Pannonica THE JAZZ BARONESS

When wandering half-lost around the lakes of upstate New York in my familiar reverie, I imagine structures of thought that incontrovertibly, for the moment, explain the way in which Pannonica’s motivation and devotion form no part of the reasons that found her crossing the Atlantic for New York City and her confirmation with Thelonius Monk. Shucking Rothschild, boarding the lifeboat, the caravansary wended through Bohemia and Persia, she sat alone at a table near the stage in the Raffles bar.
The lakes are long, and narrow, and very deep, similar to the shape of that group of souls who adore Proust. Shore roads dip into ravines and bend around vineyards and woodlots and fields of corn and hay, but taken on the whole length, are long and straight. Taverns situate themselves along the routes, attracting those persons with a couple of hours to spend, smoking and drinking and regarding the grapefields sloping down almost to the water. Many people who work in cities almost never have a day in which they may so idle.
It would not have been called courage.
I would never have quite expected that a small expatriate community of louche hedonists, deeply bored, would have found themselves over a matter of years coming together in a decommissioned 19th century resort hotel in Rose Hill, New York, Onondaga County, similar to tuberculosis sanitaria in Lake Placid, Saranac, or elsewhere in the Adirondacks. I had been by there a few times over the years, and was impressed by the stillness of the buildings on the hilltop road: tennis courts abandoned, bandstand gray. On a summer day they would gather a few of their number and drive the couple of miles to an inn overlooking Skaneateles Lake, to spend the long hours of the warm afternoon occupying a table or two at the corner of the patio deck that had the least view of the blue lake below. There they would drink wine and cocktails to cloud the edges of the cocaine and opiate derivatives that were their chief means of conveyance. I could not see that they ever very much extended their conversations past half-observations and notions and wry, satirical remarks. They were there in the off-season as well, within, quite near the fireplace; in different combinations, dressed in their slovens, having, I could only imagine, the same epically obtuse conversations, in shadows and in fogs, year after year.
For I had repeated my visits there, over many years. In the late 1980s it was on my bicycle. Later I drove a friend’s borrowed Alfa. Alone, as I was all but a few times, I would sit at the bar on the other side of the eight-foot length of extravagantly polished bowling lane, and extract bits of information from the owner, the host, who seemed indifferent to my presence there – though there were two canvas-sling high stools there, presumably for that purpose – about the group at the obscured table or near the fireplace. Over the times I would take a nod from one or two of them, meeting in the men’s room or at the bar, but no more. They were mostly from Canada, the expansive highway of literary critics and satirists; one or two were from France, or perhaps Denmark. Something had collected them. One fellow was barefoot, brownskinned, and his clothes, only lightly different from the scruffs worn by them all, was made entirely of deerskin: he was a disaffected Mohawk. He read Marx.
The cell was extremely thick and tightly closed. For a few years, I had learned from Sam, they had developed a whole-foods cooperative, and had distributed flours and ciders to small groups all around the lakes. They apparently had not foreseen or noticed that it was becoming an enterprise, but when that evidence was unmistakable, they had closed the business, and had cleared out the stock and staples.
Eight miles up the lake from this isolated, hilltop inn, Skaneateles village lay clean. It is a town of some wealth, with grand, well-tended houses; photographers, jewelers, musicians, restaurants. The town had welcomed a social-religious commune in 1843, and erected a school for fugitive slaves. But something of a vogue was started there, too, after the Second World War; matriarchs and patricians would rent or lend an attic apartment or room to writers and scholars, musicians and artists who were off-tune, oblique, or afflicted with languid impermanence. There these souls would knit and unknit equations, or trill their autisms of a phrase that would not coalesce into a sonata. They would stroll around the town streets or by the lake, whither they might gather in single pairs. They might take a job, briefly, before their practical incompetence washed over them and hied them back to their room.
But what did the tribal, static vagrants in Rose Hill unfurl with the hours of their lives? Certainly they slept and made meals; there were expansive porch discussions with coffee and toast; there was reading until dawn in single rooms. They perfected indolence; they were practitioners of this facility with a fabulous virtuosity. Had they ever sought to name the thing, they might have said the making of nothing was the very purest form of peace.
Among the musicians there was ceaseless chatter, good-natured or sharp, and Manhattan was a warren of lives and souls and isles of shoals, rooms that sealed out moonlight. Her cats were intoxicated with catnip, and her veterinarian bills were mountainous. Among them all she showed her smile of surpassing authenticity, but in the way that only those who have lost freedom know the way in which it fills the heart and lungs, only those without courage know the fits and starts of blood that does not smoothly flow. Abjuring the whole continent of Rothschild, Pannonica’s moral aspiration was freed to inhabit a fine world, where originality was one’s own, by having found the right place to be: near the perfect, and present at the creation.

Saul Bellow THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

Jarmusch, Amis, & Hitchens has been for twenty-five years the firm on which I steadily rely to defend myself against the institutional morals offenses and crimes against nature that scour my ship of speed and grace with vicious barnacles, so that I have to wonder why the elder two principals pressed themselves to an uncharacteristic declamation christening Bellow’s book the Great American Novel, a overwrought attribution without which I could have done. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH cannot be absolute though, because its howlers and breaches roil the still waters. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH does not contravene one of my favorite opinionated assumptions, that like remarks, “invention” is not literature. Novels are authors, and novelists are (only) conning when they place an awful rut in the dark mudded road bearing down upon which a carriage carrying a fleeing bride portentously hurtles. Published versions of this number in the millions-upon-millions, obscuring the sun, and in some novels, Vienna sausages in their can convey the chance artfulness has of setting the hot dogs rolling down hillsides, pell-mell, screaming with delight at (imagine!) a Beethoven Tenth Symphony. Cat runs away.
Bellow’s growlers and imperfect structure have no analogue in the pristine latter novels of Henry James, which admit no brute awakening from the granite-hard dream of literature.
Bellow’s pastiches, ornamentations, and vignettes elude the pine telegraph poles from which their progress must depend; his tone poems and impressionistic pastel clouds pair a reader with zephyrs and carousels; the human heart is unfurled and delaminated, warm flames of flickering fires rest the sentiments in contented apposition. Augie’s brother Simon is hanged from trees, and holds up signs; with the skill of a burglar he fashions himself a veterinarian and rids Chicago of its plaguing cats; the sordid vanities harked upon our betters thread through his apostles in Cleveland; Augie is rent and gouged, flensed and fellated by rapacious birds; yon bistro reserves the table ronde for his streams of workers exiting cold factories where no mirths form. An electric train anticipates the wild colors that develop out of watching a hundred shades of grey emerge from the ablurring house and factory structures along the way. In the cemetery jesters and fools spangle tombstones with kites and kite tails and kite strings. Remove to Mexican arroyos or even Callisto? Nothing simpler. I had a drug store send her up some breakfast. The poles moor clouds of grace an author has confected, it is true. But that way puppetry lay, as well as the more basic equations of construction.

Christina Stead THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN

The Arcadia in which I folded into my warm and willing arms the unearthing bloom of mescaline and Eros and transfiguring language was a small leafy green village in upstate New York, 1965-1969, yclept Geneseo. It was peopled by numerous wiggling, unidentified phantoms, and by my particular band of allies, a variety of hot house flowers born months after the Second World War, picking up the flavor of the Beats, observing the inchoate affectations of the hippies, and foretasting the dark age of morbid untime that characterized the 1970s, and then the Eighties. And then the decade preceding the millennium, followed by the ten years that found themselves both flatulent and anesthetized subsequent to the millennium.
Before the freeze at Kent State, among us it was compulsory to carry around certain books (though not in backpacks – then how? and ourselves, were we completely unhydrated?). These were to show themselves to be most-evidently outside the curriculum, cool, and to possess or at least imply the grandest (though putative) transpondences. Chief among these were McLuhan, Malcolm X, CALL IT SLEEP, and Robert E. Morrison’s PRIMITIVE EXISTENTIALISM. But it had not been evident to us that professors of literature also carried (in briefcases) certain books from which their serial years of library scholarship precluded a native, and personal, and true excitement. Professor Dante Thomas (yclept, dismayingly, by his colleagues, “Dan,”) was enthralled by and occasionally mentioned Christina Stead’s THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. That novel had appeared in 1940 and had immediately hidden itself under the bushes of backwaters and remaindered lists. But: in 1955/1965 Randall Jarrell wrote an essay and introduction: Heinrich Schliemann! Lord Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin! Howard Carter!
I had not known that such other deaths had undone so many books I now must remember with diminished affection.
The secret heart of greatness of such books obscured and created my pesky wondering – before I had recognized it as such – about where the novel can be said to be truly located.
It gives me more satisfaction than perhaps it should that I found that this core-place was where I first thought it was, and where any author should put it: in the gently swaying tone that emits from the admixture of the dimmest evocations of diction and lexicography, the heartbeat rhythm of nerves and blood in harmonic bop dancing, and the lullabification effected by senses swooned in the jazzing of bits of many beauties. People fall off bridges or espy assurance in the face of their beloved or behated, but those storylines have never moved me, or ever seemed anything but scriptwriting (monkey-with-typewriter). Flames and bits of light and distant thunders accrue, in paragraphs and sentences and chapters, until half-reading and half-sleeping you feel what Stead was up to, and it rests in your hand like a weightsome brass charm, the thing she has confected: the location of any group’s adhesion is the Apache language. Persons belonging to the one group presented in the book will go on each to join another cluster, or even a sweep of bands, but an author has devised a bit of craft to fix in time and tongue the moving x-ray he or she will title and proffer for kin-readers. The motif-strains of Stead’s literary arrangement dominate characterization, eventualities, time, and bookish notions of actually existing, so beautifully and thoroughly, that one thinks of the most elegant writers of all, recalling that their brilliance usually resides in digressions and an attribution of lyricism. Eschewing the like of Pollitry is an unbreakable code described as if it were our pre-freudian memory, that occurred usually before the age of four, as oceanic feelings of immensity, planets coming together slowly, suppressing all the familiar senses: the oceania of life and death described by oneself and simultaneously by proxy.
Lyricism is the infinite chord left over from the making of the stars. We rhyme with Stardust, a song composed by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. As Burgess says in a foreword to TITUS GROAN: context is everything.

Paul McComas UNPLUGGED

Dayna Clay slowly becomes aware of her responsibility as the arranging sensibility in Paul McComas’ novel UNPLUGGED, but has been afforded, let us say, perhaps a slight insufficiency of tools, for she otherwise possesses the wit to realize that the single significant sweep of equanimity toward which she aspires can be achieved only by integrating far-flung genres and dissimilar media; but she must for the moment be coaxed like a beef cattle along the single corral gates of story. It is her loss, as a character-entity, that the book’s resolution follows the last page of text with the white page of the face of the good Paul McComas; yet this is not at all deleterious effect, since McComas’s goal has been advanced and achieved, and he has had much to say. The argillaceous prose-fiction Dayna-entity is unfortunately deprived of her own afterflowering, and is severed from McComas’ subsequent night-thoughts. Still, one will wonder why Dayna was given a savant’s precision and wisdom, if she was only going to take two steps across the room, when she might have sailed to Byzantium, and wandered cross Patagonia, rusticated in a Venice café, and encouraged Matisse to use a little more white pigment.
One step across the room is doubtless the primary necessary expedient if it prevents the principal from trembling the trigger bar that alerts the bullet meant for one’s head, but the broad life promised her is stunted by her believing that the rest of her life - when she could be appreciating that memory is a process – is a monkey replacing one story with another.
To his great credit and in fulfillment of the promise he has made to us to unleash in the form of a novel the James within him, McComas has made Dayna Clay an artist, whereas the sniggling Paul Auster has simply and nominally declared that some character or other is an artist and by means of that endorsement, he expects us to jump on his fucking smelly trolley of a novel.
Auster arranges sentences in exactly the same way I would suppose he has violently swung a razor-sharp, mountainman’s axe to cut in half a Milky Way: with thundering declaration that the meaning of a sentence can be no more than the sum of the meaning of its words. Build a model of the Taj Mahal with uncooked spaghetti. At age fifteen, he stuffed a green pepper with ground beef, onion, tomatoes, rice and cheese, in just the way he had, the night before, for the first time, approximated coitus. This is a world without color or people of color. What do boxes in a closed warehouse do when no one is around? They defy their own destiny and besmirch the glory of their far-bound treasures, by having convinced themselves that everything will be okay as long as Regent Auster comes along and makes of themselves smug little piles and other similar, consequential, and bloodless boxes. Auster’s redemption is always only effected by paraphrase, which is not the land of wisdom, art, love, health, multiplicity, the human senses, assurance, courage, rebellion, the glories, the graces, intuition, or metaphor. Paraphrase is some old shit-chestnut you got from one of your credentialed elders. Result: Flaubert, Mailer, and Faulkner fling themselves hand-in-hand off a high cliff, supplying by picture a joke that hath ne’er been before told.
As aspects of the whole of his work, these campfire tales, McComas’ DUBLINERS, will have the warmth we locate in our family members, which we have held close to our hearts prior to our having set our own course for Yoknapatawpha, Paris, or Ramsdale. These are the places where englysshe swirls clouds and thunder into song and rhapsody-waltzes. Sincere independence of spirit is always detectable only in the implications and the digressions, as it must be, and its means reside in semiotic, implicit harmonies. McComas’ real (and next?) work is Molly’s ULYSSES, the popular music starlet who matured her accessions by means of the most austere privacy, and was perceived generally by many people as an artist who invented a field.

Edmund Wilson

LUCIDITY FORCE EASE
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Ce devait être quelque vieux refrain de comédie musicale datant de mes années d’université; ses échos douceâtres avec de temps en temps la note un peu aigre d’une harpe ou d’un violin semblaient, même avec cet écho faux et iréel, avoir conservé plus d’humanité et de charme que la musique de danse le plus moderne n’en pouvait suggérer. Je jetai un coup d’oeil à Daisy – elle regardait maintenant comme une gentille petite fille la rive qui défilait – et je tombai dans une rêverie sentimentale.

Les souches mince d'une douceur liée, avec de temps en temps une note frailly sure de la harpe et le violon - certaines musiques old-tune comédie Je me souvenais de mes années de collège - me semblait même dans ce échos parasites et de lutins de conserver une plus ce qui était humain et plus charmante que le rythme de la musique de danse plus récente avait jamais permis de posséder, et comme je l'ai regardé à Daisy, regardant comme un enfant charmant bonhomme, à des sites de la côte en passant, j'ai été touché par sentimentale rêverie.

Robert Briffault and the woe of foetid inheritance

But rebellion may be, after all, one of our most desirable traits. In his ground-breaking work The Mothers, British anthropologist Robert Briffault found that Western children are indeed rebellious by nature. Briffault argued that it is only when we are able to "shake off the dead hand of traditional heredity" that we reach our highest potential.

Episodes of Sublime Transubstantiation by Means of Prose

It is possible to safely and faithfully say that over the last thirty years I have recited to myself, three hundred times, often aloud, a passage from the vastly under-appreciated novel of Edmund Wilson
I THOUGHT OF DAISY:
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.
Call it sleep, call it praying; a peace mantra.
From Robert Craft's AN IMPROBABLE LIFE:
What I learned in the hospital is that the time between heartbeats varies in healthy hearts, but not in diseased ones on the verge of failure. Thus a perfectly steady heartbeat is more likely to be found in elderly, rigid bodies than in flexible young ones. The corollary of this is that fractal patterns of considerable complexity are linked to healthy heart functioning, and that when the complexity disappears, sudden death may follow.