Ahh, So You’re Not

Friday started at three in the morning with a conf call.  Happens that time, every week.  Asia was finishing up their workday.  Texting people, unraveling problems, suggesting ways around a misunderstanding that two people had suddenly kicked up.   And then one by one the people faded off into their Asia evening.  I’d need a nap later but for now I was up, the sun was up, and I lay down in single bed in this office room and continued my way through Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand.”

I was distracted, likely, when I read the section of it which they provided in that Harlem Renaissance Reader I’d went through not long ago.  Adroit writing, surely, thought provoking, atmospheric descriptions but like the title suggested, I felt that I was being dragged down into a slow read and a steady throb of discontent. 

I have a very different perspective on her achievement having now read the book straight through.  Certainly, Helga Crane is never satisfied.  Teaching in the south is dreadful and she leaves before the semester is up.  In Chicago, her uncle’s new wife treats her abysmally. Harlem is exciting and then it isn’t.  We travel to Copenhagen. It isn’t hard to consider how Denmark would be a welcome respite from the question of racial identity but there too, it proves inescapable.  No, she won’t marry the famous painter who cast her as a savage in his portrait.  And, so like the “Ex-colored Man” in James Wendell Johnson’s “Autobiography” or Claude McKay’s Jake Brown in “Home to Harlem” the siren call of Manhattan pulls Helga back to New York.  By this time, I wasn’t disappointed by Helga any longer.  I wished for her to surmount herself but came to understand that her dissatisfaction, was the message. 

The man she’d always love delights her and then misreads her and crushes her heart.  Helga’s anguish, achingly comprehensible, leads her out into the elements.  She comes out of the rain, and into a church service.  Slowly, plausibly, she descends into a tearful rapture.  I remember thinking, ‘ahh, so you’re not going to end this by allowing her to fall in love.  You’re going to save her soul.”  She finds religion, she marries the preacher, they move down south and live a God-fearing life during which she becomes an unwitting breeder.  New boys born, every year and remarkably, God isn’t the answer for Helga either.  She hates this life, she hates her husband, she’s no affection for her newborn and she is now sinking down and I understood the fullness of her tragedy and of course the title. 

Friday, 07/17/20

Entered, and Killed All

We were driving back from a day in along the Dead Sea, earlier this year, when my friend pointed out to me that the city we were passing was Jericho.  One of a dozen remarkably famous landmarks we’d passed during the day, “oh, that’s the place where John the Baptist, baptized Jesus.”  “You don’t say?” . . . it was too late in the day to stop, and besides, my friend who was driving is an Israeli citizen and this city in the Palestinian Authority was off limits, to him at least.  My other chum in the back seat commented on the “Walls of Jericho” and alluded to trumpets.  “Yes.” Said the friend behind the wheel.  “The oldest walls in the world.”  Alas, all of this registered rather vaguely with me.

I got started with it last night, and was drawn in immediately by the way Rudolph Fisher personifies the progression of Fifth Avenue, up beyond One-Hundred-and-Tenth Street, “wagging its head in self commiseration . . . having poked its head out into the dark kingdoms backwoods.”  And this morning after rising early, despite myself, with no early morning calls to attend to I considered the big twelve point, old fashioned font, of Fisher’s first novel, “The Walls of Jericho.” 

It’s a wonderful story.  Funny, full of marvelous slang, from 1928, easily lampooning the wealthy and the working class, among both blacks and whites, Fisher is able to profile injustice and prejudice without being predictable.  And it’s not until the final third of the novel when the moving man Shine and the “KM” Linda find a chance to discuss and unpack the metaphor, behind the books title: “Jericho, chief city of every man’s spiritual Canaan.”   The dismantling of Shine’s wall happens in a manner quite plausible.

I took a look on Wiki and reviewed the Biblical tale from the Book of Joshua.  The Israelites set out to conquer their first city in Canaan.  Spies informed them that the inhabitants were in fear of the Israelites and (of course), in fear of their God.  They marched around the city walls with the Ark of the Covenant, each day for six days,  (which sounds a bit like pilgrim perambulations of Buddhists around Mount Kailash) after which they blew their trumpets and the city walls came tumbling down.  The Israelites entered and killed all the men, woman and children in the city, including all the domesticated mammals, with the exception of the Canaanite prostitute Rahab who had helped the aforementioned spies.  This, according to God’s law.  

Blasphemer, I find it hard to see this as anything other than a wretched, vindictive tale, which only the most artful of spins could suggest was not the symbol of a brutal massacre but rather about resisting the urge to wall oneself off and being open to others . . . so they can annihilate you.  But Shine survives and so does Linda like two “salty dogs,” with the help of Merrit, whom the prior almost mistakenly murdered.  And I will now remember the allusion, and think of Harlem I suppose, the next time I pass those Palestinian city walls, should I get another chance.

Thursday, 07/16/20

I Surmount the Crest

No time for it on yesterday’s ride.  But generally, I stop the bike at some point during my daily ride and walk about twenty, thirty yards up the trail, cross the road and return continuing on for the same distance in the other direction.  Then I cross the road and complete the rectangle.  And all along the way, I look for plants which I don’t recognize.   

Time was that this process would generally yield a few discoveries for the time invested.  Three-hundred-and-eight plant species now and counting on this Seek app, I’m running into some limits on biodiversity.  At Bridge Creek Road they’ve blocked the trail.  The old bridge not far beyond was stripped of its wood a few months back and no work whatsoever has been done to repair the structure eve since then.  I’m sure it was done for my and everyone’s own good.  No one wants to fall through a bridge.  But there isn’t a day I pass by here when I don’t vex about the fact that no progress has been made.  The sign, I imagine draping over the sign they have in place there says: “So . . . when do we expect you to begin the work?” 

And one road closed means another one opens and if you take a right along Bridge Creek you get a steep decline that takes you past a few nice homes until the detour suggests a left on Old Ford Road.  This is downhill for a hundred meters and then a steep incline for the next two football fields or so.  It’s grueling every time and among the most satisfying moments of my day, whenever I surmount the crest and return to the highest gear. 

Today, I stopped just before the downhill begins.  There was a smart looking tree with long triangular leaves that caught my eye.  I stood like a fool for zooming in and out, angling one direction and another, trying to force the Seek app to positively identify the tree.  “Hickory family” is as far as it would go.  And after a while I gave up and proceeded with my rectangle.  I do my best to guess a few.  I can now tell a White Oak from a Northern Red Oak. I was hopeful when it told me I’d found an “Arrowood” but it soon became clear that I’d already identified that species months’ ago, so it wasn’t new.  At the next worthy piece of bottony I thought I was repeating this process when the app suggested I’d found and “American Hazelnut.”  Come to find however that I’d never recorded such a tree before. 

I snapped a few pictures of the trees and the field with different filters, as I always do and then got back on the bike and enjoyed the rush of the wind as I sped down the hill, passed the red house to the left, which built their place along a creek and wondered why it was they had a constructed it with metal roof. 

Wednesday, 07/15/20

But It Didn't Matter

Tuesday mornings, man.  They start at 4:00AM.  I got through three calls and had a one- hour break before the fourth one.  The trainer was still finishing his training when I got my shorts on and suited up my sneakers with these ridiculous tick-gators pulled up over my shins.  With the call done I got the bike out of the garage and leaned it against the house garage door, as the kick stand had mysteriously broken off, a few days back. 

A call.  Should I take it?  I ought to.  I’d promised to settle this and so I leaned against the car and gathered my mind to be present for what was an important conversation, I’d played out a few times with different conclusions in my mind over the past week.  I took the high road. 

By the time I was straddling the bike there was only thirty-five minutes till the next call.  I was supposed to have intelligent things to say on this conference, rather than simply listen.  There’d be no connectivity if I just tried to take the call on the trail.  My ride is usually a commitment that lasts about ten minutes longer than that.  I’d go to a certain point and turn around.  I do it one direction or the other every day.  So, I pedaled as hard as I could and I turn back wherever the mid-point was.  

No surprise.  You pedal a hell of a lot harder when you are pedaling against time.  I damn near made it to the bridge where I usually turn around but right about where a large bluff rises us to block an old home off the trail and the ground is all covered in ferns beneath the soaring Northern Red Oaks and Sugar Maples, I checked for a last time and acknowledged I was one minute too far and looped back around home.  I got back with three minutes to spare. Unpresentable visually, but it didn’t matter with the little zoom video camera blocked.  My voice sounded fine and I began the session, suitably exercised, by introducing my team.

Tuesday, 07/14/20

On the Adjoining Pane

A dove just flew straight into the window in front of me.  You know that hurt.   He darted off towards the porch.  I expected to look over and see him lying on the ground in dizzy agony.  They must have strong skulls.  He seems to have just flown on.  Oblivious to this head on collision there is a green mayfly that has stood stoically on the adjoining pane of glass for the last six hours.  I tried, unsuccessfully to identify his specific species when I was up for a call at 5:00AM.  He hasn’t moved since.  Is he sleeping?  Is he dying?  Mayflies don’t live very long, do they?  Perhaps he’s just considering his next move.

Yesterday two foxes showed.  I hadn’t seen that before.  My understanding is that foxes hunt alone.  If they were smart, and inclined to share, they could presumably secure a lot more squirrel meat employing a coordinated approach arriving at the clearing from opposite directions, but then I’m thinking like a humanoid.  These two stood uselessly beneath the juniper tree staring at the empty lawn.  Perhaps this is a husband-wife team.  My wife claims she’s seen babies, off in the woods between our place and the neighbors. 

Enjoying some Earl Hines this morning.  Have always known the name but can’t recall a time when I thought to reach for the man.  Following the thread back from the boppers, to Billy Eckstine to the Earl Hines Orchestra.  Hailing, like so many jazz luminaries from the Pittsburgh area, Hines’s Wiki page is peppered with so many salutatory quotes from Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Errol Garner, Horace Silver, I realized I couldn’t place anything to do with his style in my mind’s ear.  Continuing on I considered the Grand Terrace Café in Chicago for the first time.  A club which Al Capone had a controlling stake in, where blacks and whites co-mingled, and everyone kept silent about what they knew if and when the police showed up.  What the Cotton Club and Duke Ellington were for Manhattan, Hines and the Grand Terrace were for Chicago.  And it’s refreshing to read that he had a long, productive career during which his greatest was acknowledged by presidents and popes.  Listening to “Darkness” just now, recorded in New York in 1934, the year after Prohibition ended, considering the layered ways one could unpack that title, considering what a dance floor might have looked like would have looked like when darkness fell. 

And “Darkness” suits me as no one is singing.  Happy to enjoy the vocal tracks on many of these tunes, but not when I write or read or generally multitask.  The words demand cognition in a way that melody and improvisation do not.  I can swing with “Darkness” and still get things done.  But when the next tune “You’re the One of My Dreams” hits the air I’m blocked the moment Walter Fuller puts down his trumpet and begins to sing. I advance to the subsequent tune “Swingin’ Down” which allows me to proceed, unencumbered.  And now it’s “Pianology” which sort of brings it all together, his Basie swing, his Art Tatum fireworks, the percussive punch of Horace Silver.  Earl "Fatha" Hines, indeed.  The literature of the time has demanded I enrich my understanding of the tunes of the time, which had led me to the literature in the first place, so many years ago.  I shouldn’t but I’m about to spend some time looking for clips of Earl Hines on Youtube.  (there’s a trove.)

Monday, 7/13/20

Ethiopia and the Kaleidoscopic

I did what I could to clear away the day and catch up on this here blog today.  It’s an odd exercise to try to recreate a day that has slipped from yesterday to last week, and then beyond.  I’ll have notes from that day laid out in a document.  A meal I made.  A meal I ate.  “worked on the puzzle”, “fed the birds.”  Sometimes a meatball can be all you need to bring the breadth of a day back, Madeline-like.  Other times the phrases just mock you and catalyze nothing.  Remarkable that nearly all of it actually is up there.  You just need to cultivate access. 

The day before I’d finished off Claude McKay’s “Romance in Marsaille” which I greatly enjoyed.  It’s refreshing after spending so many fictive pages during the Harlem Renaissance reading in and around Lennox Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty Fifth Street to consider the African diaspora from the south of France or from Marakesh.  Buried in plain sight for nearly ninety years in the archives he donated his work to, I enjoyed it more than McKay’s “Home to Harlem.”  Lafala is a stowaway, caught and locked in the wash closet he nearly freezes to-death and when they reach New York they must amputate his feet, the feet that once had danced so well.  It’s New York though and he is persuaded to sue the shipping company, and the suit is successful.  He returns back to the Marsaille Quayside without his feet but as a newly-minted millionaire.  He reengages a remarkable cast of old lovers, odd friends.  Everyone schemes, no one is to be completely believed, and Lafala is nearly murdered, imprisoned and makes his way back to Africa, leaving everyone, even the remarkable Sudanese harlot Aslima, reluctantly behind. 

I gave it to my mom when she asked if she could borrow it after I’d described it.  I think I’ll send a copy to my sister as well for her birthday is approaching.  I immediately dove into yet another Claude McKay novel that was lost to history: “Amiable with Big Teeth” which is set in Harlem but concerns itself with Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the kaleidoscopic politics, and cross cutting cleavages of well-heeled Harlem, the ComIntern, Haile Selassie’s resistance and the long-gone uptown night clubs.

When you read, your mind is alight.  But when you read, you do not write.  And sometime this morning after enjoying the first thirty pages or so in the can, I put the book down, determined to write.  I won’t be at peace till I reckon with this backlog.  The rain fell.  I made some tacos for the wife and the little one.  Later in the day my older one came back from a weekend in Pennsylvania and I paid my stepdad, who is stuck in a physical rehabilitation center up the hill, a quick visit.  But otherwise, I kept to my writing.  At 9:00PM tonight there is a weekly call that signals the beginning of the Asia Monday morning.  Sunday becomes Monday, far too quickly.

Sunday, 7/12/20

Glass of Dirty Green

Confused.  I conflated the two great threads from jazz history into one.  Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra was the band that Sun Ra thought played so well, they couldn’t be human.  He reckoned they had to be angels.  Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry and Benny Carter all got their start in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra.  It was the Early Hines orchestra with its evolution into Billy Eckstine’s group in the next decade that was the hatchery, which welcomed the early boppers; launching Dizzy, Bird, Miles, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Sarah Vaughan and countless others to prominence.  Today I spent some time with the handsome mustachioed Mssr. Eckstine who was more famous than Frank Sinatra in Frank Sinatra’s day. 

I was skimming through clips and photos of him and one photo from Life Magazine in 1950 which immediately stands out.  A number of young women surround Eckstine and one has put her head on his shoulder.  They are white.  He is black.  It doesn’t seem especially sexual, rather she appears simply overwhelmed by the engagement with stardom.  The photo had to be approved by Henry Luce himself.   I’m glad he did.  The magazine took a lot of flak for photo back when segregation was still in full flush.  Some wonder if the photo didn’t cost Eckstine his shot at pop stardom. 

The Wiki bio on line suggests that Eckstine appeared in dozens of television shows, but I searched in vain for his appearance on Merv Griffin or Johnny Carson.  He apparently even made an appearance on Sanford and Son, but once again, they were not easily accessible on line.  I did however come across a majestic interview with him on the Dick Cavett show from 1972.  He would have been about fifty-eight years old not so much older than I am today.  Cavett is characteristically nervous and endearingly awkward, when he brings up the topic of segregation for bands that toured.  To me Eckstine manages the thread with commanding dignity, speaking of the injustice of that time, the inaccuracies of how jazz history was rendered and his honest assessment as to just how horrible Al Jolson was.  I found myself annoyed that Cavett who is otherwise a sharp intellect, couldn’t rise to the occasion of this rich discussion.  Rather it ended with a thud, as he broke for a commercial, suggesting that the conversation had somehow been negative. 

I’m staring at a half-filled glass of dirty green water.  From out the glass stand a dozen stems of fleabane.  I’d tried unsuccessfully for the last few bike rides to identify this little yellow and white flower that is blooming all along the trail just now.  Today the proper name appeared and I grabbed a few stalks on a sweaty walk which my wife and I took with our little one and our nephew who was visiting.  Apparently, the dried plant was thought to act as a flea repellent.  These flowers were thirsty.  I’ll get some more water and we’ll see how long they last.

Saturday, 7/11/20