I know that all kinds of artists over the years have taken heart and inspiration from the life and work of David Hockney (1937-2026), for all kinds of reasons. For gay artists, he was out there, early and proud. For painters working in, and more importantly working with, the visually chaotic often derided spaces of Los Angeles, he proved that an unbiased eye was even more powerful than irony for revealing the covert beauties of the city’s surfaces. For artists who lacked the compulsive, monastic resolve to devote themselves wholly to one medium or technique, or who feared the dread label of “dilettante,” he demonstrated how an artist might repay the generosity of the gift he had been given by scattering, not hoarding, his treasure.

Last year I went to see the big retrospective at the Institut Vuitton in Paris and found that, rather abruptly, I had a whole new reason to be inspired by David Hockney: the inarguable excellence of the art that he was, at the age of 87, still making. Indeed the high quality of his painting as an old dude appeared to be directly attributable to the very flexibility, the willingness to adapt and try new approaches, that have made him an inspiration to me in my times of dilettante doubt.

Oddly, I was thinking about Hockney just last night, at the Forum in Los Angeles, in the presence of two other lifelong sources of inspiration who were now unveiling themselves, like Hockney at the Vuitton, in new avatars: two old dudes who, authentically, with the thoughtfulness, fire, and exactitude of their commercial and pop-cultural prime, still rock. Hard.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, boyhood friends and bassist and guitarist, respectively, of the Canadian progressive rock band, Rush, are 72.

The band’s incomparable drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart, is gone, killed by brain cancer in 2020, but here were Lee and Lifeson, at the start of a projected 58-date, 29-city tour, Lee leaping and strutting and Lifeson striking guitar god attitudes as they wrung cascades and sheets and roaring rapids of notes out of their instruments, which have never had necks enough to convey the pair’s intricate yet spacious musical ideas.

Lee’s famous Plant-squared ululatory style, Malkmus-mocked1, has dropped a couple of notches over the years, from clarion-register clarinet to a mellower cor anglais. The pair, like Hockney, rely on craft, technology and practice, practice, practice to work around the challenges that youth barrels through.Ten years ago the band had retired, saying essentially that they, in particular Peart, were done. But last night those two surviving old dudes, clearly energized and buoyed by the presence at their backs of a ferociously meticulous 43-year-old German drummer named Anika Nilles, seemed ready to pick up not where they had left off but some time or place before that, somewhere nearer to their prime, closer to the heart.

My impression is that Hockney never went on any such extended hiatus from painting as he aged; that, on the contrary, increasingly he took a break from everything but the work. But then painting, like writing, and unlike rock guitar playing (pace Robert Fripp), is commonly done while seated, and involves relatively little in the way of Chuck Berry-style duckwalking or Pete Townshend-style windmilling or pounding on an array of paint can lids, hard and in time, for two solid hours.

Like Lee and Lifeson, however, Hockney remained fiercely open to new technologies, and to seeking inspiration and creative stimulus in the work and ideas of younger artists and collaborators; and maybe therein lies the secret of enduring creativity in one’s old age.

It’s become a kind of personal cliché with me to feel my heart squeeze a little whenever Lee and Lifeson, who met in grade 8 at Toronto’s Fisherville Junior High School, circa 1965-66, station themselves staunchly back to back on stage, enacting physically a lifetime of musical and emotional support, or whenever one of them simply leaves the other one—after so many gigs and rehearsals and years in the studio—grinning with astonishment at some lick or run.

But it was also unexpectedly moving, and beautiful, to watch the interplay between Rush’s old bassist and its new drummer, every time Lee wandered over to that skyline of drums, bells, and cymbals to check in with his battery-mate. Moving, because it was the habit of half a century, of more than two-thirds of his lifetime—the veteran engineer making the rounds, checking the dials, tapping the gauges, and because he still could not seem to fully grasp or get his head around the fact that the person in that city of drums, making all that organized noise, was not a stern, strapping, self-contained, stoic, intermittently mustached rock’n’roll philosopher but a slender young woman with a blond ponytail who visibly took pleasure—sometimes joyful, sometimes verging on impish—in holding fast to the sweet spot between atomic-clock precision and atom-bomb power.

You could see Lee, on the Jumbotron, marveling at that power and precision, and at the grit and guts and (justified) faith in her own talent Nilles had needed to dare replace the irreplaceable Peart. Marveling at all the changes that had taken place in his and the band’s life since 2020 and 2016 and 1980 and 1976. Marveling at the very fact of change itself. And then he would give Nilles one of those aforementioned astonished grins.

And beautiful, and moving, finally, because now as she picked up on what this old dude—one of the greatest rock bassists ever! Her battery-mate!—was throwing down, the young drummer grinned right back at him.

[Note: 13 years ago this week I met E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015) for the first and only time.* A little more than two years later, learning of his death, I wrote the following.]

Every self-respecting cartoon hero knows that when you find yourself hemmed in on all sides or lost in an endless blank expanse all you need for liberation is the stub of a pencil. You stand back. You take the measure of the problem. Then on the very fabric of reality itself—your reality, the one that imprisons you—you draw an upright rectangle. You fit an inner edge of the rectangle with a little circle about halfway down. Then you grab hold of the doorknob you just made, give a push, and make your escape. Before, there were only walls, only confinement and prohibition and discouragement; or there was nothing at all, a blank of infinite impossibility. Now, thanks to you, there is a door.

When great writers pass through the doorways that they have made they leave them open, behind them, so that others can follow. Every young writer setting out to find a means of egress from the walls and stifling blanknesses of whatever box they were born into knows how it feels to come upon one of these doorways and catch a glimpse of blue sky, and feel a cool breeze blowing in from the other side. If you are a Jewish American writer of my generation then you will have passed through a door that was made by Saul Bellow, or Cynthia Ozick, or Bernard Malamud, or Philip Roth. Those Jewish writers and their peers opened a way into in American literature that had been not there before them. If you want to write works of literature that are also unabashed works of fantasy or science fiction—an ambition for which the world will often seek to imprison you in its darkest boxes, fence you around with its most forbidding blanks—there is no sweeter relief than stumbling on the door left open for you by Ursula K. LeGuin, whose space operas and heroic fantasies set a standard of beauty and intensity and depth of understanding to which all literature aspires. And if you came of age, as I did, in a culture hungover and embittered from the lingering effects of a century-long bender triggered by the realization that history and truth, as we have always known or received them, are—to put it politely—works of fiction, than the way out—at least for me—was opened by E. L. Doctorow.

Doctorow’s trick, worthy of Bugs Bunny himself, was to turn that melancholy equation inside out, like an old gray cartoon trenchcoat that, when you reverse the lining, turns into a circus tent or a working pair of feathered wings. If history is to be encumbered with all the perceived liabilities of fiction—subjectivity, incompleteness, the fact that it’s all a bunch of made-up bullshit—then fiction might as well avail itself of the discarded privileges that history once arrogated to itself: an air of objectivity, a tone of authority or cultural omniscience, and most usefully an irresistible glamor of being true—lower case t. When Doctorow came along those privileges were, after all, just kind of lying around in pieces on the floor. Nobody was really using them.

And so, shyly or slyly at first, with 1971’s The Book of Daniel and then in 1975 with such stunning audacity that I can still remember my parents’ awed dinner-table conversation, that summer, about a novel they were reading, called Ragtime, that went up to the overgrown wall enclosing the garden of fiction and opened the doorway to history. Into that walled garden all manner of strange creatures came creeping: Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington and, not least, Doctorow’s own imagination, disillusioned but not disheartened, hip to history’s lies without any loss in his dispassionate sympathy for the human weakness that underlies them.

In opening that particular door, Doctorow made a startling discovery: done properly, the incorporation of historical figures into a fictional context did not come off as some kind of smart-ass critique of subjectivity and the fictive nature of history. Done properly it just made the lies you were telling your readers—with their full and willing consent, of course—sound that much more true. And that small-t truth then became a powerful tool for getting across whatever Truth, subjective and fragmentary though it might be, that you felt you had it in you to express.

When I started to work on the novel that became The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I knew that I wanted readers to believe, at least while they were inside the novel, that Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay were real people, had been real people. That there really had been an Escapist Comics, Inc., headquartered in the Empire State Building, which had prospered for a brief moment in the 1940s because of the success of a costumed superhero character who had been a real-life rival, in the newsstand marketplace, to Superman and Captain America. That I knew such a trick was at least possible, and that I understood the means, at least, by which it could be pulled off, was entirely due to Doctorow and his books—not just Ragtime but Loon Lake and The Waterworks and Billy Bathgate and World’s Fair, with its stunning and clever child’s-eye fictional redeployment of the Hindenburg disaster. By presenting, with a straight face, the interaction between its invented characters and people like Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, anti-comics crusader Dr. Frederic Wertham, and composer Raymond Scott, Kavalier and Clay could assert its factitious factuality, ensnaring a reader in a tangle of pleasurable doubt—I hoped—while smuggling into the novel a true accounting of the cultural milieu and influences that had helped shape the comic-book medium in its formative years.

I had the opportunity to sit next to Doctorow, a couple of years ago, as a large group photograph was taken at an annual literary event in New York City to which we’d both had the honor of being invited. In the few minutes that I could be sure I would have before the moment came to sit still and shut up for the picture-taking, I tried to tell Doctorow how crucial—how salvational—his work had been to me, from the moment I had first read Ragtime and in particular as I was setting out to write Kavalier & Clay. I wanted to explain how I had come of age, as a writer, in a time when American fiction could sometimes feel like a choice one had to make between the airless box of so-called “dirty realism” and the blank, mirrored expanse of so-called postmodernism; how Doctorow’s work—playful with the “facts” of history in a postmodern way, gimlet-eyed as the dirtiest realism about the fact that history, unmediated and un-narrated, was a bloody mess—had seemed, like no other writer’s, to offer a magic way out.

God knows what I actually said; not that. Doctorow listened graciously and politely as I nattered, but I could see he was ready to get going. He knew from past experience that the afternoon’s program, to follow the photo shoot, promised to be long and slow-moving. His placement beside me, it turned out, was the chance result of his having requested a seat at the end of a row, to facilitate an early and unobtrusive escape. When I was done babbling, Doctorow thanked me, clasped my hand in both of his. They were the hands of an old man; and I was older, so much older, than I had been when I first fell in love with Ragtime. I looked down at those bent and spotted hands enfolding my middle-aged one, and felt the messy truth about history.

“Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot.”

We fell silent, and sat still, and held our smiles for the required interval as the photographer clicked away. Then Doctorow patted me on the shoulder, ducked his head, and stood up. He held up a couple of fingers in a little farewell salute.

“I’m outta here,” he said, already moving toward the door.

☉

*Though I had, previously, caught a brief glimpse of him, being hurried past a crowd of fans and would-be acolytes, myself included, at the university-sponsored writers’ conference in Pittsburgh, when I was an undergraduate, on which, very loosely, I basedWonder Boys’ WordFest.

Following up on my post-with-playlist featuring the work of Robyn Hitchcock in his Janglemage aspect, here’s A History of Jangle (1963-2026), which I’ve been tinkering with and adding to over the past five or six years now.

As the ninety-nine songs on this playlist demonstrate, the great janglemages of rock have done their thing with six- and twelve-strings; with Gibsons, Fenders, Danelectros, Voxes, Gretsches, Guilds, and Hagstroms; by means of alternate tunings and multi-tracking (or both at once, as in “Nashville tuning”); by relying on the overtones and harmonics of single-coil pickups, on capos and steel picks and arpeggiation, and on studio wizardry—compression, layering, creative stereo spreads. But the symbol and instrumental avatar of jangle will always be a Rickenbacker Model 360/12 electric 12-string guitar, in the expressive hands of George Harrison, or of Roger McGuinn.

George Harrison introduced the Rickenbacker 12-string to rock ’n’ roll, playing a Model 360/12–the second 360/12 ever made1—on a number of tracks recorded for A Hard Day’s Night; you can hear its characteristic resonant chiming in the solos to “I Should Have Known Better” and “You Can’t Do That.” But it was the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, with his bluegrass background and fingerpicking chops, who first figured out how to deploy the Ric’s full sonic potential.

The story is that McGuinn, then calling himself Jim and fronting a trio that called itself the Jet Set, saw A Hard Day’s Night with his bandmates, Gene Clark and David Crosby, and was rocked to his core, understanding as soon as he saw the Quiet Beatle with his eloquent axe that he had to have a 360/12, too.

In addition to its semi-hollow body, relatively narrow neck, and clever right-angles solution to the problem of fitting twelve tuning pegs onto a standard-sized head, the 360/12 has a couple of other peculiarities that make it tricky to master, even for someone already accustomed to playing a twelve-string acoustic. One is those aforementioned single-coil pickups, which produce a bright and clear signal and generate the background hum that contributes to the characteristic ringing tone of jangle, but are less forgiving than humbucking pickups of sloppy fingerings and fret pressure.

The other peculiarity is the reversed coursing of the Ric’s six pairs of strings whereby—unlike traditional acoustic 12-strings—the octave string sits behind rather than in front of its paired lower-pitched string, so that the fundamental is struck before the octave, producing interesting harmonics and overtones.

Francis C. Hall, the owner of Rickenbacker Guitars, had first presented the 360/12 to John Lennon, who may have found its intricacies and quirks, in the aggregate, a bit more than he cared to contend with. He suggested that Hall give it to Harrison, in whose agile hands and musical imagination it found a more congenial home. Harrison played around with it, liked the novel sounds he was immediately able to produce and, less than three weeks after receiving it, took it into the studio to put it to work on AHDN—to memorable but, in terms of the Ric’s potential, as yet incomplete effect.

McGuinn, on the other hand, took his 360/12 to the woodshed, practicing, by his own account, “eight hours a day.” An accomplished banjo player and student of traditional fingerpicking, McGuinn immersed himself in the sonic potential of all those quirks and intricacies. “In those days,” he once told an interviewer, “acoustic 12s had wide necks and thick strings that were spaced pretty far apart, so they were hard to play. But the Ric’s slim neck and low action let me explore jazz and blues scales up and down the fretboard, and incorporate more hammer-ons and pull-offs into my solos. I also translated some of my banjo picking techniques to the 12-string. By combining a flatpick with metal fingerpicks on my middle and ring fingers, I discovered I could instantly switch from fast single-note runs to banjo rolls and get the best of both worlds.”2

Five months after the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night, on January 20, 1965, Roger (still Jim) McGuinn went into Columbia’s Studio A to record a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,”3 which is:

1. One of the greatest covers in the history of rock music, meeting all the fundamental requirements of a great cover in that it a) reinvents and even threatens to surpass while being absolutely faithful to the spirit of the original, b) forces a re-examination or fresh appreciation of the originating artist, and c) rocks;

2. The only great cover version ever recorded (though not released) more or less simultaneously4 with an equally great original (at least I can’t think of another instance);

3. The song that (along with “Ticket To Ride,” recorded one month later at Abbey Road) first rang the great shimmering carillon of true jangle.

A true jangle song, as I define it, doesn’t simply feature a trebly guitar intro and solo besprinkled with overtones. It must be built on a jangling guitar riff or pattern, built around it, built from it. Its purpose, its raison d’être, is to sound the heavenly bells, to thrum and spark like sonic St. Elmo’s fire, to mimic the firing of neurons, the formation of frost crystals on a windowpane. True jangle writhes, seethes, and crackles, from start to finish, weaving interlocking figures out of runs of arpeggiated notes.

That’s why I haven’t included any of the (sterling, immortal) songs from A Hard Day’s Night on this playlist; George Harrison needed a little more time (and a little more friendly rivalry with McGuinn) to arrive at true jangle, peaking, in my opinion, with “If I Needed Someone,” from Rubber Soul, recorded in October 1965.

I have started this chronological history, however, with two songs written or co-written by the great Jackie DeShannon before the release of the Rickenbacker 360/12, and before the cross-pollination of Harrison’s and McGuinn‘s musical ideas, and even though the first doesn’t quite meet the criteria for true jangle laid out above: “When You Walk In the Room,” (DeShannon, 1963), and the Searchers’ version of “Needles and Pins” (DeShannon/Bono, 1964).

Why? How about this: when the Beatles were touring the US with her, in 1965, George Harrison confided to Jackie DeShannon that the opening riff of “When You Walk In the Room,” composed by DeShannon, had inspired his approach to playing the Rickenbacker on AHDN; playing that had in turn inspired both Roger McGuinn and Mike Pender, lead guitarist of the Searchers. And how about this: that pioneering riff from “When You Walk In the Room” was played (by Glen Campbell, then a semi-anonymous studio ace!) on a makeshift Frankenstein’s jangle monster constructed by, or designed to the specifications of, the great studio bassist (and guitarist) Carol Kaye.5

There is, therefore, an argument to be made that two relatively neglected women co-invented jangle, along with two very celebrated men, and that the world, sorely cursed in so many ways, owes the sparkling, intricately figured blessing of jangle in part to a pair of gifted female geniuses. So, that’s why.

Apart from a curious lull or bare patch between 1967 (the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” which must by then have felt like a kind of rear-guard action) and 1972 (Todd Rundgren’s “Couldn’t I Just Tell You?”, which unmistakably felt like a revival), beautiful works of jangle have been turned out almost continuously by some of the finest, most innovative, and most important rock bands of their day, right up to the present day. The history of jangle is epic, and it deserves an epic playlist. Here you go.

My love of Robyn Hitchcock’s music started out as pure reflex, nameless, blind. I was in college, in Pittsburgh, in some kind of indoor public space, a snack lounge, a transitional zone that I was blankly transiting when I heard what struck me, at the time, as the most punk rock song ever.

This would have been circa 1981; by then the first (and so far as anyone knew, last) great punk moment was past, and one could form such retrospective judgments with confidence. I’m going to go out on a mnemonic limb and guess that I was hearing a live feed of WRCT, the Carnegie-Mellon campus radio station, coming over the PA system wherever I was, maybe Skibo Hall. The acoustics were lousy, a high-ceilinged room, HVAC, the chatter and plink of flatware, and I wasn’t getting a lot of musical detail. All I could really discern was all one ever needed from a first-wave punk rock song: a brash, relentless, buoyant clangor of guitars, and a rude, sneering, exuberant young person reveling in the prospect of destruction. Singing, in this case—and not putting too fine a point on it—I want to destroy you!

I remember I stopped dead and just stood there, jolted and pinned to the spot as if I’d stepped onto an electrified metal plate, guessing at the lyrics, inferring a melody from the oddly Beatlesque harmonies of the refrain. Wondering: Who the fuck is this?

Over the next week or two, I think I might have asked a couple of people if they knew the song, but either I chose the wrong informants, misremembered and misrepresented what I had misheard, or maybe it was that at that time, in early-80s Pittsburgh, the song was simply obscure.

I did not hear it again for seven years, and in the interval I’m pretty sure I never thought about it once, but it would be wrong to say that I forgot it. In that remote age, when nothing could be googled, when the dude who would go on to invent Shazam was just entering puberty, when even if you knew the title and the artist’s name there was no guarantee that you would be able actually to get hold of it, let alone hear it again, I never forgot a song I had fallen in love with, however brief the encounter. Love is not forgotten, only lost; and not necessarily lost forever.

With the 1988 release of his sixth solo album, the delectable Globe of Frogs, I knowingly discovered the work of Robyn Hitchcock (backed, in that instance, by the Egyptians). It wasn’t long before a new fan’s unappeasable desire for moremoremore led me to awareness of Hitchcock’s first venture, the Soft Boys (1976–1981, originally known as Dennis and the Experts), a band whose name until then had flitted at the edges of my rock ’n’ roll consciousness in a puerile blur with The Boys, Rich Kids, the Real Kids, Slow Children, and other shadowy new-wavoid entities I’d read about in Trouser Press but never—or so I believed—heard.

One day at Tower Records on Sunset, when Globe’s “Balloon Man” and “Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)” were still in regular rotation on KROQ, I turned up a copy of the Soft Boys’ second album Underwater Moonlight, which had come out in 1980. I flipped it over (partly to escape the pupaphobia-inducing horror of the cover art), scanned the track listings, and there it was, my old flame, lost but not forgotten, kicking off the album with an unforgettable clang! (and an echo of Eno’s clangorous lead-off to Here Come the Warm Jets, “Needles in the Camel’s Eye).

I took it home, and was reunited with my fleeting darling, and went around for days afterward with its clarion jangle in my head, reeling (on the inside) with Shiva-like powers of punk-pop destruction, casting poxes on the media and reducing the agents of corporatist repression to atoms and bone.

Jangle—lately produced by a Telecaster or T-style guitar, as far as I can determine—has been an intermittent but persistent feature of Hitchcock’s music since the Soft Boys days, and “I Am This Thing,” the first single from his forthcoming LP The Confuser, rings loudly with the stuff. Jangle is a quality strongly associated with the mid-60s Rickenbacker 12-string sound of Roger McGuinn (I love the music of the Byrds, Hitchcock confirms, on “I Am This Thing”) and the George Harrison of “Ticket to Ride” and “If I Needed Someone.” Since those seminal feats of jangliness, jangle has become the stylistic marker of a number of interbleeding rock sub-genres: a sonic flag raised over psych pop, power pop, dream pop, neo-psychedelia, the Paisley Underground Sound, C86, the Dunedin Sound, and (duh) jangle pop.

The most perfect example in Hitchcock’s discography is “Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)”, a track that benefits from the remarkable conjunction of Hitchcock, (the very jangly) REM’s Peter Buck, and Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze. Jangle doesn’t get any more delicious than this:

When “I Am This Thing” dropped a couple of weeks ago, I fell hard. I listened to it seventeen times the first day, fifteen times the second, and then four or five times a day, every day for a week or so afterward. It’s glorious! And when the ravening fan inside me started muttering moremoremore, I decided to try to put together a playlist that would serve as a kind of Jangle History of Hitchcock, teasing out the dream-psych-power pop gems from the dark, shimmery, richly variegated stuff of the Robyn Hitchcock songbook to emphasize only one aspect of the work of a protean artist whose range and diversity of influence and sound can be inferred from his thrilling covers, over the years, of material by Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, Bryan Ferry, Neil Young, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, the Kinks, Leonard Cohen, as well as the Byrds and Beatles.

Check it out, it’s wonderful stuff:

[In late 2007, Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Center, invited me to provide an introduction for his forthcoming book Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, designed to accompany a Costume Center exhibition that would memorably lend its theme to the 2008 Met Gala. The piece was intended to be enjoyed (or so I hoped) by a reader with less than Jeff Albertson-level Total Knowledge of All Comics Ever, and I always hoped that it might possible to include some explanatory illustrations, but production and financial considerations prevented this, both in the Yale University Press edition and in the pages of The New Yorker, when a version of the essay was published there. What follows is a restored, slightly revised version, with pictures.]

Secret Skin: An Essay in Unitard Theory

i. the danger of the cape

When I was a boy, I had a religious-school teacher named Mr. Spector, whose job was to confront us with the peril we presented to ourselves. Jewish Ethics was the name of the class. We must have been eight or nine.

Mr. Spector used a workbook to guide the discussion; every Sunday, we began by reading a kind of modern parable or cautionary tale, and then contended with a series of imponderable questions. One day, for example, we discussed the temptations of shoplifting; another class was devoted to all the harm to oneself and to others that could be caused by the telling of lies. Mr. Spector was a gently acerbic young man with a black beard and black Roentgen-ray eyes. He seemed to take our moral failings for granted and, perhaps as a result, favored lively argument over reproach or condemnation. I enjoyed our discussions, while remaining perfectly aloof at my core from the issues they raised. I was, at the time, an awful liar, and recently I had stolen a pack of Black Jack chewing gum from the neighborhood Wawa. None of that seemed to have anything to do with Mr. Spector or the cases we studied in Jewish Ethics. All nine-year-olds are sophists and hypocrites; I found it no more difficult than any other kid to withhold my own conduct from consideration in passing measured judgment on the human race.

The one time I felt my soul to be in danger was the Sunday Mr. Spector raised the ethical problem of escapism, particularly as it was experienced in the form of comic books. That day, we started off with a fine story about a boy who loved Superman so much that he tied a red towel around his neck, climbed up to the roof of his house, and, with a cry of “Up, up, and away,” leaped to his death. There was known to have been such a boy, Mr. Spector informed us—at least one verifiable boy, so enraptured and so betrayed by the false dream of Superman that it killed him.

The explicit lesson of the story was that what was found between the covers of a comic book was fantasy, and “fantasy” meant pretty lies, the consumption of which failed to prepare you for what lay outside those covers. Fantasy rendered you unfit to face “reality” and its hard pavement. Fantasy betrayed you, and thus, by implication, your wishes, your dreams and longings, everything you carried around inside your head that only you and Superman and Elliot S! Maggin (exclamation point and all, the principal Superman writer circa 1971) could understand—all these would betray you, too. There were ancillary arguments to be made as well, about the culpability of those who produced such fare, sold it to minors, or permitted their children to bring it into the house.

These arguments were mostly lost on me, a boy who consumed a dozen comic books a week, all of them cheerfully provided to him by his (apparently iniquitous) father. Sure, I might not be prepared for reality—point granted—but, on the other hand, if I ever found myself shrunk by Brainiac’s Hyper-Ray and deposited in the Bottle City of Kandor, under its bell jar in the Fortress of Solitude, I would know not to confuse Superman’s Kryptonian double (Van-Zee) with Clark Kent’s (Vol-Don).

Rather, what struck me, with the force of a blow, was recognition, a profound moral recognition of the implicit, indeed the secret, premise of the behavior of the boy on the roof. For that fool of a boy had not been doomed by the deceitful power of comic books, which after all were only bundles of paper, staples, and ink, and couldn’t hurt anybody. That boy had been killed by the irresistible syllogism of Superman’s cape.

One knew, of course, that it was not the red cape, blazoned with a small golden version of the shield on his chest, that gave Superman the ability to fly. That ability derived from the effects of the rays of our yellow sun on Superman’s alien anatomy, which had evolved under the red sun of Krypton. And yet you had only to tie a towel around your shoulders to feel the strange vibratory pulse of flight stirring in the red sun of your heart.

I, too, had climbed to a dangerous height, with my face to the breeze, and felt magically alone of my kind. I had imagined the streak of my passage like a red-and-blue smear on the windowpane of vision. I had been Batman, too, and the Mighty Thor. I had stood cloaked in the existential agonies of the Vision, son of a robot and grandson of a lord of the ants. A few years after that Sunday in Mr. Spector’s class, at the pinnacle of my career as a hero of the imagination, I briefly transformed myself (more about this later) into a superpowered warrior-knight known as Aztec. And all that I needed to effect the change was to fasten a terry-cloth beach towel around my neck.

ii. the secret origin of unitard theory

It was not about escape, I wanted to tell Mr. Spector, thus unwittingly plagiarizing in advance the well-known formula of a (fictitious) pioneer and theorist of superhero comics, Sam Clay. It was about transformation.

iii. the secret anxiety of origin

In traditional myth, a suite of portents, miracles, and aberrations attends and lends a paradoxical plausibility to a hero’s origin: baskets found floating in the bullrushes, infants abandoned on wolf-haunted hillsides, babies born with hammers in their hands. Traditional origin myths affirm the constant, even prenatal, presence of the marvelous in the hero’s life.

It’s a truism that superheroes represent a “modern mythology,” but there is something almost deliberately (or perhaps inevitably) anti-mythic in the origin template of the classic comic book hero. The costumed hero—if not a mutant—is born powerless and unheralded like the rest of us. (In this regard he or she is closer kin to the giant-killing clever fools and brave tailors of folklore than to Hercules or Samson.) It takes the bite of a radioactive spider, or some other form of half-disaster (a lab explosion, a brutal act of street violence, a secret government experiment, an emergency transfusion of mongoose blood) to give birth to the hero, who then springs, full-grown like Athena, from the prised-open cranium of everyday life.

The superhero works long hours at a day job (even millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne puts in time at the office), and struggles in every way—legally, socially, emotionally—to fit in to the expectations of the quotidian world. In general, the superhero has no overt or obligatory sense of destiny, none of the lust for glory and fame and treasure that characterize the classical hero1^.. Superheroes spend a lot of time wishing they could just stay home, spend time with their families and loved ones, date the girl they love, be like everybody else. They excel because they cannot help it, or because it would be wrong not to, or because they need to prove their worth, or to exonerate themselves, or to repay the debt they feel to society, to their dead parents, to the random ancient wizard in an abandoned subway tunnel who for obscure reasons endowed them with magic might.

Above all, superheroes have secret identities; they have lives and natures that their pursuit of heroism obliges them to conceal, to downplay, to deny. They cannot engage in the boastful trumpeting of one’s name and parentage so beloved among traditional heroes. The superhero is an arriviste, a parvenu in the house of adventure, an immigrant on the shores of myth—like the mostly young, mostly Jewish or Italian ink-stained hustlers who invented the medium itself.

iv. of mysterious origin

The comic book, descended from the glorious newspaper comic strip of the early twentieth century like an ape from an angel, pre-existed the superhero, but just barely, and with so little distinction that in the cultural mind the medium has always seemed indistinguishable from its first stroke of brilliance. There were costumed crime-fighters before Superman (the Phantom, Zorro), but only as there were pop quartets before the Beatles.

Superman invented and exhausted his genre in a single bound. All the tropes, all the clichés and conventions, all the possibilities, all the longings and wishes and neuroses that have driven and fed and burdened the superhero comic during the past seventy years were implied by and contained within that little red rocket ship hurtling toward Earth. That moment—Krypton exploding, Action Comics No. 1—is generally seen to be Minute Zero of the superhero idea.

About the reasons for the arrival of Superman at that zero moment there is little agreement. In the theories of origin put forward by fans, critics, and other origin-obsessives, the idea of Superman has been accounted the offspring or recapitulation, in no particular order, of Friedrich Nietzsche; of Philip Wylie (in his novel “Gladiator”); of the strengths, frailties, and neuroses of his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, of Cleveland, Ohio; of the aching wishfulness of the Great Depression; of the (Jewish) immigrant experience; of the mastermind stratagems of popular texts in their sinister quest for reader domination; of repressed Oedipal fantasies and homoerotic wishes; of fascism; of capitalism; of the production modes of mass culture (and not in a good way); of celebrated strongmen and proponents of physical culture like Eugen Sandow; and of a host of literary not-quite-Superman precursors, chief among them Doc Savage.

Most of these rationales of origin depend, to some extent, on history; they index the advent of Superman, in mid-1938, to various intellectual, social, and economic trends of the Depression years, to the influence or aura of contemporary celebrities and authors, to the structure and demands of magazine publishing and distribution, et cetera.

To suit my purpose here, I might construct a similar etiology of the superhero costume, making due reference, say, to:

1. Professional-wrestling and circus attire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as that sported below by the eponymous M. Jules Léotard;

2. The boots-cloak-and-tights ensembles worn by swashbucklers and cavaliers in stage plays and Hollywood films by physically gifted performers such as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

3. Contemporary athletic and swim wear, with its unitard construction and belted trunks, and professional wrestling attire;

4. The designs of newspaper comics artists Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, and the amazing pulp-magazine cover artist Frank R. Paul;

I might also cite the influence of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne aesthetics, with their roots in fantasies of power, speed, and flight, or posit the costume as a kind of fashion alter ego of the heavy, boxy profile of men’s clothing at the time.

But in fact the point of origin is not a date, or a theory, or a conjunction of cultural trends, but a story: the intersection of a wish and the tip of a pencil.

v. a faithful scale model of nothing

Now the time has come to propose, or confront, a fundamental truth: like the being who wears it, the superhero costume is, by definition, an impossible object. It cannot exist.

One may easily find suggestive evidence for this assertion at any large comic-book convention by studying the spectacle of the brave and bold convention attendees, those members of the general comics-fan public who show up in costume and go shpatziring around the ballrooms and exhibition halls dressed as Wolverine, say, or the Joker’s main squeeze, Harley Quinn.

As costumes these may often be splendid affairs, but as the veritable attire of superhuman beings they must always be accounted a disappointment. Every seam, every cobweb strand of duct-tape gum, every laddered fish-net stocking or visible ridge of underpants elastic—every stray mark, pulled thread, speck of dust—acts to spoil what is instantly revealed to have been, all along, an illusion.

The appearance of realism in a superhero costume made from real materials is generally recognized to be difficult to pull off, and many such costumes do not even bother to simulate the presumable effect on the eye and the spirit of the beholder were Black Bolt to stride, trailing a positronic lace of Kirby Krackle, into a ballroom of the Overland Park Marriott.

This disappointing air of saggy trouser seats, bunchy underarms, and wobbly shoulder vanes may be the result of imaginative indolence, the sort that would permit a grown man to tell himself he will find gratification in walking the exhibition floor wearing a pair of Dockers, a Jägermeister hoodie, and a rubber Venom mask complete with punched-out eyeholes and flopping rubber bockwurst of a tongue.

But realism is not, in fact, merely difficult; it is hopeless. A plausibly heroic physique is of no avail in this regard, nor is even the most fervent willingness to believe in oneself as the man or woman in the cape. Even those costumed conventioneers who go all out, working year-round to amass, scrounge, or counterfeit cleverly the materials required to put together, with glue gun, soldering iron, makeup, and needle and thread, a faithful and accurate Black Canary or Ant-Man costume, find themselves prey to forces, implacable as gravity, of tawdriness, gimcrackery, and unwitting self-ridicule. And in the end they look no more like Black Canary or Ant-Man than does the poor zhlub in the Venom mask with a three-day pass hanging around his neck on a lanyard.

This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero’s costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist’s sleight of hand.

The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment. It makes no suggestions. It has no agenda. Above all, it is not waiting to find fulfillment as cloth draped on a body. A constructed superhero costume is a replica with no original, a model built on a scale of 1:x. However accurate and detailed, such a work has the tidy airlessness of a model-train layout but none of the gravitas that such little railyards and townscapes derive from making faithful reference to homely things. The graphic purity of the superhero costume means that the more effort and money you lavish on fine textiles, metal grommets, and leather trim, the deeper your costume will be sucked into the silliness singularity that swallowed, for example, Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin and their four nipples.

In fact, the most reliable proof of the preposterousness of superhero attire whenever it is translated, as if by a reversed Kugelmass device, from the pages of comics to the so-called real world can be found in film and television adaptations of superhero characters. George Reeves’s stodgy pajamas-like affair in the old “Superman” TV series and Adam West’s mod doll clothes in “Batman” have lately given way to purportedly more “realistic” versions, in rubber, leather, and plastic, pseudo-utilitarian coveralls that draw inspiration in equal measure from spacesuits, catsuits, and scuba suits, and from (one presumes) regard for the dignity of actors who have seen the old George Reeves and Adam West shows, and would not be caught dead in those glorified Underoos.

In its attempts to slip the confines of the paneled page, the superhero costume betrays its nonexistence, like one of those deep-sea creatures which evolved to thrive in the crushing darkness of the seabed, so that when you haul them up to the dazzling surface they burst.

One might go farther and argue not only that the superhero costume has (and needs) no referent in the world of textiles and latex but also that, even within its own proper comic-book context, it can be said not to exist, not to want to exist—can be said to advertise, even to revel in, its own notional status. This illusionary quality of the drawn costume can readily be seen if we attempt to delimit the elements of the superhero wardrobe, to inventory its minimum or requisite components.

vi. the silver gluteal cleft of the spaceways

We can start by throwing away our masks. Superman, arguably the first and the greatest of all costumed heroes, has never bothered with one, nor have Captain Marvel, Luke Cage, Wonder Woman, Valkyrie, and Supergirl.

All of those, like many of their peers (Hawkman, Giant-Man), also go around barehanded, which suggests that we can safely dispense with our gauntlets (whether finned, rolled, or worn with a jaunty slash at the cuff).

Capes have been an object of scorn among discerning superheroes at least since 1974, when Captain America, having abandoned his old career in protest over Watergate, briefly took on the nom de guerre Nomad, dressed himself in a piratical ensemble of midnight blue and gold, and brought his first exploit as a stateless hero to an inglorious end by tripping over his own flowing cloak.

So let’s lose the cape. As for the boots—we are not married to the boots. After all, Iron Fist sports a pair of kung-fu slippers, the Spirit wears brown brogues, Zatanna works her magic in stiletto heels, and Beast, Ka-Zar, and Mantis wear no shoes at all.

Perhaps, though, we had better hold on to our unitards, crafted of some nameless but readily available fabric that, like a thin matte layer, at once coats and divulges the splendor of our musculature. Assemble the collective, all-time memberships of the Justice League of America, the Justice Society of America, the Avengers, the Defenders, the Invaders, the X-Men, and the Legion of Super-Heroes (and let us not forget the Legion of Substitute Heroes), and you will probably find that almost all of them, from Nighthawk to the Chlorophyll Kid, arrive wearing some version of the classic leotard-tights ensemble.

And yet—not everyone. Not Wonder Woman, in her star-spangled hot pants and eagle bustier; not the Incredible Hulk or Martian Manhunter or the Sub-Mariner. Consideration of the last named leads us to cast a critical eye, finally, on our trunks, typically worn with a belt, pioneered by Kit Walker2, the Phantom of the old Lee Falk newspaper strip, and popularized by the super-trendsetter of Metropolis.

The Sub-Mariner wears nothing but a Eurotrashy green Speedo, suggesting that, at least by the decency standards of the old Comics Code, this minimal garment marks the zero degree of superheroic attire.

And yet, of course, the Flash, Green Lantern, and many others make do without trunks over their tights; the forgoing of trunks in favor of a continuous flow of fabric from legs to torso is frequently employed to lend a suggestion of speed, sleekness, a kind of uncluttered modernism. And the Hulk never goes around in anything but those tattered purple trousers.

So we are left with, literally, nothing at all: the human form, unadorned, smooth, muscled, and ready, let’s say, to sail the starry ocean of the cosmos on the deck of a gleaming surfboard. A naked spacefarer, sheathed in a silvery pseudoskin that affords all the protection one needs from radiation and cosmic dust while meeting Code standards by neatly neutering one, the shining void between the legs serving to signify that one is not (as one often appears to be when seen from behind) naked as an interstellar jaybird.

Here is a central paradox of superhero attire: from panther black to lantern green, from the faintly Hapsburg pomp of the fifties-era Legion of Super-Heroes costumes to the “Mad Max” space grunge of Lobo, from sexy fish-net to vibranium—for all the mad recombinant play of color, style, and materials that the superhero costume makes with its limited number of standard components, it ultimately takes its deepest meaning and serves its primary function in the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect, and free. The superheroic wardrobe resembles a wildly permutated alphabet of ideograms conceived only to express the eloquent power of silence.

vi. gotham is burning

A public amnesia, an avowed lack of history, is the standard pretense of the costumed superhero. From the point of view of the man or woman or child in the street, gaping up at the sky and skyscrapers, the appearance of a new hero over Metropolis or New York or Astro City is always a matter of perfect astonishment. There have been no portents or warnings, and afterward one never learns anything new or gains any explanations.

The story of a superhero’s origin must be kept secret, occulted as rigorously from public knowledge as the alter ego, as if it were a source of shame. Superman conceals, archived in the Fortress of Solitude and accessible only to him, not only his own history—the facts and tokens of his birth and arrival on Earth, of his Smallville childhood, of his exploits and adventures—but the history of his Kryptonian family and, indeed, of his entire race. Batman similarly hides his story and its proofs in the trophy chambers of the Batcave.

In theory, the costume forms part of the strategy of concealment. But in fact the superhero’s costume often functions as a kind of magic screen onto which the repressed narrative may be projected. No matter how well he or she hides its traces, the secret narrative of transformation, of rebirth, is given up by the costume. Sometimes this secret is betrayed through the allusion of style or form: Robin’s gaudy uniform hints at the murder of his circus-acrobat parents, Iron Man’s at the flawed heart that requires a life-support device, which is the primary function of his armor.

More often, the secret narrative is hinted at with a kind of enigmatic, dreamlike obviousness right on the hero’s chest or belt buckle, in the form of the requisite insignia. Superman’s “S,” we have been told, only coincidentally stands for Superman: in fact, the emblem is the coat of arms of the ancient Kryptonian House of El, from which he descends. A stylized bat alludes to the animal whose chance flight through a window sealed Bruce Wayne’s fate; a lightning bolt encapsulates the secret history of both Captain Marvel and the Flash; an eight-legged glyph immortalizes the bug whose bite doomed Peter Parker to his glorious and woebegone career.

We say “secret identity,” and adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve it, but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way—and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us. Yet our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of superdrag, serving at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.

vii. my secret origin

I became Aztec in the summer of 1973, in Columbia, Maryland, a planned suburban utopia halfway between Smallville and Metropolis. It happened one summer day as I was walking to the swimming pool with a friend. He wore a pair of midnight-blue bathing trunks; my trunks were loud, a pattern of semi-abstract mandalas in orange, gold, and brown that the Sears catalog had designated as “Aztec print.”

In those days, a pair of bathing trunks did not in the least resemble the baggy board shorts that boys and men wear swimming today. Ours were made of stretchy polyester doubleknit that came down the thigh just past the level of the crotch, and fashion fitted them with a sewn-on, false belt of elastic webbing that buckled at the front with a metal clasp. They looked, in other words, just like the trunks favored by costumed heroes ever since the last son of Krypton came voguing down the super-catwalk, back in 1938. Around our throats we knotted our beach towels (his was blue, mine a fine 1973 shade of burnt orange), those enchanted cloaks whose power Mr. Spector had failed to understand or to recall from his own childhood. They fluttered out behind us, catching the breeze from our imaginations, as Darklord and Aztec walked along.

Darklord carried a sword, and wore a Barbuta helmet, with a flowing crusader cloak and invulnerable chain mail of “lunar steel.” Aztec wore tights and a feathered cloak and wielded a magic staff tipped with obsidian. We had begun the journey that day, through the street-melting, shimmering green Maryland summer morning, as a pair of lonely boys with nothing in common but that loneliness, which we shared with Superman and Batman, who shared it with each other—a fundamental loneliness and a wild aptitude for transformation. But with every step we became Darklord and Aztec a little more surely, a little more irrevocably, transformed by the green-lantern rays of fancy, by the spider bite of inspiration, by the story we were telling each other and ourselves about two costumed superheroes, about the new selves that had been revealed by our secret skin.

Talking, retying the knots of our capes, flip-flops slapping against the soles of our feet, we transformed not only ourselves. In the space of that walk to the pool we also transformed the world, shaping it into a place in which such things were possible: the reincarnation of an Arthurian knight could find solace and partnership in the company of a latter-day Mesoamerican wizard. An entire world of superheroic adventure could be dreamed up by a couple of boys from Columbia, or Cleveland. And the self you knew you contained, the story you knew you had inside you, might find its way like an emblem onto the spot right over your heart. All we needed to do was accept the standing invitation that superhero comics extended to us by means of a towel. It was an invitation to enter into the world of story, to join in the ongoing business of comic books, and, with the knotting of a magical beach towel, to begin to wear what we knew to be hidden inside us.

i.

The book we’ve been listening to mentioned cake. Only in passing, true; but in that way some British novels have (especially when read aloud by a British actor old enough to have been cruelly deprived of cake during the Austerity years) of making you question whether any reference to something so vital to human happiness as cake can really be said to be “only in passing.”

Anyway, when I came downstairs to see about dinner, I found myself unable to rid myself of the idea that a nice piece of cake might be just the thing. And I knew, to my core, that if I were jonesing this hard for cake, my wife must be in a very bad way, indeed. But the neighborhood bakeries had all closed by now, and outside it was pouring down rain, and though the exact nature of the cake whose surprise appearance had just been applauded by the characters in our book had been left to the imagination— “chocolate” was the lone detail provided—the imagination was pretty sure that it had not been Doordashed from Safeway, in a polyethylene clamshell.

The imagination and I reviewed the available alternatives. I could bake a nice layer cake—a “sandwich,” as they were known on the British baking show—but I knew from experience that even the most powerful yearning for a piece of cake rarely survives the time needed to bake one from start to finish, cooling times and all. Also: no matter what kind of cake I decided on, I knew, I was likely to be missing or running low on some needed ingredient or other: pecans, say, or dutch-process cocoa.

Cake mix? suggested the imagination, a little plaintively.

Now, I am not a mix-cake snob—far from it. Mr. Duncan Hines and I are old friends, and I will never say no to a slice of the man’s basic Yellow (though I will have no truck with his frosting, the kind that comes in a tub and can be used, in a pinch, to lubricate the rails of a rocket launcher). I have known the arcane thrill of practicing that essential trick of twentieth-century industrial food alchemy, immortalized in the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne,” of adding pudding mix to the cake mix.

The problem with taking the cake mix route tonight was that, as a quick check of the pantry confirmed, there would definitely be an ingredient missing: cake mix. (There was no pudding mix, either, for that matter.) But I had flour, sugar, salt, unsweetened cocoa, and baking soda. I had vanilla extract, and white vinegar. I did not have any vegetable oil, but I did have a jar of coconut oil. That would do nicely, I thought.

So I got out my recipe box.

ii.

Thirty years ago, just as I was beginning to grapple with the nightly challenge of presenting an interesting and compelling bill of fare to an ever-increasing party of small humans, my mother furnished me with a recipe box.

It was the same basic size and shape as the one I’d grown up with, in her kitchen—a key “textbook” in my education as a cook. In addition to a set of blank recipe cards and dividers, she had stocked this new box with a selection of those recipes that were “hers,” the ones that, she remembered, had always been my favorites.

No one really “owns” a recipe, of course, and the two dozen or so that my mother painstakingly wrote out on thin blue cardstock, in her loopy cursive, had been acquired or inherited from her own mother, from a small cadre of aunts (Aunt Margie, Aunt Vivian) who were the celebrated cooks in our family, from friends and neighbors, from newspapers, cookbooks, and women’s (and before that, ladies’) magazines.1

Most of them however, she had refined, simplified, or improved on, often parenthetically noting her changes, as in the recipe for “Chicken Rosé,” a dish served to her by a friend at a dinner party in the early 1970s, when vin rosé (and in particular, Mateus) was having its first North American vogue. “Chicken Rosé” (my first experience, though I lacked any such vocabulary, of what we would now call a complex flavor profile) was immediately promoted to my mother’s standard repertoire , as a “fancy” dish to be served when we were “having company.” Over the years, as she duly noted on the card, she began to cook with olive oil where before she had contented herself with the generic “shortening,” and learned to substitute fresh garlic for garlic salt.

What impressed me most about “Chicken Rosé,” however, at the time and forever after, was my mother’s astonishment on the morning after the dinner party as she reported that this savory dish had been cooked, and served, by the husband. Her admiration for this anomalous, magical man made such a powerful impression on my eight-year-old mind that although I met him only once, and briefly, I have never forgotten his name: Frank Testa, an early object lesson in my lifelong course of study into the subject of How to Be a Good Husband.

Other recipes in the box were conferred without alteration, either because they were perfect as they were, or because they depended on some particular thermo-chemical process for success and thus must be transmitted, and followed, to the letter.

In that latter category—food as science fair experiment—was the recipe for what my mother (mistakenly, as it turns out) has always called “Lazy Day Cake.”

iii.

A “Lazy Day (or more commonly Lazy Daisy) Cake,” it turns out, is and has always been something else entirely. The New York Times’s Melissa Clark recently presented a version. It’s a good, simple, yellow sheet-pan cake with a topping of brown sugar and coconut that you stick under the broiler until it puffs up and acquires a chewy toothsomeness. It clearly belongs among the coffee cakes, something that can quickly be thrown together for mid-morning or mid-afternoon visitors, a cousin to Streusel Cake and Crumb Cake.2 It earned its sobriquet, apparently, because of the perceived “laziness” of stirring some brown sugar, salt, milk, and shredded coconut into some melted butter and dumping them over the finished cake to let the broiler do its thing, when there were proper frostings to be boiled and whipped.

The cake that I was now determined to make, standing there in my understocked kitchen in a mild panic of yearning, is something darker, trickier, more notorious, known like a cryptozoid or legendary bandit by a variety of romantic epithets and aliases, each of them evocative in its own way: “Wacky Cake,” “Wonder Cake,” “Depression Cake” or “Chocolate Depression Cake,” “War Cake,” even “Poor Man’s Cake.” In the online accounts and histories there is a good deal of speculation and unattributed statement presented as fact, and one senses that one is dealing less with any particular, specific recipe than with a particular category, or conception, of baked good: a cake that can be made when, for whatever reason, fresh eggs, milk and, in its grimmest-sounding incarnations, even sugar, are in short supply.

iv.

Here is a faithful transcription (quirky notations, margarine, and all) of my mother’s version of what she has always called a “Lazy Day Cake”—I hope and trust that she will feel free to carry on doing so.

Lazy Day Cake

Sift together into 8 x 8 x 2 cake pan

1 1/2 C flour
3 heaping TLB cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup sugar 

Make 3 holes in mixture

① In hole 1 — 1 tsp vanilla
② In hole 2 — 1 TLB vinegar
③ In hole 3 — 5 TLB corn oil

Over all pour one cup cool water. Mix with fork. Bake at 350° 30-35 min

Icing

1 cup sifted confectioners sugar
1 TLB melted margarine
—a little milk to proper consistency
pour over cake while hot

In its egglessness and milklessness, its air of the makeshift or impromptu, this cake clearly conforms to the “Depression” or “War Cake” typology, but I’m skeptical about any claims as to its authentic heritage as the product of wartime rationing or poverty. A cake that leans so heavily on a luxury item like cocoa seems unlikely to have originated in straitened circumstances, and it’s freely and liberally sweetened, thank God, with sugar (both granulated and powdered), not molasses, or (as some of the earliest Civil War-era recipes apparently recomended) some unholy maceration or syrup extracted from raisins, halfway to jailhouse hooch. “Wacky” or “Wonder” feel more appropriate, with the latter in particular suggesting one appeal of this recipe: that you make it all directly in the pan, which requires no greasing or other preparation; that it depends for leavening on a classic trick of chemistry-class magic: the interaction of baking soda and vinegar, complete with the charming bit of flummery or misdirection of the three (perfectly gratuitous, as far as I can tell) holes.

All that, and the fact that with its rich cocoa flavor, its unfailingly moist crumb, and especially when served fresh and still a little warm from the oven, with the milk-butter-sugar icing just set—it renders up a surprisingly good piece of cake, less than an hour after the onset of the first acute spasms of cake longing.

iv.

“Oh, my God, you’re making cake?” my wife said, when she came downstairs and saw what I was up to in the kitchen, speaking with a faint, unconscious trace of our audiobook narrator’s plummy accent. “I’ve been sitting up there desperate for cake! Googling cakes! You wonderful husband, how did you know?”

Wherever he may be, on earth or elsewhere, I sensed the hovering presence of Frank Testa, giving me the thumbs up.

1

About 10 years ago, my eldest daughter went through the recipe box, recopying her grandmother’s by-now tattered and torn entries and adding tabs, all in her perfect micrographic hand, and then preserving the originals in plastic sleeves.

.

Written and sent via email this morning, with a prayer that it find its addressee, but just in case…

Dear Ms. Goode,

I hope this email finds you well, and that you remember me from Ellicott City Middle School1. I certainly could never forget you; you changed my life.

I was thinking about you the other day, and how you did that. How, toward the end of seventh grade, you gave your English class the final assignment of writing a short story like the ones we had been reading all year.

This turned out to be perfectly timed. I was in the grip of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (I think you might actually have had us read “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” that year), and I had just read a then-recent novel, The Seven Percent Solution, that blew my mind, because its author, Nicholas Meyer, had had the nerve to write his own Sherlock Holmes story!2 (And it was a good one—he had Holmes meeting and getting treated for his cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud !) Until then, I hadn’t known such a thing was possible. I hadn’t known it was, well, allowed.

Then came your felicitously timed assignment. So I decided to try to do what Mr. Meyer had done—to have that nerve. I decided that Holmes and Watson would take on Professor Moriarty, who had built an ironclad warship to terrorize the seas, and that they would naturally be helped in this mission by Captain Nemo, from Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.3

But as soon as I sat down to write, I realized what my job really was: to pay attention to language, specifically the English language, and even more specifically, the English language as deployed around the turn of the century (the century we were still living in, at the time) by this one Anglo-Irish ex-doctor in the popular magazines of his time. That was what Mr. Meyer had done—his Dr. John Watson, narrating The Seven Percent Solution, had sounded just like Conan Doyle’s (at least to my twelve-year-old’s ear).

It turned out to take work. I had to keep my eye, or my ear, my inner ear, on so many things at once: diction, word choice, cadence, sentence structure. I had never done that before, while writing, at least not consciously, with such heightened awareness. But it turned out to be work that I enjoyed—that I loved. Even more—it was work that I was good at. I had a knack.

Do you know how I knew that last bit? You told me so. Ms. Goode, you gave me an A on “The Revenge of Captain Nemo.”

You were not, I believe, in the habit of just handing out As. You had definitely been sparing of them with me! Earlier that year I had written a “history of comic books” for the research paper assignment and I was lucky to scrape by with a B! (Research papers were never my thing.)

“A superb Holmes imitation,” you wrote under that big beautiful letter-grade. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I say well done.”

But, Ms. Goode, it wasn’t Sir Arthur’s approval that I’d been hoping for. It was yours. You had such high expectations, for all of us, and you were not at all shy about letting us know that. You esteemed literature so highly, and took so much evident pleasure and satisfaction from reading it, from thinking and talking about it. And—yes, I’m starting a sentence with “and”—you knew how to communicate that love and esteem to us, by taking it, and us, and our own writing, so seriously. You were—in your calm, clear-eyed, good-humored way—demanding, like all great teachers, and like the greatest of the great, rewarding. Like literature itself, you rewarded the attention we paid you.

I wrote that story for you, Ms. Goode, and you gave me an A, and here I am today, a dozen novels, etc., later, wondering if you know about the blessing that you bestowed on me, back in 1975. After that, I knew I was ready. Your classroom was like New York in the song: if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere. I’ve won some prizes and awards for my writing over the years, but none of them, not even the Pulitzer, has meant as much to me as that grade. I knew exactly, and proudly, just how much it was worth.

With gratitude and love,

Michael Chabon

1

Ellicott City (MD) Middle School, desegregated only in 1965, a full nine years after Brown v Board of Education. Demolished 1999.

2

Published in 1974, it introduced me to the concepts, and the pleasures, though not the terminology, of pastiche, fan fiction, the literary cameo, and the retcon—all in a single feat of bravado that was, I think, an under-recognized cultural milestone.

.

3

A conceit inspired by an “Addendum” to Philip José Farmer’s “fictional biography” of Tarzan, Tarzan Alive (1972), in which Farmer postulated that an ancestor of the future lord of the jungle was among the passengers of two coaches passing Wold Newton, England, in 1795, just as a radioactive meteor fell from outer space into a meadow on the outskirts of the village.

Farmer claimed that the (purely speculative) radiation from the space rock caused a genetic mutation that affected all the passengers’ descendants, among them the eventual John Clayton, Lord Greystoke—Tarzan. Farmer extended his conceit by claiming that not only Tarzan, but all the great heroes and villains of 19th and 20th century popular literature—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Doc Savage, Phileas Fogg, Fu Manchu, Sam Spade, James Bond—were descended from the people riding in that pair of coaches, a superhuman lineage of siblings and cousins descended from that common ancestor and that catastrophic event.

This is a distinctive flavor of metafiction—more like macrofiction—that gets at another kind of truth about the indeterminacy of boundaries between “fictional” and “real.”

The 1970s were clearly a heady time for eager if unwitting devotees of what might be called “mass postmodernism.”

Tonight while standing in the lobby of the Golden Gate Theater, waiting to see Spamalot! (my second time), I was idly introduced to a slender, amiable-looking man of (I supposed) about my age (62), who turned out to be Ricky Fataar, one of rock ’n’ roll music’s secretly-greatest drummers, and the only human being on the face of the earth who has ever been both a genuine Beach Boy and a fake Beatle (you can look it up).

I was not ready to meet Ricky Fataar. I was completely unprepared. Nobody had informed me beforehand that such a thing might occur tonight, might occur ever, at any point in my life. I had not conducted any preparatory listening sessions! I had not refreshed my knowledge of the relevant discographies!

Also: I couldn’t figure out how the guy (born 1952), could possibly look so young. I had forgotten that in 1962, when he joined his elder brothers in the Durban-based Flames (later they seem to have dropped the terminal s), he was nine years old!

Somehow—unusually—I retained just enough presence of mind to tell Fataar how much and how long I had loved and admired his work, without lapsing into complete wooden-tongued incoherence.

My history at such moments—Leonard Nimoy (oy!), Ray Bradbury (ack!), Bernadette Peters (oh dear!), Quincy Jones (jesus christ!)—is painful to recall.

The problem in these situations is: you want to tell the artist how much joy, pleasure, comfort, astonishment, reassurance, even truth, even love, you have found in their imaginary companionship. But there is too much to be said, and you have, perhaps, no more than a minute, a sentence, to say it in. More would be rude; inappropriate. You want to give examples, instances, proofs, and all you can seem to come up with is cliches (though at least clichés are quick).

And, anyway: who knows how they feel about the piece, or the performance, or the work that you might cite? They may long since have wearied of it, or of being cited for it. They may consider it no more than a lark, an afterthought, the fruit of a weak or drunken moment; a painful document of artistic struggle, commercial failure, personal loss or distress; something to regret or even repudiate.

Or maybe they just don’t care what their work meant to you—who even are you? Maybe you have terrible taste! Maybe they’ve heard all those cliches—even all the examples and instances and proofs—a thousand, ten thousand, a million times before. Maybe no amount of praise or appreciation, however deftly or feelingly expressed, will ever drown out the dark, dry, mocking whisperer in their head who tells them every day, every hour, that they are a failure, an imposter, a fraud. That their work and their name will be forgotten.

“Seriously,” I said to Ricky Fataar. “I’m really, truly a fan.”

Not my worst.

Ricky Fataar listened. He smiled. He was very kind, and patient. Then the lights started flickering, and we went in to see the show.

[Key documents, in the order I encountered them: The Rutles (1978), Holland (1972), The Flame1 (1971).]

And all the people were one people, and spoke one tongue. They were subject to one king, and one law. Their manner of dress was uniform, and the food of their tables, in its stuff and style of preparation, was the same in every home. They sang one body of songs, followed one calendar of feast days, and told one cycle of tales and legends, into which variation crept only through carelessness or lapse of memory, because experience was everywhere uniformly expressed, and the people’s power to interpret that experience was limited by the patterns and coloration of the solitary tongue. They possessed one vocabulary to speak of love, joy, regret, anger. Across all the face of the land of Shinar there was one culture, one people, one way.

And the people grew smug in their homogeneity, and complacent in their certainty of being understood. And the more readily they understood each other, the less cause they had for speaking, for the set of possible utterances, while in theory infinite, became in practice circumscribed by their ever-more uniform interpretations of an ever-diminishing number of novel experiences. The power of their words, like the charm of an amulet or the weight of a golden coin, was worn away through overuse. In their minds received ideas and conventional wisdom took the place of their own thoughts. And so, into the people’s hearts, over the generations after Noah, there stole a mounting certainty that everything sayable had already been said. Everything that happened had happened before, and the story of what happened had been told before.

And as the generation before the Flood had sunk into iniquity, wickedness and sin, so that generation’s great-great-grandchildren now found themselves awash in a choking tide of monotony, conventionality, and cliche. Life came to have the flavor of one’s own mouth, the scent of one’s own nostrils. A vague lassitude pervaded the earth. Habit took the place of inspiration, and desire and ambition turned to velleity and weak appetite. The people were going through the motions, and over all the land of Shinar sullen silences were commonplace, and prolonged conversations inevitably trailed off into inconclusiveness and wistful glances toward the far horizon.

And the less the People had to say to each other, the more they feared to be alone, because it was only when they were in each other’s company, when they were part of a single integrated whole, that the sheer volume of their ideas and utterances, however familiar, could drown out the hollow echo of shopworn notions that, when they were alone, rattled in their heads like seeds in a dried gourd. And so by slow and labored consensus they arrived at a plan to construct, of brick and mortar, a city and a tower, so high and capacious that they might all live in it together, as a family under a roof, and thus never be left alone to endure the insistent feeble rattling of their own solitary thoughts.

For a time the promise of finding comfort in permanent, undifferentiated mass cohabitation rekindled ancient enthusiasms and energies among the people, and they set about building their tower with joy in their hearts. Because they spoke one language it was a simple matter to share their building plans, and collaborate with one another on construction. As they worked, raising up their common home coil by spiraling coil ever upward into the sky, they sang work songs, making their way through their language’s repertoire until they had sung them all, and then starting over again at the beginning. And when it was time to break for the mid-day meal, they all sat down wherever they happened to be, on the tower or the site that surrounded it, and spread their blankets, and opened their baskets, and ate the food they had packed, and chattered, contentedly enough, about tomorrow’s work, and the new lives they imagined living when their tower was complete.

But the people were numerous, and so the tower must be tall and large to contain them all, and as the years required for its construction dragged on, the old malaise returned. Their ears wearied of their paltry store of work songs, and their palates were jaded by the limited offerings of their lunch pails, and once again the charm and value of the words they shared-- and the experience those words defined--began to wear away. And so their progress slowed. People stopped reporting for service on the tower, parroting one of a number of stock excuses--an aching back, a sore shoulder, a sick lamb, an unruly child--that long practice of apathy had coined. In time construction ceased. The city and the tower were abandoned.

Now a great cloud of tedium settled over the land of Shinar, deep and all-pervading as the Flood, and everywhere was languor and sluggishness. One day was exactly as the next, and the people could not name the thing their hearts most desired--strangeness--for none of them had ever met a stranger.

And the Lord looked down on the people in their unhappiness, and pitied them. And in His mercy and kindness, and because He loved them most of all His creatures, the Lord said, Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. Therefore is the name of that city and tower called Babel1, because there there the richness and novelty of life were worn away.

And the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth, so that henceforward some among them were and always would be strangers to others. And in His wisdom the Lord commanded them--over and over and over again--to love and honor strangers, and to welcome all those who come speaking strange speech, telling strange stories, singing strange songs, eating strange flesh and strange fruit spiced with unknown savors. And thus the people became many peoples, and their ways diverged and effloresced, from their hats to their houses, and the words of their new languages wrought changes in the way they pondered and perceived and explained Creation, and they knew the staggering diversity of which the human family was capable. And it was good.

Written to accompany Josh Dorman’s show “Higher Ground” at the Welch Galleries, Georgia State University, 2020.

Yesterday, after weeks of rain, the sun came out, so we rolled the dog taco-style into her sky-blue muppet-fur bed, and carried her out to the front yard to enjoy the warmth and smells and sounds of a fine Berkeley morning, and to wait for the mobile hospice vet.

Agnes, an excellent labradoodle, was nine and a half. As late as the week before Thanksgiving she was utterly her good, old self: lively, constant, and wholly engaged with monitoring and responding appropriately (by her lights) to every undertaking, every proposal, every shift in mood, of the humans who make up the crew of this generation starship. By the time we understood that whatever she had was not routine or responsive to routine treatment, it had almost finished her.

I wish we could have spared her the pain and discomfort of the last few weeks, but I’m glad that in the end we decided not even to wait for the final diagnosis—a vicious and wildfire-swift gastric carcinoma—to schedule her appointment with the honest-to-god-angelic angel of death.

I spent much of our last 24 hours reassuring her that it was okay for her to leave, that we would be all right without her. I hope she believed me—all she had to go on was the look in my eyes and my tone of voice, and I’m not sure I was totally convincing—not being totally convinced. This has been such an awful year, in so many ways.

Today I’m just wandering around the house trying to take some accurate measure of the Agnes-shaped hole in the world.

i.

A recent trawl of my hard drive disclosed that I’ve been citing Raymond Chandler as one of my Key Influences since 1984, on my application1 to Stanford’s Stegner Fellowship program; that was the first time anybody had seriously inquired. I was twenty-one.

Then, as now, it was about the sentences. It’s always about the sentences. Reading as a writer—the only way I’m able to read, anymore—I don’t really care about anything else. No, that isn’t true. I care about two things: the sentences, and stuff I can steal.

But what do I mean when I say that it’s “about the sentences?” It’s what, exactly, about the sentences? Ugh, I was afraid you were going to ask me that.

Oh, that slippery, strangely nebulous noun, style, apparently definable only by reference to further nebulous nouns like tone, voice, register, diction, figuration, rhetoric, cadence, point of view, etc. Those are technical terms—terms of art, if you like. They represent components, the parts and particles of style; what you see when you break a style open.

Go ahead, crack the top off Chandler’s style, get out the tweezers, screw in your loupe. Here’s his gleeful, now and then excessive use of carefully observed and recorded criminal slang and racy talk. Now, check out the rat-a-tat, Warner Bros. banter, often slyer and wittier than anything found in the films that inspired it (and that it inspired, in turn). What else? The intimate first-person “confessional” tone. The rhetorical fireworks shows, the free-wheeling use of hyperbole and reverse hyperbole (In the same sentence: “She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella”) and understatement and Hemingwayesque polysyndeton and, most famously, simile (“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food”).

Is that it? Is that what constitutes a style: its works and complications? Sure, sweetheart, if that’s the way you want to play it. Not in my book. Style can’t be fully accounted for by an inventory of parts, or even by analyzing the interactions among them—the way Philip Marlowe’s use of coarse underworld argot, for example, heightens that sense of intimate confession, and helps sell the conceit that a narrator so perceptive and sensitive and literate is a private dick whose job seems to consist, most of the time, of getting sapped, taking punches, and waking up feeling like he swallowed a Brillo pad.

“Style,” like “light,” is both a noun and a verb. We think of style, a style, as something a writer has, but it’s equally—or equivalently, if you want to go full-on photon-waveform with the light metaphor—what a writer does. A writer styles language.

To explain what I mean by this would take another ten posts and I still might not get anywhere, but here goes: To style is to improvise on the page out of an informed experience of your mother tongue—its usages, subtleties, etymologies, literature, allusions, and associations. You are like John Coltrane (hear me out) but for church music and blues you have a lifetime of attentive even compulsive listening to everyday speech, and the ways people use and abuse it. For the years of listening deeply to records and the radio and of attending and sitting in on live performances, to hear how what you want to do has been and is currently being done, you have your life as an avid, even relentless reader of texts of all kinds. For the long immersion in Slonimski’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, I would argue, you have have made a deep study of the world’s folktales and myths, the closest literature comes to an undergirding archetypical though hardly (thank God) mathematical structure. Then you step out onto the stage of the page and blow.

That’s styling. Drop the g and see how rappers have known that a writer’s style is akin to musical performance—The melody that I’m stylin’/Smooth as a violin2—from Rakim onward.

A style—the noun—is also, therefore, a kind of transcription, the encoding of a writer’s performance. Once encoded, like someone stepping onto a Star Trek transporter pad, it can be beamed straight into the reader’s mind and there, shimmering, recreated. In that shimmer lies the thrill of style, and in that thrill the reason why among all the many gimlet-eyed, corruption-soaked (or corruption-eyed and gimlet-soaked) literary portrayers of violent, rapidly urbanizing 1930s America , Raymond Chandler is one of the few who have found their way into the canon (or at least into the Library of America). I would go as far as to say that all the now-canonical twentieth-century writers who worked primarily in the ghetto of genre—crime, science fiction, fantasy, western—owe their exceptional status to the grace and verve of stylistic performance.3

ii.

I can’t be the only kid of my generation to have first come to Raymond Chandler—to have first heard the name—through the happy intercession of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In the second episode of the show’s seventh season, “Mary the Writer” (written by 70s tv stalwart Burt Prelutsky), Moore’s Mary Richards, hoping to break into magazine writing, asks her boss, Lou Grant (Ed Asner), for his opinion of a piece she’s just written, a twee, even treacly reminiscence of her late grandfather, which she hopes to submit to Reader’s Digest.

Though at first, and atypically, he pulls his punches, Lou’s reaction is predictably unenthusiastic, increasingly pungent, and finally—she’s just not hearing him—blunt. Still, he genuinely wants to help her, or at least wants her to understand where his negative assessment of her work is coming from. He wants her to know what he considers to be good writing. So he reaches over, opens a drawer in his desk, and takes out an unidentified, time-darkened, well-thumbed paperback that, like some hard-boiled Gideon’s bible, he apparently likes to keep handy. Then—visibly looking forward to the job, like a man sitting down to his favorite dish at his favorite restaurant—he reads Mary the opening sentences of Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind.”

I have never forgotten that moment. There’s no other word for it—I was wonderstruck. I was thirteen, and just starting to sit down to try to write stories. Until this evening—October 2, 1976—I was still hazy about how one properly went about the whole business. I’m not sure it had occurred to me, yet, that my aspiration ought to be not simply to write, but to write well. I hadn’t known, until I heard those half-dozen crackling sentences, that I ought to seek out models of good writing to emulate, and—this would turn out to be just as important—that there might be people, mentors, writing teachers, who could guide me toward those models. And until this Saturday in October I hadn’t known what this scene makes so evident: that it was all about the sentences. That it was all about the style.4

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

What I love, re-watching the scene, is the question that Lou Grant asks Mary, when he looks up, ravished again, from the page:

“Makes you want to read on, doesn’t he?”

I love that he isn’t referring, here, to that aspect of prose fiction, and especially of genre fiction, that we’re taught to consider the thing that “makes you want to read on,” that makes a book a “page-turner”: plot, that dumb motherfucker. “Anything can happen,” Marlowe assures us, but at this point in the story, nothing has happened. What makes you want to read on, what seduces you, is Raymond Chandler’s style. What the reader wants more of, in “Red Wind”—and gloriously gets—is language.

iii.

I return to Chandler every ten years or so, the way I do with most of the Key Influences I cited on that Stegner application form, back in 1985: Cheever, Borges, Welty. I do it to see if they are still there, for me, and increasingly as I get older, if I’m still back there with them. The experience can be profoundly reassuring—so far, Ursula K. LeGuin has been there to meet me each time I’ve gone back, waiting for me to catch up. But sometimes I’ve had a terrible shock. As Heraclitus surely meant to say, you can’t step into the same writer twice. The first time I read Ada, at 20, I utterly adored it. I felt it had been written for me. On the second read, perhaps fifteen years later, I found it obnoxious, show-offy, inert. Nabokov seemed far less interested, this time, in welcoming me into the inside-out, proto-steampunk, alternate-history world he had so laboriously constructed; he seemed to view the whole exercise as an elaborate joke.

I was truly dismayed. Was there something wrong with me? Had there been something wrong with me the first time? Or was there, perhaps, something wrong with Nabokov? More than a decade passed before I dared again to return to Anti-Terra. When I did, I found a deeply sad, sadly beautiful novel of exile, of world-building as kintsugi, “golden repair,” drawing the eye to brokenness with gold.

It’s been nearly fifty years since the day that I rode the bus over to the Mall in Columbia (MD), looking for the story Lou Grant had recommended on TV the other night. I found it in a book called Trouble Is My Business, in the mystery section, where despite Chandler’s inclusion in the Library of America, you would still be likely to find it and all the other books. It was love at first sight. In time I tracked down and read them all. You know the rest: Key Influence.

For a long time The Big Sleep held sway over me as Chandler’s best, and then without my noticing it I got older, and experienced some disappointment, and then one day I woke up and my favorite was The Long Goodbye. Then while I was writing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (the most obvious fruit of Chandler’s influence on my writing, though I hear strong echoes of Philip Marlowe in Grady Tripp, too), I re-read him again, from start to finish, “Spanish Blood” to Playback. It didn’t all work for me; that time. I detected far more self-disgust in the distaste, at times tinged with prissiness, that creeps into the later books as Chandler, losing interest, abusing his body, continued to grind them out. When I reached The Long Goodbye (for what would have been a fourth or fifth reading), and found myself not merely not enjoying, but actively disliking the experience—I stopped. I was not ready to lose Raymond Chandler. Take a break, I thought. Try again in another decade.

I’ve gone back, over the past few weeks, and am happy to report that all is well. The Long Goodbye is overlong, and here and there seems to forget what, or whose, story it’s telling, but the writing has a wistfulness, a sense of the passing of an age, that I can, if you know what I mean, dig. Age, unfulfilled longing, and the ordinary operations of the world make fools of everyone in time, even Philip Marlowe, and in The Long Goodbye that’s the story that Chandler came to tell. More than enough plot, for me.

And in case you’ve forgotten, it starts like this:

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

Makes you want to read on, doesn’t he?

[Note: Even this list is incomplete.]

Though my father was killed for revealing the secret, Clem and I have decided to take advantage of his simple discovery, and have bought a zeppelin.

Untitled, short story, 1983. 1900 words.

I swear, I do, I’ve stopped believing that I arrived in infancy from another planet.

Untitled, short story, 1983. 773 words.

It wasn’t as if, as in an inferior novel, we had come to enjoy ourselves carelessly at the Lake House, only to find after our enchanted arrival that the weapons had been launched and the world was at an end, isolating us there until we degenerated into some unlikely primitive state and I should hit Max over the head with a tree branch for final savage possession of Sylvia.

Untitled, short story, 1983–84. 3191 words.

Lobel lived in such utter hatred of strangers that in the year 1902 alone he nearly strangled three uninvited visitors to his isolate house.

“Mad Tryst,” short story, 1984, 4305 words.

Nagao had married Tomoko the Artificial Woman; everything was his fault.

“Author of The Death of Japan,” short story, 1985. 2460 words.

The introduction of Time to an achronous planet always proves to be a highly photogenic thing: planetary volcanic suicide, vast blankets of flying deer, bug empires, global winds, the invention of hells and edens, ice ages, and, very rarely, an occasional first war or wedding of whatever tottering ganglia manage to evolve the necessary urges and tools—these and seven hundred and twenty-six million other fabulous outcomes had already been recorded elsewhere and consumed throughout the Independent Greater Moments with noisy piety and deep pleasure.

The Fell Planet, or, the Inadvertent Establishment of the Butterfly Evil Through the Holy Intercession of St. Noss, novel, 1986. 1372 words.

My life falls neatly into its many epochs only when considered in terms of the crowds with whom, over the years, I have run, the empires of gossip and solace that arose, flourished, and crumbled away, suddenly and completely; and at the long-vanished center of each of those epochs you will find, fragrant and hot, a laundromat.

Untitled, short story, 1987. 226 words.

After the last great battle the soldiers rode for home, a starveling cavalry astride ruined horses whose lungs, even at a walk, filled with an ominous rattle like that of bones in a leather bag.

Untitled, novel, 1987. 1148 words.

Those of us who spoke with Roger in the half hour he spent at his sister’s wedding noted that he’d grown gangly and affected a dour manner during his six months in Paris, that he spoke too carelessly, and that, at 22, he hadn’t the faintest idea of what he wanted to do with himself.

Fountain City, novel (first draft), late 1987. 150000+ words (final draft).

I had seen my wife in the garden, talking to the handsome young man, when I looked down on them from the balcony of our hotel room.

“Key West Story,” aka “Winthrop,” 1988. 3963 words.

I remember listening to the “Emperor” concerto one melancholy winter afternoon in Pittsburgh when it seemed to me, as I watched the helices of snow twisting outside the window, that Ludwig von Beethoven’s music, the winter sky, and my sadness—I was in love—were all formed of the same sparkling, nebulous, gray material.

Untitled, short story, 1989. 603 words.

The loss of his grandparents’ house and every alteration in their lives and furniture Nathan had borne with the self-conscious stoicism of his age, but their new condominium apartment, a linoleum-and-stucco, rattan-and-herculon, avocado-and-goldenrod two-bedroom in a walled retirement community on the barren outskirts of Pompano Beach, was as small and had as little discernible odor as their old house in Pikesville had been spacious and ripe with water damage, holidays, brisket of beef, and dogs, and the only smell was the faint sour tang of air-conditioning.

Untitled “Nathan Shapiro” story, 1990–91. 900 words.

Frank Mandelbaum, who for eleven straight nights, due to a terrific array of marital difficulties, had slept in the unlined bed of his Japanese pickup, and who was regarded by his fellow teachers at Schuyler Colfax High School as rapidly approaching basket-case status, had just finished his fourth cigarette and was about to light a fifth from its dwindling coal when he heard an alarum in the schoolyard, a cry, a gasp, the rough laughter of boys.

“Ruby,” 1991. Later reborn as “Werewolves in Their Youth.” 2942 words.

When he sold his father’s underwear-and-lingerie wholesaling company, Selig Personal after having given forty years to making it hale and profitable, Sam Selig found himself faced with the task of spending his money and living the remainder of his life.

The Gentleman Host, novel, 1993. Later the basis for my first spec screenplay. 8934 words.

I had been a Constant driver for a little over two and a half months when I was assigned to Bernard and Monroe.

“Chauffeur,” circa 1997. 6787 words.

“I have scorn for you,” said Adam, when he answered the telephone.

“Bachelors,” circa 1997. 1039 words.

In 1924, Harry Houdini came to Boston, not, as so often in the past, to be screwed into a giant iron milk can or chained like a lunatic to a cruel bed on the stage of the Keith, but to debunk a medium named Mrs. Le Roi Goddard Crandon.

Untitled, short story, 1998. 2038 words.

We were standing over our bicycles, straddling them, on the driveway of the Compton house, where I had come upon Teddy in the act of setting out to look for me in the vain and half-hearted hope, which I hopelessly shared, that in one another’s company we might find some kind of occupation or amusement in the boiling abyss of July.

“The Hit,” short story, 2002. 1414 words.

The brothers first encountered a land sloop on the night, late in the summer of 1876, that one hunted their father down.

The Martian Agent, novel, 2002. 12160 words.

“Albert Einstein… Duke Ellington… Doc Savage… Cole Porter… Mrs. Roosevelt…” Mr. Lazardo said, gathering up the latest armful of telegrams and scattering them around the Lazardos spacious bedroom, “My dear, you are beloved! Positively beloved!”

The Fabulous Family Lazardo and the Bijou of Time, children’s novel, 2003. [Proposed “Big Little Book” homage, to have been illustrated by my friend William Joyce, creator of Dinosaur Bob and his adoptive family, the Lazardos.] 2800 words.

Three black figures struggle through falling black snow.

“Los Comprachicos,” short story, 2003. 2170 words.

In my family, the yearly colonization of Jews by Christmas produced a kind of pidgin holiday, free of adjectives and ritual angst.

“A Child’s Christmas in Pikesville,” short story, 2006. 719 words.

In the autumn of year 7227, as reckoned among the Monsters, a telegram was sent from Muscovy to Gotham bearing the news of a young woman’s doom.

Hopeful Monsters, YA novel, 2007. 1601 words.

The man sat shirtless on a tomb, not his own, eating a Moon Pie.

Flood, novel, 2008. 1747 words.

The afternoon pastured over the capital, sag-bellied with rain.

Untitled, 2008. [Was to retell the infamous 1856 bludgeoning of Charles Sumner in the US Senate chamber.] 505 words.

Popkin lingered on the pavement in front of the house at 8 East 80th Street, a big-shouldered little man with the racehorse twitch of a would-be bridegroom, clearing his throat, calibrating like an argument the angle of his battered slouch hat.

“Mrs. Dadd,” short story, 2009. 1164 words.

People said that in a house where a boy was about to be turnt there would be signs.

Wolfboys, novel, 2016. 5400 words.

Thomas Kingdom (30 October 2008—31 July 2015), founder of the seminal if unknown (and wholly imaginary) British rock ’n’ roll band Black Butterfly, was slipped into the world, silent as a love letter, through a slit in his mother’s belly.

Black Butterfly’s Book of Broken Robots, novel, 2017. 1800 words.

The knock came forty-seven minutes into the monthly meeting of the Melbourne Avenue Psychonautical Society, just as Chicky’s latest creation, a tryptamine derivative, was starting to kick in.

Old Flags, novel, 2018. 7849 words.

About a year before she died, a friend I had not seen or spoken to since the summer after our high school graduation called, from Florida, to let me know that we were going to be neighbors, sort of.

Untitled, short story, 2025. 259 words.

(Originally published in Bon Appetit, November, 2012.)

You people may assemble with ritual correctness at the annual table under the ancestral roof, but in my family, Thanksgiving is as homeless as the Pilgrims. Our family tree has no trunk; it’s all roots and branches. There is no grand high grandmother to ingather the tribes by fiat or the irresistible excellence of her fare. Instead, unwritten charts ensure that a byzantine system of mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law rotates the meal through the houses of our family, with guilt playing the role of gravitation. I am not at all sure that in the two decades my wife and I have been together we have ever passed consecutive Thanksgivings at the same table. We have gone to Ridgewood, New Jersey, and Calabasas, California, to my mother and my mother-in-law, to my mother’s sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s mother. We have even, on occasion, hosted the meal ourselves.

Sometimes all these intricacies wear us down and we flee, like tax fugitives seeking shelter from a burdensome bureaucracy, to the tranquil haven of somebody else’s mishegas. One year we went to the Sacramento mansion of a Greek-American whose family gave thanks with first-generation fervor and a buffet that honored the traditions on either side of their hyphen. Another year we went to the home of some writer friends in Pacifica for a Creole soul-food extravaganza, lavishly furnished with young novelists, chess pie, and Dungeness crabs plucked that morning out of the bay. In 2002, we fled to Manka’s Inverness Lodge.

A friend — I’ll call him Mr. Robinson — had phoned that fall to announce that he, his wife, and their two children were flying from their home state (east of the Sabine and south of the Ozarks) to join some old hometown friends, now residents of Marin County, for a Thanksgiving weekend at Manka’s. Did I know Manka’s? I did. It was an hour away from our home in Berkeley. Did I know that it was the sweetest, quirkiest, most exquisite gem of a luxury inn? I did. Did I know that every Thanksgiving, Manka’s excellent kitchen cooked up a culinary narrative, operatic in its duration and epic in its whimsy, to mark the passage, so stunningly swift, of another 364 days during which we had all taken our lives and loved ones for granted, failed to appreciate the little gifts and graces, and flat-out, full-bore kvetched? That, I told him, I did not know. But I had been meaning for many years to give thanks to God or the universe for Manka’s.

It was an old hunting lodge, built in the early 1900s to shelter men who journeyed north from San Francisco to kill birds and large mammals in the fog. At its heart stood the lodge proper, steep-roofed, deep-eaved, and the color of a pinecone. It housed the reception lounge and restaurant, with a few guest rooms upstairs. In the woods that surrounded the main building, according to no discernible plan, stood a bunch of cabins and outbuildings submerged in perpetual deep-green shade. Manka’s had not been built so much as accumulated, like boots on a porch. After the presumed extinction of the huntable mammals there followed a dark period in the hotel’s history, involving bikers and mysterious Czechs, about which little was said. Then, sometime in the ‘90s, there appeared an enigmatic neuro- psychologist named Margaret Grade, who remade the place in its own idealized image as the archetypal big-woods lodge, all Hudson Bay-blanket upholstery, animal-parts decor, and dark oak, fir, and redwood; a Marin County Rivendell; a retreat out of legend, for the hunting of sasquatches and wendigos.

If Manka’s was like Tolkien’s Last Homely House, Margaret Grade was an elvish presence, magical and furtive. With a blend of Zen and whimsy, she wrought meals and a vibe of fanciful rusticity out of fine local ingredients, with furnishings that dialed down the hunting-lodge gothic with touches of farmhouse minimalism, and a distinctive use of text as decor so you knew she was around. But her presence was elusive. If you caught a glimpse of her, you felt lucky and a little dazed. To catch her in conversation was like netting the rarest butterfly, and after a minute you felt compelled, out of pity, to release her.

We numbered six and my friend’s family four; their old neighbors, who had lit out for the fringes of West Marin to spend down their inheritance in the study of soul migration, kundalini, or Swedenborgianism (I forget), brought the total of our party to 14. We arrived the day before Thanksgiving and immediately set about the leisurely work of encouraging eight children — of wide-ranging ages, with uneven degrees of acquaintanceship, divergent upbringings, and distinct styles of getting on one another’s and their parents’ nerves — to cohere. This was accomplished by means of long walks on chilly beaches, the playing of board and card games, and repeated screenings of Steve Oedekerk’s inexplicably hilarious Thumbs! micro-epics, The Godthumb, Thumb Wars, Bat Thumb, Thumbtanic. An analogous procedure was undertaken among the couples, 66.6 percent of whom had never met, with equally effective applications of hot tubs and wine. The air was perfumed with eucalyptus, wood smoke, and the brackish breeze off Tomales Bay. We sank into thick sweaters, leather club chairs, and companionship.

Recollections are hazy about the holiday meal itself. There may have been turkey, or goose, or both. It is generally agreed that the stuffing starred rabbit sausage. There can be little doubt, given the fundamental principles of Manka’s kitchen, that every course — and in our hazy, hot-tub-and-wine-soaked memories there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of courses — was constructed from roots, fruits, leaves, milk, butter, cheese, and meat that had been, until very recently, in a patch of ground, on a branch or stem, or in the udder or on the bone of an animal within an hour’s drive. The meal moved at a stately pace over several hours, at once eventless and exciting. The printed menu, as always at Manka’s, incorporated elements of symphonic program, galactic itinerary, and Victorian novel, each dish entitled like a tone poem, sketched with outlandish precision, and brought to you by one of the inn’s vast dramatis personae of local farmers, fishermen, foragers, or hunters. There was an entire menu of simpler fare for the children. One by one, they nodded and retired to their rooms until, at some late hour, long after the remnants of some last outrageous pie had been cleared, there was no one left in the dining room but we six, and nothing to give thanks for but one another and the final bottle of wine.

Ten years have passed since that night at Manka’s Inverness Lodge. The yoga gypsies broke up a while back. Mr. Robinson’s daughter was killed by a terrible disease at the age of 18, and his wife has since fallen prey to another. And two days after Christmas in 2006, a massive tree fell onto the main building of Manka’s, damaging a water heater, which started a fire and burned the old lodge to the ground. We can never go back, therefore, to the place as it was in its heyday, to the families we were in our prime, to the things that we had all taken for granted up until that day.

And that, to me, is the meaning of Thanksgiving. Of all the Thanksgivings before and since, the one spent at Manka’s stands out for me as the truest, even though we were far from our places of origin. Nothing lasts; everything changes. People die, and marriages dissolve, and friendships fade, and families fall apart, whether or not we appreciate them; whether or not we give thanks every waking moment or one night a year. For the act of returning to the same table, to the same people and the same dishes — to the same traditions — can blind you to life’s transience. It can lull you into believing that some things, at least, stay the same. And if that’s what you believe, then what have you got to be grateful for? None of our Thanksgivings are ever coming back; we’ve lost them. They’re gone. And so this year, let’s go somewhere with strange customs and unfamiliar recipes and the latest collection of ill-assorted chairs, and give thanks — not for everything we have, but for everything, instead, that we have lost.

[Adapted from remarks delivered at the annual AWP conference, Denver, 2011].

There are bits of comic art—bits, say, from certain movies—that undermine all their successors, that sow the grave earth of drama with attic salt, that parody in advance all future attempts to pull off with a straight face what these works mock so everlastingly. Monty Python and the Holy Grail rendered all Arthurian epics, I believe, preposterous for all time; in the wake of every bold crusader Russell Crowing past you on his foaming charger you look for the tubby little guy hurrying along behind, banging a pair of coconuts together. All slick heist films in which key roles and code names must be shared out among the tough and competent members of the team will forevermore threaten to devolve into the petty bickering that follows, in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, on Steve Buscemi’s learning that he will have to be Mr. Pink. And in the film version of my novel Wonder Boys, which I did not write and for whose excellence I can take no credit, the wonderful Rip Torn as the pompous and self-regarding author Q takes to a podium, in a hall like this one, begins his talk, and by means of four little words portentously uttered renders it impossible, or so I would have thought, for any writer ever to take to a podium again:

                                         Q
                       I…
                         (pauses for effect)
                       …am a writer. 

That’s why I like a Q &A. A Q&A is always the portion of the proceedings that feels freest from the taint of Q-like pomposity, from the pain of having to be Mr. Pink, of having to ride out here on my imaginary steed while somewhere in the mocking shadows two little coconuts knock. So it occurred to me, thinking about coming here tonight, that it might be possible, with the cooperation of a skilled interlocutor, or at any rate a willing shill, to circumvent all logistical difficulties and proceed, skipping the dread ascent to the podium of pontification, directly to Q&A. Michael, are you ready?

Q: Are you?

A: Let us begin.

Q: What is your novel about?

A: Which novel?

Q: Any novel.

A: So that’s how it’s going to be?

Q: I’m asking the questions here.

A: Right. OK. Well, on the day that I started it, I thought it was going to be about the same thing that all my novels are going to be about on the day that I start them, namely: what a remarkably good writer I am. But now—having finished it—I would say that, like all its predecessors and (I’m guessing) all its successors, the book turns out not to be about that. Instead it turns out to be, as usual, about all the errors I fell into and the misjudgments I made while writing it. It is about missed opportunities and nice tries. It is about its boring parts. It is about its author’s personal, moral and artistic shortcomings. It is about the parents, the siblings and all the other relatives of my almost uniformly at least semi-orphaned protagonists; all those potential characters I dismissed off the bat or along the way with cancers, car accidents, convenient appointments across town, because I didn’t have time, space, energy, imagination or skill to write them in. It is about how prolix and sesquipedalian its author can be. It tells the thrilling tale of all the other books I read while I was writing it, the favorite words and pet phrases of Jane Austen, John Cheever, Jerome Charyn, Zadie Smith, Richard Price, Roland Barthes, Herman Melville, Ursula K. LeGuin, Elmore Leonard, Cormac McCarthy, Lorrie Moore, Samuel R. Delany, etc., etc. that drifted in through its open windows like smoke from neighborhood fires, leaving their ash on every surface.

The book is about scenes that could easily have been cut, jokes that swiftly wore out their welcome, and female characters who dress interestingly and take on great burdens but never quite get to star in the show. Actually, come to think of it, this one is indeed about the same thing that all the others I’ve ever written were about: it is about the book that it failed to become, the story of a sun that, like Jupiter, never ignited.

Q: I remember this one time on Salon.com, someone said you wrote a book that had seventeen different similes for a blue sky. So... what’s up with that?

A: What can I say? I was born and have lived almost all my life in the Land of Happy Self-Delusion, where, as called for by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language, we have seventeen different ways of talking about blue skies. Actually, I’ll bet it’s more like twenty, twenty-five. So, yes. True. I can’t help myself. I need help. My name is Michael C., and I am an optimist. It has been ten years since my last taste of utter despair.

Q: But, I mean, no, what’s up with all the similes? I read Secret Yiddish Policemen’s Ball—you had three similes in one sentence in there!

A: Yeah. I know. I’m sorry. I am as sorry as a deathbed confession. I am as sorry as a grown man in flip flops. I am as sorry as the Delfonics.

I think it’s probably a quirk in the wiring. I see things in terms of other things—that is how I apprehend them. I used to know a woman who could look into a big indistinct patch of clover and spot the one, the one, with four leaves. And yet she was not particularly lucky, which shows the value in practical terms of such quirks. Seeing likenesses might be a fundamental way of perceiving the world. When my eldest was 18 months old she crawled onto an old blue Chinese carpet that was besprinkled with little white flecks of wear, pointed, and said, “Stars!” Indeed, it may be that all morality lies in our ability to see likeness in two unlike things, I and thou; it may be that all imaginative writing proceeds by forging this analogy of experience, of understanding, between the writer and the reader, that reader and writer are the terms of the fundamental and ultimate simile. But in my case, it’s probably just bad writing.

Q: Where do you get your ideas?

That is a very good question. I have a number of responses prepared. Which would you prefer?

Q: Could I get the honest one?

A: Fresh out. Hmm. Let’s see. Well, I could give the credit to all the rich and varied experiences I have lived through and pursued in my exciting life, from hunting wolverines along the shores of the Lake of the Woods to serving for three years as a Jewish chaplain on board a nuclear submarine. Or I could talk about how all my ideas come from other books, from the act of reading, that circular affair, that ouroboros, how the first sustained piece of fiction I ever wrote was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Or, I have all kinds of nice examples I can offer of how the trigger for a novel came from some kind of chance encounter: with a Yiddish phrasebook, with an architectural drawing, with a box full of old moldering comic books.

Or I might just settle, getting closer to an honest answer, for the mystery of the thing, and say that I have no idea. As proof of this I might adduce a day I spent at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk several years back, sitting on a bench while my children rode the rides, struggling in a Moleskine to keep up with the rollercoaster cars of an idea for a book that became Gentlemen of the Road. The entire plot and all the major characters, the setting, the period, the feel of the thing, it was all there. Now, I was about as far at that moment from tenth century Kazakhstan as one could possibly be. I had not just been reading about the Khazars. There was no bingeing on historical adventure fiction in my recent past. At the time, in fact, I was all about Yiddish and policemen, reading Chandler and Singer and watching Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe. The book had just appeared in my brain that morning, whole and inexplicable as the monolith in 2001. So I might honestly say, in answer to your question, that I really don’t know.

But the more important truth is that ideas are the easiest, and hence perhaps the least interesting aspect of the job. Ideas are like that one pound of insects which, as my older son recently informed me, the average person unwittingly ingests every year. Ideas are swarming, ubiquitous, chronic. Ideas are a plague. You are, as Madge the Beautician used to say of Palmolive in the old ads, soaking in them. There are five novels in every newspaper, ten in every work of history, one in every unhappy family. Ideas are easy. The hard part is sticking with the ideas when they begin to lose their luster. Sitting on their heads when they try to roll free of your grasp. Keeping yourself on task and on schedule while trying as hard as you can not to bring shame upon your family name, your nation and your mother tongue by writing bad sentences, which is, of course, a crime if not indeed a sin. Ideas!—big deal. Ask me where I got my barbecue sauce recipe, my pants, the color of my eyes. There would be more to tell.

Q: How do you feel about MFA programs?

A: The program at UC Irvine made a man out of me.

Q: Really? What were you before you went in?

A: A boy, of course. Hopped up on Henry Miller and misogyny, endlessly on fire from the age of thirteen or so with mistaken and callow ideas about women; burning without cease, like an oil well in a battle zone, to get laid, and then in the little time left over for other things, trying to write small constructions, like Satie pieces, built from bits and pieces of Borges and sf and crime fiction.

Q: Oh, wait, before you go on, let me stop you right there. Katie Roiphe said in the New York Times that, unlike your all-powerful godlike ancestors Mailer and Roth, you have no interest in sex, because you have been gelded by feminism.

A: I— wait, what?

Q: Yeah. She said Safran Foer, too. A couple of other white guys. Wallace. Eggers. Franzen. Like, six of you. But, I mean, that was enough. That’s all you need, as everyone knows, to diagnose a generation: six white dudes.

A: Huh, well, no, I mean, yes, okay. She’s right. I was gelded by feminism. Totally. I was raised on Free To Be You And Me by a single mother who went to law school in 1975 and then into the work force, and who thereafter obliged me to select and prepare a hot meal for the family every night. I married a strong woman with whom I split down the middle all the duties and chores as well as the pleasures of raising our children, among whom I count two girls in whose strength and independence I take considerable pride. So, yeah. Gelded. And yet I still put descriptions of people having sex into my books, along with descriptions of them eating, and escaping from coffins, and getting stoned on hemp in the tenth century AD.

Q: Katie Roiphe says you don’t.

A: Oh, okay. My bad.

Q: Please continue.

A: What I got out of the writing program at UC Irvine, beyond the gifts of time and cash that are so precious, and beyond the help and advice I got from my sagacious, experienced teachers and my fellow MFAs, was a seriousness of purpose. Once I had imbibed it, this seriousness began to unknit, to pick apart the fanciful structures of my arrested development. And this seriousness of purpose was imparted to me, in large part, by the hard-working, hard-reading, hard-writing women in the program: Michelle Latiolais, Peggy Reavey, Rhoda Huffey. Many of them had done lots of other things and lived several lives before they got together the wherewithal and the confidence and the will to defer their dreams’ fulfillment no longer. A couple of them were old enough to be second-wave feminists—this was back in 1985—but even the younger women knew that part of what had been won for them by feminism was the chance, at last, to seize their opportunities. Their resolute pursuit of that opportunity shamed me, basically, into doing my work.

Oakley Hall, who wrote the wonderful novel Warlock (1958), and who ran the fiction program at Irvine, has to get some of the credit for this, too. Oakley liked to admit older candidates, people who had been places, and done things, people who had worked and suffered, been married and divorced, had children. He did not care particularly where you had gone to college, or how long ago. When it came to female students, to females generally, I think, he preferred the company of someone with a few miles on her chassis. In this sense I was an unlikely selection for him to have made. I had been almost nowhere and done almost nothing. I was bouncy and jejune. I gave off the moral equivalent of that new-car smell.

Very early in my first semester at Irvine I met with Oakley to discuss the pages I’d given him to read, the first half-dozen chapters or so of the novel I’d started the previous spring. He had a craggy, somehow Western face (he’d been born in San Diego in 1920), and a prize-fighter way of looking up from under his brow at you, and the pugnacious, warm eyes of a tough-guy priest in an old Warner Brothers movie. We didn’t know very much about each other, at that point, but Oakley quickly brought me up to speed.

“I don’t like it,” he said. He said that it was well- (if a bit showily) written, but dull—nothing happened, nothing developed. The protagonist went from one party to another and every chapter introduced another character or two, and soon he had grown impatient, tired of wondering if they were going to turn out to be important to the story or not. This concern had been diminished somewhat, however, once he realized that, in fact, there was no story. He also told me that if there was one thing he absolutely did not give a damn about while reading a novel, it was the question (pace Ms. Roiphe) of who was going to have sex with whom, and in what manner. I left his office thoroughly ashamed of having wasted his valuable time, threw away 90% of what I had, and started over on the book that was published, three years later, as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Then there was my fellow first-year MFA student and new housemate (now one of my oldest friends), Louis B. Jones. Ten years older than me (he was 32) Louis showed up at Irvine as the author of five novels (unpublished1, but still), and in full command of what remains, to this day, the most impeccable writerly discipline I have ever encountered. Every morning at six—seven days a week—he hauled his ass out of bed, made coffee, went back into his bedroom, shut the door, and got to work. Every morning, no matter how late we’d been up the night before or what we’d gotten up to (our apartment was a block from the Newport Beach Pier, a neighborhood in which it was possible, at the time anyway, to get up to things). Writing had always been something that I did on impulse, when I felt like it, or (most often) when I had a deadline. It had never actually occurred to me that it might be something one did—that one must do—every day. And not only every day but (and this turned out to be key) every day at the same time. And there was no arguing with the results, because Louis was (and remains) a flat-out wonderful writer. I don’t know how many days of waking up to the smell of his Winstons (my brand, too) and the sturdy, rapid clacking of his Macintosh’s keyboard I endured before I finally got the powerful message that he did not even know he was sending.

What did I learn about writing in the UC Irvine MFA writing program? Shame.

Q: Yeah, okay, but can one really teach writing?

A: No, one can’t—not the way you mean it, I think. Because when we say teach—especially when we’re talking about teaching writing—what we tend to mean by the word is: to decant one’s knowledge like something mellow and gold directly into the empty snifters of our pupils’ souls, then light those souls on fire and send them out into the world of literature like a dessert on a passing tray at the Magic Pan. And the truth is that I had teachers, in college and graduate school, who managed, on occasion, to do just that. Whenever one of my teachers at Pitt, Chuck Kinder, got himself all worked up about nouns and verbs as the irreducible quarks of literature, or started in on the truthful lies of the late great Barry Hannah, waving around a copy of Airships, the stuff came pouring out of him already aflame.

Most of the time, however, you have to settle for a smaller and even more important kind of teaching. You give people a vocabulary. You equip them with a set of tools and some knowledge of their rudiments. With urgency and authority you recommend incontrovertibly good books that may, if your students are lucky enough not to know everything, call their taste, assumptions and judgments into question. That’s part of what an MFA program is for: to take a bunch of people who have derived a number of their most fundamental ideas from books, and throw them up against people whose reading lists are really different. And one other thing you can do, the way my workshop-mates did: you can set an example.

But can you really teach writing? What idiot asked that question? Let’s move on.

Q: In your novel, have you betrayed the secrets of your personal life and the personal lives of the people around you? Or is it just a bunch of crap you made up?

A: Both, I hope. Those are the sacred obligations of the novelist.

The first obligation—bringing the dish—I know from my experience as a reader of novels. However remote in time or space a novel’s subject matter from its author, however baroque its plot or outré its characters, I read as a memoir. As a map of a life. The least “autobiographical” novelist—a formalist, a fantasist, a social realist—by eschewing autobiography, betrays something about him or herself. And even when they give away little of their authors’ private lives, all novels betray the story of their authors’ idées fixes.

That’s part of why I like novels. They bring the news, the gossipy gospel. They trade and have always traded in secrets, confessions, betrayals, self-betrayals. That fundamental nature of the novel as gossip is part of what makes Jane Austen so powerful a pleasure. Nobody reads Tender Is The Night without thinking about Scott and Zelda, without feeling that in the tender lie it tells, something otherwise inexpressible is being confessed. We are Fitzgerald’s Nick Carroway, “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.” And if a novel is the dish, than logically its author is our friend. That is what a bad reader like me goes looking for in a novel: in its author, a friend for life.

And friends I find, even in the novels where I am least welcome. Vladimir Nabokov, for example. He does not want to be friends with me. And God knows he does not want me to think of him as his friend. Yet still I love him! For posing in photographs with the butterfly nets and the shorts worn socks pulled high. For the father he lost, the one whose portrait can be found in the murals extolling the career of Teddy Roosevelt at the Natural History museum in New York City, the one getting tossed into the air by a gang of hearty muzhiks with a blanket. For his lame attacks on Freud, carping on it like a kooky uncle with a hair up his ass. For Pnin. I revere Nabokov because of Pale Fire or Lolita or The Gift, but I love him for Pnin! He might hate that.

And yet to me that’s just what readers are: friends. Imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friend when I was a kid. His name was Cheyenne. I don’t remember anything about him. Just a stir of golden something, nearby. And if Cheyenne was already imaginary when he was hovering right beside me, or riding in my pocket, then what did he become when I forgot him? Nothing. Just a thread of loss that led me to want to go looking for a reader, an imaginary friend. Forgiving, patient, sensitive to a fault. Hip to all allusions. Always wanting to hear what you have to say.

In return, therefore, for the reader’s friendship, I must, as I said, do two things as a novelist, for the novelist’s obligations are the same as the friend’s: yes, I must serve up some dish. But in doing so I must also take care, at all times, to keep things lively. Friendship, after all, is there to enliven us.

That’s where artifice and pattern come in. It’s a cliche to say that a novel is a lie that tells a truth, but a moment’s reflection on any well-known lie—like Milli Vanilli, or Hell—will confirm the power of lies to betray deeper truths about human beings, their desires and agendas. And though a novel has this difference with a lie in its pure form—that it is told with the full consent and indeed the connivance of its audience—in return for that aid and that consent it must bring all the pleasure, all the comfort in solitude, all the thrilling sense of deliverance, that only a great lie can. It must sing for its supper. And so, along with whatever else it might be up to—hastening the passage of a transcontinental flight, seeking the abolition of human chattel, guiding us into the mind of Leopold Bloom or James Joyce, erasing for its length our sense of utter loneliness in this broken world—a novel is a performance, a full-program of effects pulled off with mirrors and rigging and the C.S. Lewis-style Deep Magic of language.

Autobiography, pure and unshaped, is the last thing wanted in this business. If you are vanishing an elephant onstage, you do not tell your audience about the half hour you spent reading a book on mirror optics while eating at a chophouse on Wabash Avenue, sitting on a donut cushion for your hemorrhoids. You tell them rather how you spent eight long years absorbing arts of wisdom and healing among the mystic Green Lamas of Shambhala.

So, yes, I opened a vein onto the page; but, fortunately, thanks to my long years of cruel and magical training amid the ancient towers of Shambhala, I only bleed stories.

Q: Why do you write?

A: I have been answering this question, I find, for a long time now. Not long ago in a box in my attic I came upon a cache of very old floppy discs--5 1/4-inch, that’s how old, written on an Osborne computer using C/PM and WordStar—and was able to extract from them a clutch of early short stories and abortive novels and love letters to lost women of the eighties. Among these I found a “Statement of Purpose” that I wrote in applying—unsuccessfully—for a Stegner Fellowship, in late 1984, when I was 21 years old. Here is what I wrote:

1. I write to get in on the game of literature, and to legitimize and elevate, through language, the games I have played, with maps, reference books, and myself, since I learned to read.

2. I write to gain a new perspective on whatever has happened to me, by taking an incident apart and putting it back together the way it looks most remarkable.

3. I write for my father and a few of my friends, whose approval I seem to require.

4. I want to keep writing because if I weren’t a writer I would not know what to do with myself.

I first became aware of the possibilities of merging my own imagination into the tradition of storytelling at age ten, when I wrote my first full-length story, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in which I led the detective to encounter Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Since my pleasure then at the new thing I had made out of old things, I have never stopped wanting to be a writer.

When I was thirteen years old, having just completed that story about Captain Nemo and Sherlock Holmes, I put the matter even more succinctly. “If I’m going to write,” I put down on a form I used to apply for a job writing for the “Teen Voice” section of my hometown newspaper, the Columbia (MD) Flier. “I’m going to write something that’s funny or scary or far-out or mythic. I’m not going to write about How I Got Stoned or I Hate My Parents So Bad.”

I don’t think I have a whole lot to add to what those two vanished gentlemen had to say, except perhaps that, at this point, a) habit has long since taken charge of the operation, b) it is still as intensely pleasurable to play those games with maps, reference books and language as ever and c): the Benjamins. Because in my work I am always trying to satisfy one prime ambition: like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, like Brian Wilson with Pet Sounds, like Edgar Allan Poe with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I want to make art that I can sell for cash money. To produce popular art that is unreservedly and unmistakably both. All of those above-mentioned works are self-conscious about what it means to be a hit book or record or movie, but they are self-conscious without embarrassment or a surfeit of irony, so that they still deliver on the promises that popular art makes—and yet they also give full expression to all the things that hung up their creators, terrified them, or moved them with their beauty or their sorrow or their horror.

Well, I’m afraid that’s all I have time for this evening, but—

Q: Just one more—? Favorite episode of Star Trek?

A: “Mirror, Mirror.” Spock with a beard. Come on.

Q: Character on The Wire?

A: Omar, duh.

Q: Song you want to have played at your funeral?

A: “Thank You, Friends,” Big Star.

Thank you, friends.

1.

If you had dropped by Tragic Magic HQ a few weeks ago, you would have found me sprawled in the conversation pit, awash in the tragic magic of Ann Packer’s beautiful new novel, Some Bright Nowhere. I tend to be a slow reader, by habit more than by nature; when the writing is as good as Ann’s, I like to take my time with the sentences. But I could not seem to hold myself back. I devoured the book in two intense sessions, and then when I was finished—when it was finished with me—I just sat there, for a long time, ashiver with the resonance of its powerful final pages, a struck wine glass on the verge of shattering.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that: a couple of days, at least. Sure, I got up, I walked around, I ate things and went places. But wherever I went and whatever I was doing, Some Bright Nowhere stayed with me. I kept thinking about the novel’s pivotal moment and profoundest mystery—a woman’s shocking and seemingly unaccountable dying wish. What makes that mystery so profound is not that it shocks, hurts, and puzzles Eliot—from whose POV the entire story is told—but rather the way it obliterates a loving and attentive husband’s unexamined certainty that, after so many years of marriage and of caring for Claire through the inexorable progress of her multiple cancers, he has every right to believe that he knows her. She ought to be incapable of taking him, and so painfully, by surprise.

Stowed away in the hold of any enduring marriage, despite the mutual expertise gathered lovingly, painfully, or simply by dint of Gladwell’s famous “ten thousand hours,” there is always a black box: a record of unstated premises, silent refusals, pardon withheld, desire repressed, truth unacknowledged. Only in literature, through the artistry and tenacity of a great novelist like Ann Packer, can that black box ever be salvaged, and broken open, its contents thrillingly exposed.

I was still pondering all this a week later when I noticed the blue lightbulbs blinking in the eye-sockets of the bust of Lester Bangs over the airlock, between the epic twenty-foot mural that interlinks every single Pete Frame “Rock Family Tree” and a mounted pair of authentic concert-twirled Neil Peart ProMark oak drumsticks. Longtime subscribers to Tragic Magic may recall what that means: somewhere, someone was having a Mixtape Emergency.

2.

Over the years, reaching way back to the cassette era, I’ve made a lot of mixtapes and playlists for other people: as gifts and love offerings, courtship gestures, mementos, nostalgic reminders of a shared history, expressions of friendship and affection, and tools for properly educating my kids (along with any other souls in need of musical guidance).

I don’t, however, get a ton of what you might call “commissions.” Of all the cassettes, CD-Rs, and links to streaming playlists I’ve ever shared, very few of them were ever actually, well, requests. And I’ll be honest: sometimes that gives me pause; I can’t help remembering my Bubbie and her cookies.

My mother’s maternal grandmother showed up to every family event or dinner with a tin of her special “Bubbie Cookies,” carefully packed between sheets of waxed paper, made with loving intention and, alas, with flavorless parve oils in place of butterfat, with non-dairy creamer instead of milk, with cheap cacao-free kosher “chocolate” chips, and (apparently, though probably not) with a cup or two of very fine sawdust. As the tin was opened, everybody would exclaim, but apart from my brother and me (who as a matter of principle were bound to eat any cookie or cookie-like object), nobody ever seemed, just then, to have saved enough room for a Bubbie Cookie. It was not until long after Bubbie’s death that my mother happened to allude, in passing, to its having been a universally if silently acknowledged truth, in my family, that Bubbie Cookies were pretty much inedible.

It’s not really that I think my playlists are sawdusty and unlistenable. But I worry, sometimes, that nobody really wants them. If they did, wouldn’t they, at least occasionally, ask?

And if requests are rare, genuine mixtape emergencies are rarer still. There was the friend, left reeling after the truly horrendous breakup of a seven-year relationship, who said she needed a soundtrack that would map and accompany her upcoming journey out of the darkness and back into the light. And there was my exhausted and despairing wife, on the morning after 11/8/2016, needing a fistful of anthems to help her get her fight back.

I was pretty excited, therefore, when those blue LEDs lit up in the eyes of Lester Bangs. I was needed! Somebody wanted some of my Bubbie Cookies! But I was even more excited when I discovered that, this time, the call was coming in from—of all people—Ann Packer, whose novel was still sending little aftershocks through me.

3.

Ann and I have been friends for a span that will soon be measurable in decades, and I’ve been an admirer of her work for even longer—ever since 2002 when, during one of our semi-regular lunches at the Washington Square Bar & Grill, my dear teacher and mentor, the late Oakley Hall (1920–2008), told me about a new novel he’d been reading, a debut, called The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, using the formula he always used for his strongest possible recommendations: “I thought it was terrific!”

Like all her admirers and friends I’d been waiting a while for Some Bright Nowhere, and immediately on finishing it had sent Ann a burst of text messages telling her how it had transported me. She had replied, thanking me with typically droll and self-deprecating warmth. Now, however, she was texting me with a problem, a genuine mixtape emergency, which she encapsulated thus:

You know Largehearted Boy? I’ve been asked to create a playlist for Some Bright Nowhere, and I just can’t. 

I am, in fact, a longtime fan of Largehearted Boy, and have spent a decent amount of time, over the years, listening to his site’s “Book Notes,” where he invites authors to post playlists of musical selections that they listened to while writing their latest book, or that reflect or embody some key aspects of its setting or plot.¹

There was, from Ann’s point of view, one problem with this proposal, and one possible solution:

Though I love music, I don’t think musically. Rather than simply say no thanks, it occurred to me: would you want to make one for me?

Instantly—before I even switched off Lester Bang’s eye-bulbs or texted Ann back to say that I had her covered—I thought of Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day.” Like Some Bright Nowhere, the song tells the story of a person facing imminent decline and death, and how that imminence affects her and the people, family and friends, who love her. It’s exquisite and wrenching, like the book, accruing quiet power through the deployment of sharp, literary detail:

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Goldenrod and the 4-H stone 
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

And, at the end:

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In the morning, when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

There was an immediate parallel, to me, as soon as I started to “think musically,” between the feel of Ann’s book and the song’s juxtaposition of delicate, aching, classical-tinged beauty (French horn) and a down-to-earth, clear-eyed, unsentimental approach to love, sex, death and questions of immortality (banjo).

In the end, “Casimir” didn’t make it to the final playlist, mostly because, as the reference to a “4-H stone” suggests, it’s (probably) about the premature death of a teenaged girl (her gender implied by a reference to her wearing a “blouse”). I went with a different Stevens track in the leadoff position, the almost too aptly-named “Death With Dignity,” from the album Carrie and Lowell. But here’s “Casimir Pulaski Day”2, anyway, because even though it fell off, it really set the tone for the playlist that eventually emerged. And because it’s sublimely beautiful:

Ann had expressed some trepidation that in assembling what I pitched to her as a “thematic” playlist (as opposed to, say, a selection of songs referred or alluded to in the book, of which, in this case, there were none), I might end up with, in her phrase, “a collection of dirges.” I had reassured her that I was not worried about that because, unlike Ann, I had not written the book, only read it, and thus I knew, from a kind of experience that will always be denied to a book’s long-suffering, anxiously fault-finding author, how thematically rich and multitonal her book was.

Some Bright Nowhere is so much more, I assured her, than a story (to paraphrase the opening sentence of Erich Segal’s Love Story) about a woman who died. It’s about: love of long duration,what goes on inside of marriages, the strength of female friendships, hurt and forgiveness, and looking back down the path that somehow has led us to this unforeseeable present moment with regret, puzzlement, and memories of exhilaration that are themselves, even now, exhilarating. And yes, it’s about death, but there are so many great songs about death that, like ‌Ann’s novel, confront the mystery of our end with curiosity, courage, frankness, or even longing, but without feeling any particular need for dirges and lamentation.

As soon as I articulated all those motifs and themes, and Ann gave me her blessing, candidate songs came flooding out of my song-memory, sometimes in clutches of two and three, so fast that I could barely keep up. I had the whole thing selected and assembled within an hour or so, and then spent another couple of hours winnowing and deciding on the track order. It came together quickly, and I really do think it came out well. I don’t know if it “sounds like the book”—whatever that could mean—but it sounds, to me, like the way reading the book felt. The longest hour was the one I spent waiting to hear what Ann thought, if she approved of and agreed with my selections and most of all, if it pleased her—or if she thought it was a Bubbie Cookie. The fact that it’s here on Tragic Magic and at Largehearted Boy for you to listen to suggests the answer to all of those questions.

4.

It’s typical for novelists presenting Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes” playlists to say something about each track and its meaning to them, to their novel, to their work as a whole; or to explain how certain songs actually played a role in their process of writing, or inspired some episode in the book. I can’t possibly do any of those things since, to my great regret, I didn’t write Some Bright Nowhere. This is a reader’s playlist, and represents only a faithful record, made in the book’s immediate aftermath, in the lingering shimmer of its comet tail,3 of everything that reading it had made me feel. The songs that gathered around this book in my mind, found in this playlist, tend to be ones whose narrator/singer shares some perception, emotion, or predicament with Claire, Eliot, or with the novel itself. In the notes that follow, I’ve limited myself simply to pointing out the connection—where I can do it without spoilers—and a key lyric or two by way of example.

1. “Death With Dignity” - Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell

Carrie and Lowell represents the intensely literary, multi-instrumentalist Stevens’s attempt to come to terms with the death of a damaged mother who had abandoned him and his siblings when they were very young. Apparently he now believes that the attempt was a failure, which is sad, but you and I know better. This song works because, like the novel, it starts in medias res, or really almost in ultimas res, and because Claire is not just a wife leaving her husband behind; she’s a mother of two, and the forlorn and confused efforts of her adult children, trying bravely to act as though they have some idea what it’s going to mean to lose their family’s center of gravity, provide some of the novel’s most poignant moments.

Key lyric: Especially for a lead-off track: I don’t know where to begin and And we all know how this will end

2. “High and Dry” - Radiohead, The Bends

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what “High and Dry” is about, though I’ve listened and attended to the lyrics with care many, many times. I’ve read Thom Yorke’s reported remarks on the subject; they are not illuminating. There’s a boy doing reckless motorcycle jumps. There are some unspecified haters, who also spit. But oh, musically, does this one ever have the ache! And of course its lyrical refrain, echoed in the title, precisely formulates the heartbroken plea that Eliot works so hard throughout the novel to repress. And then there is this lyric, stating (for our purposes) one of the novel’s hardest truths about the blow to its equilibrium a marriage can suffer when cancer (or some other illness) undoes one of the two desired bodies.

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All your insides fall to pieces
You just sit there wishing you could still make love

Key lyric: Don’t leave me high and dry

3. “Naked As We Came” - Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days

This is one of a few songs on this playlist that tries to do what Claire (along with the author) resolves to do in Some Bright Nowhere: to look levelly and unblinkingly at her death (the death of both partners, ultimately, in singer-songwriter Sam Beam’s curiously sweet bittersweet vision), and at the marriage that will pass away with her.

Key lyric: Wake up, it’s no use pretending

4. “Something On Your Mind” - Karen Dalton, In My Own Time

It’s so hard, so painful, so powerful, in the early part of the novel, as Claire moves in secret toward the death she envisions and wants for herself; keeping it from Eliot, wanting but afraid to tell him what she has decided. Of course he senses that she’s holding something back, and as the evidence mounts, that sense becomes a certainty; and here we have the weary, wary soulfulness of Karen Dalton singing “Something On Your Mind.”

Key lyric: Straight out of the baffled, desperately optimistic mind of poor Eliot: Maybe another day/You’ll want to feel another way

5. “The Greatest” - Cat Power, The Greatest

This is a fairly elliptical Chan Marshall lyric (and a fantastic vocal), open to many interpretations, but to me the song’s “I” is looking back (the way Claire does) at the strength and vigor and capacities of the body that has betrayed her, with a kind of bleak wonder (Once I wanted to be the greatest/No wind or waterfall could stall me/And then came the rush of the flood/Stars at night turned deep to dust), and trying to ready herself and those around her for its impending failure, and the final tasks that failure will entail.

Key lyric: Lower me down/Pin me in/Secure the grounds/For the lead/And the dregs of my bed/I’ve been sleeping/For the later parade

6. “Good Friends” - Maren Morris, Humble Quest

As I mentioned to Ann in trying to reassure her that a playlist faithfully inspired by her book could never be “a collection of dirges,” one of Some Bright Nowhere’s central motifs is the sustaining power, and the fundamental needfulness to women, of their friendships with other women, even as time alters and redefines them. Yet while there are plenty of girlfriends-on-the-town-having-fun pop anthems, I had a hard time finding songs on the subject of enduring female friendships and the ways they change over time, outside the work of Joni Mitchell, who has several—“Song for Sharon,” “Chinese Cafe,” even maybe “Ladies of the Canyon.” But those all felt so specific to Mitchell, somehow, in their context and in their particulars. Then I stumbled on this swell track by sometime-Highwoman Maren Morris, a favorite of my younger daughter’s, co-written with Greg Kurstin and Natalie Hemby. Of course I’m no expert, but it seemed to really capture something true.

Key lyric: Too much love, too much dirt, too much time/Wouldn’t change, couldn’t leave if we tried

“Meet On The Ledge” - Richard Thompson, Acoustic Classics II

A classic of retrospective rue, taking stock of failed promise, unfinished business, and unfulfilled dreams as one approaches the inevitable “ledge,” wondering what if anything comes next. Written by Thompson, and originally recorded with Fairport Convention, this is a powerful solo acoustic version, a sterling performance by one of the greatest guitar-and-voice men ever.

Key lyric: Kind of the whole thing, actually.

”Temptation” - New Order, Substance

The only overt reference to music in the novel is to the “1980s New Wave” playing in an LA bar that Eliot and a friend visit, which reminds them of their college days. I seized on this slight clue and reached for New Order, so many of whose songs grapple—with a spare, unsparing beauty one might call Packeresque—with mortality, life’s purpose, the fragility and strength of love.

Key lyric: Up, down, turn around/Please don’t let me hit the ground/Tonight, I think I’ll walk alone/I’ll find my soul as I go home

“Here Comes The Summer” - Fiery Furnaces, The Fiery Furnaces (EP)

See, Ann? Not all dirges! Not all of Eliot’s and Claire’s end-of-life/end-of-marriage retrospections are wistful and melancholy—far from it. Both of them take strength, at different points in the novel, from recalling their early days, the first flush of love and desire. The wonderful songs of sibling-act Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger, d.b.a. Fiery Furnaces, are notoriously elliptical and imagistic, but to me this track is about reaching for, insisting on—Remember?—the nourishment and even renewal of an old, passionate love that fond retrospection can bring.

Key lyric: And now it finally seems about to start/I swear, I swear that I will do my part

“Your Arms Around Me” - Jens Lekman, The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom

There’s a trip to the Emergency Room in Some Bright Nowhere, necessitated (in part) by the inadvertent, unintentional thoughtlessness (at worst) of one of the partners, a scene that put me in mind of this entrancing piece of deadpan “chamber music verité” by the Swedish guitar-pop maestro. Sometimes we hurt the ones we love totally by accident—even when we’re just trying to give them a hug!

Key lyric (it gives me a shiver every time): What’s broken can always be fixed/What’s fixed will always be broken

“I Will Follow You Into The Dark” - Death Cab for Cutie, Plans

I mean, obviously, right?

Key lyric: Love of mine/Someday you will die

“Night Still Comes” - Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You

The hardest hard thing for Eliot is that, fundamentally, he doesn’t—can’t—understand Claire’s decision. As much as he loves her, as long as he’s known her, as hard as he tries to understand, her dying wish makes no sense to him. And from his POV—the POV of the novel—his incomprehension is ultimately on her: she’s responsible for it. One of Ann’s most amazing narrative feats is to lead the reader, little by little, through the intervening screen of Eliot’s obtuseness, to a moving, pitying grasp of why, facing death, she wants what she wants. And it’s not—not really—on her, at all. I don’t know if all that is in this terrific Neko Case song or not—but I kind of think it is.

Key lyric: There’s nothing you can say to me/You never held it at the right angle

“River” - Joni Mitchell, Blue

There is a sad and forlorn Christmas in this book, a family Christmas where everything feels broken and wrong, and that’s part of what this song is doing on this playlist. But it’s also here because it’s one of the best songs I know about the powerful and mournful yearning, like Claire’s, for an escape, a release from all the brokenness and wrongness, that feels like it will never come.

Key lyric: I wish I had a river so long/I would teach my feet to fly

“Babylon” - David Gray, White Ladder

It’s not just death that’s about letting go, the novel says; love is about letting go, too—of outdated expectations, impossible hopes, unrealized plans, doubts, fears, and all the daily scurf of life and its disappointments that get in the way of our being present, fully present, at last, for the one we love. That’s what this superb David Gray track, one of my personal all-timers, is all about, too.

Key lyric: If you want it, come and get it/Crying out loud/The love that I was giving you/Was never in doubt/Let go of your heart/Let go of your head/And feel it now

“Flirted With You All My Life” - Cowboy Junkies, Demons

A candidate for the best pop song ever about death, certainly the greatest ever directly addressed to Death itself (might be a short list), this is a remarkable rock-and-roll cover of the late Vic Chesnutt’s dark-country-folk classic. Claire’s powerful longing for release from the pain and indignity of her illness, hinted at in Mitchell’s “River,” is here made explicit, is named. The singer may not yet be ready, but Claire is.

Key lyric: Oh, death you hector me/Decimate those dear to me/Tease me with your sweet relief

“Take Care” - Big Star, Third

We’re approaching the goodbye phase of the book and of the playlist now, and this—in its stripped-down, string-sectionless version—is one of the most haunting and ineffably final goodbye songs I can think of. In the end—the real end—what else is there to say to those we leave behind besides Take care?

Key lyric: This sounds a bit like goodbye/In a way it is, I guess/As I leave your side/I’ve taken the air

“This Is The Day” - The The, Soul Mining

I’m not sure it’s in the lyrics, and would bet that a lot of people don’t hear it this way at all, but to me the central, titular assertion in this bravely poppy, self-betrayingly melancholy song—another “1980s New Wave” classic—is not meant to be taken at face value.

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This is the day
Your life will surely change
This is the day
When things fall into place

In my mind, the poor shlep singing these words is doing so as he walks down the sidewalk under a piano that is silently falling from an upper story. I think it’s that somehow-pathetic “surely”— but that’s probably just me. What makes this song by Matt Johnson (the man behind The The) so great, so memorable, and so appropriate here is the way it creates a powerful sense of imminence. For good or for ill, we feel, this actually is The Day. And as we move with Claire beyond goodbyes, toward the last track of this Some Bright Nowhere playlist, I wanted to try to suggest the terrible, terribly moving imminence that Ann builds so expertly in the book’s final passages.

Key lyric: This is the day

“Heaven” - Talking Heads, Fear of Music

As soon as I read the lines from the Christian Wiman poem that a friend in the novel shares with Eliot: some bright nowhere/of bright fields and sunlight/that was my idea of heaven—long before I knew I was going to be making a playlist for the eponymous novel—I thought of this classic Talking Heads number, which presents a similar conception of Heaven as a place of beautiful vacuity. The possibility of some kind of afterlife glints briefly here and there in the novel like a bit of silvery thread, and this track with its deadpan, lovely, sweetly ironic David Byrne vision of some bright nowhere feels like the perfect, obvious, and most fitting choice to finish off this musical, mixtape interpretation of Claire’s life and death, and Ann Packer’s novel.

Key lyric: Heaven, heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens

Twenty years ago, give or take, I got a rare, and moderately fateful, notification of a new result for one of my saved eBay searches, set to return results for items that have been listed under the sub-subheading of Toys & Hobbies=>Vintage & Antique Toys=>Lead Toys & Figures, and whose title and/or description contains the word “unusual.”

I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure that one started with this fellow:

I found him in a wooden bin at some antique store or flea market, somewhere or other. It had never occurred to me that toymakers might once have offered, or that children had once desired to play with, toy beekeepers, and I found the idea enchanting. As a kid I had some metal soldiers, and remembered them fondly, but those had been part of a general interest in scale models and miniature things, including dollhouses and dollhouse furniture. Now I wondered what other kinds of unlikely civilian occupations and types of a bygone era, or at least rendered in a bygone manner, might be out there, and I put eBay on the case.1

Very gradually and by no means via eBay alone, they turned up: a Caveman, a Circus Stilt-Walker, a French Sailor. As each arrival reported for duty, it was escorted to its spot on the mantel to join its new mates, until one day I found myself halfway to having collected the cast of a Bob Dylan song lyric, circa 1966:

This was, like almost all of my collections not only a slow (perhaps a dozen items over two decades) and desultory business but an inadvertent one, as well. In fact, I’m not sure I really qualify as any kind of collector at all, other than a lazy and half-hearted one. Easily distracted, easily daunted, and unmoved—oppressed, even slightly bored—by the onerous prospect of completing a set. Collecting is a form of competition, and I have the same relationship to competitiveness that Mr. Spock has to his human inheritance of emotion—I despise it, particularly in myself, where deep down it burns like the fire of time mentioned by Malcolm McDowell playing Dr. Soran quoting Delmore Schwartz, in Star Trek: Generations (1994). I can’t tell you how much consolation and reassurance I have found over the years in reminding myself, “You can’t win if you don’t play.” You can’t lose, either, of course, but it’s the winning I’m really keen to avoid. The one thing I hate more than losing is winning.

My father was the most competitive man I’ve ever known, a distinction he worked tirelessly to earn and which it would, of course, have pleased him to be awarded by his eldest son, whom over the years he openly delighted, with an almost ingenuous giddiness, in absolutely crushing at chess, ping pong, Stratego, Othello, HORSE, geography, Scrabble, arm wrestling, gin rummy, and Cadaco All-Star Baseball.

He was born, at the tail end of the Depression, to lower-middle-class immigrant Jewish parents who had themselves been born into and battled their way out of a poverty that cast an epigenetic shadow over his entire life. Fearsomely intelligent, verbally gifted, relentlessly witty, and short of stature (as an adult he claimed, unpersuasively, to be 5’6”), raised playing handball, potsy, and ringolevio in the streets of Brownsville and Flatbush, by the age of 12 he had wisecracked, swaggered, schemed, sweet-talked, and outmaneuvered his way to leadership of a fearsome gang of well-groomed, cravatted, suspenders-wearing urchins.

In time he became a doctor. Then, because any idiot could do that, he became a lawyer, too, combining both fields of expertise (along with a Master’s in Public Health) to cement new employment opportunities for himself, as a Medical Director for regional hospital chains, and as an expert Plaintiff’s witness in malpractice lawsuits. As a result of his exertions—though naturally he made it look easy—he earned a decent chunk of change over the course of his working life; and everything that he did not liberally pass on to restaurants, bookstores, and bakeries, or fork over, somewhat less liberally, to creditors and the government, he put into his collections, plural: my father collected collections. Stamps, to begin with, from childhood; and autographs, presidential campaign buttons, baseball cards and “felts,” football cards, basketball cards, tobacco cards, coins, comic books, Big Little Books, vintage radio-program giveaways like Orphan Annie Ovaltine mugs and Captain Midnight decoder rings.

And he was, very much, a completist: doggedly, even compulsively completing the 1962 Topps “Mars Attacks” series, the 1938 “Horrors of War” series, and the 1956 Topps “Adventure” series, incomplete without the notorious “Black Uhlan of the Rhine” card, starring Max Schmeling and a swastika. There was always talk, of course, about the eventual resale value of his collections, of how they represented not an expense but an investment (talk that in the end, at the end—of course—proved entirely and exclusively wishful). But this was a man who taught his eldest son to play chess by systematically and unforgivingly wiping the floor with him (totally valid, given the nature of the game), and the fundamental truth of his completist mentality was that every legendarily scarce, all-but-unobtainable “tough one” with which he finally managed to crown one of his collections also meant, deliciously, that some other shmuck’s dream of completion would be dashed.

Anyway, go figure, I have always had mixed feelings about collecting and collectors, in particular completists, as a perfect complement to my unmixed feelings about playing to win. Whenever I’ve decided to see if I might find one or two more of whatever new thing has crossed my path and piqued my interest—a toy beekeeper, say—I need to feel that the category or genre it belongs to is open-ended and ill-defined, and thus beyond the imprisoning reach of any checklist or catalogue; or else so arbitrarily subjective that completion would go unnoticed by anyone but me:

• Vintage Hot Wheels Custom Cars That Resemble Hats Or Other Non-Car Objects

• Most But Not All Book-Length Biographies of Fictional Characters Published To Date

• Some of the Doubtless Myriad Vintage Metal Figures Representing Unusual Occupations or Character Types

That last one brings us back to the moderately fateful day twenty years ago when I received word of a sort of chorus line of four variously colored, identically posed, and distinctly unusual miniature metal archers with a strong Sherwood Forest vibe (see above). For reasons I’m sure will be obvious to anyone, they called out powerfully to my soul. I don’t remember how much the seller was asking, but the figures were clearly the worse for wear, one missing the top half of a bow, another the bottom, and I don’t think it could have been more than fifty bucks. It was, as they say, an instacop.

That’s when things turned all fateful. In those days I used my own name for my eBay account, a practice that prompted the seller of the metal Merry Men to add a short personal note to the sale’s confirmation, wondering if I might possibly be the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel he had read and enjoyed. Well, that had never happened before! I checked out the seller’s username, hoping to learn a little more about a person of such evident intelligence and good taste:

grrm@—————.com

Hold up, I thought, mentally quoting De La Soul, wait a minute.

Was it possible that the figures I’d just instacopped were, at least archetypically, not just Merry Men but stalwarts of the Brotherhood Without Banners? I replied to the seller, confessing that I was me, and asking in turn if he might not, just possibly, be the great Mr. George R. R. Martin? I had heard, or read somewhere, that GRRM was a collector of military miniatures, with a focus on (what else?) the medieval.

When George (it was okay for me to call him George!) replied, he seemed tickled that I had sussed him out, and we exchanged email addresses, which gave me the first of a few—all too few!—opportunities to try, and yet always somehow to fail, to tell him that reading his aching, lyrical, vividly imagined first novel, Dying of the Light (1977) shortly after it was published—I ordered it from the Science Fiction Book Club—had completely exploded and then reassembled my ideas about what a science fiction writer might do on the page, in the realm of the sentence, deploying cadence and diction and figurative language in a thoroughly literary way, while still writing unabashed space opera.

George seemed a little abashed by this torrent of praise for what was, to him, a book written long ago, in another part of his life, but he thanked me warmly, and after that we exchanged a friendly message from time to time. Which was, in my view, a deeply cool thing.

A couple of years later—though we had yet to meet in person—I reached out to George to see if he planned on attending that year’s World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon, aka Denvention 3). My novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—set like Dying of the Light at the twilight of a deliberately temporary, carnivalesque kingdom created by fiat, where two old lovers with unfinished business contend against lawless brutal men and their own bitter history—had been nominated for a Hugo Award. It seemed like a long shot, but not because I thought it wasn’t science fiction. I took it on faith that the counterfactual, or uchronian, was a branch of the sf tree, with The Man in the High Castle as the paramount example. But YPU was much more overtly a detective novel and, really, it was awfully, well, Jewish. I assumed that I was going to lose—which would of course, from my point of view, be the second-worst possible outcome.

I don’t think I said anything to George about that, though. I just explained that I would be way the hell off in Downeast Maine that night, too many long drives and changes of plane from Denver. If I should actually, somehow, win a Hugo Award, by the whim of the same curious fate that had sent that eBay alert to an inadvertent, half-assed collector of metal beekeepers, and that Book Club bulletin featuring a novel called Dying of the Light to a young would-be writer of science fiction who was also a fan of Dylan Thomas, would George possibly be willing to accept on my behalf?

He would, he said; and then he did. And when, to my subsequent astonishment, he was called up to the podium in Denver, these are the words that he carried, folded in a back pocket, or tucked into his wallet, I don’t know. I had written them at his suggestion (”I think you have a pretty good shot,” he’d told me, “but you never know”).

In the unlikely event that Mr. George R. R. Martin is standing in front of you reading these words, than he is about have occasion to blush. I’m sorry for this. George. If we ever do get the chance to meet, I will apologize to you in person. But if you’re reading these words, then my novel has just won a Hugo Award. And if that has happened, then it is not only a huge thrill for me but also the culmination of an artistic adventure—to fuse the intellectual breadth and metaphorical power of science fiction with the deep pleasure of a fine prose style—that can honestly, without exaggeration, be said to have begun, for me, in 1977, when I was fourteen years old, and read, with a mounting sense of brain-to-toe rapture, a beautiful novel called Dying of the Light, by Mr. George R. R. Martin.

So maybe some kind of circuit has been closed; or maybe the starting place of the adventure came earlier, when I checked out Volumes One and Two of The Hugo Winners from the Howard County (Maryland) Public Library, and thought, to myself, sometime between “A Martian Odyssey” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” I want to win a Hugo Award more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. That desire remains as powerful and vital to my sense of myself as writer as ever.

I wrote a novel with a Jonbar Hinge. I know you know what that means. I know, too—it means that I am, among other things, a science fiction writer. That’s something I’m proud to say, and having won this venerable, meaningful and endlessly desirable award only makes me feel even prouder. Thank you.

Looking it over now, I realize that I don’t actually know how much if any of it George actually read. It would not surprise me at all to discover, for example, that he skipped the entire first graf.

One day in the late spring of 1983, toward the end of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, I stopped by during office hours to see my poetry teacher, Ed Ochester, up on the fifth floor of the Cathedral of Learning. I had just been asked to join a band that some guys I knew were putting together. It’s possible, looking back, that I went to see Ed because I was excited, and wanted to share the news with a paternal figure who was likely to be more excited than my father about my imminent baptism in the church of rock ’n’ roll, but I’m not sure. You didn’t really need a reason to stop by and see Ed Ochester. He would always make time for you and your poems, even when your poems, like mine, were nothing special.

In class, Ed always used to start by reading to us, his voice roughened by a Canarsie accent and the unfiltered Pall Malls he smoked, his straight hair falling from his big square brow down across his big square glasses. With his Auden haircut and his flannel shirts and blue jeans, Ed looked the way that I thought a poet ought to look, at the time; blue-collar but intellectual, like an old-school folksinger, or a man who was sent by the union to organize lumberjacks.

Ed spoke with a mild stammer that disappeared when he read aloud to us. The poetry he favored tended to have a deceptively conversational tone: somebody just talking, yet saying things that no one would ever say, in language that — unlike conversation — was intended to catch you off-guard and surprise you. Ed read us plainspoken, sometimes ribald poems by people like Edward Field, David Ignatow, Linda Pastan, and Etheridge Knight, and then with an effortless zigzag he might take up some thorny and austere piece of Eliot or Stevens, and make it sound like Rodney Dangerfield in a pensive mood.

When he had finished reading us a poem he would open it up like a watch and show us the inner works, all the decisions the poet had made about line breaks and rhyme schemes (if any), vocabulary and diction, rhythm and tone. He emphasized accuracy and precision in language, the sadness of cliché, the need to find newness in the way one wrote about the world, and, unconsciously I think, the supreme importance of exuberance, the kind of mordant exuberance he discovered to us when he read William Carlos Williams’s famous number about the mooched plums, so sweet and so cold.

It was Ed who introduced me to the work of the most exuberant poet who ever lived, Frank O’Hara, giving us the one that begins:

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

The voice of O’Hara was the voice of a friend, a best friend. It was intimate and casual. And yet at the same time it was also refined, literary, erudite, capable of hopping like a sparrow down a sidewalk from densely imagistic to dishy and familiar in the space of a single line. Over that semester Ed read us a bunch of other O’Hara poems, among them “The Day Lady Died,” “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!,” and my favorite, “Autobiographia Literaria”:

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out “I am
an orphan.”

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

In the thirty years since I left Pittsburgh I’ve written exactly one indisputable poem.1 Now, if you plan to write only one poem every thirty years, you should probably make it a love poem; and indeed this one indisputable poem of mine, composed in 2003, is addressed to my beloved. She keeps it folded in the top drawer of her lingerie chest, I believe, with her good jewelry and our children’s baby teeth. Over that span of decades, however, I’ve also written a bunch of what, until now, I’ve always considered to be my “other poems,” poems so disputable that no one apart from me has ever considered them to be poems at all.

They’re too long, for one thing; crazy long: some of them go on for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Each of their lines breaks arbitrarily, at the righthand margin of every page. For stanzas they have paragraphs, and for cantos, chapters, and while they revel freely in the rhythmic antics of anapests, iambs, trochees, and dactyls, they shun rhyme. They have plots, and characters, and everyone who looks at them seems to regard them as novels. A number of readers have wondered, at times publicly and not without exasperation, if the things I write really ought to feature quite so many similes, which is not a question that people tend to bother poets with. They point to my fondness for extended metaphors and shake their rueful heads. Nobody ever gives poets a hard time for their extended metaphors! On the contrary. John Donne’s been cashing in on them for years now.

But if you build for a campanile you are no less an horologist than if you build for a dainty wrist. I tweeze each whirring word into its little niche in the clockworks, and the stroke of my hammer is a gentle tap, tap. To set the hands of plot into motion and to make the carillons of character chime, I wind the language of my five-hundred-page mainspring ever tighter, striving, the way the poet Ed Ochester taught me to strive, to combine conversation with surprise, dishiness with density of imagery, to bring my consciousness to bear on the world around me with the darting flash of Frank O’Hara, who noticed everything.

I know the books I’ve written may look, feel, and tip the scales like novels, but to me they have always felt like poems, because when I was writing them — and only when I was writing them — I, too, became the center of all beauty. When I was done for the day I would go back to hiding behind that same old schoolyard tree.

But in trying to consider the impact that the work of Bob Dylan has had on my own writing — as only seems fitting since he has just been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters — I’ve found myself thinking back on that afternoon in the Cathedral of Learning when I hung out in Ed’s office for a while, smoking and talking on and on, with all the tedious vainglory for which Ed, God bless him, had such an apparently high tolerance, about the band I was going to be in, to be called Lunchmeat Island or Hex Wrench or the Bats or Dannon Yogurt Steam-Shovel (in the end we would go with the Bats), writing song lyrics and “singing.” As I was leaving his office, Ed handed me a book, an advance copy of an anthology some textbook publisher had sent him for consideration, called Rock Lyrics as Poetry, or something like that. The idea that rock lyrics might (or might not) be a new, modern form of poetry was a meme of the Seventies that was still hanging around even as late as 1983, and even though nobody used the word “meme” back then; not in Pittsburgh, anyway.

I didn’t quite know what to make of Ed’s gift, which featured the lyrics to dozens of well-known songs by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and many other artists whose work was beloved by and important to me. In 1983 I loved rock ’n’ roll music no less than I do now — the love of rock ’n’ roll is probably the most durable and unvarying passion of my life. Many, many lyrics and bits of lyrics mattered a lot to me, then as now — like, for example:

I remember
How the darkness doubled
I recall
Lightning struck itself

or

Then I woke up, Mom and Dad
Are rolling on the couch
Rollin’ numbers rock and rollin’
Got my KISS records out

or

Beat on the brat
With a baseball bat
Oh yeah

It was interesting to learn, from the book Ed gave me, that the first line of Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” went “far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll” and not, as I had always heard it, “far between sundown’s finish and midnight’s broken toe.” But the question, the debate as to whether or not rock lyrics were poetry, did not really interest me. I had always assumed that they weren’t, even though one day in class Ed had read to us, as if it were just another poem, the lyrics to “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen, getting us to pay close attention, the way Cohen was paying close attention, to the Chinese provenance of the tea and oranges; and the fact that Suzanne’s rags and feathers had been purchased, no doubt on a tight budget, at the Salvation Army; and the beauty of the metaphor comparing Christ’s view of the world atop his fatal cross to the lookout from the crow’s nest of a ship.

But Leonard Cohen was a special case, a published, acclaimed young poet before he ever wrote his first song, and even Cohen had resorted, as Ed duly pointed out to us, to a cheesy pop cliché like “When she gets you on her wavelength.”

Anyway, it turned out not to be elitist snobbery that made me dubious of the thesis of Rock Lyrics as Poetry, or some clear sense of the boundary between a poem and a song lyric. As I read through the book Ed had given me I saw that rock lyrics could not really be poetry because when you took away the melody, the instrumentation, and above all the voice of the singer, a song lyric just kind of huddled there on a page looking plucked and forlorn, like Foghorn Leghorn after a brush with the Tasmanian Devil. I remembered how absurd the lyrics to the song “She’s Leaving Home” had seemed, mimeographed on a sheet passed out in my eighth-grade English class by an earnest student teacher who was trying to help us find profundity in the song’s social commentary. I had always felt a sense of exaltation at the end of that song when I listened to Sgt. Pepper, as ascending angelic voices triumphantly asserted “She…is having… FUN …” But typed out on a ditto, those words had looked banal, trivial, even to a twelve-year-old who hoped to slip out the back door into the world someday and have fun, too, although not necessarily by meeting a man from the motor trade.

Now when I think about Ed Ochester and the book he gave me, back when he was trying to teach me how to be a poet, the question of whether or not Dylan’s lyrics are poetry feels irrelevant. Dylan’s lyrics are writing, and as writing they have influenced my own writing as much as if not more than the work of any poet apart from O’Hara and maybe Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, song lyrics in general have arguably mattered to and shaped me more, as a writer, than novels or short stories written by any but the most crucial of my literary heroes.

Ask me to name a few of those heroes, and I’m likely to come up with a random sample of literary crushes: Cheever, Welty, Pynchon, Fitzgerald. I might try to mix things up with a genre wild card like Chandler or Ursula Le Guin, or even Ian Fleming. Maybe reach across forms to a poet like O’Hara, or an essayist like S.J. Perelman. But I have never once told the deeper truth, and answered Dylan, or Rakim, or Mitchell, or Verlaine (Tom, not Paul).

And yet the words chosen, resorted to, or arrived at by the lyricists of rock, soul, and hip-hop constitute the body of writing that I know best, that I have studied most intensively, puzzled over longest. (I can’t begin to calculate or tell you how many hours I had devoted, before Ed Ochester handed me that book, to trying to understand, to really feel, that midnight had toes, and that one of them — the big toe? — could be broken.) Lyrics are the only written works that I have ever reliably committed to memory, apart from a touch of Poe, a smidgen of Kipling’s “If,”2 bits and pieces of Shakespeare. I have memorized thousands of song lyrics. Sometimes at night, I lie in bed waiting to fall asleep with a radio in my head playing “Wild West End,” by Dire Straits, or Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul,” or “Hejira,” by Joni Mitchell, or some random piece of pop craftsmanship from my childhood like “Brandy,” by Looking Glass, and the remembering of every word of every verse is perfect, and completely involuntary. Song lyrics are part of my literary firmware, programmed permanently into my read-only memory.

Not just words: writing. Tropes and devices, rhetorical strategies, writerly techniques, entire structures of allusion and imagery: entire skeins of the synapses in my cerebral cortex by now are made up entirely of all this unforgettable literature. In the above tunes that I cited as playing on the radio inside midnight’s broken brain, we find instances of a well-observed bit of characterization from Dire Straits’s Mark Knopfler (an underrated lyricist), Now my conductress on the number 19/She was a honey/Pink toenails and hands all dirty with the money; two beautiful images, Mitchell’s White flags of winter chimneys/Waving truce against the moon and Rakim’s thrilling simile for the act of writing itself, I start to think/and then I sink/into the paper/like I was ink/when I’m writin/I’m trapped in between/the lines/I escape when I finish/the rhyme; and even, in the more workmanlike “Brandy,” the efficient, patient setting of scene, the port on the western bay that serves a hundred ships a day, the girl in the harbor town who works laying whisky down, the care taken with these lines that open the extended, Dubliners-esque portrait of poor Brandy, that fine girl, with her love going endlessly to waste.

I don’t think I could have learned more about the joy and sensuous appeal of alliteration, assonance, and consonance from any poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins than I did from Warren Zevon’s wonderful line in “Werewolves of London”: Little old lady got mutilated late last night, more about elliptical storytelling from Raymond Carver than from “Ode to Billy Joe” (Bobbie Gentry is another underrated writer); more about unreliable narrators from Poe or Nabokov than from Steely Dan (passim). And yet while songwriters are given the opportunity, often enough, to cite their literary influences, no one has ever thought to ask me about the songwriters who have shaped my work, any more than I have asked myself, until now. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the sha-la-la-las and the wo-o-wo-os. Maybe it’s the fact that so many lyrics are nothing but clichés strung like costume jewelry beads on a string of backbeat. Maybe it’s all the fault of poet manqués like Jim Morrison, the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of the pretentious actor in Annie Hall who hopes to be torn apart by wild animals and asks Annie to touch his heart with her foot. You write enough lines like There’s a killer on the road/His brain is squirming like a toad or If they say I never loved you/You know they are a liar and the stock of rock lyricists as influential literary figures is bound to go down.

Of course rock lyrics are not poetry. They don’t need to be. What they may lack, on the page, in figurative ambition, in ruthless antipathy toward cliché, and above all in the combination of stance, diction, and point of view that we call a voice, is made up for by guitars, keyboards, drums, and by the living, infinitely expressive voice of a great singer like Bob Dylan, the ache and rasp of that all-too-human voice, now snarling, now weary, now sweet, now brokenhearted.

I wonder if, in handing me that book, Ed Ochester hoped to get me to see that even if the finest lyrics lacked something, on the page, it was not through insufficient craft or “poeticalness” but by their very nature, by design, the way a great play on the page lacks actors, scenery, lights, and costumes and yet remains, powerfully and indispensably, a work of literature. Maybe Ed gave me Rock Lyrics as Poetry because he wanted me to think about everything my poetry needed to do to make up for its grievous lack of Gibson guitars, Marshall amps, Slingerland drums, of a voice as full of fire and longing and wit as Bob Dylan’s, or as Frank O’Hara’s.

When the term ended I moved on from Ed Ochester’s tutelage, and left the Bats behind, having contributed very little to the ensemble or to the greater glory of rock. For many years after that I was in and out of fiction workshops, writing short stories and first chapters of abortive novels, and never looking back except insofar as I continued to believe that my chapters were cantos, and my paragraphs stanzas, and my sentences lines of free verse that broke where they ran out of space at the right side of the page. Little by little, I began to grope my way toward a style that attempted to mingle the down-to-earth with the high-flown, or rather to fit everyday speech with antigravity discs and build elegant rhetorical flying machines out of common household objects. And I thought of the style that resulted, and that ever since has served, with steady adjustments and modifications, to let me write my books, as a poetic style.

Now it strikes me that all these years I may have had it wrong, that the lesson that I learned in Ed Ochester’s class ought not to have been to think of my prose as poetry. Maybe the stories that fiction writers tell, their characters and settings, are only the lyrics to a song the writer is called upon to sing and play. Those characters and stories must be founded in an eye for people and the world as keen as that of the Kinks’ Ray Davies, with a grasp of structure as careful as Elvis Costello’s, according to a vision of life as dark as Tom Waits’s, as luminous as Kate Bush’s, as loopily grand as the vision of the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. But the stories and characters won’t come alive, won’t catch the reader up, won’t lift free of the page that imprisons them, until you plug your nouns into the stacks of your adjectives, settle into the pocket behind the drum kit of your verbs, throw back your head, open your mouth, and let it rock.

Originally delivered as the annual Blashfield Address at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, May 2013.

i.

Throughout the 1950’s, the jailhouses and fairgrounds of eastern Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Belt were haunted by a sullen, slight, rather beautiful young man, restless and cocky, who billed himself as a “liberationist.”

By his own subsequent account, this youth—the grandson of Ukrainian immigrants—mystified audiences, including the local cops, with his timely escapes from crates, boxcars, steel cages, holes in the ground—and local jail cells. Slowly, methodically, but not at all patiently he taught himself to escape from chains, straitjackets, handcuffs, and all the vast and varied panoply of the liberationist’s trade. He was hardly more than a boy, and yet he was already a master not only of his trade but also of the allied arts of publicity, showmanship, burglary, and jailbreaking.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the “Little Houdini” of the hard-coal country pulled his greatest vanishing act.

ii.

In the late 1960s, an artist and writer briefly took over Marvel Comics’ Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Captain America titles and in their pages—and in a scant few issues of some other books—proceeded to irrevocably blow several million impressionable young minds.

At the peak of the Pop era, borrowing ideas from Surrealism and other modernist art movements, he introduced a number of techniques of composition, layout and design, mostly borrowed from the worlds of advertising and commercial art, to a comics page that had not seen much in the way of formal innovation since Bernard Krigstein’s obsessive experiments of the 1950s.

After barely three years at Marvel, he quit, more or less never to return.

The name of these two interesting fellows, the teen hoodlum escape artist and the comics innovator, is James Steranko (b. 1938).

iii.

In October 1964, Steranko produced a special number of Genii, The Conjuror’s Magazine, dedicated to examining the life, career, and techniques of Harry Houdini.

In this issue, in startlingly generous detail, he spilled many of the secrets of the liberationist’s art. To my eternal sorrow, I learned of the existence of this remarkable issue when it was too late to be of any assistance to me in writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Among the many mad pleasures of Genii, Volume 29, No. 2, are a number of drawings, unsigned but unmistakably the work of Steranko himself, illustrating a series of truly bizarre feats of liberationism.

These images do not, for the most part, depict real, or even possible, escapes; in their modest way they are in the nature of Piranesi’s prisons: idealized nightmare contrivances deeply rooted, it seems to me, in the vibrant, desperate imaginings of a gifted, poor kid trapped by the crushing prognosis of his anthracite-belt childhood.

A few months after Kavalier & Clay came out, I received an unexpected gift in the mail. It arrived in a long cardboard tube, the kind used to ship posters and unframed artwork. The name on the return address label was H. TRIMPE.

To a reader of Marvel Comics during the 1970s there could be only one H. Trimpe, and that was Herb—”Happy” Herb Trimpe, as he was invariably styled, in the days of the Stan Lee Bullpen1. Trimpe (1939-2015) had a deft, fluid style that looked great in the hands of an understanding inker with a light touch, but he excelled (though at the time it went largely unnoticed) at visual storytelling: layout, pacing, page design. He had pencilled every issue of The Incredible Hulk that I had ever read, give or take, including (and perhaps, though I can’t be certain, starting with) issue 134 (1970):

This Trimpe turned out, indeed, to be that Trimpe.

Over the past twenty-five years I’ve been lucky enough to shake hands, hobnob, and even collaborate with many of the comics artists who were the idols and demigods of my youth, but on this particular January morning in 2001, I had met with (or spoken by phone to) only a handful of old-timers—among them Will Eisner, Gil Kane, and Stan Lee—way back when I was still conducting research. Kane (1926-2000) had been dead for a year, now, and so far I’d heard nothing from the others. I had seen a generous and enthusiastic review in a recent issue of Comics Buyer’s Guide, by a leading comics writer of my own generation, the late Peter David (1956-2025), but I had no sense yet of how the book was going down among the older pros, or if they were aware of it at all.

I popped the cap off one end of the cardboard tube and carefully extracted the sheet of Bristol board (heavy illustration paper) that was neatly rolled up within. A handwritten note was clipped to the outside of the roll, as if to suggest that I read it before I looked.

Michael--

I can’t believe the pristine condition of this cover-- The guy I got it from had no idea what it was-- mumbled something about it being in a time capsule dug up in Central Park in 1999. How he got it, is anybody’s guess-- If a copy of issue #1 went for $42,2002, no telling what this would go for.

Have fun.

Herb

In my previous post I talked about the experience of reading Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in the early 1990s, and being held by it in a kind of unstable equilibrium between magnetic poles of doubt and belief, half-remembering a non-existent episode of I Love Lucy described in the book. I might also have mentioned how, for months after I put it down, every time I dropped by the late, lamented Discolandia record store on 24th Street in the Mission District, it would cross my mind to check the used vinyl bin for a rare copy of the Castillo brothers Play Songs of Love, featuring their one big hit, the epically yearning “Bella Maria de Mi Alma”; and how I would then think sadly, every time, Oh, right. Between us, Hijuelos and I had very nearly managed to wish that old record into existence. Now, it seemed, Herb Trimpe had accomplished the impossible: he had broken the Wish Barrier.

He had blasted straight through it, into the Impossible Zone: the original paste-up cover artwork for Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1. Complete pages of original, pre-press comic book artwork dating from the Golden Age were very rare;3 a complete cover from that time, as far as I knew, was more or less impossible—until, as with the Coelacanth, somebody found one.

I saw right away that Herb Trimpe understood what it took to induce that pleasurable shimmer of credulous doubt, or doubtful belief: the hand and eye of a counterfeiter. It had the registration marks, the dented corners, the pasted captions, a crusted brown smear of ancient rubber cement. It had blue-pencilled marginal notes in three distinct hands: the production editor, the art director, and Sam Clay. My favorite of these was Sammy’s putative all-caps exclamation, running up the left margin: JOE - MY GOD! THE TEETH! On the reverse, right where it ought to be, there was even the production stamp, typical of the time, to prove that Joe Kavalier’s work had been Empire’s to throw away.

That it had survived was an authenticated miracle, and like all authentic miracles, a work of art, and only art, and art alone.

Across the bottom, in black pencil and in his own hand, by way of sly signature, Trimpe had written: Michael--Picked this up at a yard sale for five bucks-- thought you might like it. Herb Trimpe.”

i.

The other night, during an onstage conversation tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s lovable new production of Kavalier & Clay, someone asked how I had come up with the idea for the book’s super-powered escape artist, the Escapist. I explained that my thought had been to leave the job to my protagonists, Joe and Sam, and that while I waited for them to get around to it, I had muddled along with what I knew to be only a placeholder superhero, a pedestrian concept with a terrible name1 and dull powers; a bad idea that I planned to jettison as soon as the guys came up with something better. Something cooler, more evocative, visually more compelling, his powers more obviously the fulfillment of an authentic human wish.

The challenge here was twofold. First of all, my reason for assigning the task to Sam and Joe was not some kind of Tom Sawyer dodge, farming out the labor while I kicked back and cut pieces of an apple with my Barlow knife. I wanted the character my guys came up with to express aspects of their respective personalities, to reflect their separate and their shared existential predicaments, to hint at what the fulfillment of their particular and their common wishes might be. I knew—no, that’s overstating it, it was more like I trusted—that the book was going to be about the workings of the creative imagination, its transformative power and its tragic limitations, which meant I had to portray Sam and Joe as they dreamed up their superhero—the one they would dream up. But to do that, I needed first, thoroughly and well, to dream up Sam and Joe.

The second challenge was identical to the one they themselves faced, only much harder. In hindsight, I’m amused to see myself trying to come to grips with this difficult challenge right on the page, right there in Part One, Chapter 3, as Sam and Joe walk from Madison Square to Chelsea with a brief to produce a character that might rival the popularity of the latest sensation of the age, Superman.

“Who is he, and what does he do?”

“He flies.”

Sammy shook his head. “Superman flies.”

“So ours does not?”

“I just think I’d...”

“To be original.”

“If we can. Try to do it without flying, at least. No flying, no strength of a hundred men, no bulletproof skin.”

“Okay,” Joe said. The humming seemed to recede a little. “And some others, they do what?”

“Well, Batman—”

“He flies, like a bat.”

“No, he doesn’t fly.”

“But he is blind.”

“No, he only dresses like a bat. He has no batlike qualities at all. He uses his fists.”

“That sounds dull.”

“Actually, it’s spooky. You’d like it.”

“Maybe another animal.”

“Uh, well, yeah. Okay. A hawk. Hawkman.”

“Hawk, yes, okay. But that one must fly.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Scratch the bird family. The, uh, the Fox. The Shark.”

“A swimming one.”

“Maybe a swimming one. Actually, no, I know a guy works in the Chesler shop, he said they’re already doing a guy who swims. For Timely.”

“A lion?”

“Lion. The Lion. Lionman.”

“He could be strong. He roars very loud.”

“He has a super roar.”

“It strikes fear.”

“It breaks dishes.”

“The bad guys go deaf.”

They laughed. Joe stopped laughing.

“I think we have to be serious,” he said.

“You’re right,” said Sammy. “The Lion, I don’t know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger. Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let’s see.”

They began to go through the rolls of the animal kingdom, concentrating naturally on the predators: Catman, Wolfman, the Owl, the Panther, the Black Bear. They considered the primates: the Monkey, Gorillaman, the Gibbon, the Ape, the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.

“Be serious,” Joe chided again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Look, forget animals. Everybody’s going to be thinking of animals. In two months, I’m telling you, by the time our guy hits the stands, there’s going to be guys running around dressed like every damn animal in the zoo. Birds. Bugs. Underwater guys. And I’ll bet you anything there’s going to be five guys who are really strong, and invulnerable, and can fly.”

“If he goes as fast as the light,” Joe suggested.

“Yeah, I guess it’s good to be fast.”

“Or if he can make a thing burn up. If he can-listen! If he can, you know. Shoot the fire, with his eyes!”

“His eyeballs would melt.”

“Then with his hands. Or, yes, he turns into a fire!”

“Timely’s doing that already, too. They got the fire guy and the water guy.”

“He turns into ice. He makes the ice everywhere.”

“Crushed or cubes?”

“Not good?”

Sammy shook his head. “Ice,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of stories in ice.”

“He turns into electricity?” Joe tried. “He turns into acid?”

“He turns into gravy. He turns into an enormous hat. Look, stop. Stop. Just stop.” They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, between Sixth and Seventh avenues. […] “This is not the question,” he said. “If he’s like a cat or a spider or a fucking wolverine, if he’s huge, if he’s tiny, if he can shoot flames or ice or death rays or Vat 69, if he turns into fire or water or stone or India rubber. He could be a Martian, he could be a ghost, he could be a god or a demon or a wizard or monster. Okay? It doesn’t matter, because right now, see, at this very moment, we have a bandwagon rolling, I’m telling you. Every little skinny guy like me in New York who believes there’s life on Alpha Centauri and got the shit kicked out of him in school and can smell a dollar is out there right this minute trying to jump onto it.“

This “walk and talk” scene is not only a record of an imagined brainstorming session; it’s also a piece of metafictional sleight of hand, in which the benefit (or rather the burden) of hindsight regarding sixty years’ worth of superhero concepts unfolds (to the deep-nerdly eye) as a remarkable feat of prescience in 1939, since with the exception (as far as I know) of Gravyman, Hat Giant, and Vatman 69 emitting powerful jets of blended whisky, all the concepts and categories Sam and Joe considered that morning did make it, in the fullness of time, into actual comic books.

For the boys as they consider the myriad possibilities before them, there at the threshold of the Golden Age of Comics, the problem is simply to try to decide which idea feels likeliest to become a Superman-level smash hit. For me, as I say, the job was much harder. The character had to credibly fit the bill in terms of period verisimilitude (no Atoman, no Jetman) and of storytelling needs (i.e., the reader had to believe that it really could have been a smash hit, and so, alas, nothing so wonderful as Arm-Fall-Off Boy).

But also—and this was the really hard part—the character had to be original, not only in the fictive space where Sam and Joe were operating (easy enough for them, in a world that as yet basically knew only Superman and Batman) but in my own late-90s context, too. Say that I said Joe and Sam had been the first to create a red-white-and-blue-suited super-American character; readers might take this as a veiled allusion to (or pallid pastiche of) Captain America, and Joe and Sam as disguised versions of Cap’s real-life creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.2 Pastiche and the roman à clef have their appeal—I’ve been known to dabble in the former, from time to time—but that wasn’t how I wanted this book to read.

What I wanted, in that bygone age when “google” was just becoming a verb, was for this novel to create an effect in the reader’s mind like the effect that Oscar Hijuelos’s magnificent The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love had produced in my own, as I’d read about how its narrator’s Cuban-immigrant father and uncle, both musicians and friends of Desi Arnaz, had once guest-starred as Cuban-immigrant musician-friends of Ricky Ricardo on an episode of I Love Lucy. Hijuelos described that episode in such plausible detail that I’d started to feel as if I actually remembered having seen it. And there was, back in 1994 when I read Mambo Kings, no ready or obvious way to prove that I hadn’t.

The effect that I was hoping to create with my book, writing about the cousins and the comic books they made, was doubt: that all-but-incurable, deeply pleasurable doubt about a fiction’s fictionality, an ancient and venerable form of readerly pleasure, that has utterly vanished over the past twenty-five years. I would be operating in a space where the general reader’s reliably superficial knowledge of comic book history, coupled with my adoption of a narrative historian’s intimate but authoritative tone might, if I took sufficient care with my details, bring the once-celebrated team of Kavalier & Clay, along with their once- beloved creations, shimmering to the very verge of fact.3

So this character had to be, or at least had to feel, unique, original, and plausible. It also had to have a plausible (and ideally not ridiculous) name. This was another reason to avoid picking a character idea from one of the low-hanging-fruit categories that the early creators had pillaged first: all the good names (and many of the bad ones, too) were already taken. In the super-American category alone, the Golden Age brought us American Eagle, Captain America, Captain Battle, Captain Courageous, Captain Freedom, Captain Flag, Captain Midnight, Captain Wings, Commando Yank, Fighting American, The Fighting Yank, The Flag, Lady Liberty, Liberty Belle, Major Victory, Miss America, Miss Victory, Minute Man, The Patriot, The Shield, The Star-Spangled Kid, The Spirit of ‘76, Uncle Sam, U.S. Jones, and Yankee Eagle, not to mention an actual Super-American.

(Coming up with original, credible names would be a constant problem throughout the writing of K&C, as Sam and Joe and their various comrades and bullpen-mates generated entire stables of fictitious superheroes and supervillains, for multiple fictitious publishing houses, over the whole span of the Golden Age. As I researched, I made and continually updated a file called ACTUAL SUPERHERO NAMES. At some point I printed it out and pinned it to my corkboard, where it both kept me honest and reminded me to be bold in my nomenclature.)

ii.

To the extent that my plan was to write, and write, and keep writing, becoming ever more expert in the hearts and histories of Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier, until the name, nature, and abilities of the once-wildly-popular superhero they had created would emerge from my knowledge of their hearts like a latent image in developer, my plan failed. I wrote, and wrote, always tiptoeing around the woeful Captain Sunbeam and his tedious solar flares. Finally I had to stop, and face the interesting truth that the story of Kavalier & Clay, of their partnership and their friendship, of the choices they made or avoided making, of their success in failure and failure in success, had to reflect the famous character they created together every bit as much as the character had to be a reflection of them.

I needed to figure this thing out once and for all. By this point I had been working on the book for almost two years. It was time, I decided, to risk a quick peek at my themes, see how they were getting along, down there in the darkness. Just a peek. Themes grow best in darkness, unattended. They really don’t like your looking at them too much.

I printed out what I had—around three hundred pages, more than enough for some themes to have sent out their sparkling hyphae—and sat down to read.

As soon as I reached the second of two passing references to Houdini in the book’s first fifty pages or so, I had the obvious thought: escape artist. Then—not in sequence but in simultaneous array, in a cluster, in an electron swarm impossible to render with words and punctuation marks in a line—I had a whole bunch of thoughts: Escape yes because Joe doesn’t just leave Europe or flee it he escapes in a way he is an escape artist no but literally dude (I actually do address myself as ‘dude’) what if he is literally an escape artist! and if he studied escape with a teacher who is an escape artist and who studied with Houdini and the teacher helped him escape and— because, escapism! comic books and superheroes were always denounced were reviled as ‘mere escapism’ but why ‘mere?’ as if there could be anything more desperately needed than the possibility of than the hope of escape as if helping people to escape because Houdini if you think about it how was that— how was he not an actual real-life superhero? special powers secret knowledge peak physical condition he even righted wrongs unmasked frauds oh my god dude

I had it! Did I have it? I stress-tested it: a super-powered escape artist. There had been stage magician superheroes, fighting evil in their dinner jackets, all of them more or less swiped from Mandrake of the newspaper funny pages. DC’s Mandrake-knockoff, Zatara, had debuted right alongside Superman in Action Comics #1. And there had been out-and-out sorcerers, in particular DC’s Doctor Fate (1940), and characters who blurred the distinction between stage conjuror and wizard, like Fawcett’s Ibis the Invincible, in dinner jacket and turban. But from that world-altering 1938 issue of Action until April, 1971, when Mister Miracle made his first appearance, there had never been a superhero who was an escape artist.

And, I realized, it had been in the pages of Mister Miracle—through the portal of one delirious, dizzying panel spread across pages 2 and 3 of issue #8, to be exact—that I had made my first and most enduring escape, emerging in an off-world barracks decorated in Flamethrower Moderne that seethed with edgy, strong, combative women—the Female Furie Battalion; escaped into the epic, chaotic, preposterous ideaspace of Jack Kirby’s mind.

I knew that Jack Kirby was said to have been partly inspired to create Mister Miracle by stories he’d heard, from a gifted acolyte of his, the innovative illustrator Jim Steranko, about the latter’s youthful career as a fairground escape artist in the 1950s. Clearly, I saw now, Kirby had also been drawing on memories of the first “Super Escape Artist”—the one created at Empire Comics, by Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier, way back in 1939.

I had my guy; my guys’ guy. Now all I had to do was come up with a name. I opened a file, suspended my critical faculty, and spent five minutes riffing on words that I associated with escape artistry, with magic and magicians, with locking and unlocking, liberation and freedom, keys and solutions and riddles.

I sat back and looked the names over. The Key, I thought. No, the Golden Key. Or—whatever. I could feel that the right name was on that list somewhere. Next time I saw them, I’d pass the list along to Joe and Sammy. See what they thought.

2

Though I did, quite obviously, borrow their archetypically distinctive physiognomies, and builds, as models for Joe’s and Sam’s (not to mention the whole issue-#1-punching- Hitler-in-the-face-routine).