’TIS THE SEASON . . .

The neighbors are always trying to make me look bad. They work at it like it’s their job . . . and sometimes I wonder if they’re on my wife’s payroll. Last month it was all about raking leaves. Coming home after a hard day in the classroom—okay, so it was an hour and fifteen minutes . . . but it was hard—I could feel the eyes of my across-the-street neighbor boring into my back as I hoisted my bag of books and student papers out of my car. She had been raking leaves since sun-up . . . sun-up the day before . . . and I knew that she was passing judgment on the unkempt state of my front yard. What could I say? Hey, I knew what she didn’t know: that my wife had finally hired a crew to come and clean up the yard the next day. So I just smiled and called out: “Hey, I don’t do anything that I can’t put on my Vita!”

But it’s not just about raking leaves. It’s about mowing the lawn. And painting the trim. And trimming the hedge. And hedging my bets . . . And betting . . . Yes, there’s a pattern: the neighbors up and down the block are always just a step or two—or a week or two . . . or three—ahead of me in all of these outdoorsy domestic enterprises.

But this time of year is always the worst: just when my seasonal affective disorder begins to kick in, and just when the weather turns lousy, I’m supposed to announce Joy to the World! by climbing up on a ladder or clambering out on our porch roof to hang a festive string of lights. My yard-raking neighbor had her outdoor lights up on December 1st—and a candle in every window too. Even our new neighbors next door have lights up—and they moved in just a week ago: their holiday decorations must have been the first box they unpacked!

The past couple of years I just haven’t gotten around to hanging lights (I think that the disagreeable weather agreed with my bad attitude, providing me with a reasonable excuse not to push my luck on a ladder), but this year I’m really feeling the pressure . . . which I suppose I’ll succumb to. The last time I was given an ultimatum by the chorus of sopranos I live with—“Have those lights hung by the time we get home from shopping . . . or else”—I really outdid myself. I’m not sure what I’ll manage to do this year, but here’s what my wife and daughters saw when they came around the corner three or four years ago:

THE SALINGER OF THE SOUTHWEST . . .

I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now about W. P. Kinsella’s wonderful baseball novel Shoeless Joe, with its subplot involving protagonist Ray Kinsella persuading notoriously reclusive author J. D. Salinger to accompany him on his whimsical journey to, ultimately, northern Minnesota in search of baseball footnote Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. “Are you kidnapping me?” Salinger asks Ray, who has cornered “Jerry” in the driveway of his secluded home in Windsor, Vermont:

“Oh, please, that’s such an awful word. I’m sorry. I planned things so differently. I wanted to convince you to come with me. I never wanted to have to do this . . .”
00“Then you are.”
00“I just want to take you for a drive. I have tickets for a baseball game. A baseball game,” I say again. . . .
00“And if I don’t?” . . .
00What can I possibly say? I am inarticulate as a teenager at the end of a first date, standing in the glare of the porch light, a father hulking behind the curtains.

In Field of Dreams, the disappointingly diluted movie version of the novel, the Salinger figure is replaced by a character named Terence “Terry” Mann, played by James Earl Jones (who in my estimation is always really just playing James Earl Jones—yawn . . .). Lamely-conceived and lamely executed, this substitution was prompted (or so I understand) by the fear—or the threat—that visually representing the intensely private Salinger on the big screen would result in a lawsuit that verbally representing him in the pages of the novel could not.

So . . . did I have in mind that scene, or scenario, from the novel when I headed off to Santa Fe a few weeks ago, having told various people that my purpose in going there was “to stalk Cormac McCarthy”? Well . . .

Well, McCarthy is in the headlines these days thanks to the release, just yesterday, of the movie adaptation of his relentlessly bleak post-apocalyptic novel The Road. And part of the McCarthy story in newspapers and newsmagazines involves his Salinger-like reclusiveness, his retreating to the outskirts of Santa Fe where he hunkers down—or bunkers down in pre-apocalyptic fashion—far from the madd(en)ing crowd of paparazzi, autograph seekers, and other celebrity hounds. Well, it ain’t necessarily so; in fact, last week The Wall Street Journal published a very engaging interview—or extracts from a conversation—with McCarthy and film director John Hillcoat, conducted in San Antonio, thus giving the lie to McCarthy’s reputed utter reclusiveness. Anyway, I haven’t seen the film yet . . .

. . . but I have seen Cormac McCarthy.

I don’t want to give away too many specific details of my “sighting” him because I don’t want to detract from his right to privacy. I’ll just mention that whenever I travel, one of the ways I get my bearings in a new city or town is by mining the Yellow Pages for a list of used bookstores that becomes my connect-the-dots map of wherever I happen to be. In Sante Fe, I managed to get to only two of the stores on my list. In the first one, I had a great visit with the proprietor, Henry: we chatted about everything under the southwest sun . . . including how, as Henry put it, “Cormac will come in here and sit down and talk about anything and everything . . . except about being an author.” And he added: “And he won’t sign books.”

From that bookstore on North Guadalupe Street, I walked about ten minutes up through The Plaza (the heart of Santa Fe) to East Palace Street. Arriving at the bookshop there just before closing time, I had just begun to browse when I heard a voice talking with the proprietor and his assistant about “the Institute” (that is, the Santa Fe Institute, which I knew McCarthy is associated with). Could it be . . . ? I wondered, though I already knew the answer: I had recently re-watched Cormac McCarthy’s interview on Oprah . . . and the voice was unmistakably his. Just to be sure, I double-checked the physical person standing three feet away from me against the author photo in a copy of The Crossing that I pulled off a shelf . . .

So . . . did I pull a Ray Kinsella and try to kidnap him? I just want to take you for a drive . . .

No. I left him alone, though as soon as he left the shop, I confirmed with Nick and Pat, the proprietor and his assistant, that I had indeed had a close encounter with America’s second-most elusive and reclusive author. I returned to the shop the next day to browse some more and Pat told me “you played it just right”—had I “outed” McCarthy, he explained, I would have created a very awkward moment indeed! He also mentioned that McCarthy is not quite as reclusive as everyone believes: because no one expects to see him, he is actually able to “hide in plain sight” . . .

So did I really go to Sante Fe to stalk Cormac McCarthy? Of course not. I went there to scout out possible relocation destinations for the Witness Protection Program, should I ever be (un)lucky enough, on my travels, to bump into fugitive South Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, high on the roster of America’s Most Wanted. I used to see him out walking around Castle Island when I lived in Southie years ago. I think I’d recognize him anywhere . . . though I doubt that I’d find him in a used bookstore . . .

ITALIAN SEASONINGS

Yesterday I ventured into Boston’s North End not for a Mediterranean dining experience—my usual reason for visiting that enclave—but for a relatively rare literary event in that otherwise culturally rich community. The event, held at the local branch of the Boston Public Library, was a reading by Canadian novelist Nino Ricci, whose most recent novel, The Origin of Species, was awarded Canada’s highest literary recognition, the Governor General’s Award. But Ricci was in the North End to read not from that novel (which will be released in the U.S. by Other Press in the Spring of 2010) but from his first novel, The Book of Saints (originally published in Canada as Lives of the Saints), which won the Governor General’s Award back in 1990.

While I have known Ricci’s name for a good decade-and-a-half, I had not read any of his work until a couple of weeks ago, when I tossed The Book of Saints into my carry-on bag as I headed out the door for an overseas flight—an apt choice, as it is truly a transporting novel. Set in the fictionalized southern Italian village of Valle de Sole in 1960, it dramatizes the scandal that grows around Cristina, a young mother who becomes pregnant again after her husband has emigrated to North America for work. Narrated from the first-person perspective of her young son Vittorio Innocente, the novel records in rich detail the texture of life in the village—not just its physical properties but more importantly the social fabric that would enwrap Cristina and Vittò and suffocatingly define them by the mother’s indiscretion. Compellingly plotted and beautifully written (and tastefully seasoned with Italian phrases throughout), The Book of Saints is thoroughly engaging—really one of the most satisfying novels I have read this year. I was happy to learn that the novel is the first volume of a trilogy: I look forward to tracking Vittò’s story further in the sequels, In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone.

An unexpected bonus at yesterday’s reading was the screening of a couple of video clips from Lives of the Saints, the made-for-TV movie adaptation of the trilogy. While Ricci admitted that the movie takes great liberties with the original narratives, it nonetheless brings the physical world of the books to life in visually pleasing ways—not the least of which is Sophia Loren, whose star power led to the creation of a role in the film that does not exist in the books. Interestingly, though, Ricci shared with yesterday’s audience that when he was writing The Book of Saints and imagining into literary life the strong character of Cristina, he had the person of Sophia Loren in his mind’s eye.

Anyway . . . I am so taken by Nino Ricci’s writing—and was so taken by his reading yesterday as well—that I hope to bring him to UMass Boston for a reading when he returns to the area to promote the U.S. edition of The Origin of Species in April.

In the meantime . . . while I read Ricci’s novel on my transatlantic flight to London a couple of weeks ago, I read another Italy-centered book on my return flight from Paris a week later. Pietro Grossi’s Fists fell, almost literally, into my hands from a crowded shelf in the legendary Shakespeare & Company bookshop in the Latin Quarter right on the Seine: with the reviewers’ blurbs declaring it “A perfect book” and “The greatest addition to Italian literature for a very long time,” I decided to give it a chance. Originally published in Italian as Pugni in 2006 and just released by Pushkin Books in a translation by Howard Curtis, this gathering of three short stories—“Boxing,” “Horses,” and “The Monkey”—is truly exquisite. In one sense, as narratives involving young men coming-of-age, the stories read like parables. But they are so gracefully composed and so winningly developed that they ultimately sit between the covers of this beautifully produced book (I must confess my weakness for French flap covers!) as enduring works of finely crafted and fully realized literature.

WILL THAT BE NYLON OR STEEL . . . ?

A few weeks ago I tuned in for the first time to Skylark, a relatively unheralded album by alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. Recorded late in 1973 and released on vinyl on the CTI label, it shows some of the handmarks of producer Creed Taylor, including arrangements by Don Sebesky, which tended to encourage noodling on the part of the players—meandering soloing, presumably intended to register the laid-back temper of the time. Aiming to expand the commercial market for jazz by smoothing off some of the inherent edginess of mainstream convention (note the extensive presence of Bob James’s mellow electric piano on this recording, along with the inclusion of pop musician Paul Simon’s song “Was a Sunny Day”), CTI had its moment that in a way also helped to define the moment. (I must pause here in the midst of my mild critique of CTI to admit that even while I am thinking offhand of long-winded albums like Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay and Straight Life, one of my favorite jazz recordings of all time is part of that label’s catalogue: guitarist Jim Hall’s Concierto, which also features Desmond on alto and Chet Baker on trumpet, along with Sir Roland Hanna on piano and Steve Gadd on drums . . .)

I actually picked up Skylark mainly to give a listen to Hungarian-born guitarist Gábor Szabó, who in the CD liner notes is attributed with “all solos.” I think that I own Szabó’s album Mizrab on vinyl, but it is buried in the basement (and I don’t currently own a turntable), so he has not really been part of my aural landscape in recent years; still, I was able to recognize right away his distinctive tone—a bit “thin” and at times a bit wavering—in his single-string soloing. But the real surprise and the real treat of the album is not the playing of Szabó but of the “second” guitarist for the session, Gene Bertoncini: while he may not be given the nod by Taylor and Sebesky to stretch out in linear fashion like Szabó, his simpatico comping behind both Desmond and Szabó really lends the album its defining texture. I have to admit that on a first listen I did not attribute that rich and expressive background chording (and occasional chord soloing) to Bertoncini; but seeing his name in the liner notes, I was prompted to drop him an email and he wrote back to explain: “Actually, Gábor is only on a couple of things. . . . That’s me on the tune ‘Skylark,’ which turned out to have some nice interplay between Paul and myself.”

But, really, I should have known without being told; for while Bertoncini plays electric guitar on the album—not his signature sound of recent years, which is mostly nylon-strung acoustic—his contribution to Skylark has the “architectural” consistency that many listeners would identify as his truly defining musical signature: lines that move simultaneously both horizontally and vertically—both melodically and harmonically—thanks to his subtle and tasteful chord voicings in the left hand and his deft righthand finger-picking. Referring to Bertoncini’s playing in terms of architecture—he received his degree in Architecture from the University of Notre Dame back in the late ’50s—might seem a bit too obvious, but it really does seem like an apt metaphor to describe not only his spatial conception of musical arrangement but likewise his approach to the guitar as what Hector Berlioz referred to as “a little orchestra.” I have several of his albums on my iPod—including a solo outing titled Body and Soul and a set of duo arrangements, Two In Time, with bass player Michael Moore. In each case, his exquisite playing on his nylon-strung Buscarino ensures that distinctive Gene Bertoncini sound.

Coincidentally, right around the same time that I picked up Skylark, I found in my office mailbox Compass Rose, a newly-minted CD by my friend and colleague Peter Janson, who teaches guitar at UMass Boston. Like Winter Gifts, an earlier CD of his that I wrote about in this blog a few months ago, this one features what is clearly Peter’s “signature sound”: steel-strung finger-picked solo acoustic guitar. As with Winter Gifts, the playing here is superior—with his contrapuntal arrangements, Peter sounds at times like he is playing with four hands, and he brings out all the natural warmth of the acoustic guitar. His tune selection is also impressive, ranging from original compositions like “Bluebird” and “Binnacle” to “Black Mountain Side” (recorded by Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin’s debut album) to tunes from the Irish and Celtic tradition like “Rose of Allendale,” “Planxty Irwin,” and “The Return from Fingal.” There is also a nice scattish vocal on a tune called “The Magic Box”—could that possibly be Peter himself scatting? Aptly, one of the tunes on the album is called “Steel String Surprise,” which features sweet lyrical playing punctuated by nicely-placed harmonics.

Having given a nod to Buscarino, the maker of Gene Bertoncini’s guitar, I would be remiss in not acknowledging that on Compass Rose Peter Janson plays guitars made by Bill Tippin of Marblehead, Mass. and by Ted Thompson of Vernon, British Columbia.

DEEP IN A DREAM

About three years ago I read Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, James Gavin’s biography of the legendary jazz trumpeter. Some Baker fans may take exception to Gavin’s unrelenting “warts and all” portrait of the artist, and others may find the book a bit thin on sophisticated musical analysis; but I found it thoroughly engaging and also enlightening about an enigmatic figure whose uneven career I came to a better understanding of by way of learning the sordid details of his life which contributed to his musical journey.

I also came away from the book grateful to have learned of some of the recordings that Gavin’s narrative pointed to. Baker has a vast catalogue as leader, as co-leader, and as sideman . . . so there is no single “starting point” for getting to know the man through his work; as usual, then, I defaulted to the recordings mentioned by Gavin that feature the trumpeter in the company of guitarists. One of my favorites of these is Chet Is Back, recorded in Rome in 1962: showcasing the great (but often overlooked) Belgian guitarist René Thomas, it is a keeper from start to finish. (The other members of the supporting quartet are Bobby Jaspar on flute and tenor sax, Benoît Quersin on bass, and Daniel Humair on drums.) Baker had just been released from prison after serving more than a year-and-a-half for drug smuggling and forgery: he was in top form, and Thomas was his equal.

But two other recordings that I tracked down (both also recorded in Europe) have had staying power—and more—as far as my own “musical journey” is concerned: The Touch of Your Lips (1979), with American Doug Raney on guitar and Danish-born Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Chet’s Choice (1985), with Belgians Philip Catherine on guitar and Jean-Louis Rasinfosse on bass. One common denominator of these two recordings is that each features a drummerless trio—the result being a sort of “chamber music” effect: jazz well-suited to be played in a small and intimate space. At least that’s how I sold the “concept” of these two albums when I shared them with my friends Joe and Greg, who play trumpet and bass respectively, in The Next Band, the seven-piece combo that we perform in at the John Payne Music Center in Brookline (see my earlier post below). Not sure of what I might be getting into, but feeling the urge to get into something new, I wondered if they might like to try on a Chet Baker-esque trio for size . . . and they said, “Let’s do it!”

So we did it . . . after a while. I think I floated the idea at them in May. We then rehearsed once, in July: that was fun and felt promising . . . but then summer vacations got in the way. And then the start of a new semester. And then . . . and then suddenly we had the chance to make our debut—a chance offered with such short notice (just a couple of days) that we had no time to get nervous . . . or to rehearse. So this past Saturday we convened for a couple of minutes to look over a plausible tunelist and then headed off to provide the background music for a moving-away party for my next-door neighbors in another neighbor’s back garden.

By all accounts—the neighbors’ enthusiastic applause and sincere compliments and our own after-the-fact self-affirmation (“Let’s do it again!”)—we acquitted ourselves more-than-respectably. And we had fun! And the secret in both regards was the tune selection. Using the principle of “The 5 Bs”—a blues, a bop, a ballad, a bossa, and a burner—to shape our two sets, we had a good workout, starting with Dizzy Gillespie’s bluesy little number “Birk’s Works.” Filling out the first set with “Groove Yard,” “Five Brothers,” “Blue Room” (which we sight-read), “Black Orpheus,” “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Billie’s Bounce,” we certainly earned our beverage break! Then after some schmoozing with our new-found fans, we jumped right back into it with Lou Donaldson’s gem “Cookin’,” followed by “Yesterdays,” Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple from the Apple,” the bossa classic “Desifinado,” “Crazeology,” and “Taking a Chance on Love.” We then had a rousing finish with “Sandu,” a catchy blues penned by Clifford Brown. What a great afternoon! Hey, we were deep in our own dream of making music—“chamber jazz,” I suppose—and making others happy in the process . . .

Who knows where the trio goes from here? Well, maybe we’ll go wherever we’re invited . . . because when we get there, we get to “do it again”!

CAPE CRUSADERS!

If there’s anything more satisfying than embarrassing one’s own children in public, it just might be embarrassing someone else’s. One of my favorite moments in the first regard happened just a little less than a year ago when I pulled up in front of my youngest daughter’s high school—at the start of her senior year, no less—in my new eye-catching black Volvo S60 . . . sporting a Batman license plate: with a crowd of about 40 classmates hanging around the entrance of the school, my daughter was absolutely mortified to be picked up by her Dad . . . driving The Batmobile. Perfect! Then a few nights later I doubled the satisfaction when I picked up my middle daughter in the traffic circle in front of her college dorm. A cool freshman, she pretended not to notice the license plate. But as she closed the car door and buckled herself, she turned to me and spoke one word straight from her heart to mine . . . like a stiletto: “Loser.”

So . . . yesterday’s embarrassing moment involved not my children but two of the three children of Irish retro rock ’n’ roller Rocky De Valera. We had just brunched with them and their father (traveling incognito under the unlikely name of Ferdia Mac Anna) in Chatham on Cape Cod and they needed a ride back to their summer home on the outskirts of town. So we piled into The Batmobile (though without the front plate—I too sometimes travel incognito) and pulled onto crowded Main Street . . . but not before I rolled down all the windows and opened the sun roof and cranked up the volume on “Baby, Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” the current hit single of Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. Were Rocky’s kids embarrassed to have their old Dad’s vocals blaring out into one of the major thoroughfares on the Cape in the height of tourist season? You betcha!

Afterwards, I realized how (in)appropriate it would have been to play the longlost-but-recently-found recording of a tune titled “Batman and Superman,” cut by Rocky De Valera and the Rhythm Kings way back in 1982-83 when his kids were just a twinkle in his eye. Next time!

In the meantime, I’m sure that my kids are relieved that they weren’t along for the ride: they would have been utterly “scarlah” (Dublin slang: red-faced) over the coincidence that Rocky and I were wearing matching Polo golf shirts and khaki shorts . . .

POST-APOCALYPSE . . . NOW; and/or, ABOUT A BOY

A few weeks ago I found myself reading Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. This book was all the rage when it first came out in 2006, and no doubt it will be all the rage again when the movie version hits the big screen in a few months. I wasn’t sure that I would get to it this summer . . . but it sort of fell off the bookshelf into my lap, so I gave it a go.

It is a bleak novel, that’s for sure: a depiction of a post-apocalyptic world (presumably after a nuclear holocaust) sparsely populated by survivors who can be categorized unequivocally as either “good guys” (the minute minority) or “bad guys.” As its title hints, the book is a quest narrative, and it traces the route—mostly uncharted—taken through the utter wasteland of human destruction and self-destruction by a dying father and his young son in search of some vestige of human decency. Written with a minimalist precision suited to the barren landscape—physical as well as psychological/spiritual (the “quest” can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically)—the novel is equal measures relentless and riveting: McCarthy offers the reader no respite from the mere remnant of civilization that his father and son find themselves wandering through.

Obviously, one of the challenges McCarthy confronted in writing this novel involved how to ground the narrative in a world both familiar and strange. Resisting any temptation to insert obvious post-apocalyptic landmarks, such as the buried Statue of Liberty at the end of the movie Planet of the Apes, McCarthy relies instead on inscribing a landscape of such remarkable consistency (in two senses of the word) that the reader who buys into it does so completely. I think this is a perfect example of what John Gardner meant when he described, in The Art of Fiction, the “dream” that a successful novel creates in the reader’s mind:

We may observe . . . that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous—vivid because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.

But if the result is clearly a cautionary tale—a frightening projection of the post-apocalyptic world that human agency could very imaginably produce—there is another dimension of the novel that I found emotionally charged in a different way. As McCarthy acknowledges in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2007, this novel of a dying father’s desperate love for a son who will soon have to place his trust in what seems to be merely vestigial human goodness reflects and refracts the 73-year-old author’s own anxiety about the future that his own young son, John Francis McCarthy—to whom The Road is dedicated—will inherit. “Is this a love story to your son?” Oprah asks. “I suppose it is,” McCarthy understates in response. His answer typifying the overall dynamic of the interview—the author’s reticence being far from an antidote to Oprah’s over-simplistic line of questioning—the poignancy of the fact that the novel is, in effect, “about a boy” pervades the entire narrative.

Yet, notwithstanding that essential dimension of The Road, the novel that I chose to serve as an antidote to its unrelenting bleakness was just coincidentally Nick Hornby’s fine comic novel titled . . . About a Boy. I’ve read three other novels by Hornby—How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and A Long Way Down—and enjoyed each of them immensely. I would have read About a Boy long ago (it was first published in 1998) except that by the time I fully tuned in to Hornby, the only copies I could find in bookstores had actor Hugh Grant on the cover—and I despise Hugh Grant! Funny, then, that as I was reading the novel over the past few days (I found a used copy with an older cover), I realized that at some point I must have sat through the film adaptation that Grant stars in (my wife and daughters love him and we probably even own the DVD of the film) . . . and so the character of Will was indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye in the image of Grant. I could say Ouch! but I have to admit that he may have been perfectly cast. . . . One way or the other, About a Boy proved to be an altogether entertaining read—just the sort of “father and son” narrative that I needed to awaken me from Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish “dream.”

GUITAR FANCYING . . .

Back in February—on the Sunday of Valentine’s weekend, in fact—I had my 15 minutes of notoriety when the Boston Globe Magazine published under its Coupling rubric (a weekly feature on “domestic relations”) a piece I had penned titled “Cat Fancying.” Suggesting that men who own cats might be better schooled in the ways of intimacy than men who own dogs, the piece elicited all sorts of cranky/nasty responses on the Globe website, several of which—quite clearly from dog-owning pickup-driving he-men—had me checking over my shoulder for a few days afterwards. (Seriously: there are some real crazies out there . . .) The Globe has now taken down the comments . . . but pleasingly enough, the piece continues to have shelf life. Just a couple of nights ago, I walked into the kitchen as my middle daughter was reading “Cat Fancying” off her computer screen to some of her guy friends—more than 5 months after the fact. And about a month ago I was stopped on the street by a realtor who had tried to sell our old house about 15 years ago; he not only remembered me by name (we had not crossed paths in all that time) but when he read the piece in the Globe he also remembered the vicious feline love of my life at that long-ago time—aptly, her name was Ursula, which means “little she-bear”—who had refused to let prospective buyers go up to the second floor: she positioned herself on the stairs and hissed and spat and swatted at all comers, protecting her territory!

For a while I kept fairly close track of the range of responses—and of responders—to “Cat Fancying.” Even 5 weeks after its publication, at a political fundraiser here in my town, one of our Selectmen complimented me on it. And the week before that, when I was walking the dog at 6:30 one morning, an around-the-corner neighbor pulled over in his car to comment approvingly on the piece (he has 4 cats, 2 dogs—I guess that gives him “expert” status). And in the week before that, 4 new people (including one person at my jazz combo’s gig at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge) remarked on it to me—that’s pretty good staying power! But that’s not all: shortly after the piece was published, someone shouted out to me (twice) at a local high school basketball game, “Hey, O’Grady . . . got your cat with you?” That 15 seconds of fame raised some eyebrows in my section of the bleachers as a number of people didn’t catch the point of the reference. But another guy at that game confided in me that his cat had lived to be 17 years old . . . and that after it died he was too heartbroken to get another. I told him that he should honor that cat’s memory by getting another one now: the cat gods would want him to and they would reward him accordingly. . . . I also had many email messages from people from all corners of my life (and beyond). One guy who works with my wife swore me to secrecy when he admitted that his favorite pet was a bunny named Thumper. A former student admitted that he is known as “Dr. Catvorkian” because he has now taken aged or ill cats belonging to 3 different friends to the vet to have them put to sleep. My furthest-back student to respond was in my first-ever class at UMass Boston, in the Fall of ’84; he hates cats but the piece gave him an occasion to drop me a line, which was nice. Another former student, from about 15 years ago, emailed to say that his mother sent him the piece in California. . . . Also, 3 or 4 of my neighbors told me that they had left the piece on their college-age daughters’ beds for when they returned home for Spring break: sweet!

Obviously, “cat fancying”—the unabashed admiration of cats which I confessed to—strikes a chord with many people; this no doubt explains the allure for ailurophiles of the long-running monthly magazine Cat Fancy. And so—very evidently—does guitar fancying, which I will also plead guilty to, strike a chord, very literally. In fact, guitar may be the only instrument that invites the same degree of fetishistic zeal that felines provoke: guitarists just love to talk about (and think about . . . and dream about) guitars. Not surprisingly, then, there’s no shortage of magazines catering to this fetish in one way or another: Guitar Player, Just Jazz Guitar, Guitar World, Flatpicking Guitar Magazine . . . the list goes on and on and on. One of my favorites is Vintage Guitar Magazine, a large format publication with well-written features on both “classic” and “unique” guitars—individual guitars as well as both popular and obscure models. Lots of “eye candy” too—color photographs detailing the wonders of these exquisite creations. (All cats are beautiful; all guitars are beautiful too . . .) The target audience for VGM comprises not only bona fide guitar collectors, guys (mostly) with a “guitar jones” that simply must be fed no matter what the cost, but also would-be collectors like yours truly—guys with (as the saying goes) “champagne taste but a beer budget.”

So I was naturally curious when, browsing the magazine rack at the local Borders a few weeks ago, I happened upon the inaugural issue of Guitar Aficionado. Interestingly, the checkout clerk was also curious, as she asked me: “So . . . what makes this magazine different from all the others?” Well, the answer to that million-dollar question might just be . . . a million dollars! For—transparently—the target audience for this new magazine is not Joe Six-Pack poking around yard sales and pawn shops and guitar show booths in search of some personal Holy Grail but a different breed of cat altogether. Celebrating not just guitars but classic automobiles, high-end fashion (including $25,000 wristwatches), exotic travel, and vintage wines and bourbons, Guitar Aficionado is aimed at guys with a “champagne budget” who are looking to cultivate a “taste” to match: in short, it’s inviting its readers to ogle not just guitars but an entire deep-pocketed lifestyle that most of us can experience only vicariously . . . or voyeuristically. I have nothing against cover-boy chef Tom Colicchio or California vintner Robert Foley owning great guitars—and apparently they play them, which is sort of the point! But to the publishers of this magazine, guitars seem little more than commodities—“blue chip investments” like stocks and bonds or vanity acquisitions like trophy wives. I truly admire Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, but the article focused on him is much more about his owning a pair of Friesian horses; they may be stunningly beautiful beasts that testify to the bumper sticker I noticed yesterday—“Horses are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”—but I think that most true guitar “aficionados” would be more interested in hearing Perry hold forth on his passion for guitars than in catching a glimpse of “his leisure role as country squire.” As for the review of the $255,000 2009 Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Coupe that brings up the rear of Guitar Aficionado . . .

But who am I to judge the fantasy life of others? After all, I’ve got an 11-year-old tortoiseshell cat whose coloring matches the tobacco sunburst finish of my 53-year-old Gibson ES-125.

SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS + DUTCH TREAT . . .

It’s not often that I get down off a horse—or a book—in midstream . . . but I did just that a few weeks ago with the Scottish novel The Crow Road by Iain Banks. Originally published in 1992, the novel recently appeared in an American edition: its back cover blurbs promise a book that is “riveting” and “masterful”—all the usual blarney. But 206 pages into the 501-page tome, I finally said to myself that “enough is enough”: neither the narrative nor the characters ever came to life for me . . . so I just set it down and moved on.

There’s a chance that at some point I’ll pick up where I left off in The Crow Road, but I think that the novel’s problem—or my problem with the novel—is encapsulated in this observation by John Gardner in the chapter titled “Interest and Truth” in his book The Art of Fiction:

Thus it appears that to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it-the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and beards, exactly the right memories and jargon). He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot . . .

After setting aside Banks’s novel, I learned from a friend that it was adapted as a popular BBC television series in the mid-1990s. Perhaps the narrative lent itself to such an episodic format right from the start: maybe that’s why the novel’s “narrative arc” seemed to me so intolerably slow in developing. Hmmm . . .

But in the meantime, I picked up another novel which that quotation from Gardner coincidentally affirms: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. With its protagonist quickly identified as a Dutch-born British banker relocated to New York City, where he gets involved with a group of cricket-playing Trinidadians, I was not so sure setting out where I would find my angle of entry into that multiply “foreign” world. I think the point where I got hooked was on p. 31, when protagonist Hans van den Broek describes his separation from his wife who, suffering from post-9/11 trauma, returns with their son to her parents’ home in England:

The three of us flew together to England. We stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton at their house in Barnes, in southwest London, arriving on Christmas Eve. We opened gifts on Christmas morning, ate turkey with stuffing and potatoes and Brussels sprouts, drank sherry and red wine and port, made small talk, went to bed, slept, awoke, and then spent an almost unendurable further three days chewing, swallowing, sipping, walking, and exchanging reasonable remarks. Then a black cab pulled up in front of the house. Rachel offered to accompany me to the airport. I shook my head. I went upstairs, where Jake was playing with his new toys. I picked him up and held him in my arms until he began to protest. I flew back to New York. There is no describing the wretchedness I felt, which persisted, in one form or another, throughout my association with Chuck Ramkissoon.

That was where the world that Joseph O’Neill created—“his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others”—began to emerge for me as “a single, coherent gesture.” Netherland proved altogether worthy of the blarney of its back cover blurbs.

NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO . . .

“God is in the details,” legendary skyscraper architect Mies van der Rohe reminds us. . . . So this morning I got up and put on my favorite pair of Levi’s® and my favorite t-shirt advertising Gibson® guitars. With rain in the forecast, I chose my Teva® sandals over my Birkenstocks.® My new Ray Ban® polarized sunglasses at the ready in case the weather forecast was wrong, I headed out the door, revved up my beloved Volvo S60,® fired up my Garmin nuvi 260W GPS Navigator® . . . and then just sat there.

Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Was that the emptiness that I suddenly felt as I paused so fully “detailed” in my suburban driveway?

Or was it that I had forgotten to plug my 120gb iPod classic® into the Kensington Digital FM Transmitter®? Seeking a cure for what ailed me, I thumbed my way through several hundred tunes until I landed on “No Particular Place to Go,” that old Chuck Berry number that laments the “trouble” caused by a different sort of “device”:

No particular place to go,
So we parked way out on the Kokomo.
The night was young and the moon was bold,
So we both decided to take a stroll.
Can you imagine the way I felt?
I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!

Perhaps the YouTube video of Berry performing this tune live reminds us of the flipside to van der Rohe's belief: “Man proposes, God disposes . . .”

DIANA KRALL, LIVE IN . . . NEW HAMPSHIRE

A couple of days ago, I happened to visit the website of legendary jazz photographer Herman Leonard. Two mouse-clicks into that site, the featured photograph is a priceless image shot from the rear of the bandstand in a New York City jazz club in 1949, capturing Ella Fitzgerald singing to an utterly enraptured Duke Ellington at the foremost table and an obviously impressed Benny Goodman at the table behind him—to my eye a classic instance of what another legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, deemed “the decisive moment.” Ah, those were the days, I thought, when jazz was performed in the intimate confines of a casual nightclub—not as it mostly is today, with audiences being herded in and out of cramped hotel lounges like Scullers or The Regattabar . . . or else with audiences congregating in massive numbers at a venue like the Meadowbrook Pavilion in Gilford, NH. So I was thinking about that photograph yesterday as the missus and I motored north of the border to see jazz chanteuse and pianist Diana Krall perform at the Meadowbrook Pavilion.

But as we were driving, we were iListening to Live in Paris, Krall’s remarkable recording from 2002, so I was hopeful that the show would at least approach that standard of excellence. (I should mention that back in the Fall of 1984, we had the fabulous fortune of seeing Ella Fitzgerald perform live in Mechanics Hall in Worcester—an evening made even more special with the unannounced appearance for the second set of guitarist Joe Pass, with whom Ella had collaborated on a couple of classic duet albums: it would be unfair to use that transcendent concert as a measure for every musical event we’ve attended since then . . .) Well . . .

Well, first of all the venue: the Meadowbrook Pavilion is a wonderful concert site! It’s easy to get to and from (about 2 hours from Boston); the parking was free; the site itself is spacious and clean with decent food options; there’s a “second stage” that features a live performance before the main event . . . And then there’s the pavilion itself—a large open-sided roofed structure that accommodates several thousand people: it has tiered seating, a full-size stage, a good sound system, and large screens at each side of the stage projecting the show from shifting camera angles—no reasonable complaints!

As for the concert . . . well, Diana Krall delivered! She played for a full hour-and-a-half and pretty much offered a thrill a minute. I recall that when she first emerged on the musical scene (about 15 years ago), critics debated whether she was a bona fide jazz artist. I think that debate has quieted down: Krall may not be the world’s “greatest” (whatever that means) jazz singer and she may not be the world’s “greatest” jazz pianist . . . but she may well be the “greatest” combination of those two musical identities, as she chooses both songs and arrangements that allow her to showcase her estimable strengths as a musician . . . which include truly “owning” a tune, both vocally and at the keyboard. She also knows how to own an audience. This was evident from the opening tunes, “I Love Being Here With You” and “Let’s Fall in Love” . . . which happen to be the opening tunes on Live in Paris. An auspicious start! The rest of the evening’s songlist comprised mostly jazz standards from her various albums, including a couple from her recent bossa-centered album Quiet Nights. Surrounding herself with a wonderfully supportive trio—Robert Hurst on bass, Jeff Hamilton on drums, and the dazzling Anthony Wilson on guitar—Krall shone in the footlights, but she also shared the limelight generously, making for a fully satisfying evening. We’ve been following Diana Krall’s career pretty much from the start, but this was the first time we’ve managed to catch her “live and in person”: no doubt we’ll try to catch her again, whatever the size of the venue may be.

AT THE MOVIES WITH CORMAC McCARTHY . . .

Two of the highlights of my summer reading last year were novels by Cormac McCarthy—No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses. I found the former so “dark” and “grim” and yet so “gripping” that I had to admit: “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for the movie. . . .” I think that at the time I didn’t even know there was a movie of All the Pretty Horses.

Well, finally I got up the nerve to watch No Country for Old Men this past weekend . . . just a couple of hours after I whetted my appetite by watching All the Pretty Horses. The former was just as I expected it would be—“dark,” “grim,” “gripping” . . . and also just wonderfully made: no surprise to me that it won four Oscars—for best supporting actor (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh), best director (Joel and Ethan Coen), best adapted screenplay, and overall best picture. I found it remarkably faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the novel: it was thus both riveting and disturbing, as the violence is graphic and relentless in McCarthy’s vision of what amounts to a moral apocalypse. Neither the movie nor the book is for the faint-of-heart—but I have now survived both!

As for All the Pretty Horses: well, the movie channel that I watched it on gave it only 2 stars (out of a possible 4). To my mind, that’s a serious underrating. In fact, no less than No Country for Old Men, the film is wonderfully true to the novel that I admired so much when I read it last summer. And perhaps that is why I would give the film a 4-star rating: a viewer unfamiliar with the novel might find the adaptation a bit meandering—“leisurely,” the blurb on the TV listings described it—but for a horse-centered quest narrative, that is the nature of the beast (as it were). And, believe me, I don’t give that rating lightly, as I had to overcome my general coolness toward actor Matt Damon, who plays the lead role of John Grady Cole. From where I sat, he was perfectly cast, as was Penélope Cruz as Alejandra, his love interest and (near) femme fatale. This film was a fine first half of a great Sunday double bill of Cormac McCarthy at the movies . . .

BREAKING NEWS FROM CANNES . . .

The word on the street—literally . . . well, from across the street—is that a film co-executive-produced by my friend and neighbor Scott Hainline has just been awarded a Silver Lion at the 56th annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. That’s very exciting news—and very cool! The film—Father’s Day—is part of a series of short films that Scott and his colleagues at Boston’s Hill Holliday advertising agency have developed for The Responsibility Project, a web-based spin-off of the series of “pay it forward” television commercials that Hill Holliday produced for the Liberty Mutual insurance company. To view this fine film, which clocks in at just 11 minutes, click here. Congratulations, Scott!

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE . . .

A couple of days ago, I read in pretty much one sitting a book titled Aerobleu by an author named Max Morgan. This book crossed my readerly radar screen by way of my interest in the Parisian jazz scene around the time of World War II, so I ordered a used copy and gave it a go. The book purports to be the diary of an American-born pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force who settles in Paris after the war. Published in facsimile hand-printed manuscript in a format resembling a pilot’s log (and, furthering that effect, the “log” comes in a metal case), the book presents an engaging account of the mysterious Max Morgan’s encounters with various jazz greats—including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker—who visited Paris in the years immediately following the war. The hands-off owner of a jazz club called Aerobleu, Morgan also becomes the owner of an old DC-3 airplane, which affords him side-adventures in North Africa and elsewhere; some of these adventures involve musicians hitching a ride with him and jamming en route.

Perhaps because it is written as a diary, the gaps in the probability of all this get obscured by the thin veneer of plausibility. Like the musicians, I too went along for the ride . . . pretty much until the end. One of my favorite moments in the narrative was when Morgan tells tales of Le Festival Internationale de Jazz in May of 1949. I was so willing to suspend my disbelief that I thumbed the wheel of my iPod until I came to the live recording of the Miles Davis / Tadd Dameron Quintet at that actual event; the recording is complete with voiceovers from a French radio commentator identifying the band members and the tunes! (One of the tunes is Dameron’s “Good Bait,” one of my personal favorite tunes to blow on in the jazz combo I play with.)

Of course I knew that it was all a work of fiction . . . but I didn’t know until I did some homework after finishing the book that it is both more than that and less than that: Aerobleu was actually part of an elaborate marketing ploy by a San Francisco-based agency called Less Than Seven. In an article in the Business section of the New York Times in October of 1997 (after Aerobleu was published), Stuart Elliott writes:

Remember Morgan, the free-spirited aviator, and Aerobleu, the jazz club he ran in Paris after World War II? Remember those all-night jam sessions in Morgan’s DC-3 en route to London, New Orleans and New York? Remember his mysterious disappearance in Havana as Castro was coming to power?

Well, if you remember those events, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn someone may want to sell you, because they’re all imaginary. What is real, however, is a line of merchandise—now being sold by stores across the country—focused on Morgan and his fabulous though fictitious life style.

In other words, the book was simply the tail wagging the dog of a much larger enterprise involving the selling of posters, coffee mugs, clothing, and other accessories all calculated to cash in on an American nostalgia for iconic jazz and the romantic allure of Paris. The essential non-literariness of the diary format was perfect in every respect: it was literate but not dauntingly so, and was grounded just enough in “reality” to draw susceptible readers into its web of intrigue. While I enjoyed the narrative for what it was, I have to admit that I enjoyed even more finding out afterwards exactly what it was!

But I have to admit further that the greatest pleasure I took was in tuning in to a telltale false note just five pages into the narrative when, in a diary entry dated Wednesday, August 7, 1946, Max Morgan recalls an event from the previous year: “That Charlie Parker concert at Town Hall in September was mesmerizing.” Indeed it was . . . except that it was in June of 1945, not September—a forgivable slip . . . if not for the narrator’s unforgivable failure to note a truly distinguishing feature of that concert, which headlined Dizzy Gillespie as well as Parker: that Parker was a no-show until partway through the opening tune, “Bebop,” when he suddenly appeared on the stage. Could anyone actually there have forgotten such an unlikely entrance? Probably not. Could the corporate creator of Max Morgan and Aerobleu have known that little detail? Definitely not, as the acetate discs of the concert were discovered, restored, and released on CD only in 2005, sixty years after the concert—and eight years after the book’s publication. But when I read that reference to the concert, I remembered right away how in his introduction of the night’s proceedings radio host Symphony Sid Torin hesitated for a second before mentioning that Don Byas would be substituting for Parker to start the concert. I thumbed my way to that on my iPod too, after I closed the cover on Aerobleu.

JEFF BECK TURNED 65 TODAY . . .

Jeff Beck turned 65 today. Sheesh . . . if he’s that old, what does that say about me? (Well, I’m not that old . . .) As a tip of the cap to him, tonight I tuned in to his classic jazz-rock fusion album Blow by Blow—one of the few albums that I’ve had on vinyl, on cassette, and on CD. (Should I mention how much I like it?)

Well, despite his age, he is still going strong; in fact, he recently performed in the Boston area—I missed the show but the Boston Globe gave it a rave review. I wonder if he had his amazing young bass player Tal Wilkenfeld with him. Check out this YouTube video of Beck and Tal performing “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” one of the tunes originally recorded on Blow By Blow.

iTUNING IN . . .

For years, I had an iPod that held around 4000 tunes. When I first got it, that capacity seemed far more than enough, but I eventually exceeded that limit and had to resort to cycling certain CDs and artists and songs in and out of the mix, depending on my listening interests or moods at any given time. (Not that I could ever have listened to 4000 tunes non-stop . . . but the potential to do so was certainly “empowering”!) Inevitably, that overworked iPod gave up the ghost and I graduated to a model that will hold upwards of 20,000 tunes . . . which means no more cycling . . . which also means that as I’ve built my library up to more than 7000 tunes I’m rediscovering (or at least revisiting) certain recordings that were part of the “cycling” program. I have to say that I’ve taken particular pleasure in re-tuning in to a couple of recordings featuring friends of mine.

One of those is a CD titled Must I Holler by a band with a highly unlikely—and thus highly memorable—name: Whoa! Man! Jesus! If I recall correctly, the name derives from the responses the band heard from their first awestruck audience: a literal case of first impressions becoming lasting impressions. I regret that I never got to see W!M!J! perform live; for a while they had regular gigs at local venues (always late on weekend nights when I would be on chauffeur duty for my teenage daughters), and they also did a bit of touring. Rumor has it that the band has now disbanded. But they live on by way of Must I Holler, which captures them in all their “roots music” glory. Comprising two guitars and drums (one of the guitarists being my friend Wayne Rhodes), the trio performs a heady hybrid of blues-folk-delta boogie distinguished by a catchy rhythmic pulse, earthy vocals, and sinuous slide-guitar work. They are a tight unit, and I have to say that there’s something contagious about their songs (including a couple that attempt to detach Jesus from the clutches of the American religious right wing). Beyond their CD, W!M!J! lives on via YouTube—some live performances and also a very engaging MTV-style video of “O Rosalyn,” the opening tune on their CD.

Another CD that I re-loaded onto my iPod is Winter Gifts by Peter Janson, who teaches guitar and directs the student jazz ensemble at UMass Boston. As its title suggest—and as the specific tunes reinforce—this CD has a “seasonal” flavor to it; perhaps that it is why, when I first listened to it a year or so ago, I immediately thought of mulled wine! Listening to it recently, though, I’ve modified my tasting metaphor: Peter’s delicately inflected arrangements for finger-style solo acoustic guitar actually bring to my mind the language used by reviewers of fine wines—“a hint of toasted hazelnut with floral notes and black cherry accents,” for example. In others words, his playing is highly nuanced, whether cued up as background music or as music to be listened to attentively. To my ears, this CD fully justifies the accolades Peter has received over the years from acoustic guitar aficionados. Winter Gifts was in our Holiday Season mix last December; I'm happy to have it permanently on my iPod now.

WONDERING ABOUT THE WANDERERS . . .

Many years ago—maybe even twenty-five years ago—I caught just a few snippets, on TV, of a movie that intrigued me partly because of its rock ’n’ roll soundtrack and partly because of the stylish visual impact of its dress-coded rival gangs in the Bronx in the early 1960s. Despite my catching those snippets on my old 12-inch black-and-white telly, two scenes in particular stuck with me vividly: one was of a gang distinguished by their bald heads; the other was of another gang, decked out in bowling-style jackets, parading through the streets, the members whistling up at windows to summon additional members to join them as they staked their claim on the inner-city turf. That movie was The Wanderers, released in 1979.

So . . . fast-forward to last night, when I finally got to see the movie in its entirety . . . but not before reading the book—of the same title, by Richard Price—that it is based on. Price’s current claim to literary fame is Lush Life, which I have on hand and will get to eventually; but The Wanderers (1974)—his first book—has its merits as well. More a collection of linked stories than a novel per se (it lacks the coherent narrative arc of a novel, though the final story does help to tie matters together thematically), The Wanderers depicts not just gang-life in NYC circa 1963 but also the individual lives of gang members as they move through adolescence toward the uncertain responsibilities of early adulthood. A bit rough around the edges stylistically, it nonetheless illuminates both the social and the anti-social dimensions of street gangs.

Directed by Philip Kaufman (who co-wrote the script with his wife Rose Kaufman) and starring Ken Wahl as Richie Gennaro and John Friedrich as Joey Capra, the movie version of The Wanderers is, for my money (I bought it on DVD), more enduring than the book version. Taking liberties with the book—condensing or eliding characters and scenes, eliminating some characters and scenes altogether and adding others—it yet does justice to Price’s original literary vision while also achieving its own cinematic integrity: by turns dramatic, melodramatic, comedic and tragic, it is irresistibly engaging from start to finish. (Presumably Price would agree with that estimation, as he actually enjoys a cameo appearance in the film . . .) Of course, both book and film present highly sanitized versions of gang warfare, yet there are also elements of grittiness and candor that testify to Price’s personal boyhood intimacy with the real-life gangs—the Fordham Baldies, the Del Bombers, the Ducky Boys—that serve as his models.

It took me almost a full quarter-century to focus in on the Technicolor feature film that had teased me in black-and white. But ultimately the film proved to be even more satisfying than I expected; and discovering the book of The Wanderers was a bonus.

UPDIKE . . . IN THE AIR AND ON THE BRAIN

John Updike is in the air. Last weekend the Kennedy Library in Boston hosted a symposium on his work and the New York Times Book Review included a review of his posthumously-published book of stories My Father’s Tears. Prompted by his death earlier this year, I already had Updike on my summer reading list; I guess those further prompts put him on my brain, so I decided finally to sit down with his novel Rabbit, Run. For whatever reason, I have not tuned in much to Updike. I know that I read his much-anthologized short story “Lifeguard” when I was an undergrad . . . and I think that I must not have liked it: that might have been enough to put Updike on my “non-essential” list. But recently I re-taught his just-as-much-anthologized short story “A & P,” which I quite like. In between I’ve read odds and ends—his iconic piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” for example, on Red Sox legend Ted Williams’ last at-bat, in 1960: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”—so it famously begins. And I've read quite a few of his book reviews in The New Yorker . . . though with those reviews I always felt like I was listening in on a conversation between Updike and his loyal readers that had begun decades earlier. . . .

Having now just finished Rabbit, Run, I can appreciate some of what I’ve been missing over the past few decades. Updike’s protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is a thoroughly unlikable lout—an anti-hero in a literal as well as a literary sense—but the novel itself is compelling reading. I’ve never paid any attention to Updike as a poet (though I know he’s prolific) but there is certainly a lyric poet’s sensibility at work in the authorial eye for detail that defines the narrative. At the same time, there is a natural-born storyteller’s sensibility at work in the utterly persuasive symbiotic development of plot and character. And not just of Harry’s character: the Episcopalian minister Jack Eccles, his earnestness serving as an essential counterweight to Harry’s protracted adolescence, is fully engaging in his own right and steals several of the novel’s finely-wrought scenes. In fact, the novel comprises scene after scene that read as wonderful set pieces, with various characters coming to the fore, yet each and every one of these scenes integrates seamlessly into the narrative as a whole.

One of the scenes that I found particularly intriguing from a literary standpoint involves Ruth, Harry’s paramour (a far more polite term than Harry himself would use!). Is it just coincidental that her musings on Harry in a three-and-a-half page interior monologue about halfway through the novel remind me of Molly Bloom’s musings in the “Penelope” episode that closes James Joyce’s Ulysses? Perhaps . . . but factoring in that he names Harry’s foil “Eccles,” which is the name of the northside Dublin street where Molly and Leopold Bloom live, I suspect that Updike is giving a nod of acknowledgment in Joyce’s direction. Fueled by booze, Harry’s wife Janice’s interior monologue, later in the novel, is not quite so Molly-esque, though her resentment toward her husband’s sexual advance toward her shortly after childbirth also has a familiar ring to it: “Makes you feel filthy they don’t even have decent names for parts of you.” Hmmm . . .

Part of what makes Harry Angstrom so unlikable is his relative youth: he is in his mid-twenties . . . yet he wallows in an angst that would be a far better fit on a man twenty or thirty years his senior—Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, perhaps, or even Larry McMurtry’s Duane Moore. Still, I will probably—eventually—revisit this character by way of Updike’s sequels to Rabbit, Run: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Maybe “Rabbit” redeems himself somewhere along the way . . .

SOUTH OF BOSTON . . .

A couple of days ago I drove my niece to T. F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island. As we passed through Providence on I-95, she quizzed me about the city, which she had never seen before. I didn’t have much to say: I’ve been there a few times for college basketball or hockey games at the Civic Center; I’ve been to a couple of fine theater productions at the Performing Arts Center; I’ve been to Providence College a couple of times for academic reasons; I dropped off one of my daughters at Brown University so she could visit a friend . . . I guess I was a bit muted in my enthusiasm, but I didn’t try to explain that most of my vaguely unfavorable impressions of the city were formed—perhaps unfairly—back in 1989 by a couple of pieces written by Boston Globe columnist Jack Thomas: “Providence a ‘hot city’? Heaven help us!” and “Providence reconsidered: It’s still Palookaville.” Since then the city has had a big upgrade (they even re-routed the river that runs through it) . . . but I still remember taking perverse pleasure in Thomas’s scathingly funny exposés of Providence’s flaws and foibles at that time.

So maybe it wasn’t coincidental that the book I chose to start my “summer reading period” (June thru August) was Geoffrey Wolff’s 1986 novel titled . . . Providence. Of course, any book with that title has to have a metaphorical dimension to it, and most likely an echo of Paradise Lost: “The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” But if there is an element of divine guidance in the lives of Wolff’s characters, it must be subsumed into the grit of day-to-day existence in the grim world he inscribes in the novel. Wolff’s portrait of Providence is hardly flattering; here is the pride of place filtered, with only a trace of authorial irony, through the consciousness of one of his lowlife criminal characters:

If you lived in a jerkwater that outsiders bombed past on their way to Cape Cod, if you lived fifty miles south of a city that called itself The Hub, if you spent time telling people you chose to live in Providence because who needed the hassle of a big city, who needed to spend an hour looking for a parking place, who needed the pressure—well, if you lived in Providence it was difficult not to feel a shiver of pride when you were reminded (and you were reminded) that the whole New England mob got run out of a laundry on Atwells Avenue.

But as a novel—well, as a crime novel (for that is what it really is)—Providence is really quite engaging. (And I do not read many crime novels . . .) While he inclines at times more toward telling than showing—substituting lengthy passages of center-of-consciousness oblique narrative for direct action and dialogue—Wolff clearly applies his writerly skills to the task he sets for himself, and the result is a page-turner. An ensemble piece centered around five characters—a terminally ill defense lawyer and his wife plus a corruptible police lieutenant and a small-time crook with wise-guy ambitions who share an attraction to a doozey of a floozy—the novel has some nicely finessed twists and turns of plot which allow the complexity of the characters to emerge naturally.

I had no intention of starting my summer reading with a novel like this—and certainly not with this very novel, which I happened to pick up just the day before I drove my niece through Providence. But it proved to be a good read . . . and thus a good start to the summer.

D. IT IS WRITTEN . . .

As I pretty much confessed in a post-Oscar post in February, I am not the world’s biggest movie buff, and although I attend an Oscar party with diehard moviegoers pretty much every year, I generally ante up for my daughters and let them fill in ballots in the winner-take-all voting pool. But last night I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire, and I wish now that I had been filling in a ballot myself in this past Oscar season. I thought the film was terrific from start to finish and would have slotted it in as winner not only in the “obvious” categories—Best Picture and Best Director—but also (why not pretty much run the table?) Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography and Writing (Adapted Screenplay): all the categories in which it got the Oscar nod. Hey, I could have picked up some decent walking-around money!

But part of what intrigued me immediately about the movie was not its overall engaging effect on so many levels (all of the above categories—and more) but its improbable ending, which brings together Jamil and Latika in a moment promising a happily-ever-after future. The movie itself concedes the improbability—even the implausibility—of this ending by showing during the closing credits an unlikely ensemble dance sequence, featuring Dev Patel (Jamil) and Freida Pinto (Latika), delightfully choreographed to the popular Hindi song “Jai Ho.” Part of the effect is to remind us of and/or to test the strength of our viewerly “willing suspension of disbelief” that necessarily kicks in during the film if we are to be engaged and entertained by it at all: it’s just a movie, the movie itself announces to us . . . at the end! Another dimension of the effect is to acknowledge that in its entirety—despite all the trappings of “realism”—the movie is really a “romance,” a fictionalizing of “reality” that (as Nathanial Hawthorne puts it) “sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” yet it has “fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” At least that’s how I see it in a reflex response . . .

And I see it that way partly in light of my experience teaching Chet Raymo’s novel The Dork of Cork (and its film adaptation Frankie Starlight) this past semester. In the novel, the protagonist Frank Bois is the author of a memoir titled Nightstalk, of which his editor remarks: “I think the reader would have felt cheated by a happy ending.” That’s certainly how some of my students felt about the ending of Raymo’s book which frames Nightstalk. Some of them were quite unforgiving, despite Raymo’s embedding in the novel an analogue to the improbable relationship between Frank and the object of his childhood adoration, Emma. This analogue is in the form of a tale (ultimately from Chinese mythology) involving Vega the Weaving-girl and Altair the Herd-boy that Jack Kelly, Emma’s stargazing father, shares with young Frankie: “Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, at the height of summer, the lovers are allowed to meet when a bridge of birds briefly spans the stream of stars.” Unlike Simon Beaufoy, however, the screenwriter for Slumdog Millionaire, Raymo does not quite compose for himself the escape clause that Slumdog director Danny Boyle has appear on-screen in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” fashion:

D. It is written

Raymo’s novel begins with the sentence “Begin with beauty.” But it is really a novel about beauty and brokenness—even “ugliness”—as Frank himself articulates: “Beautiful and sinister. Jack thought I didn’t understand. But I understood. I was eight or nine years old, but even then I understood how beauty and hurt get jumbled up together. Even then I had seen how long are the shadows that beauty casts.” So when we see Frank and Emma—the Herd-boy and the Weaving-girl—at the end of the novel (and of Frankie Starlight) we might wonder whether the happily-ever-after ending of their narrative is really as “beautiful” as that afforded Jamil and Latika. Hmmm . . . Late in The Dork of Cork, Frankie may be speaking for his author when he muses: “I like the sense of completion, of tying up loose ends . . .” Slumdog Millionaire happens to tie up its loose ends with a dance sequence and a flowing yellow scarf!

DJANGO LIVES . . . !

I first tuned in to the playing of Django Reinhardt, the legendary manouche (French Gypsy) jazz guitarist, in the mid-1970s via an LP that I borrowed from my local public library. As I recall, that particular recording did not include Django’s equally legendary stable-mate, violinist Stéphane Grappelli: the other solo voice on the album was a clarinetist. I would not encounter Grappelli until, a couple of years later, I bought a cassette tape of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, a combo that confirms unequivocally that sometimes the whole is indeed greater than the sum even of its awesomely estimable parts. (Thirty-some years later, I still have that cassette, though by now I have all of the tunes on CD and on iPod as well.) Django died young, in 1953; but one of my abiding regrets is that I took a pass on two opportunities I had to see Grappelli perform: the first time in Dublin in 1978 (backed, I think, by Canadian-born British guitarist Diz Disley), the second time in Boston (backed, I suspect, by brilliant Scottish-based guitarist Martin Taylor), shortly before his death in 1997.

Maybe those missed opportunities were somewhere in the back of my mind when I decided, almost literally at the last minute, to head out to Scullers Jazz Club last night to hear John Jorgenson perform with his quintet. I arrived late, just as the show was about to start, and the room was filled almost to capacity—I was lucky to get a ticket. Really lucky. I wonder how many conversion experiences one is allowed to have in one’s lifetime. My most profound Saul-of-Tarsus-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment occurred back on July 8th, 2001 when I saw a performance by the New Guitar Summit—Duke Robillard, Jay Geils, and Gerry Beaudoin, six-string swingers in the tradition of the iconoclastic-become-iconic Charlie Christian—at a dive called The Rendezvous in Waltham, Mass. On our way home from that show I said to my wife: “That’s what I want to do with my life . . .” I suppose I should be grateful that I was converted to playing in a tradition and style that afforded me a chance at reasonable competence; what John Jorgenson does is at least as exhilarating . . . but considerably more daunting!

What Jorgenson does is bring to life the music of Django and Grappelli and the Quintette du Hot Club de France—who flourished in Paris between 1934 and 1939—with a flair and a finish in person that exceeds even what he has laid down in the recording studio on highly acclaimed CDs like Franco-American Swing and Ultraspontane. Playing tunes associated directly with Django as well as originals composed and arranged in the manouche style, Jorgenson is yet no mere imitator: he has fully mastered the style and the technique—the attack and the inflections—to the point that he has made Django’s music utterly his own. (As a gauge of just how “utterly,” check out Jorgenson’s fascinating and entertaining account of how he came to play the role on-screen of Django in Head in the Clouds, a 2004 feature film starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, and Stuart Townsend.)

I have to apologize—to myself!—for not having paid attention to John Jorgenson long before now. He has many claims to guitaristic fame—not the least of them a long-term hitch as a member of Elton John's backing band. He was also a member of the highly successful country music group The Desert Rose Band during the 1980s as well as co-leader of a group of Telecaster-slinging guitar heroes called The Hellecasters. As he displayed on the Scullers bandstand last night, he also plays clarinet and sings—he has multiple musical personalities!

But back to Scullers . . . As jaw-droppingly amazing as Jorgenson himself was on guitar—his fingers just flying up and down the fretboard in breathtakingly Django-esque arpeggios—the rest of his quintet confirmed further that indeed the whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, one of the sweetest moments of the night came just before the combo’s final tune when Jorgenson took a few minutes to introduce his backing musicians at length, giving each of them his well-deserved due: Dutch-born Simon Planting on bass, British-born Kevin Nolan on rhythm guitar (the absolutely crucial role filled by Django’s brother Joseph Reinhardt in the Quintette du Hot Club de France), Alabama native Rick Reed on snare drum, and—last and by no means least—twenty-something Jason Anick, of Marlborough, Mass., on violin . . . a remarkable stand-in for Stéphane Grappelli!

But the ultra-sweet moment of the evening was the encore, when the quintet returned to the bandstand to perform—unplugged, just as Django Reinhardt and company would have—Django’s literally anthemic “Nuages.” This capped one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended in my life: I’ll be watching for John Jorgenson to come to town again.

THE THRILL OF THE GRASS

So . . . this afternoon I attended a girls high school fastpitch softball game. It was the final home game for my daughter’s friend Devin, the team’s catcher and senior co-captain, and I had promised her that I would make it to a game before the end of her career. Unfortunately I had to leave after only three innings, but Devin was calling a good game behind the plate and she had gotten on base twice: evidently she has a reputation as a slugger, and the other team pitched to her cautiously and ended up walking her each time. It was nice to see Devin get recognized before the game as one of three graduating seniors on the team, and I had a funny moment during that little ceremony when I asked a woman sitting alone in the stands who she was “at the game for.” She replied: “I’m here for Devin. I’m her grandmother.” That made two of us, anyway.

I have to say that being down close to the ballfield for the first time since the final game of my youngest daughter’s career in youth softball—5 or 6 years ago—brought back many memories related to what preeminent writer of baseball fiction W. P. Kinsella phrased “the thrill of the grass.” (Kinsella first uses this phrase in his wonderful and wonder-filled novel Shoeless Joe and then borrows it from himself to re-use as the title of both a terrific short story and a fine short story collection.) Perhaps my favorite memory is of a game about 8 or 9 years ago when I was head coach of my middle daughter’s team. We were a lousy team and I was a lousy coach and on that particular evening some of the spectators at the game thought I was a lousy parent too. What happened was that my daughter, who I had put in left field to avoid any appearance of nepotism on my part, had been busy twirling her hair or chewing on her glove’s rawhide lace or watching the ice cream truck pull into the parking lot (or all three at once) and had thus allowed a catch-able ball to roll past her for extra bases. I suppose I shouted at her from the bench: “Wake up out there!” When she came in at the half-inning, she used her outfield error as the reason why she should have a turn in the infield. So the next inning I put her in at third base—and of course within a few pitches she got hit on the ankle by a low line drive. And of course I shouted from the bench, “That’ll teach you!” Which of course prompted some gasps and tut-tutting from the other parents (from both teams) gathered behind the backstop. What could I say? Well, what I said—as if it made the matter any better—was: “Hey, she’s my daughter . . .”

And hey, we ended up winning the game in the bottom of the last inning! Trailing by multiple runs to a team that, as one of my assistant coaches observed, looked “like East German Olympians”—for 10-year-old girls, they were built like Amazons—I pulled out all the stops . . . literally: somehow our players were getting on base—mostly on dropped third-strikes, I think—and coaching at third base, I waved player after player to keep running for home, shrewdly calculating that the odds were not very likely for the fielders on the other team of 10-year-olds to execute both an accurate throw and a successful catch on the same play. At the end of the day we truly ran away with the victory—a victory made that much sweeter by the utterly baleful look the opposing coach gave me during the obligatory post-game handshake.

I ended my coaching career as an assistant for my youngest daughter’s team a few years later. But that losing coach from a few years earlier is still involved in the game, leading the girls varsity team at a local private academy. I see her in Starbucks pretty much every week. I can’t imagine that she remembers me. If she did, I’m sure that she would still hate me.

JANE MONHEIT . . . LIVE AT SCULLERS JAZZ CLUB

The first time I saw Jane Monheit perform “live and in person” proved very memorable for me . . . though not exactly because of Monheit’s performance. As I recall, while her singing was crowd-pleasing—and I remember being personally pleased that she sang “Please Be Kind,” the opening song on her debut CD, Never Never Land—she was surprisingly lacking in stage presence and seemed truly to be swallowed up by the venue, the Sanders Theatre at Harvard University. For me the most memorable aspect of that evening was the playing of guitarist Rodney Jones, whose name I knew but whose impressive chops I had not been exposed to previously. The musical director for the Rosie O’Donnell Show and also for vocal legend Ruth Brown, he just happened to be guesting with Monheit that night, but for my money he stole the show and I eventually got my hands on a couple of really fine CDs that feature his expressive playing: his own session titled Dreams and Stories and also The Opening Round, a session led by tenor saxophonist Houston Person.

That was quite a few years ago and I have not seen Monheit in the meantime, though she does visit Boston fairly often. But last night my wife and I treated our middle daughter and one of her friends to the 10:00 show at Scullers Jazz Club . . . and once again Monheit pleased the crowd, though this time with considerably more stage presence. Although confessing to jetlag—she and her trio (piano, bass, drums) had just flown in from Japan—she gave a warm and satisfying performance . . . despite no “Please Be Kind” this time. But her set did include nicely-swung versions of “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Taking a Chance on Love” as well as a fine rendition of the classic Jobim bossa nova “Waters of March.” Monheit seems to incline more toward slower numbers, though, and last night those included three showstoppers: Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” the Julie Christie anthem “Something Cool” (as my wife whispered, this could be a theme song for Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire), and “Over the Rainbow,” which has become Monheit’s signature tune. While I would have appreciated another “solo voice” in the mix—a saxophone or a guitar—I was probably in the minority in that regard: this evening was all Monheit’s and she owned the room.

CRUISIN' WITH ARLEN ROTH . . .

Channel surfing on a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, I just happened to pause on the local cable station NESN (New England Sports Network). Specifically, I happened to pause on an episode of a series called “Cruisin’ New England,” which according to the NESN website “showcases premiere antiques, street rods, muscle cars and special interest vehicles from all over the Northeast.” I’m not a “car guy” by any stretch . . . but something about that episode caught my eye. Well, actually it caught my ear first: a familiar voice that I yet could not quite place. When I paid closer attention, I realized the speaker’s face was also familiar—but there was no way I could have placed him in the context of vintage and classic automobiles and related memorabilia.

But as soon as Paul Mennett, the show’s host, spoke his guest’s name, it all came back to me: that familiar voice and that familiar face belonged to guitarist extraordinaire Arlen Roth, whom I have gotten to know over the past year or so by checking out his free lessons on the Gibson.com website. Not only a brilliant guitarist but also a brilliant teacher, Roth—still known in the music world as “The Master of the Telecaster”—obviously has switched guitar brands from Fender to Gibson . . . at least for the terrific series of short and to-the-point instructional videos posted on the guitar-maker's website. Roth also has an interesting blog that he maintains on the Gibson website: filled with anecdotes, advice and musical wisdom, it’s both engaging and informative.

Perhaps I should have known about—or remembered—Arlen Roth’s obsession with cars: now that I think about that dimension of his life, I realize that sometime in the past year I read an article on him in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine that focused as much on his cars as on his guitars. (Roth lives in Aquinnah on the Vineyard.) One way or the other, my serendipitous happening upon him on “Cruisin’ New England” prompted me to look beyond those free guitar lessons, and I have so far managed to track down three of his well-worth-tracking-down CDs.

The first one I found was Toolin’ Around Woodstock, a collaboration with Levon Helm, legendary drummer with The Band. Released in February of 2008, it has an unapologetic “retro” emphasis as the tunes include Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” Joe South’s 1960s folk-ish anthem “The Games People Play,” and the Buck Owens classic “Cryin’ Time.” It also has nice vocals chipped in by Roth’s daughter Lexie on Willie Nelson’s “Night Life,” and she is joined by Helm’s daughter Amy for some fine harmonizing on “Just One Look.” But the common denominator among all the tunes is Roth’s guitar work: whether straight-ahead blues, slithering slide, or jazz-inflected country, it is always just scintillating. Clearly he practices what he preaches—or applies what he teaches . . .

I have to admit, though, that I was briefly confused when I discovered that Roth has another, earlier CD with a very similar title—simply Toolin’ Around. First released in 1993 on the Blue Plate label, it was re-released in 2005 on Roth’s own Aquinnah label (apparently with an accompanying DVD documenting the making of the album). It’s hard to track down and expensive when you find it, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of the original Blue Plate release—and it’s just great. Mostly instrumentals, many of the tunes are also duets—or duels!—with other guitarists: “Tequila” with another “Master of the Telecaster,” the late Danny Gatton; “Let It Slide” with Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush; “Rollin’ Home” with first-call Nashville session man Albert Lee; “Black Water” with Duane Eddy, whose “twangy” guitar sound helped to define early rock ’n’ roll; the aptly titled “Housafire” with blues maestro Duke Robillard; and a surprisingly subdued “Six Days on the Road” with latter-day rockabilly star Brian Setzer. But the tunes I keep returning to are the staggeringly beautiful instrumental versions, featuring just Roth, of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and “When a Man Loves a Woman.” I think that Roth himself would be quick to admit that his treatment of these three tunes owes a debt of influence—or at least of confluence—to yet another “Master of the Telecaster,” the late Roy Buchanan (one of my boyhood heroes), whose handling of the Patsy Cline hit “Sweet Dreams” on his first album set the high bar for the sort of double- and triple-stopped melodic arrangements and sinuously-phrased improvising that Roth lays down here. Toolin’ Around is just filled with highlights: it’s a pity that this CD is not more widely available . . .

(Incidentally, Roth and Gatton performed “Tequila” on the Conan O’Brien Show back in 1994: it’s well worth checking out on YouTube.)

I guess that in moving forward with adding Arlen Roth to my iPod, I moved backward in time. The third of his CDs that I picked up is titled simply Arlen Roth; released by Rounder Records in 1987, it’s apparently a selection of tunes from two earlier albums recorded in the late ’70s. While it has its moments (mostly instrumental), I have to say more accurately that it is “of its moment”: the music is very laid back soft rock-ish, reminiscent to my ears of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by The Eagles, pre-Joe Walsh. ’Nuff sed? If not, then perhaps the CD cover photo speaks volumes about much of the content! Still, Roth is a guitar force to be reckoned with, and the earlier of his Toolin’ Around CDs might rightly be considered a six-string classic.