Songs that get stuck in my head

“The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.”

That is a line from Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban. It has stayed with me because I meet its truth over and over again.

Especially with music.

All my life, songs have been getting stuck in my head. With the exception of the unwelcome ear worms that get stuck in everybody’s head, they mean something. They have the power of dreams.

When I heard the latest song float by at someone else’s house on Sirius, I was tired—almost always a requirement for songs to stick. I had heard it before, but not until that night did it decide to move in and stay.

It wanted to be played. It demanded to be played. The next day it nagged and kicked at me until I bought it on iTunes. Then it hung around, insistently, while I tried to work. In the evening, it disturbed my rest.

So what was that song, anyway?

It was “Broadway, Here I Come!” from the second season of SMASH.

I had the wrong idea about it, though. I thought it was an either/or song: either the singer is about to become a star on Broadway or jump from a ledge to his/her death. To me, it tracked both ways. The outcome is uncertain.

But when I looked up the musical HIT LIST — it is the big song in HIT LIST — I found out that the singer is quite definitely thinking about suicide.

This was a little depressing, as it is such a spirited song. It is full of life. A buoyant song about suicide? Apparently so. That melody both floats and falls.

My take on “Broadway, Here I Come!” is that change can feel terrifying, like leaping off a ledge. You realize your dreams and your old life is smashed to smithereens. The dark undertow of the song fits the pain of change.

It is a good song. So here is a shoutout for Jeremy Jordan, who sings it; Joe Iconis, who wrote it; and the excellent series SMASH, which enabled me to hear it.

Music reaches around reason.

****

What songs have stayed with you? Do you have any idea why?

Russell Hoban, a memory

Feb5

Yesterday, February 4, 2013, was Russell Hoban’s birthday; he would have been 88. He began as a successful children’s author in his native USA, then moved to London and reinvented himself as a novelist for adults. His books have lingering effects.

This is what he has to say about his own work:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can’t be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

In January 2011, I published my first Huffington Post piece, titled “Russell Hoban: A Great American Writer.” That was an audition blog—the one that determined whether I would get blogging privileges.

About two months later he contacted me via a Yahoo newsgroup I belong to called the Kraken, who are fans of Hoban’s work. His daughter in Connecticut had read the Huff Post piece. He wanted to talk to me, he said. Would I call him at his London home?

I thought it would be a short conversation, but it was a long one. We talked about writing and books; he gave me title after title, and author after author. I scrawled the names on scrap paper, which I still have.

He was 86 and had a number of health problems (he would die in December of that year). On the phone, however, he sounded like a man of thirty—both in his tone of voice and in his enthusiasm. That is how I will remember him.

In the words of blogger Christine Bissonnette: “Screw time and all its rules.”

Since 2002, fans around the world have celebrated Russell Hoban’s birthday by writing lines from his novels on yellow paper and leaving the paper in various places to be found by strangers. (Yellow writing paper figures in his first novel Kleinzeit.)

Coming upon a Hoban line unexpectedly is in my opinion the best way to discover him. You can see some striking examples here.

Lines here and there

Feb16

I will never be guilty of unconscious plagiarism, not because of my ethics but because of my memory. Never in this world could I steal from another writer without knowing what I am doing.

From the beginning, I have had this weird total recall for turns of phrase.

 What do I remember?

Examples from books:

Which fairly famous writer was fond of the adverb “obscurely” in dialogue? As in: “Not yet,” Ben said obscurely.

Answer: Shirley Jackson. She liked that construction and I don’t know of any other writer who does. I kind of like it myself.

Another example: Who wrote “It seemed to want to happen”?

Answer: Russell Hoban in Turtle Diary. This is a line I would love to steal, but I won’t.

Examples from movies:

“Is that clear?
“No, but it’s consistent.”
—What’s Up Doc

“Does salt work against the supernatural?”
“The Montusi bush men thought so. But they’re extinct.”
—The Haunting

“And you really are a gardener, aren’t you?”
—Being There

**Even more to the point, why do I remember?**

I am a writer, so recalling things I have read is not so unusual. The lines usually reflect some quality of the writing that I admire.

On the other hand, the lines I remember from movies tend to be from outer space. Such as the following:

“You tell municipal lighting we’re going to candlepower in fifteen minutes.”

That line is from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Not long ago I saw the movie and was slightly pleased to hear that line again, because I remembered it right down to the inflections in the actor’s voice.

I’m really sure I’ll never want to steal that one though.

Why did it stick? “Candlepower” is a good strong word, but that doesn’t explain it.

Please share some lines that you can’t forget. They couldn’t be nuttier than mine.

“You know you’ve got the brain of a four-year old child, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it.”
Groucho to Chico, Horsefeathers

Russell Hoban, in memorium

Dec14

Russell Hoban passed away yesterday. His editor David Lloyd wrote this tribute, one of many.

“Dear brilliant Russell. We took it in turns to read to him at the
end. His wife read Bassho. His son read Elmore Leonard. I read Robert
Louis Stephenson. The world will sound so different without him.

“Thank you Russell.

“Your words have been our delight.”

The following s is a post I wrote in January 2010. I’m a fan. I always will be.

The Sun Over the Water

And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going. . . . Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary, 1975

Sometime in the 1980s Turtle Diary and I found each other. The novel’s theme is “the things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.” I could relate and still can.

This is what he has to say about his own work:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can’t be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

In his search for the moment under the moment, Russell Hoban can make you laugh, too. He’s good at it.

An example: In his vampire novel, Linger Awhile, the hero is an 83-year-old man who falls in love with a girl in an old black and white movie. The man goes to one of the scientist-technician-sorcerers that pop up in Hoban novels now and then, and asks him to bring the girl back to life.

“Great,” remarks the scientist-technician-sorcerer. “You’re old and she’s dead. What do you want from me?”

Celebration

Russell Hoban’s birthday is February 4. Since 2002, fans around the world have celebrated by writing lines from his novels on yellow paper and leaving the paper in various places, where strangers find it unexpectedly. (Yellow writing paper figures in his first novel Kleinzeit.)

I once left a Hoban quotation in a Maryland train station that had an antique locomotive parked on a siding as an exhibit. The locomotive looked more like a prehistoric beast than a machine, and the day was raw and windy.

Coming upon a Hoban line unexpectedly is in my opinion the best way to discover him. You can see some striking examples here.

Armchair BEA: Who are you?

May23

Thanks to the excellent book blog Erin Reads, which I know about because I know Erin (we belong to the same book club), I discovered the Armchair BEA. I discovered that BEA (Book Expo America) was about to get under way through another book blog: The Book Smugglers.

I am a part-time book blogger. However, as you can tell from the “Books I Like” category on the right, books are often the subjects of posts at Writer’s Rest.

Reading and Writing

I wrote and self-published a novel, Cel & Anna, about 3 months ago. This was, is, and will continue to be a learning experience. One of the things I learned was how many books there are in the world. Following on the heels of that realization came another one:

I want to read a lot of books.

The Book Smugglers alone are responsible for quite a few now on my To-Read list. Every time I go onto Goodreads, I find more.

About Me

When not writing, I live a quiet normal life in a semirural area of southwestern Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up. I spent more than 20 years in the Washington, DC, area, where I worked as a medical/pharmaceutical editor (I still do, from a home office).

The most notable thing about me as a reader is the way obscure books fly into my hands. I swear that they find me. How many people own novels by Amos Tutuola and Fred Secombe? How many people have blogged not once but twice at The Huffington Post about the American expatriate author Russell Hoban?

And I am absolutely positively the only novelist in the history of the world to request permission from Syracuse University Press to reprint passages from Anne Sneller’s beautiful 1964 memoir, A Vanished World. I cannot prove this, but the connection is too obscure to have occurred to anyone except me, who has roots in the country Sneller wrote about.

Here is something I wish for: more illustrated books for adults. Not graphic novels, but books with pictures in them. One of the first posts I wrote was titled Illustrated Books: A Good Idea.

Here is a book I would recommend to anyone: Nancy Willard’s Sister Water.

Here are a pair of mid-twentieth century masterpieces: Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge.

My idea of a lovely Sunday afternoon: a glass of iced tea, a breeze blowing through the french doors, and a book to enjoy.

Reading and writing are both acts of imagination. I believe a story unread is a story uncompleted.

Apocalypse x 2

Nov23

Riddley Walker

I wrote about Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker not long ago (Reader Seeks Imperfection). It is a post-apocalypse novel set in England (“Inland”), where life has regressed back to the Iron Age.

Riddley Walker is a 12-year-old boy (at 12 you are an adult in that world, for good reason). He leaves home to walk the riddles of existence, telling stories when they come to him as his father did.

The novel is written in fractured English and reads at the speed of good poetry, which is to say that it will be on the nightstand for a long time.

Riddley Walker’s world is brutal and his life is hard. But if you are up to the challenges Hoban throws down, the novel is exhilarating, not depressing. It plunges into the heart of a mystery. This small novel is very large.

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood sets Oryx and Crake in the aftermath of a global plague that has wiped out most of human life on earth. The time is the near-future, which isn’t plausible. There are far too many technological advances for a society that still spells “e-mail” with a hyphen.

Readers see plenty of recognizable objects: the Internet, television, cars, energy bars, canned ravioli. The novel is written in ordinary English.

In Riddley Walker, Hoban strips away every familiar thing. Atwood creates vast piles of familiar trash and says, what a mess.

Atwood does know how to create a story that pulls, no small achievement because the world she depicts is ugly and apparently past redemption, and so are the creatures who inhabit it.

The narrator, Snowman (aka, Jimmy) whines about the bad treatment he received from his parents. His father did this and this and this, his mother did that. Yet he is not a boy; he is a grown man, a bizarre survivor of the plague. He is fighting to survive, but he can’t stop remembering how unhappy he was at home. How unhappy he was at college. How unhappy he was in his first job. And so on.

When Snowman/Jimmy goes to college, there are vermin in his dorm room, the food is vile, and the girls are unappealing. When he sees a production of MacBeth, it is lousy. You get the idea.

On page 72 of Oryx and Crake is this line: “It went without saying, his unhappiness.” When I read that, I thought, if only.

I tried to imagine 12-year-old Riddley Walker whining about how his parents treated him. I couldn’t.

The difference between Riddley and Snowman reflects the greater difference in the novels. Riddley Walker goes deep; Oryx and Crake stays in the shallows.

(Full disclosure: I haven’t finished Oryx and Crake yet—I have 77 pages to go. Atwood may pull a a redemption stunt at the end. I suspect she will because Oryx is the only sympathetic character and so far her role was been minor. Oryx has to do something to get her name in the title.)

Reader seeks imperfection

Nov5

I want writers to be reliable and lively guides through an undiscovered country. If they are, I’ll follow them without counting or even noticing the bumps in the road. Flaws sometimes indicate a writer is going deeper and trying harder to get it right.

Readers are forgiving as long as writers are not dull. An imperfect story with heat—that indefinable spark between a writer and reader—will always be worthwhile.

Forget perfection

In the words of Paul Gross in the great miniseries Slings & Arrows, “There’s nothing more BORING than perfection.”

Imperfect masterpiece turns thirty

November marks the 30-year anniversary of publication of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. I’ve written about him before: here.

This novel is set in a desolate, post-nuclear holocaust England and written in fractured English. Although the lives of the people are short and brutal, they live in a world that once knew art and spaceships. They grope for meaning. So do you. For example:

…You cud get jus the fayntes glimmer of what it musve ben to be the Puter Leat [the computer elite?]. To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyond the sarvering gallack seas [the sovereign galaxies]. Not jus singing it you know. Acturely going it acturely roading out thru space.

Yes, the whole book is like that. And yes, it works. As you puzzle out the meaning of the words, the characters puzzle out the meaning of their existence.

Hoban is a lively and reliable guide through an undiscovered country, but the country is weird and the going is slow. He pays you the compliment of assuming you can keep up with him.

If Hoban had written about this demolished world in ordinary English, Riddley Walker would not be a masterpiece. The most eloquent prose in the world could not have elevated it so high.

Once a firehead…

Feb25

Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers

Certain experiences become part of who you are. As you might guess from the above picture, this is not an entirely rational process.

Last Friday a friend on Facebook posted something that made me smile. He said there is a new web zine about the Firesign Theatre: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here.

Fireheads know that line. It was spoken by a janitor in Don’t Crush That Dwarf. He then said, with weary disgust, “My, you people are so superstitious.”

I can hear those lines now, right down to the inflections in the janitor’s voice.

The Firesign Theatre’s comedy is joyful and rampant, and comes at you fast from every direction. It is hard to put a label on what they do because they do so much.

Firesign’s humor has no meanness in it. I have always liked them for that.

I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus

On some level this makes sense

Why do novels by Russell Hoban and recordings by the Firesign Theatre occupy places of permanent high esteem in my life? I’m pretty sure there is a direct path from Firesign, those grand deconstructors of the rational world, and Hoban with his pursuit of “the moment under the moment,” but I can’t explain it.

Our weird and interesting affinities make sense on a deep level below reason. That deep level does interest me.

Angerdream, an homage

I wrote a novel called Cel & Anna. In it is an enforcement agency called Public Eye, and in Public Eye is a particular enforcer named Rad Blucher. Blucher requires ever-increasing doses of aggression-enhancing medication to do his job. I needed a name for the drug he was on.

Instantly a Firesign line popped into my head:

“Today’s modern, a-go-go woman just pops these simple little pills called Angerdream.”

Snap! I had the name of Blucher’s drug.

I don’t know whether Firesign would call this an homage or plagiarism. Right now the point is moot.

The Firesign Theatre are David Ossman, Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, and Peter Bergman. It makes me happy to know that they are alive, well, and unrepentant. And still working—

Happy Russmas

Feb4

Since 2002, it has been traditional for fans of the great novelist Russell Hoban to spread the word about his books on his birthday, February 4. To find out more about this celebration and the man who is the reason for it, go to the SA4QE web site.

(S stands for Slickman, the last name of the event’s founder. A4 refers to the size of the yellow paper strewn about in the novel Kleinzeit. QE stands for Quotation Event.)

Writer's Rest

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