O little axe of Bethlehem

In the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and eighty-three, a youth humbly approached his special destination — a little music shop in the heart of his city’s downtown. Inside, he took $188 in crumpled tens and twenties from his pocket.  Then the kindly shop owner reached above his head and took down a cherry-red imitation Les Paul electric guitar — a Japanese knockoff — from a long row of guitars hanging from the ceiling.

When the transaction was ended and the lad emerged from the shop with his guitar (in a very cheap black case), he whispered under his breath:

O Lord, though I’m pimply,

though the lenses of my glasses are very thick,

though my hair is oily,

though I am girl-less …

O Lord, please … let me rock.

This is my story.  Well, OK, it didn’t quite happen like that.

But at this time of year, a season that's full of old stories and myths, there’s just no other way to talk about the magic of the electric guitar — it is a thing of myth ... there's no instrument, I think, that has had more hopes and dreams foisted on it than the electric guitar.  I’m not talking just about the big myths — Robert Johnson laying down his guitar at a crossroads and making a deal with the Devil — but also adolescent ones like mine.

I can only wonder what would’ve happened to the dreams of so many poor young teens like me  if guitars had never been electrified, if a young Texan named George Beauchamp hadn’t come up with an idea for adding amplification.  Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna tell the story of Beauchamp's many experiments -- for instance, taking apart a phonograph and mounting its little pickup on a 2 x4 with a single string ... something Jack White would do -- in the opening pages of Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar, which Doubleday published earlier this fall.

Play It Loud is an entertaining, easy tour of the players who have had the biggest impact on popularizing the electric guitar and some of the companies that have dominated the industry.

In the end, Tolinski and Di Perna make me feel sorry.... Wait.  Sorry?  Sorry for what?

For all those kids who have spent their time (wasted their time) playing Guitar Hero and other video games that are supposed to give you the feeling of the guitar experience.

As this book may remind some readers, like this reviewer who once spent every last dime to get a knockoff Les Paul, there's nothing like crunching out power chords with a little overdrive and reverb … or the crisp ringing of six strings in tune ... or pulling on the B string up past the twelfth fret until it sounds like it’s crying, until your meager talent blends for just a second or two with all those mythic heroes of the past ….

You can play Guitar Hero until your fingers fall off, and you'll just never get it.

A-holes: What kind of writer are you?

I've been away for a long time, my beloved friends. A new day job and the weird, twilight frenzy of revising my novel (if you go into the dictionary and look up the word "palimpsest," I'm sure it says "for an example, see Nick's book") -- it has been impossible for me to keep up, and I'm sorry for that.  

Even if I haven't felt capable of posting an original thought on Call of the Siren, I have been capable of reading other people's thoughts ... like Seamus Perry's piece in the TLS, "Angry, Difficult D.H. Lawrence."  Lawrence was not the kind of writer you would want to get close to; Richard Aldington, Perry writes, said Lawrence had a "wounding capacity for not adapting himself to others."

Perry's piece gives us one kind of writer; I'm also reminded of Evelyn Waugh's cold attitude to his children if they played too loudly and disturbed Daddy; I'm also reminded of a former professor friend meeting the author of The Once and Future King, T.H. White, and finding him to be the complete opposite of the generous, compassionate, bemused narrator that my friend cherished in that book (the photo accompanying this post shows White during a lecture at Boston College).  This leads to a simple conclusion.

Writers can be real a-holes.

So can plenty of other people, of course, and my own prolonged experience of trying to get my gothic novel right ... I almost said "ordeal" instead of "experience" ... has been good.  I've learned a lot.  It's given me a chance to think about what it means to be a writer from the writer's chair, not from the point of view of the admirer/critic/reader/outsider.

When my "litel bok" finally leaves its maker behind, I think he (meaning: me) will be far more patient and sympathetic than he was before; far more supportive of others; far more self-deprecating, too ... because this whole process has taught me more about how little I know than about anything else.  I can't imagine what geniuses like Lawrence must feel from their Olympian heights; the air up there must be so thin that it's difficult to breathe.

Maybe that, finally, is what turns/turned so many of them into a-holes.  I'm glad it hasn't come easy to me.

On reviewing and breaking backs

One advantage of being the L.A. Times deputy book editor was this: I rarely reviewed a book I didn't like. Every week, I sorted through piles and piles of new books for only those things that resonated with me -- if something didn't, I wouldn't write about it.

But what happened if I was a hundred pages into a book before I realized it was a dog?

What would I do then ... drop it?

Are you crazy?  I couldn't do that -- I'd already committed too much time to it!  I had to review it!  So, there were a few options open to me:

• Damn it with faint praise

• Forget faint praise and be ruthless -- break its back just like Bane

• Give most of the review space to the subject, not the actual book ... and then finish off the piece with a sentence about how the book was"helpful" or "serviceable" (which I guess sounds like the first option). It sounds like praise, but it isn't. Calling a book "helpful" puts it in the same category as a shovel. Or a Boy Scout.

I was reminded of this reviewing strategy as I was leafing through a recent TLS issue and came across this sentence at the top of a review of a biography of Edward VII:

In his enjoyably evenhanded potted life of Edward VII, Richard Davenport-Hines balances terseness with orotundity....

Let's get a few things straight: The only thing that can ever be nicely described as "potted" is a fern or a gardenia bush.

And that word "evenhanded" is as bad as "helpful" and "serviceable."  It sounds as if the biographer is getting applause for not being hysterical.  And that word near the end, "orotundity" ...  good God, does anyone really use a word like that today?

I felt sorry for the biographer, and I was reminded of that old cliche that says all publicity, even bad publicity, is better than nothing at all.  When I finished reading this snide review, I couldn't help thinking nothing at all might be better.

A pale view of Hill

For I will consider my cat Jeoffry…

We lost a major figure in the world of poetry at the end of June, Geoffrey Hill, and as I’ve scrolled through the posts of Call of the Siren, I realize I haven’t written very much lately … but when I have, some of it seems to have been about Hill.

Maybe that’s because no one – aside from talking to W.S. Merwin a few years ago and listening to him describe visiting Ezra Pound – has given me a greater sense of poetry’s living tradition than when I sat at a table and listened to Hill talk about Eliot, Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, Dryden, Auden, Lowell, Southwell, and so many others.

I studied with him in the graduate program at Boston University in the 1990s.   When I enrolled, I had no idea the maker of Mercian Hymns was on the faculty, and when I learned that he was, I rushed over to his office to sign up for his class on poetry and religion. I was gushing with excitement as I reached the top floor and entered his office.

“I’m so happy to have found you!” I said as I set my Add slip on the desk in front of him.

“Found me?” he said, looking up. “I didn’t know I was hidden. I’ve been here three years.”

He gave me that trademark look you find in the Guardian photo accompanying this post. I think this photo was taken around the time he lived in Brookline and taught at BU. That’s the way he looked when I made my gushing declaration on that autumn day in his office.

But forget that sour expression or what some people have said about his crankiness -- I want you to know that Hill was a warm, generous teacher. There were six of us, including him, gathered around a conference table.

He played recordings of John Dowland for us that were hypnotic; the notes of the lute floated down the hall. He described the torture of recusant priests in Protestant England and then recited Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” as if he were composing it in his head. The way he read poems was a revelation to me. He was gruff and good-natured, and he was always patient with our ignorance of the subjects he knew so well.

“Mr. Owchar, and how is your Bunyan today?” he asked me once, smiling, as we studied Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners.

“Fair to middling, sir,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, “give us some of the fair.”

Everyone laughed, and then I did my best to explain some passage in Bunyan, and when I was done, Hill improved on my thoughts the way a jeweler polishes a dull stone.

As I've been reading obituaries and tributes about him, I've learned how prolific he was in the past decade. My reading of him stopped with the Peguy poem and the Enemy Country essays … and the occasional item I found in the TLS.

That’s because I like the earlier phase of his career – the later works are too compact, too elusive for me. But the balance between contemporary England and its legendary past that you find in Mercian Hymns, for instance, to me is, well, perfect. It is magic.

There’s a line in one TLS tribute that talks about Hill’s discouragement over his royalties checks even in his laureled, later years. He was discouraged not because of the money but because it suggested to him that he didn't have a readership.  Poetry has never really been a big seller (unless you're Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes), but I hope Hill is enjoying some kind of adulatory compensation in the afterlife that he never found in those royalties.

And hopefully he can add my middling post to that compensation, too.  Rest in peace, Professor.

Getting published … an author's stats on herself

Everyone has an opinion about the ordeal of book publishing, but who can you really trust? Only the writers who have actually experienced it.

And that applies to Yi Shun Lai, author of the new novel Not A Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu (Shade Mountain Press), although "new" is a misleading term …. Lai is perfectly transparent on her blog about how long it's taken - agents queried,  months spent querying, etc. - to usher her engaging, funny, charming fictional memoir into print.

At The Good Dirt, Lai provides us with the numbers that every writer wants to know about, as well as the lessons that she's learned in her post "How I Landed My Publisher."

One of her best lessons, for me, has to do with balancing your book project with the rest of your life … and that means not letting it consume the rest of your life.

As Lai says, "if you really want to make this a part of your life, get on it."

Visit The Good Dirt for more of Lai's insights into finding that balance in your own writing life … and to learn more about the writer behind the one and only Marty.  She's a wonderful creation ... so funny and wise as she navigates between obstacles and her own soaring aspirations, advertising quotas and office tedium, and the steady nagging of an unforgettable Taiwanese tiger mom.  You'll want to get your hands on a copy of this book.

My beloveds, you'll be so glad you did.