Backland

Four brief quotations

"Writing is one of the prostheses we have invented to empower our body." - Elena Ferrante

(From a fascinating recent interview.)

"Symbols become more polysemous as they grow in familiarity: jade will always signify purity, but the apple can stand for anything." - John Jeremiah Sullivan

(From his astonishing memoir, Blood Horses.)

"If we cannot use arms, dearest, let us embrace with complaints." - Franz Kafka

(From a letter to Felice Bauer, 1912.)

"The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting." - Zora Neale Hurston

(From her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me.")

BRO to BUE

An alphabetized sequence of songs from this morning’s bicycling commute:

Ike Quebec, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Quebec was one of the greatest of the breathy tenor saxophonists whose amorous mid-century sound makes me weak, and this is one of the few instrumental jazz versions of the classic Depression anthem.

Cymande, “Brothers on the Slide.” Subtle UK funk with a message that sticks.

Fleetwood Mac, “Brown Eyes.” The haunting softness of this song is one of the reasons Tusk is in my top five.

Don Cherry, “Brown Rice.” Charlie Haden on wah-wah bass supplies the elemental groans and snarls; Frank Lowe on tenor supplies the wishes and screams; Bunchie Fox on bongos supplies the propulsion; and Don Cherry whispers recipes and folk rhymes. There’s never been anything like this.

The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar.” It’s hard not to hate this song, to be utterly repulsed by its weird and salacious presentation of slave rape; it’s also hard not to be propelled forward by its perfect guitar sound and production. Even though I’ve heard it a thousand times, I still feel icky. Greil Marcus’s 1971 Creem piece says it all.

8 Bold Souls, “Brown Town.” New Orleans Brass Band sound meets Chicago post-ACM stylings for deliverance into funk.

Zap Mama, “Brrrlak!” Terrifically rhythmic nonsense, this is the sound of feminine surprise.

Coleman Hawkins, “Bu-Dee-Daht.” The title says it all.

Fanfare Ciocarlia, “Bubamara.” A Romanian brass band breaks the speed limit.

Bud Powell, “Bud’s Bubble.” From the first trio recording Bud did in 1947. Stupendous.

Jelly Roll Morton, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues.” This mysterious ballad about overhearing other jazz musicians talking shit is both foundational and timeless. Luc Sante devoted a great piece to it in the anthology The Rose & the Briar.

Boredoms, “Budokan Tape Try (500 Tapes High).” From their best album, Super Roots. Uneasy listening.

Pio Leyva, “Buen Tumbao.” On any list of the greatest Cuban mambos, the push and pull of the vocals against the rhythm is pure seduction.

Why I Stopped Reading Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba

I couldn’t decide which of the three Rachel Kushner books to try, and an employee at the bookstore told me that a friend who had read all of them said that Telex from Cuba was her best. So I bought it and got 120 pages into it before I gave up.

Kushner wants to make the point that one of her main characters, K.C. Stites, is racist. So she puts these words in his mouth: “I’m sure you know the slaves had a revolution in Haiti. A hundred years before slavery was abolished in Cuba, slaves were running the show over there. But instead of voting in a real government, those guys ran buck wild. Put jeweled crowns on their heads and acted like crazed despots, strutting around with white babies on pikes. But what can you expect of a revolution that began with the pounding of African drums, slaves communicating by voodoo? Bloody mayhem is what. Freed slaves running amok in generals’ coats with all the medals and the gold epaulets, and nude from the waist down.”

That struck me as overkill. Maybe I'm being too sensitive, I thought. Maybe a lot of folks really did think that way. Then K.C. talks about their black maid: “Annie did have a smell, sort of musky. I loved it. I can smell it right now. . . . Once, in a taxicab here in Tampa, the driver was some type of black Caribbean and his cab smelled like Annie.”

OK, I thought, reading on. The author is a bit heavy-handed. But maybe there will be some black characters in the novel to burn off the stench of this.

There weren’t any. Just a few glimpses of them here and there in subservient roles.

K.C.’s father is the epitome of the rich colonialist with government connections who treats his workers with contempt. We get it. Kushner supplies us with all the details we need to picture him. But then she throws this in, again from K.C.’s point of view: “Daddy hit the pig with a hammer. The poor animal squealed something horrible. I was just a little kid and I hadn’t seen anything so rough before. I started crying and begging him to stop. He had a grim expression, and he hit the pig with the hammer again, and again. There was blood everywhere.”

OK, I thought, reading on. The author is a bit heavy-handed. But there are some other interesting characters. It’s not only the Stites family. There’s also a burlesque dancer whose mother dropped her off at a burlesque club when she was thirteen years old and who has been living and dancing there ever since. Well, um, that does seem somewhat improbable, as does the fact that she’s the mistress of both Prio and Batista (two successive presidents of Cuba). And then she gets close to a French arms dealer who served in the SS.  

OK, I thought, reading on. The author is a bit heavy-handed. But . . .

Then I got to Part Two. It opens with an advertisement for—wait for it—Colony perfume from Jean Patou. Oh, the irony. Then we see Blythe Carrington, who has arrived in Cuba four weeks ago from Bolivia, where her husband was managing a silver mine. I guess Kushner forgot that Bolivia ran out of silver in the nineteenth century and the novel is set in 1952. Blythe’s daughter Pamela yells at her, “I hate this place! It’s ugly and we have to live under a disgusting factory. My shoes are all ruined because these idiotic people haven’t paved our road.” OK, she’s a teenager. Maybe some teenagers really did talk like that in 1952. So Blythe tells her to order whatever she wants from the catalog she’s been reading. And of course, Pamela wants “Colony perfume by Jean Patou.” OK, we’ve just read about that, but the point could use a bit of reinforcement. Maybe. Then Pamela says, “I love Colony perfume. And it’s only forty-five dollars.” In 1952. That’s over $400 today. Hit me over the head again.

Even when Kushner is describing the scenery, she can’t help but overdo it. “Branches xylophoned down the sides of the jeep as it forced its way through the foliage that strangled the road’s throat. They ducked under a fig tree, and giant water-filled leaves upturned like ladles, raining into the jeep. Figs plopped on the hood like soft leather pouches.” I could just imagine Kushner thinking, Look at me, folks! I just used two metaphors and two similes in only three sentences. And is there a connection between xylophones, strangulation, ladles, and soft leather pouches? This is not what a good writer does. It’s useless embroidery. A good writer might have written, “Branches brushed the sides of the jeep as it forced its way through the strangling foliage. It ducked under a fig tree, and leaves spilled water into the jeep. Figs dropped on the hood.” Or a good writer might have left all that out and just concentrated on making her characters come alive.

I’m in the middle of reading (actually, listening to) another novel too, Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. I love it. I’m constantly thinking about the characters, wondering what they’re going to do next. Kushner’s characters are puppets whose strings she pulls. I never think about them when I’m not reading the book. I never wonder what they’re going to do next. I actually want to get as far away from them as I can.

So that’s why I’m not going to finish Telex from Cuba unless someone tells me that it gets a whole lot better after page 120.

Nonsense Songs

There’s a long tradition of nonsensical songs. Think of the stuff you sang when you were little kids. Folk music is full of nonsense or things that are close to it. “The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she wobbles as she flies; she never says coo-coo till the Fourth day, July.” Or “Well it certainly is a mystery about the old black crow in the hickory nut tree.” Or “I wish somebody would tell me what ‘diddie wah diddie’ means.”

I love it when great musicians record nonsense records. Two of my favorite albums are Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. They’re not all nonsense, of course, but there’s certainly enough to go around. A year or two after Highway 61, Dylan topped himself with The Basement Tapes, which is about as deep and resonant as nonsense gets.

Interestingly, for a while there wasn’t very much nonsense in black music. The blues was too earnest for nonsense. Fifties rhythm-and-blues sports a few great nonsense songs, but when that turned into soul, the nonsense mostly went away. There were important points to be made and commercial success called for love songs, dance songs, and dramatic numbers. Even songs that appeared to be nonsense, like “Mickey’s Monkey,” were usually more in a dance-song tradition.

But the rise of rap made nonsense in black music totally acceptable again, and it’s been flourishing in hip-hop ever since. Kool Keith may be the paradigmatic nonsense rapper, but there’s some really stiff competition.

Now, Bl_ck B_st_rds by KMD may be my favorite rap album, and there’s certainly a lot of stuff on there that sounded to me like nonsense. But what a kick it is reading the annotated version of the lyrics! Everything makes perfect sense now.

On the other hand, there’s a fine line between “Moon in the window, bird on a pole, can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal” (Tom Waits) and  “Making street hits like Quaker with the grits, for as a monkey spits I never gots the shits” (KMD). Or isn’t there? You tell me.

"A thudding, shapeless text"

After a four-year hiatus, during which I only blogged about investing, I have decided to commence blogging again about literature, music, food, drink, race, religion, philosophy, and my life . . .

The New Yorker writes of Jeffrey Stewart’s new biography of Alain Locke, The New Negro: “At more than nine hundred pages, it’s a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances.”

This goes too far. Stewart’s is by no means an excellent biography. But I like it better than the previous one, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth’s Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Stewart digs up some great material, delves deeply into questions of sex, forthrightly calls Locke out on his condescension and misogyny, and fills his book with terrific portraits of those with whom Locke parried. My favorite part of the book is Stewart’s multilayered attack on the art collector Albert Barnes. Stewart not only really understands Locke in a way that I think Harris and Molesworth failed to, but understands Locke’s peculiar milieu. I found very interesting, for example, Stewart’s argument that Jessie Fauset, editor of the Crisis and sometime lover of W. E. B. Du Bois, had a crush on Langston Hughes despite the twenty-year difference in their ages.

But remarkably, despite the length of the book, there are important things missing. Zora Neale Hurston studied with Locke at Howard, where he encouraged her literary ambitions, but this gets only a brief mention. And utterly inexplicably (unless I missed it), Stewart leaves out altogether Locke’s voyage to Germany in 1932, when he traveled with Ralph Bunche on the same boat as Hughes and a large contingent of African Americans bound for Russia to make a Communist Party–backed movie about racism in the US. On board, Locke disparaged Hughes and his friends viciously in letters he sent to his patron, Charlotte Mason, and when he bumped into Langston, the latter refused to shake hands.

Stewart also gets a number of things wrong. For instance, Hurston did not attend the 1924 Civic Club dinner that was more or less the “coming out party” for the Harlem Renaissance; the anecdote Stewart tells of Zora’s behavior that night happened more than a year later, after the May 1925 Opportunity awards dinner.

But with all its flaws, the book offers many riches, and creditably makes a fascinating figure more fascinating than he has ever been before.

And beyond that, is there a real point to The New Yorker's disparagement? Even if it were entirely just, I fail to see what such an extraordinary dismissal of a book accomplishes besides making its writer look mean-spirited.