Archives for February 17, 2004

Books are published by installments, and A Terry Teachout Reader is down to the short strokes. I got a package in the mail from Yale University Press the day before I left for Smalltown, U.S.A., containing two copies of the dust jacket, which is printed prior to the actual book. I’d wanted a piece of modern American art on the cover of the Teachout Reader, so I polled the readers of “About Last Night” a few months ago, asking whether they preferred Fairfield Porter’s “Broadway,” John Marin’s “Downtown. The El,” Stuart Davis’ “Owh! In San Pao,” or Davis’ “Ready-to-Wear.” The Porter won, and I can now report that the final product looks great. In fact, I’ve never had a better-looking dust jacket–and I’ve had some handsome ones.

No book is completely real to the author until he holds the very first copy in his hands. Until then, it becomes real by stages–the manuscript, the proofs, the dust jacket, the bound galleys–and the fact that it’s actually going to be published sinks in a little deeper with each additional step. By the time you’ve seen a half-dozen books through the press, you’re not likely to be surprised by any part of the process, but my heart still leaped when I pulled the dust jacket out of the envelope and held it in my hand.

I know the Teachout Reader isn’t going to be a best seller, and I’ve been around the track often enough to suspect that I’m going to get my share of kick-in-the-crotch reviews (which I won’t read–I’m scrupulous about that). That’s par for the course. On the other hand, I brought one copy of the dust jacket home with me, knowing my mother would take it to the office and show it off to her colleagues, which she did. If she could, she’d blow it up and slap it on a billboard in the center of town. She’s like that.

It’s not that my mother reads everything I write, least of all “About Last Night.” She hasn’t figured out blogs yet, nor is she especially media-savvy. We went to the neighborhood video store yesterday to rent a couple of movies to watch during my visit, and as I was picking my way through the westerns, she called out, “Oh, look! Have you heard of this one? I think Bill Murray’s always funny.” I turned around and saw her holding a copy of Lost in Translation. I nodded my head and said, “You might like that one, Mom. Let’s rent it.” I’ll tell you what she thinks of it tomorrow.

I’m sitting in my old bedroom as I write these words, listening to the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It’ll keep on blowing for several more minutes, because the tracks run all the way through town, and it takes slow trains a long time to clear the city limits. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about riding the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, and in the first paragraph I mentioned the trains that rumble through Smalltown. “Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood,” I wrote, “and their lonesome whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I’d never been.” The editor kicked the first draft back to me with a terse note saying that “lonesome whistles” was a clich

Back to Terry’s five questions: “If you had to live in a song, what would it be?”

A song where everything’s still the same:

Everybody’s had a few

Now they’re talking about who knows who

I’m going back to the Crescent City

Where everything’s still the same

This town has said what it has to say

Now I’m after that back highway

And the longest bridge

I’ve ever crossed over Pontchartrain

Tu le ton temps that’s what we say

We used to dance the night away

Me and my sister, me and my brother

We used to walk down by the river

Mama lives in Mandeville

I can hardly wait until

I can hear my Zydeco

and laissez le bon ton roulet

And take rides in open cars

My brother knows where the best bars are

Let’s see how these blues’ll do

in the town where the good times stay

Tu le ton temps that’s all we say

We used to dance the night away

Me and my sister me and my brother

We used to walk down by the river

That’s Lucinda Williams’ “Crescent City.” The appeal of this song–aside from the gorgeous fiddle–is how the Crescent City and environs are static, but alive: full of walking, driving, gossip, dancing. And just in case all that activity isn’t enough to keep things from getting stale, the song contains the outside space of wherever the narrator is returning from.

Of course, everything in “Crescent City” is really just in the narrator’s head–the song takes place while she’s on the road home. Yet the scenes she imagines are so vivid (helped out by that fiddle), it’s easy to forget that they’re only imagined. In this, the song has something in common with a poem so famous, it’s hard to hear freshly:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing daffodils;

Along the lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;

A poet could not but be gay

In such a laughing company.

I gazed, and gazed, but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought–

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Before the standard-bearers get their noses all out of joint over the comparison, let me state that I am not putting Lucinda on the same artistic plane as Bill. (Now I’ll probably hear from the people who think Wordsworth suffers from the comparison!) I’m just pointing out that the song and the poem are each about the memory of their apparent subject. But they both make their remembered scenes so vivid that you easily forget they’re really about the reveries of a woman behind the wheel of a car and a guy on a couch.

My runner-up is David Bowie’s “Kooks.”

Many thanks to Sarah for directing me to this Denver Post article about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, longtime object of my affection/obsession. Things I learned:

Originally McGee’s first name was to have been Dallas. Then John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and MacDonald didn’t want to have that association. When he was casting about for a new name, fellow writer MacKinlay Kantor suggested that Air Force bases had nice-sounding names, and MacDonald settled on Travis.

Various means were considered to enable readers to distinguish one book from another in the series. Use of numbers was rejected because readers might think they had to read them in sequence. Eventually he and his publisher came up with color, and MacDonald went back and dropped color references into the four manuscripts he already had written.

MacDonald placed McGee across Florida in Fort Lauderdale because he had a hunch the books would catch on and didn’t want his privacy in Sarasota disturbed by gawking McGee enthusiasts.

Gawking TMFTML enthusiasts, on the other hand, can train their binoculars here. And don’t forget this more out-of-the-way gaping spot.

“I hear you laugh at me for being happy in the country, and upon this I have a few words to say. In the first place whether one lives or dies I hold and always have held to be of infinitely less moment than is generally supposed; but if life is the choice then it is common sense to amuse yourself with the best you can find where you happen to be placed. I am not leading precisely the life I should chuse, but that which (all things considered, as well as I could consider them) appeared to be the most eligible. I am resolved therefore to like it and to reconcile myself to it; which is more manly than to feign myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post, of being thrown away, and being desolate and such like trash. I am prepared therefore either way. If the chances of life ever enable me to emerge, I will shew you that I have not been wholly occupied by small and sordid pursuits. If (as the greater probability is) I am come to the end of my career, I give myself quietly up to horticulture, and the annual augmentation of my family. In short, if my lot be to crawl, I will crawl contentedly; if to fly, I will fly with alacrity; but as long as I can possibly avoid it I will never be unhappy.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Holland, September 9, 1809