Dating Your Mom
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To my brother Fritz
Table of Contents
Title Page
THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP LIVE AT THE APOLLO - (Liner Notes from the New Best-Selling Album)
II - SAILCAT TURNER REMINISCES ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
III - VIRGINIA WOOLF TALKS FRANKLY ABOUT THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
KIMBERLEY SOLZHENITSYN’S CALENDAR
APARTMENT 6-A: AFTER THE FALL
A GOOD EXPLANATION - (A Con Ed Customer’s Account of Why the Lights Went Out)
THE END OF BOB’S BOB HOUSE
THE SANDY FRAZIER DREAM TEAM
OFFENSE
DEFENSE
DATING YOUR MOM
NIVEN: A RECONSIDERATION
HOW I DID IT
INTO THE AMERICAN MAW
LGA-ORD
THE MUSEUM
LIST OF FUNNY NAMES RELEASED
WHAT THE DOG DID
THE STUTTGART FOLDERS
THE ELSINORE AGENDA - By William Shakespeare
THE TAFT ENIGMA - Chapter 1
A READING LIST FOR YOUNG WRITERS
THE KILLION
JUST A COUNTRY BOY
FROM THERE TO HERE
IGOR STRAVINSKY : THE SELECTED PHONE CALLS
TO THE HEAVENS, AND BEYOND
YOUR NUTRITION & YOU
MORRIS SMITH: THE MAN AND THE MYTH
ENGLAND PICKS A POET
A NOTE FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT
SONGS FOR A CONQUERED MOON - A Play in Three Acts
Also by Ian Frazier
Acclaim for Dating Your Mom
Your Notes
Copyright Page
THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP LIVE AT THE APOLLO
(Liner Notes from the New Best-Selling Album)
Live albums aren’t supposed to be as exciting, as immediate as the actual stage performances they record, but (saints be praised!) the Bloomsbury Group’s newest, Live at the Apollo, is a shouting, foot-stomping, rafter-shaking exception to this rule. Anyone who has not seen John Maynard Keynes doing his famous strut, or Duncan Grant playing his bass while flat on his back, can now get an idea of what he’s been missing! The Bloomsbury Group has always stood for seriousness about art and skepticism about the affectations of the self-important, and it has been opposed to the avowed philistinism of the English upper classes. Live at the Apollo is so brilliantly engineered that this daring NeoPlatonism comes through as unmistakably as the super-bad Bloomsbury beat. A few critics have complained that the Bloomsbury Group relies too heavily on studio effects; this album will instantly put such objections to rest. The lead vocals (some by “Mister White Satin” Lytton Strachey, the others by Clive Bell) are solid and pure, even over the enthusiastic shouts of the notoriously tough-to-please Apollo crowd, and the Stephen Sisters’ chorus is reminiscent of the Three Brontës at their best. There is very little “dead air” on this album, even between cuts. On Band 3 on the flip side, there is a pause while the sidemen are setting up, and if you listen carefully you can hear Leonard Woolf and Virginia Stephen coining withering epigrams and exchanging banter with the audience about Macaulay’s essay on Warren Hastings. Very mellow, very close textual criticism.
Lytton Strachey, who has been more or less out of the funk-literary picture since his girlfriend threw boiling grits on him in his Memphis hotel room in March of 1924, proves here that his voice is still as sugar-cured as ever. In his long solo number, “Why I Sing the Blues,” he really soars through some heartfelt lyrics about his “frail and sickly childhood” and “those painfully introverted public-school years.” The song is a triumph of melody and phrasing, and it provides some fascinating insights into the personality of this complex vocalist and biographer.
Much of the credit for the album’s brilliance must go to G. E. Moore, who wrote “Principia Ethica,” the group’s biggest hit, as well as to Lady Ottoline Morrell, their sound technician and roadie. The efforts of professionals like these, combined with Bloomsbury’s natural dynamism, have produced that rarest of rarities—a live album that is every bit as good as being there.
II
SAILCAT TURNER REMINISCES ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
People will tell you nowadays, “Well, the Bloomsbury Group this or the Bloomsbury Group that,” or “Bertrand Russell and Sir Kenneth Clark were members of the original Bloomsbury Group,” or some such jive misinformation. I don’t pay ’em no mind. Because, dig, I knew the Bloomsbury Group before there ever was a Bloomsbury Group, before anybody knew there was going to be any Bloomsbury Group, and I was in on the very beginning.
One night in ‘39, I was playing alto with McShann’s band uptown at the old Savoy Ballroom—mostly blues, ’cause we had one of the better blues shouters of the day, Walter Brown—and Dizzy Gillespie was sittin’ out front. So after the set Diz comes up to me and he says, “Sailcat, I got this chick that you just got to hear. Man, this chick can whale.” So he takes me over to Dan Wall’s Chili Joint on Seventh Avenue, and in the back there they got a small combo—two horns, some skins, and a buddy of mine named Biddy Fleet on guitar. They’re just runnin’ some new chords when from this table near the stage this chick steps up. She’s got what you might call a distracted air. She looks around the room nervous-like, and then she throws back her head and sound comes out like no sound I ever heard before. Man, I sat there till eight o’clock in the morning, listening to her. I asked Diz who this chick was, and he says, “Don’t you know? That’s little Ginny Stephen.” Now, of course, everybody talks about Virginia Woolf, author of To the Lighthouse, and so on. When I first knew her, she was just little Ginny Stephen. But man, that chick could whale.
I liked her music so much that me and Diz and Billie Holiday and Ginny and Ginny’s sister Vanessa started hanging out together. So one day Ginny says to me, “Sailcat, I got this economist friend of mine, he’s really outta sight. Would you like to meet him?” So I said sure, and she took me downtown to the Village Vanguard, and that was the first time I ever heard John Maynard Keynes. Of course, his playing wasn’t much back then. Truth is, he shouldn’t have been on the stage at all. Back then he was doin’ “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” but it sure didn’t sound like the hit he later made it into. Back then he was still doin’ “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” as a demonstration, with charts and bar graphs. Later, of course, he really started cookin’ and smokin’. That cat took classical economic theory and bent it in directions nobody ever thought it could go.
Now, Ginny and John, they were pretty tight, and they had this other friend they used to run with. This was a dude named Lytton Strachey, that later became their lead singer. He also won a wide reputation as an author and a critic. After hours, they used to sit around and jam and trade aphorisms. Me and Cootie Williams and Duncan Grant and Billie Holiday and Leonard Woolf, who later married Ginny, and Ella Fitzgerald, who had just taken over Chick Webb’s band, and James (Lytton’s brother) and Dizzy and the Duke and Maynard Keynes and Satchmo and Charles Mingus and Theodore Llewelyn Davies and Thelonious Monk and Charles Tennyson and Miles Davis and Ray Charles and Hilton Young (later Lord Kennet) all used to sit in sometimes too. We smoked some reefer. Man, we used to cook.
Well, that was the beginning. Later, a lot of people dropped out, and Lytton and Ginny and Vanessa and Maynard and Leonard and Duncan and some of the others started to call themselves the Bloomsbury Group, after their old high school over in England. They asked
me and Diz to join, but Diz was supposed to go on tour with Billy Eckstine’s band, and as for me, well, I wasn’t too crazy about the group’s strong Hellenic leanings. Now, of course, I wish I’d said yes.
III
VIRGINIA WOOLF TALKS FRANKLY ABOUT THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
Being a member of the Bloomsbury Group has brought me out of myself and taught me how to open up to other people. At the beginning, all of us—Leonard, Clive, Vanessa, Lytton, Duncan, Maynard, and me —we were like different states of mind in one consciousness. It was like we each had one tarot card but it didn’t make sense until we put all the cards together, and then when we did—it was beautiful. Like in 2001, when that monkey figures out how to use that bone. Everything was merged.
Of course, we still have our problems. The interpersonal vibes can get pretty intense when we’re touring, going from one Quality Court to another and then to another and then another. Sometimes I wonder if I have room to grow as an artist. But usually it works out O.K. Like the time I told Lytton that our new reggae number “Mrs. Dalloway” might work better as a short story or even a novel. We talked it out, and Lytton told me I was thinking too linear. Later, I had to admit he was right.
The hardest thing about being a member of the Bloomsbury Group is learning how to be a person at the same time you’re being a star. You’ve got to rise above your myth. We’ve reached the point where we’re completely supportive of each other, and that’s good. But at the same time we all have our own separate lives. I’ve been getting into video, Maynard recorded that album with Barry White, Duncan’s been doing some painting—we have to work hard to keep in touch with each other and ourselves, but it’s worth it. The way I figure it, there’s really nothing else I’d rather do.
KIMBERLEY SOLZHENITSYN’S CALENDAR
Two years have passed since the Russian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union to take up residence in the West.
—News item
May 1—Derby Day buffet at George and Dottie Balanchine’s. Bring cranberry ketchup for the ham.
May 2—Twins to band camp. Drinks with Andre and Nan Malraux.
May 8—Welcome Wagon visit in a.m. Remind Al to drain dehumidifier pan again.
May 9—Sunday dinner at the Levi-Strausses’. (Claude and JoAnn. Children: Sean, 7, and I think Jason, about 4.) 1003 Red Fox Trail, Walden Estates.
May 10—Pick up twins at band camp. Take Al’s old Siberia clothes to Fire Dept. Rummage Sale.
May 11—Crêpes Club here: Mimi Sartre, Megs Ionesco, Barb Dubuffet, Wendy Szent-Györgyi, Tracy Robbe-Grillet, Gail Miró.
May 12—Remind Al—bring patio trays up from basement. Nobel Prize winners’ Spaghetti Dinner. Get Al’s marimba fixed.
May 15—Al’s Rotary Meeting: Brown Derby. 8:00 p.m.: To P.T.A. Mummers’ Barefoot in the Park with Mikhail & Candy Baryshnikov.
May 17—Ecology Day. Al’s old Cancer Ward notes to recycling center. Twins’ swimming lesson—2:30: Leisure Time Pool.
May 20—Leave Subaru at the shop: oil & lube. Twins to the Balanchines’. Sam & Patsy Beckett for lunch and paddle tennis.
May 21—Hog roast at the Lévi-Strausses’.
May 24—Get twins’ band uniforms cleaned for Memorial Day Parade. Al’s slide show at Church Guild—“Russia: Land of Contrasts.”
May 26—Blocked Writers’ Benefit Car-Wash & White Sale: Church parking lot, 9:00 a.m. Evening: Gals’ poker night at Cindy Böll’s.
May 31—Memorial Day Horse Show: 2:00 p.m. Bring covered dish.
APARTMENT 6-A: AFTER THE FALL
It has been over a year now since, in the wake of demoralizing setbacks, I finally abandoned my West Village apartment to the North Vietnamese. It was a time of great chaos. In my haste I had no choice but to leave behind hundreds of dollars’ worth of appliances, clothing, and plants. The panic, the loss of my security deposit, getting my phone turned off, packing my small traveling bag, grabbing a taxi—all that seems like a dim nightmare to me now. But as the painful memories have lost some of their sharpness, my curiosity has grown. How has my apartment changed in the past year and a half? What have the Communists managed to make of the place where I sustained a free and democratic life for the better part of two years? I, of course, have not been allowed to visit my old pied-à-terre, but from accounts of Taiwanese businessmen and Belgian journalists who have been allowed in I have managed to piece together a picture of the new Apartment 6-A at 226 Waverly Place.
More than a year after its fall, 6-A appears to be an apartment still in transition. In the living room, the Communists have retained much of my furniture, including my stereo and my portable color-TV. All the furniture and appliances that used to belong to me have been registered and given identity cards. My two end tables have been removed, under the Communists’ Return to Deco Shop of Origin program. My terra-cotta fish poacher and horseshoe-crab-shell lamps have been relocated out into the country. My couch has submitted to voluntary reupholstering. The Communists have kept all my record albums, and I am told that they play them a lot. My cat, Bill, who likes to watch pigeons, seems perfectly happy with his new name, Ho Chi Minh Domestic Animal. My clippings of “Ziggy” and “Today’s Chuckle” are no longer taped to the refrigerator, and in their place are Communist maxims: “Advance in the Flush of Victory with New Vigor and Remember to Get an Extra Set of Keys Made!,” “Strive Resolutely to Pick Up the People’s Laundry before Five!,” and “Work for a Striking Development of Our Sunny Breakfast Nook!” In general, the kitchen has a more functional, lived-in look than before, when I mainly used it to prepare cans of Campbell’s Chunky Beef Soup.
Among the more important dynamics at work in the redesign of my apartment is a division between two schools of thought in the Politburo of the Workers’ Party. One school, the moderates, maintains that illiterate peasants who have only recently emerged from the jungles and paddies after a twenty-year period of war and apartment-hunting cannot be expected to have any sense of design, style, color, or fabric, and that the new government should not be afraid to hire interior decorators who may be foreign-born or who even may not hold to the strict Communist Party line. The hard-liners, on the other hand, believe that coming up with a decorating scheme is well within the powers of the North Vietnamese Army, and that all they really have to do is put a couple of coats of barn-red deck paint on the floor, paint the walls and ceiling off-white, buy a couple of nice rugs and some hanging plants and some big pillows, and then get a wheel of Brie and throw a party to break the place in. A similar theoretical split exists among the members of the Phong-trao Phu-nu Giai-phong, or Freed Women Movement, whose efforts to fix the bathroom so that the cold-water pipe under the sink doesn’t leak on the physical therapist in 5-A have been beset with problems. The moderates advocate trying Liquid-plumr or an Epoxi-Patch, while the hard-liners believe it is the landlord’s problem, and if he doesn’t do something about it pretty soon they favor going after the windshield of his Mercury Montego with a Volkswagen jack. At present, the moderates hold sway in most areas of the renovation of Apartment 6-A, and the success of their efforts over the next few months will very likely determine whether they or the hard-liners will continue to formulate apartment policy in such unresolved areas as the potentially divisive matchstick versus traditional-plastic-venetian window-blind issue.
In recent months, the Communists have been entertaining more—having more people over at Plenteous Rice Harvest Brunches and Revere Progressive Elders At-Homes, and guests have remarked that they notice a new atmosphere of hope in my former residence. After all, it’s in a nice neighborhood, and it’s convenient—right on the IRT—and there are lots of things to do in the area, and the Communists have my list of sitters. They have a two-year lease on the place, so unless rent control is repealed the rent won’t go up right away, and they also have a sublet clause, just in case they ever want to move on. It’s a fairly safe part of town, and just a couple of blocks away there’s a delicatessen that’
s open until two, where they sell Pepperidge Farm cookies, and there are some terrific new courses they can take at The New School, and things just might turn out to be not all that bad.
A GOOD EXPLANATION
(A Con Ed Customer’s Account of Why the Lights Went Out)
8:37 p.m. All is quiet at Indian Point No. 3 power station, when suddenly a huge dog jumps out of the bushes and eats several of the parts vital to the operation of the plant’s main generator. As quickly as he has come, the dog disappears.
8:56 p.m. Ten miles away, at the Millwood power station, another huge dog, not the same as the first dog but a different one, jumps out of the nearby woods and eats some insulation off an important transformer. This triggers circuit breakers.
8:57 p.m. Every person in Queens between the ages of fourteen and thirty-six gets out of the shower and turns on a blow-dryer. This places an enormous strain on the power reserves of the system.
9:06 p.m. A guy, I don’t even remember his name, nobody had ever seen him before or recognized him at all, happens to fly his helicopter over Con Edison’s computerized control center on the West Side and throws a cigarette butt out the window of his helicopter, and in a one-in-a-million chance an ash lands on some computer tape and burns some holes that spell out “Shut down all systems” in computer language.