Poetry, Fiction, and Apps

Elliot’s poem The Wasteland and  Kerouac’s On the Road, are the recent buzz as
iPad apps–not the first by decades to announce that poetry and fiction can
live digitally (what with the plethora of audio available and the yeoman work
of Project Gutenberg). The Wasteland is an incredibly interesting poem though
it’s always seemed to me, a fellow Missourian, that Elliot was putting us on in
some fundamental way, which is OK. Gertrude Stein did it. I don’t mean put on
in a bad way except that in some cases it wanders off course. I’m just not sure the poem really speaks to the heart and soul of poetry in English from Chaucer to
Shakespeare to Blake to Keats to Whitman to Crane. So why The Wasteland as the
poster child of the newest way to present poetry? And why Jack Kerouac? Why not
Faulkner or Hemingway, or any of the dozens of great contemporary novelists? I
guess the answer is that it takes big bucks to produce this slim output–hence
the $13.99 apps on a device that costs you at least $600 to begin with–the less
substantial choice with pop fizz no doubt deemed more likely to appeal to the
audience.

These are precursors anyway, so why argue with the choices,
but to my mind they’re unadventurous shooting stars instead of real
discoveries. They’re nice little documentaries. Oh look, we can do this. Technology demos. They avoid the real issues of reading and digital presentation in favor of whistling underwater
(that would be a trick, wouldn’t it?). It’s great that there are people
interested in the idea that fiction and poetry can evolve, the digital mags,
etc., but no one has really offered any proof at all that poetry belongs to any
digital domain except audio, and fiction is still just words. In both cases
there is hope for typography, web fonts for instance, but there is no hope for
this overheated app approach unless aliens arrive offering funding.

John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett @ Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery

I’m a big John Hiatt fan. Not so much Lyle Lovett. I’d seem them both before once each, Hiatt with the North Mississippi Allstars at Marymoor Park several years ago, Lovett at Pier 62/63 with the large band in a summer long gone by. This was a special blend, not a duo, a duet, or a double bill. More like a musical conversation. Just the two of them on stage together with amplified acoustic guitars–Hiatt blew a little harp on one song. The chit chat between songs (they traded songs throughout, Hiatt first, then Lovett) was kind of inane but amusing. It seems to be a sounding board for suggesting what to play next. I gained a new respect for Lovett and a new insight into the multi-faceted songs of John Hiatt. Great cool Pacific Northwest evening. The merlot was good too.

What is Poetry

A few recent occasions have brought this to mind. Watching the Allen Ginsberg biopic, Howl, I was astounded, not by the cheesy animation, but rather by the lawyer in the obscenity trial quoting lines from Howl and asking witnesses what those lines meant or if they had any value. The amazing ignorance in our culture of what poetry is, here portrayed circa the late ‘50s, but unchanged fifty years later, boggles the mind. People who don’t understand poetry don’t understand a lot of things (sorry friends who don’t read poetry—check it out—and take the second half of this sentence with a grain of salt, but think about it), or could it be they’ve never really listened to poetry, or read it, or more likely, in many cases they simply don’t know how to read because reading, the central skill to understanding, was given short shrift in their education. Reading skills are no guarantee of future performance. But they certainly go a long way toward breaking down the walls between people, and you have to wonder how much of what we commonly attribute to bigotry and intolerance might be radically altered by enhancing our reading skills because reading is a quintessentially human activity, not restricted to or by one’s race, gender, or religious and moral beliefs. This might not make Howl everybody’s cup of tea, but it might open a few doors and it might suggest that there’s more to poetry than indicated by stupid questions about its meaning and validity.
The David Kirby review of David Orr’s new book, Beautiful and Pointless, in the Times Book Review (April 10, 2011) also set off a little firecracker in my brain. Again, there’s this cockamamie assumption that poetry is this shape shifter walking among us that needs to be explained or can only be understood or appreciated by people who “love” poetry. You do not have to love poetry. Reading it helps, and being able to read at what Maryanne Wolf in her amazing book Proust and the Squid calls the “fluent, comprehending” level is essential. The idea of eroticism being the source of attraction, while true to the extent that sex is always at the center of our beings, as Ginsberg well understood, the Susan Sontag reference by Kirby notwithstanding, just seems like such an outmoded view I don’t even want to go into it. It’s obvious. That’s why it’s outmoded, so if you want to say reading is erotic, be my guest. Lots of people will agree with you, myself included, but that’s not really the point and it doesn’t really explain why lawyers ask questions about poetry.
Lastly I read recently that one of my favorite publishers, Copper Canyon Press, whom I contribute a few bucks to for cryin’ out loud, has received a big grant to study how to bring poetry to digital formats. There are, of course, lots of obstacles to bringing poetry to digital devices like ereaders and phones. Strangely, I see in this another questioning of what poetry is, or in this case, trying to make it something that’s it’s not. You cannot preserve line breaks required by many poems on a device too small to display those lines. That’s it. I coulda told you that and you could’ve used the grant for something more relevant, like paying writers or publishing more books. Sorry, I’m not saying poetry should not be offered digitally—the spoken word is the most obvious choice—but I think that the idea that poetry needs to be molded to fit digital models is a technological version of the question what does it mean or does it have value. It’s meaning and value is intrinsic. Trying to adapt existing poetry that has been intended for the printed book for the last couple of hundred years to a digital facsimile of same is a blind alley just as blind as the arguments of the lawyer asking what particular lines from Howl mean. This is not to say that poetry cannot embrace new digital forms beyond print, and even beyond voice. It may. It will. But as the recent debacle turning Howl digital (in the current misguided sense of digital) suggests, trial by conversion may not be such a good idea.

Duos

There’s something very special about duos and trios in jazz, a music born in the USA of big band parents, travelling bands, big sounds, and ultimately tribal celebrations. That’s at least one reason why it’s so remarkable when two or three musicians can seem to encompass that tradition in a performance. I think of bassist Charlie Haden’s duos, my favorite being the record with pianist Hank Jones. Recently I’ve been listening to a couple of 1980s discs led by bassist Ray Brown with pianist Gene Harris. Both men were rooted in the blues (both died over a decade ago). The Leonard Feather quote in the liner notes to “Live at the Loa” (with drummer Jeff Hamilton, recorded in July 1988) sums it up: “…one of the most naturally compatible threesomes ever to go public with their creative impulses.” If you don’t like this disc, man, you should see a doctor.
“The Red Hot Ray Brown Trio,” this time in 1985 with drummer Mickey Roker, recorded live at the Blue Note—not available on iTunes, by the way, for whatever reason—I got the CD from Amazon—is hotter than hot. It cooks. Steam rises. Especially on the Ray Brown ending composition “Captain Bill.”
The key thing that makes these recordings work, though, is the absolute musical affinity between Brown and Harris. Harris seems to dominate with his brash, barreling, big sound, but Brown is always there and there’s always a connection, a grounding in Brown’s bass that keeps the listener riveted not just to the bass or the piano, but to the larger sound.

Will ebooks last?

The first book I ever read cover to cover was a sci-fi potboiler, Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, which I plucked off the rotating metal paperback display in the drugstore where my Mom worked in the early ‘60s. 25 cents. I still have it. I can still read it (if I wanted to). For lots of reasons, it’s hard to imagine that some kid will be able to read the copy of Paolo Bacigalupa’s The Windup Girl fifty years from now that she just bought on an ereader. $8 (the paperback costs $15 in a physical bookstore, $8 online at Amazon or B&N). Of course if she’s twelve years old, like I was, the big obstacle is that she won’t have an ereader. Nooks and Kindles and iPads are still adult devices at this point because they’re too expensive and require credit cards. Facile anecdotes about preschoolers wondering why paper books don’t pinch and squeeze like the iPad, or gushing headlines about ereader adoption by younger audiences (which appears not to be the case), or even hip parents saying “look at this,” don’t add up to ebooks in the hands of many 12-year-olds.

So she may not buy The Windup Girl or even be able to buy it in the first place, unless she’s the daughter of a prosperous American. Beyond that there’s the fact that whatever electronic reading devices are available 50 years from now, if there are any, won’t be able to display that Kindle file or epub “file” she downloaded, if she did, anyway—notice, it’s not a book now. It’s a “file,” a curiously deceptive evolution of how you describe a book. The book may survive but be disembodied and as such might be LESS readily available than the current Google wisdom implies.  If that last statement makes no sense to you, I suggest you take a long weekend without an Internet or cellular connection and think about it.

Moving right along, it’s interesting when you go to “ebook stores” that the genres survive, like science fiction, where you’d find Heinlein or The Windup Girl. But here’s a modest proposal: why?

I just read Jack McDevitt’s 2005 novel Seeker, which is just an amazing detective, uh… sci-fi novel with a liberal dose of ethical intrigue that makes me wonder why a lot of people who’ve never in their lives read a science fiction novel (and to whom Harlan Ellison is an undiscovered country) wouldn’t enjoy reading this book. I bought the paperback ($7.99). How can you not like sci-fi covers? That got my attention way back when (and it’s far less a gender issue now—no more babes gripped by giant crabs). Still, hard to appreciate art in an ebook cover, though with a color Nook, why not? It could even be a thirty second video, like a movie trailer. This could be one advantage of ebooks—genre busting, attention grabbing, content marketing. To me the experience of reading Nevada Barr’s Winter Study and McDevitt’s Seeker were such similar reading experiences–strong characters, evil doers, suspense—that I just can’t help but think of them in the same cold breath. Maybe as novels get stirred in the big digital pot some of the genre lines might blur, not necessarily, but potentially if the booksellers adjusted their suggestions–if you like this, you’ll like that, instead of clinging to the niches. Just a suggestion, could be fun, although my wife would say I’m barking up the wrong bits on this one. She wouldn’t watch Inception with me last night. Good choice, actually.

It may be that instead of thinking about the technology what we should really be thinking about is what books are, the words themselves and the reading experience? I’m skeptical about the ereader experience, for some of the reasons amorphously implied above, but print faced similar challenges early on. The “Gutenberg revolution” in fact took a 150 years to bear fruit for anyone but an elite few. The magic trick, if it’s to be believed at all, will be to produce ebooks that can be preserved (independent of the gadgets du jour) that also engage readers as much as print books do. Ebooks have a LONG way to go. Maybe fifty years from now we’ll be able to hold them somehow. Turn their pages, which slowly age, like everything else in existence. Instead of expiring like ebooks checked out of libraries do now, maybe ebooks will just turn gray, or lose their page numbers. Who knows?

McCoy Tyner at Jazz Alley

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner’s music can be dense and complex. It can also be precise and straightforward. Most wonderfully, it can be all those things in a single song. His forceful left hand and the fleet cascades of his right create a style and substance that are unique. This is serious, sometimes soaring music, but he can have a lot of fun with it to, as he showed in the first show Saturday night at Jazz Alley in Seattle. Physically the Philadelphia native seemed a little frail (he’s 72) as he approached the bandstand and seated himself behind the big black Steinway. There is no frailty in his playing however. He is a forceful master of his craft. With a group that included saxophonist Gary Bartz, drummer Herlin Riley, bassist John Patitucci, and guitarist Bill Frisell, Tyner just jumped through a set that ranged from a ballad to a blues (“Blues on the Corner”) to the throbbing core of his repertoire that gave the band plenty of space for soloing (great to hear Gary Bartz’ incisive alto!). Riley soloed only once. (He’s so damn good (and inventive) it seems like he’s soloing all the time.) Frisell added an interesting dimension to the music. Patitucci is a bit manic when you’re up close and personal with him. Great bass work though.

In a career spanning over fifty years, from his days with Coltrane in the ‘60s to the brilliant playing and recording that followed to this day, you just have to be thankful if you’ve had a chance to hear or witness any part of that.

Thomas McGuane’s new book

It’s interesting, reading a writer over 40 years or so, hopefully longer. It’s not exactly like family, though you develop odd interests in the life of the writer as if they were your long lost cousin, not entirely irrelevant to the books usually, but for any writer worth reading, you always know that the important thing is the book. Of course, if you’ve read somebody for forty years you have to believe in what they’re doing, whether it’s simple entertainment or something more, so that belief connects you to their lives too. That said, I’d also say that more importantly reading (and writing), as well as speaking, singing, painting, composing and playing music, dancing, laughing—may come into play and make matters complicated when you read somebody for 40 years. All this preamble to recommending Thomas McGuane’s new novel, Driving the Rim.

When I read Ninety-Two in the Shade back in the early ‘70s, I was just coming off a tour of duty in Vietnam preceded by a BS (sorry, BA) in English. I immediately read his first two novels and have been reading him ever since. I will say this. I got a little bored at times after Panama. Three things I’ve always loved about McGuane: his humor, his perspective, and his mastery of his craft. (I’d say this about his friend Jim Harrison too since what I say here also applies to Harrison, with the caveat that Harrison is also one of my favorite poets.) Then I got Gallatin Canyon, a book of shorter fiction by McGuane, including some stories that leap off the page (in Robert Bly’s sense of leaping poetry). Driving the Rim is even better.