Saturday is Coming Sooner Than You Think
I had posted this list as my slate for the performance on Saturday:
Triumphal March of the Evil Empire (with CD, drums, keyboard and video projection)
Scribbles (with keyboard/guitar, drums and violin)
Walking Song (with CD & guitar)
Red Alert (with keyboard)
Daumen oben (with CD)
Al Adamson (with guitar)
Dolly the Sheep (with guitar, keyboard and possibly violin)
The Powers that Be (with clarinet & keyboard)
Claudia (with CD & film projection)
I finally went through my "rehearsal" last night. I discovered that I had to drop "Daumen oben" and "Al Adamson". I looked up the
file I had programmed the Daumen oben music into, and found that it only went up to the end of the introduction and was full of transcription
errors. I have neither the time nor inclination to fix the problem, even though it's just a short little piece.
With "Adamson" the music and words came to me on the bus one day recently. I didn't have a notebook or anything, so I ended up scrabbling
the whole thing down onto the empty spaces on the back of a postcard our church had sent out to notify my kid about Vacation Bible School.
The song, which has five verses, was written in tiny, barely legible handwriting, and I would have happily copied out the whole had I been able
to find the thing. But I can't. I barely located the notebook which contains "Dolly the Sheep."
For this performance I really didn't want to fall back on "(When I Kiss You) You Look Like John F. Kennedy". Let's face it, when I wrote that I was
21 years old, and had no problem the subject or the screaming voice that I sang in back then. The subject has worn alright (certain other songs,
such as "Haitian Vacation" are really starting to show their age) but the voice can no longer hack it. I'm older, and my new songs are pitched
lower and may as well address the topic of my struggle with arthritis as some topical event. I'd like this upcoming performance to reflect these
developments and I hope that the audience isn't too disappointed that I don't really plan to do the old songs that they know.
Big Books vs. Little Books
Finally, I had a frankly stupid thought, but would like to share it nonetheless. It's about large books versus small books - it occurs to me that large
books should have more "power" because they have more content (hopefully), but that small books have the advantage because they are more likely to be read. How many high school students who have read John Steinbeck's "The Pearl" have gone onto read "Of Mice and Men"? How many folks who have read Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" have also taken the plunge and read "David Copperfield"? Who that has read Marx and Engels' "Communist Manifesto" has gone onto to tackle "Der Grundrisse"?
It also occurs to me that there are exceptions to this rule in pop literature. Stephen King's long version of "The Stand" I believe has been read more widely than it's short predecessor, and the longer J.K. Rowling's books are the happier her fans tend to be when a given Harry Potter tome hits the market. Some short books are likewise not read very widely because their authors are known for works that are yet shorter. Many have read "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe but few are familiar with his one novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (one of the greatest books in English, IMHO.) A fairly well-known work of H.P. Lovecraft is "The Colour Out of Space", but it appears to me that even persons who try to pass themselves off as "Lovecraftians" are not necessarily hip to his novel "At the Mountains of Madness", which, I feel, blows Lovecraft's short stories away.
What this is all leading up to is that I'd like to see how one goes about writing a short book that has content equivalent to a large one. And I don't mean like in the case of Samuel Beckett's "Imagination Dead Imagine" (1965), a text of maybe fifteen pages so dense that it takes literally hours to read well; a sort of literary equivalent to a "black hole". It's certainly been done - George Orwell's "Animal Farm" comes to mind, as does the medieval book "The Little Flowers of Saint Francis".
My father, who writes novels and detective fiction, tells me I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to books. One short book that I used to see in the collections of my friends quite often was "The White Negro" by Norman Mailer. They generally didn't have any other Mailer books lying around, but that one was short, cheap, easy to find used and published by City Lights, so you'd see it around a lot. Perhaps not so much today, as it was a 1950s text about white people who aspire to be black to achieve a kind of cultural "coolness." It was my Dad who had the big Mailer books like "An American Dream" and "The Naked and the Dead." I was ultimately disappointed in Mailer for gravitating towards the pop, true crime type of writing, but in my own reading it's the big books that I like, but the short ones I'd like to write myself. Chapbooks, generally of philosophy and short fiction, used to be common in the American marketplace, especially during the depression - I read H. G. Wells story "In the Country of the Blind" in just such an edition when I was a teenager. You could hold it in the palm of your hand and carry it in your shirt pocket. Their disappearance from the scene (replaced by the regular paperback format in the 1950s) is yet another thing that I mourn no one else cares about - sort of like my friend Greg Frenandez' fixation on the replacement of Zantigo's restaurtant with the Taco Bell chain in the 1980s. I don't think he is yet over that.
Uncle Dave Lewis