From the Archives: Stanley Crawford's 'Mayordomo'

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I was saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two important New Mexico writers, N. Scott Momaday and Stanley Crawford. I never had the chance to meet Momaday though I certainly knew of his legacy as a voice of Native American culture. I did intersect with Crawford years ago and wrote about one of his New Mexico books. I’d only recently begun traveling to the Southwest and getting a handle on the interwoven cultures of the “Land of Enchantment.” Crawford’s Mayordomo was an enlightening guide to the complications of village life. This first appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1988.

From the Archives: Calvin Trillin Three Ways

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One of Kansas City’s favorite literary native sons is coming back to town on a book tour soon. He’s touting a new collection of some of his classic magazine journalism, including landmark reporting on the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. It was some years later when Trillin’s “American Journal” reports began catching my eye in The New Yorker, and then a decade or so more when I began writing about Trillin during my days as Book Review Editor of The Kansas City Star.

I’ve dug deep into the files to unearth one of those book related stories, which included an interview in Trillin’s Greenwich Village pad.

Twice in the 2000s I managed to accompany Trillin on food tours of his beloved lower Manhattan, which turned me on to some of the more interesting corners of the village and Chinatown.

For now, I’m posting jpeg clippings. Hope that works for all.

Now, a food tour, 2005. My syndicated piece published in the Honolulu newspaper.

Seven years later, 2012, mostly new places, but some old favorites.

A Suite of Jazz Poems

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Over the last few years i’ve found a place for some of my jazz poems at JerryJazzMusician.com, a hand-built enterprise that offers a wide array of music-inspired study, commentary, history, and creative production. See the editor Joe Maita’s recent interview with Glenn Mott, who edited a collection of Stanley Crouch’s previously uncollected essays and critical pieces, Victory is Assured. (I wrote about Crouch’s book for KC Studio last September-October.) All well and good, but I thought it might be a decent idea to round up some of my poems that Joe has published. Given that my poetry practice remains mostly a private affair, I’m grateful for the outlet.

Piano

“In the creative state a man … lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious…”
—E.M. Forster

.

Taking Forster’s bucket
into the unknown
like Keith Jarrett

in Bremen sailing
into pianissimo

pedals and digits and the dust
of oblivion all summoned
to transform silence

into a path where
bees sting where
hearts bleed where
buckets slosh and spill

torqued with bop and bounce,
they teeter back toward
stillness.

……………………..first published in New Letters

The Night I Heard Mose Allison Sing

Was in 1984, not yet 20 years after
I’d first heard that Southern drawl, soft
as cotton or Mississippi silt,
and those plaintive and wacky blues
lyrics that floated out of my little radio
in the night air.

But now, in the heart of the country,
Mose was looking academic, his gray hair
and beard neatly trimmed. He wore
a seersucker jacket.

At the piano, with a local bass player
and drummer I knew,
Mose first launched into a boogie-woogie
rhythm, with slightly skewed riffs, just
off balance. There was a maelstrom of
notes in double time, and I wondered,
as those sounds reached my ears, if I could characterize
it all as Looney-tunes meets Fats Waller meets Chopin.
Or maybe just Waller and Chopin, piano stars
of equal stature, I’d say.

Fifteen minutes into the piece, he shifted
to a darker place, then back to this
orchestral craziness. (Do you remember
this, Bob Bowman, deep in your string bass
aural archive? Would your fingers ever
recognize that jazz abandon again?)

Then we applauded Mose’s ear for a great
song, Percy Mayfield’s “Lost Mind,” and
I can still hear Mose sing, “If you would be so
kind as to help me find my mind…”*

After another offbeat tune,
Mose slowed down to sing
“Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy,”
which speaks to us today
in the darkness: “people
running round in circles,
don’t know what they’re heading for.”*

I could name all of the songs he played,
because just now I found the notebook
where I wrote it all down, his tributes
to Duke Ellington, Willie Dixon
and the lesser-known Johnny Fuller,
a blues man who came out of Mississippi,
landed in Oakland and within 12 months
of this glorious Mose night
would be dead at an age we all hope to live past.

It looks like I must have written down
all the words, as Mose sang them, of “How
Much Truth,” not
knowing then one iota of what I know
30-plus years later about truth and whether
the world is “left without its daydream…
threatened by the works of man…Destined
for the frying pan.”*

Mose, dead now just one month
at the age of 89, took his piano
to the edge of chaos
more than once that night. That’s what
we live for, the truth and transformation
in music, crystalline moments that help us find
our lost minds and deliver meaning
in the love and the mist.

.

Quoted lyrics by Percy Mayfield (“Lost Mind”) and Mose Allison (“Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy,” “How Much Truth”)

.

by Steve Paul

Body And Soul

The jazz man spoke
of his ancestors, the
lineage that brought
him to where he is.
Do not shine your
light on yourself, he

told the students
gathered around.
Honor the past,
honor the trials
of simple existence,
honor the pain and

blood that came
before you, and the
greatness that grew
despite all of that.
When he riffed

on “Body and Soul,”
the sounds coming
from all his circuits,
darting in and hinting
at the melody as we
knew it, reshaping,

and making the song his
own body in the moment,
his soul saxed message
was obvious, went
straight to the
heart and the blood.

.

by Steve Paul; in tribute to Logan Richardson

The Horn

The neighbor with
a trumpet stumbles
through “Watermelon

Man” on his porch,
an act to mitigate
loneliness perhaps

to reach beyond
the distance of
homeboundedness

“Lean on Me,” he
tries, knowing
we’ve lost the

songwriter who
made it an anthem
the notes skitter

around Withers’
melody like scouts
on a mission

securing the
perimeter,
protecting the

body and its
fragile
hymn.

.

by Steve Paul

Three Tiny Poems

Nutty

The twirler, the plinker-plunker
be minor, be diminished,
be neither of those things,
the waking, the daily glories,
the human scales
and ache-y arrows to heart, to ear,
I dream of Monkishness supreme

.

Ornithology

Bird call this morning is alto-sax heir of
that Bird, jabs and run-ons and then a melodic line
flits in again;

outside, the sun: dog on a leash,
finches galore stab at seeds,
everyone wonders
what else is there?

.

Havana Vibes

A conga player collides with “Pork-Pie
Hat,” the woman vibist fists two mallets,
follows bandmates into a driving, propulsive sound—
her stance languid, lanky, her long arms made moreso
as she stares into the music, now a Cuban bounce
thick like picadillo with piano and drums one on top of the other,
her mallets fly above like lightning bugs in the night.

Art in Balance: From Anadol's AI Ooze to Serra's Steel "Equal"

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First posted on FB, Feb. 16, 2023.

I had an hour or so to spend at the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, and it occurred to me later that in my random wanderings, mostly through recent and contemporary art, I'd experienced a kind of yin/yang revelation. On the one hand there was the astounding, rather psychedelic, machine-dream digital video creation of Refik Anadol, "Unsupervised." The pulsing, wall-sized, ever-evolving blob was a kind of macro abstraction in three-dimensional motion, which (and speaking of AI) had its origins in actual MoMa imagery transformed by the computer brain. It was mesmerizing, performatively electric and extremely captivating given the quantity of phone cameras and gawkers (self included) in its presence. On the other hand there was the room that held Richard Serra's "Equal," a suite of four stacked pairs of steel cubes. This, I realized, was Anadol's opposite, an experience in solidity and stasis. Mesmerizing in its own way, it asks us to slow down and look inward. MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

From the Archives: The Salman Rushdie Uproar, 1989

The recent violent assault on Salman Rushdie at a literary event in upstate New York reminded us of the unpredictable perils we live with in today’s world. And that doesn’t even begin to speak to disturbing current trends in book-banning, censorship, and battles around free expression. I joined those who were much relieved to learn of the encouraging news about Rushdie’s slightly improved condition following serious stab wounds, and I’ll add all best wishes for a full physical recovery. The incident sent me back more than 30 years to a piece I wrote, as book review editor, about the furor unleashed by the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the death sentence issued by Iran’s Islamic leader. Except for a couple of tiny edits I’d like to make, I was rather surprised to see how timely the essay still seems to be. Sixteen years later, Rushdie spoke to a capacity crowd at the University of Kansas’ Lied Center in Lawrence, an event I attended. His message about speaking up in the face of challenges to freedom hadn’t changed, though he was able to take local note of the rise of fundamentalism in Kansas and, according to a press account of the time, to dish another timely comment: “It’s a pretty bad time for us who don’t believe that superstition should rule the world.”

 

The following commentary first appeared in the Sunday Arts section of the Kansas City Star, Feb. 19, 1989.

 

By Steve Paul

Anyone who underestimates the power of the book—the power of fiction, no less—should consider the recent events in Islam.

            A novel by a lapsed Muslim, a native of Bombay now settled in England, has caused an upset so great among fundamentalist believers that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has called for the writer’s assassination. Seven persons died in riots in Pakistan and India prompted by the American publication of the book. The novel has been burned by zealots in England and banned in a large part of the Islamic world.

            Except for the violence, the furor over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is akin to the emotional uprising that occurred last year upon the release of Martin Scorsese’s film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which was based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel. The movie prompted protests, boycotts and threats from fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants in America and abroad.

            It is easy to dismiss the impulse to censor as a symptom of the narrow-minded ignorance of the self-righteous: Just as “The Last Temptation” was unseen by the vast majority of its detractors, The Satanic Verses has been largely unread by the opposition.

            It is not so easy to fathom the consequences.

            No one outside Islam can presume to know the depth of belief that can make one willing to “die one thousand deaths to assure that Mohammed and his family are not hurt,” as an Islamic leader in London has been quoted. One can only compare those feelings to one’s own belief system: Would I kill to defend what I believe? Two centuries of American patriotism and warfare—a sliver on the blood-spattered time line of world history—can confirm it for those in this country. But would we kill because of a book?

            It is impossible to compute the number of lives lost in the name of the Bible or the Koran over the centuries. The history of earthly literature, by contrast, has produced its share of controversy, but rarely amid bloodshed. The thunderous reverberations of Darwin’s little book of natural history, for instance, continue to be heard in the nation’s more backward school systems.

            But a novel? Serious fiction is a product of the imagination, and only the most naïve can mistake it for history, James Michener notwithstanding. (And what is history, if not reasoned conjecture, the work of a scholar’s imagination?)

            A novel is a testing ground for an individual’s ideas about the self and life in general, John Gardner suggested in his book On Moral Fiction. Salman Rushdie is discovering the exception to one of Gardner’s assertions: “True moral fiction is a laboratory experiment too difficult and dangerous to try in the world but safe and important in the mirror image of reality in the writer’s mind.”

            The Satanic Verses is a sprawling, manically written novel, a hallucination that can be difficult to enter but exciting nonetheless. It is Rushdie’s attempt to come to terms with the centrifugal force of multicultural identity that is the burden of immigrants in London—Muslims and others who may have fled repression or upheaval in their homelands only to find the paradoxes of freedom in the West.

            At the same time Rushdie examines the shifting nature of good and evil. It is a challenging book whose magical language can propel a reader past its occasional obscurity and break-neck gyrations in plot and structure. It can dazzle you with its style before you realize you may be missing something. It may be self-indulgent and self-reflective—but so was James Joyce.

            The Satanic Verses was widely acclaimed in England, where it was published in September and immediately became a short-list candidate for two prestigious prizes. (It won a Whitbread prize in fiction.) Bill Buford, writing in the Sunday Times (of London), called it “a masterpiece of a novel that is more ambitious than any other fiction being written today.”

            American reviewers have been far from unanimous in their praise, often noting that Rushdie’s accomplishment has fall short of that ambition. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called it “an odd, uninvolving book that shows only intermittent flashes of its author’s considerable gifts.”

            It is curious to note that the offending segments of The Satanic Verses and “The Last Temptation of Christ” are contained in dream sequences. In Rushdie’s case, the dreams involved the birth of a religion not unlike Islam and a prophet who can be seen as a parody of Muhammed. It is, of course, futile to point out to the irrational that dreams are the province of irrational consciousness, and so even further removed from representational reality (which should not always be equated with truth).

            Rushdie is not alone among Muslims who have tested the patience and faith of their leaders. Curious American readers have been discovering the wry pleasures of Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian writer who a few months ago was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1959 Egypt banned a novel by Mahfouz, The Children of Gebelawi, a proscription that continues to this day. The book, which challenges Islamic orthodoxy, contains “grave insults to religious creeds,” according to Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old Islamic institute in Cairo. The institute last fall renewed its ban with the statement: “A novel cannot just be permitted into circulation because its author won the Nobel Prize for literature, since that award does not justify the propagation of misguided ideas.”

            Mahfouz is often considered to be the leading writer in the Arab world, which produced its first modern novel only in 1913, two years after Mahfouz’s birth. (That book was Zainab, by Muhammad Hussein Haikal, an Egyptian writing in Paris.) Mahfouz, however, apparently is a political moderate, and that has cost him readers in the Mideast. According to Anton Shammas, an Israeli-Palestinian writing in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, when Mahfouz suggested in a newspaper column in 1975 that Arabs should find ways to live in peace with Israel, several Arab nations banned his works.

            Free expression—even the ability to propagate “misguided ideas”—is a hallmark of the West, a privilege that too often may be taken for granted. “Whenever books are burned,” the German poet Heinrich Heine once wrote, “men also, in the end are burned.” We in the West in recent years have come to learn only too well the implications of Islamic zealotry. We may not understand it, but we can shake our heads at its unsavory extremism. Western institutions are daily targets of satire, jest and critical opposition—and the debate only makes them stronger. Will Islam ever learn that?

            “Mr. Rushdie’s case is intellectual,” the British education minister, Kenneth Baker, wrote recently in The Times of London. “The response should be intellectual, too. His critics should reach for the Koran, not for a box of matches.”

From the Archives: A Chat With Robert Bly

As I’ve been delving into the life and work of William Stafford, on the way toward a possible biography, I couldn’t help but take a new interest in Robert Bly, who became an important champion of Stafford’s poetry. I was sorry to learn of Bly’s recent death. I’d been reading a new book about Bly’s raucous period as the argumentative editor of a small-press poetry journal, serially called The Fifties, The Sixties, and, finally, The Seventies (only one issue under that title). The book is Born Under the Sign of Odin, by Mark Gustafson. I had a few memories of hearing Bly read his work and presiding over a men’s workshop in Kansas City many years ago. Until I dug out an old file, I’d forgotten that I’d actually interviewed him, by phone, in 1992, in advance of one of his Kansas City events. This was at the height of Bly’s fame in the Iron John era, the work in which he explored the power and necessity of myth. So, here’s that piece, which first appeared in the Kansas City Star on October 15, 1992. It ran under the headline “Men's work: Poet Robert Bly uses yesterday's stories to touch today's lives.”  

By STEVE PAUL

Two years ago this fall Robert Bly underwent an unexpected rite of passage. 

  The Minnesota writer, author by then of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, translator of 15 others by European and South American poets, and editor of a handful of anthologies, issued a book that, in the course of its long and still-beating shelf life, not only exceeded sales of all the rest but turned its thoughtful, white-maned author into a pop-culture personality. 

  The poet as media sensation! Unheard of.

  But Bly's book, Iron John: A Book About Men, captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers. It also inspired widespread and vigorous discussion of the meaning of men's lives ("What Do Men Really Want?," Newsweek's cover eventually blared) and put Bly into the thick of a talk-show and speaking-tour whirlwind.

  But once you've seen the mountaintop of fame - People magazine chose Bly as one of the 25 most intriguing people of 1991 - how can you slip back into the contemplative and relatively unnoticed valley of the poet? 

  Bly says it's not at all difficult. The attention finally has waned, and he says he's sticking to his vow to take a year off from speaking and teaching and furthering his "men's work." His hiatus has been interrupted only by some prior commitments, including a speaking engagement Friday at Johnson County Community College and a daylong workshop for men Saturday at Avila College.

  "In general I've been wonderfully at home and lying down and reading and doing some poems," Bly says by telephone from his cabin - he calls it his writing place - at Moose Lake, Minn. "So I'm enjoying it a lot." 

  Bly says he wasn't totally unaccustomed to being in the public eye. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and with Kansas City poet David Ray, helped organize poets against the war through public readings and publications. That was a similar public expression of feeling, he says - an example, like Iron John, of "someone saying things that needed to be said." 

   "But," he adds, "it's no trouble to drop out at all and go back to writing poetry. Thoreau said, `When you give a speech, there's usually an occasion for it, and you give it to those who can hear.' Then he said, `When you write, you write for those who can understand, and the occasion is your whole life.' Isn't that wonderful?"

  Through a combination of ancient mythology, contemporary psychology, poetry and, especially, a deep reading of the "Iron John" fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers early in the 19th century, Bly's book gave men and women an understanding of a great "father hunger," as Bly puts it, that has beset the lives of boys and men since the Industrial Revolution. 

  He touched many lives bound in confusion over the role of men in society. And, perhaps, he presented a moral touchstone to those set adrift in the greedy fervor of the 1980s.

  Long a student of ancient storytelling, Bly helped point readers to the archetypal lessons of mythology. "Mythology," he writes in Iron John, "helps to give weight to our private wounds Without the weight given by a wound consciously realized, the man will lead a provisional life."

  The book helped to bare the soul of a burgeoning "men's movement." For a decade Bly had been conducting weekend "wild man" retreats in the woods. The concept accelerated in early 1990 when Bill Moyers presented Bly and his men's work in a PBS special and hit warp-drive when Iron John appeared in November of that year, on its way to spending nearly 60 weeks on the hardcover best-seller lists.

  Ever since, books about men and their grief have proliferated, including, just this month, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, a collection of 300 poems "for men," which Bly co-edited (HarperCollins; $25).

  Bly is gratified that his workshops, such as the one he'll conduct here Saturday, have opened up a new audience for poetry. 

  "Some of the complicated grief that men have is best described by poems," he says. "Poems make it more clear. Sociological language can't do it. Psychological language can't do it."

The emerging poet

  Bly's journey to the upper ranks of American poetry began on the farm in western Minnesota that his great-grandparents settled after immigrating from Norway. He served two years in the Navy in World War II, and it was there, he says, that he discovered the power of the poem. 

  "I met the first person I knew who wrote poetry in the Navy," Bly says. "He wrote a poem in front of me. I was stunned. I'd never seen anyone write a poem. I thought the books wrote them. It went something like, `The south side of Chicago is like a running sore on a large body.'

  "What did I know? To me, that was wonderful. The idea that someone could make up an image like that was amazing." 

  Bly then applied to Harvard University and got in. There he studied with Archibald MacLeish and joined what is now an impressive list of fellow writing students, including Donald Hall, Kenneth Koch, George Plimpton, John Hawkes and Adrienne Rich. 

  Bly opted against graduate school and chose instead "the old route of the person in the garret."

  "So I went to New York and made my living as a file clerk one day a week, a typist one day a week and, toward the end, a house painter. 

  "Those were wonderful years, because in a way I escaped graduate school and I had time to read and time to brood and be depressed."

  There was something wonderful about it, because here I had been at college and suddenly I was at the bottom of the whole heap and people could look at me and instantly understand that I was not very far away from being a bag man. 

  "In a way it took away my fear of falling. A lot of people think that if they don't do the right thing, the safe thing, they'll fall through their class."

  By 1962 Bly had published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields. He came to prominence later in the decade with his opposition to the Vietnam War and his book The Light Around the Body (1968).

  In the wake of Iron John, several of his best-known poetry collections were reissued last year, including The Light Around the Body; The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), which explored father-son relationships; Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985); and Selected Poems (1986).

  This year HarperCollins published a collection of Bly's prose poems, What Have I Ever Lost By Dying? That book draws together work spanning more than 20 years, largely observations of nature, family and love. Because of the straightforward, detail-packed style of the prose-poem form, the work tends to be more immediately accessible than the more surreal dreamscapes of his lyrics.

  Bly says he plans another book like Iron John that will deal with several fairy tales. Before that will come a new collection of poems that he has been working on for some years. Many of the poems are about his father.

Easily misunderstood 

  Bly recognizes that his recent work and the movement it has fed are not universally admired.

  "Women have received so much depreciation from men," he says, "that they are justifiably afraid that when men get together they are liable to do something to women."

  The media is to blame, he says, for its oversimplifications and tendency to focus its images on the drum-beating extremes. Bly's metaphors of the inner wild man or soul warrior are easily

misinterpreted. ("Warrior doesn't mean you go to the gulf war," he has said elsewhere. "It means you fight inside your community for what is good.")

  "Most women get the big picture out of the media," he says, "and there's a lot of false pictures of it floating around  But some of the same things that are now being said about the men's movement were said about the women's movement when it began." 

  Typical of the criticism is April Bernard's recent assessment in The New Republic. Reviewing The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart and another book of men's poetry, Bernard wrote: "While it would be unfair, of course, to fault men as a group for exploring their feelings, it could be argued that they have already done that, in what is loosely known as The History of Civilization."

   Bernard characterizes Bly as something of a huckster and particularly disingenuous, betrayed by his language, in his "claim to embrace women, or feminism."

  "For some of those young women feminists," Bly counters, "they are not writing about the book. They are attempting to establish themselves in the eyes of their women peers, and for that they've got to hit it hard."

  Bly has gone beyond the men-only approach by presenting workshops for both sexes in collaboration with Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst in Toronto. A year ago he and Deborah Tannen, the popular author of You Just Don't Understand, a book about how men and women fail to communicate, gave a joint program in New York on "Men and Women Talking Together."

  Bly is adamant about the value for men and women in such soul-searching work.

  "I'm not a separatist in any way," he says. "I think that many women who participated in the women's movement 20 years ago did marvelous things. They helped to bring out pain and anger that hadn't been expressed, which really is important. Women now feel that something else is needed - it's time to stop attacking men and see if we can get along.

  "The people in the media seem to want more anger between men and women. They are always trying to get us to say something inflammatory. Men and women themselves want less anger and more reconciliation."

Missouri and Maine, The Personal Compromise: An Essay on Place

The Missouri River making the bend as it reaches downtown Kansas City.

The Missouri River making the bend as it reaches downtown Kansas City.

I caught wind of a call for contributions to Essay Daily, an online journal and started thinking about what Missouri means to me. The result was this piece built around the river. I left out the part where I almost perished in the upper Missouri in the midst of a reporting trip, though I think I mentioned that in passing on another recent river-related piece for my KC Studio column. No matter, here it is:

http://www.essaydaily.org/2021/05/the-midwessay-steve-paul-rivers-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EssayDailyNotReallySoDaily+%28Essay+Daily%3A+Not+Really+So+Daily%29

Some Quarantine Reading and Notes On Hemingway's reading of American Lit

I’ve been somewhat remiss lately about feeding this little blog beast. But I’ve been wondering about the thing that follows and was sparked to write it down, first by reading some essays and articles by James Salter (a rather random impetus, I’ll agree) and then by previewing the forthcoming “Hemingway” documentary series by Ken Burns and company, which I’ll be writing about separately before its debut in early April. — Steve Paul, Feb. 7, 2021.

I’ve been looking for my copy of Death in the Afternoon for more than two years now. It just has to be somewhere around the house, I keep thinking. So I compulsively peek under beds, behind other books, and around every reading pile in the place. From time to time, I imagine that no matter how often I’ve scanned a particular shelf I must have merely overlooked it. The book is filled with my pen strokes, notes, and yellow highlights. That makes it a personal loss, not just an inconvenience.

The last time I was in it, I’d been writing a paper, not about Hemingway and bullfighting, the book’s ostensible topic, but about Hemingway and wine. The topic of wine and life happens to come up in a digression about connoisseurship that happens to be a particularly vintage (sorry) passage. (I’m now wondering, did I take the book to Paris and lose it that year, 2018, when I gave my conference paper in a steamy auditorium at the Sorbonne?) 

What brings this back to mind lately, and what will send me out to pick up a new used copy of the book, is a thought that stirred recently about Hemingway and American literature.

Hemingway famously pronounced, in the non-fiction book he wrote right after Death in the Afternoon, that all modern American literature stemmed from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It’s an understandable thought, and it cements the notion that in his arrival on the literary landscape of the 1920s, Hemingway forged a bold modernist style that, like Twain’s novel, captured the authentic sound of American speech. Whenever Hemingway is at his best, you can hear the muscle and the ache of his characters in the words they speak as well as the silences and glancing blows. Whenever he’s at his worst, Hemingway’s dialogue rings hollow. 

In the last year of sheltering and quarantine, along with working on a book that had not much to do with Hemingway, I’ve been reading constantly. Early on, while rearranging and sorting books I hadn’t looked at for years, I tripped across my college-era copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and determined right then and there to start rereading it again. I was blown away by its stream-of-consciousness modernism, the darting points of view, the lovely language in a way I’m sure I did not fully appreciate all those decades ago.  

A few weeks ago, I also went back to Moby-Dick, which I hadn’t read since the summer after graduating from college. This time, again, I found new reasons to admire it, to be surprised and enveloped by it. I swooned at times over the pre-Joycean language. The specificity of Melville’s vision of the human and natural worlds, channeled through the consciousness of Ishmael, remains towering and powerful. In writing my book lately about the American author Evan S. Connell, whose work ranged from light fiction to dark and sweeping history, I was taken with an assessment made by the late critic Stanley Crouch. He called Connell’s landmark work about “Custer’s Last Stand,” Son of the Morning Star, an American masterpiece in the mold of Moby-Dick.

Somewhere in the midst of reading Melville’s novel, I began wondering whether it would be useful to make comparisons between it and Death in the Afternoon. Each book attempts to teach readers about a grand and gory ritual in which humans pursue ultimate truths and experience in the violent conquering of animal nature. Each blended its non-fiction truths and expositions within a fictional arc and narrative. Hemingway returned to the technique in Green Hills of Africa (1935), the account of his first African safari that contains his judgment about Twain. Chasing after fish and mammalian wildlife, of course, underlies any number of Hemingway’s life-and-death defining works, from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” to The Old Man and the Sea.

So, why does all American literature go back to Huckleberry Finn (1884), and not three decades earlier to Moby-Dick (1851)? While meditating on literature in Green Hills of Africa Hemingway makes passing mention of Melville’s achievement of rhetoric, but that’s it. I remember once, on a trip to Hemingway’s bookshelf-lined house outside Havana, Cuba, when Susan Beegel, one of the foremost Hemingway scholars on the planet, scoured the place for Hemingway’s copy of Moby-Dick, as if it were the white whale among his collection of more than seven thousand books. It eluded her grasp. One scholarly resource suggests that Hemingway had multiple copies of Moby-Dick in his Key West library, implying that it did not accompany his transition to life in Cuba circa 1940. Perhaps he’d left Melville behind figuratively as well; his library in Cuba had plenty of Twain. Nevertheless, Hemingway had just completed For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the Spanish Civil War novel that would seem to owe less to Twain than to Melville.

I must concede for now that I have no definitive answers. The question, the challenge to study this idea of influence, will linger. I happen to be rereading Green Hills of Africa at the moment. Like Death in the Afternoon, it has certain qualities that have long been recognized as a kind of ur-text in the lineage of what we later called “the new journalism.” The books blend close “objective” observation of the outer world with the unmistakable “subjective” presence of the author. Neither book retains much of a compelling reputation these days, but like all of Hemingway, there are nuggets that glitter. In the current mission, and like Captain Ahab, perhaps, I’ll remain atop the vast Hemingway sea, looking for those shiny, meaningful things and the telltale spout in the distance.

On Art, Books and More: Some Recent Writing

I’ve spent a bit more time reviewing books this year, including a handful of 175-word advance reviews for Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association. I was happy to write a somewhat longer review of an important new book that combines memoir and environmental reporting in what was once my home state of Maine. The book is Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault. My review appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in August:

https://www.startribune.com/review-mill-town-reckoning-with-what-remains-by-kerri-arsenault/572251082/

When the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in June became one of the first cultural institutions to reopen since the widespread pandemic shutdown began in mid-March, I made a day trip down to Bentonville, Ark., to report on the museum for The Art Newspaper. Along with the precautions I found a surprising resonance with the social upheaval that began just a couple of weeks earlier after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis:

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/visitors-return-to-crystal-bridges-amid-adaptations-and-provocations

As the Charlotte Street Foundation prepared to finish building out its new headquarters building, I’d begun work on a profile of its executive director Amy Kligman. And then came the pandemic, which provided the story a sense of drama and urgency. Here’s the link:

http://kcstudio.org/the-art-of-adaptation-charlotte-street-foundation/

For KC Studio, I devoted my bimonthly column to the departure of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Arts curator of Native American art:

http://kcstudio.org/gaylord-torrence-transformed-native-american-presence-at-nelson-atkins/

And this one, which celebrated the contributions of Bobby Watson to the Kansas City jazz scene:

http://kcstudio.org/after-20-years-in-academia-bobby-watson-will-travel-jazz-world-again/

From the Archives: Jay McShann and the Kansas City Sound

Lockdown has meant a lot of paper-shuffling, organizing, and weeding out. Every now and then something pops out of a folder that makes me smile. I feel so lucky at times to have had a chance to meet and write about so many gifted writers, artists, and musicians in my newspaper years. There was a stretch in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, after my stint as a jazz DJ, when I wrote quite a bit about jazz. As I noted elsewhere recently, at the time I wrote under the influence of Whitney Balliett, the great jazz commentator for The New Yorker. Close readers might catch a whiff of that influence in this review of a club date by the Jay McShann Quintet in October 1984. This was first published in The Kansas City Star, Oct. 14, 1984, under the headline “McShann provides showcase for KC jazz.” Along with McShann’s voice and piano, the band, playing at the Signboard Bar at the Westin Crown Center, included Budd Johnson, tenor sax; Carmell Jones, who’d long lived as an ex-pat in Germany, on trumpet; Noble Samuels, bass; and drummer Paul Gunther. I regret some of the cringeworthy prose, but I stand by what I hope represents a sense of some vital musical history.

By Steve Paul

Jay McShann, a national jazz treasure who calls Kansas City home, is in the middle of a monthlong stint, his fist extended appearance here in a couple of decades.

The homecoming in such a comfortable setting was long overdue and it should not be missed by anyone who professes an affinity to the pleasures of jazz.

A couple of sets Friday at the Signboard were notnecessarily a breahtaking evening of electrifying performances.

Rather, Mr. McShann—he’s been saying for a while that he’s 68, other sources say 75—and his colleagues delivered a populist sermon on the hybrid, swinging music that began emerging from Kansas City and the region a half century ago.

The program, familiar to much of the adience, included compositions by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mr. McShann and others. The presentation was mostly predictable: Mr. McShann out front for a couple of choruses, then solos by Mr. Jones, Mr. Johnson and, frequently, Mr. Samuels, before returning to an ensemble chorus to close.

But the allure of this living and breathing Kansas City jazz is not in the fundamentals of form. That simplicity is merely the springboard for the bounce of the blues-based sound.

Mr. McShann’s keyboard echoes with diverse influences: the austere economy of Mr. Basie, the frolicking barrelhouse of Pete Johnson and others, and often the more sophisticated textures of Art Tatum. His round face tightens up around the mouth as he concentrates on a two-handed boogie-woogie and then rolls and beams with pleasure as he manufactures a particularly offbeat phrase.

And then he sings. Tehre is something about that cidery voice: Its natural element is the blues.

Budd Johnson of New HYork, another septuagenarian, has been in and out of Kandsas City jazz circles over the years. His career includes stopovers with Earl Hines (early on and again in the 1960s), Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine and Count Basie. he blows a sweet, sometimes delicate sax. On Friday, the intensity of his delivery expanded with each solo as he and his colleagues fed from the collective pool of energy and ideas that grew all night.

On a featured number such as “Body and Soul,” Mr. Johnson showcased a versatile range and a style so easily presented that it must be, after all these years, indelibly etched in that abstract interior where music lives.

On Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,: Mr. Johnson, like his colleagues, didn’t stray too far from familiar ground, but he showed he can surprise a listener with a towering yelp or a beefy incantation.

Kansas Citian Carmell Jones has an aggressive but lyrical style. His phrasing was understated and controlled. Some solos were simply gorgeous.

At one moment early in the second set Mr. Jones seemed almost in awe of his surroundings. Mr. Johnson had just finished a chorus of “Confessin’ the Blues.” Mr. Jones began his turn with a simple four-bar entrance. Then he paused and said to the saxophonist, “That was beautiful. I don’t know what I’ll do to follow you.” Of course, he re-entered without missing a beat and then reeled off an exquisite, driven blues. That was it. No problem.

Mr. McShann is a true ambassador of the Kansas City style. He and his cohorts, finely dressed in black suits and formal shirts, are appearing at the Signboard (in the Westin Crown Center hotel) Tuesdays through Saturdays through Oct. 27. All shows begin at 9 p.m.

From the archives: Let's toast Roger Angell

Angell.jpeg

Some FB chatter erupted today about the great Roger Angell, now 99, inspired by Joe Bonomo’s recent book about him (right) and a new Q&A posted this week at the New Yorker. All that sent me in search of a baseball column I wrote a few years ago as the Kansas City Royals were heading for the post-season (and ultimate victory in the World Series). I’d name-checked Angell, and I’m pretty sure I sent a copy to him, with thanks for a truly inspiring career, though I never got a response. In searching for the piece, I discovered that the NewsBank archive, accessed via the Mid-Continent Public Library, has an odd flaw—an apparent adversity to anything with embedded hyperlinks or fancy text coding. I think I’ve filled the resulting gaps accurately. In addition, I tripped over an earlier blog piece I wrote about Angell for The KC Star website, including a list of three of my favorite Angell pieces, and I’ve tacked on a copy of that at the end of this post. This first piece—yes, I can feel an Angellic tilt to some of the writing—appeared in print in the Kansas City Star on Sept. 27, 2015. If anyone finds it online, you’re a better sleuth than I am. The Star’s website often sucked.

A Fan’s Notes Emerge as the Anxious Season Peaks

By Steve Paul

I'll admit it: I left Wednesday night's Royals game at Kauffman Stadium before it was over.

It was the ninth inning. Relief pitcher Luke Hochevar had gone to a full count with three straight batters and let the third get on base. I had another one of those feelings that we've had so often in this crazy baseball September. Not tonight. It was already a given that the Royals wouldn't have clinched the division title that night, but still there was faint hope though not much optimism that the team would catch enough spark to get the job done.

On the way out of the stadium, I caught Hochevar on a monitor, luckily, closing out the top of the ninth with no further damage. On the drive home, we heard the Royals tie the game. Nevertheless the frustrating inability to get runners home — 14 batters stranded through nine innings — bode ill for this game. The agony lasted into the 10th.

It's hard to criticize the wussy people who had left the stadium even before my partner and I did. We'd sat in those hard plastic seats for four hours already. We're just real people with day jobs, and perhaps everyone else had an early appointment the next day, too.

Don't get me wrong. There were bits of exciting, scratch-it-out baseball; Yordano Ventura, the fiery and floppy hurler, looked fairly effective; and a big beer and a footlong brat helped fill the time and distract us from the goofy goings-on between innings on the giant scoreboard.

Even the newly minted fan in my house — to some faithful readers, that's the former She Who Is Not Easily Pleased — noticed the subtly intriguing dynamics of the game. "There was one moment when fans rattled Seattle," she texted to a friend. "Lots of drama. Guys talking behind gloves."

We got home just in time to turn on the radio broadcast and hear new closer Wade Davis shut down the Mariners in the top of the 10th and — at long last — the return of Royals ecstasy, when Lorenzo Cain drove home the long-legged Brazilian, Paulo Orlando, for the game-winning run.

In case you're wondering, I am not trying out for a spot on the sports page. But I am trying to get in touch with that thing about baseball that stirs in many of us even if our team weren't heading for another string of post-season battles.

I was glad that Wednesday night's game began with a moment of silence for Yogi Berra, whose death at 90 was reported that day. Sure he was one of those hated Yankees, but he was one of the very few who transcended that ancient rivalry to enjoy a kind of historic, heroic esteem. "That he triumphed on the diamond again and again in spite of his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity," Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times' lengthy obit.

My personal history with Yogi goes back to my ancient and brief days as a Little League catcher, like him, when all those Yankees were my heroes. This vivid passage last week from another hero, Roger Angell, The New Yorker's 95-year-old deep observer of baseball, stopped me in place: "I think of him behind the plate as well: a thinking bookend, a stump in charge."

Yogi's St. Louis heritage and school-dropout past meant nothing to me then or now, but I can't quite get over a sense memory that his visage always reminds me a bit of my grandfather, who hasn't been with us for 50 years now. He was something like a thinking bookend, too. Or at least that's how I remember him.

One thing we learned during the Royals' magical season last year was how intensely the game binds the generations. Will Salvador Perez endure behind the plate like a Yogi Berra for tomorrow?

I have watched or listened to almost every game this season, including the division clincher on Thursday. I'm ready to plan for October success. And to celebrate more baseball, which can make us anxious, break our hearts and, ultimately, lift our spirits.

There is that other thing about Yogi. I should've thought about it Wednesday night as we debated whether to stay or go. "It ain't over till it's over." One of the most classic Yogi-isms. And one of those Royals things we've been holding onto all season long.

—-

The following appeared online on Dec. 12, 2013, on the occasion of Angell’s receipt of a lifetime award from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Roger Angell in the Hall: A real home run

BY STEVE PAUL

With drug scandals, end-of-season disappointments, and winter-meeting, team-building hiccups, the sport of baseball could seem like it’s in the doldrums.

But now comes news of a real grand slam: The Baseball Hall of Fame will honor Roger Angell with its J.G. Taylor Spink Award, which goes to those who chronicle the game in words.

Angell, who has long served as the fiction editor of The New Yorker, has also written classy, intelligent and deeply felt long-form pieces for the magazine over the last 50 years. Many of his pieces have been anthologized (see, for example, “Once More Around the Park.”)As his editor, David Remnick, opined the other day, “Roger Angell is the greatest of all baseball writers.”

Period. Underlined. No question about it.

Angell embodies two important passions in my life — baseball and writing — though I’m a relative newcomer to his work, given that I’ve only been reading him for three decades or so.

What makes Angell special is how he tells stories and how he always manages to find heart and humanity in the game.

For evidence, I’d offer up a triple-play of Angell’s classic pieces (and The New Yorker has helpfully posted one of them):

• “Down the Drain,” the aching tale, from 1975, of Steve Blass, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who inexplicably went from top-of-the-game, World Series success to inexplicable oblivion (read it here).

• “Before the Fall,” another career-end story of a pitcher, the Kansas City phenom David Cone, then pitching for the Yankees (2001). “I was writing a book about Cone,” Angell writes, “but almost from the beginning he was aware that it wasn’t going to turn out the way we’d hoped.”

• “In the Country,” probably my all-time favorite Angell piece (I’ve used it in non-fiction writing classes). This one comes from 1981, and it starts with letters Angell receives from the girlfriend of a semi-pro pitcher named Ron Goble. Before you know it, you are witness to the pain and joy of these people, as baseball, cancer and sheer determination course through the lower levels, but entirely human stations of the game.

Landmark KC Sculpture by Kenneth Snelson is Scheduled for Repairs.

“Triple Crown” at rest, lowered to the grown this summer and awaiting repairs to connection joints. Photo by Steve Paul.

“Triple Crown” at rest, lowered to the grown this summer and awaiting repairs to connection joints. Photo by Steve Paul.

Here’s another recent piece for KC Studio magazine. We posted it online in early September because it seemed to have some newsworthiness. The article will also appear in the November-December issue in print. I’ve long been entertained by this landmark sculpture. Of course, I just noticed that the trolls came out in force when a lousy local web site ridiculed it when linking to the piece:

http://kcstudio.org/after-nearly-30-years-kcs-floating-sculpture-needs-a-fix-kenneth-snelson/