Category Archives: Literary criticism

My kingdom for a word

Posted on by

(2013)

Thirty years ago I was watching an Ancient Lives episode, Egyptologist John Romer‘s series from the early 1980’s. (The only television my wife and I seemed to watch back then were documentaries). Remarkable series, never seen one like it. He was standing in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings and behind him was this magnificent painting wall painting. The artist, he showed us, had painted the outline of the figure of a man (or was it a god?) in one continuous sweeping stroke, twelve feet long. It wasn’t a straight line, but a lifelike line, curving, gently undulating, utterly ungeometric. Then he pointed out that all the paintings were like that, beginning as immensely long single strokes, perfect. All the artists painting the tombs did the same. In whatever schools they taught tomb painting back then, they taught this patient, focused technique. And, Romer said, we can’t do that now. Not with such ease. I watched a detailer draw a line across my car in a body shop once, one long continuous stroke. It was exquisite. One long, focused, flawless stroke. But could he have taken that brush, dipped it in paint, and swept across a wall in one long stroke, curving, undulating, unerring, a perfect outline of the figure to be filled in afterward? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Our art is grounded in Greek sculpture and Roman mosaics, I think, infinite details, a zillion tiny steps creating a whole. I can’t imagine one of those Egyptian artists would dig Monet. Theirs was a world of long, graceful, fluid lines. One endless, perfect, living stroke. And thirty years later I’m looking for an adjective that described that stroke. Or described the look of that stroke. I needed to compare a picture to a melody played on the trumpet. Nothing bebop and pointillistic, but a long graceful richly hued melody. Like the theme from Chinatown. I was looking at a still of Faye Dunaway, it was softly black and white, the light was low, her expression haunted, and it struck me that the still–a portrait, really–looked like the trumpet playing the theme sounded. So I began to write that and halfway through the sentence suddenly needed a term that described those long seamless ancient Egyptian strokes. Because that is what her outline was, that’s what would nail it descriptively. An adjective that could apply to both a painting of Ra and a photo of Faye Dunaway. I needed that adjective. I began with soft but it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t firm either. It was —–. I was stuck. There isn’t one. There’s no such word. And no wonder, the very concept of the impression made on us by seeing a shape made by one long stroke like that doesn’t exist. And if it weren’t for John Romer it never would have occurred to me that such a thing even existed, and I wouldn’t have wasted an hour trying to look for a fucking adjective describing it. Hell, I couldn’t even describe it here, this is a mess, I’m flailing about trying to describe something that can’t be described in English. Romer had the visual, he followed the line with his finger and loving camera. We could see it on the screen, and visuals, even after four thousand years of writing and a hundred thousand years of speech comes nowhere near the effectiveness of the eye. Even something as rich in vocabulary and concepts as English, packed as it is with the borrowed lexicons of several languages and bits and pieces of a hundred others, is struck dumb by things it doesn’t even know exists. That skill John Romer marveled at defies my ability to describe without elaborate description. So the Chinatown piece sits unfinished, awaiting one non-existent word, and instead out gushed this. My kingdom for a word.

 

 

Punch line

Posted on by

When I was young and buff and gorgeous and 22, I declined an offer from a beautiful blonde acquaintance to appear in porn movies. True story. I think her name was Monica, and she was icy and tall and leggy and serious and a production assistant in the San Fernando Valley. Her studio offered $200 per movie (about $700 today) she said, with the promise of lots of work. The money was tempting, but I had my heart set on being a writer. Besides, you could make a lot more than a lousy $200 (about $700 today) writing an article.

That was the punch line, actually. Too bad it’s not a joke.

Books

Posted on by

Somebody mentioned they were watching High Fidelity and I remembered how the vinyl geeks in the flick were forever reorganizing their records by weird categories of the moment. Yeah, so we all did that. Maybe not as geekily as in High Fidelity, and maybe we were never in bands as anti-climactically lame as the one that ended the movie (I fucking hated that band), but we reorganized our record collections. Alas, I’ve gotten rid of most of my record collection to feed my epilepsy medication habit (I probably have 400 LP’s left….) and reorganizing it just doesn’t hang anymore. It’s just sad. I only have four categories left. One is jazz. One is classic jazz. One is pre-Baroque music. And the final one is everything else. You know you don’t have many records left when one of your categories is everything else. And I just sold another batch yesterday. There’s no joy in reorganizing LPs when you barely have any. What normally would last all weekend now takes an hour watching Bob Ross on PBS. Funny little clouds indeed.

So I spent the weekend reorganizing my books. Getting rid of 90% of my jazz library suddenly opened up all this space so I was finally able to get the books out of the closet and shelf them. I did so lovingly. All these wonderful books, mostly hardcover, all non-fiction, any one of which could make me an excruciatingly dull person to sit next to at a cocktail party. Not to mention an annoying know-it-all on Facebook. It was a happy time, sorting and shelving books, Caetano Veloso on the stereo, three cds worth. (I’ve been on a Brazilian kick lately.) Finally, I tucked in the last book in the last spot. I was done. Project complete. I sat at my desk in the office (aka the living room… brickwahl.com maintains a homey work culture) surrounded by hundreds of carefully shelved books. I felt intellectual to the max.

Then as I lay in bed in the dark going off to sleep, the German inside of me began to grumble. Kein Ordnung, sie sagte, so viele Bücher und so ein Durcheinander. And the German was right, it was anarchy. Just a mess. This is what happens when I let the Irish me sort books. I glory in their words, I lay them out in random order, sprinkled like spring blossoms on an Irish hillside. But what I needed was them broken down by subject. So first thing this morning, as the Irish me slept in late, as usual, the German me came into the living room and worked my German engineering magic. Now right next to the desk is my linguistics section, while behind me are the history and science sections. There’s a whole shelf full of brain books. The surviving music books are tucked away where vinyl used to be. Beneath the desk is an enormous stack of to be reads, maybe a hundred of them. Stretched across the desk is a whole column of reference works, making me feel very secure. Next to me is a charming little collection of foreign language dictionaries, because you never know when you might need to say við hliðina á mér er heillandi lítill safn af erlendum tungumálum orðabækur in Icelandic. There’s a pile of coffee table books to my left, another bunch to the right. There’s even a secret stash of Penguin classics for when I want to read Xenophon xenophobically.

And I still have longstanding plans to get more shelves. And more books. Collecting music has lost much of its magic. Too many formats. Too easily accessible. I do it but it’s not as exciting as it used to be. Books, though…probably three quarters of the books in my library are not available digitally. Books are the last bastion of old analog bastards. Books and the boxes full of handwritten scrawl in my closet, daring me to digitize them. And the photographs. Thousands of them, unscanned. I had so much hair then, and looks, and charisma, and modesty. There must be a quarter century of photographs. Pictures of parties and gigs and bands and all these young people raising hell. There are even cat pictures. Good lord that will be a project. I’ll have a throwback Thursday that will last the rest of my life.

“Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn’t so important, I’d show you something. My library. Thousands of books.” Elisha Cook Jr., as an old school lawyer, to Captain Kirk on Star Trek.

Hemingway

Posted on by
There’s a storm somewhere off Baja, and the air over L.A. is damp and listless and hot, and everywhere is the sound of overheated air conditioners and little else; people, pets, even the birds are still, no chatter, nothing. Words linger, form little phrases that string themselves out into long, lazy sentences full of conjunctions and commas that seem to wander nowhere in particular until stumbling onto a period. Remind me not to use such long sentences in a heat wave. When it’s humid, think like Hemingway. Short sentences. Drunk.

George Davison, again

Posted on by

Ya know, I spent so much time reminiscing about George Davison in ye olde daze that I completely forgot to mention something I had only discovered about him via Facebook. George was a talented writer. I’m not talking music here, I already talked about that, but language. You can see that almost immediately in someone on Facebook (or in emails or tweets even) because they can spin little stories even if they’re ony a couple sentences long. When he was on the farm you could see the farm, when he was in Santa Barbara could see the streets, and the trees, and feel the sun. You don’t even have to describe it, a reader fills all the background in if you say the right words. Which he did. Towards the end his stuff got very, very dark…he told us some awful things and warned us he was going to tell more. I was glad he didn’t. Maybe he had second thoughts, maybe the drugs kicked in, I dunno, but it spared us an evil side–we all have those, I certainly do–but I don’t recall ever seeing his on display before. Not even in his most punk rock moments in the early days. Those dark stories he forewarned of us were stories that didn’t really need telling, I guess. Cancer was a world we all might face sometime, but no use letting us in on it now. If it happens–and it will, to some of us–it happens. Worry about that when it comes.

I remember how much I admired his skill with language, his flare for words, and I told him so. He was surprised, I think, most natural writers never even think of themselves as such. They just write naturally. I figured as he recovered we would see endless threads of George stories. It would be part of the recovery process. When I heard he’d finally slipped away I felt cheated that he never had the chance to spill like that, to pour it out in that breezy style of his. I didn’t say anything because, well, it was a selfish reaction and would have been just one more thing for you all to be sad about. But it’s been bugging me. So I said it here.

I don’t think there are that many natural writers. It’s a rare thing still. Writing is new, only a couple thousand years old, and it comes far less easy to people than music which is probably a hundred times as old at least. And when I spy someone with talent there’s a bond, like we’re in on a secret most people don’t know anything about. And I always hate to see them go, because when somebody goes they take a zillion stories with them, and we’ll never know what they would have been. And crazy George, like all the rest of us crazies, would have had some stories to tell.

Sigh……

 
.
 
.
 

Jazz writer

Posted on by

There was that time at LACMA a couple years ago, one of their Friday jazz nights, and I’m chatting with some people. A guy just cuts right in and snarls Hey, is your name really Brick Wahl?   Uh, yeah, it is. Well, how the hell did you get a stupid name like that?

I politely explained. My name is Phil, my wife’s name is Phyll…so I got the nickname, etc etc. He didn’t understand what the hell was wrong with two people having the same goddam name. I said oh well. He said I’m a jazz writer, too. Can you get me a job?  I told him to contact the paper. He thanked me and split.

Voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate

Posted on by

Good writing does have its place, I replied to the economist, but not in the press much anymore. Since journalism is driven by online readership (as opposed to print readership) the press needs people who can turn copy quickly and can write  basically their entire piece in the first paragraph. Few readers get past that. Furthermore (I continued), revenue comes in the number of hits. There’s not much value in a reader staring at one page a long time, unless you can distract him with those ever changing graphic ads that lead you to another page, anyway. You’ll find good writing tucked away on obscure if beautifully written blogs that tend towards the literate and academic. As far as readers go they are in the backwaters of the web, but worth the search, if you’re so inclined. Which I am. But, like you, I also enjoy the occasional bit of academic writing myself. Not economics….Lord no, I get lost. Fascinated, but lost. But I have a weakness for linguistics. Still, I prefer my Chomsky in English so generally avoid the original and read one of his  acolytes. Kind of like Joyce. One of the reasons that I was so excited about that upstart Daniel Everett was that he could write in English. Besides, if it weren’t for Daniel Everett I’d have no idea what a voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate is. Though, to be honest, I still don’t know what a voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate is, no matter how many times I listen to the damn MP3. Voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate. In German that would be one word.

Sigh…I passed out on the couch hours ago after taking an allergy pill and now I woke up and it’s 3:30 in the morning and I just wrote voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate three times. Four times.

Ray Bradbury

Posted on by

A couple years before Ray Bradbury died he made an appearance at a book store in Glendale called Mystery and Imagination, one of those places devoted to science fiction and fantasy and science fiction and fantasy fans. The place was packed, every nook and cranny. It was a thoroughly enjoyable event, there were things to eat and wine to drink and weirdos to talk to and cool books everywhere. Ray was his usual incorrigible self, up there in years but still Ray. My wife was thrilled. She’s seen him several times, but Ray was old now, and weak, and wheelchair bound, and you got the feeling that we wouldn’t be seeing him again.

The LA Times had sent a hip young blogger out to the thing. He dashed off a few quick sentences tearing Ray Bradbury apart, making him look like a doddering old fool, hinting at senility. He also took one of those National Inquirer style pics that somehow puts a celebrity in the worst light possible. It was not one of the finer moments of the Los Angeles Times.

Nor of Reason magazine, whose online edition featured a blogger snidely railing against Ray Bradbury, tearing him to shreds, based solely on the account written by the LA Times blogger. That was enough for me and I hit the roof and fired off an email. The guy had the decency to post it in his next blog, which surprised the hell out of me.  Though if I hadn’t been writing for the LA Weekly at the time, I doubt he would have bothered.

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

I was at that Ray Bradbury event. My wife’s a fan, I tagged along. It was in a wonderful old fashioned used book store, and was a very charming party full of long winded reminiscences and toasts, and to be honest anything Ray said I have heard him say before. Nothing was new.  Not a damn thing. He’s been bitching about machines for his entire career (he wrote everything on a manual typewriter). He’s always hated being called a science fiction writer. His government views have changed little. The moon stuff is not surprising…we’ve fallen decades behind schedule on that one compared to what was expected in the sixties, and he’s frustrated not to have witnessed a mars landing. Hard to blame the man on that one. And even his plural internet is perfectly valid unless one pretends that all the intranets, some of them truly vast,  are not actually internets…and of course Google is working on its own internet–not intranet–as we speak. He’s hip enough to know that.

And that pic the Times used was not the beaming, laughing old gent who I watched on Sunday.

Alas, that badly written and edited blog entry in the LA Times has now become part of his legacy.  The man is being trashed all over the web–like you have done–based strictly upon that little story. There’s no turning back now.  He’ll be dead soon enough, and that bullshit story will long survive him, and will become him to many people.  After all, they saw it on the internet, it has to be true.  

Thx much….

Brick

Ray Bradbury died a year or so later and all this was forgotten. I imagine the L.A. Times blogger now brags about the time he met Ray Bradbury, and I’m sure the guy in Reason forgot all about excoriating Ray Bradbury as a “Luddite old fart”.

The problem with bloggers is they think they are important.  But really, we are not. It’s just a zillion people typing a zillion zillion words onto the internet. It’s not like writing a novel. It’s not even like writing an essay. It’s barely writing at all. It’s more like the drunk guy at a cocktail party who won’t shut up.

About Lester Bangs

Posted on by

(Comments posted to a New Yorker piece about Lester Bangs, 8-30-2012)

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
                                                                       Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

That Astral Weeks review is awfully pretty, gorgeous even. Too bad it’s complete horseshit. It has nothing to do with what the album sounds like and everything to do with Lester Bangs. Not that Lester Bangs wasn’t a fascinating guy, but if you’re reviewing a record you should leave yourself at the door. I don’t care how many English classes you’ve had or if you’ve read Baudelaire or can do more acid that Philip K Dick, I just want to know what the album sounds like. So many music critics to ignore that principal. Lots of pretty words that don’t give you a clue about what the music actually sounds like. If you want to write about yourself, write your memoirs. If you’re going to review an album, let the music do the talking. And if you can’t do that in prose, you’re in the wrong business. Because when you write about music, the only thing that matters is the music. You the critic don’t matter at all.

Here’s a rule of thumb…if you’ve completed a review and it’s one of the best things you’ve ever written in your life, dump it. You probably wrote about yourself.

Remembrance of moms past‏

Posted on by

Someone once wrote a nearly 300 page biography of Proust’s mother. University of Chicago press just published the thing. Personally, the idea of spending years writing a biography of Proust’s mother seems so sad. But then I was never a post-grad in literature, so I suppose it’s just a matter of perspective. If that was a proustian joke I didn’t get it, as alas I have never read Proust. If it was a Joycean joke I didn’t get it either. Same reason, but even more on the alas side. I think. Which means I had better start or I will never be able to tell if I made a joke or not. I wonder if my employer will grant paid leave for a month or two to read Proust? Damn…ignorance had been so blissful. Now this nagging doubt. I wish I had never started this post.