—and it can do so without even engaging the verbal, rational mind, but can bypass it entirely.

I have had occasion to argue with poets who had the opinion the poetry was the greatest (most rarified, highest) artform, because language is so abstract; but music is even more abstract, not even requiring language (symbolic or otherwise) to be able to create a powerfully moving aesthetic experience.

Britten, like other composers I have admired, was a composer who knew the power of words-and-music, how the two together can synergize into something greater than just each part alone. His choral and solo vocal writing is sublime, some of the most pleasing to sing as a performer, and even at its most complex it retains a sense of being rooted in primal human song, the communal activity of singing together, in a way that makes us into one voice. We achieve unity through song, through making art together. And this is an aspect of English choral music that is well-known, in its applications of social cohesiveness, and also of singing together in church, making us all spiritually one through the medium of unitary song.

•

All of us—the public, critics, and composers themselves—spend far too much time worrying about whether a work is a shattering masterpiece. Let us not be so self-conscious. Maybe in thirty years' time very few works that are well known today will still be played, but does that matter so much? Surely out of the works that are written some good will come, even if it is not now; and these will lead on to people who are better than ourselves.
—Benjamin Britten, interviewed by Edmund Tracey (Sadler's Wells Magazine, Autumn 1966)

This speaks directly to me as an artist and composer. Indeed, "Let us not be so self-conscious." That actually inhibits creativity, that kind of self-consciousness about always needing to create an original masterpiece. I can think of at least two composers I knew in music school who crippled themselves creatively by being too perfectionistic, too concerned about originality, too worried about the end result—to the point where they basically stopped writing music. This kind of perfectionism in art can thus be crippling to the artist.

Britten's attitude, by contrast, is more relaxed. He was a working composer all his life–and in some ways his attitudes towards his work were craftsmanlike, very artisanal. Not that he didn't always give his best, as a good craftsman ought; rather, he did his best work, then moved on to the next project. There were no endless rewrites and reworkings, the sort of compulsive editing that can take an actual masterpiece and destroy it. To make a masterpiece, you have to be able at some point to just stop, and declare the work done. There may well still be imperfections, things you would fix, or do differently. But the attitude Britten had, which could serve as a good role-model for any artist, was to look forward to fixing his mistakes in the next work. He did revise his work, but not neurotically. Often it takes a new occasion, some time after the original work's conception, that gives one the chance to fix things; and also the time to gain a clearer perspective on what might need to be fixed, and what can stand already as good enough.

Happy Birthday, Ernest Hemingway

It's Ernest Hemingway's birthday today. It's probably time, this evening, to hoist a glass in his honor. Myself and all the Michigan boys.

I prefer Hemingway's short stories to his novels. I think his best writing is in the shorter fiction, the stories and novellas. Maybe some of the journalism and essays. My favorite set of stories is the NIck Adams Stories, because many of the best of them are set in northern Michigan, a place I know well, and have many of my own resonances with.



Sources of writing are in the land, in experience, in the people who interpret their lives for others. A few years ago I visited Hemingway's Key West home, which is now a museum, preserving much of the writer's life and memorabilia. But what they emphasize there is that it's all about the stories: everything that matters is in what he wrote, much more so than in who he was.

So that's what I'll do here, in appreciation. I'll quote the opening section of one Hemingway's best short stories. It's a story set in northern Michigan, featuring his recurring semi-autobiographical fictional hero, Nick Adams. Here's the opening part of "Big Two-Hearted River":

•

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.

Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and he turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.

•

You can read the complete story "Big Two-Hearted River" online here.

Bloomsday

June 16th is Bloomsday, the day (in 1904) in which the novel Ulysses by james Joyce takes place, all in one day, in Dublin. Ulysses, the iconic Modern novel (along with a few others, such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves) that changed modern literature for all time, by presenting the interior monologue stream-of-consciousness of its main character(s).

STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

-- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

-- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. . . .

So much has been written about Ulysses, from scholarly analyses and "decryptions" to popular fandom praise, and so much modern novelistic literature has swarmed from this novel's artistic wake, that it seems pointless to add to the fray. The novel is quoted and referenced often, in modern art and literature, cited and parodied and paid homage to. All I really can add to the many voices already chiming in on Bloomsday is my own appreciation, my personal experience with reading Joyce, with reading Ulysses and the rest.



I first read Ulysses when I was 17 years old, starting it in the autumn, and finishing it after I had turned 18 that following winter. It did take me several months to read. The novel blew my socks off. I read it, modeled as it is on Homer's Odyssey, each section written in a completely different literary style, with deep pleasure, and with no real difficulty. It all makes sense within its own internal logic.

One of my favorite chapters is the "Sirens" chapter, constructed as a musical symphony in words. It begins with an overture that compresses the action into short poetic lines, followed by the full symphony, complete with musical themes and variations. The overture begins:

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the.

Goldpinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.

Trilling, trilling: Idolores.

Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping
answer.

O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked. . . .

Our modern-day hero, Leopold Bloom, navigates a long day and night, past many dangers and through many trials, to arrive home at last, to be greeted by his Molly. The last section of the novel, told in Molly's voice, is a tour de force of stream-of-consciousness writing, in some ways setting the standard.

The novel ends with what I still feel is one of the great erotic monologues in all of literature:

. . . and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Reading Ulysses began my fascination with Joyce. At one point I had probably 30 books about Joyce in my library, as well as editions of all his writings. I gave up some of the scholarly works at one point, but have retained the editions of the novels and other writings, and some of the better books about Joyce.


James Joyce

I've read all of the rest of Joyce's published writings at least once. I still believe that the story "The Dead," from Dubliners, is one of the greatest short stories of all time. (The film made from it, director John Huston's final work, is faithful to the story and quite beautiful in its own right.)

I seem to be one of those rare people who has actually read Finnegan's Wake. I read it in my 20s, sometimes after reading Ulysses, and joyce's poems, plays, and other fictions. In fact, I've read the Wake somewhere between one and three times; I'll leave that assessment fractionally vague. I figured out for myself that one way to read the Wake that makes sense of it, is to read it out loud in a thick Irish accent. A lot of the word-plays and altered language that seem so strange at first suddenly begins to make sense, when you read it that way. It's not something you read in one sitting; each section that you get through needs time to sink in and integrate; it is a Dreamtime novel, after all, with dream logic and psychological reality blended in.

Ulysses is still a lot more popular, and better known, than the Wake, as most people find it easier going. Joyce's avant-garde literary experiments did get more complex with each major work. A lot of readers stop at Ulysses where they can still make sense of most things.

But Joyce's works have permeated the culture. Everyone has heard jokes or parodies, or puns on Joyce's titles. Entire musical works, on both small and large scales, have been written from Joyce's texts. (John Cage has used Joyce texts for songs and other kinds of performances, and has used the Wake several times as part of a "writing through" sequence.) The Joycean novels still inspire, they still reflect modern life and attitudes, and I would argue they are still vital and relevant to contemporary literature, and life. Ulysses and annual celebrations of Bloomsday remain popular, vibrant, and joyous. The world was changed by Joyce, the world's consciousness, not just its literary tropes and fashions. Thus, these annual remembrances of Bloomsday, these annual rites of celebration.

Happy Bloomsdday! May your wanderings always bring you, at last, home.

Jan Garbarek: An Appreciation

Jan Garbarek, saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and musical shaman, has been one of my favorite musicians for several decades. I listen to his recordings with fresh ears every time, no matter how often I've played them before.

I'm not going to write a biography here, because those are available. Most of Garbarek's recordings on the ECM record label, most of them still in print and available. Indeed, Garbarek's characteristic musical style has had an important role in shaping the sound of the entire record label.

What I want to give here is my personal reactions to a music that has meant a great deal to me.

Garbarek can be lyrical, even softly beautiful. His early work with Keith Jarrett has many such moments. But his distinctive tone and compositional style, his signature if you will, is a soprano saxophone tone that is hard-edged, sustained, clear as winter ice, and gets under your skin in the most remarkable way. It's a northern sound—the sound of Arctic Circle winters, the sound of wintermind, the sound of ice in the soul.

There are albums of Garbarek's, such as Dis, that rip your skin off and leave you naked to world. That leave claw-marks on your soul. There are others, such as Twelve Moons, which are the healing mirrors of Dis, in which your ripped-apart soul is reassembled with lyrical attention, with elegiac grace. Sometimes all at once.

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Garbarek's music is a kind of improvised and composed music that, in the latter half of the 20th C., can only be described as shamanic. Spiritually, it follows in the footsteps of the late John Coltrane, of Albert Ayler. Like Coltrane's late work, this is music that transports, that transcends, but that doesn't ignore the suffering that led to transcendence. There is always a shadow of northern tragedy in Garbarek's music—this is almost a cliché to say, but it expresses it well—the same sense of tragic destiny and striving against the gods that one finds throughout the Norse Sagas. There is always, in the Sagas, a sense of the hero waging war on himself, as well as on others; of fate being simultaneously resisted and acknowledged.

A lot of Garbarek compositions are directly influenced by Norwegian folk music, and other Scandinavian folk music, including the shamanic chants of the living singers of Finland. There have been times when the music triggers a deep inner imagination, a kind of waking dream, that is very similar to shamanic journeying—at least for me. Perhaps that's because half of my personal ancestry comes from Norway, from north of the Arctic Circle. This music resonates deep in my bones.



There is also a deep inner silence in this music, which also leads it towards that shamanic, vatic, visionary thread in late 20th C. art—a thread often dismissed or ridiculed by the mandarins of artistic culture, particularly in this narcissistic contemporary moment, but there nonetheless. Garbarek is, I believe, part of this often-unrecognized thread of art that speaks directly of vision, of the inner self, of the life of the soul. The music is part of the soundtrack to this thread. It's obviously a thread in art that matters to me, and which I place myself within, as an artist. This is art that is intentionally transformative.

The shamanic aspect is like shamanic initiation: the dismemberment experience found in so many shamanic traditions, in which the spirits rip you apart, symbolically, actually, rip your soul to shreds, then reassemble your body in a newer, stronger, more powerful form. Some of Garbarek's music feels exactly like that to me. I've been listening to it for literally decades, yet it still has the power to rip me to shreds, then put me back together. The feeling emotional cathartic release is quite profound in much of this music, and it has the power to recreate that catharsis in the listener.

That is my main point here. Others can discuss the music in terms of jazz history, music theory, or other forms of discourse. Sometimes those other discourses seem pallid to me, unable to really capture the heart of the music; descriptive words for this kind of music stumble and fall short. So others can talk about musicology and music history.

What I want to say is very simple: jan Garbarek's music has the power to change your life, again and again, if you let it. At least it has, for me. There have been some occasions, when I was close to the dark night, when listening to this music was the only thing that gave me the strength to go on, to get through the night, to make it till dawn, to survive the void and abyss. I have survived my own dark nights possessed by shadow and darkness, in part, because listening to this music gave me the will to endure. Simply to endure. It's something to hold onto, when all else fails.

André Gide: An Appreciation

An open letter to all of my gay (and non-gay) friends on the occasion of the birth anniversary of a great man of letters:

If you can pry yourself away from your most recent narcissistic piece of personal drama long enough to realize that the bigger world not only doesn't care but has seen it all before, try walking for a mile in the shoes of French gay writer and mystic André Gide. Gide made history by being frank about his gay lovers, and his friendship with Oscar Wilde.

Gide was born on November 21, the same birth date as my late mother, and also of two of my best friends. Gide was a radical who wrote both openly and honestly about his own life. He was one of the greatest of French short story writers. I remember reading in the original French, back in high school French class, his short story "The Prodigal Son," a modern retelling of the Biblical parable is profound and moving. I read this story in order to translate it, but it has stayed with me, and opened the door to reading the rest of his writings. (I had great French teachers in junior high and high school. This was also how I was introduced to Saint-Exupéry, who has remained one of my favorite writers throughout my life.)

Throughout his career, Gide's writings give voice to the universal and gentle sides of homosexual love. Without glossing over the hardships of life, and the emotional difficulties of coming out and being who you are, he was always positive and life-affirming. He showcased in Corydon, which is structured as a modern Platonic dialogue, how essential the contributions of gay and lesbian artists, writers, and musicians have been to the history of Western arts and literature. (Corydon is highly readable, with enchanting characters, and not at all didactic in tone while conveying vast amounts of historical knowledge.)

One of Gide's most powerful, oft-repeated messages in his writings was the simple truth (which seems to be lost on so many gay men lately) that: You cannot demand that others treat you with respect, and take you just as you are, if you then turn around and judge them harshly. More bluntly put, as Gide might phrase it, You cannot expect to be treated with respect if you show no respect in turn for others.

I can't tell you how often I've run into this fundamental truth in recent weeks, in conversation and encounters with my LGBT friends. Some of the younger, more militant of them are all up in arms about being respected for being just who they are, while without apparent irony turning right around to voice judgmental sweeping generalizations about others. One other lesson one takes away from the mature writings of Gide is that sweeping generalizations do more harm than good; we are all complex stories, with many individual paths taken that cannot be fit into stereotyped categories.

On December 10, 1947, in Stockholm, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, spoke to France's ambassador in his award ceremony speech about Gide, "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time." (Gide was at the time too ill to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person.) Österling said as part of his speech:

The seventy-eight-year-old writer who this day is being honoured with the award of the Nobel Prize has always been a controversial figure. From the beginning of his career he put himself in the first rank of the sowers of spiritual anxiety, but this does not keep him today from being counted almost everywhere among the first literary names of France, or from enjoying an influence that has persisted unabatedly through several generations.

The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist (1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality; soared again with what some consider his best novel, The Counterfeiters (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his autobiography, If It Die (1926), with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with the concierge's son, or his lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide had also befriended Oscar Wilde; Gide wrote of their visit together to a tavern to seek out boys for pleasure.

In 1927 Gide published Travels in the Congo, his hugely influential attack on French colonialism, which turned out to be prophetic in his predictions of how colonialism would fail because of its own success. That trip also marked the end of Gide's eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was 16 and Gide was 47. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951.

In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books, where they remain. That alone is testimony to his radical thought, his courageous self-revelations, and his courage in speaking out on forbidden topics.

(Hat tip to Band of Thebes.)

John D. McDonald: An Appreciation

When Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the other writers who became associated with the development of the "hardboiled" detective mystery were creating their new style of story—a style which later in film became the seeds of film noir—they were in part reacting against the constraints of the English "cozy," those tightly-plotted, carefully-constructed drawing-room mysteries epitomized by Agatha Christie. They were also inventing for the first time a distinctly American style in crime fiction writing.

Often, major changes in literary style, which this was, come about because of a renewed pursuit of realism in fiction. An old mannerist style is replaced by something more reflective of the current times, in terms of what stories are now more relevant to the times, but also in the ways in which the current times are represented. We are going through a similar major literary transition right now; the symptoms of it are all around, although some are determined to ignore them. Chandler, in his desire to pursue a more realistic fiction, made some pithy observations about social problems, not least the gulf between the have and the have-nots; and in this sense Chandler's stories meet the requirements of what novelist/critic/Medievalist John Gardner termed moral fiction.

Chandler's seven novels, at least three of which in my opinion are so good as to be unbeatably archetypal of the form, are driven by character rather than by plot. In fact, Chandler's plots are often rather weak and sketchy, compared to some other writers. His great strengths are in setting mood, poetic descriptions of people, places, and events, his dialogue which seems very natural to the ear but in fact is carefully stylized, and the progression of events in his stories which often seem close to real life in their sometimes illogical and chaotic and inexplicable drama. Chandler was a keen observer, and had a gifted ear for dialogue. In some ways Chandler's style was a rebellion against the existing constraints of the existing detective novel of that era; in other ways, his style was just the way he wrote.

What we're left with from that early era of the hardboiled detective novel is some writing that is surely amongst the best of the 20th Century. The three novels of Chandler's that I think are his best—The Long Goodbye; Farewell, My Lovely; The Big Sleep—and Hammett's best novels—including The Maltese Falcon—I would put up there with anything written in the past century in mainstream literary fiction.

Not only did Chandler et al. create a distinctly American style of crime fiction, they also created a distinctive voice in which to write. It was like Walt Whitman all over again, a surprisingly American dialect emerging from an unexpected direction. Every contemporary thriller on the best-seller lists in New York City owe a debt to these writers. Most of these latter day thrillers don't have such a distinctive style, many of them are bland by comparison, lacking poetry and sheer archetypal magnitude, but the debt is still owed to Chandler, Hammett, et al.

And one or two others.

One of these is John D. McDonald.

I came late to reading McDonald. I had been referred to his writing by other writers who I've respected. Homages and avowed influences. The enthusiast's charming invocation: Hey, if you liked that, you'll love this! Some direct tributes, one or two pastiches. Unlike Hemingway, who late in life became a self-parody, McDonald is very hard to pastiche. Finally I got around to reading McDonald, figuring if that many other writers who I like to read like to read McDonald, then there must be something there. Indeed there was.

If I were to recommend a place to start reading McDonald, honestly I'd say start anywhere. He was a prolific writer, and unlike many others who have high and low points in their careers, the quality of writing is consistently high. Or you could do what I did, finally, and start reading in the Travis McGee series. I'm fairly sure that McDonald thought of himself as a hack writer, the definition of a hack being one who writes for money rather than in the service of High Art, but like Chandler he transcends.

In some ways Chandler's Philip Marlowe and McDonald's Travis McGee are the same type of character in two different times and settings. The lone antihero, the tarnished knight always fighting against being dragged down by the evils and horrors of the lives of those they move among. Among the differences, there are many similarities. Both are soiled knights with solid personal ethics who operate within often squalid settings, often emerging at the end of a story quite scathed. One of the main differences between Marlowe and McGee, though, is that while Marlowe succeeds, perhaps unbelievably, in never really compromising his moral standards, there are a few times that McGee does cross the line, due to the necessity of action—and hates himself afterwards for doing so. McGee is even more mortal than Marlowe, in a way. Some of the finest character moments in the McGee novels are in the epilogues, when the protagonists take a long hard look at themselves, after all the main action is done.

McDonald's setting was often Florida, or the Gulf. Several of his non-series novels are also in those settings. He had a knack for showing the reader the simultaneous layers of past and present that a native sees when looking at a beloved place going through changes—often negative changes brought on by over-development, pollution, poverty, crime, and related issues. McDonald's descriptions of locale somehow manage to make us see, from within his character's viewpoint, both what they used to love about a place, what has become soiled, and what little beauty might still peek through between the billboards. McDonald was not really cynical, he was just keenly observant.

One can expect from a McDonald novel a deeply existential tone, an awareness of the ephemerality of all of life, darkening even the sunniest day, but also lightening some of the dark nights. But this existential feeling is rarely on the surface, instead it's an underpainted layer that often explains the quiet desperation of surface action. If life has no meaning, then let's keep dancing. What makes McDonald a great writer is precisely this ability to give the reader many layers of meaning simultaneously, always subtly and without fanfare. Mainstream so-called realistic literary fiction is rarely this genuinely realistic.

McDonald had a knack for depicting the deeply absurd aspects of even the most serious scenes, and there are times when the reader is tempted to laugh and cringe at the same time. Sometimes it's just gallows humor. But often what it is, is a writer giving us a moment of very complexly mixed emotions, many things going on below the surface, very much like real life. Like those moments in real life when you stand on a cusp of change, of decision, of liminal choice. One of the most remarkable aspects of McDonald's writing style is that you can be pulled inside this emotional complexity even as the fists are flying.

McDonald's prose style is lyrical and blunt at the same time. You get poetic descriptions of people, places, and events, and then a moment of dialogue which slaps you back into paying attention. The first person internal monologue inside Travis McGee's head will wander off into a reminiscence of the old Florida, then you're back in the moment with what's going on. This sort of associative, layered thinking is again very like real life. McGee sometimes makes mistakes because he gets distracted, or lets passion overrule good sense. Sometimes there are consequences. McGee's feeling is that it's okay to mess himself up this way, but powerfully not okay to mess up with his friends and clients and loved ones. If you've ever beat yourself up repeatedly for saying or doing something you horribly regret, you know exactly what this feels like.

The dialogue is almost always more intelligent and erudite than not. That's in part because of Meyer, McGee's good friend and neighbor who is often consulted on matters both practical and philosophical. Some have suggested that Meyer was McDonald's own alter ego within the McGee novels, and that seems possible. Certainly his use as a character who provides discourse affects the viewpoint and interpretation of events, often pivotally.

McDonald is more tightly plotted than Chandler, but again a lot of the action is character-driven, and the scaffolding of plot does not show. I think there is a need for careful plotting in crime fiction, perhaps more so than in other genres, but one way to sort the grain from the chaff is by whether or not the scaffolding shows. The less it shows, the better. McDonald's plots often feel quite surprising and unpredictable in their twists and turns as they unfold before you, yet seem quite inevitable after the fact. Character does drive a lot of the twists. The seedier the character, the better, perhaps.

I'm trying to describe a writing style that cannot be taken apart like this without making of it less than it is. I feel in some sense that I betray McDonald in the act of describing what I like about his prose. I don't want to give a false impression; McDonald may be an heir to Chandler, but I don't want to unfairly overdo the comparison. McDonald is very much his own man, with his own unique and contemporary voice. I worry that I might lead the prospective reader astray, because I am clumsy where McDonald is not.

So in the end I recommend that you go read a John D. McDonald novel for yourself. Start anywhere, and dive right in. You're in for a bracing, exhilarating, memorable, and potentially life-changing reading experience.