The Beiderbecke Affair

A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request

Tonight was a start.

• A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request – Steve Goodman [Mp3]

IMAGE: Al Bridwell and Jimmy Archer of the Chicago Cubs, July 21, 1913

Inventory

In the last seven years, I’ve lived in Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, South Korea, Iowa again, almost Chicago, and now Virginia. I’ve camped out on a deserted island, where I fell asleep to the smell of juniper. I’ve been whale watching. I’ve climbed a mountain. (At the end of the hike, in a nearby pub, I ordered a tall glass of ice water—anything to ease my exhaustion. The waitress brought me a Guinness instead.) I’ve participated in a five-and-a-half-hour native sweat lodge ceremony. I’ve eaten dog. (Twice.) I’ve written two love poems. I’ve floated in hot springs. I’ve lost forty-five pounds. I’ve been lost in Boston. I’ve been cheated in New York. I’ve been to Fenway. I’ve been to Wrigley and Monticello. I’ve almost been richer than my wildest dreams. I’ve almost declared bankruptcy. (My financial counselor suggested I buy fewer books. She suggested I investigate something called a library.) I’ve performed a marriage ceremony. I’ve gotten married myself—by a rabbi—and I’ve gotten divorced. (By a lawyer. From a lawyer.) I’ve taught kindergarten. I’ve taken guitar lessons. I’ve sold my guitar. I’ve started this blog, then quit it. I’ve started this blog again. I’ve shaved my head. I’ve grown my hair back. I’ve grown a beard, then, while drunk one night, shaved it off. I’ve grown a beard again. I’ve worked at three newspapers, two of which have gone out of business. I’ve been fired and rehired in the same meeting. I’ve been to Canada for the first time. And for the second time. (I’ve slept in my car every night I’ve spent in Canada.) I’ve lived for more than a year without a bed. (Twice.) I’ve lived for two months in a house without any furniture. I’ve hosted three Seders. I’ve been to four funerals—two Catholic, two Jewish. I’ve been a godfather. I’ve ridden in a helicopter. I’ve had emergency surgery. I’ve taken hula lessons in Hawaii. I’ve slid into third base wearing shorts. I’ve called a crisis hotline. I’ve been threatened with a lawsuit. I’ve learned how to swim. I’ve been snorkeling. I’ve had a family member in Iraq. (She’s back now.) I’ve seen a person die. I’ve put a kitten to sleep. (It was 4:30 in the morning and he was attached to an IV cart.) I’ve written more than half of a book. I’ve been published in a book. (You can buy it for a penny on Amazon.) I’ve made the highest salary of my life. And I’m now unemployed.

IMAGE: Isola del Giglio + young woman + ugly seaside development. From Giornale Nuovo.

Broyard, Confidence Man

My friend Rick checks in:

Brendan, that great quote by Janet Malcolm that you cross-referenced on your blog came to mind this morning when I read the book review in the NYT of a memoir written by Anatole Broyard’s daughter. I read some Broyard in the 1960s; he was part of that postwar writing crowd that lived in Greenwich Village supposedly enjoying carefree vagabond lives. Later, Broyard became one of the daily critics at the NYT. In the mid-’90s, Henry Louis Gates wrote a brilliant essay published in the New Yorker about how Broyard, born in New Orleans to black parents and raised in Brooklyn, lived a white life, full of privilege (earned) and conquest (earned seduction), but fell short of literary greatness probably because of his lifestyle and effort at being charming bon vivant and sophisticated faux Caucasian. Broyard’s daughter writes of becoming friends with Gates, and then feeling betrayed when the essay was published. Ah, Malcolm so understood the subversive nature of biography and its practitioners. I look forward to reading the memoir, and I will probably read some Broyard as well. My take on Broyard was that he was a fascinating confidence man.

ELSEWHERE: Anatole Broyard serves up red meat to Philip Roth

'Her footnote filled us with ecstasy'

The opening paragraph of Janet Malcolm’s new book, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice:

When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the White House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published n 1954, was given to me by a fellow member of a group of pretentious young persons I ran around with, who had nothing but amused contempt for middlebrow American culture, and whose revolt against the conformity of the time largely took the form of patronizing a furniture store called Design Research and of writing mannered letters to each other modeled on the mannered letters of certain famous literary homosexuals, not then known as such. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book fit right in with our program of callow preciousness; we loved its waspishly magisterial tone, its hauteur and malice. “The French never add Tabasco, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce, nor do they eat any of the innumerable kinds of pickles, nor do they accompany a meat course with radishes, olives or salted nuts,” Toklas wrote, as if preparing a manifesto for us. Her de haut en bas footnote pointing out that “a marinade is a bath of wines, herbs, oil, vegetables, vinegars and so on, in which fish or meat destined for particular dishes repose for specified periods and acquire virtue” filled us with ecstasy.

PREVIOUSLY: On the treachery of journalists

Autocartography (Part 2)

From “Autocartography: The Case of Palestine, Michigan” by Anton Shammas in The Geography of Identity (Patricia Yaeger, ed.):

It all started when A. wanted to leave Michigan and go home to Palestine. And it was painfully clear to her: this was not about going back somewhere but, rather, about going home. The difference being as simple as this: you go back to someplace where you have lived in the past, but you go home to a place that even though you may have never seen it in your life, still it is as if you had; it is a place that is the other, deep end of that pool of your created, acquired, and invented memories.

So A. wanted to go home to Palestine. The problem was that outside her imagined memories and imagined space—as created by her Palestinian father in the post-nostalgic world of Dearborn, Michigan—there was, there is, no Palestine to go to. Her father belonged to those 800,000 Palestinians who had been de-territorialized with the establishment of the state of Israel. Simply put, this meant that after the Big Bang of 1948—the scattering of the Palestinians upon the face of all the earth, as a biblical writer would have it—he’d become a Palestinian refugee. After a decade in one of the refugee camps in Lebanon, he’d made it to Dearborn, joining some distant cousins of Lebanese descent. Whenever he would reminisce aloud about his Galilean home village, those cousins would ruthlessly remind him of what other Palestinians, commenting on their tragedy, were prone to say: “Rahat Falasteen, Palestine is gone.” True, the territory did not vanish in 1948, but their territory did, and it was renamed, thus cut from under their feet, hence: gone.

PREVIOUSLY: Part 1

IMAGE: British locomotive in Palestine

'My parents were both working-class people'

Richard Russo on writing about class:

I grew up in a town not very different from the ones that I write about. My parents were both working-class people. Both sides of my family were all working-class people. My conviction has been throughout my writing career, if anybody’s gonna get stiffed in America, it’ll be working class people almost uniformly. I’ve also become even more interested in class in the last decade or so because we’re living in a period right now where we want to look at destiny, at human destiny, as a feature of gender and race. Those are the two things that seem to occupy a lot of our conscious thought about human destiny right now. What happens to us happens to us because of the color of our skin, according to our gender. And while I wouldn’t want to minimize the effect of those as forces that shape our culture, there seem to be fewer and fewer people writing about class anymore, whereas, you know, in the proletariat ’30s, class was all anybody talked about. But we seem to have buried Marx and Marxism and all the attendant variations and ideologies on what Marx had to say and dispensed with them as if those economic forces, those social forces, are not in play anymore. We’ve discovered other forces now that we’re focused on. As other writers and other people in general have become less interested in class, I’ve become more interested in it. I wouldn’t say that I have the field to myself, but it’s not particularly crowded.

(From an interview I conducted with the author on June 26, 2001)

PREVIOUSLY: Russo on his settings

ADDITIONALLY: Janet Maslin on the new novel, Bridge of Sighs: “Mr. Russo juxtaposes youthful drama with the subtler, sadder understanding that comes later in life. In the process, he winds up maneuvering Thomaston not into the territory of epic fiction but into the realm of dreams.”

IMAGE: Vintage postcard of Richard Russo’s hometown of Gloversville, New York

'The least talented talk about Art'

The classic opening paragraph of The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

A Khmer Rouge Remix

With the Khmer Rouge in the news again, now’s a good time to visit Radio Phnom Penh. The CD was released two years ago by the eccentric but outstanding Seattle label Sublime Frequencies, which introduces the record this way:

Cambodia’s people, economy, and culture have been “re-mixed” perhaps more than any place on earth for the past 50 years. The name was even changed to Kampuchea and then back again to Cambodia. So it almost seems natural that modern Cambodian record companies have been re-mixing the old classic pop and rock tracks from the pre-Khmer Rouge era, overdubbing drum tracks, and sometimes all instruments leaving only the original vocal in tact. These re-mixes, designed to hold the interest of younger listeners, are the staple for current programming on Phnom Penh’s FM radio stations as the AM flagship “National Radio of Cambodia” remains the only source regularly featuring the original master recordings.

Radio Phnom Penh, then, is a ride across the Cambodian dial. Sublime Frequencies assures us that the “older, classic Pop/Rock FM cuts are ALL re-mixed versions while the new forms/other styles of Cambodian music collected here are not.”

Whatever the case, Splendid magazine dug it:

Wisely, then, Sublime Frequencies have elected to present this music as it’s played on the radio, with no separation between genres, time periods, or styles of re-mix. Naturally, this also means that the sound quality varies widely, but no more so an on any number of lo-fi records you already own. The results range from the familiar to the truly exotic, from what must be rocked-up Khmer folk songs to strangely hip-hop-styled tunes. There’s not a moment on Radio Phnom Penh that isn’t eminently listenable, and from one moment to the next, you have absolutely no idea in which direction the whims of DJs and archivists will pull you. One minute: torch song. The next minute: garage rock fronted by opera-quality vocals. It’s deeply exciting and hypnotically compelling.

I agree. The following track is interrupted by a DJ speaking is good but heavily accented English, only to veer, wonderfully, into a smokin’ Beatles cover. Enjoy.

• Bubble Gum Independence – Unknown Artists [Mp3]

BONUS: Here are a couple more Cambodian tracks not from Radio Phnom Penh.

• Sui Bong – Dengue Fever [Mp3]

You can read about Dengue Fever on my recent “In the Lounge” mix.

• Unknown Title – Unknown Artist [Mp3]

A pretty decent Cambodian pop song . . .

PREVIOUSLY: Radio Pyongyang; Choubi Choubi!: Folk & Pop Sounds from Iraq

Autocartography (Part 1)

“A person is only the ground of a small land. A person is only the outline of his native landscape.” – Saul Tchernikhovsky

IMAGE: Jewish refugees from Europe on their way to Palestine, 1948, by Werner Bischof

Huong, You Dissident Slut!

I’m excited to learn from Critical Mass that Duong Thu Huong is considered a possible winner of the next Nobel Prize in Literature. This is from my review in January magazine of her most recent novel, No Man’s Land:

If you’ve heard of her at all, chances are it’s because she is Vietnam’s most vocal dissident, regularly quoted in the foreign press shouting epithets at the suits in Hanoi. “The government is a bunch of liars,” she told People magazine in 2000. “They are corrupt, ignorant, incompetent leaders.” Of course, the Supreme People’s Organ of Control gives as good as it gets, over the years calling Huong a “national traitor,” “the lowest-class hack writer for Western bosses,” and “a woman ungrateful for what Vietnamese martyrs have done for the country’s liberty.”

The irony of this last insult is that Huong herself is a veteran of the “American War.” The daughter of one of Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas, she served in a front-line cultural unit for 10 years, living in tunnels and dodging B-52s. The job of her theatrical troupe, she has said, “was to make our voices loud enough to drown out the sound of the bombs.” In 1987, she published her first novel, Beyond Illusions, in response to a call for writers to freely address Vietnam’s problems. Even though the book condemned government corruption, Communist Party chief Nguyen Van Linh personally praised it. Huong’s second novel, Paradise of the Blind, went a step further, however, attacking Ho Chi Minh and his disastrous Land Reform Campaign of the mid-1950s. This time, Nguyen called Huong a “dissident slut” and booted her out of the party. Then, in 1991, the government caught her trying to smuggle out of the country a third novel, discreetly titled Novel Without a Name, and she was thrown in jail.

The problem with all this biography is that it too often gets in the way of Huong’s actual writing. “It is a measure of her talent that the government has tried so hard to muzzle her,” reads one typical review. “And it is a measure of her courage that they have failed.”

That’s just dumb. The huffing and puffing of bureaucrats and the pain inflicted by seven months in prison are not a measure of Huong’s talent but a response to the size of her readership, which, in Vietnam anyway, has always been large. In a recent consideration of a Thai writer, Carlin Romano of the Philadelphia Inquirer let his tsunami-weary readers in on the fact that “Asians, too, possess intricate private psychologies.” In other words, if you don’t read Southeast Asian writers for their politics, then read them for the fact that their novels prove them to be . . . human.

Happily, No Man’s Land is worth a great deal more than that.

Since I wrote that review, Huong has finally left Vietnam for France. And speaking of Carlin Romano, he came up at The Reading Experience on the subject of reviewing foreign or ethnic writers . .

IMAGE: Duong Thu Huong.