Ephemeral Firmament

Listening to Gerhard Richter and the Late Harry Crews

I began this day with the news that Harry Crews had died, which led me to this:

Dwight Garner posted an appreciation, and Maud Newton, former student and longtime admirer, is working on something longer [update: she finished it], but you can visit her archives for a number of Crews-related posts. Crews is still for the most part on my lengthy yet-to-read list, but all day I had the first lines of the video above running through my head:

The writer's job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing, to look at it, to not blink, to not be embarrassed by it or ashamed by it. Just strip it down, and let's get down to where the blood is, the bone is, instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff. Luxury.

About two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I threw away half a novel. Threw it away. Because I'd made a wrong turn, and man, you make a wrong turn and you just keep on that wrong turn and pretty soon you've got that much stuff that won't work. The amateur, or the coward, or the non-writer, will try to keep it and make it work 'cause he doesn't want to have to throw it away and do all of that over again, another way. The real artist, with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire, and does it again.

And then I ended the day at the new documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting, watching Richter demonstrate by example and rarely by words, saying little more than that he has to keep working at a painting until it looks done to him--until it looks good for days and not just hours--or until he ruins it, and telling a story of a fellow student in art school who whistled while he painted, while Richter thought, "You have to be a better critic than that. You're talking yourself into being happy with what you are doing." (I can't find a way to embed the trailer, but you can watch it via the link above. The image below is from the most moving shot in the film, as the old painter works to push his giant squeegee across his painting, not even seeing what it reveals until he has made his way across to the other side.)

With those stern, tireless voices in my head, there is even less reason than usual not to wake up tomorrow and try to do some good work.

 

 

 

Is It the Great (or At Least Goofily Good) Unacknowledged DeLillo Novel?

It's been a bit since I've posted, since I've been working on some things I hope you'll see soon in other spaces, but another item arrived in the mail that I had to share. It used to be I'd get excited about galleys of big books that arrived months ahead of pub date; now a big day for me is when some semi-obscure out-of-print book with a great backstory I've ordered shows up in the mail, and this week's was a good one: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League, by Cleo Birdwell. Enjoy the front and back covers:

You may know the story behind this goof of a "memoir": it was written by none other than the great brooding Bronxian himself, Don DeLillo (in collaboration with a former ad-agency colleague named Sue Buck), and disowned by its author, who had it removed from his list of published works and apparently has never officially acknowledged his paternity. I had always been fascinated by the idea of the book, and when I was recently reminded of it by my fellow bibliophile Dallas (who also turned me on to No Big Deal), I realized there was no reason I couldn't get a copy for myself, if only for the pleasure of filing it in the "D"s next to Americana.

I haven't had a chance to read much yet, but here's how it starts:

If a man's name sounds right whether you say it forward or backward, it means he went to Yale.

Sanders Meade, class of '67, was the Rangers' general manager when I made my first appearance under the smoky lights. Sanders's job was to wear plaid double-knit pants and a leisure-suit jacket with his shirt open at the top and the shirt collar worn outside the jacket. That's all you have to know about him, excepting his surprising prowess the time we hopped into bed during the snows in southern Ontario. I couldn't tell you why I wanted Sanders. He was the absolute antithesis.

Oh, I can't tell you how it lightens my heart to see DeLillo, who increasingly seems to be carrying the weight of history and consciousness on his slim, aging back, messing around like this!

A few years back Gerald Howard (once DeLillo's editor) told what appears to be the most complete story of its publication out there, and it's a good one: rejected by Knopf when DeLillo submitted it under his own name, he published it as "Cleo" with another publisher and after a spirited publicity stunt involving the lady on the back cover above it became "by far" his top-selling novel until White Noise five years later (in which, by the way, the cultural-id-channelling character Murray Jay Suskind, first introduced in Amazons, memorably reappears).

Is it just a novelty I can stick on my shelf and laugh about? I think it's more than that. Dallas, in a 1998 article in Notes in Contemporary Literature (sorry--it's not online, so you'll have to look it up in your library unless you can get Dallas to send you a xerox too) that may well have been the most thorough discussion of its authorship until Howard's, argued it "should be considered a legitimate part of his oeuvre," and I certainly agree. Published between Running Dog and The Names, just before DeLillo hit his midcareer peak with White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, it seems a crucial element in his development, and only more so (don't you agree, Dr. Freud?) because DeLillo has tried so hard to suppress it from his identity. I rather expect that when that first, mammoth biography of the man comes out in 2035 or so, the Amazons interlude is going to be given its own chapter.

I've always been struck by the moment in his career DeLillo describes in his Paris Review interview, when he was writing The Names (soon after, one assumes, finishing Amazons), and, inspired in part by the "clear light of the Aegean Islands" and the gravity of the "letters carved on stones all over Athens," he approached his writing with a new, "deeper level of seriousness." "Some of the work I did in the 1970s," he says, "was off-the-cuff, not powerfully motivated. I think I forced my way into a couple of books that weren’t begging to be written, or maybe I was writing too fast." Since Amazons was the last book he had written at that point, and the one that he has since disowned, you can't help but think it's at least part of what he had in mind, the sort of unmotivated, unserious goof that he wanted to leave behind.

I've always looked at that moment as a powerful and important one, since he did go on soon after to write the wonderful (and yes, deeply serious) books (Libra is my favorite) that made him such an exciting force in our literature. But thinking of the austere, portentious novelist he's become since (I confess that I'm making that judgment mostly second-hand, since after the terrible Cosmopolis I've lost my heart for keeping up with him), seeing a joyously inventive book like Amazons (well, maybe it wasn't joyous for him--in fact, it sounds like it wasn't) is a refreshing reminder of a loose and playful side to DeLillo that he has, for better or worse, outgrown. I've already explained here that I'm not an author completist, so it may not surprise you (though it still surprises me) that I've never actually gone back and read any pre-Names DeLillo, the books like Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street that he has since distanced himself from (calling them "hasty" and "shaggy") almost as much as he has from Amazons. But now I want to: whether I start with Amazons or go even further back, I think they could be a tonic. And they might be for him too. 

Flipping the Trims into the Bin

As I've gotten older, and more committed to a particular vocation (the exact parameters of which I'm still working out), I've accumulated a few professional paths I can imagine I would have pursued in another version of my life: sleep researcher, Kafka scholar, and, most longingly, film editor. For a movie lover who could not possibly bear the stress nor summon the multi-tasking authority required to direct a picture, it seems the perfect job: take the images created by someone else and craft them, frame by frame, into scenes and stories. (Even though I'm a word person, it's actually more appealing to me than screenwriting--maybe because it seems closer to the heart of filmmaking, while screenwriting has an inherently frustrated relationship to the art.)

Would I be any good at it? I really don't know. My biggest character flaw probably would be that I'm a bit of a (a bit of a?) pack rat in terms of both things and ideas: I can see the potential value in almost anything, from an old cereal box to a poorly framed photograph, as long as they somehow reveal the human hand. That might not be the best quality in a film editor, who doubtless needs to be more ruthless. I can imagine, say, sitting at the editing suite with Terry Gilliam and saying, "Gee, you're right, Terry. That stuff is all fascinating. I think this really needs to be a five-hour movie, no matter what the studio says."

I've posted recently about probably the best-known, and certainly the most theoretically articulate, film editor, Walter Murch, and recently, on the Museum of the Moving Image site, I came across a very enjoyable interview with probably the only other celebrity editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, the three-time Oscar winner indentified even more strongly with Martin Scorsese than Murch is with Francis Ford Coppola. It's a fairly old interview, recorded in 2002 after a screening of Raging Bull, and just before Gangs of New York was released. And for me it covered some familiar ground, since listening to the commentary tracks to Raging Bull (there are tons of them on the deluxe DVD), Schoonmaker's among them, was one of my favorite art experiences of the past few years.

But it still seemed fresh, and really, I could listen to her talk for days. I often say that Scorsese, along with Jonathan Lethem, is one of my very favorite talkers, and Schoonmaker, seen above while working on Woodstock, her first major gig, is nearly as appealing: not quite as analytically enthusiastic as he, but close, and with an unperturbable calmness that you can imagine as a useful complement to his more anxious obsessions. I love the way Marty talks, but I also love the way everyone talks about Marty, since clearly his passions are infectious and draw similiarly passionate and hard-working craftspeople to him.

I usually favor interview transcripts over audio, but in this case I'd recommend the recording, to capture some of her aplomb. I tried to skim back through the transcript for a high point to excerpt here, but I think my favorite moment is this small one, which may or may not translate and is probably better experienced in the context of her larger discussion of switching over--reluctantly but inevitably--to digital editing. She's talking about going back to analog editing on film when she worked on a non-Scorsese movie after she and Scorsese had moved on to digital:

Yes; it was funny, because I found after about a week or so, I was enjoying flipping the trims into the bin, because I always used to know how to do that. You know, you have to do it a certain way, so the end of it will get in.

I just love that little workaday detail, "flipping the trims into the bin," one of the simple pleasures of a craftsperson's life (which could apply to almost anyone who learns to do something well, from parking cars to crafting Excel spreadsheets). Meanwhile, there's more traditionally substantive material in the long interview, from lots of detail about shooting and editing the fight sequences in Raging Bull to why she works so well with Scorsese. Podcasts don't usually fit into my life very well, since I usually can't concentrate on other words while I'm working--I envy my wife and my sister who have more space in their working heads for that kind of soundtrack--but I'm going to go back to the museum's site for more: Errol Morris, Jane Campion, and, yes, Terry Gilliam.

Turing's Cathedral at Town Hall

Thanks to a call from my friend John, I got out of the house Monday night to hear someone talk, something I did all the time a decade ago, before a) I had kids, and b) I was lucky enough to have a job where a lot of those people came to talk to us around a Starbucks table or into a microphone I was holding. I don't have that job anymore (I do still have kids), and what I miss perhaps most about it is getting to listen to those fascinating people when they come to town. But it took going out and seeing a smart author speak to make me realize how much I missed it.

George Dyson was the one talking, at Town Hall (a former cathedral of sorts itself, its great vault having been built by the Christian Scientists almost a hundred years ago). I only knew the most superficial things about him (mainly whom he is related to), but his story (dropping out of high school to live in a tree house and build kayaks and then returning to the family business in a way by becoming a self-taught historian of science and technology) and his new book (Turing's Cathedral, on the development of the computer) both seemed promising. I still only know slightly less superficial things about him and his work now, but a few seem worth noting here.

First is his book, and very first is its cover. I'm sometimes skeptical of book covers that merely hinge on a witty idea, but this one is both witty and, well, as profound as a book cover can be. It doesn't all come across that well online, but the cover is designed to look like an old punchcard, with--are they called chads in this context too?--real holes in the dust cover, and the holes peek through to the image on the cover board itself, the face of Alan Turing. But the aspect I love is the way the punches also, to me at least, evoke the cathedral of the title--or if not a classic Gothic cathedral then a starker medieval fortress, with slits for windows distributed across a stone face. I'm not even sure what that connection specifically means: perhaps just a sense, cutting across history, of the mystery and impersonal beauty of human ambition.

It was hardly a surprise to hear that the cover is by Peter Mendelsund, the celebrated young Knopf and Pantheon designer who was one of those fascinating people I got to interview back at Amazon (though not in person).

And the book itself I came away with a hunger to read. My friend John said it sounded like the equivalent on the computer side of Richard Rhodes's Making of the Atomic Bomb (another book I'd love to finally get to): in both cases there is a thoroughly dramatic story of breathtaking scientific breakthroughs being engineered into practical, world-changing applications by outsized personalities, in large part under the urgency of world war. And of course there was a lot of overlap between the two projects (and those who worked on them), though the weight of the computing story falls more heavily after the war.

What fascinated John (a developer himself) was the way that artificial intelligence seemed nearly invented from scratch by these thinkers, and what fascinated me was the idea, which Dyson raised, that the path our computers took (which I don't know enough about to even define) was just one of many possible ones, and that what looked like parallel dead ends to that path may yet have potential as future breakthroughs.

And what I enjoyed about the evening was a sort of familial sense about it all. Dyson obviously comes from a family of scientists and technologists (he grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where much of his story is set), and since he's lived in the Seattle area for decades he knew a lot of people at the reading, but in a larger sense there was a feeling in the room, based both on the heads I saw nodding at various points in his story and on the questions (often really statements with question marks) at the end, that many of the people there had personal connections to various aspects of his story: to the technology, or to the people themselves. And that sense echoed Dyson's approach to the subject, which seems as interested in the personal stories of the scientists (and engineers and secretaries) who worked on these breakthroughs as in the technology itself. It was a reminder that the story of technology is as human a story as any.

I also appreciated, when so much of what I read (and write) is both produced and consumed in bite-sized morsels, hearing from someone who has been devoted to a project for years and years (he said he turned in the book about six years past his publisher's original deadline). The Town Hall site has a video of a similar talk Dyson gave at Google a few years back, while still in the middle of his giant project, a meandering slide-show tour through the images of his book:

The Breaks of the Game: Pretty Much as Good as I've Always Assumed

I've read about David Halberstam more than I've read him. He represented something in my mind that only became stronger after his death a few years ago: a Greatest Generation type making his name in the era of New Journalism, a hard-ass, gutsy workaholic who took vacations from his serious books by writing only slightly less serious books on sports instead of war and politics, and a reporter whose radical conclusions were only made more convincing by his disinterest in radicalism for its own sake. He chose to write about some of the subjects I've been circling around as a reader my whole life (the civil rights movement, baseball, Vietnam, the New York Times, and, my god, the Portland Trail Blazers), and some of his books on those subjects (The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Breaks of the Game) have loomed so large for me--as they do, or did, for the larger culture--that I feel like I've digested them already. But only now, that I've just finished the latter, did I realize that it's the first book of his I've actually read.

My mouth has always watered at the idea of The Breaks of the Game, rumored to be one of the great sports books and about what to me is a great subject: the late '70s Blazers. (The Blazers became my favorite team for a while a decade or so later, but late '70s NBA, like late '70s anything, is more or less catnip to me.) It sounded so good I had been saving it for a time when I could inhale it without interruption, and I finally found that time on vacation last week. And how was it? Good and fascinating, though my guess is that it was so influential that the ground it broke, both in form and argument, has come to seem less earthshaking to a later reader than it did at the time. Blunt about race in a way that seems very much of its time (we're more delicate now, or maybe just exhausted by the persistence of the subject), and thoroughly and intimately reported in a way that the carapaces of modern athletic celebrity would likely prevent now (and were just beginning to then), it's a complex and smart story of sports and society (a little stronger on the latter than the former), and an excellent collection of personal portraits of figures I remember like Kermit Washington, Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas, and Jack Ramsay, and forgotten names like Tom Owens, Billy Ray Bates, Stu Inman, and Blazers then-owner Larry Weinberg. For a season-long locker-room portrait, I still prefer Ken Dryden's The Game, both for style and insight and for his undeniable advantage of being inside the uniform himself, but I feel like a world I only half knew is now thickly populated thanks to Halberstam. (Note: only after writing this did I run across this piece by Ramsay explaining how the book grew out of his friendship with Halberstam, which itself grew out of Ramsay's regular tennis matches with Gay Talese.)

I could natter on about details large and small (for a Maryland Terrapins fan, his short, wry history of Lefty Driesell's nearly successful wooing of Moses Malone, though painful, is worth the price of admission alone), but I'll just note a few here. One is how fascinating it is to me that this is Bill Simmons's all-time favorite sports book, the one he says woke him up to the adult world of sports as a kid and that he rereads every couple of years to keep his own writing on the straight and narrow. Because Bill Simmons, as a writer, is almost nothing like David Halberstam. You could, in fact, easily imagine old-school Halberstam, were he still alive, waxing crotchety at the new wave of sports journalism that Simmons represents: the standup comedy tweeting, the celebrityhood embracing, the fanboy rooting, the WWF loving. Halberstam was humorless, Simmons is hilarious. Halberstam reported, Simmons reacts. The only saving grace he might have found is that Simmons does do the work: he knows the game, he thinks things through, and he writes his ass off. And Halberstam respected nothing more than someone who worked hard and was good and serious about his job.

And meanwhile, knowing how much Halberstam means to Simmons tells you a bit about Simmons. For all his gags and his frat-boy sensibilities, Simmons is surprisingly tuned in to the sociology of sports, especially the racial complexities that play out there more overtly than anywhere else in America, and I imagine a lot of that stems from the wakeup call The Breaks of the Game gave him back in 1982. When Simmons writes about Halberstam you get the feeling I used to get when Mary Tyler Moore would come on Letterman and he would drop his winking schtick and just get reverent in the presence of one of his idols. I'm even tempted to say that if you subtracted Halberstam from Simmons's development, you would have ended up with, I don't know, Jim Rome or Jimmy Kimmell--the bombast or the gags--not the writer who is, warts and all, the best sportswriter of his (and my) generation.

And then via that Simmons tribute, I found some of the pieces that Halberstam wrote for espn.com's Page 2 in the years before he died. (Halberstam on Page 2? Maybe he would have been more open to Simmons than I give him credit for.) And the most fascinating to me, on the heels of reading The Breaks of the Game, was his appreciation of Allen Iverson, after AI willed his overmatched Sixers to a Game 1 finals win against the Shaq-Kobe Lakers in 2001 (they lost the next four, by the way). In some ways it's an update, in capsule form, of his ideas on race and the modern celebrity athlete twenty years after The Breaks (fun, by the way, to abbreviate the title to echo fellow basketball fan Kurtis Blow, since in the piece Halberstam notes his ignorance of hip-hop culture). If anything, it's more blunt on those subjects than that blunt book, certainly personally so, as Halberstam confesses his initial old-white-man distaste for Iverson's thug-life persona and then explains how either he or AI (or both) have changed enough so that Halberstam can appreciate him now within his traditional ideals of manliness and honor. It's also an interesting reporter's window on the perception of "good guys" and "bad guys" among athletes (and a chance for another cameo by one of his favorite characters in The Breaks, Steve Kelley, then a young Portland reporter and now a senior columnist for the Seattle Times, as he has been ever since I've lived here). Here's one glimpse into the Halberstam ethic:

The early afros of the 1960s didn't bother me. Athletes at the 1968 Olympics raising their hands in black power didn't bother me. But I feel that whatever your beliefs, you have to prove yourself, first and foremost, by what you do, and how good you are at your profession, and your alienation better not interfere with your job.

Allen Iverson, at that moment at least, was very good at his job.

And finally, speaking of measurements of character among celebrity athletes, reading the epigraph Halberstam chose for The Breaks of the Game (which is unchanged in my reprint edition from the original published in 1982, as far as I can tell) will bring any current reader up short, with layers of irony and tragedy--right down to the man O.J. is talking to--that need no explaining:

"Fame," O.J. said, walking along, "is a vapor, popularity is an accident, and money takes wings. The only thing that endures is character."

"Where'd you get that from?" Cowlings asked.

"Heard it one night on TV in Buffalo," O.J. said. "I was watching a late hockey game on Canadian TV and all of a sudden a guy just said it. Brought me right up out of my chair. I never forgot it."

--From an article by Paul Zimmerman, Sports Illustrated, November 26, 1979, on O.J. Simpson