Rob the Recounter
Dec. 27
“It’s typical, I guess, for an older man, a dad of sorts, to linger in the past. To claim some importance to people I first heard about in my youth. Must steer myself, like a car in first gear, onto the streets of the present.”
Haha, that does sound like an old man, heading off for new adventures in first gear. I’m sure you’re more adroit in mind and soul than this image would suggest. You’ve been going off to sample some new kind of art or idea as long as I’ve known you, and I don’t think you’ve slowed down any. It’s been a blessing to me that you have this appetite, that you like to share what you’ve found, and that you do it appetizingly. What a list it would be if I put down everything you’ve gotten me interested in, from Mark Twain and Jimmy Cagney and Tom Lehrer and Flip Wilson and James Dickey to Tobias Wolfe and Richard Ford and Jon Franzen and Anna Karenina and…whatever’s next. That’s a very short version of the list.
I like that reporting on your night of somewhat-blues by a Japanese guitarist. Both your observations and Celia’s. A fresh example of you going out and finding something new and coming back to share the the salient, most-interesting parts.
Do you remember coming to school and recounting something you’d seen on TV the night before? Often with key bits of dialogue, sometimes done more or less in the voice of the performer? I remember you “doing” The Music Man, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen. I remember you doing one or more of Tom Lehrer’s albums. I remember you reading me a long passage from Tom Sawyer (or maybe Huck) on cassette tape. I remember you bringing “The Corrections” to one of my Brooklyn apartments and reading me the first several pages. Same thing with a Richard Ford novel. I remember you taking me to see a 17-hour French film in which an actor walked around the city trying to remember something, and I think never did—but maybe in the sequel. I’ll be busy that weekend, so you can tell me about it.
Yeah, I’d like to hear more, too, about how that guitarist came to have the blues. And wonder what he would say to your observation that his work still doesn’t have the pain.
Happy to hear that the letters are Paul Bowles aren’t up there with ours. I’m zeroing in on getting our first set (Years 2000 – 2002) into covers. There’s a process of trial and error to go through—getting printed samples in various sizes, paper stocks, font choices, and so on. And learning how to create covers efficiently. And more things like that. It can take three weeks to get back one of the experiments. But I’m getting there. Accumulating know-how.