Tuesday, September 30, 2014

the last book I ever read (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, excerpt five)

from There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya:

Until Clarissa turned seventeen not a single soul admired or noticed her—in that respect she was not unlike Cinderella or the Ugly Duckling. At an age when most girls are sensitive to beauty and look for it everywhere, Clarissa was a primitive, absentminded creature who stared openmouthed at trivial things, like the teacher wiping off the blackboard, and God knows what thoughts ran through her head. In her last year at school, she was involved in a fight. It was provoked by an insult Clarissa believed had been directed at her. In fact, the word wasn’t directed at Clarissa or anyone in particular (very few words had been said about her), but instead of explaining this, the boy simply slapped her back. During that time Clarissa imagined herself as a young heroine alone in a hostile world. Apparently she believed that every situation had something to do with her, although very few did.



Monday, September 29, 2014

the last book I ever read (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, excerpt four)

from There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya:

Misha and Karpenko had a fruitful collaboration, and at the end of March the play was performed before the faculty and students. The maestro praised the part of the horse, especially her tap dance, and the voice professor bored everyone with a lecture on how to teach singing to students with insufficient talent. The audience loved the horse and yelled “Bravo!” Misha and Karpenko, both exhausted, took a long time packing their music and texts. By the time they finished, the subway was no longer running. They climbed up to the attic, and there, on an old mattress, Misha betrayed his wife for the first time, and Karpenko became a woman. That summer their play was performed at a student festival in Finland, where Karpenko was named the best supporting actress. Her certificate, written in Finnish, was displayed in the department.



Sunday, September 28, 2014

the last book I ever read (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, excerpt three)

from There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya:

This Christmas story has a sad beginning and a happy ending. It begins in March with a certain Misha, a struggling composer from the provinces. He’d written a dozen children’s songs and two symphonies, Fifth and Tenth, so named as a joke. Misha survived by moonlighting at clubs with various bands. Onstage he wore a lace blouse and a fake bust, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. That spring he was hired to write a score for a senior show at a drama school, an assignment for which he got paid by the hour, next to nothing. He wrote in his kitchen, at night, while his wife’s family, who unanimously despised Misha, slept nearby.



Saturday, September 27, 2014

the last book I ever read (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, excerpt two)

from There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya:

31. Victor wanted to find refuge in his ideal Marguerite, but Alla’s belly grew remorselessly, and on his birthday Alla presented it to him, like a gift.

32. To cheat fate, Victor signed a three-year contract at a big industrial site two thousand miles away. He reckoned that in three years they’d all forget about him, including Alla, who’d find herself a husband. It was like a temporary suicide, he thought, a thing that everyone desires at some point—to step out for a while, then come back to see what happened.



Friday, September 26, 2014

the last book I ever read (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, excerpt one)

from There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya:

Later, Klava reluctantly recounted the tragic events that had led to her homelessness. Misha the grandson had had a small publishing business that printed calendars. He’d wanted to expand, and so he put out an expensive monograph by a Moscow artist (who had convinced Misha that he was the artist of the moment). The book didn’t sell, and Misha owed money all around. The meter was ticking, and finally his creditor sent “shakers”—thugs who shake out money.

By then Oksana was taking classes part-time, in the evenings, and had found work at a landscape design company. Graduation was postponed by two years. She was paid very little but did impeccable work for both the owner and her bookkeeper. What Oksana missed most was her English class. She always carried in her purse the same book, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and tried to read it on the train but immediately would doze off.



Tuesday, September 9, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt twelve)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

I spent all afternoon playing Logic’s Steinway Hall Piano. I didn’t use any other instruments. By playing slowly and then speeding it up, and by adding one line over another, I could sound a little like Glenn Gould, which is a powerful feeling. After that I experimented with some slow ninth chords, and I got something that I liked, and I put some words to the chords: “I saw you/I heard your voice/And then one day I knew/I loved you.” Another love song. At around noon, the Axiom keyboard developed a problem: Middle C wouldn’t play. I looked up “Axiom silent key” on some discussion forums. Apparently it’s a known problem. There’s a loose connection somewhere, and a key, often middle C, will just stop speaking. This is frustrating if you’re trying to compose a piece of music with a middle C. I thought I was going to have to drive back to Best Buy and return the keyboard. Then I found a video in which someone posted a solution: You squeeze hard on the two sides of the plastic near the mod wheel. I tried it and it worked perfectly. I’m overjoyed, because I really like this keyboard. Just give it a squeeze.

Glenn Gould, you know, used to sing along while he played Bach. He was a hero of mine when I was in high school. I liked his clean staccato playing style. Later, when I got into Debussy’s Preludes and Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, I was less sure about him. He wrote a fugue called “So You Want to Write a Fugue.” It’s got a funny title and good lyrics, but it isn’t all that original a piece of music. Gould was a performer, not a creator. He was cold all the time. He took pills and he wore scarves and hats and coats indoors. The film about him, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, begins with him standing on a windswept ice field. What was missing from Gould’s art was very simple: love. His jumpy playing style showed that—or no, that’s a cheap shot. He sat very low in front of the piano and did beautiful things to it.



Monday, September 8, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt eleven)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

“Oh good, that’s good, that’s good,” I said. I took a deep breath and drove to RiverRun Books—they’ve relocated to a smaller space—and bought a copy of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume Two to give to Roz when she got home. A woman who works there runs a blog called Write Place, Write Time where writers send in photographs of their work areas and describe them. I keep hoping she’ll ask me to contribute so that I can take a picture of my car, but she hasn’t yet.



Sunday, September 7, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt ten)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

We started the DVD. It was a concert movies and David Byrne looked completely insane. He had no stage patter. He began singing “Psycho Killer” on a bare stage, with his guitar and a drum loop. I didn’t like it much. I glanced at Roz. She looked doubtful

“Hm,” I said,” shall we skip ahead?”

“Maybe.”

We skipped through several songs. “Slippery People” was a bit of a disappointment—more of the musicians were on the stage, including two backup singers who helped a lot, but it didn’t sound as good as the recorded version, with Tina Weymouth playing her clean thumpity-funk bass. There wasn’t much humanity in what David Byrne was doing. It was all too arty, too knowingly ironic. Maybe at a different time I would have liked it, but it definitely wasn’t the sort of thing to watch if you were with a person who was having a hysterectomy the next morning.



Saturday, September 6, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt nine)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

People believe that the CIA is forever—that it’s an immovable fixture of American government, like Congress or the Supreme Court—but it was begun with an executive order by a president and it could be ended just as easily. It exists by presidential whim. Obama could shut it down tomorrow, but he doesn’t want to. People believe wars are inevitable, that human nature can’t change, but think of capital punishment. In England people were once disemboweled and castrated in front of a cheering crowd, with their heads put on spikes for viewing. In India they executed criminals by dragging them through the streets and having an elephant step on their heads. Now most countries have outlawed capital punishment. Or think of dueling. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel. Manet dueled an art critic and wounded him with a sword. Pushkin, who fought dozens of duels, died of a bullet wound to the abdomen. Abraham Lincoln almost fought a duel. Nobody duels now. It’s inconceivable. It isn’t basic to anything. Centuries of patrician tradition, absurd rituals, faces slapped, gauntlets stiffly thrown, times appointed, companions holding out pistols in velvet cases in the park at dawn, the iron laws of honor—we know now it’s all hokum. Progress is possible. Drones on autopilot are not inevitable.



Friday, September 5, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt eight)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

I recorded some harmony, using the Steinway Hall Piano—I always seem to go back to the Steinway—then added several jingly, tinkly rhythms from the Indian and Middle Eastern drum kit, and some guitar, and then experimented with some sampled classical male voices singing “ah” and “oh,” and placed the egg-slicer sounds on top. I guess I was making some kind of sound salad. But the egg slicer didn’t fit well and I muted it. The broom was pretty good, it had a sort of double thump, but the egg slicer was a disappointment. I couldn’t find any handclap samples anywhere in Logic—although I’m sure they’re there somewhere—so I recorded some of my own, and I watched a YouTube video on how to take a single, inadequate handclap and double it and then shift the claps around so that they sound realer, moving one clap track to the left and one to the right of the stereo center. But the handclaps sounded corny and I cut them out.

I played what I had so far, and thought I had the beginnings of a song. All it needed was the melody and the words. I set up a “Male Ambient Lead” vocal track. My underpowered voice become enormous in my headphones. I started singing along to the loop with my huge stereo voice. At first I sang wordlessly: ba-doodle doodle doodle doo, doot doodle, doo. Then I sang, “Waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come.” There it was, the beginning of a song, and it had only taken me four hours. Four hours of sweating in the ridiculously hot barn.



Thursday, September 4, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt seven)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

Then Fountains of Wayne came on, playing “All Kinds of Time.” Holy shit, is that a good song. What a great undulating guitar thing in the middle. Shit! Apparently Collingwood, one of the songwriting pair of fountains, has or had a drinking problem—well, who wouldn’t after singing a song as good as this one? He managed to catch the moment nobody has ever caught, the suspended hopeful moment as the quarterback is looking for a receiver, the most poignant and killing moment in football. There are some great chords, and Collingwood is able to control his falsetto notes, and the whole thing is just total genius. The quarterback knows that no one can touch him now. He’s strangely at ease. The play is going to end in a sack—we realize it, gathered around the widescreen TV—and then this slow wavy-gravy warble of a guitar solo comes on that is like the look of a football in flight—the football that he hasn’t yet thrown—and it’s totally mystical and soul-shaking. Power pop is the name given to Fountains of Wayne’s style of music, it seems—but whatever it’s called, they are great songwriters and they deserve thanks.



Wednesday, September 3, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt six)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

He reminds me a little of me in his single-mindedness, except that he’s doing pop music and I was doing classical music in high school. I barely passed Algebra II and I refused to write papers on King Lear, which I thought was an unbearable, false, vile jelly of a play with no beauty in it anywhere, and instead I read Aaron Copland’s book on music and Rimsky-Korsakov on orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov really understood the bassoon—that’s why he gave it Scheherazade’s D minor solo. In minor keys, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, the bassoon has a “sad, ailing quality,” while in major keys it creates an “atmosphere of senile mockery.”

I read some of Stravinsky’s books, too, all written with the help of the overly allusive Robert Craft, including the one where he says, “I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” And I read one of Paul Hindemith’s books. Hindemith, a composer, outraged me when he wrote that the bassoon, “with its clattering long levers and other obsolete features left in a somewhat fossil condition,” was due for a major overhaul. I had to admit, though, that the keys did make a lot of noise. There’s no way to play a fast passage without some extraneous clacking. Listen to Scheherazade—you’ll hear all kinds of precise metallic noises coming from the bassoonist.



Tuesday, September 2, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt five)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

Imagine a drone. Can you imagine a drone? An unmanned aerial killing machine? I will try. I read that they sound like lawnmowers. Here I am in my driveway, listening, and—yes—I can hear a distant lawnmower. What if I knew that that aerial lawnmower could at any moment blow up my house? What if in trying to blow up my house it blew up Nan’s house, killing the chickens, killing both her and Raymond?

Tim told me he’s going to write a book about drones. A few years ago he went to the Hannah Arendt conference at Bard College, where a man from Atlanta gave a talk on robot warfare and how it was inevitable, and how very soon drones would have software that incorporated the rules of warfare so that onboard drone computers could decide, using either-or algorithms, whether a target was legitimate and whether a missile attack would result in an acceptably low number of civilian casualties. Then the drones would not need any human operators living in Syracuse or Nevada. No human person would ever have to push a button to fire a drone missile. Everything would be preprogrammed and hands-free and guilt-free. Tim came back from the Bard conference very upset, and he began making notes for his drone meditation. Will Tim’s book do anything at all to stop targeted killing? Possibly. Probably not. I have no faith in books to stop anything. You need something more than a book. If I wrote a poem against drones, would that help? Not a chance. You need more than words. You need shouting. You need crowds of people sitting down in the road. You need audible outrage.



Monday, September 1, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt four)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

Roz and I are—I don’t want to say we’re finished, because we’re really not. We’re still good friends and we talk on the phone and I sometimes send her postcards when I’m lonely in hotel rooms. I still hold out hope. She’s promised to make me an egg salad sandwich on my birthday, after all. But it doesn’t look good. She’s very busy with her radio show. She produces a medical radio show called Medicine Ball in the expensive new NPR building in Concord, where everything is carpeted and hushed and all the microphones are state-of-the-art, even if monophonic. It’s a successful show, it’s syndicated, it’s good. Every week they discuss the side effects and potential harmful outcomes of at least one pill or medical procedure. They did an extremely good show on Lipitor. Who knew that Lipitor could be so interesting? A totally useless drug, it seems. You take it for years and it makes you dizzy and forgetful and you fall down and break your hip.