Standing in the Doorway

-> Craft Talk -> Jam -> Craft Talk -> Not Fade Away

As promised a few weeks ago, here is the full text of the essay that I read from at the Pickathon music festival on August 4. It was first published in The Northwest Review Vol. 52 No. 02 (Winter 2023) and has heretofore been available in print only. Consider this the semi-formal inauguration of what is shaping up to be an unusually Bob-forward fall in what is, under normal circumstances, already a pretty Bob-forward newsletter and life. I’ve got a novella coming out in the next ZYZZYVA that takes its title from “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, “All Along the Watchtower” has a cameo in a short story that’ll be in the next Harvard Review, and I wrote about my visit to the Bob Dylan Center for an upcoming issue of Bookforum. These pieces were written each for their own reasons years apart from and without reference to each other. Now they’re all coming out in a cluster. So why not one more?

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Standing in the Doorway -> Craft Talk -> Jam -> Craft Talk -> Not Fade Away

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Driving out from Portland to the coast to see my friend Ed one afternoon in the first fall of the pandemic, I turn on the satellite radio which came free for three months with the new car. My dad liked to call it “sat radio” for short; he liked anything that made you feel, however slightly, like an insider. Like someone in the know. On the Grateful Dead channel the host says, “January 7, 1978, a very special night, because Jerry has laryngitis, so this is a whole set of Bobby songs, with some extra help from Donna.”

A year or so later I’m in South Florida. Golf courses, subdivisions, office parks and strip malls, occasional feed n seed. “Dancing Queen” plays on sat radio in the rental car as we wait in the motor queue at the National Cemetery. Palm trees and drainage canals, headstones in neat white rows. We’ve come to bury Mom’s father, my Grandpa Jack. 

Diarmid MacCulloch, in his epic history of the church, reports that Evagrius advised, “Never give a shape to the divine as such when you pray, nor allow your mind to be imprinted in any form, but go immaterial to the Immaterial and you will understand.” He was accused of Origenism by the Council of Constantinople in 553, making him the second person in Church history to be posthumously condemned; the first, naturally, having been Origen himself.

Rukeyser: The fragments join in me with their own music

From Grandpa’s apartment I will take a dark blue throw pillow with a butterfly pattern that I’ll keep in my office, and a sky-blue Guy Harvey baseball cap. Blue was his favorite color. I’ll find the program from his funeral one day when I’m scrounging in my bag for a bookmark. It’s still in my copy of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.

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The other day a few of us were languidly defending our stupid love of jam bands to the rest of the group chat. I told them that the thing I value most in music is virtuosity captured in a moment of self-surprise. I want to witness genius restored to profound sustained unknowing, I said, and after I saw it on the screen I realized that this is what I value most in writing, too. Probably also religion. It felt like a huge breakthrough and I thought I should write a whole essay about it but what else was there to say? 

Thank you for coming to my craft talk.

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Jack was 96 years old. He spoke Yiddish until he started kindergarten. If you asked how he was doing he said, “I live a pain-free life.” But that first year of hard quarantine wrecked his brain; he didn’t leave his apartment, couldn’t tell the days apart, started trying to call us with the TV remote. After he got vaccinated and could see people again he got back some of what he’d lost, but the deep damage was done. In conversation he was lucid and attentive, but if there was a lull he would start singing to himself. It was always the same three songs, segueing in and out of each other like the thickening mist in his mind was some jam band having a goof: “Ode to Joy,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, and a song I did not recognize but eventually discovered to be Edgar Guest’s “A Patriotic Wish,” which I believe he learned in the army. This jam lasted months. Every once in a while he’d throw in a verse from the “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls. We had to move him to the memory care wing of the assisted living place, where he caught covid within a week. Technically, he survived it. They told us that he was no longer infectious or symptomatic when he succumbed to the pneumonia that he had contracted while his immune system was weakened by the first disease. 

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Chrissie Hynde spent lockdown recording Dylan covers which she first posted to Youtube and then released as Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan. Here’s the track list:

“In the Summertime”, “You’re a Big Girl Now”, “Standing in the Doorway”, “Sweetheart Like You”, “Blind Willie McTell”, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight”, “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”, “Every Grain of Sand.”

It’s unbelievable how good this album is, how wild and attentive and true. Her fidelity is a form of re-imagination and listening to this record is an act of simultaneous instantiation and self-estrangement, like praying, and I wish I knew what I meant by that exactly, if I mean it’s a prayer or that I’m praying to it, or through it, or what.

Exodus 29:25 but it’s just me in my office with this record on repeat. 

I stop when I ought to or when I have to; never because I’ve had enough.

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Jack joined the army in 1943 when he turned eighteen. Five years earlier, in 1938, he was a camper at Camp Kinderwelt—rare treat for a city kid—and the experience so impressed him that 83 years later, in May of 2021, he remembered his counselor’s name: Ralph Nagnowitz. He said it with the same awe that the kids in Roth’s Nemesis say “Bucky Cantor.” Grandpa said he had looked up Ralph Nagnowitz some years ago, to try to see what ever became of him; he said Ralph appears in the 1940 census but none thereafter, which almost certainly means that he died in the war. It was amazing, Grandpa thought, what could change in five years: you’re 13 and then you’re 18; it’s 1938 and then it’s 1943. 

In the fall of 2020 I wrote in an essay that, given the duration of the shutdown and the actuarial realities, I might never see Jack alive again. But I did see him, in May of ’21. I was in Florida researching a hollow earth cult and spent a few days with him before I drove across the Everglades. On the way back east, since I was running early and it was almost on my way to the airport, I stopped by again and we sat together on his building’s front patio for about an hour,  just talking, him sometimes singing. When it was time for me to leave I hugged him and said I’d see him again soon and got into my rental car and sat in the parking lot sobbing because I knew it wasn’t true. And it wasn’t. The mist thickened through the summer and by October he was gone. 

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I just spent a week trying to find a copy of The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. I didn’t want to have to order it, I wanted to pull it from a shelf. I called every secular and most of the Christian bookstores in Portland, got nothing, then my friend Craig told me about this store up in Saint John’s I had never heard of. He said they were maybe Episcopalians but definitely cool. The drive was a half hour through perfect post-storm afternoon light, a ceiling of pregnant bright-dark clouds, and when I got to the store it was half off of everything and a customer was wearing a red tee shirt that said PORN KILLS LOVE in big white letters and the new owner’s toddler was running around and they had two copies of the Otto, which was perfect because my friend Cheston also wanted one—he had come to meet me when he got off work—and there it was, the minor miracle of commerce I’d been pining for. Here’s everything I bought: 

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto; Heavenly Questions by Gjertrud Schnackenberg; The Finishing School by Muriel Spark; The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which Cheston said had changed his life a little; Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius, edited by Sarah Gordon, which counts my old prof Padgett Powell among its contributors; Lanzarote by Michel Houellebecq; In the Presence of Schopenhauer by Michel Houellebecq; The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson, a first edition hardcover in great shape, six bucks after the discount; Sestets by Charles Wright; Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham.

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The other thing I could have said to the group chat is that jam bands are indefensible. That that’s the whole point of them. The freedom that comes from that surrender. You trade a serviceable indifference for an impossible love. As subject-positions go, this seems like a good one. It even feels right right now to say that it’s biblical, like Chrissie Hynde’s Bob Dylan covers or the sea at night. 

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Picking up a book from my shelf, say Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown or The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale, and trying to ballpark the odds that I am, at this moment, the only person alive on earth with this book in-hand, reading these words in this order, bringing this lost voice briefly back to vanished life.

I used to think this about Harry Crews but he’s a Penguin Classic now. I used to think it could never become true for Barry Hannah but lately suspect it has. I doubt I’m ever the only person revisiting Airships or Ray, but Hey Jack? High Lonesome? 

Or B.H. Fairchild, who my friend Eric told me to read. He said, “Start with ‘Beauty,’ that’s the one they’ll remember him for if anyone remembers him for anything.” Or Wright Morris, who my friend Alex turned me onto; Willie chimed in too, I think. I guess these guys are also reading those guys, I mean at least enough to recommend. Ed might mention Evan S. Connell or what’s her face, Peter Taylor’s wife, a poet; he says you can’t find her anywhere but she’s pretty good.

It sounds sad and it is sad but there’s a goodness to it too, this wanting to be alone with something and then achieving that aloneness, or at least being able to believe for a while that you did. To have stood alone with the pattern before your eyes, as Kierkegaard says, and he’s talking about Jesus but you can sub in whatever it is you’re willing to be alone with, whatever it is that someone else made that for a while you invite to be your life. 

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Schnackenberg, from that book I bought:

And myriads appear, self-multiply,

And multiply again: Let this be X,

Let this be X times X, and let there be

More myriads of zeroes grain by grain

In sacks of sand where one by one by one

More sacks of sand are filled with other grains,

Let numbers coalesce and re-emerge

Unharmed by coalescence and unchanged;

And always let a higher number form

And every single number have a name:

*

It feels right right now to say that I hold with Augustine that evil has no positive quality, that it exists solely as the palpable absence of the good.

I want to publish a book of my collected literary criticism. I also want to publish a book of one hundred short essays about one hundred Grateful Dead songs. I want to call it 100 Grateful Dead Songs after the classic dorm room poster and I want it to be a small-trim hardcover that mimics the look of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. That seems like it should be enough nonfiction for a lifetime, for mine anyway. More than either of these books the book I hope to publish is a Collected Stories. The two collections that I’ve already published, plus the two or three (unclear)  that could be gathered out of what I’ve written since.

Eleanor, that’s her name. Eleanor Ross Taylor.

And Padgett Powell’s not dead by the way, I didn’t mean to suggest that earlier, I only meant that not many people have read that book I mentioned, or they aren’t reading it lately. I emailed him this morning to ask about a writer named Peter Christopher, who he and Crews both knew, who had a debut book in ’89 and then died in ’08 without having published another. For a long time Christopher was a guy you could read and be the only person who was reading him. And when I say you I don’t mean me because I didn’t know a thing about him. I just found out. This little press in Minnesota is putting the collection back out along with a whole unpublished second collection: this is his Collected Stories, his life’s work and his afterlife, 268 pages, paperback original, $16.95.

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I was writing a piece of criticism and had cause to quote a line from the Denis Johnson story “Triumph Over the Grave.” It’s the one where the narrator says, “Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back to where you came from for years and years.” I suggested that Johnson’s lines were a stealth ars poetica. I wrote, “I don’t know if you could write Tree of Smoke this way but you could certainly write Jesus’ Son or The Name of the World, at least if you happen to have lived an extremely interesting life and to also be a genius blessed by God.” My editor read this as a joke, which it wasn’t, and cut it for space, which was fair. I had blown my word count and my darling needed killing; some of them always do. If my book of criticism ever gets published I plan to dedicate it to this editor, who will have commissioned no less than twenty of the however many pieces it ends up containing. Maybe this piece will be in there as well. 

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The pomposity of this, what I’m doing right now. It’s okay, we can talk about it. The insularity,  the bloat, the begging of narrowness to open out into depth, the fitful grasping, the allusions and teases and high-low referential swerves, the whole fake slouch of it and my unbearable whiteness and constant winks at the camera and lack of interest in resolving contradictions within my own thinking or even hitting a baseline level of aesthetic consistency.

It’s indefensible. I feel perfect.

Typing on my phone while walking laps around the drained reservoir and maybe as long as the words move through me and my body keeps moving I can invite this to be my life for a while, I can ask for more life into a time without boundaries, because eternity is not a location beyond time but rather a condition within it, as someone somewhere once said and it was me in one of my uncollected stories, I was ripping off some Jewish mystic, probably Scholem or Heschel, possibly my friend Josh. 

Here’s something Eileen Myles said in their recent essay FOR NOW:

It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there’s so much shit and so much horse. But if you’re somebody that wants to do that with your life which is just waste your time moment to moment, I mean it’s great, I thought I will waste it being a poet, I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after was nothing and nothing is where I work. 

Deuteronomy 6:9 but make it this. 

*

And someone on the group chat asked, Do you think of yourself as having literary influences? Like, is that part of how you conceive of your work? It was a good question and people had great answers. Since the chat is a sanctified space, an ark, I won’t be sharing any of their names or wisdom, but I feel okay about including my own reply: 

Absolutely. Huge part of it. One of the biggest questions I think about wrt my own work and really with all art, is where/when/how originality springs out of the emulative or derivative. I think there's real value in discipleship, but I am also increasingly suspicious of the desire to be part of a movement/group/scene. And acutely skeptical of any given guru's desire to be a guru. Maybe because when I was younger I valued both of those things so highly, and I think of my process of artistic maturation as a movement away from other people’s values/judgments about my work or their desires on my behalf. What they want to imagine me as. Where they can see me fit. I don't care about any of that anymore, though I remain basically a people-pleaser and push-over in my personal life. I had a teacher in grad school who once accused me of "just looking for a team to be on," and of caring far less about which team it was than about being on it. He was a mediocre teacher and kind of a prick but he had me dead to rights on that one. I've never forgotten it, and spent a long time determinedly growing out of it, just squashing that urge. But I kind of draw the line at squashing the way influence flows through the work itself, because I still see that as basically inevitable and fundamentally interesting. Harold Bloom's idea of agon across the ages between writers and between bodies of work feels true to me. I mean I want it to be true. Also why I love cover songs in general and jam bands in particular. Very interested in fucking around and finding out; maybe more interested in the fucking than the finding, if I really had to choose.

The chat’s on Discord, by the way. I’m not some monster who would send this as a text.

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Listening to Standing in the Doorway again and let me put it this way: if God decided to cut an album of Dylan covers, and He didn’t want to sound too much like Jerry Garcia, this is the album He would record. 

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I’m writing this on 5/15/22, what would have been my father’s 70th birthday if he had not died horribly and alone in March of 2017. What those five years are, what they’ve been. I’m probably not going to mention Dad again but his death is the name of my permission. Maybe you know the name of yours.

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Here’s something I said recently to a student about revision: 

“Kill your darlings” is often understood as an injunction, i.e. “you must kill them,” but I think it is better understood as a state of mind, i.e. “you must be willing to kill them.” It’s worth recalling that when Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22, the angel intervenes to save them both: Isaac from death, Abraham from murder. God didn’t want Isaac’s life, he just wanted to know that he had Abraham’s unlimited loyalty—or faith, depending how you interpret the story. Jewish theologians have tended to argue that Abraham knew in his heart that God would never force him to go through with the sacrifice, so for them the issue is trust, which Abraham had; some Christian theologians (Kierkegaard, must acutely) have argued that Abraham must not have known, because certainty would have meant not needing to have faith.

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How from the sky this country is just geometry homework: rectangles and lines, nautilus shells of on- and/or off-ramps (that’s calculus; I never took it) and I was sipping coffee somewhere above the mountains outside of Salt Like City, in or outbound who knows now, thinking NRBQ is the yacht-rock of alt-country and then repeating the line a few times, weighing whether I liked it enough to dig my phone out of my bag and pull up Notes and type it into the scratch file, where it found itself preceded by a fragment—from the jalapeño chicken pinwheels to the snowcapped peaks—and followed by this note about another old prof:

Mark wrote this amazing book-length poem about a boyfriend who died of AIDS at 25. I read it after watching the Trey Anastasio documentary. It—the book-length poem—was like watching a second, much better movie. Some double feature. There’s a part in the doc where Trey’s friend dies of cancer and you’re supposed to cry and I might have let myself, but I knew I was going to read Mark’s book after and I wasn’t going to cheapen those tears by having cried once already over the fucking Trey doc. Trey’s friend looked right at the camera and said that he had just poured liquid LSD into his chemo port and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding but fwiw I’d like it to be true.

And just because something was born somewhere doesn’t mean it can survive there. You can save some of your darlings (see above) if you evacuate them from the jurisdiction where their sentence was handed down. You can turn them into emigrants and refugees. You can build an ark for darlings and set sail. I’m not promising the dove will come, I’m saying you can wait and see. 

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And I want to state for the record that while writing has been consistently analogized to music throughout this essay I do not mean to suggest that writing should literally aspire to the condition of live performance, that it should commit unrevised spontaneity to the page. Try to write prose like Jerry plays, you’re gonna end up on some cringe shit like Bukowski. My friend Sam says he doesn’t trust writers who say they don’t revise. He says, “They’re either lying or their sentences suck.” That’s true, give or take a miracle. And you could write a paper on the epic jams of Sam’s sentences, which in fact I did some years ago, it was published by Bomb magazine and is linked on my website if anyone wants to see. I’d put “Cremains” or “The Republic of Empathy” up there with the Live/Dead “Dark Star” or the “Shakedown Street” from New Haven, October ’79.  

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Thank you coming to my craft talk. This cruise aboard my ark of darlings. The dove is coming but first here are some of my notes for 100 Grateful Dead Songs: 

6) “Viola Lee Blues” 4/26/69, the one on Fallout from the Phil Zone — how the highest I’ve ever been in my life was the twenty minutes I spent listening to this song alone in my room after smoking salvia in either 2002 or 2003.

9) “Cold Jordan” 5/15/70 at the Fillmore East — Dad’s 18th birthday, not that he was there or would have wanted to hear the show, but whenever I put it on I think of him, try to imagine what he might have been doing that night he came of age in Florida, could ask Mom she might know but don’t think I will ask.

31) July 19, 1987, Dylan & the Dead at Autzen stadium, Eugene OR — their only joint performance of “Heart of Mine.” You can stream it on Archive.org. It sounds absolutely awful in the most wonderful way.

40) “Not Fade Away,” 10/31/71 released as Dick’s Picks 2 — I was fifteen when I bought the CD with my Best Buy employee discount, spring ’98 I think, and we were moving my grandparents into a new apartment they’d bought and I wandered off to sit by the retention pond behind the building and there was an exposed drainage pipe and with my house key I scratched my name and the name of my summer camp girlfriend into the metal, trapped us in a heart and captioned it NOT FADE AWAY which even at the time I knew better than to truly believe, though that undercurrent of unbelief in no way lessened the pleasure of writing it or of seeing it written or of knowing it would disappear when the waters rose.

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A life lived not in expectation but in hope, maybe hope of nothing in particular.

Rukeyser (reprise): The fragments join in me with their own music

Schnackenberg: A quest for truth but not for certainty

Dylan: Sometimes I turn and there’s someone there, other times it’s only me

Myles (reprise): I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after was nothing and nothing is where I work

Psalm 91 but make it about the group chat.

John 12:32 but make it Chrissie Hynde singing “Every Grain of Sand.”

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