the almost right words

There’s often good cause to question our culture’s obsession with sports.  Large chunks of it are dedicated to discussing, debating, observing, coddling, and paying for games while there are vastly more important issues (you know, like, say, poverty) who receive so much less face time relevant to their actual importance in our country that it’s downright embarrassing.  111.3 million people tuned in for the Superbowl this year, yet one in every two Americans doesn’t exercise his right to vote.  We’ve been at war in Afghanistan and hardly anybody talks about it.  The achievement gap between rich and poor students has widened recently, yet education funding is stagnant and we’re mired in a defeatist testing culture that prizes equality over equity and ignores the needs of individuals.  Many of us know this–we do, and not just sort of, we really know it–and continue to obsess over something more trivial like professional athletics.  Why?

It’s complicated.  Entertainment, one.  The simple pleasure of watching great athletes, two.  A break from lives that are legitimately busy and near overwhelming in their demands, three.  In the context of this post, none of these reasons seems all that impressive.  Sorry poor students, I’d rather watch Rajon Rondo and the Celtics than think about you anymore today.  Not quite, but kind of, right?

But the recent ascendency of Knick’s point guard Jeremy Lin provides an unexpected answer that, while it may not totally satisfy, is well worth considering.

Jeremy Lin–the story of Lin, I mean–argues for the relevance and necessity for sports in our culture.  Granted, the way the culture has rallied around and uplifted Lin in the past two weeks is frightening in scale and one can’t help but begin looking down to see how far the fall is going to be, but regardless of whether Lin continues performing magic, defying skeptics, and winning basketball games, his story, and what his story makes us think about, is important.

Lin received no athletic scholarships to college. Went un-drafted out of Harvard.  After being cut by the Golden State Warriors earlier this year, Lin was picked up by the Knicks, played a whopping five minutes during pre-season, before being sent down to play for the D League’s Erie Bay Hawks. The D League people.  You ever seen a D League basketball game?  I didn’t think so.  It’s where basketball players go to die.  After putting up a triple double with the Bay Hawks, Lin was quickly recalled by the Knicks, who must have realized their mistake.  Even still, he was the Knicks third string point guard.  A notch above the water boy.  Lin said he was “competing for a backup spot, and people see me as the 12th to 15th guy on the roster. It’s a numbers game.”

At this point we’d assume that the Knicks saw something incredibly special in Lin and made him their point guard to show his stuff.  Wrong.  Lin only got the chance to play at all because all the other point guards were either injured or setting new standards for shitty play at the point guard position.  Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni even admitted “He got lucky because we were playing so bad.”

Lin made the most of that chance, then the next one, then the next one, and the one after that, putting up silly numbers and displaying late game heroics that have sports writers digging out their thesaurus.  People have been wondering how Lin will co-exist with Knicks star Carmelo Anthony when he comes back from injury.  Two weeks into the saga of Jeremy Lin, a reporter asked D’Antoni who would take the big shots at the end of games, Lin or Anthony.  D’Antoni said he honestly didn’t know.   This is the equivalent of asking the Giants coach who would be leading the Giants up field at the end of the Super Bowl with the game on the line, Eli Manning or back-up David Carr and the coach having to wait a long as beat before responding.

Meaning, it’s unlikely to the point of laughable.

But it’s happening.

After Lin lit up the Lakers for 38 points and outplayed Kobe Bryant (probably the fourth or fifth greatest player of all time), Bryant was complimentary and deferential, “players playing that well don’t usually come out of nowhere,” he said.  “It seems like they come out of nowhere, but if you can go back and take a look, his skill level was probably there from the beginning. It probably just went unnoticed.”  It’s a great quote because it speaks to something valuable to consider when considering Lin.  The role timing, opportunity, and effort play in relation to raw ability.

Lin’s raw ability is obviously sufficient to warrant an NBA contract, which means he’s a very, very good basketball player; however, his raw talent was no where near sufficient enough to earn him an athletic scholarship out of high school or an entry into the NBA draft, let alone a starting point guard position.

And by the way, what kept this kid going when everything around him wasn’t supporting his decision to be a pro basketball player?

So if this guy isn’t that great, how did he end up being so great?  The story is young and who knows what the rest of the season holds for Lin and the Knicks, but for me, the coolest thing that Lin’s story offers and why I think it argues for the relevance of sports is that it’s been Lin’s effort, timing, and confidence that we should be inspired by, not his raw talent.  Kobe’s right…this guy was good all along, but for whatever reason was denied the chance to show it, or didn’t show it when he was given the chance.  The basketball apparatus told this guy to stop.  Didn’t give him money.  Didn’t draft him.  He played anyway.  I don’t exactly know why.

But I do know that as a writer whose been at it a long time and is still waiting to break through, I take heart in the way Lin just seemed to say, fuck it, I’m playing basketball and when the time comes, I’ll be ready.

Why?  Because it’s what I do.  It’s who I am.

Rock on, Jeremy Lin.

Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” is one of my very favorite songs.  Melancholy and haunting, full of experience and regret and a kind of upbeat sadness.  Or, if not upbeat, at least still standing.   Plus when’s the last time you heard a song that had a line like “Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life, to get the feel of life.”  Or like “the girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces.”  This is, like, Dylan shit.  Thirty years before Dylan.

Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life” in the mid to late thirties, when he himself was in his teens and before he even met Duke Ellington.  He was a prodigy, a gifted pianist, arranger, and lyricist.  The songs I wrote in my teens were so bad that I’d trade any one line from “Lush Life” for all of them.  Originally entitled “Life is Lonley,” the song evokes a story of a lost love and how the loss taints the life of after.  Our narrator would like to think that a week in Paris could make him feel better, but all he really wants to do is keep smiling.  So dispirited is he that he claims that “romance is mush, stifling those who strive” and then goes on, almost condemning himself to live a life in dives, bereft among those who are lonely too.  Not bitter so much as tired and defeated.

But the song also  has a wink inside of it.  After he’s had his heart broken and realizes that this love is not what he thought, he says “ah, yes, I was wrong.  Again, I was wrong.”  The word Again is important here, for his pain is not a young love pain, not a first time pummeling, the likes of which we’ve all been leveled by.  No, this is something more tinged with the weight of experience, of a man who’s learned to numb his pain with a little bit of brown death, along side the rest of the chumps.

Let’s not forget the song’s tone and feel, which begins brisk and bright, then mirrors the lyrics as they progress to something slower, more somber.  Almost soaking up the suffering.

What’s great about this song, and with so many jazz standards, is the way it bears up under varied interpretation.

I’d always thought that Coltrane and Hartman’s version of “Lush Life” from their 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman was the only version a guy would ever need to keep him company.  And, in many ways that’s true.  It’s the definitive version for a reason, and will always be my go to.  Re-live the magic here: 

But, my good friend the Internet offered some fine alternatives as well, including this odd gem, Strayhorn himself singing and playing the song: 

Or this stripped down version, a duo between Joe Pass and Ella Fitzgerald, who also recorded the song with Duke Ellington.  

Here’s a version that’s very reminiscent of the Coltrane/Hartman version from Kurt Elling’s tribute to the duo’s well known album: 

Here’s an oddity–a “re-mixed” version of Nat King Cole’s rendition, souped up with a dance beat and crystalline synth dew drops.  I’m not even sure what to say about it, really.  

Even odder, almost, is this obscure version of Linda Ronstadt doing the song.  Hey, at least she’s with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.  

For sheer beauty, it’s hard to match this instrumental version by Stan Getz at the North Sea Jazz Festival: 

With each listen, the song grows in depth, beauty, and complexity and each version offers a little something different.  Strayhorn was a genius, somewhat unsung outside of jazz circles, and over the years his output has been homogenized down a small handful of contributions, mostly to “Lush Life” and “Take the A Train,” which, hey, if you’re going to get boiled down to two songs, you could do a lot worse.

“Lush Life” by Billy Strayhorn

 I used to visit all the very gay places

Those come-what-may places

Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life

To get the feel of life from jazz and cocktails

The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces

With distingue traces that used to be there

You could see where they’d been washed away

By too many through the day, twelve o’clock tales

Then you came along with your siren song

To tempt me to madness

I thought for awhile that your poignant smile

Was tinged with the sadness of a great love for me

Ah yes, I was wrong

Again, I was wrong

Life is lonely again and only last year

Everything seemed so sure

Now life is awful again

A trough full of hearts could only be a bore

A week in Paris could ease the bite of it

All I care is to smile in spite of it

I’ll forget you, I will while yet you are still

Burning inside my brain

Romance is mush

Stifling those who strive

So I’ll live a lush life in some small dive

And there I’ll be

While I rot with the rest of those

Whose lives are lonely too

I’m thrilled to have a new story up on Monkey Bicycle called “One of the Fighting Fish.”  Many thanks to the editors for giving me the opportunity.   It’s been a nice stretch of publishing for me (Brilliant Corners, Word Riot, Seven Days, and now Monkey Bicycle) and I’m glad to be getting more of my work out there and about the positive reaction it’s been getting.  Thanks to everyone for their support!  Sitting alone in my office with nobody  but the computer for reassurance, it’s nice to know there are readers on the other end.  Cheers!

So I used to be the kind of person who labored through whatever he was reading, determined to reach the end.  Finishing was important to me then.

Cue the cute girl who changed my point of view merely by suggesting an alternative.  Cute girls are good at changing lives without really meaning to.  Let’s call her…oh, I don’t know, Amelia.  A fellow bibliophile, she suggested that she had no trouble putting down a book she wasn’t enjoying and declared with a whip of her radiant blonde hair, “life’s too fucking short, man.”

And dammit, I agreed.

It wasn’t just because she was cute.  Or that I was drinking wine.  I genuinely agreed with what she was saying.  And still do.  She was right.  After all, wasn’t life too short to labor through a book that was annoying or boring you or not going anywhere?  So I started putting books down when I stopped liking them.   Not all the time.  Just once in a while.  And for years this practice served me well.  I spared myself the stinkers and racked up far more winners than I otherwise would have.

But now I can’t stop…stopping.  I have a problem.

To illustrate, I just spent five minutes walking around my house and making a list of the all the books currently in various stages of completion:

1. Giving Good Weight 

2. It 

3. Moby Dick

4. The United States of Arugula

5. One Hundred Years of Solitude

6. Falconer

7. The Ugliest House in the World

8. Game of Thrones

9. The Pale King

10. Mad Men and Philosophy

11. Crazy for the Storm

12. Service Included

13. Man in the Dark

14. The Passage

15. When the Killing’s Done 

16. Pillars of the Earth

17. Infinite Jest

You’re probably sitting there wondering what the hell is wrong with me.  There’s a lot of books on that list.  And some great ones.

What’s changed over the years, I think, is that it used to be that I stopped reading books when I stopped liking them.  And that’s certainly the case of some of the victims listed above.  But a good deal of the books on the list (Man in the Dark, When the Killing’s Done, Game of Thrones–just to name three) I was enjoying quite a bit and stopped reading anyway because something else caught my eye.  One of the them (It), I was no less than six hundred pages into and was wholly enthralled by and it was totally owning me and I can’t even remember why I stopped reading it.  It’s just sitting there on the bookshelf staring at me sadly, wondering what it did wrong and how it might re-gain my affection.

A more disturbing trend emerges when I look even closer.  There’s a lot of long books on my didn’t finish list.  Infinite Jest, Pillars of the Earth, It, Game of Thrones, The Passage, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Moby Dick are all of substantial length.  A few are over eight hundred pages.   And don’t think I can’t read long books.  You’re looking at a guy who’s read some door stops.  Hell, I just read Stephen King’s new book, which tops out at a cool 850 pages, in about ten days and didn’t balk at the length even once.  Okay, I balked once.

So what the hell gives here?  Is it my iphone?  My abuse of Facebook?  Having little kids?  Is it this wacky, crazy fast paced world we all live in that makes it hard just to take a deep breath let alone focus long enough to finish a long book?  Or is there something more sad and sinister at work?

Have I lost the will to stay the course?

That hasn’t proven true in my writing life.  I regularly start and finish pieces I’m working on.  Recently I wrote a 50,000 novel in a month for the hell of it.

Here’s a thought.

I hate going to sleep.  Hate it.  I feel like the last third of the day taunts me with a flash of thigh all day long and then when I get to it, it whizzes by in a hazy blur.  The minutes are precious and deserved to be soaked up but my sponge is often full by the time I tuck in my three year old and clean up the toys.  I’ve always been a guy who tries to make the most of his time.  I’ve always been pretty good at that.  But maybe that’s working against me here in a way I hadn’t considered.  Maybe I’m sitting there two thirds of the way through One Hundred Years of Solitude for the third time and though I’m enjoying it, can’t stop entertaining the thought that there’s some slightly more fulfilling experience to be found in another book and isn’t that what I need to be reading?  And not later.  Oh no.  Right.  Fucking.  Now.   I need the bliss now.  Much more, apparently, than I need to finish what I start.  So I put it down and pick up something else and maybe I get through that and maybe I don’t.

Here’s another thought.

Maybe if looked at differently, completion in reading is overrated compared with other aspects of the practice, say, quantity, or reading with great care and attention, or reading a wide variety of texts.   If one is reading widely, actively, and diversely, why is completion necessary?  Or even a virtue?  After all, reading is for pleasure.  I’m not answering to anyone but myself.  And, I feel guilt about having not finished the books, but it’s guilt that stays mostly in the abstract, and is not so much because I don’t know how the story ends.  I seem to be fine with that.  I’m glad to have read two thirds of Infinite Jest.  I hope to finish it someday.  But it doesn’t feel all that pressing.  Not having finished doesn’t negate my two thirds.

Of course, I could just be trying to make myself feel better.  If I was fine with all this, the post you’re reading wouldn’t exist.

Am I alone in all this?

There’s a small handful of artists with whom I’ve experienced what can only be described as an obsession, and I don’t use that term lightly.  I’m serious.  I was so head over heels for these people’s work that I probably should have been medicated, or sedated.   They include, but are not limited to: The Beatles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker.

And Woody Allen.

I don’t quite know what it is about certain writers or musicians or film makers that makes it feel like they’re creating simply to please us.  As if we are their first and only true audience.  I only know that it’s a somewhat strange and wonderful feeling, one in which there’s immense pleasure, a little bit of fear, and probably some guilt too (of coveting, of over doing it and ruining it in the process).  There’s this feeling that you’ll never have enough, and yet alongside that, there’s also this horrible feeling of ruining it by loving it too much and compromising the brilliant spark that made you want to absorb it in the first place.  And yet you can’t stay away.  Some of these obsessions we outgrow, but most we don’t.  They change form, perhaps, but they’re always sort of with us.

When I was a boy we had a dog named Joni.  It always struck me as a strange name, somewhat because I’d never heard it before, but also because it sounded so…well, human.  Come to find out, it was my father’s crushing love of Joni Mitchell that inspired the naming of the canine.  For years my father had been spinning Joni Mitchell for us, expounding on the genius of Hejira or The Hissing of Summer Lawns, riffing about Joni’s artistry.  I didn’t get it at the time; mostly I thought she looked weird.  But obsessions are not there to be gotten, condoned, or understood.  They simply are.  I fully believe that we have no say in them or control over them.

I don’t indulge my love of Woody Allen like I used to and haven’t watched his films as regularly as in years past, but Robert B. Weide’s recent two part documentary, originally aired on PBS, re-kindled the flame.  It’s tremendous.  A little padded with love for its subject, perhaps, but full of insight and great interviews with actors and confidantes and writing partners and former lovers.   Highly recommended.

As someone who’s many times been walking through a subway station, been briefly inspired to pause at the quality of the busking musician I just walked past, wondering, how the hell could someone this good be playing for change?, this article was a revelatory gem.  It’s about the violin virtuoso Joshua Bell.  And I don’t only share it because Bell is from Bloomington, Indiana, where I went to college, but because it’s got some juicy food for thought about the nature of musicianship and when and where we choose to celebrate it.  But it’s also about beauty and whether we stop to appreciate it when we see it.

I recall a family band in the NY Subway, maybe five years ago.  I’m not even kidding, they were as good as the Jackson Five, if the parents had been in the Jackson Five.  Dad was on bass.  Mom on keys.  Sis was banging the tambourine and singing harmony.  Older brother was ripping guitar licks on a Gibson semi-hollow.  Younger brother was out front singing and dancing, doing knee drops, slamming falsettos, a veritable Michael Jackson, if Michael Jackson had been trying to sound like James Brown.  For their efforts, a guitar case was open, CDs were for sale, and they’d made what looked like a good stash for the day, by busking in the subway standards.  But, still, it was a whole family.

Appreciate great music, wherever you find it.  And for God’s sake, throw a buck in the kitty.

Ask 10 random people what “Setting” is and they’ll tell you something resembling the following:

The Time and Place a story occurs.

Not so fast.

A third element of setting worth celebrating, though oft neglected, is that of Circumstance, which I humbly submit is actually its most interesting and durable attribute.

In a park at dusk is a time and a place.  But in a park at dusk the moment a war breaks out between two warring factions of squirrels known as the “Corns” and the “Oaks,” that’s another thing entirely.

In Ann Patchett’s lovely novel Bel Canto, a group of distinguished guests is held hostage at a vice president’s manor in a small South American country.   The setting (the house) is, frankly, not particularly interesting.  It’s fine–it’s a big house, lush, and a marked contrast to the roughness of the terrorists who live in the jungles surrounding the city which plays up the unjust ills of the class system in the third world–but they could have been many places and the same set of events (mostly) could have occurred.  What makes her use of setting noteworthy is the circumstance of music.

The group of people had congregated there to celebrate the birthday of a rich Japanese businessman named Mr. Hozikawa.  He’d been enticed there on the promise of his favorite opera soprano, Roxanne Koss, who’d been paid to come and sing five arias to celebrate his birthday.  The plot–a prolonged hostage/terrorist set-up–becomes infected with the presence of music and informs everything that happens.  In the presence of beautiful music, strangers declare their love for one another, friendships are formed, time drifts as hostage and terrorist alike are swept away by the universal tide of music.

As the book begins, we already picture the conclusion, the one Die Hard has taught us to expect.  We meet the standard cast of characters: the defiant vice president who initially stands firm, the gruff and intelligent terrorist leaders all generically called “General,” the cool headed intermediary negotiator (Swiss, no less), the intelligent Japanese translator, child terrorists with guns and hair triggers who appear ignorant, angry, and afraid.  And yet, Patchett must have planned, or decided along the way, that the circumstance of being around music, and not just any music but THE soprano of her generation was far more interesting than mere life and death, and to make that the focus of her story and the engine driving her narrative.

Half way through the book, one of the hostages, a Japanese diplomat, begins playing piano on a whim; the original accompanist has already died from lack of insulin.  Roxanne then begins practicing with him every day and they form a duo.  Soon she begins to give small concerts to which there are curtain calls and bows and applause.  She sends out for sheet music to expand her repertoire.  The terrorists assent to her whims, treat her differently because she’s famous, yes, but more so because they are completely astonished and overwhelmed by the power of her singing.  She falls in love with Mr. Hozikawa, who she was brought there to entertain, and he is snuck up to her room in the night by one of the female terrorists, who herself has fallen in love with Mr. Hozikawa’s translator, Gen, who has become the official translator for pretty much everyone.  Soon after that, on a morning Roxanne has slept in after (presumably) wild hostage sex with Mr. Hozikawa and therefore isn’t there to fill the morning with music, to compensate, one of the young male terrorists, while wielding a semi-automatic rifle, begins singing arias a capella from memory, and turns out to have a world class voice.  Roxanne then becomes, wait for it–his teacher.  During all this, vast meals are prepared.  Terrorist generals play civil games of chess with hostages.  The vice president finds a strange love of domesticity and keeps the house immaculate, dusting and sweeping and discovering the joys of weeding a garden.  Multiple men declare their love for Roxanne, not able to resist their hearts.  For four and a half months things progress in this way, the situation in the house becoming so self-sufficient, so insular, so normal that both hostage and terrorist lose complete track of time.   And reality.  No one seems to remember that half of them are holding guns and it’s all going to go tits up in the end.

The beautiful thing is that we accept it.  Believe that this is probably what must happen during every prolonged hostage situation.   The ending is harsh and fast and, to me, was very predictable.  The only failing here on Patchett’s part is that the ending undermines the glorious fantasia that’s just transpired, reminds us at the last moment of the extent to which her elaborate conceit (maybe) wasn’t all that possible after all.

Patchett’s created a fantasy that reads like realism, which is really something.  And the thing that made it all possible, was music.  The circumstance of music.   What was primed to be another story of terrorists and hostages becomes one about the miraculous power of voices in flight and fingers in motion, of love and community, how quickly these things can take over and how suddenly they can be taken away.

Alan Heathcock, a writer I admire, recently wrote a fabulous short essay for NPR about reading a poem a day to quiet his mind and steady himself against the bustling life he (and we all) leads.

I listened to the audio version of Alan’s piece while waiting for the shower to warm up (it’s short) and it made me think of a similar practice I enact in my teaching life.

A few years ago, feeling that I wasn’t exposing my students to enough poetry, both because I wasn’t feeling terribly confident at teaching poetry and because I’m always feeling pressed for time in my work and find formal exploration of poetry incredibly time consuming, I began the practice of reading each class a poem before we started the day’s work.  I read them Billy Collins.  I read them Langston Hughes.  Robert Frost.  Carl Sandburg.  Emily Dickinson.  Major Jackson.  Alan Ginsberg.  Elizabeth Bishop.

We don’t discuss the day’s poem.  I don’t ask the students what they think it means.  In fact, there’s an unofficial no interpretation rule.  I ask for nothing from the students but their open ears.  Even half open will do.  After all, one of poetry’s great pleasures is its aural gifts and once you begin reading poems out loud, taking your time and savoring the language, you’ll soon begin asking yourself why you ever would read them any other way.

Once in a while, my students react to the poems.  One will nod appreciatively, another will give a small compliment to the author, or even rarer, to me as the reader.  But I don’t mind admitting that mostly they don’t respond at all.  I say the  poem title and the author’s name before reading and again when I finish, and then off we go into class, the poem quickly behind us.  When I first started doing this, I felt a little self conscious when I’d catch students staring off into space or scribbling in their notebooks or even scuttling past me to their seats after arriving tardy while I read.  But I quit worrying about that, tried to remember why I’d started reading them a poem a day in the first place.  For its simple pleasure.  For the reminder it gives about poetry’s immediate, often unexpected, joys.  In an environment where they’re constantly being pushed and scrutinized, urged to think deeply, it’s nice to get a break.  And I like reminding them, and myself, that poetry can provide that.  Even if we don’t fully understand what we just heard.

I’m a longtime reader of Seven Days, our local weekly here in Burlington.  It’s the go-to spot for local politics, music, art, food, and occasionally, fiction.  This is all to say that I’m beyond excited to have a short story in this week’s edition.  It’s a story called “Bloomsbury Heads West,” kind of a strange little story, actually, and one that I’ve long been fond of and am glad it’s found a home.   There’s also a great piece of art by Stefan Bumbeck created to accompany the piece.

Special thanks to Margot Harrison and Pamela Polston for selecting the story and sheperding it to publication.