The Literary Life

"Then there are books that are not bad, but also not good enough" - Paul Collins

Careful with the word "clever": there's funny-clever and then there's unfunny-clever. In Sixpence House (2003), a memoir about books, about moving from San Francisco to England, to Hay-on-Wye, a village of books, Paul Collins can loosely be described as clever. That's the kind of voice he primarily establishes, anyway. But I hurry to add, as others perhaps fail to in similar instances, so there's no confusion: he is largely arch or unfunny-clever. In one scene, the writer sees an old saw for sale. He studies the sign, the price crossed out and lowered and crossed out again until on the bottom it finally reads FREE. The seller approaches him and asks if he's interested. Collins replies: "I'm waiting for the price to go down." The acme of unfunny-clever that is followed by, in the curious way the book has of commenting on itself, directly and indirectly, the appropriate response: the seller smokes his pipe.

"Hedley Lodge, it turns out, is run by Benedictine monks of the Belmont Abbey. So if you steal the towels, you're going to hell." It appears that in the margin next to these lines I drew a stoneface smoking a pipe. 

"Jennifer was reading a book that bore a blurb from the Times describing it as 'luminous' - and indeed it would be, if you soaked it in kerosene and burned it." No drawing but there might as well be.

It's the kind of humor, encountered page after page, that can be accompanied by a laugh track on a justly forgotten sitcom. You may know a friend, a family member, a neighbor, a coworker who's nice, who makes these sorts of jokes, though probably not with the same frequency. To spare his or her feelings and avoid awkwardness, you smile politely, laugh a little, and move on, together. Someone may do the same for your weaker jokes. A near-invisible kind gesture that helps keep society from crumbling. Sometimes, however, people take the act too far, throw back their heads, ho ho ho, bellypat, wipe away a non-existent tear, creating a starker contrast a moment later when, free to react as they wish, something more than a stoneface, a stinkface, emerges. Pure misery! (Which makes me laugh.)

Back to the book. Collins is better when drawing from his knowledge of obscure, forgotten reading material, which is summarized or quoted throughout. He informs us that a 19th-century travelogue he's a fan of ends with the writer transcribing the sound of himself vomiting. (Whoop, whoop, oh dear, whoop, etc. - for a whole paragraph.) He transcribes sounds throughout too, mostly to amusing effect, though other fillips fare less well from overuse, soon curdling into distracting tics. Also, he finds some genuine mirth by simply observing his daily life as he adjusts to his new home, such as when he runs to answer the phone and his young son anchors himself to his leg for the last ten yards.

Here's Collins on a work that serves as a model for his own: "His book consists of what amount to pleasant musings upon the home, upon books, upon city and country life." He goes on to praise it for putting him to sleep. Sixpence is thoroughly low stakes. It's not revealing, no one is vividly drawn. Nothing pulse-quickening happens as it meanders from one chapter to the next. His insights aren't piercing. Yet for all his attempts at levity, and his obvious passion for reading, his thoughts on the subject lean more toward sadness. He sees countless books no one will ever touch. Books with something but not enough to them to be rediscovered. Burdensome books. The familiar sight of books in boxes abandoned in the street. Books no one wants unloaded on unsuspecting aspiring booksellers. Books that aren't burned in one colossal pyre solely because the flaming pages would blow away. He tries to search the internet for a once acclaimed novelist, queries his old publisher, sends emails to possible relatives, and finds absolutely nothing, not a shred of information about him. 

A reader like Collins looks back, goes where many others wouldn't think to, with a spirit of adventure, trying to make sure such a writer isn't completely neglected. In part it's because he counts himself among them: "Someday this book will join you on those dusty shelves, its binding shaken and a little soiled like yours, and we'll all gaze out upon the passing years." I salvage what shouldn't be lost to them: his good readerly conduct. It's a commendable quality one hopes never vanishes.

The Strokes in San Francisco

     This past Halloween marked eighteen years since I attended my first concert, the best concert I've ever attended, as it happens: The Strokes in San Francisco. I was fourteen at the time. 

Miguel, my older brother by six years, had his music collection, mostly essential rock albums everyone knows, and, without asking, I'd spent a couple of years getting acquainted with it. And him through it. Radio stations covered some of the holes: pre-Beatles pop, Motown, 70s soul, R & B of the 80s and 90s. (Shoutout to the program "Between the Sheets," a nightly ritual for years, the sexy sounds of which kept them ghosts away long enough to let me sleep in peace in the dark, after an hour or two of quaking between my sheets.) But as I got a little older, I came to realize that there was no modern guitar rock worth listening to in the usual places I went to let music find me, the deeply uninspiring nu metal and rap metal and pop punk and arena rock hits of the day having turned my soul inside out. Worse, it didn't end there. For musical domination brings with it a domination of style and mood that makes being on the outside all the more torturous. A defining image: a person at an outdoor music festival in dark glasses, scowling, wearing a T-shirt that grimly reads "LOSER." Caught between sonic and sartorial lugubriousness on one side, skateboards, chain wallets, and sophomoric chortles on the other, all of it drab, pummeling, heavy on the hair gel, and ignorant of flavor. Juvenile mockery eased my pain, sort of. Though I could have used a great band in my life as an amulet, I suffered without giving much thought to an alternative. The revelatory moment is when what one is dimly looking for suddenly appears, as one bites into a sandwich. The Strokes were revelatory.

Is This It?, the best post-Nirvana rock album, was one of the first I bought (along with White Blood Cells, Veni Vidi Vicious, and The Ramones). Perfectly sequenced, every song a potential single. "Last Nite" was the first. I caught the music video at daytime, sitting on the carpet in the living room of our place in Union City, CA. One of the most striking observations I've come across about The Strokes is that, for all the early use of and associations with the term "cool," they are an exceptionally self-conscious band. Proof can be found from the first self-consciously introductory moments, the song kicking off with the group appearing in shadow before the vocals come in and all the lights turn on. The song's structure, beginning with a lone guitar chord, gradually building, shapes the visual structure. They make the novel decision to perform live. Weird and refreshing that they feel no need to rely on what had become the standard wash of overblown instrumentation. Drums bounce at a hangout pace, artfully unclean guitars lightly strummed and stabbed. Verse is as catchy as hook. The visual aesthetic is warm, classic but I couldn't quite place the era they were drawing from. The band is composed of individuals that share a loose, tossed off, worn-all-day-and-all-night style. Denim, color, funky t-shirts, bought cheap from a thriftstore or discovered by chance buried in a closet. A quick 12-bar guitar solo that's all fun, no flash. Not a single choreographed jump. The singer sips from a bottle, walks into a guitarist, a mike stand falls over - another element of rock n roll theater. It's not music aimed at an adolescent audience, creating a world that seems bound by adolescence, a world I was chafing within. It's boozy, amiable, the sound of a more mature brand of trouble. The singer tosses his mike. The great song starts much as it ends, a lone guitar chord, accompanied by the drums, that together come to a blunt stop. Lights out.

When we return! Nickelback? Sum 41? Who knows? 

A neighbor who happened to be in the room with me said it was the group all her lady friends were talking about. 

The Strokes are now firmly part of the legendary NYC music canon and in my innocence I was ready to place them there from the outset. But as I began doing research, expecting to hear only universal praise from the further reaches of the music press I began exploring because of the group, I found that the image was one among a few things held against them. Pretty boys with more style than substance, their reputation inflated by the surface appeal. Another: Children of privilege slumming it who somehow bought the attention they received. These criticisms lost their bite, if they ever had any, upon returning to the music. Despite the complaints, I've yet to find the group whose rightful position The Strokes cruelly usurped. The final notable criticism, the accusation of plagiarism, was more absurd but less easily shrugged off, at least by me, the novice music listener, because it required one to compare the group to the luminaries their music brought to mind. The "saviors" are just - The Stooges, Television, The Velvet Underground. Except in no way is the band a carbon copy, one does not go to them when "Gimme Danger" or "Marquee Moon" or even "Sweet Jane" have been played one too many times. Before I formed an idea of what a bad reader is, I began forming an idea of what a bad listener is. Annoyed then, I laugh now. Bad readers, bad listeners: they'll turn up, sooner or later, to deal what they think of as massive blows. The best survive them, silence them, and often secretly convert them. The album is a classic, as much a beginning-to-end pleasure to put on today as it was then.

A year after it arrived, I was there, kids, in the audience for the show.

The first thing I noticed about that glorious night was that I'd never before (and haven't since) seen so many gorgeous women gathered in one place. Not simply physically attractive but dressed to impress, tugging at skirts nervously, peering into pocket mirrors, touching up makeup. My head was spinning before I'd made it through the lobby. In hindsight, it shouldn't have come as a surprise. If part of a group's image is formed by self-presentation, it naturally spreads a sort of self-consciousness to the audience. I could also say I hadn't before or since seen people at a show care so much to be seen. The group's sense of style even merges with the music in an anecdote from Lizzie Goodman's oral history of the period, Meet Me in the Bathroom, Julian Casablancas once describing the sound he was looking for to the producer of Is This It?, Gordon Raphael, as a well-worn pair of jeans. And I became conscious of a personal style myself. I grew my hair out. I balanced my taste for black - black Dickies pants, black New York Dolls t-shirt - with a thick wool longsleeve olive green army shirt, worn as a jacket. I kept my black-and-white high-top Chuck Taylors long enough to let them fade and get a hole or two. There were missteps in high school that swiftly earned me verbal abuse, I confess - loud movie theater vest, rusty nails in my Members Only jacket - but I was in classic teenage DA form that night. Anyway, that's the form memory places there and it's probably true.

This was before I'd had a growth spurt and I felt my size keenly during the long transition between the Mooney Suzuki and the main event. The floor was packed, weed smoke filled the air, and I wasn't tall enough to breathe somewhere above it. Not that I complained. Didn't occur to me. First of all: In what would be a recurring pattern, Miguel and I had become separated so there was no one to complain to. Second: though I began thinking I could pass out, I was too thrilled to care. Maybe the danger was part of the fun. Rock n roll? Jostled and pallid as the crowd swayed one way and another, I thought: Here! I! Am! People noticed how I looked and asked if I was okay, telling me to let them know if I needed to be lifted so I could get fresh air. 

Lights out. Screams.

It's mostly an intoxicating blur from then on. They sounded perfect. No, my judgment hasn't been warped by nostalgia. I don't look back on the passing years with any particular fondness or wish to turn back time and relive them. Nor do I find myself refusing to look back, for fear of what I'd find. Too much going on now to lose myself in the past for long. They sounded perfect during a period in which any song they would have chosen to play from their modest catalogue could have been a favorite. Ample evidence from shows of the period can be readily found online. They performed a couple of songs I'd never heard before, songs that would appear on album two, Room on Fire. This was before most people owned a cell phone and raised them to document every moment. If I'm not mistaken, I didn't even detect what would later make me think twice about going to shows, the sense of being surrounded by stiffs brought there by the hype alone. It was electric.

At one point, someone asked if I wanted to crowd surf. Before I could answer, I was crowd surfing. (One way or another, someone was determined to see me launched.) Riding the crowd like a baby struggling to stand up, I realized that I didn't understand crowd surfing, didn't like it. I have never done so again and would like to think that I'm too much of a big man now to launch so easily. Soon I'd made it to the front, where a burly security woman plucked me from the crowd and cradled me, like a baby, to lift me over the barrier and dump me somewhere in the back. That's where I was, feeling a momentary mix of disappointment and relief, until the lights came up.

These days there doesn't seem to be a center anymore. I'm not oppressed by sounds, bypassing what I don't like almost completely. Having lately discovered the beauty of ad blocker, I'm not even briefly interrupted on my daily YouTube musical flights. When I step outside, it's usually for work, and so my style has mostly become utilitarian. With age, The Strokes seem less concerned too. Julian will sport a ridiculous suit while performing at a Bernie Sanders rally.

The Strokes haven't released an album on par with the first. Someone asks in Goodman's book, as the band is ascendant: "Are they going to be The Clash?" Album one from The Clash featured "Remote Control" and "Career Opportunities" and "48 Hours" but also pushed into the future, in length, genre, and songcraft, with "Police and Thieves" (which I prefer to the original). By the end of the decade they would outdo themselves in every way with London Calling. The list of groups that can come up with a classic sound across an entire album is short. Shorter is the list of those that achieve the same feat with another classic sound. To emphasize the exclusivity: The Beatles, The Stones, Hendrix, The Ramones, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, The Pixies are not on that list! And neither is The Strokes. The group struggled to expand on the classic sound and haven't attempted a total or near-total break from the past. (And covers don't seem to be for them and perhaps provide a clue to their hindered progress.) They've done variations on it that occasionally rival their early songs but a sustained, surehanded vision of the future has thus far eluded them. Although "The Adults Are Talking," a song released this year, will surely find a place on a greatest hits collection and is the closest they've come. It's recognizably them and yet in tone, structure, length, individual elements they're a different group - frayed, melancholy, aged, somewhat metallic but bracing all the same. Albert Hammond Jr. says he's excited about what comes next and I think he has reason to be.

Limp Bizkit fails to make a comeback in the US. Retreating to Europe, Fred Durst says: We ain't going out like that! I say: Sure you are. Meanwhile, The Strokes never left.