Research Notes: Just Kids

Poncho and Lefty (heh).

A few years ago, I was at Book Expo, which is basically a boat show but with books. The best part of Book Expo this particular year was that they'd scheduled a conversation between Neil Young and Patti Smith. Young was about to publish his memoir, and Smith had just won all the awards ever for hers. The talk was in the basement of the Javitz Convention Center, which is kind of like a Holiday Inn ballroom, only dark and industrial. The two of them, pretty obviously stoned, sat in plush chairs and just talked about, you know, whatevs. Model trains, Lou Reed, Kent State.

It was when the last of those came up that I got a bit of a shock, which, looking back on it, is sort of where this current project started. Because when they talked about the 48-hour turnaround between news of the shooting at Kent State and acetate copies of "Ohio" hitting the hands of DJ's, it became clear that Young and Smith were not, as I had in my mind, talking across a generational divide. They were contemporaries, affected by that moment in similar ways. Of course, by the time Smith's first album was released, Young was almost a decade into his musical career. But they were both (just) kids who came out of nowhere and created themselves in the middle sixties.

And yes, not realizing this sooner indicates a lack of thinking on my part. Got it, noted, thanks.

I should say right off that Just Kids is as fantastic as people say it is. I made the excellent life choice to consume it via audiobook, read by Smith in her amazing Midwest-meets-New York accent (side note: if you can track it down, listen to Amy Goodman interviewing Smith. Their voices are remarkably similar. It's kind of awesome), a sort of slow, soft speech pattern that runs at odds with the auditory idea I had of Smith from her recordings. In fact, the book as a whole runs counter to my conception of Smith, which was revelatory and really opened up my thinking regarding what I'm working on.

I'm really interested in female anger and the way it's "dealt with". Being a dude, it's always been clear to be that anger is an acceptable tonality in which to operate. Male artists are allowed to affect/perform anger as a sort of base state; it doesn't need to be explained or justified. I'd say music and stand-up comedy are the easiest fields where you can spot this. I can think of a half dozen male comics whose personas are basically anger-schtick, and Angry Young Man is practically a musical genre. But female anger in the arts is different, and I mean this not just for artists, but for characters. I'm not going to argue that Patti Smith invents the idea of the Angry Female Artist, but certainly the way she enters the cultural landscape is unique.

There's the fact of her independence, the fact she is not connected to or guarded by a male. Even when her band gets billed along with her, it's the Patti Smith Group: the boys in the band belong to her. Think about this in contrast with, let's say, Debbie Harry or Chrissie Hynde. And she is staunchly playing on male turf. There is a prescribed role in the culture for the female singer-songwriter by 1975, but it's located within the folk tradition. Rock is for the boys. Smith shows up at the party not playing anyone's game. She doesn't present as a sexual commodity (a la Harry). Not only is she not a chanteuse, she opens up Horses by warping "Gloria", a song that provided hits for Van Morrison's Them and The Doors which is basically one of rock's iconic "Hey, Look At That Girl" tunes. Smith injects the song with a female subjectivity it had previously lacked, then screamingly melds that with Gloria as a visual object, owning the song, eclipsing every other version of it.

The anger on those early records is largely absent from the book, which is sweet without being cloying, warm without being nostalgic. Smith is brutally, brilliantly honest about the difficulty of living in New York at this time (she's also great on the economics of it, detailing the myriad jobs she had to work to make her rent) and the complex relationship with Mapplethorpe as the two of them became their best selves, even as this evolution moved them apart. But it's not an angry book, and the cynical part of me wonders if it would have been as widely praised had it been a little more vicious.

To return to the other side of the anger issue, I've been finding that people respond strangely to angry females in fiction. The project I'm currently editing (not this one, a different one) has at its core an Angry Young Woman. Now it was my belief when I started, that she could just be angry. Because some people are just fucking angry: it is almost always a valid response, if not a long-term healthy one, to one's environment, or to the social conditions one finds themselves in, or just the existential suck-fest that is your limited time on this planet. But the response to the character from some of my early readers has been, "What's she so mad about?"

This is a (fictional) nineteen year-old girl growing up an environment with almost no opportunities for women to advance socially, no roles for women that are not dependent on men. A smart girl who has her education truncated at age seventeen because it is illegal at the time to educate women past high school age. Who cannot own property, who has virtually no legal rights. And I have to explain where her anger comes from.

But here's Patti Smith. Amazed by the world, in love with everything, and struggling to find her place in it. Looking back, she seems almost bemused at her hardships. She is, perhaps, softened, or maybe only changed to a person who no longer needs to snarl and spit. And here's Patti Smith, coming up on thirty years old, part of a scene that is almost exclusively male (both the music scene and the poetry scene). And she grins, and spins. And she snarls and spits. And feels no need to tell you why, because the why is obvious and permanent and all around her, always.

Research Notes: City on Fire

This is not the book cover. It is just a city that happens to be on fire.

Here's a weird thing that happens. You sell a book, and awesome, you are an author now. And probably you'll be able to sell another book, unless this first one tanks (which it could. It totally could. I can imagine seventeen different ways in which it could tank).

But also now you are out in the marketplace. You meet with things like "We're going to pass on your book that includes a nine-year old boy on a road trip with his mom, because we've already got a book about a seven-year old girl on a road trip with her grandpa coming out next year" (this is actually why an editor passed on my book, for real). So when something comes out that is a huge book, both in sheer physical bulk and in the amount of attention/money it garners, and is in the realm of a project you are working on, you sort of have to pay attention.

I think this is what people feel like when they say "They stole my idea! I was totally going to write a television pilot about puppets who run a late night talk show!"

Anyway, I'm still in early days on this project and I start hearing about this big NYC 1977 book. Dude got $2m for it (I know this is just a "rumored" number, but yes, he got at least that much), sold the development rights before he sold the book. A dear friend has taken to calling it Great American Novel as she spitefully hauls it around the city. So I dutifully bought a copy the day it came out and launched in.

We should start by saying I was primed to dislike it. I even mentioned in an email to my agent, "I'm about to hate-read this book." And I did, I seriously hated it. I made it through about 400 pages and then I stopped, because hate.

Let's talk about what Hallberg does well. He's excellent at writing about wealth and its trappings. When the book moves through the luxe apartments and houses of the New York uber-rich, the author's prose style really finds its match. This is perhaps less true when he turns to the corridors of power: the office buildings where the money is being made seem vague. I pictured the board room of Queen Consolidated/Palmer Industries from Arrow. Probably because I kept thinking I could be better spending my time catching up on Arrow. In fact, I'd say work gets the short end here. Most of the characters don't seem to have jobs, or at least not jobs that take up much of their time.

Wait, I'm supposed to be saying good things.

There is an abundance of period detail. Strike that, there is an overabundance (fuck, I'm doing it again). At least once a page there is a THING FROM THE SEVENTIES. I understand the intent was authenticity, but it ends up feeling like an overly-intricate lie, and rather than noting the finely-wrought detail work, I found myself fact-checking. This is totally spiteful, and for the most part pointless. I mean, it's a big release from a major publishing house. Shit's been fact-checked. But I would like to note that it's almost impossible that Sam would be able to dub a record onto eight-track for Charlie, because that wasn't really a consumer-grade technology at the time, outside of serious audio-heads. Suck it, dude.

All right, time to let rip. I thought the prose was terrible. Clumsy, overwrought, thick with modifiers. Also, his tenses are a mess. He repeatedly makes this move from fuzzy time to the definite which drives me nuts. Something something something. And now, sitting on steps and drinking the eponymous beverage he purchased at an Orange Julius, he thought... There's nothing wrong with it, it just bugs me, especially because the movement of time in the novel is pretty fuzzy in general. Even in the (much lauded) opening chapters, there's this kind of slack formulation of time when it feels like we should be spiraling tightly around the inciting incident.

Speaking of which, I don't like offing a young girl so that you can have a plot. It was cheap and unearned. Maybe he manages to earn it post hoc by making the character more three dimensional, but I'm doubtful. She's an object of desire, a punk Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, and then she's dead (or in a coma, I guess). Her shooting serves as Charlie's ticket into the world of the novel (which is to say, into New York) and connects several of the characters by Dickensian coincidence, but she's not really there. To borrow a comic book term, she gets fridged.

The female who remains conscious doesn't fare much better. She's introduced to us drunk and high (which is to say, fuzzy, ineffectual) and, in the chapter where I finally decided to bail, is going all twitterpated at the nearness of a younger guy with exceptional hair who's new to the office. If it's a general rule that you can endear a character to an audience by having them demonstrate mastery, the reverse is just as true: if you want to inspire audience contempt in a character, show them being needlessly inept, particularly at work.

There's a certain queasiness about homosexual sex throughout. Hetero sex is an act of pleasure, but gay sex is presented as A) risk-taking, B) bargaining, or C) an act of athleticism/violence. Of course, by the time the author gets around to describing hetero sex acts (I'm going to paraphrase here, but roughly: "as part of him entered part of her, another part of him wondered..."), readers might be relieved the author skirts homosexual intercourse with euphemisms like "in flagrante" and "athletic fucking."

But I've skirted around perhaps the most relevant fact, for my purposes. This book is terrible at writing about punk. It's annoying enough that he's imagined a world where the Ramones and Patti Smith exist but not Television (because Ex Post Facto/Ex Nihilo stands in for the band). But the author doesn't seem to really enjoy the music. In the early chapters, Charlie pores over an Ex Post Facto record, making sure he hasn't missed a chord, and when the author pays any attention to music, it's with that same clinical detachment. Charlie, who is notably Jewish but really into Jesus, is also our entry into the punk world while really being more of a Bowie fan. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you want to talk about glam, go ahead and talk about glam. New York 77 would provide ample opportunities to talk about glam as a music and as an aesthetic. The author seems like he's been shackled with punk as his soundtrack.

Probably the worst of this is when Nicky Chaos is explaining his philosophy to Charlie (this is, I think, the chapter before I bailed). It comes off as a sloppy mix of Situationism and nihilism, without giving proper respect to either. In addition to being utterly charmless, Nicky Chaos is being set up as a false prophet (I can only assume Will would have ended up the True Prophet, had I kept reading), but as the only one who speaks on behalf of punk, his freshman year philosophy schtick hobbles it as a cultural movement/artifact. The fact Charlie is taken in by it makes him another contemptibly inept player in the piece. The author doesn't trust punk to bear any narrative weight; it's a convenient subculture, a place to run away to, a youth culture ready to be coopted, by the novel's sinister asexual land developer as much as by the author.

The good news? Even one moment of New York is still a big place, and I'm happy to work in the spaces the author largely ignores. It's what I was going to do anyway.

Research Notes: I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

Tom Verlaine and Richard HellRichard

There's an old Simpsons episode where George HW Bush is writing his memoirs. "And, having achieved all of my goals in my first term," he writes, "there was no need to pursue a second."

Or something like that. Then there are locusts, as I recall.

That sort of labeling failure as triumph is all over Richard Hell's memoir, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp. Something along the lines of "And, having invented punk with the Neon Boys, I was happy to be sort of kicked out of Television and then kind of fuck around on heroin for a number of years before retiring from music."

Going into this book not a massive fan of Richard Hell (when Hell describes the split in Television, between his idea for the band, which ends up sounding roughly like the Voidoids, and the band as they ended up, I can't hide my preference for Verlaine's version), I was not inspired to become one by the text. I know it's maybe silly to say that a memoirist is self-aggrandizing, but holy shit is Richard a fan of Richard. And a huge shit-talker regarding everyone else, particularly Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. He's got some choice words for other folks who either tried to help him out or tried to screw him over, but rest assured that every choice Richard Hell made was the correct one.

That said, there's a lot to pull out here, although some of it comes from reading across Hell. The first and biggest thing, and something I'm likely to return to a lot, is the idea of running away and inventing yourself. "My favorite thing to do was run away," Hell writes. "The words 'let's run away' still sound magic to me." And, later, "We lived in the suburbs of America in the fifties. My roots are shallow." Note the present tense in the last sentence. I like the idea of Americans as being essentially unrooted and drifting, and I particularly like the idea that, growing up in the suburbs, you hit a point where you either have to invent yourself or replicate the lives of your parents. Maybe that's changing and maybe it isn't. I wonder a little to what extent the internet replaces the role of the city when it comes to self-invention.

I think it's important to situate Hell and his cohort right alongside the hippie generation. We (or at least I) tend to think of the hippie sixties and the punk seventies as separated by ten years, but there's a lot of bleed there. Hell talks about what it felt like to hate Sgt. Pepper when it came out, to feel like it was just a bloated piece of crap. The sixties become so monolithic in our thinking, to the point we imagine two forces: the hippies and the establishment, in perfect opposition. But of course the hippie movement is fractured and factional and not really a movement at all, and there are other fringes, other cracks to fall into. Or worse (better?), there is a space that is both outside the culture and outside the counter-culture.

Hell is exacting in cataloguing the women he slept with during this time. He describes many of them as muses, which is to say they paid his rent or provided him drugs. It's a particularly awful form of misogyny that labels the female as a kind of creative force/erotic charge which is itself unable to create; it can only be channeled by the male. It allows him to both praise women and negate them. It's ugly stuff.

We should talk about negation, because it's at the heart of things here. If there are two bits of language often attached to Hell, it's Please Kill Me and the word Blank. As in Blank Generation and as in ______. But, as Hell points out, negation as an end point can be difficult as an artistic project. 

This created a kind of paradox. If your message is that you don't care about things, how can it be delivered? Where's the initiative? Even though I didn't understand this contradiction consciously, I intuited it. And its ruinous consequences were becoming more and more obvious.

It's a bit of a central dilemma of punk. If punk is best summed up as a very loud NO, why say it? Why produce art, even if that art is intended, in a dadaist/lettrist sense, as non-art or no-art. Why is a no wave still a wave?

I wish there was more about New York and "the scene," but to be honest, much of what Hell writes about the burgeoning punk scene at the time is self-serving, suspect, and contradicted by other sources. A lot of it is Hell's attempt to "set the record straight", and anecdotes often begin with phrases like "Verlaine and Ficca will tell you..." before recounting a version of events in which Hell is the conquering hero and his bandmates are obstacles he's narrowly able to overcome.

I also wish there was more here about his relationship with Verlaine, but Hell is so sure he was in the right that he's unable to really look at the dissolution of their musical partnership and friendship. Maybe the most poignant moment in the book is the ending where he runs into Verlaine at a used book shop in the West Village. "We were like two monsters confiding," Hell writes. I'm interested in the way art can destroy a friendship, and the ways in which personal conflict can fuel art, but Hell is so caught up in affirming himself as the creator of capital P Punk that he manages to miss many of the moments that create it. The book comes off as one man's attempt at an origin myth, but for something that seems to come from everywhere at once.

One thing the book makes clear, despite itself, is that "the punk moment" is one that never happens, it has always already happened, and attempts to imagine a single Big Bang moment are both misguided and misguiding.

Research Notes: Introduction

So I'm working on a new thing.

Okay, even that's not quite right. I've written...maybe twenty pages. So I'm not even sure yet I'd call it a new thing. I certainly would not call it a novel. I would call it a project. And even then, I'd do it cautiously.

Mostly what I'm doing right now is research. And it's a kind of grazing research, not yet zeroing in on particulars. Looking for ideas rather than fact-checking.

Here's what it is, more or less. I'm thinking about music scenes in New York. Particularly the worlds of punk and avant garde music from around 1975 through 1987. Maybe beyond that, I'm not exactly sure where the piece is going to go. And before you start, yes, I am aware there is a very large novel that just came out about New York City in 1977. And yes, I tried to read it, but then I bailed. Because it's kind of terribly written, for one thing. And for another thing, it's particularly bad when it talks about exactly the stuff I'd want to talk about (that is, the book is overly enamored of wealth and its trappings, but when it deals with punk, it becomes clear the author doesn't like any of the music he's talking about). I'll probably address the book in question here later. But, moving on.

Because research for this project is probably more interesting to other people than, say, the research for a book about Warsaw in 1889, I'm going to keep some notes here. Feel free to read them or not. Feel free to comment or suggest other sources. Again, I'm casting a pretty wide net to see what I haul in, so tangents and side streets are not only acceptable, they might be preferable.

Onward. Or, more to the point, one two three four.