Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

I’ve kept this blog for writings about my own tunes thus far, but I’ve thought for a few weeks now, having finished or nearly finishing a number of books I’ve been working on, to create a blog on which I respond to the things I read.  Among other things, I’ve realized over the years that I am in a process of forgetting the things I’d read in my twenties.  I don’t want to do that, and as I donated my library to the Riverside Public Library when we moved to Senegal, I can’t just go to my shelves to remind myself.  I began a separate blog, but realized as writing that I would do as well to keep all my writing in one spot.  In any event, the tunes I write have everything to do with the things I read and have read.

Last thing I finished was Mumbo Jumbo, which I’d been told made Ishmael Reed‘s reputation.  I finished it a week ago Saturday, I’d read a piece he’d written for Counterpunch on “Precious,” obliterating the film in what is in hindsight an obvious way but which I’ll say I didn’t piece together myself. In any event, it put it in my head that I needed to read one of his books as I hadn’t yet.

The short and long of it was that it was a fantastic book, and I’m more satisfied with it than I think any novel I’ve read in a long while.  Reed’s approach to text is idiosyncratic, but totally controlled.  I’ve always liked writers who tweak the language, and it’s probably that which made me go through my Joyce phase right after college.  I like Amos Tutuola as well, even though he got unfairly promoted as the stereotype of a primitive, unschooled writer, which is totally beside the point and which takes an imperialist approach to pidgins.

Reed is more of a tinkerer with syntax along the lines of Joyce than Tutuola, which is to say his control is totally obvious where Tutuola’s is hidden to the imperialist eye.  The sentences in the book have an almost clunky rhythm to them, but absolutely consistent throughout and sort of reminiscent of the way dialogue would run in Stanley Kubrick‘s later films.  I gather that Kubrick would run an absurd number of takes with actors and their dialogue would gradually become less natural, producing a type of stilted interaction that gave the impression that the characters were simultaneously in monologue and dialogue, a dissociation from the other.  Kubrick used this to produce a sense of alienation, where on the other hand Reed produces a sense of absurdity–while dealing with absolutely serious questions–which is not unlike Gogol in effect if not intent.

Stylistic questions aside, for the last 10 years or so I’ve read more and more in what my wife calls the Subaltern Canon, beginning I think with C.L.R. James–The Black Jacobins, of course–and then to people like Vine Deloria, etc.  My wife, too, has studied Vodun and thought deeply about it.  Combining this, it was really a treat to find that Vodun and Haiti were so central to the text.  I suppose I felt that I’d made some progress over the last 20 years or so.  I had a pretty typical Western Civ. type of education, excepting my courses with Allen Greenberger at Pitzer.  If I’d been assigned this in college, not only would I not have gotten any of the references, but I wouldn’t have been likely even in a position to have them explained to me.  At 40, things fit together like pieces in an easy jigsaw puzzle.  I know what loas are.  It made for a great read.

Of additional interest: the book has numerous images, but–and I have to say this reminded me a bit of what I myself did when I would make those little booklets with my records and put them in ziploc bags, back in the old days–they were rarely directly related to the accompanying text.  The result is to dislodge the reader from what is immediately present in the writing and expand the potential meanings of the novel.  It engages a reader: because the images are generally not directly explained, one must engage one’s own creative mind to produce meaning.

Imagine You’re Flying

“Imagine You’re Flying,” 4-track version, from Poison Against Poison (recorded 1991, released 2005).

“Imagine You’re Flying,” from The Little Band (recorded 1992, released 1997).

“Imagine You’re Flying/September,” performed by the Little Band, from The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes (recorded 1993, released 1997).

Late at night, when the sun goes down
And the evening spreads its wings,
I’m sitting down upon the shoreline
Just a-changin’ my guitar strings.
I play, oh I play to the seagulls
Though they can’t know what I say.
It does not begin to bother me.
It doesn’t really matter anyway.
I left from the place where I came from
And I settled in the West.
It just happened like an accident.
It ain’t the worst and it ain’t the best.
The world, oh the world is a wheel
And it spun me ’round and ’round.
When I returned into my senses,
This was the place that I had found.

Back at home, I’m a poor, poor boy
And I play for all the passers by.
When they tossed to me their empty pennies
I didn’t stop to even blink an eye.
My heart, oh my heart’s now a window,
My mind a hall of crystal mirrors
Because I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears.
I left from the place where I came from.
I try to tear it from my mind.
Today, nobody tosses me pennies.
It always seemed to me a bit unkind.
My name, oh my name is now useless.
For it is just another sound
Like my hand across my instrument,
Like the rain that falls upon the ground.

This tune, when I wrote it, seemed like a really big deal to me, and in hindsight I think it actually was.  I was a senior at Pitzer, and by this point I’d actually written a fair number of good tunes, having even cut my first serious demo, which I was sure would have publishing execs clamoring to sign this brave new songwriter, at the end of my junior year.  Obviously, that didn’t happen.  What did happen was that I wrote a bunch of mediocre tunes in the fall of my senior year, trying hard to “progress,” as I conceived it at the time, beyond where I was with those first five good tunes I’d written.  To qualify that last sentence, I’d actually come up with a decent tune in the summer prior to that year, called “I Travel Alone,” which I’ve never included on an album but which is something of which I’m not embarrassed.

It wasn’t a good year for me, that senior year, writing, now that I look back.  I probably would have felt better about myself if I were drinking a lot, but truth be told I’d gotten pretty sick of the college party atmosphere and though I did have a fair amount of Guinness with my friends I really wasn’t overdoing it in the least.  I was gaining weight—20 pounds—but that was because I’d grown so sick of dorm food that I was eating at In-‘n’-Out Burger at least three times a week, and EZ-Out at least once in the same time.

Peter Giuliano and I had a discussion at one point fairly late in our collaboration that our rate of growth as we got along in things slowed as writers.  We’d done La Petite Orange in 1992, after a couple years working together on stuff that in hindsight was crap (at least, I’ll say that my stuff was crap), even though it was the best we could do at the time.  Going from utter crap in my case to really good stuff was the biggest leap.  La Petite Orange still stands up, excepting I think my closing tune.  Hey Rhumbahead! was a huge leap up, though, which at the same time was sufficiently less developed than In the Choir of Primates that the leap to the House Carpenters record would have been unpredictable to anyone not actually in the band.  We felt we had great things in us but you wouldn’t know it from hearing the two Bill and Pete recordings.  That said, the difference between Hey Rhumbahead! and In the Choir of Primates wasn’t nearly as big as the crap I was producing before La Petite Orange and La Petite Orange itself.  Had the House Carpenters made it through our second record, it would have definitely been better than In the Choir of Primates.  All of our new tunes were better than all our tunes on Choir—and I included all but one of the ones I had for that second record on mostly The Bathroom Mirror, with one ending up on The Duck Hunter.

The curve described above was in full effect my senior year, but I had no idea at the time how it worked.  The tunes that ended up on that first demo were a huge leap for me, and because I wrote them within about a four-month period (if you except that a good portion of “Bad and Good” had been written my freshman year), I felt that all of a sudden I’d figured out songwriting and should have been able to keep up that pace of development indefinitely.  Much to my chagrin, that wasn’t the case.  I have a number of tunes from that fall that, I promise you, will not see a general release in my lifetime.  I do not want to hear what people say.  One, “What Your Heart Can See,” was included on Mind Monkey, the compilation of my stuff that came out on the late, lamented Duckweed records, but I defy anyone to plausibly tell me it wasn’t the weakest tune on the record.  In a pretty vain attempt to coast through my senior year, I did an independent study with a prof I really liked in “songwriting,” in which I was to journal my progress.  I ended up getting the worst grade I’d gotten in anything since my freshman year, because I was in no mood to be reflective about my process, such as it was, because everything I was writing was either mediocre or total crap.  I think I was a bit of a disappointment to the prof.

Nothing really changed for me, concretely, in the spring, but in hindsight I mellowed out a little bit which really was what was needed.  If I could point to anything that might have jogged me a bit out of my slump, it was a creative writing class I took.  The professor was interesting.  I’ve talked with other people about him and there seems to be a consensus that he really did not have much to teach: two things, to be precise.  Pretty sweet life for only having two things to teach.  He was a Joyce scholar, too, and as much as I love Joyce I also know that in academia one way a person can carve a niche if you’re not really that bright is to specialize in something that people know of or about but don’t and never will know.  God forbid you should study something people actually engage in, because that would put you in danger of having your bluff called.

That said, the two things this guy had to teach were actually worth learning, though so painfully obvious in hindsight.  Basically, he told us, as writers, to edit, and to show rather than say things.  The first should be news only to rock ‘n’ roll songwriters.  There is so much nonsense that gets tossed about to everyone’s detriment when it comes to writing songs that it can be—definitely was—difficult for a young person to use common sense.  I remember reading an article about Neil Young around this time which made the point that Neil doesn’t edit.  He wants—I can’t vouch for the veracity of this report, only that it was reported—to preserve the spontaneity of creation, apparently.  When I read that, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I took this course, I thought to myself, “well, it shows.”  Neil has indeed at times hit it well in his writing, but he’s put more crap out than anyone else I know of with his level of a reputation.  And this all before “Let’s Roll.”  It may be a goal in making art to produce something so internally coherent that it seems or feels to have simply appeared spontaneously, without effort.  Getting there, however, is the result of effort, and cutting off that effort before a piece has achieved the kind of internal coherence art demands is idiotic, as well as dishonest if one tries to pass it off as a serious attempt to communicate.  My take-away, though, from the discussion, was that there wasn’t anything wrong with me if I didn’t hit it on the first try with a tune.  On the contrary, it’s normal to need to edit.  If only rock ‘n’ rollers as a group understood this and practiced it, we’d all be better off.

The second imperative the creative writing prof presented—to show rather than tell—was, I know in hindsight, the most typical lesson one gets in an intro creative writing course anywhere.  That said, I needed the lesson.  If you listen to the words on the songs on that first demo, all good tunes some better than others, they much less than my work since make use of clear imagery.  There’s a lot of emotions bandied about, and clever lines, and even a moderate coherence, structural and thematic, in each tune, but none of them give the sense of place that were I to claim one particular virtue I would claim for my music.  In any event, it was with this tune that I really grounded the song in place—not a particular city or location of some other sort, but a sense left with the listener that actual things were happening in the tune in a particular spot.

Interestingly, the song itself, while one I’ve always liked, isn’t one of my very best.  Some of it is borrowed, lyrically: as much as I hate to admit it, I had bought Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints, understanding little at the time of how problematic his whole project was and how absurd it was for him to take it upon himself to delve into Third Worlders’ spirituality (spirituality, that is, in the abstract, which isn’t spiritual at all, but, rather, a good selling point to disaffected, college-educated white people in Manhattan and San Francisco).  Paul Simon made the biblical reference, to Little Moses, keeping things Judeo-Christian enough not to freak out his record-buying public:

Down among the reeds and rushes
A baby boy was found

Trying to come up with some sort of spiritual vibe in my tune, I cribbed his line, which of course wasn’t really his anyway:

Now I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears

The song itself was about the simplest good tune I’d yet written.  The trick to it, a simple one, is the E7sus4 chord on the vamp and then as the first chord of the verse, which itself contained only four chords, repeated four times.  Very few things are as effective as an interesting chord, repeated at length.