Friday 7/2/21
Plumber came. Second plumber had to come.
Wrote an 1800 feature on Scott LaFaro and the work he cut apart from the Bill Evans Trio that is foundational to his legacy, focusing on sessions with Booker Little, Gunther Schuller, and Ornette Coleman.
I wonder if I should ask Sagging Meniscus about also doing a book of my jazz writings in addition to the second novel. The editor is a man who really knows his stuff, with an intellectual mind I respect. Or giving them a second book, anyway. Fiction or non.
I'll write about the Beatles' Get Back docu-series for The Daily Beast in November.
This is McCartney singing Lennon's "I'm So Tired" during the sessions.
Right now I'm revisiting "And the Life"--and considering it for There Is No Doubt, but also just revisiting it and seeing if anything needs doing, and "Big Bob and Little Bob." I can see how it could be very hard for someone to believe that the same person wrote these works. They're just so different. And while it's different, the voice of "Big Bob and Little Bob" reminds me vaguely of "The Bee's Knees" and "Blinkered." The former is in Between Cloud and Horizon, the latter will be in If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, Fuckery, Hope in January. But even with that said, the voice is so different than the voices in those stories.
(Note to self: I cannot believe you started a book with a grocery list. Additional note to self: I can't believe you wrote something as outrageous as "EAP and Abe.")
I rarely reply to anything on Facebook, but I'm in a baseball books FB group, and someone put out a call for papers in which someone writes a piece on why they love a book, and someone else writes a piece on why they hate it. Two of the books they were doing were Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer and Jim Bouton's Ball Four. I wouldn't do something like this--it's an academic journal, so you're talking few eyeballs, and it doesn't pay, but I did post a comment about Ball Four:
That's an arresting premise. Ball Four is, I think, as much a portal as it is a book. Zeppelin is the band version of this--or a band version. One reads the work at a place in time, a point in life, and it is there that the work is most potent. Revisited long after, the work may not resonate as it once did, which is also in some ways not its purpose. It belongs to a stage in one's life. And, too, it can help move someone towards something with better staying power, that has a knack for changing, blending with a person's life as they themselves change and blend. I think those are the most important works, and the most important books. For me, Ball Four was what it was when I was fifteen. I do not hate it, certainly, but in the scope of a life, it is a form of comparative juvenilia. But all kinds of things are needed to fulfill all kinds of roles. And help with all manner of passages.
I think composing "Eede Upstairs" is going to be the most intense experience of my life. I want to savor it, because I know it will transform me.