The Beiderbecke Affair

From the Reader Feedback Dept. (Hot Arab Boys Edition)

My friend Rick checks in:

I checked your site yesterday, some pictures from Korea. I know so little about that place. I feel bad for the people of North Korea, “but what can a poor boy do (except sing in a rock & roll band)?” Hey, for want of reading Vidal’s Palimpsest, which wasn’t in the library, I took out Fred Kaplan’s bio to re-read. Don’t know why I keep returning to Gore Vidal when all else bores me. On pp. 491–492, I read this and was reminded of you (and my hipping you to the Vidal-Mailer feud). I thought this was rich. Here goes:

In late Nov. 1960, Mailer, destructively drunk, made headlines great than any of his books . . . after a tense party, he stabbed his wife with a kitchen knife and fled . . . Adele’s life was saved, and she declined to press charges. They moved back in together. [Vidal, friendly with Norman at the time, invites him to his home, Edgewater, north of NYC] “It was a marvelous evening” Mailer recalls. “Gore was very entertaining, generous, and it meant something. I certainly thought of him as a friend at the time. I was something of a social pariah, and here I am, with the woman I stabbed, at Gore’s home. It was a supportive gesture.” But even this evening was not without its usual competitiveness. “At one point Gore said to me, ‘Until you’ve known an Arab boy, you don’t know what sexual pleasure’s all about.’ And I turned to him and said, ‘I am married to an Arab boy.’ Adele has a lot of Gypsy and Spanish blood and Indian blood and could pass for an Arab lady. Gore did not have a rejoinder for that.”

She preferred to believe he was dead . . .

I just finished reading the graphic novel Exit Wounds by the Israeli artist Rutu Modan. It’s about a suicide bombing in which a single body remains unidentified.The protagonist, Koby, teams up with his estranged father’s lover, Numi, in an attempt to prove that the body indeed was their rather mysterious & missing loved one. In an interview with Maisonneuve Magazine, Modan explains where her writing started:

I was looking for elements of a story, and I saw this documentary film—a wonderful documentary called No. 17 (2003) by David Ofek. Ofek’s film is about a suicide bombing on a bus, in which seventeen people were killed. However, only sixteen of the seventeen bodies were identified. One body was completely destroyed and could not be identified. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time that a body had been burnt beyond recognition. What was special in this case is that no one came forward to claim it. This was unusual. Most of the time, family members get worried and come forward but in this case, no one did. The director decided to find the identity of this body and to determine whether it perhaps belonged to a foreign worker or a tourist. The film primarily revolves around this search.

Ofek put an ad in a newspaper hoping that someone would come forward and claim it. What I found really interesting, and very sad, was that a few people started calling, including a father who had completely lost contact with his son and did not know where he was. It was really sad, that it could have been his son, but that the father had lost touch for so long that he would not have even known whether he was dead or not.

Also, I remember when I was in my twenties I once dated a guy who never called me back. After a few days, I decided that he was probably dead. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t called me. Eventually I called him, and of course he was still alive. But this situation was sort of like the character Numi’s situation in Exit Wounds. She preferred to believe that Gabriel, her ex-lover, was killed in the suicide bombing than that he had left her.

I also wanted Exit Wounds to be structured like a detective story, but I wanted to explore the theme of confronting death. We live with death everyday, but sometimes in extreme political situations, you cannot ignore death, or the fear of death, anymore. It has to be confronted. But you also develop ways of dealing with it, including irony and dark humour and simply closing yourself off. For example, the character Numi explains that usually when she sees footage of suicide bombings she just switches off the TV.

This happens in Israel. People close themselves off from the political situation in order to cope. But in the process of hermetically sealing yourself off, you do so—not because of a choice you make—because you just do it. Israelis don’t speak much about politics. I used to, but I stopped. It feels useless. People just stop thinking about it, but as much as you try to ignore it, it increasingly becomes part of your private life.

People find ways of rationalizing things. For example, when there were small suicide attacks, less than five people or if there was an attack in the settlements (communities in territory that came under Israel’s control as a result of the Six Day War in 1967), you say to yourself that it happens somewhere else, far away. You find ways to distance yourself and explain why it did not happen to you. I tried to make Exit Wounds reflect some of these aspects of life.

IMAGE: A panel from Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)

Good Craic Here

I have no idea what he’s talking about here, but I love it:

As I remember it, the 1970s were gas, and sometimes they were gas altogether, but in the early 1980s it was gas crack we were having—fueled by a gas man here and a gas woman there. Eventually we were to have just craic, though it could be mighty as well as 90 (even if I have suggested that number should be updated to 174).

Now read the whole thing. Then read Ciaran Carson’s wonderful Last Night’s Fun:

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary dates crack, ‘chat, talk of the news’, to 1450. ‘Cracker’ is ‘one who or that which cracks, esp. a boaster, a liar’, reminding me of the Fermanagh use of ‘lie’, meaning an impressively convincing tall story, or wind-up. As the late Eddie Duffy, flue-player and cracker, would say, ‘The trouble with the young ones nowadays, they can play none, they can sing none, they can dance none, and they can tell no lies.’

IN ADDITION: On the journey of a lifetime and the craic was ninety-one:

Joxer Goes to Stuttgart – Christy Moore [Mp3]

PREVIOUSLY: Eavan Boland writes: “a new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before.” I first read these lines a few years ago and they reminded me that my great-great grandfather, a Kerry farmer who emigrated to the hills of Iowa in 1848, spoke Irish.

On the Korean Gaze (It's Really Fucking Foreign)

Philippe Chancel’s photographs of North Korea promise “a place not frozen in time, but outside of time, a place, litteraly, like no other on earth” [sic]. A woman in traditional hanbok (or, in North Korea, choson-ot) is faceless, except for her Kim Il Sung pin. His is the only face that matters. Reminds me of the graphic novel Pyongyang by the animator Guy Delisle, which I reviewed a year or two ago.

Delisle peppers the narrative with enough history and politics to orient the non-expert reader. He doesn’t claim to be an expert himself, and he’s best when noticing what only an animator would: for instance, that the omnipresent framed photos of Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, are slightly wider at the top than at the bottom. This, he tells us, is to prevent glare, but it “also intensifies the gaze in this face-to-face encounter.”

That’s what makes this other photograph so powerful: the man’s face, the aversion of his gaze. It provokes something the hanbok can’t: empathy. From another review I published several years ago:

Meanwhile, our ignorance of Koreans—both north and south of the DMZ—rivals only our ignorance of Afghans and Iraqis. In his grouchy but outstanding1997 history, Korea’s Place in the Sun, Cumings argues that in order to understand Koreans, an act of empathy is required. And in order to achieve that, “we should try—temporarily—to disabuse ourselves of American assumptions that get in the way of knowing, of seeing, a truly different society.”

This, of course, is easier said than done. After a year’s experience there, I can testify that Koreans are, to quote P. J. O'Rourke, “really fucking foreign,” and they see us in the same way.

IN ADDITION: “No Motherland without You” [Mp3]

FAQ NO. 582: Brendan, as we gaze at the North Koreans not gazing back at us, what are the Lacanian implications of said gaze, especially where it is, you know, at its most fucking foreign?

A: Good question. As someone else helpfully wrote, “at the heart of desire is a misrecognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projection. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire.”

On Not Moving to Chicago

I’ve been away. In the interim, I’ve decided not to move to Chicago, and so far the Cubs have responded with strong hitting from their outfield. A former work colleague, because of this blog, has accused me of being a spanking fetishist. Despite that, people from all over the world continue to Google and enjoy, many times daily, my post “Bix Porn (V): Flaming Cheeks Edition”; do they think I’m a spanking fetishist? Do they think Bix was a spanking fetishist? I quit my job. I visited a place called Warm Springs, Virginia, where I spent an hour pickling myself in ninety-eight-degree pools once frequented by an elderly Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t much like them and complained to his granddaughter that they gave him boils on his butt. I had a nice conversation with the author of The Cuckoo’s Child about Carolyn Chute. The occasion prompted me to remember my interview with the Maine author many years ago:

I arrive self-conscious about my fuel-efficient little Honda (beep beep!) having read of her distaste for yuppies in their “self-righteously small cars.” [. . .] If it hadn’t have been for the map, I never would have guessed that the slight patch of dirt off the side of the blacktop was her road—not so much a road as an indentation into the woods, where her house hides from view. A clothesline with several black-markered notes hangs across the way, encouraging friends and acquaintances, even Bruce Springsteen, to scram. She’s working. However, a dangling business-sized envelope has my name on it. Inside is a virtual pre-approval voucher for $27,600 from Toyota to be used toward the purchase of a new or pre-owned car. On the other side, it reads “Proceed,” with a smiley face.

I was hired to write about Bix Beiderbecke—a happy first. I ate goat—another first—at a Puerto Rican restaurant and saw A Mighty Heart in a cool little indie theater. I cried at the beginning and at the end. I cried recently while watching Braveheart on TV, but for entirely different reasons. I hired a lawyer and began reading The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, a novel for which I’ve been saving myself for four years now. It reads like a parody of the hyper-literary:

They told him that they had read the entire work, on the ship from England, and were now going over favourite passages. They were also reading Carlyle, which he might overhear—“For that’s a loud book, in its way.”

“An excited book, rather.”

Helen said, “But the excitement is magisterial.”

Leith said, “I think—”

“What?”

“That about large subjects there can be many kinds of books, playing on our sympathies or alienating them. Truth can be a synthesis, or an impression.”

Which is true. I’ve hurt someone badly in the past month. That’s something I take seriously. I miss Oscar & Ida. I miss many of the things I thought were real. Who knew? The Cubs are only four-and-a-half back and, from my new perch in Charlottesville, I’ve looked the future straight in the eye. It reads “Proceed,” with a smiley face.

PREVIOUSLY: On Leaving Iowa

From the Reader Feedback Dept.

Apropos my Bix mix, Michael Cole of London submits the following inquiry:

Can someone please clear up who the arranger was on the Tram/Bix February 1927 version of “Singin’ the Blues”?

I have seen the arrangement attributed to Bill Challis (with Paul Mertz on piano), to Irving Riskin (also playing piano) and to Fud Livingston (unspecified piano).

So who was it?

No one, according to Dr. Albert Haim, proprietor of the Bixography website and forum. Bix & Tram didn’t even know Challis in 1927, and anyway “Singin’ the Blues” is so solo-heavy as to require no real arrangement. Paul Mertz said as much, apparently: “Except for the introduction, there is no ensemble arrangement.”

PREVIOUSLY: “Listen to Trumbauer’s solo on ‘Singin’ the Blues.’ It’s like a poem.”