O'Grady Says . . .

BOOK REPORT . . .

2011-09-06T20:30:00.002-04:00

So . . . a new semester has begun.

That new beginning seems like a good vantage point to look back at some reading I’ve done over the past 8 months. I must admit that it looks like a pretty random gathering of authors and titles . . . but maybe there was some sort of method to my madness . . .

Well, the first title that I tackled in 2011 was a Christmas gift—The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter. It was an engaging narrative about a guy going through a pre-midlife crisis. There was something Nick Hornby-esque about the book—and I think Hornby may even have written a blurb for the cover. I like Hornby. I liked Walter. A good way to start the year.
And then, because I was going to San Francisco (for the first time ever) in late January, I figured I should read something iconically associated with that wonderful city. I chose Dashiell Hammett’s classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon. I think I read it long ago, and I had certainly seen the movie. Anyway, it provided a good dose of local color and local flavor, and I enjoyed it enough that I decided to read another Hammett offering right away (this one set in New York)—The Thin Man.

Then it was on to one of my favorite books of the year—Steve Martin’s latest work of fiction, An Object of Beauty. With interpolated images of paintings, the book itself—which is about the contemporary art scene in New York—is “an object of beauty”: I thoroughly enjoyed and admired this book, for both its conception and its execution.

Next stop was one of the most heralded books of last year: Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. A collection of linked stories centered around an English-language newspaper office in Rome, it certainly proved worthy (despite some unevenness) of the attention it received for its innovative concept. After that, perhaps prompted by my earlier reading of Jess Walter’s book, I took a run at Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked, which was published a few years ago. I’ve read and enjoyed most of Hornby’s novels, but this one seemed a little bit “thinner” than some of his previous works.

Then it was back to crime/detective fiction with Raymond Chandler’s Playback (one of his lesser-known titles, I think) and his classic The Big Sleep. Those were sandwiched around a totally different kind of book, A Seventh Man, a collaboration between British novelist and art critic John Berger and Swiss photographer Jean Mohr; I read this relative to a scholarly project I’m immersed in—it was interesting conceptually, but not really riveting reading.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting, a collection of stories focused on Dublin men experiencing midlife crises. Very compelling reading—quite poignant at times. (I really should write a real review of this book. Hmmm.)

And then I read two very different memoirs. The first was Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, which relates the launch of his wildly successful career (remember . . . he was “a wild and crazy guy”!) as a standup comic. But there is a depth to his story involving Martin’s complex relationship with his father: I was impressed by how he explored that dimension of his life. The second memoir was Paul Quarrington’s Cigar Box Banjo. I think I happened upon this title when I noted somewhere that Roddy Doyle had written the Foreword. A well-known Canadian novelist, Quarrington died of lung cancer a year or so ago: this musing on his life of books and music is ultimately an unsentimental account of his last months.

After the at-times heavy lifting of that book, I picked up Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Who knows how long that novel has been sitting on my bookshelf? It was one of my favorites of the year: a fully realized coming-of-age novel with all sorts of narrative and thematic twists and turns. I wish I could remember how or why I then decided to read Thomas McGuane’s Keep the Change: maybe because it had horses in it? I suppose I would describe it as a latter-day “western”—a “literary” piece of fiction exploring age-old themes involving land ownership. A good read if you like that sort of subject matter.

And finally, just as summer came to end, so did my reading of After Lyletown by old friend and former colleague K. C. (Chet) Frederick. Dramatizing how an individual’s past can have a way of catching up him or her, this very satisfying novel asks (and in its own way answers) the question of what price we have to pay for the indiscretions—even if fueled by idealism—of our youth.

ADAM McQUAID STANLEY CUP FESTIVAL ON PEI THIS WEEKEND!

2011-08-25T08:30:00.009-04:00

The last time the Stanley Cup came to Prince Edward Island I missed seeing it by just a few hours. The year was 2004. The Tampa Bay Lightning won the Cup that Spring and PEI native Brad Richards brought the trophy home to Murray Harbour, where he shared it with the gathered masses for a precious afternoon. Alas, we arrived home on the Island just around the time it was being crated up to be shipped on to the next player on the Lightning roster who would have his turn showing it and sharing it.

This year I’m once again missing the chance to see it on PEI—but this time by 8 days as we returned last Saturday from our annual pilgrimage to the Island. This year’s Islander with his name etched in immortality is Adam McQuaid, who will be hosting and hoisting the Cup this coming Sunday in his hometown of Cornwall. From what I’ve heard, the celebration will be first-class all the way: a meandering parade will allow the expected crowd of 15,000 at least a glimpse of the Holy Grail and a well-organized lottery will give at least 54 families the opportunity to get up close and personal with McQuaid and the Cup. (McQuaid’s uniform number with the Boston Bruins is 54.) And a number of non-profit organizations will get a piece of the action through the sale of souvenir t-shirts, a raffle of memorabilia, and food and water concessions. The organizers of the Stanley Cup Festival have also scheduled live music and entertainment to keep the crowd happy throughout the afternoon.

Well, even though I’ll miss seeing the Stanley Cup on PEI, I didn’t miss seeing Adam McQuaid, who established himself during his rookie year as a vital member of the Bruins shut-down defensive corps. His +- rating of +30 was tops for rookies across the league and he proved himself repeatedly as what tv analyst Pierre Maguire referred to as a “tough hombre”: his willingness to the throw down the gloves and “oblige” opponents interested in fisticuffs quickly established him as a fan favorite in Boston. (Here’s a link to one of his bouts: his beat-down of a Dallas Stars player that added the exclamation point to a remarkable start to a game in February—3 fights in the first 4 seconds!) But by all accounts, McQuaid is a gentle and approachable guy off the ice, and I took that part of his reputation as my invitation to “approach” him last week as each of us prepared for the start of the annual Gold Cup and Saucer Parade in Charlottetown.

I wrote a little bit about the Parade last summer. This year, I chose to wear my Bruins colors as my “uniform” in the Charlottetown Community Clash. Believe me, I took my share of abuse from self-avowed Montreal fans (in particular) along the parade route: I ran the gauntlet for my beloved Bs! (For more on my love of the Bruins, click here.) I expect that as Parade Marshall, sharing that honor and a spot on a float with members of PEI’s bronze medal-winning Special Olympics softball team, Adam McQuaid got a somewhat warmer reception.

Anyway . . . just before the Parade got underway I had a chance to chat with McQuaid for a few minutes—to congratulate him and to thank him for his role in bringing the Cup “home to Boston.” And home to PEI. I was surprised that he is not bigger: he’s tall, obviously, but he’s not big-boned or even intimidatingly muscular. In person he looks pretty ordinary—and even his mullet fits in on PEI! (He has retained that classic hockey cut from a charitable event in Boston during the winter.) All he needs is a “Canadian tuxedo” (a denim jeans/jean jacket combo—I still wear mine sometimes!) and you might never guess that he has his name on the Stanley Cup!

BAD HAIRCUT . . . AND OTHER STORIES

2011-08-04T10:30:00.004-04:00

Alright, I’ll admit that Tom Perrotta used that title first for an engaging collection of short stories (the story “Thirteen” is a true classic of adolescence awakening). I hope he doesn’t mind my borrowing it as a heading for this blog post. It seems to be a good catch-all for what follows.

MOO
So, a couple of days ago I took our Springer Spaniel in for grooming. She got the worst haircut ever: she came home looking like a Holstein calf! In fact, the next morning when my wife was out walking her, a guy in a pickup truck slowed down and shouted out: “Hey, nice cow!” My wife called back: “Hey, she’s a dog!” The man revved his engine and said: “I was talking to the dog.” Ha-ha!

WALKOFF
Okay, that story was only partly true (the bit about the bad haircut). But this is all true: for the second time this baseball season, I had drop in my lap a ticket for a great seat at Fenway Park—this time almost directly behind homeplate, about 15 rows deep. The price on the ticket was $94: my friend Joe, who invited me to accompany him to the game, got a pair as a “perk” for something or other, and we ended up getting far more than face value out of them. The game was delayed almost an hour-and-a-half because of a passing thunderstorm, but it was well worth the wait and the resulting late night as the Red Sox walked off with a win over the Cleveland Indians when pinch-runner Jarrod Saltalammachia slid in headfirst to score on a close play at the plate after Jacoby Ellsbury lined a single into center field in the bottom on the ninth inning. Exciting! Joe summed up the evening nicely in an email the next day: “I’ll not soon forget the cheese steak, the usher’s bench wipe, the rain delay, the high-quality brews, the thrilling outcome, the packed Green Line car, and the last Red Line car back home. Last night was an eleven!!!”

THE LAST OF THE MOHEGANS
One more “story” that warrants telling involves the less-than-24-hour visit to Block Island, RI that my wife and I enjoyed over the weekend. We strapped our bikes onto the back of the Batmobile then ferried over from Pt. Judith for an overnight visit with my wife’s sister and her husband and their three daughters, who had rented a place with a breathtaking outlook on the Mohegan Bluffs. The weather was perfect—mid-80s—and we savored the whirlwind getaway. As we were ferrying back to the mainland, we caught sight of my sister-in-law running along the jetty waving to us. Was she a Siren attempting to lure us to our doom on the rocks? Or was she simply making sure that we left her and her family to enjoy, without visitors, their final day on that glorious spot?

WEEKDAY MATINEE AT FENWAY PARK

2011-07-28T23:00:00.002-04:00

The last time I attended a weekday matinee at a ballpark was long ago and far away: April 29, 1983 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, to be exact. I was a grad student at Notre Dame at the time and drove up from South Bend with a friend to meet my brother who was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago at the time. I don’t recall much about the game: mostly I remember just that the day was miserably cold and rainy and that the hometown Cubs were an embarrassment in a 4-3 loss to the Dodgers and that the smattering of fans who weathered the game let them know it. Hardly the equivalent of that wonderful scene at Wrigley in Ferris Bueller's Day Off . . .

But I remember the date so precisely because it has achieved infamy thanks to the profanity-laced tirade directed at the fans by Cubs manager Lee Elia in a post-game press conference. I have to admit that watching it on TV that night back in the South Bend, I was caught somewhere between a grimace and a grin with every bleep inserted into the rant. Because this is a family-oriented blog (well, my daughters occasionally read it), I have asterisked this representative excerpt from the transcript of Elia’s diatribe:

F*** those f***in’ fans who come out here and say they’re Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin’ every f***in’ thing you do. I’ll tell you one f***in’ thing, I hope we get f***in’ hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 f***in’ people that show up every f***in’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago f***in’ fans, they can kiss my f***in’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.

They’re really, really behind you around here . . . my f***in’ ass. What the f*** am I supposed to do, go out there and let my f***in’ players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f***in’ nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherf***ers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the f***in’ game. They oughta go out and get a f***in’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f***in’ living. Eighty-five percent of the f***in’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here.

Ouch! I suppose that, given our lofty academic aspirations, my brother and my friend and I could have taken Elia’s remarks personally: “the other fifteen percent,” indeed. Maybe it’s a variation on Stockholm Syndrome, but to this day I still just chuckle and nod my head and wonder if Elia was not far off the mark after all.

But what a difference 28 years can make! This afternoon, I attended the Red Sox-Royals matchup at Fenway with my friends and colleagues Len and Matt. Like the Cubbies, the hometown Sox lost 4-3 in a somewhat subdued performance (especially after they had drubbed the Royals the previous two nights). But it was a gloriously sunny day, and even though we were in the farthest seats possible from home plate—Row 40 in Section 37 of the bleachers—we enjoyed the novelty of a weekday afternoon at Fenway. Afterwards, we paid a visit to the Lansdowne Club across the street from the ballpark. Out of the corner of my eye I saw on the television screen above the bar Red Sox manager Terry Francona’s post-game press conference. I’m not the best lip-reader in the world, but I would swear that he didn’t use one word starting with an “f.”

"GIMME A DOLLAR AND I'LL SHOW YOU . . .

2011-07-11T13:00:00.005-04:00

. . . the Queen’s arse.”

That was an old trick I fell for once as a schoolboy. Did I really have a dollar bill to spare?

I must have because I can remember someone—I can’t remember exactly who, but probably some rough-around-the-edges (as my mother would say) classmate—taking my Canadian one-dollar bill with a picture of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on it and folding it and folding it and folding it until finally only her jaw line remained visible . . . as a reasonable facsimile of an arse (as we say in Canada).

I wonder if anyone else remembered that trick after seeing the photo of the future Queen of England—and thus of Canada—baring her arse to a Stetson-toting Calgarian a few days ago. With the British tabloid News of the World now laid to rest, the Toronto Sun was happy to fill the void with this racy snap that has been variously labeled Kate Middleton’s Marilyn Monroe moment or her Janet Jackson-esque wardrode malfunction. Cheeky.

POST-SEASON HARDWARE

2011-06-22T11:00:00.013-04:00

Tonight certain members of the Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins may pick up a few more pieces of post-season hardware in Las Vegas. I haven’t gotten the call to join them, but during their 63-day playoff run I thought that I might be in the running myself for something shiny. In particular, there were 4 games in which I distinguished myself. The first was in the second round, against Philadelphia. Enlisted for long-distance chauffeur duty to bring my youngest daughter home from college, I found myself in a restaurant—Café Bruges—in Carlisle, PA in the company of a bevy of bright and lovely young women . . . but with no television in sight. What to do? Surreptitiously receiving score updates via phone texts from my wife, I finally announced: “Sorry to end the party, ladies, but I’ve got to get back to my hotel room for some beauty sleep before tomorrow’s return trip to Boston.” That allowed me to catch the third period of the Bruins’ victory over the Flyers.

It also gave me a strategy for other games where I had a scheduling conflict—such as my wedding anniversary (I was able to keep one eye on the small television over the bar at Spazio’s restaurant in Braintree), a friend’s retirement party, and the Honors Convocation at UMass Boston: in each case I managed to engineer a disappearing act that allowed me to catch the bulk of the game at home. But don’t I deserve some sort of credit for not bailing out altogether on those various social responsibilities?

Well, maybe my reward was simply that my beloved Bruins won the Cup. About 10 minutes after game 7 ended, my oldest daughter called me . . . from Thailand, where she had been tracking the score online. I told her that when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 I was happier for her and her sisters than for me: they were bona fide fans and were all old enough to savor the moment and to remember it; this one, I told her, was for me—almost a half-century of diehard loyalty rewarded! The morning after the game, I broadcast to the world a photograph of that aforementioned oldest daughter and me, snapped in 1988, with the caption: “This morning I feel . . . this young again!”

Anyway, I have now watched game 7 three times in its entirety . . . and two more times mostly fast-forwarding to get to the goals and certain other crucial moments. Pretty soon I’ll have all the nuances memorized. I find it apt that there is no single iconic moment—such as Bobby Orr’s goal in 1970—for this year’s championship: but the entirety of game 7 seems to sum it up—I can’t get enough of it! The series as a whole certainly produced lots of highlight-reel goals and saves and lots of video-clip equivalents of sound bites (and real bites—ouch); but for me, ultimately, the whole was far greater than the sum of even those scintillating parts. . . .

All of that being said, I must proffer a few “analytical” thoughts about the final series. While the concussion-inducing hit on Nathan Horton in game 3 clearly motivated the Bruins and galvanized them as a team, it may have been a blessing in disguise in another sense in that it led to an odd case of “addition by subtraction”: it turns out the Horton was playing with a separated shoulder suffered in Game 7 against Tampa Bay. So the Bruins lost an already-wounded Horton but gained Shawn Thornton (toughness and tenacity) and Tyler Seguin (game-breaking speed and a scoring threat), both of whom were 100% and were desperately itching to play. It all worked out. Players had their roles, they knew their roles, and they played their roles . . . even while sometimes going above and beyond. As much as I’ve always liked Claude Julien as the Bruins coach (his interview responses are always thoughtful and articulate—in both English and French, no less), I don’t think there was a lot of genius involved on his part: it was more a case of discipline among the players along with a healthy dose of determination that carried the day. Also, somewhere along the way I told someone that I believed that “the hockey gods would ultimately smile on the Bruins”—and then added, “If they don’t, then I’m changing religions.”

Part of the basis for that “faith” involved the aforementioned playing of roles. I just re-read a section of The Game, by Montreal goalie Ken Dryden, the Bruins’ nemesis from 1971. . . . Believe it or not, it’s possibly the best book of any sort that I’ve ever read. (I read it a few years ago, the summer Dryden was running for the leadership of the Liberal party in Canada. I also started a novel by another leadership candidate, Michael Ignatieff—which I have yet to finish . . . though probably I will go back to it someday. He eventually won the leadership . . . but was forced to resign a few months ago when the Liberals got utterly slaughtered in the Federal election.) One essential point that Dryden makes involves the philosophy—and the practice—of Montreal coach Scotty Bowman, who believed that the “speed” players (or “skill” players) needed to be complemented by muscle players.

Here’s what Dryden writes: [S]peed is not enough. Quick players are often small, and in smaller rinks against bigger teams, are frequently subject to intimidating attack. Bowman knows that Lafleur, Lemaire, and Lapointe, players whose skills turn the Canadiens from a good team to a special one, must be made “comfortable,” as he puts it; they must be allowed to play without fear. So never farther than the players’ bench away, to balance and neutralize that fear, Bowman has Lupien and Chartraw, sometimes Cam Connor, in other years Pierre Bouchard, and of course, Larry Robinson. With a game-to-game core of fourteen or fifteen players, Bowman fine-tunes his line-up, choosing two or three from among the six or more available to find the “right mix,” as he calls it, for every game we play. He believes that a championship team needs all kinds of players, and that too many players of the same type, no matter how good, make any team vulnerable.

This was Vancouver’s problem. The Bruins had just enough firepower, thanks to Roberto Luongo’s leakiness in the Vancouver goal, to match up with the Canucks—and the Bruins also had Tim Thomas to counteract the Canucks’ “skill”; but the Canucks did not have enough physicality to match up with the Bruins. This seems to be the verdict in the Vancouver Sun as well. I’ll betcha that next year they add some muscle and some attitude. . . . In that regard, I feel bad for the Sedin twins—great “skill” players who took abuse both on the ice and off: the Vancouver GM might have spared them both kinds of abuse by building a better-rounded team. (The comments in the media and on call-in radio programs about the “Sedin sisters” and “Thelma and Louise” were mean-spirited and took away from the series as a matchup of worthy opponents, which is all that any true hockey fan would ask for.) I have been struck for years now by how much different playoff hockey is from regular season games—how much more physical to the point of being brutal. The Vancouver-San Jose series scared me because both of those teams were so “skill”-oriented; when the Canucks won that series, I was afraid that the Bruins would not be able to match up if the Canucks dictated a finesse game. It turned out the other way around. And the rest is happy history!

SUMMER READING LIST . . .

2011-06-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

IT TAKES AN AWFULLY BIG MAN . . .

2011-06-06T08:45:00.001-04:00

. . . to overshadow my wife!

(And an awfully brave man to post a photo of it?)

A TALE OF TWO SEATINGS . . .

2011-06-06T08:00:00.002-04:00

Okay, I’ll resist the temptation of saying “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—in largest part because I would be lying. We enjoyed both of the Red Sox games we attended over the weekend. In fact, getting to go to two games in a three-day period was more than “double the pleasure, double the fun”!

On Friday night the Sox beat the Oakland Athletics 8-6. My wife and two of our daughters and I had the game marked on the calendar from early in the week, and I ordered tickets once I knew that we would have “baseball weather.” Or so we thought. We thought that we dressed warmly enough for a night game in early June, but a brisk sea-breeze made us think otherwise pretty quickly. A bad night at the ballpark may still be better than a good day at work—and this wasn’t even a bad night as the Sox got back on track and rallied from the 4-run hole they dug for themselves in the first inning—but we were sitting on our hands and shivering for a good part of the evening. I never thought I’d have a hot chocolate on top of a beer—at a ballgame, no less—but so it went, especially high up in the bleachers: section 38, row 36 . . . just about as far from home plate as you could sit.

But what a difference two days can make. Sunday afternoon was still a bit breezy and cool, especially in the shade . . . but for that game my wife and I had it “made in the shade.” About two hours before game time our across-the-street neighbor rang the doorbell and offered us a pair of tickets for the Pavilion at Fenway Park, a seating area we never even knew existed. With neighbors like that who needs a sugar mama or a sugar daddy? . . . Well, I’ll let the photo tell this tale: from where we sat, in the third row of a luxury deck directly above home plate, we could almost read the names on the lineup cards being delivered to the umpires during the pregame ritual! And the seats came with waiter service from a full bar menu. And oh yes, the Sox won 6-3 to complete a 3-game sweep of the A's: maybe it was the best of times after all . . .

“GIRLS” AND THEIR GUITARS

2011-05-11T11:00:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago I found myself seated at a dinner beside a woman who, in the course of our casual conversation, revealed that several decades ago she had been a serious guitar student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Doing the math in my head, I wondered—and then I asked—whether she had attended Berklee around the same time as the somewhat legendary Emily Remler, whose promising career ended with her early death, in 1990 (she was 32 years old), from a drug overdose. The woman I was seated next to had indeed known Remler personally and was pleased that I knew of her . . . and was surprised to learn that I even have one of her CDs, East to Wes. It is a fine recording altogether, showing off Remler’s impressive chops on tunes like “Daahoud,” “Hot House,” and the Wes Montgomery-inflected “Blues for Herb.” Here’s a great video of her playing “Tenor Madness” in Australia the year before her death.

In her time Remler was something of an iconoclast, a rare female axe-slinger in the very male world of jazz guitar. Her mentor Herb Ellis predicted that she would be “the new superstar of guitar.” Remler herself hoped that her legacy would include “memorable guitar playing and my contributions as a woman in music,” though she added: “the music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement.” Ultimately, she was right: her playing did not break down any barriers (for some reason there are still very few women making noise on jazz guitar), but her music lives on.

Ditto—in part—for a woman guitar player who preceded Remler onto the bandstand by about 40 years. Mary Osborne resented being cast as mainly a “woman guitarist”: inspired by seeing Charlie Christian play with Al Trent’s band in Bismarck, ND (a year or so before he joined Benny Goodman’s band and became a legend), she committed herself to swinging in his wake (quite literally—for a while she even played a Gibson ES-150 guitar identical to Christian’s). Eventually moving to New York, she recorded with true jazz giants Dizzy Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins . . . but during the prime of her career she recorded only one album under her own name, A Girl and Her Guitar, in 1959. While the title might have a novelty ring to it, the music on board could not be farther from a commercial sell-out: in fact, it is one of the most satisfyingly swinging albums I’ve heard in a long, long time. Backed by Tommy Flanagan on piano, Jo Jones on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Daniel Barker on rhythm guitar, Osborne soars through 10 jazz classics (including “I Love Paris,” “How High the Moon,” “I Found a New Baby” and “These Foolish Things”) and one original blues. Her playing is striking—she is wielding a beautiful Gretsch “White Falcon”—and the album is a classic, which makes it that much more a pity that it has never been released as a CD (I paid big bucks on eBay for a copy of the original vinyl recording).

Odds and ends of recordings by Osborne are available on jazz guitar compilations like Hittin’ on All Six and Swing To Bop Guitar: Guitars In Flight 1939- 1947. And there’s a terrific, albeit blurry, video clip of her playing on a television program, Art Ford’s Jazz Party. Maybe someday A Girl and Her Guitar will be reissued and her playing will live on for a wider audience like Emily Remler’s does.

LIVE AT SCULLERS . . . CATHERINE RUSSELL

2011-05-05T20:00:00.007-04:00

Sometimes it’s good to be led into temptation . . . and to succumb. Last night, my wife and I couldn’t resist the lure of a new-to-us jazz singer in town, so we trekked out to Scullers jazz club to catch Catherine Russell live and in person. What a treat! We had first heard of her in a write-up in the Boston Globe last week, but a number of people in the audience seemed familiar with her already and she certainly rose to the anticipation that filled the room. A small woman with a big voice and high-energy stage presence, she delivered a wonderful performance of songs that my wife aptly described as being from “the anti-songbook.” That is, rather than perform indisputable “classics” by Gershwin, Porter, et al., she chose mostly lesser-known songs that were yet recorded by well-known leading ladies of jazz and blues whom she channeled brilliantly—Ella Fitzgerald, Alberta Hunter, Maxine Sullivan, Mary Lou Williams—while also adding her own interpretive touches. Her selections included several cuts from her latest CD, Inside This Heart of Mine—the title tune, “As Long as I Live,” “Close Your Eyes,” and “We the People”—plus a number of other obscure gems that she dusted off and polished up. On most of the tunes on the CD, she is backed by horns, but last night she had just a drummerless trio—Mark Shane on piano, Lee Hudson on bass, and the estimable Mark Munisteri on guitar and six-string banjo. They provided plenty of support for a vocalist who owned the room from the moment she stepped onto the bandstand.

DAYTRIPPERS . . .

2011-05-02T18:50:00.007-04:00

When we pulled out of our just-south-of-Boston driveway on Saturday morning at 7:20, the GPS gave our ETA for the heart of New York City as 11:00. Not for the first time, my wife and I asked each other why we don’t make the trip more often: neither one of us had a really good answer. . . .

The trip down was remarkably easy . . . though not quite as easy as the GPS promised, as traffic on FDR Drive was crawling after we got to the edge of Manhattan. Still, we made it to the Museum of Modern Art by 11:30 . . . and we even found on-street parking! MoMA was our only goal for the day—we wanted to see the exhibit titled Picasso’s Guitars, 1912-14. As anyone knows who has scouted around in his enormous body of work across various media and various “periods” over more than half a century, Picasso had many obsessions: nude women . . . picadors . . . guitars. . . . As its title suggests, the current exhibit emphasizes his particular fixation with guitars at a particular point in his career. It is centered around two sculptures of guitars—one in cardboard, one in sheet metal—in the company of various other guitar-focused cubist-oriented collages, sketches, and paintings that the artist created in his studios in Paris and in the south of France just before the outbreak of the Great War. Comprising thirty-some pieces, the exhibit could obviously be summarized in aptly musical terms as “variations on a theme” . . . but in many respects it defies summary: this was that odd case where the whole was equal to the sum of its parts—each piece was intriguingly Picasso-esque in its own right, and the overall exhibit left this visitor staggered by the match of visual imagination and physical execution that I suppose is Picasso’s signature.

After viewing that exhibit, we wandered around MoMA for a while—standing in awe before one modern masterpiece after another . . . including Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” which I always find bigger than I expect it to be. Incidentally, on Friday night, whetting our appetite for MoMA, we went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I was surprised (not for the first time) at the small size of John Singer Sargent’s painting of the Pasdeloup Orchestra.

Speaking of appetites being whetted, after leaving MoMA we decided on a whim to find a bite to eat . . . in Brooklyn. We had never been there before, so to remove some of the randomness from our driving around in a borough that if it were a city unto itself would be the fourth-largest in the U.S., we punched into our GPS the words Blue Bottle Coffee, the name of a sister shop to a café we had visited in San Francisco in January, and that took us to the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. It is a funky neighborhood with lots of shops and eateries catering to its predominantly twenty-something denizens. We had a nice mid-afternoon lunch at Juliette, by far the most popular place around . . .

Then we hit the road back to Boston . . . though with a “Why not?” detour down to legendary Coney Island—which proved to be less of a “destination” than we expected. That diversion got us stuck in some really heavy traffic as we tried to make our way back toward I-95. Still, we made it back to Boston before 11:00 p.m. Not a bad daytrip. We’ll do it again . . .

B-ING THERE: PRICELE$$!

2011-04-28T07:00:00.002-04:00

I had a flashback a few nights ago to a transporting moment in sports history: the night in 1988 when my beloved Boston Bruins defeated the Montreal Canadiens in a playoff series for the first time in 45 years. I was living in South Boston at the time and didn’t have cable TV, so part of my flashback involves watching the game at the L Street Tavern. That was almost a decade before that local watering hole would become a made-over tourist destination in the wake of being featured in the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck vehicle Good Will Hunting. I lived only a couple of blocks away, on East 6th Street, but I was not a regular—and everyone there knew it on the very few occasions when I stopped in for a cold Bud. The place was the antithesis (probably not a word spoken there very often!) of the legendary Cheers bar downtown, where supposedly “Everybody knows your name”: clearly, I was an outsider and was looked upon with deep suspicion. . . . Anyway, one funny memory I have of the night the Bruins finally ousted the Habs in ’88 involves the locals toasting Bruins player Billy O’Dwyer, a native son of Southie, by singing at the television screen some lines from the mid-70s anti-war pop song “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” . . .

But last night, sitting belly up to a bar was not going to satisfy my thirst for the ecstasy of victory! By my calculation, I have been a diehard Bruins fan for at least 47 years—ever since my hometown hero Forbie Kennedy suited up for the Black and Gold back in 1964. And I have despised Les Habitants (a.k.a. the Canadiens) for almost as long. I just had to be at last night’s game . . . so yesterday morning I woke up and logged on to StubHub, my ticket broker of choice, and found a nice selection of tickets at a fairly reasonable price.

My wife and I had gone to the Bs opening night back in October—a ton of fun—but the sheer spectacle of a Game 7 was almost worth the price of admission itself: the house sure was rockin’, from start to finish, and seeing was B-lieving the outfits that some of the fans were wearing—they had more than their hearts on their sleeves, and many of them ended up being featured on the Jumbotron over center ice (maybe that was the point). I’ll not bother to tell the tale of the game—it’s happy history now. But I have to admit that when it went into overtime, I could feel one of my recurring nightmares coming on: how many times have I awakened in a cold sweat from the image of the goal scored by Jean Beliveau in double overtime in April of 1969 that eliminated the Bruins from the playoffs that year? Countless. What was it worth to feel utterly purged of that image after Nathan Horton scored the winner for the Bruins in overtime last night? Pricele$$!

BOSTON: VOICES AND VISIONS

2010-11-16T23:00:00.002-05:00

Time flies . . . whether you’re having fun or not. And it sure has flown by as far as my blogging is concerned: I haven’t posted an entry in more than two months. I’ll not bother to proffer excuses; instead I’ll try to get back in blogging stride with the words below . . . which are actually, verbatim, a transcription of the brief remarks I had the pleasure—and the honor—of offering a week or so ago (on November 4th, to be exact) to lead off the celebration of the publication of the latest title in the catalogue of the University of Massachusetts Press, Boston: Voices and Visions, an anthology edited by my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell. I am prompted to post these remarks in blog form partly to justify the posting of the pleasing snapshot of Shaun and yours truly (see below), taken by UMass Boston master photographer Harry Brett, that landed in my inbox this morning!

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For most of you gathered here today, Shaun O’Connell is the proverbial “man who needs no introduction.” Now in his 46th year as a member of the UMass Boston English Department, Shaun is the literal “last man standing” of the literal “founding fathers” of both the University and the Department. Picturing how the highlight reel of that exemplary career would play—the decades of teaching, of writing, of serving the Department and the University in myriad ways, of representing UMass Boston beyond these walls as a major public intellectual—we might all recall how Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the influence of short story master Nikolai Gogol, reportedly once said of an entire generation of Russian writers, “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” (“The Overcoat” being one of Gogol’s signature short stories.) Shaun O’Connell’s “overcoat”—in Irish (I can’t resist), his cóta mór . . . his great coat—has been just as capacious. Colleague, mentor and friend to so many of us over almost five decades, those descriptors could well chime with William Butler Yeats’s praise reserved for Major Robert Gregory: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he . . .”

But I come not to bury Shaun—not even in mounds of collegial admiration and personal affection—nor simply to praise him inadequately, but to give some sort of context for Boston: Voices and Visions.

Actually, Shaun himself gives that context in his first book, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, published 20 years ago this month. In that book Shaun established the essential coordinates for a coherent reading of—or mapping of—what he described as the “emblems and visions of place created by Greater Boston’s writers, writers who have invented and extended America’s sense of the city upon a hill.” Titling the seminal chapter “Hawthorne’s Boston and Other Imaginary Places,” Shaun set in motion his critical and scholarly analysis of a broad cross-section of writers—from our own Phillis Wheatley through William Dean Howells and Henry James to Edwin O’Connor and John Updike and beyond—who have indeed imagined into literary life not just “a city upon a hill” (or “the Athens of America” or “the Hub of the solar system”) but countless variations on the theme of Boston and environs as place and as possibility.

In one respect, Boston: Voices and Visions reads as Shaun O’Connell’s revisiting of that earlier inscription of Boston’s literary landscape by way of incisive introductions that frame the six thematic groupings of his generous selection of primary texts. The crucial difference, however, is that by way of Shaun’s carefully-chosen medley of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—extending from John Winthrop in 1630 to Patricia Powell (our former UMass Boston colleague) in 2004—this wide-ranging and far-reaching anthology adds high relief contours to that earlier mapping of Boston’s literary terrain. In a sense, it is the complement to, or perhaps even the completion of, that earlier project. Twenty years in the making? Shaun himself should be feeling high relief right about now!

But around six weeks ago, I was chatting with Shaun about the imminent publication of Boston: Voices and Visions. As blasphemous as it might sound, we ended up talking about the “pertinence” (or was it the “impertinence”?) of such a compilation in our age of Googlebooks and other electronic media that put entire libraries at our fingertips. Shaun wondered: “What is the place of such an anthology in this day and age?” Good question. And I hope that I proffered a good answer. “It’s a way of shaping the conversation,” I started. Then I became appropriately metaphorical: “It’s about defining the topography . . . of putting the full scope of ‘literary Boston’ literally on the map, not only for today’s readers but also for posterity.” I wish that I had had my wits—or my wit—sufficiently about me to borrow from John Winthrop and say, “The eyes of all people are upon you.” I was a bit more prosaic but no less certain: “It’s your legacy, Shaun.” And today, as we come together to help Shaun launch this landmark and landmarking book, we are the immediate beneficiaries . . .

HEY ROSETTA! . . . LIVE AT THE MIDDLE EAST DOWNSTAIRS

2010-09-10T14:00:00.004-04:00

For the past couple of weeks there’s been an annoying ad on tv. I think it’s for some model of compact car . . . though it could actually be for car insurance. It features a young woman with a bland nasally voice and uninflected delivery who purports to be in a hipster band on some sort of tour. She’s wearing cut-off shorts (denim, I think) and fishnet (I think) stockings. A couple of mornings ago, my wife asked: “Who dresses like that in real life?” Well, we found out the answer that night—that would be this past Wednesday night—when we paid our first visit ever to The Middle East Downstairs, a longstanding Cambridge music venue that seems to feature mostly alternative rock bands. And the answer was: “Just about every young woman at The Middle East dresses like that.” We were amused. I guess we didn’t read the small print on The Middle East website about the dress code!

But even if we had dressed the part, it would have been tough for us to blend in to the predominantly twenty-something crowd gathered in the cavern-like performance space to see and hear the triple-bill of bands performing there that night. We had our twenty-something daughter with us—maybe she gave us some “street cred” . . . or maybe not: maybe she just confirmed how old we really are. But we weren’t really there to blend in—we were there to see the opening act, a band from St. John’s, Newfoundland called Hey Rosetta! Or actually we were there to see the violin player, Kinley Dowling, the daughter of our good old friends Alan and Estelle. Kinley is on tour with the core quartet of Hey Rosetta!, joining with a cello player to add some Electric Light Orchestra-like texture to their basic folk-rock sound. Hey Rosetta! played a well-received 45-minute set: we have their CD Into Your Lungs, so we were pleased to see them live and in person. And we were very happy to have some visiting time with the lovely Kinley, whom we hadn’t seen for quite a few years: she fit right in with those hip twenty-somethings . . . even though she wasn’t wearing cut-offs with fishnets. Our daughter remarked afterwards: “All the guys thought she was cool . . . and all the girls were jealous of her.” I couldn’t get my camera to work in the low-low light of Downstairs, but I’ve tracked down a video on YouTube from just after Kinley joined the band in Los Angeles in mid-August on their current connect-the-dots North American tour. Check it out!

Kinley mentioned that when the tour ends in Montreal she’ll hop on a plane to Vancouver to perform with another rising star from the vibrant eastern Canadian music scene, Jenn Grant . . . who happens to be the sister of another of our old good friends. Maybe they’ll end up at The Middle East some evening. We’d know how to dress the next time . . .

TEN YEARS AFTER . . . THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

2010-09-01T08:00:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, driving by the Simmons Sports Centre in Charlottetown, PEI, I had a flashback to a rock concert that I sneaked into sometime in the early 1970s at that unlikely venue (a small hockey arena in a mostly residential neighborhood). The band was April Wine. They were formed in Halifax in the late 1960s and eventually found not only a national but even a south-of-the-border following. Their signature sound of twin lead guitars is still catchy a full 40 years later, and I have three of their tunes—“You Could Have Been a Lady,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” and “Roller”—on my iPod. As this old video shows, they were a tight band with a distinctive presence.

One flashback prompting another, I have to observe that today marks the 35th anniversary of a “road trip” that my friend Marty and I made from Charlottetown to Moncton, New Brunswick—we took my family’s old VW Beetle on the car ferry from Borden to Cape Tormentine—to see the British blues-rockers Ten Years After perform there at the Coliseum. Listening now (literally now) to TYA’s Recorded Live album, I am transported back to that transporting night when Alvin Lee lived up to (if not beyond) his “guitar hero” reputation. This video from 1975 would be pretty much what we saw and heard . . . but I remember the live show being in color!

THE BIG HOUSE + THE LANDMARK CAFE + PARADE DAY

2010-08-29T23:00:00.005-04:00

In Ireland, the phrase “The Big House” is historically laden with baggage—political, social, economic, cultural—associated with the mansions (and sometimes castles) that dotted the countryside as homes to mostly Anglo-Protestant landholders whose identification and self-identification with Great Britain emblematized the conflicted relationship between colonizing Britain and colonized Ireland.

Believe me, then, when I say that we have our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks when we call our summer farmhouse rental on Prince Edward Island “The Big House.” By PEI standards it is a fairly substantial residence—especially for a farmhouse more than 150 years old: it includes 5 bedrooms , 2.5 baths, 2 parlors, a dining room and a spacious modern kitchen . . . all fully updated by its current owner (a descendant of the original owner . . . of Irish stock, I might add). Oh yes, there’s also a little room at the front of the house, in that little centre gable on the second floor—apparently this was known as “The Priest’s Room” because back in the day the priest coming out from Charlottetown on Saturday evening to say Sunday mass at St. Martin’s Church (about a mile up the road) would stay over in that room. The house is perfectly located for our vacation—a short walk across a road and down a lane to the south shore beach that I grew up on and that our daughters have known for their entire lives. We first rented the farmhouse in 2004 when another rental we had arranged fell through: we just spent our 7th family vacation under its roof . . . and expect to keep returning to it as our “summer home” well into the future.

A few years ago I took a photo from the back steps of the Big House that continues to please me. It shows the various barns and sheds still standing on the property: they’ve been repainted recently, but in this photograph they reflect the Island tradition of farmers painting the corner trim red on outbuildings so that they would be able find their way to them to tend to the livestock during winter blizzards. Or so my sister told me many years ago: she was working as a guide on a tour bus at the time, and such arcane knowledge was essential to her spiel. She also told how the cattle were complaining about the new technology at the time that allowed hay to be rolled into bales rather than cubed: apparently the cows claimed that they could no longer get “a square meal.”

As usual, this year’s version of our annual pilgrimage to PEI was filled with highlights involving family and friends—including various dinner gatherings at The Big House. Despite having only one week to squeeze in a whole year’s worth of visiting and general holidaying, we also managed to get “out and about.” One especially nice outing was a jaunt to the attractive village of Victoria-By-the-Sea for a meal at the Landscape Café. My wife and I had eaten there once before—around 20 years ago (it has been open for 21 years)—and our return visit with our daughters and my father was well worth waiting for: tasty food served up in the interesting atmosphere of a renovated general store.

One other “detail” of our visit worth mentioning is the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade, which for almost 50 years has added pomp and circumstance to the culminating harness race of the year at the Charlottetown Driving Park. The Gold Cup and Saucer Race also marks the end of Old Home Week . . . which in turn pretty much marks the end of summer on the Island. This year—for the first time since 2007—I marched in the parade as a member of the Charlottetown Community Clash Band . . . an intentionally ragtag gathering of local musicians (well, many of us are “former” music students) who have been showing up and creating a scene for the past 20 years or so. What we lack in rehearsal time we make up with enthusiasm and energy. Last year I watched the parade from the sidewalk and realized that I had more fun in previous years when I marched. So I found my old saxophone under a bed in my boyhood home, went to one of the two rehearsals, and then stepped out with a rush of adrenaline when the drumrolls started. Could there be a better way to observe the end of summer?

THE BLUES SCALE

2010-08-10T17:15:00.005-04:00

Usually I don’t have to make New Year’s resolutions: my wife makes them for me. But this past January, I decided to challenge myself to shed a few pounds—20 pounds to be exact. Well, I did better than that, losing a total of 24.2 pounds in a little less than 5 months, which brought me back to my marriage weight just in time for our 25th wedding anniversary. That was in May. Since then I’ve backslid a bit: nine days in Dublin in June didn’t help; nor have all of the caloric temptations of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. So last weekend I resolved to get back on the exercise wagon—well, back into the gym—with renewed commitment . . . which also required adding some new music to my iPod shuffle.

For much of my run for the roses during the winter and spring, I listened either to my 137-song “Rock Party” playlist or to my 50-song “Blues You Can Use” playlist. But at a couple of crucial points I tuned in exclusively to a couple of albums that I had been tempted by but had never gotten around to adding to my music library. The first was Piety Street by John Scofield. I wrote a lengthy blog post about Scofield and his band after I saw them perform at the Regattabar in Cambridge a year-and-a-half ago. Worrying that their recording would not come close to their terrific live act, I resisted the temptation of picking up the CD . . . but finally I succumbed—and I am happy to admit that my worrying was completely unwarranted. Ostensibly an album of gospel music, Piety Street is really a blues album of the first order, with Scofield’s guitar front and center—and it was just what I needed to keep me on the straight and narrow of the treadmill during the dark days of February.

But it wasn’t all that I needed: after years of having guitar hero Rick Derringer’s album Blues Deluxe in my shopping cart, I also finally added it to my listening mix. And what a great addition it proved to be: every single tune on the album—mostly blues standards—is a keeper . . . and the whole package certainly kept me go-go-going during March.

But now it’s August—the dog days, no less—and once again I am looking to the blues to tip the scale in my favor. So I currently have cued up on my iPod shuffle a pair of albums, by local blues bands, that I’ve been deferring the pleasure of listening to for a while . . . until now. One is Low Expectations by Ernie and the Automatics, a blues/rhythm-n-blues/rock unit that has been making some noise around here for the past couple of years. Part of their claim to fame is that a couple of the band members—guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Sib Hashian—are alums of the legendary “corporate rock” band Boston. Another part of their claim to fame is that the “Ernie” who lends the band half its moniker (he also plays rhythm guitar) is Ernie Boch, Jr., who sports a household name thanks to his late father, who owned several major car dealerships in the Boston area. Come on down! But the band is truly greater than the sum of its parts—which also include Brian Maes on keyboards and vocals, Mike “Tunes” Antunes on tenor sax, and Tim Archibald on bass. Low Expectations features tunes with super-tight arrangements, catchy hooks and fine guitar, piano, and sax work. I should get some pretty good mileage out of it. (I might also mention that Ernie and the Automatics are well worth catching live and in-person: I saw them at Firefly’s in Quincy back in January—they were barbeque hot!)

The other album that I added last weekend is Living in the Light by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, a band that I wrote about at length on this blog a year or so ago. This album came out not long after I saw them in concert in Arlington, and coincidentally, I was in the guitar repair shop in Winchester run by bass player Jim Mouradian and his son Jon on the morning that Jim received his copy of the CD—it was just sitting on the counter unopened and unlistened to: so it has been on my radar screen for quite a while. Well, it was worth waiting for . . . though the blues stylings are really quite different from those generated by Ernie and the Automatics. First of all, they are much more gospel-oriented, fueled considerably by Hammond B3 organ player Dave Limina and also by pianist Dave Maxwell on a couple of numbers. Also, some of the vocal numbers, delivered by Kim Wilson and Dave Keller, are a bit earnest (no pun intended on Boch, Jr.) lyrically: “What Can I Do For You” might be too overtly religious for some listeners’ tastes, “Child of a Survivor” has the Holocaust as its subject (an unlikely subject for a blues tune), and “Donna Lee” is a very personal tribute to Ronnie Earl’s wife. But, almost needless to say, the quality of the music—with Earl’s guitar the main event—is first-rate. With Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums, Earl and Limina deliver the goods. No less than Ernie and the Automatics, Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters should help to keep me on track for my daily workout.

DUNKIN' DUGOUT . . .

2010-08-04T08:00:00.008-04:00

So . . . last night my wife and I took our three daughters and a boyfriend of one of them to the Red Sox-Indians game at Fenway Park. It wasn’t the most dramatic game of the year . . . though we were already on our feet applauding the return of Mike Lowell to the lineup (he had been on the injured reserve list since late June) when he really lifted us up by hitting the first pitch he faced into the Monster seats, delivering what proved to be the winning run in a 3-1 Sox victory. Josh Beckett, who I checked out during his pre-game warmup in the bullpen, pitched very well—he allowed only three hits (one of them a solo home run) and was able to wriggle out of the several minor jams that he found himself in.

We enjoyed the game and the entire evening despite sitting in nosebleed seats—Row 48 (out of 50) in Section 41 of the bleachers: we were just two rows below the seats donated by Dunkin’ Donuts every game to kids in Boys and Girls Clubs and similar non-profit and charitable organizations. The Dunkin’ Dugout.

Fenway Park has its history, and it has its traditions—though some of them are relatively recent, like the en masse singing in the late innings of Neil Diamond’s hit “Sweet Caroline” and the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie” and even “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. (The singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh-inning stretch goes without saying.) But we also have a family tradition at Fenway that involves a visit, before the game, to a particular sausage stand on the street outside the ballpark. It is run by the family of a teacher our daughters had in high school: he works at the stand himself, and he and the girls always have happy reunions whenever we make it to a game. Not that we’re superstitious, but we have to believe that our faithful observance of that tradition contributes to the success that has become another Sox “tradition” in recent years!

DOG DUTY

2010-08-03T11:00:00.000-04:00

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but somehow I have ended up on dog duty for our neighbors, keeping an eye on their two Chihuahuas for a day or so. Are these creatures even dogs? I’m not so sure. One of them looks like a chinchilla; the other is what is known as a teacup Chihuahua—the sort of critter that hides in Britney Spears’ handbag. My cat would eat them for breakfast . . . if she could ever catch up with them: they sure are hyper, and they sure do move fast!

I think their names are Zoey and Bella, but I’m not sure which is which, so—taking a page out of Vicki Hearne’s book Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, in which she emphasizes the importance of giving a pet a distinctive individual name—I call them Scruffy and Baldy.

PRETTY WOMAN

2010-08-02T23:00:00.000-04:00

All cats are beautiful, and they know it . . . including my cat, Honey, who recently posed herself (obviously for comparative purposes) next to a cover photo of Julia “Pretty Woman” Roberts.

O'DOCHERTY SLEEPS . . .

2010-07-28T13:00:00.002-04:00

This morning’s Boston Globe included the sad news of the death, last month, of Boston-based Irish-born painter and musician David O’Docherty. Reading his obituary, I was transported first of all back to my earliest days in Boston, in 1984—specifically to my first visit to The Black Rose, a landmark Irish pub near Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market. One of the distinctive features of the pub at that time was a large painting (probably 4’ x 7’) of faces and profiles all blended together into a sort of Chagall-esque expressionistic dreamscape. The painting, by O’Docherty, was titled Finnegan’s Sleep , an obvious allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—that “lingerous longerous book of the dark”—and featured many recognizable figures with literary associations in particular: Joyce, his character Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, Seamus Heaney. . . . Needless to say, I found the painting both eye-catching and intriguing . . . and I was prompted to arrange for O’Docherty to have a show of his paintings at the Harbor Gallery at UMass Boston. A quarter-century later, most of the details of that event have faded from my memory, but I do know that the show included Finnegan’s Sleep. I bought a poster of that piece and it has hung in my office ever since. . . .

But I was also transported back to some point in the past decade when I happened to be in the vicinity of Downtown Crossing and my ear was drawn to the sound of an Irish jig being played on a tin whistle. I had not seen David O’Docherty since the mid-1980s, but I immediately recognized him as the man behind the music. I am quite sure that he was not busking —he was just playing his whistle for the joy of playing and for the joy that his playing gave to others. After a few minutes we made eye contact and then we had a nice chat: he was a gentle and generous spirit. Reading his obituary this morning, I remember with happiness that chance meeting by way of his musical talent so many years after we first crossed paths by way of his talent as a painter.

DISRAELI GEARS

2010-07-21T13:00:00.006-04:00

I’m sitting in Cakes right now, a coffee and baked goods shop located a block or so from my house. My trusty steed is tethered to a signpost outside the window—the same signpost I tied it to a week or so ago when the chain slipped off its teeth and got jammed in the rear sprockets. I was on my way to the gym and didn’t feel like taking time to fix the bike’s problem, so I simply dismounted, locked it up, and walked the rest of the way. When I got to the gym I texted my wife to let her know what happened: I worried that she might drive by the coffee shop and notice my bike there and think that I was “cheating”—stopping in for a cupcake instead of burning off last night’s cupcakes (metaphorical) on the treadmill.

A couple of days ago, the Tour de France bicycle race was scandalized by a similar situation. No, not a rider being falsely accused of stopping for a cupcake (ou peut-être une crêpe?) . . . but the leader, the guy in the yellow jersey, having his chain slip off its sprocket, which allowed another rider to pass him and ultimately win that stage of the race and thus get to wear the yellow jersey the next day. Apparently this was a violation of bike-racing etiquette. Sacre bleu! That’s a very nuanced notion of fair play . . .

Anyway . . . all of this reminds me of that fine album released by the supergroup/power trio known as Cream—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker—back in 1967. Just for the sake of Clapton’s utterly sculpted guitar solo on “Sunshine of Your Love,” Disraeli Gears could be a desert island essential. Cream trivialogists will know that the album’s title derives not from the name of 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli but from a roadie’s mispronunciation of the word “derailleur” when he chipped in to Clapton’s chatting about buying a racing bicycle with that so-named gear mechanism. Those same trivialogists will also know that “Badge,” another song recorded by Cream (on the album Goodbye), derives its title from Clapton’s misreading of the word “bridge” (as inscribed by song co-writer, Beatle George Harrison) on a sheet of paper with lyrics and chords. How random. Speaking of random . . . I wonder what the odds are that either of those songs would pop up on my iPod Shuffle when I’m on the treadmill at the gym thinking about eating cupcakes and watching Tour de France highlights on ESPN?

ON THE ROAD AGAIN . . .

2010-07-18T10:00:00.015-04:00

I’m not sure how or when a trip to Annapolis, MD got on my calendar . . . but I can now add that quaint state capital to my list of been-there-done-that places. The temperature was pushing a withering 100 degrees during my evening/morning visit, but I still managed to walk the heart-of-downtown streets three times and mostly liked what I saw . . . including the Starbucks in the cellar of the Maryland Inn. It was a cool haven . . . with a cool vibe as it was once a happening jazz club called the King of France Tavern. The wall-hangings include photos and clippings of jazz greats who played there—Teddy Wilson, Chet Baker, Charlie Byrd . . . and my old friend Gene Bertoncini. In fact, a clipping from 1979 previewing Gene’s performance there with bassist Michael Moore prompted me to cue up their album Two in Time on my iPod as I sat there: time travel!

I wish that I could have been transported so easily on my drive down to Annapolis. Whenever I’m on a road trip—no matter where I am—I keep my eye out for Prince Edward Island license plates: it drives my wife crazy, but I always assume that I would know anyone from that small common ground. Well, this time I ended up getting a long close-up look at a PEI license plate while sitting behind a tractor-trailer for a full hour in virtually standstill traffic in the vicinity of Lyme, CT. I didn’t get a look at the driver, though: when the jam finally broke, I was off to the races . . .

My lucky wife had flown down to Annapolis on Monday, so she was spared that traffic. But the trip back to Boston was even worse—we lost easily two hours sitting in a bumper-to-bumper gridlock trying to get onto the George Washington Bridge in NYC. According to the car thermometer, the outside temperature was 108 degrees—so hot that the GPS device in the front window shut down . . . not that we needed it at the rate we were moving!

But the trip back from Annapolis did have an upside—an overnight in Philadelphia . . . a city I had never visited before, but would happily return to again. Mostly we just wandered the streets—no agenda beyond getting a feel for the place. We had a hotel room right in the center of the city—on the 27th floor looking out on City Hall. But the real highlight was our evening of random wandering that included first a fine pint at a fine pub called The Black Sheep and, much later, a terrific meal at Lolita, a Mexican restaurant on 13th Street. Like a number of restaurants we checked out, Lolita has a BYOB license—which we were not prepared for. So imagine our delight when our server said that she would see if anyone had left anything behind that we might enjoy . . . and sure enough, she showed up at our table with a fairly substantial quantity of Jose Cuervo tequila. The food itself was outstanding—but with tequila thrown into the mix (as it were), we ended the night truly in Margaritaville!

The next morning, before hitting the road back to Boston, we wandered around Philly both on foot and by car . . . for a couple of very hot but very pleasant hours. I found the heart of the city stunningly attractive—almost Parisian in the grand scale of its buildings (and of the architectural styles). I kept on thinking “Philadelphia, Here I Come!”—I hope to get back there sooner rather than later . . .

IN FULL SWING . . . JEAN McKENNA O'DONNELL

2010-07-06T20:00:00.001-04:00

This morning’s tide of emails brought home all the usual flotsam and jetsam—notices of new releases on Amazon.com and on iTunes, various barely resistible offers for health products, the daily overtures from Nigerian scam artists addressing me as “Beloved one,” a reminder from my University bookstore that I had not yet placed by book order for the Fall semester. . . . But one message floated to the top of all those—news of an event that I’m going to try to squeeze onto the calendar for July 18th: a concert at Greenvale Vineyards in Portsmouth, RI featuring jazz vocalist Jean McKenna O’Donnell. The concert is scheduled for 1:00-4:00 p.m. and admission is free. The event also features wine tastings.

I first met Jean about 7 years ago and at the time she was a long-retired jazz chanteuse. Prodded by her proud husband, she confessed that “in her day” she could hold her own with a big band swinging behind her. I think that in the course of our chat it emerged that she has fine musical bloodlines—her brother is the legendary jazz pianist Dave McKenna (now departed). So fast-forward about 5 years to the first time I actually heard Jean sing . . . at a concert in Woonsocket, RI memorializing her late brother. That was in December of 2008. The concert itself was warm and poignant as it featured a number of New England jazz musicians who played with Dave McKenna during his lengthy career. But the concert also served notice that Jean was back on the scene! She had just released a CD—appropriately titled Full Circle, as indeed she had come full circle, returning to the bandstand quite a long while after first making a name for herself. It was great to see her performing in the tribute to her brother . . .

And so this morning when I got that email, I immediately spun the dial on my iPod and summoned up Full Circle for a good listen. Comprising mostly tunes from the Great American Songbook—“You Stepped Out of a Dream,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You”—it’s an altogether pleasing compilation. Supported by Mike Renzi on piano, Dick Johnson on alto sax and clarinet, Marshall Wood on bass, and Jon Wheatley on guitar, Jean is in fine company and in fine vocal form. The CD is a real treat!

No doubt Jean will be singing some of those gems on July 18th at Greenvale Vineyards, which is located on the Sakonnet River just five miles north of downtown Newport, RI. For more details, contact Greenvale Vineyards (582 Wapping Rd., Portsmouth, RI) at (401) 847-3777.

THE MONIKERS . . . MAKING A NAME FOR THEMSELVES

2010-07-02T07:00:00.013-04:00

So last night I was out on a hot date . . . with my middle daughter. On her recommendation, we took in an evening of music at All Asia in Central Square in Cambridge that included—for us, featured—a rockin’ four-person band called The Monikers. A great name for a band! I had seen this foursome before—many times before . . . mostly sitting in our kitchen or in our family room, sometimes strumming guitars and singing Beatles tunes (one night the entirety of Abbey Road, word for word, chord for chord, note for note . . . until 2:00 in the morning). But I had never heard them perform under their official moniker . . .

Well now I have, and they are well worth catching “live and in person.” Not only do these self-styled “hipsters” look the part with their skinny-legged jeans and their moppish haircuts—they live up to their appearance with their playing and singing. And with their songwriting. And with their onstage performing. Hey, they’re not just making a name for themselves—they make a spectacle of themselves . . . led by Francis Anderson on guitar, keyboard, and lead vocal: he really creates a scene all by himself! And he’s backed up with real finesse by Peter Chinman on lead guitar and supporting vocal, by Tim Marchetta-Wood on room-thumpin’ bass, and by Erica Warner holding them all together with impressive work on the drum kit. They threw a few covers into their set—most notably a show-stopping arrangement of the Beatles’ iconic “Let It Be”—but mainly played catchy original tunes with titles like “Dressed Up in Yellow,” “That’s What She Said,” and “Catch a Little Rainbow.” (A nice touch: the band provided takeaway lyric sheets.)

I hear that The Monikers have a few more gigs lined up for the summer. Check out their website. And catch them if you can!

PLUS ÇA CHANGE

2010-06-23T09:00:00.005-04:00

Just a day or so before heading across the pond for Dublin, I found a photograph of myself from a visit to Ireland in 1987—“Exhibit A” supporting my longstanding claim that I didn’t have a gray hair on my head before I became the father of three daughters.

That photo may not be a fair gauge of change for this visit . . . but inevitably I have been tuning in to various other measures. One that struck me particularly on my last couple of nights is the proliferation of taxis. Last night—my last night in Dublin, spent happily in the company of my friends Fionán and Paula and their fine children Oisín and Laoise—I needed less than 15 seconds to flag down a cab in the northside community of Drumcondra. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much to say that close to 50% of the cars driving the streets of Dublin at 1:00 in the morning were taxis. Chatting with the driver on the way back to the Burlington Hotel, I learned that this radical change came about partly because of an intense enforcement of drunk driving laws in Ireland and partly because of a deregulation of the taxi industry, which allowed pretty much every man and his dog to buy a hackney medallion and get into the business.

Another gauge, of course, is the gradual disappearance of various Dublin landmarks with literary associations—especially Joycean associations. One that I happened to notice whose days are numbered is the Ormond Hotel, site of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses . . . and until recently site of the “Sirens Bar” as well. It is now shuttered and up for sale: I imagine the wrecker’s ball and the developer’s dream will give an entirely new face to that old Liffey quay.

But some things also remain the same—including Bewley’s Café as an essential place to grab a bite to eat and a restorative cup of tea or coffee. There used to be a number of Bewley’s locations in Dublin—there are fewer now and the only one that I visited is on Grafton Street. I had a great lunch there on Saturday with my old friend Robert Duffy, who drove up from Hacketstown, Co. Carlow for the afternoon. Robert and I go all the way back to 1977 and have managed to keep our connections alive over the years by get-togethers on both sides of the pond—in Indiana, in Boston, in Carlow. But we hadn’t seen each other since 1998, so it was great to get caught up on personal, familial, professional, and writerly matters: just before I left for Ireland I read about halfway through Jack in the Box, an engaging collection of short stories, set mostly in small-town Ireland, that Robert published a year or so ago. . . . After Bewley’s, just to punctuate—or “christen”—the reunion properly, we decided to grab a pint at one of Dublin’s true landmark pubs, McDaid’s. Associated with Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, among many other writers of “Bohemian Dublin” of the 1950s, it is a grand place to raise a toast to “the good auld days.” But as one more measure of change, right across the street from McDaid’s, in front of the Bruxelles nightclub, stands a larger-than-life-sized statue of the late Phil Lynott, lead singer of the band Thin Lizzy that rocked the charts back in my student days in Dublin in the late ’70s. It seemed apt that Robert and I pose for a shot with the man who sang on the hit single “The Boys Are Back in Town”!

46A

2010-06-22T10:00:00.011-04:00

Back in the day, the Burlington Hotel was a pretty fashionable address. But times have changed—several times—and now even a visiting academic with a small budget can afford to stay there. The hotel is still stylish and well-maintained, and for my money I could not have asked for more. And as for location, location, location . . . well, it was about a 12-minute walk to anywhere I wanted to go in the heart of Dublin—the National Library, the National Gallery, St. Stephen’s Green, Grafton Street—and also my old stomping grounds of Ranelagh and Rathmines. It’s also on the AirCoach bus line—a direct ride from and to the airport for just 8 Euros each way—and it’s on a couple of regular bus lines as well, the #11 that goes far into the northside and the 46A that goes south. . . .

I took the 46A last night out to meet my old friends Bairbre and Gerry (and their sons Oisín and Eoin) at my old “local” back in 1977-78, Byrne’s Galloping Green pub on the dual carriageway in Stillorgan. Bairbre was one of the first people I met when I came to Dublin as a student in 1977—we’ve almost fallen out of touch a couple of times, and I hadn’t seen her and Gerry since 1998 (in Galloping Green) and had never met their handsome young sons. But seeing them after a dozen years made no big difference—time collapses under the substance of old friendships and we spent a wonderful few hours together. Now if only I could do justice to Gerry’s stories—including several about a friend’s yellow Ford car! Gerry was insistent that his stories were not only “good” but also “true” . . . Hmmm.

Perhaps needless to say, seeing Bairbre and Gerry under the roof of the Galloping Green pub brought back many memories for me, some with literary associations. One of them is Galloping Green’s claim to literary fame as the only pub that barred legendary writer Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen from its premises . . . in writing. (Clearly, publican Jerry Byrne, who ran the establishment when I frequented it and who wrote the letter, took serious exception to something!) I believe that incident is recorded either in Anthony Cronin’s biography of his crony, No Laughing Matter, or in Peter Van de Kamp’s illustrated biography of the author of my favorite novel of all time, At Swim-Two-Birds. In fact, as I was riding the bus out to Galloping Green I had yet another memory . . . of my first-ever pint of Guinness, which I enjoyed at Kiely’s of Donnybrook, a well-known pub which happens to be on the 46A bus route. Not long after that experience, in September of 1977, I read for the first time this passage in At Swim-Two-Birds:

We sat in Grogan’s with our faded overcoats finely disarrayed on easy chairs in the mullioned snug. I gave a shilling and two pennies to a civil man who brought us in return two glasses of black porter, imperial pint measure. I adjusted the glasses to the front of each of us and reflected on the solemnity of the occasion. It was my first taste of porter.

The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired. Personal experience appeared to me the only satisfactory means to the resolution of my doubts. Knowing it was my first one, I quietly fingered the butt of my glass before I raised it. Lightly I subjected myself to an inward interrogation.

Nature of interrogation: Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? . . .

Ah, what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed . . .

Anyway, there’s a funny story about Kiely’s pub, told by author Benedict Kiely—no relation to the publican, though he lived almost directly across Morehampton Road from the pub for the last couple of decades of his life. Kiely told me this story in person back in 1998, but I think he may have written it somewhere as well. It’s about an American friend who grabbed a cab at the airport and told the driver—vaguely, he thought—“Kiely’s . . . Donnybrook”: when the driver headed off without further details, the American thought that Ben Kiely must have really made a name for himself if even a random cabbie at the airport knew exactly where he lived. The American was dropped off at the pub . . .

ICONS

2010-06-21T12:30:00.004-04:00

I didn’t set out to have lunch at the Hard Rock Café today . . . but as I was passing through the Temple Bar area of Dublin I had a “Lestrygonians” moment and, like Bloom, decided to duck in to a convenient establishment for a quick bite. While I was waiting for my fajitas—a brave menu choice deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis?—I took a peek at several books that I picked up this morning: a new volume of poems by my friend Louis de Paor, a substantial gathering of poems by the late Michael Hartnett (about whom I have a little piece in progress), and a compilation of various short writings by James Joyce. Then I decided to record the moment for posterity.

DUBLIN MISCELLANY

2010-06-20T19:30:00.007-04:00

As I recall, the Irish Times used to have a regular feature titled “Dublin Miscellany.” Maybe it still does. Well, I’m borrowing that heading as the umbrella for the somewhat random musings that follow . . .

First of all, a simple gauge of the changes that have taken place in Dublin since I last visited in 2005. On that occasion, on my first night back in the city I met my old friend Fionán for a pint at Conway’s pub on Parnell Square South. Competing with The Brazen Head for the title of “the oldest pub in Dublin,” it was for me an emblem of the radical social and economic changes that had taken place in Ireland during the roar of the so-called Celtic Tiger: not only were our pints of Guinness pulled by a woman . . . but that woman was Asian. As Fionán explained to me at the time: Irish-born people no longer work in the service industry. Well, five years later that particular gauge is moot . . . as that one-time claimant for the distinction of ultimate longevity is now shuttered and out of business. Hmmm . . .

Second of all, today I did some particularly Joycean rambling, covering a lot of territory in the process. Around midday I stopped in to the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street. I didn’t know what I would find there . . . and, frankly, I didn’t find much. It provides a very basic introduction to Joyce’s life and his works, mostly via a video and some displays. The major point of interest for Joyce fetishists would probably be the door from #7 Eccles Street, the real-world address for the fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Beyond that? Well, I don’t think there is anything beyond the door—it’s all façade!

In contrast, about 8 miles away via the D.A.R.T train, in the seaside town of Sandycove, sits the early 19th-century “Martello” tower that houses the James Joyce Museum, which I visited an hour or so later. I had been there before but I still found it to be “ambient”—Joyce himself lived in the tower briefly, and of course it is the setting for the opening episode of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus’ antagonist Buck Mulligan describes it as “the omphalos” . . . the “navel” of the world. It has some interesting memorabilia, including Joyce’s old guitar and also a beautiful striped necktie given to him in Paris by Samuel Beckett. . . . Close by, of course, is the “Forty Foot” swimming place that Buck Mulligan plunges into at the end of the “Telemachus” episode. (“Forty Foot” also figures prominently in Jamie O’Neill’s fine novel At Swim, Two Boys.) It used to be “For Gentlemen Only”—it was essentially used for bathing in the nude—but is now a family swimming area.

Finally (for this installment), a note about my evening stroll tonight. I decided to see if I could make my way without a map to one of my old addresses—9 Effra Road in Rathmines. Well, I have to admit that I got very lost. I thought that I knew where I was going—I went past my previous “digs,” my bedsitter on Beechwood Avenue Lower, and I went past my friend Joan’s old flat on Dunville Avenue . . . but then I was suddenly in a brave new world: old landmarks had been replaced by new shops and condos, and even once-familiar street names seemed part of an utter “throughotherness.” I did end up in the heart of Rathmines . . . but even using Slattery’s pub (one of my old watering holes back in 1978) as a new starting point, I got desperately lost again. Finally I gave up and took a left turn that I hoped would bring me back in the basic direction I had come from. At the end of that street I paused for a second, my eye drawn by an ultra-modern looking house that was architecturally completely anomalous with the century-old (or more) row houses lining both sides of the street. I was truly stunned to realize that I was standing in front of 9 Effra Road. I had heard years ago in a roundabout way (from my parents, who met my old landlord—who happened to be celebrated Irish playwright, novelist and short story writer Eugene McCabe—when he received an honorary degree, along with my father, from the University of Prince Edward Island) that the house I lived in had burned down; but I had never imagined that it would be replaced by such an anomaly! Oh well . . . I am still in disbelief that I happened upon my old address after I had given up hope of finding it this evening.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS . . .

2010-06-18T23:30:00.004-04:00

The social emphasis of my blog posts notwithstanding, my week in Dublin actually has a work-related dimension to it, and today was a total immersion in a couple of projects that are quite literally “earning my keep” here. The first of them, which I am just getting started on, is my “official” reason for making this trip; the second is one that I am literally putting the finishing touches on—I’ll be sending it out the door the day after I get back to Boston.

The first of them involves the work of photographer Fionán O’Connell. Many years ago, I published in Colby Quarterly an essay centered on a selection of his Dublin curbscapes: “Through a Lens Darkly: New Focus on ‘Joyce’s Dublin’.” That essay focused (as it were) on how Fionán’s photos of contemporary Dublin complement the new literature of the city emerging in the early to mid-1990s—the writing of Roddy Doyle, Paula Meehan, and Dermot Bolger, for example—to create essentially a palimpsest over James Joyce’s etched-in-stone (as it were) representation of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. This new project involves a series of black-and-white photographs that Fionán happened to shoot around the same time—interior shots of Belvedere College, SJ, where he was teaching at the time. What makes these shots so interesting to me is first of all that they represent a variation on what I call Fionán’s “peripheral vision”—his method of capturing with his lens essentially what an individual might catch, almost subliminally, out of the corner of his/her eye: architectural details, shadows, odd angles of light, the physical texture of the place they were taken. But what compounds my interest is, of course, the Joycean element: like Joyce, O’Connell is an alumnus of Belvedere College—and in an intriguing (yet also coincidental) way, O’Connell’s photographic art shares certain aspects of Joyce’s narrative technique of “stream of consciousness” that he employs at times in Ulysses. Add to this the fact that Belvedere College is the setting for most of Chapter Three of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . and you (or I) have the makings of a promising exploration of cross-disciplinary artistic convergence.

So . . . an important dimension of my Dublin visit was my first visit ever to Belvedere College—which included not only a personal tour of the place by alum and former teacher (and current parent of a student) Fionán O’Connell but also an “audience” with the school’s Headmaster, Gerry Foley. By coincidence, I had met Gerry in Boston just a month before I set out for Dublin—that at least gave me a knock on his door. (I had to laugh when I found out that I would be sitting down with Gerry: I met him at an event in Boston in which one of the speakers described how difficult it is to get through to him directly—his responsibilities as Headmaster of Belvedere are all-consuming.) But after a great, wide-ranging chat about matters literary, Joycean, and Jesuitical, I—or Fionán—actually came away from Gerry’s office with literally the keys to every door in the Belvedere compound. With unrestricted and leisurely access to Belvedere, I felt that I was able to absorb for myself some of the “spirit of place” that Fionán registers in his photographs and that Joyce would have registered in person (in a literal, not literary, “stream of consciousness”) during his days as a schoolboy there in the late 1890s. Fionán has sorted and catalogued his Belvedere photos from the mid-1990s: my job now is to find the language of critical engagement to do justice to the idea that I have just sketched. . . .

But that is not the only work-related project I have had on my mind, and on my agenda, while I’ve been here. In fact, as always happens when I visit Ireland, I will come away from this visit with a stockpile a new ideas and a freshening up of old ideas that I already have on the multiple back burners (metaphorical) of my desk (literal). One of these is a follow-up to my twice-published essay on Dublin-based jazz guitarist Louis Stewart. I had the high hope of seeing Stewart play when I was in Dublin . . . but the rumor slipped to me that he was starting up a new residency this coming Sunday was off by one week, alas. . . . But I am still motivated to return to my Stewart materials and pursue another project that I feel has great promise.

However, the day after I get back to Boston I will get into the mail a slightly re-tuned (as it were) version of another music-centered essay—this one on retro rock-’n’-roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. I was at the band’s debut performance 32 years ago (hard to believe), and have been following their trajectory since their resurrection (as it were—a lot of as it weres in this blog!) on New Year’s Eve of 2005. I had also hoped to see them perform while I was visiting—but as with Louis Stewart, no such luck. Instead . . . I got to play with Rocky himself (a.k.a. novelist, memoirist, screenwriter . . . and, briefly, long-ago classmate of mine, Ferdia Mac Anna) along with the band’s flashy lead guitarist “the Lizard” (a.k.a. Martin Meagher) and also Rocky’s son Finn on drums! Rocky/Ferdia secured a practice space in the bowels of the Button Factory in Temple Bar, the fashionably hip music and arts center of Dublin, and we spent a couple of fine hours together finding musical common ground and enjoying each other’s guitar-centered company. (I didn’t bring a guitar with me, but Ferdia lent me his beautiful red Gibson ES-335—a clone of “Big Red,” the axe played by guitar-hero Alvin Lee of Ten Years After.) We didn’t play “Taking Care of Business” . . . but we should have: for while this get-together was a real treat and a ton of fun, it also added to my serious critical/scholarly interest in the workings of a band named to satirize arguably the most prominent Irish political figure of the twentieth-century, militant nationalist rebel during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish Civil War, founder of the Fianna Fáil political party, prime minister and president Éamon de Valera. The story of the band is interesting in and of itself . . . but that old question “what’s in a name?” really begs to be answered.

That all happened today—Friday, June 18th—deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis.

CANAL BANK WALK

2010-06-17T13:10:00.005-04:00

“O commemorate me where there is water,” poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.” Well, as the photograph affirms, he got his wish in the form of a statue of himself sitting on a bench situated at the side of Grand Canal. I wonder if I earned my own canal-side commemoration after all my walking along its banks today, perhaps my unintentional affirmation of another of Kavanagh’s well-known poems, “Canal Bank Walk”: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me, that I do / The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.” That long, long walk—from Kilmainham back to Ballsbridge (I don’t even know how many miles)—was what linked the two major events of my day.

The first event was a cuppa java with Mary O’Donoghue, an old poet-friend from Boston who has just had her first novel, Before the House Burns, published by Dublin’s Lilliput Press. It’s a beautiful-looking book which I will sit down with when I get back to Boston. She launched it in Galway a week or so ago. I had hoped that she might be launching in Dublin too while I’m here, but no such luck. Back home in County Clare for the summer, Mary just happened to be in Dublin for the day, coming in by train from Galway. We had a nice catch-up at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. And then we walked a few blocks over to catch up with another Boston-based poet-friend, County Monaghan-born Aidan Rooney. Aidan knew he would be seeing Mary, but he did not expect to see me “out of context”! It was great to spend a few minutes with the two of them . . .

Then I set off to do some wandering around Dublin. I had no specific plan beyond simply absorbing the sights and the sounds (and the smells, too) of the city. But I guess I did more than wander—I just kept on going, following streets rather than a map . . . and eventually I realized that I was headed toward the infamous Kilmainham Gaol. Dating back to the late 18th century, this prison housed not only the full range of criminals—from debtors and petty thieves to ruthless murderers—but also many of the major figures of Ireland’s struggle for political autonomy—from Robert Emmett and Charles Stewart Parnell at either end of the 19th century to the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 (Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Countess Markiewicz), fifteen of whom were executed by firing squad in the stone-breaking yard within the prison walls. The prison was decommissioned in 1924 then stood in disrepair until the mid-1980s, when it was restored and opened as a museum of—and a monument to—the Irish nationalist cause. Obviously, the conditions under which the prisoners lived were horrendous. I found my visit to Kilmainham to be very moving and very thought-provoking about what certain individuals will do—and also what they will endure—for love of their country.

Leaving Kilmainham, I followed my nose for water and found the Grand Canal, which I knew would lead me back within a block of my hotel. At least an hour later . . . I got back just in time to freshen up and head into Merrion Square—specifically to O’Connell House, the Dublin home to the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Center for Irish Studies. (In the 19th century, the building was the home of legendary nationalist Daniel O’Connell—the Liberator.) I had gotten wind that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney would be giving a private reading there this evening, for participants in the Notre Dame Irish Seminar. I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from Center director Kevin Whelan and from ND Irish-language professor Breen Ó Conchubhair when I arrived on their doorstep: I’ve known both of them for years . . . but hadn’t seen either of them for years, so the friendly greeting from each of them was no small part of the evening’s pleasure.

But the larger part of the evening’s pleasure was, of course, Heaney’s reading. I have heard him read perhaps 8 or 10 times, dating back to 1981. This reading was particularly enriching—and enlightening—as he pre-viewed a number of new poems from his collection Human Chain, due out in September. He also read a number of poems that recognized the presence in the audience of his longtime friend and long-ago (early 1950s) classmate at St. Columb’s College in Derry, Professor Seamus Deane. For my money the preeminent scholar of Irish literature, Deane is also a fine poet and the author of the staggeringly powerful novel Reading in the Dark (which I have taught on a couple of occasions). After the reading there was the usual milling about, in the midst of which I managed to have a nice conversation with each of the Seamuses. Like Kevin and Breen, they were very welcoming of my being there.

On my way back to the Burlington Hotel, I walked along the Grand Canal again. Passing Kavanagh’s statue, I wondered if even that notoriously cantankerous man-about-town might have enjoyed some of the company I kept during this long and winding day.

BLOOMSDAY . . . THEN AND NOW

2010-06-16T23:40:00.013-04:00

By sheer coincidence (“What other sort is there?” pseudonymous Irish novelist Flann O’Brien once mused from behind another of his pseudonyms—Myles na Gopaleen), my Bloomsday in Dublin ended with my reading the opening chapter of Ulysses and Us, scholar and critic Declan Kiberd’s newish guidebook for reading James Joyce’s “damned monster novel” (Joyce’s phrase—not mine or Kiberd’s . . . or O’Brien’s) Ulysses. I picked up Kiberd’s book while playing my part, I suppose, in what he describes as a cultish ritual commemorating the place-specific ramblings around Dublin of the fictional Leopold Bloom on the 16th of June, 1904. “Every year,” Kiberd writes, “hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book—Stephen with his cane, Leopold with his bowler hat, Molly in her petticoats, Blazes Boylan under a straw boater—as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. They re-enact scenes in Eccles Street, Ormond Quay, and Sandycove’s Martello Tower.”

So, what role did I take on? Well, I guess that like every other person is Dublin who did not “dress the part” (and I actually saw only a handful who did), I unwittingly played the part of a random character from the densely-populated “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses . . . which Joyce’s friend and early commentator Frank Budgen, explaining how Joyce wrote the episode “with a map of Dublin before him” and “calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city,” has described as “peculiarly the episode of Dublin.” (I must now briefly put on my robes of academe and add my own explanation in the form of a lecture-like digression. In describing in several “schemas” that he shared with friends a correspondence between his “Groups of Citizens” and the Symplegades, Joyce apparently conflates two mythological phenomena, the Wandering Rocks and the Clashing Rocks. Strictly speaking, the Symplegades were the Clashing Rocks located at the mouth of the Bosporous, in this case obviously the two banks of the Liffey metamorphosed into metaphors for church and state, forces that tend to converge on the individual. The ordinary citizens of Dublin who fill this episode seem to represent much more suggestively the phenomenon of the Wandering Rocks, like the Symplegades found not in Joyce’s obvious Homeric analogue to Ulysses but in Appolonius’ Argonautica. End of digression.) In others words, like the vast majority of the denizens of Dublin on June 16th, 2010, I simply went about my business as if today were just another day in the life of the city. (Allow me to put my robes back on for one more moment: in Joyce’s Voices, senior Joyce scholar Hugh Kenner observes that none of Joyce’s characters are aware of the Joycean roles they are playing, or else they wrongly think of themselves in other roles; I don’t have Kenner's book at hand, but one example that I recall him citing is that in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus thinks of himself not as Telemachus but as that other equally famous literary “dispossessed son,” Hamlet. So . . . was I or was I not one of the “wandering rocks”? Hmmm.)

That second parenthetical aside notwithstanding . . . my unselfsconscious “wanderings” included picking up a few books—the aforementioned Ulysses and Us plus Colm Toibín’s newest novel Brooklyn (which I was reminded of when I brushed shoulders with Toibín first thing the morning previous—though by the time I realized who that familiar face was, he had disappeared, so I didn’t get a chance to say hi to him) plus John McGahern’s book of essays, Love of the World, plus Before the House Burns, the hot-off-the-press first novel by Boston-based Clare-born poet and fiction writer Mary O’Donoghue, whom I will be meeting for a cup of coffee tomorrow.

I also went to the National Library and took care of a little bit of research and to the National Gallery where I spent time mesmerized by the paintings of Jack B. Yeats. Both of those places are visited by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses—and the former is also the setting for the entire “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, in which Stephen Dedalus holds forth on Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the benefit of a motley gathering of librarians, poets and scholars. (One more academic aside: in his heavily illustrated Ulysses guidebook, James Joyce’s Odyssey, Frank Delaney includes not only photos from Joyce’s time, the turn of the twentieth century, but also more recent shots. The one he chooses for the interior of the National Library was shot in 1978—I know that for a fact because that’s me standing Stephen Dedalus-like at the ticket desk. No kidding!)

By mid-afternoon I had been mostly on my feet for hours, so first I sat down for a cuppa java and then changed venues for a coupla pints with old friend Fionán O’Connell, whose wonderful photographs are at the center of the research project I’m “officially” working on while I'm in Dublin. We met at Nealon’s, a fine old bar on Capel Street just north of the River Liffey.

The next stop on my “rocky wanderings” was a very fine restaurant called The Church, where I met my dear old friend Joan—we go back to 1978, and every time we see each other (not often enough) we just pick up our conversation exactly where we left off. She just happened to be in Dublin for meetings—part of the serendipity that seems to be shaping my visit to Dublin. We had a great meal and a great chat, then she caught the train back to Limerick.

But my wanderings were not over! Leaving The Church, I decided to walk all the way back to my hotel—a long way, as it turns out. Then almost as soon as I got back, my friend Rob Savage (see previous post) called to see about heading back into the City Centre, to O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row, to meet yet another Irish Studies colleague, Joseph Lennon (recently of Manhattan College, soon-to-be of Villanova University) and a friend of his.

On our way back the hotel, Rob and I decided to stop for one more nip, at O’Brien’s on Sussex Street, which seems like the leading candidate to be our “local” during our stay at the Burlington. I think that James Joyce would approve.

“Bloomsday” was first observed in 1954, on the 50th anniversary of the day immortalized in fiction by James Joyce, by Flann O’Brien and fellow writers John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Anthony Cronin, and another friend Tom Joyce. Declan Kiberd wonders if the current “celebration of Bloomsday may in fact be a lament for a lost city, for an earlier time when Dublin was still felt to be civic, knowable, viable.” Well, without any sort of play-acting on my part, I found it to be all that—and much more—on the 16th of June in 2010.

THE SUMMIT

2010-06-15T19:18:00.013-04:00

So far—less than 12 hours into my week or so in Dublin—the planets have been aligning very nicely, as I just got to spend a splendid evening in the company of two of my favorite friends . . . who also happen to be my colleagues in Irish Studies: Rob Savage from Boston College and Louis de Paor from the National University of Ireland-Galway. Rob and I go all the way back to 1987, when we met in the microfilm room at BC. When we discovered last week that we would be overlapping in Dublin—Rob is here partly to launch his new book, A Loss of Innocence?: Television and Irish Society, 1960-72—we decided to end up under the same hotel roof. That makes the socializing very easy. . . . Both Rob and I go back a long way with Louis too—an Irish-language poet whom I have written on not once but twice.

So we had an Irish Studies “summit meeting” this evening—over pints and pizza. As the accompanying photo documents, we found ourselves in a very fine old pub indeed . . .

While our conversation ranged widely, one matter that we did not engage with, but which is sharing the day’s news headlines with the FIFA World Cup, is the release of the official Saville Report on the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of 14 Northern Irish citizens by British paratroopers 38 years ago. The Report took 12 years and 1.2 million Euros to complete—and the verdict is that the British soldiers acted irresponsibly and recklessly in gunning down unarmed and unequivocally innocent civilians. I had forgotten that the Report was to be released today . . . until I saw a news report on TV as I passed through Heathrow airport very early this morning which included a statement by Ian Paisley, Jr., a British MP from Northern Ireland and a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. His notoriously cantankerous father’s son, young Ian seemed to be resenting at least the cost of the Saville Report . . . but I took his resentment with the proverbial grain of salt, as I had a flashback to about 15 years ago when I gave him and another Northern Irish politician (whose name eludes me now—but he was of Nationalist stock and had actually run, unsuccessfully, against Paisley, Sr. in a parliamentary election) a ride to Logan airport in Boston after an Irish Studies conference in western Massachusetts. Surprisingly, it was an altogether cordial hour-and-a-half, and one detail that I recall distinctly is Paisley, Jr.’s admission that sometimes he is burdened with toeing publicly the party line (literally) even if he does not really buy it wholesale himself. I suspect that burden was at least partly behind the stance he was taking on the morning news. Mostly the Saville Report has been warmly embraced on first read and is seen widely as long overdue not only in its timing but also in its conclusions.

DEAR, DIRTY DUBLIN

2010-06-15T10:30:00.003-04:00

So . . . within minutes of getting settled into “the Burlo”—the Burlington Hotel on Dublin’s southside—I received an email from my old friend Fionán: “Welcome Home!” he exclaimed. And I have to say that Dublin does feel an awful lot like home. . . . As I was passing through the city on the bus from the airport, I was reminded of our family visit to Dublin in 1998: our three daughters were young and not really “into” urban life—“dear, dirty Dublin,” indeed—and we actually ended up cutting short by a day our planned time for wandering the city; but my wife told me afterwards that the girls whispered to her: “Dad just loves Dublin, doesn’t he? He seems so happy . . .” And I guess it’s the happiness of unselfconscious familiarity with a place—of still feeling comfortably and naturally at home in a place that once was “home,” even with the inherent temporariness of a student’s lifestyle.

I have to admit that I didn’t choose to stay at the Burlington with any great designs: my wife actually booked it for me after getting the unbelievable rate of $54 (that’s dollars, not Euros) a night. Hey, that’s cheaper than I can live at home! But its location is perfect for getting into and out of “the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis” . . . and today it was perfect for allowing me to walk about 10 minutes to the neighborhood of Ranelagh, where I lived in a tiny “bedsitter” at 103 Beechwood Avenue Lower for about 3 months in 1978. That building is still standing—and looks like it’s being renovated, maybe as a condo. But the rest of the neighborhood has certainly evolved—or been gentrified. Conspicuously absent is Beechwood Stores, the little grocery that used to sit directly across the street. But I was especially struck by the number of small coffee shops and other casual eateries lining the main drag of Ranelagh Village. . . though I was surprised that the Kylemore Cake Shop is gone. (I remember coming around the corner one morning in 1978 and seeing Johnny Fingers, the pajama-clad pianist of The Boomtown Rats, coming out of that Kylemore’s. That now seems so long ago—and in a sense so far away, though perhaps less so for me than for Johnny Fingers, who I’ve heard has settled in Japan, where he works as a “greeter” for visiting rock bands.)

So . . . “the Burlo” will be my base for the next 8 or 9 days. When I checked in today, the desk clerk asked me: “Are you here for business or for pleasure?” I replied: “Well, my boss thinks I’m here for business, but my friends think I’m here for pleasure.” Then—did I have in the back of my mind the fact that the Burlington claims to have the largest ballroom in Ireland?—I added: “I’m not sure what my wife thinks.” Without missing a beat, the desk clerk smiled and said: “Well, we’ll not let on to her . . .”

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE . . .

2010-06-11T10:00:00.012-04:00

Sometimes you have to wonder what they put in the water around here . . . or at least on one corner around here.

A day or so ago as I was leaving my local gym I caught the tail end of a verbal altercation involving the resident masseuse (no kidding) and some big lug who followed her in off the street to give her a tongue-lashing for her poor parking job somewhere in the vicinity. Well, it seems that despite English being her second language, she gave as a good as she got in the tongue-lashing department, though her grasp of English idioms left me scratching my head. I’m pretty sure that what I heard was the lug offering as his lame parting shot, “Well, you need to get your eyes checked,” and the masseuse retorting: “Yeah . . . and maybe my ears checked too.” And then as the door clicked behind him, she muttered something about his needing a “psychologiste” . . .

Hey, he might have needed more than that if he had really gotten into it with her. And I’m not alluding to the trio of her fitness-freak co-workers—one of them a competitive bodybuilder—who happened to be in the gym’s lobby when the lug came in to make his point about her parking skills. A month or so ago I happened to have a handshake with the masseuse at an evening social event at the gym—and I thought I would need reconstructive surgery afterwards: I have never felt such a steely grip! Combine that with her Eastern European accent and she would certainly warrant a casting call back for any James Bond flick I’ve ever seen. Scary . . . That lug doesn’t know how lucky he is that he got away with just a tongue-lashing . . .

And then an hour later I was directly across the street at my local Bank of America. I had parked right in front of the door and when I came out the guard caught my eye . . . and then my ear. Nodding at the John Lennon “Give Peace a Chance” bumper sticker on the rear end of my car, he said: “I’ve always wanted to talk to someone about that . . .” I guess he took eye contact as encouragement, as he proceeded to give me a little lecture about the limited virtue of peace as a global goal. Hmmm. Did I mention that he had a pistol holstered on his hip? And that I didn’t have one on mine? Discretion being the better part of valor, I nonetheless suggested that he give a listen to Lennon’s anthemic song “Imagine”: “You may say that I’m a dreamer / but I’m not the only one . . .” Maybe I should have resisted adding that I had put the bumper sticker on my car during the last Bush administration. But I didn’t . . . which gave him the opening to say, “Well, I don’t like the yahoo we’ve got in office right now.” Shrugging, I suggested that the real “yahoo” was his predecessor, who left us in our current global mess. Should I mention that as I got into my car, I glanced across the street at the gym, hoping that the steel-fingered masseuse would have my back if this conversation went much further? But it didn’t . . . Imagine.

“VINTAGE” HERB ELLIS

2010-06-05T23:30:00.012-04:00

While out on my appointed rounds a couple of days ago—picking up dog food, redeeming my wife’s shoes from the cobbler . . . the sort of tasks that fill up the “Honey Do” list—I treated myself to a copy of the latest issue of Vintage Guitar Magazine. “Guitar porn,” my brother-in-law calls this sort of glossy pictoral publication (as the owner of more than 100 guitars himself, he might speak with some authority on the matter)—and I have to admit that my eye was drawn by the sensuously curvaceous form on the cover: a to-die-for two-tone (light green body with avocado pickguard) Gretsch tenor guitar, circa 1960.

But what prompted me to buy the magazine (I really should subscribe) was the promise of an article on jazz guitarist Herb Ellis, who died in March at the age of 88. Written by guitar historian Jim Carlton, the piece is more a general appreciation than a full-scale retrospective, but it prompted me to spin the dial on my iPod and tune in appreciatively to Ellis’s signature style, which is summarized neatly by fellow jazz legend Mundell Lowe at the end of Carlton’s article: “In his music he loved two things—Charlie Christian and playing those Texas blues. He was the king at that.” Naturally enough, then, I started by cuing up a pair of his early albums—first Nothing But the Blues from 1957 and then Thank You Charlie Christian from 1960, the titles of which speak volumes about their content.

Inevitably, those two albums affirm an observation made by Barney Kessel that Carlton also quotes in his article: “He signed his work. You could always tell when it was Herb playing.” Indeed you can—and that is the basic reason why I find that so many of his albums as frontman sound pretty much alike . . . which is the basic reason why I find much more satisfying his albums where he is either sharing the marquee or else performing as sideman. In the first category, I have a particular fondness for the two albums he recorded in an extended session with Duke Robillard in 1999—Conversations in Swing Guitar and More Conversations in Swing Guitar: the two six-string swingers truly complement each other stylistically, and it seems to me that Robillard really encourages Ellis, pushing 80 years old at the time of the recording, to push himself “conversationally.” Ellis also recorded several albums with guitarist Joe Pass that stretch him beyond “nothing but the blues” and ongoing homage to the iconic Charlie Christian, who brought electric guitar to the forefront in jazz during his all-too-brief stint with Benny Goodman between 1939 and 1941. In contrast, Rhythm Willie, an album that Ellis recorded in 1975 with four-to-the-bar rhythm guitar legend Freddie Green and which features only Ellis playing solos, has a lot of “sameness” despite the winningness of those solos individually. (Coincidentally, this issue of Vintage Guitar Magazine also includes under its Fretprints rubric a piece by Wolf Marshall entitled “Freddie Green: Rhythm-Guitar Engine of Jazz,” which explains and illustrates Green’s singular technique—for five decades the foundational pulse of the Count Basie Band; this piece makes no mention of Green's collaboration with Ellis.)

As Carlton observes, one of Ellis’s true claims to fame was his long hitch in the drummerless Oscar Peterson trio, which featured Peterson on piano and included Ray Brown on bass. Most of the recordings that I’ve heard of the trio per se really showcase the prodigious Peterson—Ellis plays a distant second fiddle (as it were). But as Carlton also notes, the trio served essentially as the house rhythm section for the Verve record label, backing up myriad household names of jazz in the 1950s. At times, on an album like Stan Getz & Oscar Peterson Trio, Ellis is relegated to primarily a rhythmic role, and his presence is literally much more felt than heard in backing up tenorman Getz. For my money, tenorman Ben Webster’s Soulville is a more satisfying album with regard to Ellis’s presence—right from the opening plucked notes of the title tune. But perhaps my favorite of all of his sideman appearances on my iPod is on Anita O’Day’s Anita Sings the Most. Giving Ellis several solo spots as well as putting his expressive comping on display, this album is a “vintage” classic by virtue of not only O’Day’s vocals but also the sympathetic backing and the subtle interplay of Peterson, Brown and Ellis.

FORE!

2010-06-01T21:00:00.006-04:00

So . . . I played my first round of golf of the season this past Sunday morning. Or was it just a half-round? It was 9 holes . . . but on a course with only 9 holes, the Milton-Hoosic Club, a tidy little private course tucked down a side road in Canton, just south of Boston. Considering that I hadn’t even seen my clubs since last August and that I had time to take only two practice swings before I was summoned to tee off, I played okay . . . for the first 7 holes. Then my morning jolt of caffeine began to wear off and my concentration—like several of my balls—wandered off into the woods. As it turns out, we were playing best-ball partners and my partner is a former club pro who has still “got game” . . . so we ended up winning. The thrill of victory included a $5 bet . . . which we didn’t bother to collect: we agreed that we would roll it over into a “double or nothing” round (or half-round) later in the summer with the same two guys who completed our foursome.

Anyway . . . both coming and going to the Milton-Hoosic Club, I drove (no pun intended) within shouting distance—Fore!—of another, literally “storied” (see next paragraph), golf course also in Canton. A 36-hole layout, Ponkapoag Golf Course was built in 1936 by legendary designer Donald Ross. A public course, it is often referred to as a gem . . . but it also often cited as an example of unfortunate neglect on the part of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. I’ve played it a couple of times—though not recently—and have mixed memories of some fine holes mixed in among holes in need of serious drainage work.

“In need of serious drainage work”: come to think of it, that is how I might describe a novel in which a version of Ponkapoag (well, it is actually renamed Ponkaquogue Municipal Course and Deli and is relocated to the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester) features prominently. The novel is Missing Links. The author is Rick Reilly, whom I used to admire greatly when he was a feature writer for Sports Illustrated; but when he was given a back-page column some years ago called “Life of Reilly,” he became a caricature of himself as thoughtful commentator on and gifted writer about sports . . . and that’s the effect that reading Missing Links had on me when I took a few swings at it several years ago: it was a mere caricature of good writing. In fact, I found it so bad that it turned into one of those rare books that I just couldn’t be bothered finishing even after committing myself to it. I found the Boston-area local color shady at best and the humor strained, and even the golf sequences (and Rick Reilly does know golf—it’s as a novelist that he’s a duffer) are characterized by more whiffs than solid hits. Maybe it reminds me too much of my own golf game in that last regard . . . but although I know that many readers sing the novel’s praises, I think I’ll continue to take a miss on Missing Links.

Instead . . . I will sit down and re-read sections from a golf book that I truly love: On Golf: The Game, the Players, and a Personal History of Obsession. The book happens to be written by a fellow named Timothy O’Grady (no relation to yours truly, though we are acquainted) and that might have been what drew me to the book in the first place. But what kept me there—and what keeps me returning to it—is the combination of the graceful writing, the deep contemplation of golf as a sport, a tradition, and a culture, and the author’s poignant but unsentimental musings on his relationship with his father, who introduced him to the game . . . and to the love of the game. On Golf should be on every golfer’s bedside table.

I guess that I love the game too—the physical/mental challenge that Winston Churchill once described thus: “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” But what I love most of all is the camaraderie involved in a round of golf. “Male bonding” happens best in side-by-side—not face-to-face—activities: at a hockey game or a baseball game, on a road trip, on a golf course, maybe even at a rock concert. . . . Mark Twain has said famously, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” (One of my regular golf buddies once Freudian-slipped on that line, saying something like “Golf is a walk in the woods gone bad”; perhaps needless to say, he had spent a lot of his round that day following stray balls into the underbrush . . .) But it’s not just about a good walk—it’s also about good talk. That’s what keeps some of us swinging the clubs: golf is a good excuse for friends to get caught up with each others’ lives under the guise of being caught up in following a little dimpled ball wherever it happens to go. . . .

So says I? Well, about 15 minutes after I got home from those 9 holes on Sunday, I had an email exchange with my cousin, who affirmed indirectly that playing golf is not only or all about athletic accomplishment. “I need more time to practice,” he admitted trying to explain to his wife, but then added: “her response is that I’ve been playing for 40 years and if I haven’t figured it out yet—I’m not likely to figure it out now! (Sad, but true . . .)”

SPEAKING OF IOWA . . .

2010-05-29T11:00:00.007-04:00

There’s a well-known country song by Mac Davis with lyrics proclaiming “I thought happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my rearview mirror . . .” I have to be careful about singing along with it, though, as my in-laws live in Lubbock, and I wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression . . .

But I have to admit that those lyrics were echoing in my head last Tuesday as my wife and our two younger daughters and I pulled onto I-80 after what may well be our final visit to Grinnell, Iowa, following our daughter’s graduation the day before from Grinnell College. I wrote about my first visit to the Hawkeye State four years ago in a piece that I still like: check it out! My second visit, in 2008, was disconcerting in a different way, as motoring from Davenport* (where I was attending a conference) to Grinnell, I had a weird almost-out-of-body experience when I realized that never—not even in my wildest of dreams—would I have pictured myself driving alone across Iowa to visit my daughter. Unlike I-80, life has some funny twists and turns that you could never predict. I was actually a bit rattled by the “revelation”—it was like I was watching my life from above . . . but it didn’t seem like it could really be my life. . . .

Since then I’ve been back to Grinnell two more times, both in the past month. The cornfield landscape of Iowa has grown on me a little bit, and I continue to find the town of Grinnell “interesting,” with the double-wide streets of its small downtown giving it the feel of an old west movie set. But notwithstanding the wonderful experience—educational and much more—that my daughter had at Grinnell College, I am still affected my first night in Grinnell, in August of 2006. As soon as our daughter was accepted at Grinnell College we booked accommodations at the Day’s Inn there, requesting for the first night a rollaway cot as well as the usual two double beds to accommodate the five in our traveling party. My wife’s email confirmation recorded that request, as did the hotel’s own record of our reservation. But there was no cot in the room. When I asked at the front desk, I was told by the rather crusty night clerk (an older woman) that they do not have rollaway cots. When I raised an eyebrow about that, she went on to explain that 3-4 years earlier a construction crew staying on the 2nd floor had attacked the owner-manager by throwing rollaway cots down the stairs at him—so he had gotten rid of all the cots in the hotel! (As if such lightning would strike twice.) I said, “That’s nutty.” She didn’t disagree, but that didn’t solve our problem. After a bit of prodding, she said, “Well, we might still have one cot in the room that the night crew at the hotel uses as their lounge.” But with the influx of families dropping off students, they had rented out that room. Still, she called the room and asked the people there if they had a rollaway cot. They seemed not to know what one even looked like! As it turns out, they did not have one—but they said they had a La-Z-Boy recliner . . . which the clerk offered to me! I declined. (Declined to recline—that’s a good one.) At which point, an odd-looking hunch-backed fellow on the couch in the lobby (I think he was waiting to go on duty as the post-midnight desk clerk) offered me the cushions off the couch. At which point the woman said, “Or you could sleep out here in the lobby on the couch . . . though I would have to leave the lights on as I need to do the books tonight.” I declined. Another woman working at the desk suggested that I go to Wal-Mart and buy an inflatable bed. I declined. They also suggested that I take a second room, at the Budget Inn across the road—owned by the same person who owns the Day’s Inn: but she said she would have to charge me for that additional room. . . . Finally, they gave me some sheets and blankets and what looked like a tightly-rolled mattress pad in a sealed plastic bag: “That’s the best we can do.” So I took those back to the room. . . . But imagine our surprise when we opened the bag and discovered that the “mattress” was merely an oversized pillow! As my middle daughter said, “I may be short, but even I am not short enough to curl up on that!” (This was the same daughter who, growing tired of her older sister’s double mantra about Grinnell College being referred to as “the Harvard of the Midwest” and about its exceptional “one of everything” diversity, finally said, “more like the Harvard Square of the Midwest”: another good one!) Well, me made do . . . but these past two visits we’ve given the Day’s Inn the proverbial wide berth, staying at the Country Inn and Suites instead.

Anyway . . . as my oldest daughter likes to sigh, “Oh, Grinnell . . .” And after all, even that Mac Davis song ends up casting Lubbock in a positive light!

*********************

*Davenport is another story altogether . . . but I was reminded of that story when, hightailing it from Grinnell to Chicago to catch our flight back to Boston, we made the mistake of making a pit stop in Davenport in search of a Starbucks. More than an hour later . . . Still, driving around and around the heart of Davenport, I inevitably recalled how a friend shared with me an architect friend’s description of that city as being like a mouth full of cavities and missing teeth. I recalled how on my previous visit to the city, I was immediately disconcerted by the ghost town effect—those midwestern double-wide streets . . . with no traffic and no people. Some interesting architecture—but mostly empty buildings. What pleased me most was the neon sign around the corner from the hotel announcing an Arthur Murray Dance Studio: that detail evoked for me a romantic vision of the 1930s or ’40s! But one morning I had a bit of a breakthrough when I went looking—unsuccessfully—for coffee around 7:30 a.m. I walked a block or two further than I had previously—still nothing but a ghost town, but something about the architecture and the streetscapes began to appeal to me. A block or two from the hotel there was a little green building angled onto a corner lot—the Musicians Local. Across the street was a place with a lit-up neon “Open” sign (truth in advertising was obviously not a concern) called Sergeant Pepper Auto Repair. . . . Although three damp hours on a Mississippi riverboat a couple of nights earlier (the aquatic equivalent of seeing the backyards of America from an Amtrak window) did not add much to my experience of Davenport and environs, I did feel some of the aura of “the mighty Mississippi” when, on that early morning perambulation, I ended up riverside for a few contemplative minutes.

TIM HORTON'S DONUTS + BORDER CROSSINGS

2010-05-28T09:30:00.005-04:00

So . . . last week at my daughter’s graduation from a small college deep in the heart of Iowa, I met a fellow Canadian Maritimer—originally from Pictou County, Nova Scotia but now a transplant to the Quad Cities area of Iowa/Illinois. His daughter was also graduating. After all the usual “small world” connections were made—he had gone to medical school with about a half-dozen louts who had made my life miserable in high school—we got down to talking about certain matters of importance to Canadians: hockey . . . and donuts. (It was a bit early in the day to talk about beer, which would have completed the conversational hat trick for Canucks.) The hockey part was obvious: the NHL playoffs are in full swing, so we naturally exchanged some thoughts on how they were shaping up. . . . I guess the donut part was prompted by our admiring the two largest boxes (pallets might be the more precise word) of the largest donuts we had ever seen—some unknown saint had brought them to the graduation brunch we found ourselves at. . . .

Anyway, we got talking about donuts and I was inevitably reminded of a little episode I was involved in at a Tim Horton’s donut shop in Salisbury, New Brunswick a few years ago. We stopped there for lunch on our way back to Boston from our annual summer vacation on PEI (which, by the way, must have the highest number of Tim Horton’s donut shops per capita in the world: I think there are at least 9 in my hometown of Charlottetown alone). Standing in the long lunchtime line wondering seriously to myself if we had enough Canadian cash left to pay for our soup and sandwich combos, I wondered aloud (I love to see my wife and our three daughters cringe in public) whether Tim Horton’s would be willing to barter. I then dug into my pocket to see what I might have. First I pulled out a golf tee. Then I pulled out a guitar pick (red). Then I pulled out a ball marker from the Glen Eagle golf course I had played (miserably) a couple of days earlier. I said to my wife and daughters: “All of these should be worth something.” They were not particularly amused, but the woman in the line in front of us seemed to be (unless, of course, her smile was a pitying one, directed toward my traveling companions). . . . As it turns out, Tim Horton’s gave an exchange rate on American dollars, so we were okay. As we sat eating lunch, I commented (tongue only lightly in cheek): “Isn’t this just the perfect meal—a ham and cheese sandwich, a cup of coffee and a donut?” A trucker at the next table overheard me and leaned over to say, “I have this meal every day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner . . .” And then, to complete the lunchtime trifecta, a woman a couple of tables over asked me what I had said after my daughters all gave me high fives for my response to my middle daughter’s questioning whether my sister “was cool in high school.” I replied that I didn’t know my sister when she was in high school (she was two grades behind me). Then my daughter asked whether I was cool in high school. I replied, “I was always cool”—then added “except when you were in middle school” . . . Ah well. Maybe you had to be there. . . .

Anyway . . . about two hours later my wife was driving when we crossed the border from Canada back to the U.S. Noticing that the last name on her passport was different from the rest of ours, the border guard asked, “How do you all know each other?” My wife replied: “We met at a Tim Horton’s in Salisbury.”

Actually she didn’t say that—but she should have! (I would have . . .)

But that reminds me of another time we crossed that same border from Canada to the U.S. and encountered that same guard. (In the interests of national security, I will resist identifying him too specifically—but just let me say that his surname is a slight variation on the name of the Welsh soldier in Shakespeare’s Henry V. I’ll also resist mentioning his wife’s family’s name, but I will say that I’ve crossed through his checkpoint and chatted with him enough times to learn that she is from New Dominion, PEI . . . and that our families have spent summer vacations less than a mile apart on the same south shore beach. But I digress . . .) So . . . we were crossing one time in a Dodge Caravan with darkly tinted windows. I was driving. Peering through the driver’s window, the guard nodded toward the back of the van and asked: “What have you got there?” I replied: “Three daughters and a dog.” He then asked: “Any weapons?” I replied: “No.” Then it was his turn again: “You should have,” he said, smiling grimly and waving us on.

NOW . . . WHERE WAS I?

2010-05-27T13:00:00.005-04:00

Now . . . where was I? That’s a really good question in light of my failure to post even a single blog entry in almost four months. I guess that one way to answer it is to take the question literally and borrow the reply that the missus and I have become accustomed to using when asked how we dealt with “empty nest syndrome” this year with all three of our daughters away at college. Framing the “where” between a visit to our youngest daughter in Pennsylvania last October and a trip to Iowa this past weekend for our oldest daughter’s graduation from college (we also visited her about a month ago), we cheerfully respond: “London . . . Paris . . . New York . . . Santa Fe . . . Exuma (in the Bahamas).” Not a bad answer . . .

But it’s not the complete answer—and thus not a fully accurate answer—as all of those travels should have provoked any number of blog posts . . . and they may yet. The no-less-literal but far-less-romantic answer to the question is: “I was at a committee meeting.” Seriously, the past three or months have been my worst nightmare: just one meeting after another after another . . . which made the whole semester feel like one long meeting. I hate meetings . . . and by association I hate anyone and everyone I have to have a meeting with . . . which means I end up hating pretty much everyone in my small world. Not good . . . My spirit was just drained right out of me . . . and so were my words.

But now that the semester is pretty much all wrapped up—just the proverbial crossing of a few i’s and dotting of a few t’s left—I plan to return to musing regularly in this blog spot on matters literary, musical, and otherwise. I also have a trip to Dublin in the works—if that doesn’t generate a few blog posts then maybe there’s something more wrong with my life than a surfeit of meetings!

So stay tuned . . .

********************

PS: I am also reactivating my other blog, Irish Matters, which I haven't added to for a full year. In fact, it has a new post, a little piece on Seamus Heaney’s “bog poems,” scheduled to be launched at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, June 1st. Check it out!

FOUND IN TRANSLATIONS

2010-02-21T17:30:00.004-05:00

“There are, it may be hinted, several sides to The Playboy.” So wrote playwright J. M. Synge in 1907 regarding The Playboy of the Western World, for my money the greatest (whatever that means!) of all Irish plays. “On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy,” Synge wrote in his Preface to the play—perhaps not the formula that every play should follow . . . but it certainly worked for him in his richly ambiguous “extravaganza” (as he described it).

And in its own way (though the “joy” is a bit muted) it worked for Brian Friel in Translations, his 1980 masterpiece that, in my humble opinion, ranks a close second to Playboy in the many-splendored catalogue of Irish drama. I was reminded of that last night when I attended a production of Translations staged by the Boston College Theatre Department. Employing only two equity actors, it was nonetheless an altogether compelling production, thanks in no small part to the guidance of director Carmel O’Reilly, who really drew out the talents of the student actors. The founder (with her husband Peter) of Boston’s now dormant Súgán Theatre Company, Carmel has directed literally countless plays, both at Súgán and for other Boston companies, and has received much recognition and many honors in the process. She is this year’s Monan Professor of Theatre Arts at Boston College.

Before last night, I had seen Translations performed two times: a disastrous mainstage production back in 1995 that starred TV actor Brian Dennehy (it had a short test run in Boston and then rightly got run off Broadway in less than two weeks), and a much more modest but still very satisfying production by the Devanaughn Theatre Company in 2004 in the intimate 50-seat Piano Factory Theatre in Boston’s South End. Last night’s production, in the Bonn Studio Theatre of BC’s Robsham Theater Arts Center, was still “intimate,” but the space also allowed the audience to experience the play’s full “spectacle.”

No less than Synge’s Playboy, Translations has “several sides” to it, as Friel himself recognized and identified in the “Sporadic Diary” that he kept while writing the play in 1979:

I don’t want to write a play about Irish peasants being suppressed by English sappers.
I don’t want to write a threnody on the death of the Irish language.
I don’t want to write a play about land surveying.
Indeed I don’t want to write a play about naming places.
And yet portions of all of these are relevant. Each is part of the atmosphere in which the real play lurks.

As crafted by Friel, the play never lands definitively on a single one of those topics or themes. Rather, as implied in the author’s program note to the first Field Day Theatre Company production of Translations in 1980—“The only merit in looking back is to understand how you are and where you are at this moment”—it engages with the complex and protean issue of “Irish identity” . . . though not in 1833, when the action of the play is set, but in 1980.

When first produced in Dublin in 1907 and then when first toured in America by the Abbey Theatre players in 1912, The Playboy of the Western World provoked protests both in the theatres and in the streets by audiences upset by what one reviewer described as “this unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish men and, worse still, upon Irish girlhood.” More than a century later, audiences mostly wonder what the fuss was all about! Perhaps not quite so with Friel’s Translations: with all of the political, social, economic, and demographic changes in Ireland over the past thirty years, the coordinates of “Irish identity” may be different, but the issue is certainly no less relevant today than it was three decades ago.

BLOWING HIS OWN HORN

2010-02-15T08:00:00.007-05:00

I like to believe that I rub shoulders mostly with pretty tolerant people. Hey, why can’t we all just get along? But I was a minor party to an incident last week that has left me wondering.

The incident started when I was meeting with a student in my office. Suddenly one of my colleagues appeared in the doorway, stepped over the threshold, blew a brief flourish on a shiny brass cornet, and then darted back to wherever he had come from. Was I at a loss for words? I sure was! And so was the student . . . but we both took the moment in stride—well, actually sitting down—and went on with our meeting . . .

A short while later, I heard my colleague practicing scales on his cornet behind his closed office door, which is only about 10 yards from my office. English Departments can foster all sorts of eccentricities among its faculty, but this musical “prelude and étude” (as it were) was a first in my 26 years of haunting those particular hallowed hallways. Whatever . . .

But apparently not “Whatever . . .” for some others in the vicinity! For, another short while later, my colleague paused in the midst of marching purposefully down the hallway and told me that our office manager had phoned him to say that there had been “a complaint” about his cornet-playing and to ask would he please cease and desist. Working himself up to a state of Swiftian saevo indignatio in my doorway, he continued on his way, calling back over his shoulder, “Well, I’m going to register a complaint with the office manager about whoever registered a complaint about me!”

Another extremely short while later, he stood in my doorway for the third time in about 20 minutes, this time with his proverbial tail between his legs. “It turns out,” he reported with downcast spirit, “that there were four complaints about my playing . . .”

Well, we had a good laugh about it all a few nights later, and he explained that he had brought his cornet to work because he had a thirteen-hour day on campus—a morning meeting and then nothing on the docket before an evening class—and figured he could get in some serious practice on his scales for his lesson the next day. Poor guy: I suspect that taking up the cornet doesn’t even rate on the chart of questionable midlife crisis activities, yet he gets chastised simply for blowing his horn. . . . I guess the real lesson learned from this incident is what we all know already about life in an English Department: “Everyone’s a critic . . .”

HOW DO YOU SPELL R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

2010-02-14T08:00:00.001-05:00

This is a story I heard—second- or third-hand . . . but who’s counting?—about a guy that I have met once or twice just in passing. The guy is Irish-born (not that it really matters), and he’s a contractor of some sort. So . . . a couple of years ago he was at a garden center on Rte 28 just south of Boston and he noticed an African-American man that he thought he knew from somewhere, so he approached him and greeted him. “Where do I know you from?” he asked. “Have I done some work for you? Built an addition on your house . . . put in a driveway?” The African-American man smiled, then paused for a second before saying, modestly, “Well . . . I’m your Governor.” And so he was—the newly-elected-at-the-time Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick! He was at the garden center buying some flowers to plant at his home. Obviously, the contractor just couldn’t quite place him outside of the context in which he would have seen him before—that is, on the TV screen by which most of us know politicians, public officials and other “celebrities.”

I remembered that story a week or so ago when I saw Governor Patrick “out of context” myself—in a local supermarket. Unlike the contractor, I recognized him immediately; but also unlike the contractor, I did not approach him (though I do admire him greatly and plan to vote for him again in the next State election). But lots of other people in the supermarket did approach him, and I was impressed by how accommodating he was to requests that he pose for cellphone photographs with shoppers and their children. When I went through the checkout about fifteen minutes after he did, the clerks were still buzzing about how exciting it was to see him live-and-in-person and close-up: one of them said, “It was almost like meeting Obama . . .”

Anyway, as I tend to do whenever anything even vaguely out of the ordinary punctuates my day, I text-messaged my three daughters with the news: “Just saw the guv’nah @ Shaw’s!” Were they impressed? Well, here’s what I got back in response:

Woooo pretty cool! :)
Whattaya know! Did you talk to him?
wow!!! big friday night for deval patrick

Hmmm. . . . They say that text messaging is “tone deaf,” but somehow I came away with the impression that someone was being “disrespected” by those messages. Knowing that my daughters admire the Governor as much as I do, I have to figure that I was the one being denied just a little bit of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Not so, though, a few months ago when I texted those same three sardonic ladies from the airport in Albuquerque (of all places) where I had just seen another, though considerably lesser, local politician: talk about “out of context”! (But don’t talk about him as “considerably lesser”: his very large ego would be very badly bruised . . .) This was a guy whom, as a family, we had actively—and successfully—worked to defeat a couple of years ago in a hotly-contested election. So how did my daughters respond to the news that I had just seen him?

wow! did you say hi?
that sucks…safe travels!
Oh goshhhh….what is he doing there???

Well, that’s not quite all that was written . . . but rather than risk a libel suit, I’ll stop right there. And right here.

’TIS THE SEASON . . .

2009-12-15T18:30:00.003-05:00

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 . . .

2009-11-26T11:00:00.013-05:00

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

2009-11-01T09:00:00.009-05:00

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 . . . ?

2009-10-12T15:00:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-28T10:00:00.007-04:00

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!

2009-08-24T11:00:00.014-04:00

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

2009-08-09T23:00:00.004-04:00

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 . . .

2009-08-02T08:30:00.004-04:00

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 . . .

2009-07-24T09:45:00.005-04:00

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 . . .

2009-07-16T11:00:00.004-04:00

“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

2009-07-04T11:30:00.005-04:00

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 . . .

2009-07-01T10:30:00.002-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-29T23:20:00.006-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-27T23:30:00.010-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-24T23:45:00.001-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-21T16:00:00.002-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-16T13:00:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-11T11:00:00.004-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-05T10:00:00.004-04:00

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 . . .

2009-06-02T09:30:00.006-04:00

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 . . . !

2009-05-21T15:43:00.011-04:00

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

2009-05-18T23:00:00.011-04:00

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

2009-05-16T10:00:00.001-04:00

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 . . .

2009-05-12T08:45:00.003-04:00

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.

ROCKY DE VALERA & THE GRAVEDIGGERS ON THE PODGE & RODGE SHOW

2009-04-22T11:45:00.005-04:00

I am not often at a loss for words, especially when it comes to my favorite Irish retro rock ’n’ roll band, Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. But I’m pushed pretty close to speechlessness by their recent television appearance on RTÉ2’s The Podge and Rodge Show with glamorous “presenter” Caroline Morahan. Hard to imagine them performing “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies . . . but I guess that seeing is believing: ’nuff sed!

WHY LYRIC? . . .

2009-04-14T18:00:00.009-04:00

Right around a year ago, I had the pleasure of introducing two Boston-based Irish poets to an audience of colleagues and students at UMass Boston in the Global Writing Series sponsored by our MFA Program in Creative Writing. I have known the work of these two poets—and have known both of them as friends—for quite a few years. But I am thinking of them now, in National Poetry Month, relative to an essay I read recently by esteemed literary critic Jonathan Culler: “Why Lyric?” Published in PMLA last year, this essay makes the case for restoring the reading of lyric poems . . . as lyric poems: that is, not as “narratives” that are telling a story, which seems to have become the pro forma way of reading lyrics, but as rich and subtle linguistic and formal constructs (and as “a moment's monument,” perhaps, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes a sonnet). As Culler observes: “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the reader’s engagement with each line—and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its difference from narrative.”

So let the celebration of lyric begin with “Corpuscles,” a poem by Mary O’Donoghue from her second book, Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007), that really does both require and reward “the reader’s engagement with each line.” A writer of award-winning fiction as well as poetry, Mary was born in County Clare in the west of Ireland. The author of an earlier volume of poems, Tulle, which was published in 2000, she teaches in the English Department of Babson College.

CORPUSCLES

The train journey is ten hours,
eight states, long. After I finish
my book, finish eavesdropping

on conversations (the sweet-spoken
southern lady who once used her hand-bag
to clobber a man with a hand-gun;

the woman who talks about her driveway,
her diet, how her husband brought four
lobsters home on her birthday,

and she ate one each day with butter;
I want to change seats and cuddle up
to her gusto), I think about your blood

test, how you’ll have the outcome by now.
How they chose the big lively vein
that twists vine-like down your arm,

then they plunged and drew like a sump.
That evening, drops of you pipetted,
a palette enough for a Georgia O’Keefe,

a grid of round red sweets. I have
never seen you bleed, not in the crime
scene way of “bleeding profusely,”

though one nose-bleed was satisfying,
patterning the pillow with flattened
poppies. Even the large gash on your thigh

had turned to nice chitin by the time
I saw it, and itched to prise off a rusty
flake for the pink of skin caught off guard.

And I make awkward boxer-fisted
prayers for your corpuscles, shallow-shaped
bowls, tiny rubber diaphragms.

We talk long-distance late that night. Your voice
is chirrupy, Guinnessy, curious about Virginia.
My heart unfists in one swift graceful systole.

No less than “Corpuscles,” but in a much different way, the title poem of Aidan Rooney’s Tightrope (Gallery Books, 2007) also demands readerly attentiveness to each line to learn both the “how” and the “why” of the domestic tension that can hide behind closed doors. A native of County Monaghan, Aidan has been out in the Boston area for around twenty years, teaching French and English at Thayer Academy in Braintree. His first book of poems, Day Release, was published in 2000. Tightrope was officially launched in Dublin on Holy Thursday of 2008.

TIGHTROPE

Both how, when I pulled the front door
this morning to let the sun in,
some night class of spinner had strung
from one jamb to the other
the flimsiest funicular
that, now a waft of light and air
enters to liven the dusty house,
passes lightning bands of silver
along its barely visible floss
as if to make sure all is clear,
and why, is just beyond us, unless
some huge jump needed to be taken.

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH . . . CONTINUED

2009-04-10T09:00:00.007-04:00

“Words alone are certain good.” That is the tenth line in the first poem in William Butler Yeats’s Collected Poems. Pretty conspicuous. Words are also literally “the stuff of poetry.” Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to poems that draw to themselves a reader’s awareness of any and every poem being what W. H. Auden referred to so accurately as “a verbal contraption.” (Auden described his initial engagement with any poem thus: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?”)

Certainly that was part of what caught my eye in “Poem I Cannot Read Aloud,” included in Getting Lost in a City Like This, the hot-off-the-press volume of poems by Jack Anderson. A longtime NYC-based dance writer and critic, Anderson steps lightly with his theme here, yet his deftly-phrased and nicely-balanced free verse couplets (how this poem “works”) leave a satisfying imprint on this reader.

POEM I CANNOT READ ALOUD

There is this ancient word:
Caryatid.

I know what it means,
Am fascinated by its image:

A stoic noble marble maiden
Who props up a building with her head.

There are male caryatids, too.
(Parenthetical question:

What are they called?
Answer at the end of this poem.)

Ever since I first saw that word
I’ve never known how to pronounce it.

Where does the accent fall?
And is the “y” like “eye” or “ee”?

If I ever peeked at a dictionary once,
I forgot what it said,

And I never want
to look it up again.

O mysterious word, be like that maiden,
Stay always patient, stony, mute,

Dear word I must never learn to pronounce
For, should I do so, this poem will crumble,

This poem kept alive
Only by its silence.

So do not ever say
“Caryatid” in my hearing!

(Male caryatids are called atlantes.
Does anyone know how that word in pronounced?)

Jack Anderson’s tenth collection of poems, Getting Lost in a City Like This was sent my way by my friend and colleague Mark Pawlak, one of the founding (and continuing) editors of the book’s publisher, Hanging Loose Press.

JOHN SCOFIELD AND THE PIETY STREET BAND . . . LIVE AT THE REGATTABAR

2009-04-05T09:00:00.008-04:00

For me, the first surprise related to last night’s show at the Regattabar in Cambridge was that I was there. John Scofield and the Piety Street Band sold out all four of their Friday-Saturday weekend performances. Not the biggest fan of Scofield (I have only one of his albums on my iPod, and it’s not among my favorites), I had taken a pass on the first call from a friend organizing fellow guitarists for an outing to the gig. But when an extra ticket became available at almost the last minute, I decided there could be worse ways to spend an hour or so on a Saturday evening, so . . .

So . . . the third surprise was how much I enjoyed the second surprise, which was the type of music that Scofield and his band performed: a rousing 75-minute set of Gospel tunes. A legendary jazz guitarist, Scofield has obviously returned close to his bluesy roots, and he and his fellow Piety Street-ers (Jon Cleary on vocals and keyboards, George Porter, Jr. on bass and Ricky Fataar on drums) gave the packed house a truly engaging show. Apparently the band’s name derives from the name of the street where their recording studio is located in New Orleans . . . which is good to know because there was no pie-in-the-sky piousness to their playing: this was “roots” music, pure and simple—bluesy, funky, and rockin’. While there was no air of irreverence about the band’s performance of traditional Gospel songs (sung mostly by Cleary, whose terrific voice is matched by his awesome piano chops), the choice of music seemed mostly an excuse—a really good excuse—for Scofield and company to stretch out and play multiple variations on the blues.

The dominant musical inflection of the night, then, was unabashedly pentatonic . . . but just when Scofield appeared to have locked himself into that boxy groove, he would bedazzle the there-to-be-bedazzled audience—mostly middle-aged male guitar players by the cut of them (. . . or us!)—with a “How-did-he-do-that?” Houdini-like escape clause (or phrase) pulled from his well-stocked gig bag of jazz tricks. Given that Scofield and company could play such “roots” music in their sleep, the fourth surprise of the night was that there was nothing perfunctory about their performance: they were clearly “feeling it” . . . and so was the audience.

If I were a guessing man, I’d guess that seeing John Scofield and the Piety Street Band “live and in person” could be more “vital” than listening to their recently-released CD, Piety Street, with its cookie-cutter 5-minute versions of the songs that they gave extended treatment to last night. Still, I might just add that album to my iPod: that sort of music doesn’t get old . . .

Postscript (9:30 a.m.):
I just found on YouTube a really interesting documentary video about the making of the Piety Street album: check it out!

SOFT DAY . . .

2009-04-03T23:00:00.007-04:00

Somewhere—I think on a bookshelf in my office—I have an anthology of contemporary (at the time) Irish writing that I added to my personal library way back in 1980. I have not looked at it in a while, but I thought of it today as I ventured out into what the Irish would surely call a “soft day” in Boston: a bit foggy with a light mist falling steadily and with a false hint of brightening behind the low overcast. A perfect day to cross the border into the People’s Republic of Cambridge for lunch at Grafton Street in Harvard Square with my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell and our mutual friend Irish publisher and poet Peter Fallon, who happens to have been co-editor of that long-ago anthology . . . titled Soft Day.

I first met Peter in 1980 when I was in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame and he was out to America promoting that book: I have thus known him longer than I’ve known my wife! Over the years, we’ve crossed paths a half-dozen times or so—each time the occasion involving Peter stepping out of the impressive shadow cast by his primary literary identity as publisher of Gallery Books, the leading poetry press in Ireland for the past four decades, and stepping into the spotlight as a truly fine poet in his own right.

Mostly Peter is a poet of life on and around a family farm in the Irish midlands. “I think it exquisite,” he wrote in the title poem of his volume Winter Work (1983), “to stand in the yard, my feet on the ground, / in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit.” Obviously, bucolic County Meath could hardly compete for headlines with the poetry of so many of his contemporaries engaging with the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland during that same period. Yet Peter continued to be true to his own small world, and the body of his poetry that has accumulated over several decades testifies to the quiet assertion he makes, relative to the Northern Troubles, in “My Care” (also from Winter Work):

All I ever wanted was
to make a safe house in the midlands.

‘How’s all you care?’ I’m asked.
‘Grand. And yours?’ I don’t repeat
my worry for my care, my country. When I go home
the animals are healthy, safe. There’s that.

There’s that, indeed. And in his most recent volume of poems, The Company of Horses (Gallery Books, 2007), Peter Fallon continues to work finely nuanced variations on the themes of place-centeredness that have defined his writing from the beginning. One poem that I really like from this new volume is “A Winter Solstice,” not just for Peter’s signature engagement with his familiar beloved place in north Meath—here heightened by his wonderful weaving and unweaving of the metaphorical and the literal in the language of the poem—but also for his signature music, those quiet yet certain end rhymes of lines 2, 4, and 6 in each stanza, their mathematical predictability subtly subverted by the poet’s deft management of irregular line length. Peter Fallon is not a prolific poet (this is his first full-length volume of new lyric poems since 1998). He thus makes every word and every line and every stanza count:

A WINTER SOLSTICE

A low sun leans across
the fields of County Meath
like thirty watts behind
a dirty blind. New year begins to breathe
new life into the ground.
The winter wheat begins to teethe.

The tarmac streams like precious ore
beside wrapped bales bright in the glare.
Crows shake like collies by a puddle
blooms of spray, and they declare—
a boy’s voice breaking in the throat
of morning—a prayer

that works to scour the slate
of unimaginable
hurt. We draw breath in the air—
its shapes are almost tangible—
and the breath and sweat of horses
makes a minor mist—beautiful.

And beautiful the light on water
as the age’s newly minted coin.
You’d be hard pressed from here
to tell a withered elm across the Boyne
from an ash that’s hibernating.
Past and present join

in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive
with losses, yes, and lessons too,
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice—to live; to thrive.

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH . . .

2009-04-01T07:00:00.013-04:00

April 1st—and thus the start of National Poetry Month. No fooling . . . and no better time than now to begin to redress the utter absence of poetry from this blog. It’s not that I don’t read poetry (on pretty much a daily basis, no less): it’s more that I just haven’t come up for air much recently from my reading of prose, especially fiction.

But I might as well get this month off on the right foot (metrical and otherwise) with “shout outs” to a couple of poet-friends of mine who have shared their work with me in recent months. The first is Dorothy Shubow Nelson, who last Fall published her first book of poems, The Dream of the Sea. I took my time with this book, picking it up and putting it down, reading it forward and backward over a few weeks. Dorothy shows a real attentiveness to craft in her poems—they are satisfying and gratifying, one after another. But the one that I keep on returning to is actually the one that I just happened to read first, when I flipped open the book for the first time a few months ago:

HORN PLAYERS
Pine Street, Cambridge

Six horn players performed under
our window in the middle of the night

a dissonant modern composition
with unexpected harmonies.

The horns were old, tarnished, gray.
Were we being targeted or praised?

I read that the army was short on buglers—
they were playing reveille on tape.

There’s hunger here and lack of work
no shortage of horn players on this street.

I love the way that the poem “turns” away from its whimsical—almost surreal—opening six lines to hoist some serious thematic weight related to the troubling times that we live in: the painful recognition of both the need for and the shortage of military buglers in this time of high-casualty overseas war along with the compounding irony of the war-complicated economic woes so close to home. This one is a real keeper.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the launch of a fine new literary journal, Consequence, which is dedicated to publishing literary engagements with war in the 21st century. Dorothy has a poem in that inaugural issue of the journal, and so does Kevin Bowen, who is well-known for writing about the Vietnam war from his perspective as a veteran who served with the U.S. Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division in 1968-1969. Consequence is well worth looking into.

And so is Kevin’s latest gathering of poems, Thái Bình / Great Peace—a set of compelling lyrics culled from his various return visits to Vietnam over the past couple of decades. Of the many poems that gripped me in this chapbook, “In the Cu Chi Tourist Zone” is among the most powerful. Part of the reason is that I read it right around the time we read and discussed in my Understanding Literature course Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” which has a scene involving the network of tunnels that the U.S. soldiers had to deal with in Vietnam (and that scene inevitably reminds me of the movie Platoon, which captures so graphically the unspeakable stress and strain the soldiers experienced when they had to crawl into those tunnels to ensure they were empty before destroying them). But another reason this poem particularly struck me involves the way that it testifies to the ongoing-ness of the Vietnam war . . . the “collateral damage” that continues to be felt on both sides of the globe. One of the functions of poetry is to provide such testimony:

IN THE CU CHI TOURIST ZONE

After the tunnel crawl, the lecture on methods
of channeling smoke from the kitchens,
care of the wounded, the old woman tells
how she survived the Rome Plows,
listened from her spider hole to the soldiers’
footsteps overhead. But then, something
not in the script happens. The acrid scent
of tear gas drifts through the lean-to.
In a nearby field two boys run from a ditch,
behind them a rusting red fifty-five gallon drum
leaks pink powder down into a water-filled bomb crater.
Call it collateral damage, thirty years later again.

THE NEXT BAND . . . LIVE AT RYLES JAZZ CLUB!

2009-03-16T11:45:00.016-04:00

So . . . last night the jazz combo I play in took to the bandstand in one of our 3-times-a-year “battle of the bands” sessions at Ryles Jazz Club in Inman Square in Cambridge. An ensemble housed at the John Payne Music Center in Brookline, we call ourselves The Next Band . . . because that’s who we are at these battles: “the next band” to take the stage . . .

Of course, it’s not really for me to say . . . but that will not stop me from saying it anyway: I think we played a pretty good set—5 tunes that showcase who we are and what we are capable of musically. We led off with “Grooveyard,” a really fine tune—catchy melody, good chord changes for soloing (I’ll take credit for suggesting it!)—penned back in the 1950s by pianist Carl Perkins. We went around the bandstand for solos—Noam on baritone sax, Joe on trumpet, Amelia on piano, yours truly on guitar, Greg on bass—all held together by our guest drummer, Bruce.

With our groove established, we turned the mic over to our vocalist, Julie, for the “North American nightclub debut” of “I Believe in Rhubarb,” a witty love song written by Oren, the brother of our bari player. Noam (on flute), Amelia, and Joe took solos . . . and Oren took a bow!

Then we shifted gears and played “Simone,” a Frank Foster tune written in 3/4 . . . and I guess we performed it in 3/4 too! (I’m pretty sure Amelia chose that one: she likes those jazz waltzes . . .) Joe, Amelia and Greg soloed. . . .

Then we had another vocal feature—Julie silencing the hubbub of conversation in the room with a compelling version of Eden Ahbez's “Nature Boy,” a song introduced to the world by Nat “King” Cole in 1947. We had a nice arrangement, with Greg walking the bass behind Julie for a half chorus before the rest of us joined in. Noam and Joe soloed.

Our closer was a great Lou Donaldson number, “Cookin’” (Joe’s recommendation—lots of dots on the page!). Again we went around the bandstand for solos on this one, and Julie took a turn too with some scat-singing: a rousing finish to a fine set.

I guess that by the time we took the bandstand at 8:10 p.m. as the penultimate combo of a “battle” that started in the afternoon, there were still about 125 people in the audience. Many of them were groupies of our trumpet player, Joe—including his 85-year-old mother who rode a bus all the way from Baltimore just for the occasion! They seemed pleased with what they heard . . . which is more than enough incentive for us to do it all again: in May, I think . . .

THE EARL OF STRATOCASTER . . . AND OTHER MUSICAL NOTES

2009-03-08T23:00:00.008-04:00

Somewhere—in a box in the basement, I expect—I still have the bootleg cassette tape that a friend gave me a dozen years ago or more of a Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters recording, Blues Guitar Virtuoso Live in Europe. Sometime in the meantime, I picked up that recording on CD and added it to my iPod. It has some great tunes on it: Freddie King’s “San-Ho-Zay” and “The Stumble,” the jazz anthem “Moanin’” (recorded most famously by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers) . . . and a lot of variations on Earl’s forte, the twelve-bar blues. And I’ve got more Ronnie Earl on my iPod: his albums Healing Time and and The Color of Love and his collaboration with fellow New England guitar slinger Duke Robillard, The Duke Meets the Earl. So I’ve been listening to him a lot and for quite a long time . . . but until this evening I never had a chance to see him perform live. Although he lives in the Boston area, Earl rarely “plays out” . . . and by bad luck or bad timing I’ve missed him the couple of times that he has played in the area in the past year. But the chance was well worth waiting for as he and the Broadcasters certainly did not cheat their audience at the Regent Theater in Arlington—they played for more than two hours non-stop! Mostly it was the blues . . . with variations or inflections: some slow tunes, some burners, a bit of gospel, a bit of jazz. . . . From the opening razor-edged notes on his red Fender Stratocaster, the guitarist had the audience at his mercy: he is an expressive player with a signature Strat sound—at times introspective, at times (as when he wanders off the stage and into the audience as far as his cord will allow) unabashedly extroverted—and the almost-full house lapped it up. While the missus and I agreed that a guest vocalist on a tune or two would have added some variety to this all-instrumental show, we also agreed that his keyboardist—Berklee College of Music professor Dave Limina on Hammond B3 organ and piano—certainly helped to compensate, contributing some brilliant solos as well as utterly sympathetic comping. Providing a rock-solid foundation for those two frontmen, Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums rounded out the really tight quartet. (Coincidentally, Mouradian was featured in the Boston Globe a week or so ago: he and his son are master guitar makers and repairmen . . .)

Catching a legend like Ronnie Earl “live and in person” reminded me that so far 2009 has been pretty good musically. About a month ago we saw another guitar legend, Pat Martino, play at Scullers Jazz Club, and on Valentine’s night we went to see vocalist Ernestine Anderson at the Regattabar. Each of those shows had its moments, though each fell a bit flat as well. Martino has chops galore, but he plays so fast—even on slow tunes, just furious flurries of notes—that subtlety of expression tends to fall by the wayside. Martino has an interesting story: a couple of decades ago he had a brain aneurysm and lost his guitar memory—he had to relearn his instrument from scratch by listening to his own recordings. . . . Obviously, he has returned to his previous level of mastery . . . with a fury!

Ernestine Anderson has a story too: at 80 years old, she is one of the last links to the golden era of jazz vocalists (she would have come up on the heels of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday). But while she still has the pipes, she was literally invisible to many people in the audience: already diminutive, she sang sitting down on a low chair; with the Regattabar filled to overflowing, there were no sightlines to the low riser that held the chair—that was a bit disappointing. Still . . . we enjoyed being in her presence, especially since her album When the Sun Goes Down has been a constant in our lives for two decades, first on vinyl, then on CD, now on iPod . . .

ROCKY DE VALERA ON YOUTUBE

2009-03-06T17:00:00.011-05:00

On my Irish Matters blog, which recycles various of my shorter pieces of published writing (reviews and so on), one post focuses mostly on the Irish retro rock ’n’ roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers, first formed in Dublin early in 1978. Their resurrection late in 2005, almost a quarter-century after the original band had been laid to rest, testifies persuasively to the power of embalming. As further evidence of that power, check out their hot new video, just launched on YouTube. As one waggish commentator has already remarked, this video—filmed on the Hill of Howth—“obviously” alludes to Molly Bloom’s remembrance of that very setting in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses, which culminates in that most famous of affirmations: “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Yes, James Joyce is rockin’ in his grave!

Postscript: 3/11/09:
As if that YouTube commentator’s remarks are not irreverent enough, yesterday’s Irish Times includes a column by Kate Holmquist, the wife—or “band widow,” as she puts it—of the Gravediggers’ pseudo-eponymous leader/vocalist. Styling herself “Mrs. Rocky De Valera,” she has a lot of fun at the expense of “Mr. Holmquist” and his protracted mid-life crisis . . . “which started at the age of 20.” Check it out!