Are You Hip To The Jive?

I've enjoyed most of the output of Dash Hammett and Raymond Chandler, while managing to avoid the clinkers, if there are any. Out of curiosity I recently read one of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer novels. Those three gentlemen are often mentioned in the same breath by critics. Let's get this out of the way right now: I liked it a lot.

Ross MacDonald turns out to be the “main pseudonym” of “American-Canadian” crime writer Kenneth Millar. Some of these guys act like they are running from the police themselves, the way they use multiple aliases and addresses. To say “American-Canadian” might be gilding the lily for a guy who was born, grew up, worked, and died in California. It's a free country, though, so I'm willing to let all of that slide.

I read “The Galton Case,” and it was a good place to start. It comes right in the middle of the long series of Lew Archer books. A lot of the action takes place in mid-1950s San Francisco, and there are Beatniks involved. As was customary in the Fifties and Sixties, new forms of artistic expression come in for some gentle ribbing.

The detective visits a jazz bar at one point, and he hangs around long enough to develop an opinion about the band. The small combo was “playing something advanced.” Did Mr. Archer understand it? “I didn't have my slide-rule with me.”

There may have been an age cut-off for this kind of thing. (Mr. MacDonald was born in 1915, so he was forty or so when he wrote the book.) Maybe people born before a certain year could not get hip to the jive of 1950s jazz and literature (poetry included). Same for the 1960s. Look for the video of the Rolling Stones on the Dean Martin TV show. Old Deano and all of his Rat Pack friends fancied themselves to be genuine swingers in a world of squares, but this new mess swung a bit too hard for an old warhorse like Dean. I'll bet that something similar was happening with Mr. MacDonald (Millar).

The musicians themselves, of course, were hip. They got it. They “smiled and and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night.” (How do you like that double-barreled dog-whistle about drug use?)

The melody was “done to death.” The pianist “bent over his keyboard . . . like a mad scientist.” The detective was forced to listen to multiple songs. Before long, “another tune failed to survive the operation.”

Before long our detective is discussing the artistic fine points of the age with an effete, but sympathetically rendered, Beat poet. “You can't make a Hamlet without breaking egos,” says the poet. But you could, evidently, still write a novel in the mid-1950s that had its feet planted firmly in the Thirties and Forties.

No complaints from me, though. Just an observation. “The Galton Case” is a good read.

Rufus Thomas - Jump Back

I love these nonsense songs that were a staple of black American music in the 1950s and 1960s. Bo Diddley, by Bo Diddley; Don't You Just Know It, by Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns, it was a certain formula of nonsensical negation, and it was very entertaining. 

Twenty five years later, this music was called Uncle Tom stuff, but people forgot one important thing about it. The acceptance that was won by cheerful, friendly men like Rufus Thomas made the world safe for the anger of Public Enemy. 

RUFUS

I can't 100% guarantee the propriety of this song, but it's a nice, crisp example of the Stax/Volt/Enterprise funk machine at the height of its power. (The tension arises from the real-life father/daughter relationship of the singers.) 

tommy hunt i am a witness

I love the way this cut is put together. Nothing like the usual A, A, B, A of the time. Could this be part of a sub-genre? Could you call them, "story songs?" I'll let greater minds than mine figure it out. 

Definitely Tommy Hunt's ticket to musical immortality, though. Great job all around. 

Almost Missed It!

I've been keeping a careful eye on my e-mail for a couple of weeks. The hotel that I stayed at in Indo wants to send me “invoices” or something. That's another story. They sent me an SMS message of all things. Who sends those?

You probably don't realize it, but Hotmail has gotten even more inconvenient since the major update about a year ago. You are probably using g-mail, unless you happen to be an older person like me. We are creatures of habit, we oldsters. I'm dancing with the one I brung, even if it is a pretty lame platform.

They now divide your e-mails into three categories. There's junk mail, of course, but now the non-junk mail is prioritized by mysterious algorithms into two categories, what are they, Focused and Casual? Something like that. If it looks important, they put it in Focused; if not, they put it in Casual, or whatever it is. I had been in the habit of checking the Casual every few days, but it's only since I've been looking for this e-mail from the hotel that I'm checking the junk mail.

And what a lucky break! I almost missed a fabulous opportunity! Junk mail my ass, this thing was important! I was personally contacted by a Emirati gentleman named Sifri Khaled, who is the Chief Economic Officer of the Emirates Investment Bank in the UAE. It looks like a great chance to make some extra money for my, what do we call it these days? Not retirement, that ship has sailed. Ninety percent of us are on the work till we die and scramble frantically for extra cash along the way program.

Wish me luck anyway, but don't worry. I won't be responding to Mr. Khaled's e-mail. I wouldn't work for anybody who would hire me for that kind of law work at this point. They obviously don't know what they're doing.

BUT OFFICER by Sonny Knight

These days we are all too familiar with the bad habit of police officers taking on young black men for no good reason. It's a bad habit that often leads to bad treatment, and it's a problem of great concern to many of us. This record is archival proof that there is nothing new about the phenomenon. 

Political Poetry Incorrectness

Anders Carlson-Wee had a fourteen line poem called “How-To” published in The Nation magazine on July 24, 2018. Should we say, “good for you, Anders! What a coup!” Why no, we should not. We are not allowed. If we congratulate Anders, or if we have enjoyed the poem in any way, we are as bad as he is. The preferred response these days is to throw up one's hands and shout, “j'accuse!” Such a poem is no longer to be tolerated.

Here is the offending poem, in its entirety:

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,

say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower

themselves to listen for the kick. People

passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee

funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely

to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know

you is. What they don’t know is what opens

a wallet, what stops em from counting

what they drop. If you’re young say younger.

Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t

flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough

Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,

say you sin. It’s about who they believe

they is. You hardly even there.

(My sincerest apologies to the Copyright Gods, although I don't think that Anders would mind. I'm on his side, after all.)

The poem caused a giant shit-storm in multiple communities and among desperately sincere social justice warrior wannabes. There were letters to the editor and torrents on social media, and the kerfuffle made the New York Times this morning. The two main problems were identified as: 1) a white poet attempted to use black vernacular; and 2) an able person included the word, “crippled.”

Let's look at the cripple problem. The complaints seem to have revolved around the mere use of the word “cripple,” which is now judged to be disparaging and ableist language. Ableist! Can you even imagine? That is a word now! For all I know, poor Anders may himself have a limp, or even mild cerebral palsy, but I don't think even that would excuse him in today's hypercritical climate. No, the world must be purged completely of such words, all of them. I have never seen a list published; please let me know if there is such a list. Let me know so that I can ignore it, when appropriate.

I would probably use the term “handicapped” myself, at least in my personal discourse. Or maybe “disabled.” Handicapped, after all, includes mental and emotional conditions that rise to the level of pathology. Even there, one could be mentally handicapped without being mentally disabled. There are gradations to everything. What's a poor writer to do?

How about the cultural appropriation problem? How about it? Is it a cultural emergency when a white writer attempts to use “black vernacular?” That is a slippery slope. Does that mean that we must remove “Huckleberry Finn” from the catalog? Or must we only purge it of all dialog sections. How about a suburban, Harvard educated black American poet? Would she be able to use the black urban vernacular of big city thug life? That's a serious question. Here's another one: if she were writing a novel, would she be able to use the vernacular English of a white housewife from another part of the country? How about the broken English of a recently arrived immigrant? Would the ethnic information about the immigrant have any bearing on her permission to “attempt to use” it?

What a fucking mess.

The poem is a first person narrative. Are we now to impose all of the constantly shifting rules of political correctness on every character in every fictional narrative? Oh, honey, that ain't going to happen.

Can we agree that there is a difference between using offensive words in personal conversation, live presentations, dialog presented in quotes in fiction writing, and third person fictional narratives? There is also a difference when the word is used in poetry, with similar gradations if the word is used in the first, second, or third person. Each situation requires viewing through a different lens.

If I write a novel, and one of the characters uses the totally offensive term, “nigger,” in quoted dialog, am I to be publicly condemned and required to apologize from the deepest depths of my heart and soul? That is going to happen within a year or so. You may wish to begin sharpening your knives in preparation.

I think that it's a pretty good poem. I'm no critic, but if I were assigned to debate the proposition, I'd rather have the “this poem is fine” side than the “this poem is a racist, ableist abomination” side. I've written poems myself that are a lot more offensive than this one. I wrote them for effect; I chose the words carefully. I stand before you now as a licensed, experienced attorney, and I've been some kind of junior academic for over ten years, teaching university classes. Before that I was a worker at various jobs, many unsophisticated. Before that I was a teenage borderline hooligan in the Borough of Queens. Before that I was a boy in a very rough working class neighborhood of New York City. Which of these vernaculars am I still permitted to use? How about in fictional narratives or poetry? How about in blog posts about the old days? In my own speech, I was never comfortable with “nigger,” but it was a commonly used word in my milieu. Not only as a noun, but as an adjective, “niggerized,” which applied to anything that had been decorated in an elaborate way, no longer being limited to having anything to do with black Americans. (A white man could have a niggerized motorcycle, with lots of chrome and extra lights and reflectors.) We definitely called stupid people stupid back then, and cripples were cripples, and that was universal. Interestingly, faggots were not homosexuals. They were boys who would not fight back or stand up for themselves. Am I barred from reminiscing about these old customs? It's my own vernacular, after all.

I stand four-square for artistic freedom. Anders Carlson-Wee should be free to write his poem in any manner that he sees fit. It's his Goddamned poem! Those are his words! To oppose his right to express himself in his own art is nascent fascism. It's a mini-book-burning. Leave the man alone. Making him, and the poor poetry editors at The Nation, grovel, begging for forgiveness, makes you look ridiculous. That our culture has descended to embrace this kind of drum-head rhetorical criminal trial makes us all look ridiculous.

So, that's how I really feel about it. Some days I'm very happy to have a blog.