the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt three)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Presumably Father Watson said these things automatically. He couldn’t have walked all the way down to the Reach from his comfortless presbytery simply to talk about Martha’s name.

‘She’ll be taking another name at confirmation, I assume. That should not long be delayed. I suggest Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, since you’ve decided to make your dwelling place upon the face of the waters.’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt two)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

‘Rochester? Grace? Bluebird? Maurice? Hours of Ease? Dunkirk? Relentless?’

Richard was quite correct, as technically speaking they were all in harbour, in addressing them by the names of their craft. Maurice, an amiable young man, had realised as soon as he came to the Reach that Richard was always going to do this and that he himself would accordingly be known as Dondeschiepolschuygen IV, which was inscribed in gilt lettering on his bows. He therefore renamed his boat Maurice.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt one)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Richard did not even want to preside. He would have been happier with a committee, but the owners, of whom several rented rather than owned their boats, were not of the substance from which committees are formed. Between Lord Jim, moored almost in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, and the old wooden Thames barges, two hundred yards upriver and close to the rubbish disposal wharfs and the brewery, there was a great gulf fixed. The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt sixteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Verchomin took the opportunity to address a serious subject—the pianist’s incessant financial woes—in a lighthearted way. “Hey, Bill,” she said, “what do you think about having a memorial concert to raise money for you?”

“You mean a tribute, my dear, as I’m still alive,” he said, dryly.

The three of them laughed again, and Evans began to cough up blood. In a moment a steady stream was flowing from his mouth; hilarity turned to horror. Evans gave LaBarbera directions to Mount Sinai Hospital. “Lay on the horn, Joe,” he said. “Tell them it’s an emergency.”

Verchomin turned in her seat, keeping a desperate watch on Evans. “He gives me the fear in his eyes,” she writes. “I want to tell him that I need more, that we aren’t done yet. He tells me, ‘I think I’m going to drown.’ I’m not sure a person can lose that much blood.”

They pulled up to the hospital. LaBarbera: “I remember picking him up—he weighed almost nothing—and carrying him into the emergency room.” Evans’s blood was everywhere, leaving a trail through the waiting room. He was laid on a gurney, and doctors and nurses took over. Back in the waiting room, sitting with his jacket on her lap, Verchomin watched a janitor mop up his blood. "A nurse appears and in a soothing voice describes Bill’s condition as something similar to a nosebleed that just needs cauterizing.” A woman sitting next to Verchomin told her, in great detail, about a similar experience her husband had gone through. She spoke of him in the present tense. A young doctor came out and took Verchomin into a small office. “We couldn’t save him,” he said.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt fifteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Yet the stars in Bernhardt’s eyes (and ears) didn’t prevent him from noticing what, in Evans’s home life, went beyond slobby eccentricity. “Elaine looked like she had been in a concentration camp and Bill had tracks all over his hands, et cetera.”

The et cetera covered what was too painful to elaborate on—these were two junkies in love, with each other and, perhaps just as much, with junk. And the pushers loved them: there was nothing like a steady customer. The tracks all over Evans’s hands implied what wasn’t seen: tracks all over his arms, legs, and feet; collapsed veins necessitating a constant search for fresh needle-access points. Keen-eyed admirers in clubs noticed that the left-handed Evans had overinjected his right hand and arm to the point of nerve damage: in early 1963 “he played one-handed throughout a week’s booking at the Vanguard,” Pettinger writes. “With his left hand and some virtuoso pedaling, he was able to maintain harmonic interest in support of treble lines. In morbid fascination, pianists dropped by to witness the phenomenon.”

The bassist Bill Crow witnessed it on another occasion: “He would dangle the dead hand over the keyboard and drop his forefinger on the keys, using the weight of the hand to depress them. Everything else was played with the left hand, and if you looked away you couldn’t tell anything was wrong.”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt fourteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

We’ve seen much evidence of Coltrane’s worldly side. And though he had a powerful need to keep himself to himself (“He was the type of person, he didn’t care for socializing,” Alice Coltrane recalled “and I don’t care for socializing, so that’s sort of the way it was”), he had a domestic existence in Dix Hills, and he savored it. The presence of four young children, Alice’s daughter and their three sons, would have made the household lively; the harp and grand piano in the living room would have made it tuneful. (John combed the TV listings for reruns of Marx Brothers movies: he loved to watch Harpo play.) There was a telescope in the backyard for scanning the night sky. There were shelves full of books on philosophy and spiritualism.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt thirteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

“Does your religion help you in living, in playing?” the writer asked.

“It’s everything for me,” Coltrane said. “My music is a way of giving thanks to God.”

Or of addressing God. Two months after the Birmingham church bombing (and four months after his switch from Naima to Alice), he recorded, for a part-live, part-studio album, Live at Birdland, an original song dramatically different from any he had written before. “Alabama” begins with a kind of invocation, a mournful tenor prelude played over McCoy Tyner’s dramatic, almost menacing tremolo, then shifts to an oddly swinging middle section with the whole quartet, a passage packed with mixed emotions: sorrow, anger, resignation—and then returns to Coltrane’s somber tune within a tune. The total effect is devastating. “If anyone wants to begin to understand how Coltrane could inspire so much awe so quickly,” Ben Ratliff writes, “the reason is probably inside ‘Alabama.’ The incantational tumult he could raise in a long improvisation, the steel-trap knowledge of harmony, the writing—that’s all very impressive. But ‘Alabama’ is also an accurate psychological portrait of a time, a complicated mood that nobody else could render so well.”