Fortunately, I’ve Got a Day of Atonement Coming Up

I’m still kinda bummed out about that bad drinking story from Friday night. I was physically fine, but it really is the first time I let drinking mess up something like this. On Saturday, I went into NYC to pick up my wallet from the home of Samuel R. Delany, an author and friend. By Sunday night, I realized that you can love a person and hate him at the same time. Love him as a friend, hate him as a procrastinating, dyslexic author.

I’ve worked with Delany (known as Chip) on a movie and several books, including a chapbook that nearly destroyed my life. I once proofread galleys of his essay collection Shorter Views in four days. No easy task, but he’s one of “my” authors, and I help him out when I can. Also, in the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve become pretty good friends (which, if I had more time this morning, would lead to a tangent about how Chip’s probably the first friend I have who’s utterly outside of my age range–about 30 years older than me–and how odd that fact struck me; next entry, I guess).

On Saturday, we shot the breeze for a little while after I got my wallet back (which, all of a sudden, makes me think of the second scene from my favorite movie, when Tom wakes up in a bar, hung over and missing his hat. He asks the bartender how he did at cards last night. The bartender replies: “What do you think? You are a millionaire, you are going to remember your friends?” Anyway), and Chip mentioned that he had still yet to read over the galleys for The Fall of the Towers.

“I finished this book [a series of three short novels] before I turned 22, Gil. I just can’t read it again…”

“When do they have to be back at Vintage?”

“Monday morning.”

“It’s not written like Dhalgren, right?”

“No. It’s very… simple prose.”

“How many pages?”

“450.”

“Hand it over, Chip. I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

So Saturday night (7:30pm-11:30pm) and Sunday (10am-6:45pm) was spent reading 450 pages of science fiction written by a very intelligent 20-to-22-year-old. Chip phoned when I was five pages from the end.

I told him I’d be done in a few minutes, and he had the temerity to ask, “So, um, I was just wondering: Does the story work for you?”

You can love someone and hate him at the same time.

Happy New Year!

Talk about embarrassing. I mean, beyond super-atomic Dudley Moore-level drunk, I actually got to the point of crashing at my friends’ apartment in NYC at 9:30pm, following a 5-hour mini-binge at the Hi Life Bar & Grill, woke up at 2:15am, picked up my briefcase and suitcase (don’t ask), and drove home before realizing that my wallet is still (I hope) at the friends’ apt.

Fortunately, I have cash at home, which will enable me to get back to the city and pick up the wallet tomorrow, but this is all pretty pathetic, because the original plan was to spend the evening with these Lubavitcher friends of mine for Rosh Hashana. Problem was, I got to the city WAY too early, and all my friends were unavailable. So I drank and chatted up the bartender-ess at the Hi Life, discussing the finer points of trashy ’80s pop music.

I really need to get these priorities in order.

Fly, Eagles, Fly

Went down to Philly on Sunday to see a football game with my buddies Adam and John. Adam wanted to reward me for coming out to pick him up during the zombie plague/blackout that we had back in August (see that entry on the CHUDs). We had a tailgate party with some of the greatest soul food around, courtesy of Adam’s friend James, who’s a cook somewhere in the city. He and a friend feted us with grilled sea bass, jerk chicken, strip steak, shrimp, and the obligatory ribs. It was some of the best food I’ve ever eaten.

A good time was had, even though we got rained upon. Adam, ever prepared, wore a bathing suit under his shorts, so he could strip with impunity. And he did.

The Eagles were terrible, which made me feel good, as a Giants fan. However, the Giants got beaten last night, so I wasn’t THAT enthused. And I’m much more of a baskeball fan than a football fan anyway.

I’d write more, and more wittily, but I’m tired. I’m heading to bed soon. If you like me, you’ll go buy a copy of the new book I put out. It’d make me happy, or at least less stressed.

They’re Here!

The books showed up! They look gorgeous! Fate has conspired to give me the means of catharsis-izing the mental trauma of 9.11.01! And on the anniversary, no less!

Order one now! Enable my catharsis! Bill Marx on Boston’s NPR thinks you should, and he put his case much more eloquently than the Village Voice’s editor did!

First Review

Forever Bummer
Paul West’s Novel Blends 9-11, Philosophy, and Nigella
by Ed Park
Village Voice
September 10 – 16, 2003

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11
By Paul West
Voyant, 231 pp., $23

What would a proper novelistic response be to the attacks of 9-11? If everyone knows the central story, what stories can be told? A writer I know said that 9-11 shut down her capacity for fiction. Months later, she drafted a dozen pages in pursuit of what seemed to be both a narratively compelling and brokenhearted take on the tragedy, before realizing she was rewriting Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

Most novelists are still tuning out the 9-11 frequency, with some exceptions: The father of the protagonist in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition went missing on 9-11; the murderer in Lawrence Block’s Small Town loses his daughter in the attacks, and his wife commits suicide in grief. In Paul West’s 23rd book of fiction, The Immensity of the Here and Now, the aftereffects of that day gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination–the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine. West’s complex narrative voice relates the story of friends Shrop and Quent, amnesiac patient and paraplegic shrink, former Cambridge philosopher and ex-military man–a Beckettian dyad that splits the ravages of mind and body. With nods to cultural figures from Plato to Nigella Lawson (perhaps her first fictional immortalization), and sentences that interrogate their own structure, Immensity’s generous helping of culture and language also exposes their inadequacy.

If the pair’s minutely rendered mental lives don’t always fascinate, at least West realizes failure as a theme. Shrop circles about his “lost philosophy,” throws (or imagines) a party for long-lost pals with names like “Lomar Antecedent,” and comes to recognize Oulipian Raymond Queneau’s formulation as his new and necessary creed: “How does one live in an absurd world? Absurdly.”

Hail to the Chief

It’s been a busy week: a Labor Day drive down to Princeton to meet up with one of my best friends for lunch, a trip to Boston for a healthcare investor conference on Tuesday (where I stayed with another good friend in Worcester), a couple of late evenings in NYC (Thursday for a fiction reading by Adam Haslett, and Friday for a reading of The Designated Mourner by my buddy, John Castro), and now a party to celebrate a friend’s elopement.

There were a bunch of high points, including the moment of manic, mantic fire leaping from my pen as the idea for a novel struck me during lunch at PF Chang’s near Boston Common. More on that as it evolves.

But the peak, at least physically, had to be when I got back to the Four Seasons hotel after lunch. Standing at the counter to check in was one of the tallest men I’d ever seen. His back was to me, but it was relatively clear to this detective that he was a basketball player (nearly 7 feet tall, black, and checking into the Four Seasons). So I pretended to have to rearrange things in my briefcase until he left the counter and I could see who he was.

And that’s when I saw the face of the man alternately goofed on as “that big wooden Indian” and “that Easter Island statue-looking mo’fo'” by me and my friends for years. Yes, I was face-to-face (well, face-to-sternum, to be accurate) with Robert Parish, former center of the Boston Celtics. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend, so it made sense for him to come to Boston a few days early (the Hall is in Springfield, about 70 miles away).

Which makes me think of how much I hated the Celtics in the 1980s, when they were always battling the Lakers in the NBA finals, and how much I grew to respect them, once they all got old and started retiring. I’m saving my long piece on that for another novel about mythology and death. You’ll see.

Off to the elopement party. Wish the groom good fortune.

The Raw and the Stupid

Last night, the bartender at the Hi Life Bar & Grill actually convinced me to partake of “half-price sushi,” after plying me with a G&T that owed FAR more to the G than the T.

I told her, “I’ve made it a practice never to eat any raw food when it’s offered for half price.” But she DID have that Art School Girl of Doom look that I’ve always had a weakness for, so I relented and had two pieces of tuna sashimi.

And I’m still alive!

Who’s Smarter?

Read this pretty neat essay on Slate last week, about the problems music reviewers have with pop music. The centerpiece is the reaction some critics had to Justin Timberlake’s solo album. I’ve never heard any of his songs, so I have no idea how valid the writer’s descriptions of the tunes are.

(I don’t cite that fact to establish that I’m hipper than people who listen to Justin Timberlake. I just don’t listen to music radio much during my morning commute, preferring to listen to Howard Stern, my iPod, or ESPN radio, where guys just ramble about sports, but don’t do it as pompously as the hosts on WFAN.)

A couple of years ago, my assistant asked me to download a song from Gerri Halliwell’s solo album for her. I did so that evening and, at work the next day, I e-mailed it over with the message, “Your musical taste now officially sucks.”

She took this badly, and sent an angry e-mail about my own bad pop music listening habits, from 15-20 years earlier. I wrote back, “At no point am I saying my musical tastes DON’t suck. I recognize that you’re only going to dig Squeeze (as a fer instance) if you were a certain age at a certain time in musical history. I happened to be around 12-13 when I first heard Pulling Mussels (from the shell), and it struck me as one of the greatest pop song of all time.” In fact, to this day, the opening words of the song continues to elicit an instant smile from me, like seeing an old friend.

So what I’m saying is, of course our musical tastes suck. Pop music is meant to be disposable, and it’s only the best of it manages to transcend its expiration date and linger in your head or heart for years.

Now, all of that said: this new Madonna commercial for The Gap flat-out sucks (which is sorta what I meant to get at a few paragraphs earlier). Changing the words to your song to sell corduroys, and playing up the yoga-contortionist thing isn’t smart. It makes you sound like the Beach Boys when they changed the words to Good Vibrations for that Sunkist commercial.

There’s no longer an issue of “artists selling out” by doing Gap ads. It’s an acceptable way for an artist to extend his or her brand identity. It’s cool. Seeing Luscious Jackson do a Gap ad a few years ago was actually pretty neat, I have to admit. But this ad borders on unintentional self-parody.

The missteps seem to be coming a little faster and more furiously for Madonna, given that she’s now credited with two of the worst flicks of all time: Swept Away and Shanghai Surprise.

But she’ll always have one thing going for her: she’s smarter than Salman Rushdie. Yeah, Rushdie may have been a cause celebre fifteen years ago by writing The Satanic Verses, a controversial novel that no one actually read. And maybe he seemed pretty cool by going on stage with Bono, and writing that Orpheus song which he later expanded into a truly terrible novel: The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

(I mean, it’s one thing to posit an alternate reality in which JFK lives, and Bollywood culture reaches a level of parity in the west. But I don’t care HOW alternate a reality you’re building: concept album rock-n-roll concerts with sets that were borrowed from Spinal Tap will NEVER catch on. It’s a major failing of novelists who want to write about rock music: they try to bring their own literary aspirations to the rock world, which expands upon the grandiosity of the music, and that leads them to the terrible idea of the concept album/theme concert.)

So, Rushdie becomes a potential Nobel winner, while Madonna’s just a pop tart who lasted long beyond her expected career span? Well, I contend that Maddie might actually have a little more going on between the ears than Salman.

Madonna’s found ways to offend Christianity (particularly her own Catholic church), Judaism (“Uh, yeah, I study Kabbalah, too.”), and Hinduism (“Those sacred mendhi tattoos are cool!”), while extending her music career and becoming an international icon of . . . something or other. I’m not clear on what she’s actually supposed to represent, which is probably the point. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with representing the mutability of our age, and I’m perfectly fine with making Plastic Man my patron saint (Jews are allowed to have those, right?). Which is to say, identity ain’t what it used to be.

Anyway, despite all of these perceived offenses to various world religions, I contend Madonna remained at least one synapse smarter than Rushdie, because she never decided, “I’ve got it! I’ll make a fashion statement out of Islam!”

Now, that’d certainly be a tall order, but I bet she could sit down with Jean-Paul Gaultier, come up with some kind of burqa-inspired look, and carry it off pretty well. But she never seems to have decided to mess around with the one major religion known for its propensity for suicide bombers and assassins. After all, it’s one thing to goof on Christians, Jews or Hindus; it’s another to make fun of Islam.

It’s a pity Salman wasn’t smart enough to figure this out. I’m sure he had the best intentions when he was trying to undercut the tenets of Islam by exploring the heretical concept that some of the Koran was false (hence, verses written by Satan). Maybe he just thought it was a playful conceit, one that no one would take too seriously. After all, it was in a novel by an ostensibly highbrow writer, and who reads those?

So, this morning’s big thoughts: Madonna’s new ads smack of desperation, but she’s still smarter than Salman Rushdie.