Sometimes I scroll…

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I’ve been so busy, I almost forgot about this annual tradition. Here are some cartoons from the Straubinical archive.

From Gaha…

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John Martone joins me to help dissect Raymond Carver’s story Why Don’t You Dance, and the many differences between the famous version and Carver’s original.

Gordon Lish edited Carver’s stories for the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. John and I talked about the specific edits that caught our attention. (The first 24 minutes are just the background to our in-depth look at the story and how it changed in the edit. If you want to get to the red meat, use the handy Red Meat Scrub Bar.)

What we were doing is our approach to “close reading,” a method of studying prose fiction where you dig into the words the author chose, and how they put them together to get emotional effects. Our approach here was more like “medium close,” but even that standard led to hours of palaver.

Comparing the Lish edits with the originals Carver handed in, you can start to see reasons you like one or the other— this gave us some new insight into reading, writing, and editing. (I recommend you read the Carver story before listening, but the thrill-seekers among you may wish to take their chances and dive right straight into our ice-cold festival of yammering.)

We also went on various tangents, including but not limited to:

🧜‍♀️ some terrific writers Lish taught and edited (Diane Williams, Amy Hempel, and Christine Schutt)

🧜‍♀️Spike Lee (substack already tried to convince me to post their excerpt and title it “This Spike Lee Movie Was Unwatchable”)

🧜‍♀️Kurosawa (Akira, not the other Kurosawa, but he is also good)

🧜‍♀️Toshiro Mifune (inevitably)

🧜‍♀️Les Miserables (with great brevity)

🧜‍♀️Paul Bowles (he deserves more space, but he just has a quick walk-on)

Music underscore is Jack Teagarden’s trombone and (occasionally) voice in a variety of settings, everything from all-star early jazz groups to more orchestral material. A lot of it has the doomed genius Dave Tough on drums (although he’s largely, if not completely, inaudible).

Tough was a genius, so you can feel him even when you can’t hear him. He made everybody swing more.

Additional ambient noise recorded on location using the mixed medium of metal on soupbowl.

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Facts come across my desk with alarming frequency.

You can watch the facts land on the desk with grim resolve, as if they’re hitting the beach at N…

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I was listening to a podcast interview with the late Christopher Hitchens, as part of some research I’m doing for my own podcast. On my podca…

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I was chatting, some years ago, with the woman who was my boss at the time. As I acquaint you with the rest of this anecdote, I will keep the boss’s name confidential.

Now, any time I decide to keep a coll…

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I write book reviews for Washington Independent Review of Books, and I reviewed Ron Chernow’s new Mark Twain biography.

Usually I…

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You may have heard about the controversy surrounding hiphop veteran Andre 3000’s album of piano sketches. If you’re online a lot, you may have seen pianist Matthew Shipp’s rant about …

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Please note: I’ve had to sideline my writing here this past month, for some life-intruding reasons. Thanks for your patience! I assume that my r…

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A word’s meaning can change over time.

Sometimes they tell us we shouldn’t object to this, because it’s the resul…

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I am famous for hating memoir.

This is just an expression; I’m not actually famous, and if I ever do become famous, I doubt it will be for this reason. But I enjoy fantasizing about it.

I picture myself w…

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Here, finally, is the coldly anticipated first episode of Tangent Town, my new podcast where I chat with interesting guests about books, movies, music, philosophy, and soci…

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We’ve reached another of those critical moments, where I finally get to sit down between rushes of activity, put my…

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🧜‍♀️WHY THIS GIG IS IMPORTANT

I once played a gig at a winery, with a short-lived country band. I say “short-lived,” but that is history’s determination after the fact. Before the fact, things had been different. I was very excited about this ensemble. Its future seemed bright; we had three good singers who were also solid instrumentalists. But the hands of fate can be cruel. They’re not the sort of hands you want touching you. They probably will, though, sooner or later; I would describe fate as handsy.

If I say upfront that this winery gig changed my life, you will roll your eyes and accuse me of exaggeration; I know that if I were you, that’s what I would do. On the other hand— it must be nice to be you. I don’t actually know you, but I would sum you up this way— more than anything else, you are a person who has not lived through this gig that I am about to describe. I tend to be pretty relaxed about lumping people into that category.

Trust me; people sometimes bristle at being lumped into a category, but this is one category-lumping at which you should not bristle. In fact, if you’re being lumped into this category, you should thank your lucky stars. You either lived through this heinous gig, or you are hearing about it today for the first time— there is no middle ground.

I believe that if all Americans were to read this essay, and familiarize themselves with its gruesome details, this would be the one thing that could save our republic. There would finally be a fact that every American could cheerfully agree on, mainly because it doesn’t conflict with any of our cherished values. Nor does it conflict with any of the values we don’t cherish.

Other facts have been cautiously trotted out, and failed to find a consensus. No matter how mundane and self-evident a fact is, it is now a bridge too far for some Americans.

“Liberals cannot control the weather”— that is a fact that, until recent years, nobody struggled to accept. It used to be the sort of statement nobody needed to accept, because it never came up. It was a sibling of such statements as “turtles cannot pass the Bar,” or “teenagers cannot tell time.”

But in today’s USA, this idea that liberals cannot control the weather is a fact that does not generate a consensus even among our elected officials. (I’m not inclined to alarmism, but I cautiously suggest that this may mean that our long American tradition of only electing the best and brightest is shakier than it used to be.)

However! The fact put forth in this essay would unite us in a new American consensus, and we could plant that seed of good fellowship, and watch it grow into a healthy democracy. It would be a tonic indeed to know that my essay meant we could now observe Americans of all stripes gazing into each other’s eyes and seeing not an enemy, but instead a person who shares with them the one fundamental thing that makes an American an American— the fact that they had not played this gig.

There are many things our Founders could not, and did not, anticipate, but the main one for me is this gig.

Would Jimmy Madison, Button Gwinnett, Jr., and the many other Founders have put something about it in the Constitution, if they had foreseen it? I don’t know. But I do know that if all of you readers share this piece with every American in your life, this generous act will repair our broken polity, and I will at last be able to get some scant comfort from that.

Scant is good, I guess, because it’s a lot better than nothing. An aside: I have a little mnemonic device I like to use to help me remember the difference between scant and nothing. Feel free to borrow it— “Scantily dressed, the cops won’t arrest.”

🧜‍♀️BEFORE THE GIG

As this winery gig approached, calendrically, the bandleader decided it was necessary to augment the core of our ensemble with players whose acquaintance with country music was more or less non-existent. For many bands, this would not have been a liability. For this band, though, a liability is exactly what it was.

The point is that our band was a country band, formed for the sole purpose of playing country music, and the primary qualification for anyone playing country music is that you’ve heard it. Or— failing that— at least you’ve heard OF it.

I would have guessed that everyone knew this. It isn’t taught in school, but need it be? I would have said no. And if you had told me that there was one person walking the earth who did not know it, I would have been skeptical. But even if I had accepted your premise, it would not have troubled me, because your assertion would have seemed entirely in the realm of the abstract. If you had insisted that not only did this person exist, but in fact was a person I knew, I would have figured that it would not be the bandleader hiring the musicians for this gig— the one living person who really, really needed to know it. Surely not.

When I found out that some musicians had been hired for the gig, I accepted this news without concern, because the bandleader said he “vouched for ‘em.”

This tells you, immediately, that these events transpired in the distant past, because I no longer recognize the concept of “vouching.” In that far-off epoch, a time more innocent than our own, I vouched for people, and in turn I accepted the vouching of others. There was a kind of neat and admirable equilibrium in this system, where one day you might be a voucher, and the next day you might be a vouchee, and you embraced either role calmly.

Today, I feel differently about it. I recommend that you never, in my presence, vouch for anyone. Those who would like to carry on vouching when I am not in the room can let their conscience be their guide, but keep this in mind— if you can at least manage to avoid vouching for people when I’m around, we will probably get along. If, on the other hand, you decide to tempt fate and do a little vouching anywhere near me, you will be fortunate if you leave the room without a concussion.

I don’t believe there is a god. Or— I should have said— after this gig, I no longer believe there is. But if I were considering an organized religion, it would have to be built on a foundation of no vouching. If the religion also was against murder, coveting, and things like that, fine, but there must be a clear anti-vouching policy.

At the gig, I would find myself flanked on either side— and that “on either side” business is the whole essence of flanking, it seems to me— by two instrumentalists for whom country music was essentially a closed book. Their knowledge of country music was much like my knowledge of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. I’ve always assumed that riding was involved, as well as roughness, but that is where my assuming ends.

The core issue was that our bassist— through no fault of his own— had been brought into our merry little group less than 24 hours before the first note would be played at the winery. He was required to learn, at rehearsal, three sets of material; this was around 35 songs. And it was material that had never before reached his ears, in life; this was the inescapable conclusion when you heard his initial attempts to play it.

A further obstacle arose when we decided to begin with an easy one, “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash. The bassist— a man of boundless optimism— had not heard the song, but he believed that if we played it for him, everything would be fine. I explained, as I had learned to do in college, that it was in the key of C. This information left him unmoved, as he said he did not know what a key was. I had trouble processing this, but an additional revelation was waiting for me; he also did not know what C was.

I showed him where the note C was, on his instrument, and to his credit, he seemed glad to learn it. More “rehearsing” followed, but I will not speak of it.

🧜‍♀️THE GIG

At the gig, the bassist’s amiable personality was an asset, but the chord progressions consistently had him buffaloed. There were some numbers where he would occasionally emerge from the maelstrom, to briefly land on the correct chord, and then recede again into the murk from whence he came. Though I would not have predicted it, I grew to prefer the songs that fell into this egregious category, because the alternatives were in some ways worse.

There were songs where he had the bulk of the chords lined up roughly where they were supposed to be, but every once in a while, there would be a glaring error that he would consistently make every time that part of the song came around.

It was like driving to work and always running aground on the same exact pothole, five days a week, in all weather, and this somehow disoriented me even more than the songs where he was completely at sea. Looking back on it, it seems I would get spoiled hearing every musician playing the same chord as every other musician, for one bar, and then for two, and then for three, and so forth, and I would get lulled into a misleading sense of security, only to hear us badly scrape the undercarriage— babadonk!— on that same pothole again. You know, like Sisyphus, if he were driving his Honda day in and day out to the boulder-rolling job site.

On the other hand, there were songs where he had all the chords basically placed in the right neighborhood, but the chords never really landed in any kind of systematic way, rhythmically speaking. Rather, they would just be tossed in, the way you might throw shark bait over the rusty side of a fishing vessel. You would throw it here, or throw it there, if you follow me; the goal being to throw it somewhere, to get rid of it, and then move on with a lightened load.

Of course, there were also many occasions where all of these different kinds of mistakes happened in the same song. I can’t give you an accurate breakdown, after these many years. All I remember is that every type of error happened a lot, way more often than any of its ignominious brethren.

On the other side of the stage was the keyboard player, and he was distinguished by having had the least rehearsal time of any of us. One of the things he had brought to the table was his unavailability during all but about twelve minutes of rehearsal; even to make that golden dozen possible, we had to go to him.

Once we had packed up our equipment and gone to him, it developed that he had been promised that we would add into our repertoire a few jazz standards, so he could be featured on those numbers. This complicated things in a way that at least had the virtue of being fresh, as it turned out that I was the only musician able to play that material with him.

At the gig, he was soloing on a number by jazz legend Horace Silver, when he suddenly stopped playing and goggled at me like a fish. Two could play at that game, I felt, so I also stopped playing, and goggled back at him. This back-and-forth goggling festival continued, and I recall thinking that I would be damned if I was going to be the first one to stop goggling. To me, that seemed like his responsibility.

He was from a different school of thought, though, and eventually I caved, and played something resembling a guitar solo. Somehow, we finished the piece and returned to our idiosyncratic version of country music.

This keyboardsman, it must be said, approached country music in a way it has never been approached before or since. His playing included tireless facility and an extensive command of vocabulary. Regrettably, it was not country music vocabulary. Musical facility and vocabulary are normally a desirable combination, but in this case, the employment of the one to demonstrate the other led to a style largely at odds with the material.

The Texas honky-tonk songs of Ernest Tubb, with their down-to-earth chronicles of drinkin’, dancin’, and cheatin’, were particularly ill-suited to this man’s garlands of rococo frippery. There was a strangely diffuse quality to his work, a vague but relentless impressionism that blended but imperfectly with the low-register hullabaloo and squall coming over the hill from the west.

Typically, he spent the majority of each song effortlessly playing Liberace-esque rippling waterfalls of arpeggio embroidery and filigree. He would begin at the bottom of his piano, overplay a bit down there to limber up, and then scamper his way up to the twinkling ice castles of the nosebleed register, before festooning back down the way he had come, and starting the infernal process all over again.

The words “inept” and “inapt” sound a lot alike, but his logorrheic approach to honky-tonk neatly illustrated the difference between them.

The drummer, I’m pleased to report, was the smallest problem, because he had musical training, plus plenty of professional and academic experience. When things went wrong with him, his innocence was inarguable; at rehearsal, we had had such an uphill battle with regard to notes and chords that there was nothing for it but to leave the drummer to his own devices.

We were in the situation of the kindergarten teacher who doesn’t have time to look at Becky’s drawing of a duck, because Brad has soiled himself.

On the fast bluegrass numbers, he was somewhat at a loss as to what to play, and we didn’t have time to help him out. Nor is it clear to me what we would have said to him if we had time to say anything. Some of our material came from an acoustic string band tradition where drums played no role. In the absence of the sort of roadmap he might have reasonably expected us to provide, he fell back on his academic training, and he reached for his arsenal of drum rudiments.

These rudiments are used as fundamental training exercises, especially for the snare drummer in a military band. This meant that we were singing and playing honky-tonk idioms in tandem with the keyboard gentleman’s fussy cascade of roulades, barrel rolls, and obliggati, and the bassist’s addled but meaty peregrinations, while our drummer kept up an impressive outpouring of paradiddles, Swiss army triplets, and single, double, and even triple ratamacues, as the occasion demanded.

Bluegrass fans reading this will scarcely need me to tell them that a Flatt and Scruggs tune like “Honey, Let Me Be Your Salty Dog” will sit but awkwardly alongside the kind of rattletrap percussion flourishes we associate with the avant-garde classical compositions that bewildered audiences of the 1920s, and retain the ability to bewilder us still, a century later. The combination of that approach to percussion with the ill-advised, alternately florid and arid contributions of my colleagues on the port and starboard sides o’me would have staggered a better man than I, and I don’t mind telling you that while I did try to “fit in” with what I was hearing, invariably, these efforts were not crowned with success.

More and more, as the gig progressed, I found myself turning my volume knob all the way down to zero, and indulging in the transparent fiction that I was actually playing my guitar. In my defense, I was trying to adhere to the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

Lest you wonder whether I am unfairly focusing on the grimmer aspects of this macabre afternoon, allow me to put things in perspective for you. At some point deep into the gig, I gazed into the faraway distance. I had hoped for some respite from the horror, but instead I saw a group of women who were engaged in the construction of an elaborate and ironic pantomime, cruelly mocking the awfulness of the sound we were creating.

Do not ask me to describe their impromptu performance with any clarity, as my vision was much obstructed and compromised. All I can remember now is that one woman, under the influence of baking sun and sangria, was lying on her back with her legs in the air. These legs were being manipulated by a second woman, in the manner of a person operating mammoth levers to control the machinery in a factory of some sort.

I can’t say how long this went on. I turned away after about ten minutes, concluding that these artists had made their point, and the rest would be of interest primarily to the specialist.

You might guess that this occult audience ritual would be the climax of my story. I know I did, at the time; it would be hard to imagine a blow that would have been more difficult for me to recover from. Fortunately, neither of us needs to strain our imagination in this way, as I can simply tell you what actually did happen.

When the third set (the longest of the three) was over, and the music was done at last, I found myself standing around in a kind of numb stupor. The bandleader who had set the infamous events in motion— the George Armstrong Custer of bandleaders— turned to me and said something that rattles me to this day.

“Well,” he said, “another bar gig. I’ve certainly played many that were worse.”

“Good god, man,” I thought, with a frisson of gothic dread. “If that be true, small wonder then that what little hair you have remaining is as white as meringue.”

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Many years behind me now— back when I sat at desks in th…

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I read a few books clean through without striking any internal organs this year, and I ruined a pair of shoes wading in a bunch of others. All these excerpts are from books I took seriously enough to want…

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🧜‍♀️ Mark Alan Stamaty, MacDoodle St.

Mark Alan Stamaty used to do a strip satirizing American politics, called Washingtoon. That’s where I first heard about him, as I read it religiously in the Post. It’s been collected, but…

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