Bookends Read online

  there was so much to see, and hear, and touch—walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden [ . . . ] And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn’t know—music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real.

  I had wanted, carrying my sugar pills and plastic stethoscope around in a plastic black bag, to be a doctor, and then, feeling the first pangs of world-making hunger, an architect. It was while reading The Phantom Tollbooth that I began to realize, not that I wanted to be a writer (that came a little later, at the mercy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but something simpler: I had a crush on the English language, one that was every bit as intense, if less advanced, as that from which the augustly named Mr. Norton Juster himself evidently suffered.

  I am the son and grandson of helpless, hardcore, inveterate punsters, and when I got to Milo getting lost in The Doldrums where he found a (strictly analog) watchdog named Tock, it was probably already too late for me. I was gone on the book, riddled like a body in a cross fire by its ceaseless barrage of wordplay—the arbitrary and diminutive apparatchik, Short Shrift; the kindly and feckless witch, Faintly Macabre; the posturing Humbug; and, of course, the Island of Conclusions, reachable only by jumping.

  Puns—the word’s origin, like the name of some pagan god, remains unexplained by etymologists—are derided, booed, apologized for. When my father and grandfather committed acts of punmanship they were often, generally by the women at the table or in the car with them, begged if not ordered to cease at once. “Every time I see you,” my grandfather liked to tell me, grinning, during the days of my growth spurt, “you grusomer!” Maybe puns are a guy thing; I don’t know. I can’t see how anybody who claims to love language can’t fail to marvel at the beautiful slipperiness of meaning that puns, like aquarium nets, momentarily catch and bring shimmering to the surface. Puns act to shatter or at least compromise meaning; a pun condenses unrelated, even opposing meanings, like a collapsing dwarf star, into a singularity. Maybe it’s this anti-semantic vandalism that leads so many people to shun and revile them.

  And yet I would argue—and it’s a lesson I learned first from my grandfather and father and then in the pages of The Phantom Tollbooth—that puns, in fact, operate to generate new meanings, outside and beyond themselves. Anyone who jumps to conclusions, as to Conclusions, is liable to find himself isolated, alone, unable to reconnect easily with the former texture and personages of his life. Without the punning island first charted by Norton Juster, we might not understand the full importance of maintaining a cautionary distance toward the act of jumping to conclusions, as Mr. Juster implicitly recommends.

  But it was not just the puns and wordplay that gave me a bad case of loving English. It was the words themselves: the vocabulary of the book. I can still, forty years later, remember my first encounters with the following words: macabre, din, dodecahedron, discord, trivium, lethargy. They are all, capitalized and adapted, characters in the novel. Entire phrases, too, found their way into the marbles sack of my eight-year-old word-hoard: “rhyme and reason,” “easy as falling off a log,” “taking the words right out of your mouth.” To this day when I happen to write those or any other of the words that I remember having first seen in The Phantom Tollbooth, I get a tiny thrill of nostalgia and affection for the wonderful book, and for its author, and for myself when young, and for the world I then lived in. A world of wonders, but not so replete that it could not be improved upon, perhaps even healed, by a journey like Milo’s, through a book. But if you’ve read the book, you probably know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, what are you doing at the afterword? Stop reading this nonsense, already, and go back to Chapter 1. I’ll be waiting here for you, with a pin to prick your fingertip. (2011)

  Wonder When You’ll Miss Me, Amanda Davis

  ONLY DEAD WRITERS GET AFTERWORDS. AMONG ALL THE hateful consequences of the early death of Amanda Davis, on March 14, 2003, both to those who loved and miss her and to lovers of contemporary American fiction, this particular one—the words that you are now reading—is probably the most minor. I have spent the past five months or so hating every thing, and there have been so many, that has come along, or popped up, or appeared in a magazine or the day’s mail, to remind me that Amanda is dead. And now here I am, creating my own black-edged reminder. I guess that it’s a cliché to write “it saddens me to have to write these words,” but if so, the sentiment expressed is one that I have never truly experienced in my life before now. Every word that I string along here is bringing a cliché lump to my throat and a cliché tear to my eye. Every one of them is like each day that has passed since the fourteenth of March, a wedge driven into the crack that opened that afternoon, leaving Amanda forever on her side, back there, in the world that had Amanda Davis in it. There was no place, no need, in that world, for an afterword.

  My wife, Ayelet Waldman, met her before I did—roped by Amanda and her golden lasso into a friendship that while heartbreakingly brief was one of the truest and fiercest I have ever stood next to and admired—and one of the first things she told me about Amanda is, I think, the most germane to my purpose here. “I just finished her book,” Ayelet said, referring to the novel that you, too, have presumably just finished reading. “She’s the real thing.” Or maybe what she said was “The girl can write.” I’m not sure, anymore. It’s only after your friend’s airplane has crashed into a mountain in North Carolina—killing her, at the age of thirty-two, along with her mother and her father, who was flying the plane—that everything she ever said to you, and everything anyone ever said to you about her, takes on the weight and shadow, the damnable significance, of history.

  At the time, all that really registered, when I heard about Amanda from Ayelet, was the rare note of true enthusiasm in the voice of my wife, who reads almost everything, and in particular everything by youthful female novelists, and in particular those novels that treat in some way of damaged girls with body-image problems, of which, God knows, there have been many, with doubtless many still to come. Some of these novelists, some of whose books she admired, she had also met, and liked, as she had instantly liked Amanda. Never had she pronounced this judgment on any of them. It was obvious to her that Amanda had the goods—maybe that was what she told me—and then, when I read Amanda’s books, it was obvious to me, too. Her sentences had the quality of laws of nature, they were at once surprising and inevitable, as if Amanda had not written so much as discovered them. As the catcher Crash Davis said to his wild and talented young pitcher, Ebby LaLoosh, “God reached down from the sky and gave you a thunderbolt for a right arm.” Amanda had that kind of great stuff.

  It’s unfair, as well as cruel, to try to assess the overall literary merit, not to mention the prospects for future greatness, of a young woman who managed to produce (while living a life replete as a Sabatini novel with scoundrels, circus performers, sterling friendships, true love, hair’s-breadth escapes, jobs at once menial and strange, and years of hard rowing in the galleys of the publishing world) a single short story collection, the remarkable Circling the Drain, and a lone novel. I would give a good deal of money, blood, books, or years to be able to watch as Amanda, in a picture hat, looked back from the vantage of a long and productive career to reject her first published efforts as uneven, or “only halfway there,” or, worst of all, as promising; or to see her condescend to them, cuddle them almost, as mature writers sometimes do with their early books, the way we give our old stuffed pony or elephant, with its one missing shirt-button eye, a fond squeeze before returning it to the hatbox in the attic.

  At bottom of this kind of behavior on the part of old, established writers is the undeniable way in which our young selves, and the books that issued from them, invariably seem to reproach us: with the fading of our fire, the diminishment of our porousness to the world and the
people in it, the compromises made, the friendships abandoned, the opportunities squandered, the loss of velocity on our fastball. But Amanda never got to live long enough to sense the presence of her fine short stories and of this stirring, charming, beautifully written novel, as any kind of a threat or reproof. She was merely, justly proud of them. On some level that was not buried very deeply, she knew that she was the real thing. This is, in fact, a characteristic of writers who are (alas it is often found, as well, among those who are not). After Wonder When You’ll Miss Me, she was going to write a historical novel about early Jewish immigrants to the South, or a creepy modern gothic, and then after that she was going to try any one of a hundred other different kinds of novels, because she felt, rightly, that with her command of the English language, and her sharp, sharp mind, and her omnivorous interests, and her understanding of human emotion, and, above all, with her unstoppable, inevitable, tormenting, at times even unwelcome, compulsion to do the work, the hard and tedious work, she could have written just about any book she damn well wanted to.

  And we will never get to read any of them. This and the story collection are all that we have, and the crack in the world falls farther and farther behind us. And Amanda’s there, and we’re here, and I’ve never yet written or read a book, with or without an afterword, that could do anything at all about that. (2004)

  Appendix: Liner Notes

  1980–1996, Carsickness

  I SAW CARSICKNESS PLAY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE FALL of 1980, somewhere on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University, where I was a freshman; it might have been in the old Skibo Ballroom.

  I had listened to their self-released EP about a hundred and seven times by then, and I thought their live show was very exciting. There was nothing very exciting, however, about the five guys who made up the band. They had on jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of them wore a cardigan sweater. A couple of the guys verged, particularly when it came to the way they wore their hair, on the unkempt, but most of them looked, frankly, a lot like CMU engineering students. None looked even remotely, in the fall of 1980, like punks. This came very much as a relief to me, I remember. I was kind of afraid of punks, or at any rate I was going to be afraid of them, I believed, if I ever actually met any. They did not have punks in the suburban Maryland town where I had grown up and bought my first Clash, Blondie, and Jam records.

  I had been introduced to the music of Carsickness shortly after arriving at CMU by a dude on my dormitory hall (Donner A-Level West) who was the first, but by no means the last, ninth-level grandmaster of rock fandom I ever met. His name was John Fetkovich, but people called him Fetko. His knowledge was deep, wide, and intricately hyperlinked. He could steer you from the Velvet Underground to David Bowie to Uriah Heep to Pere Ubu to Patti Smith to Bruce Springsteen in one listening session without ever departing his zone of musical happiness. He was an engineering major, bespectacled, small of stature, and generous with his knowledge and with the contents of his record collection. He had a slot on WRCT, the campus radio station, and in time became a vigorous local champion of bands that had begun to ooze and bubble up from dark subterranean seams all over America: Hüsker Dü, X, Black Flag, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, etc. He spoke in brief, precise declaratives, with a Jim Henson gulp in his voice, bobbing his head for emphasis. There was a certain air of Muppetry about Fetko.

  “If you like punk,” he had told me, soon—like, minutes—after we first met, “you should check out Carsickness.” He bobbed his head. “They’re from here, and they’re great.”

  I went out and bought the aforementioned EP—it had four songs, among them the local “hit” “Bill Wilkinson” with its radio-hostile chorus—and, as I said, I loved it. But did I like punk? And were Carsickness a punk band?

  They didn’t look it, as I’ve said—no mohawks, no safety pins, not much leather in evidence—and they didn’t sound it either, apart from the vocals, and the angry politics that fueled most of the lyrics. Leader and lead singer Joe Soap (a pseudonymous Irish immigrant, it was said, whose precarious status was reflected in another song on that EP, “Illegal Alien”) often sounded a lot like Joe Strummer at his most drunken, if you know what I mean—the plaintive, heartbroken Strummer of “The Right Profile” and the final 00:30 of “Hate and War.”

  Even a cursory listen to this disc, however, will yield very little in the way of the kind of blunt, buzzing, major-chord drums-bass-guitar attack, formulated by the Ramones and codified in the UK, that by 1980 had already become conventionalized as “punky,” and none of ironic-nostalgic Sha-Na-Na-meets-Artaud pastiche vibe, Warhol’s drag-queen aesthetic filtered through the New York Dolls, that characterized the sound of many of the New York punk bands. Carsickness played songs that were rhythmically complicated, sonically adventurous, and instrumentally distinctive—saxophones! guitarists who could double on keyboards!—with drummer Dennis Childers laying down tricky time signatures and the rest of the band managing very nicely, thank you, to keep up. Their songs wandered musically in and out of genres, often in the course of a single track, and the band was not afraid, now and then, in their own spiky, frustrated way, to swing. At times Carsickness seemed—to my ear, at least—to verge on jazz or even (could it be?) on prog. They made music as hyperlinked and omnivorous, as disrespectful of boundaries as the musical taste of John Fetkovich (or of any ninth-level grandmaster of rock fandom, in my experience).

  In Pittsburgh, in 1980, they were playing a music that didn’t yet have—and would never really find—a name: “post-punk.”

  In fact it might be argued that in their restlessness to move, musically if not politically, beyond the stupid-is-smart aesthetic of punk, Carsickness invented post-punk—in Pittsburgh. Just as Hüsker Dü and Gang of Four and Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth were busy restlessly inventing it in Minneapolis, London, Boston, and New York. Just as, a few years later, bands in Pittsburgh that were made up of post-post-punks like me and my friends, kids who loved the Birthday Party and Wire but refused to stop listening to their Black Sabbath records, would spontaneously evolve a kind of heavy, heavy music that was called—as we would in time be informed by a Seattle-obsessed national media—“grunge.” (Moral of the story of Pittsburgh rock ’n’ roll, over and over and over again: if you want musical immortality, move somewhere else.)

  I didn’t know, in the fall of 1980, that there was something called “post-punk.” But I could tell—anybody could tell—that Carsickness were moving in another direction. They had pulled up stakes and struck out for some hinterland beyond the kingdom of punk. Even thirty-five (good lord!) years later, you can still hear it in the songs on this record: the sound of five young men united, for a time, by a sense of adventure. It’s the sound of my youth—and yours, whenever you were born, wherever you came of age, however you came into possession of the restlessness that is our common inheritance. (2017)

  Uptown Special Vinyl Edition, Mark Ronson

  INTRODUCTION

  “I don’t really know where the title came from. It was just something people said, just a term we used. Like, when you don’t see somebody around for a bit, when they’ve sort of gone missing, socially. You say, so-and-so ‘moved uptown’ or, you know, ‘he’s riding the Uptown Special.’”

  MARK RONSON (TO THE BEST OF MY RECOLLECTION), LONDON, JANUARY 2014

  IF YOU’RE READING THESE NOTES—IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH OF an interest in Mark Ronson and his music to dig so deep into the sofa cushions, feeling around for one last shiny dime—then by now you’ve probably heard the story. It’s the conventional wisdom, part of the mythology of this record: the story of Ronson’s so-called lost or uptown years: how the scenes he made, and the beaches he washed up on, and the sweet American music he imbibed in the course of that strange journey became the raw material for this, his fourth album.

  Just to make it clear at the outset: as far as I know, everything you’ve heard or read is bullshit. There’s nothing, no truth, in any of the outrageous claims that have been put for
ward, by the media and by various sketchy characters claiming to have “been there.” No Russian (or in some versions, Georgian) mobsters. No spiritual quest in the Nevada desert or under the tutelage of a slide-guitar-playing Delta hoodoo man. No monthlong, six-figure blackjack benders. No desperate transcontinental pursuit of an elusive, beautiful high-wire aerialist and “human cannonball,” as her circus company crisscrossed the country. All of that is slander at worst and at best the outcome of too many people with active imaginations getting a little too baked and then having at it on Genius.com.

  Part of the blame for this mess, and he’d be the first to admit it, lies squarely on the shoulders of Ronson himself. He never showed much interest in talking about the “Uptown Years” (a term that always makes him smile), preferring, as he would patiently explain to friends and interviewers alike, to let the music speak for itself. Until he played these songs for me, I had never heard much from Ronson about those years except when, for whatever reason, he would be caught off guard by some sudden fond memory of his days on the road as a roving ambassador for the American Automobile Association (AAA)’s Car Safety and Care-A-Van program. I can’t say that I was surprised when I learned the truth, though. Anyone who knows Ronson has heard his little lectures on the importance of regularly checking tire pressure, or keeping a well-stocked emergency kit in the vehicle. Whatever the reason for Ronson’s having fallen into what he prefers to call “my little uptown funk,” there is nothing mysterious in the cure he hit upon: lighting out for the territory, like Huck Finn, in a well-maintained, low-mileage 1994 stretch Lincoln Town Car,* its rear seating area and capacious trunk loaded with boxes full of literature on winterizing your vehicle and not, as some have claimed, bootleg Chinese semi-automatic rifles, stolen pharmaceuticals, or (you have to love this one) an alcoholic circus bear named Julio.