Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #89
"Spanish Key" by Miles Davis - 04/01/21
"Spanish Key" by Miles Davis
This 17:32 minute song is from the jazz trumpet great Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, released in 1970, which continued his experimentation with electric instruments he had featured on his previous record, In a Silent Way, like the electric piano and guitars. Davis departed from traditional jazz rhythms in favor of loose, rock-influenced arrangements based on improvisation in what’s called fusion jazz.
It made me think of the writer we’re studying this week in my friend Alfred Brown IV’s Creative Creative Writing class: Donald Barthelme, who loved jazz.
~“In an 1981 interview for The Paris Review, Barthelme mentions growing up with country music and classical music in Texas but being basically unimpressed; instead, he sought out the world of black music in New York turning into a jazz nerd: ‘After a time a sort of crazed scholarship overtakes you and you can recite band rosters for 1935 as others can list baseball teams for the same year,’ he said.
Barthelme's 1978 story, "The King of Jazz," is his most explicit about jazz, and can be traced to a sojourn in Japan, where he sought out the musicians in the burgeoning jazz scene there.
In the story, Barthelme describes how a trombonist named Hideo Yamaguchi challenges the reigning ‘bone man,’ Hokie Mokie, to see who will be the ‘King of Jazz.’
Barthelme evokes a world of hierarchy, with its own mysterious gentleman's code, he unfurls the setup and then the punch line:”
"What's that sound coming in from the side there?"
"Which side?"
"The left."
"You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like—"
"Good God, it's Hokie! Even with a cup mute on, he's blowing Hideo right off the stand!"
"Hideo's on his knees now! Good God, he's reaching into his belt for a large steel sword - Stop him!"
There’s also a mention in a biography of Barthelme of his one-time meeting with Miles Davis!
~“According to Karen Kennerly, an author with whom Barthelme had an affair and who claims to have dated Miles Davis from 1966-76 (Kennerly isn't mentioned anywhere in Miles's autobiography, however), the two were mutually aware of each other (Miles referred to Barthelme as "Texas"). The full story is in the book, but basically it was a meeting of egos. Kennerly describes her hesitation about setting up a meeting ‘...because I thought Miles would outcool Don, and Don had a very big investment in being cool.’
Barthelme goes with Kennerly to meet Miles for dinner, who arrived early and was already eating dinner, not being the type to wait on others. The conversation is stiff, and Barthelme possibly views Miles as a masculine threat; he loses his cool when he learns that Miles picked up the check after leaving early, and he ends up paying for the meal and giving the waiter Miles's money as a tip. He later tells Kennerly that Miles has a ‘tin ear, nowhere as good as Charlie Parker's.’ When she pushes back, he concedes, ‘Well, he's great, but he's not up there.’”
LOL.
What egos!
I’ll always forgive the personality of artists for the artistry of their work though.
My favorite story of Barthelme’s is one of the two that my friend Al Brown is teaching this week called “I Bought a Little City.”
It inspired me to write a short story, which I think will be the first story in a new book that I’ll write and self-publish hopefully this year which will take my favorite short works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and what cannot be defined by those three forms, display them in full first and then do my own riff on them afterward.
Hope you enjoy!
I Bought a Little City by Donald Barthelme
So I bought a little city (it was Galveston, Texas) and told everybody that nobody had to move, we were going to do it just gradually, very relaxed, no big changes overnight. They were pleased and suspicious. I walked down to the harbor where there were cotton warehouses and fish markets and all sorts of installations having to do with the spread of petroleum throughout the Free World, and I thought, A few apple trees here might be nice. Then I walked out this broad boulevard which has all these tall thick palm trees maybe 40 feet high in the center and oleanders on both sides, it runs for blocks and blocks and ends up opening up to the broad Gulf of Mexico — stately homes on both sides and a big Catholic church that looks more like a mosque and the Bishop’s Palace and a handsome red brick affair where the Shriners meet. I thought, What a nice little city, it suits me fine.
It suited me fine so I started to change it. But softly, softly. I asked some folks to move out of a whole city block on I Street, and then I tore down their houses. I put the people into the Galvez Hotel, which is the nicest hotel in town, right on the seawall, and I made sure that every room had a beautiful view. Those people had wanted to stay at the Galvez Hotel all their lives and never had a chance before because they didn’t have the money. They were delighted. I tore down their houses and made that empty block a park. We planted it all to hell and put some nice green iron benches in it and a little fountain — all standard stuff, we didn’t try to be imaginative.
I was pleased. All the people who lived in the four blocks surrounding the empty block had something they hadn’t had before, a park. They could sit in it, and like that. I went and watched them sitting in it. There was already a black man there playing bongo drums. I hate bongo drums. I started to tell him to stop playing those goddamn bongo drums but then I said to myself, No, that’s not right. You got to let him play his goddamn bongo drums if he feels like it, it’s part of the misery of democracy, to which I subscribe. Then I started thinking about new housing for the people I had displaced, they couldn’t stay in that fancy hotel forever.
But I didn’t have any ideas about new housing, except that it shouldn’t be too imaginative. So I got to talking to one of these people, one of the ones we had moved out, guy by the name of Bill Caulfield who worked in a wholesale tobacco place down on Mechanic Street.
“So what kind of a place would you like to live in?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, “not too big.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe with a veranda around three sides,” he said, “so we could sit on it and look out. A screened porch, maybe.”
“Whatcha going to look out at?”
“Maybe some trees and, you know, the lawn.”
“So you want some ground around the house.”
“That would be nice, yeah.”
“’Bout how much ground are you thinking of?”
“Well, not too much.”
"You see, the problem is, there's only x amount of ground and everybody's going to want to have it to look at and at the same time they don't want to be staring at the neighbors. Private looking, that's the thing."
“'Well, yes,” he said, “I’d like it to be kind of private.”
“Well,” I said, “get a pencil and let’s see what we can work out.”
We started with what there was going to be to look at, which was damned difficult. Because when you look you don't want to be able to look at just one thing, you want to be able to shift your gaze. You need to be able to look at at least three things, maybe four. Bill Caulfield solved the problem. He showed me a box. I opened it up and inside was a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of the Mona Lisa on it.
“Lookee here,” he said. “If each piece of ground was like a piece of this-here puzzle, and the tree line on each piece of property followed the outline of a piece of the puzzle — well, there you have it, Q.E.D. and that’s all she wrote.”
“Fine,” I said. “Where are the folk going to park their cars?”
“In the vast underground parking facility,” he said.
“O.K., but how does each householder gain access to his household?”
“The tree lines are double and shade beautifully paved walkways possibly bordered with begonias,” he said.
“A lurkway for potential muggists and rapers,” I pointed out.
“There won’t be any such,” Caulfield said, “because you’ve bought our whole city and won’t allow that class of person to hang out here no more.”
That was right. I had bought the whole city and could probably do that. I had forgotten.
“Well,” I said finally, “let’s give ’er a try. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it seems a little imaginative.”
We did and it didn’t work out badly. There was only one complaint. A man named A.G. Bartie came to see me.
“Listen,” he said, his eyes either gleaming or burning, I couldn’t tell which, it was a cloudy day, “I feel like I’m living in this gigantic jiveass jigsaw puzzle.”
He was right. Seen from the air, he was living in the middle of a titanic reproduction of the Mona Lisa, too, but I thought it best not to mention that. We allowed him to square off his property into a standard 60 x 100 foot lot and later some other people did that too — some people just like rectangles, I guess. I must say it improved the concept. You run across an occasional rectangle in Shady Oaks (we didn't want to call the development anything too imaginative) and it surprises you. That's nice.
I said to myself:
Got a little city
Ain’t it pretty
By now I had exercised my proprietorship so lightly and if I do say so myself tactfully that I wondered if I was enjoying myself enough (and I had paid a heavy penny too — near to half my fortune). So I went out on the streets then and shot six thousand dogs. This gave me great satisfaction and you have no idea how wonderfully it improved the city for the better. This left us with a dog population of 165,000, as opposed to a human population of something like 89,000. Then I went down to the Galveston News, the morning paper, and wrote an editorial denouncing myself as the vilest creature the good God had ever placed upon the earth, and were we, the citizens of this fine community, who were after all free Americans of whatever race or creed, going to sit still while one man, one man, if indeed so vile a critter could be so called, etc. etc.? I gave it to the city desk and told them I wanted it on the front page in fourteen-point type, boxed. I did this just in case they might have hesitated to do it themselves, and because I'd seen that Orson Welles picture where the guy writes a nasty notice about his own wife's terrible singing, which I always thought was pretty decent of him, from some points of view.
A man whose dog I’d shot came to see me.
“You shot Butch,” he said.
“Butch? Which one was Butch?”
“One brown ear and one white ear,” he said. “Very friendly.”
“Mister,” I said, “I’ve just shot six thousand dogs, and you expect me to remember Butch?”
“Butch was all Nancy and me had,” he said, “we never had no children.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” I said, “but I own this city.”
“I know that,” he said.
“I am the sole owner and I make all the rules.”
“They told me,” he said.
“I’m sorry about Butch but he got in the way of the big campaign. You ought to have had him on a leash.”
“I don’t deny it,” he said.
“You ought to have had him inside the house.”
“He was just a poor animal that had to go out sometimes.”
“And mess up the streets something awful?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s a problem. I just wanted to tell you how I feel.”
“You didn’t tell me,” I said. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like bustin’ your head,” he said, and showed me a short length of pipe he had brought along for the purpose.
“But of course if you do that you’re going to get your ass in a lot of trouble,” I said.
“I realize that.”
“It would make you feel better, but then I own the jail and the judge and the po-lice and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. All mine. I could hit you with a writ of mandamus.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I’ve been known to do worse.”
“You’re a black-hearted man,” he said. “I guess that’s it. You’ll roast in Hell in the eternal flames and there will be no mercy or cooling drafts from any quarter.”
He went away happy with this explanation. I was happy to be a black-hearted man in his mind if that would satisfy the issue between us because that was a bad-looking piece of pipe he had there and I was still six thousand dogs ahead of the game, in a sense. So I owned this little city which was very, very pretty and I couldn’t think of any more new innovations just then or none that wouldn’t get me punctuated like the late Huey P. Long, former governor of Louisiana. The thing is, I had fallen in love with Sam Hong’s wife. I had wandered into this store on Tremont Street where they sold Oriental novelties, paper lanterns and cheap china and bamboo birdcages and wicker footstools and all that kind of thing. She was smaller than I was and I thought I had never seen that much goodness in a woman’s face before. It was hard to credit. It was the best face I’d ever seen.
“I can’t do that,” she said, “because I am married to Sam.”
“Sam?”
She pointed over to the cash register where there was a Chinese man, young and intelligent-looking and pouring that intelligent look at me with considered unfriendliness.
“Well, that’s dismal news,” I said. “Tell me, do you love me?”
“A little bit,” she said, “but Sam is wise and kind and we have one and one-third lovely children.”
She didn’t look pregnant but I congratulated her anyhow, and then went out on the street and found a cop and sent him down to H Street to get me a bucket of Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken, extra crispy. I did that just out of meanness. He was humiliated but he had no choice. I thought:
I own a little city
Awful pretty
Can’t help people
Can hurt them though
Shoot their dogs
Mess ’em up
Be imaginative
Plant trees
Best to leave ’em alone?
Who decides?
Sam’s wife is Sam’s wife and coveting
Is not nice.
So I ate the Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken extra crispy, and sold Galveston, Texas, back to the interests. I took a bath on that deal, there’s no denying it but I learned something — don’t play God. A lot of other people already knew that, but I have never doubted for a minute that a lot of other people are smarter than me, and figure things out quicker, and have grace and statistical norms on their side. Probably I went wrong by being too imaginative, although really I was guarding against that. I did very little, I was fairly restrained. God does a lot worse things, every day, in one little family, any family, than I did in that whole little city. But He’s got a better imagination than I do. For instance, I still covet Sam Hong’s wife. That’s torment. Still covet Sam Hong’s wife, and probably always will. It’s like having a tooth pulled. For a year. The same tooth. That’s a sample of His imagination. It’s powerful.
So what happened? What happened was that I took the other half of my fortune and went to Galena Park, Texas, and lived inconspicuously there, and when they asked me to run for the school board I said No, I don’t have any children.
I Bought a Little Story by Dave Cowen
So I bought a little story (it was “I Bought a Little City” by Donald Barthelme), except I didn’t buy it, because it was already sold to The New Yorker, in 1974. But you also can’t buy a little city, except in fiction, unless you are Kim Basinger or Elon Musk, then I guess you can do it in real life, too. Barthelme is dead, like his father, and mine, and so is my relationship with The New Yorker, but if they are reading this submission they are likely pleased and suspicious. Be worried, we’re changing it suddenly, no chillax, big changes right away. Fuck! It’s the 21st Century, the culture has coarsened, we write four-letter words in The New Yorker now. Or at least I did once. I read through the rest of this first paragraph about the spread of petroleum throughout the Free World, a big Catholic church that looks more like a mosque, and some apple trees, and I thought, A few emojis here might be nice.
What a nice little story, it suits me fine.
It suited me so fine, I didn’t want to change it. I liked the next sentence where Barthelme has the narrator (What should we call him? I can’t just call him the narrator. That’s boring. And it’s my story now! Oh, I think I got it!) where Barthelme has Elon Musk ask some folks to move out of a whole city block on I Street, so Musk can tear down their houses.
I’m changing it though so that Musk puts the people, not in the Galvez Hotel, which is the nicest hotel in town, with its sea view, but instead, he puts the people in his colony on Mars, which is the first and only and nicest colony there.
But does anyone actually want to live in a colony on Mars? If the people on I Street lived in a colony on Mars, how would they see the rest of the people in their little city? Zoom? No one’s delighted with that.
Also, I just bought another story. To fill in some details about Mars.
It says, “With no magnetic field, Mars has no defense against harsh solar radiation. If I were exposed to it, I’d get so much cancer, the cancer would have cancer.”
That doesn’t sound good.
Also, it may have been a mistake not actually buying but just saying I’m buying that Mars story. It was adapted into a blockbuster Sony movie starring Matt Damon, and so maybe I’d be sued for copyright infringement for not really having the rights to it.
I’m sticking with the Galvez Hotel and making that empty block a park. I should listen to Barthelme and not try to be imaginative.
Except I’m not pleased. I like to be imaginative. Maybe it needs a GIF?
Oops that GIF wasn’t imaginative enough. Or was it too imaginative? I went with a reference to the next part of the story where Musk watches the people in his little city sit in the new park, but there’s a black man there playing bongo drums and Musk says, I hate bongo drums and wants to stop him from playing those goddamn bongo drums.
It seems like Barthelme is satirizing boorish racism, but by satirizing racism this way is he merely buttressing it? I could ask him, if only his dead body were also alive? Like I also wish for my Dead Father.
In my story, in the park in the little city, Donald Glover is performing “Feels Like Summer”
And there are hundreds of people dancing. There is also no Covid-19 and never has there been. And there’s also another photo in my story. A non-GIF this time.
Glover sees Musk and says, “Cool little city, man.”
“Thanks,” Musk replies. “Got any ideas about what else I can do to make you like living in it?”
“Yeah,” Glover says. “Can you give everyone a Universal Basic Income? A UBI? Like they did in Stockton, California for six months? But, like, a lot more?”
“‘Bout how much UBI are you thinking of?”
“Well,” he said, “not too big.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just enough to always have food to eat, have a place to live, have clothes to wear, and have medical care if you get sick.”
“So the bare necessities?”
“That would be nice, yeah.”
“You see the problem is,” Musk started to reply, “Well, I guess, I can’t think of a problem. I’m currently worth 166.9 billion dollars. And there are about 26 residents here in Boca Chica, Texas, which I bought. So that would be more than six billion dollars per person per lifetime.”
“Cool,” Glover replied. “Also. Can you get rid of the po-lice? Like not just defund, but abolish it?”
“What about muggists and rapers?” Musk pointed out.
“I don’t know, man, I’m not a criminologist, but it seems like there will be a lot less crime if people don’t have to worry so much about money anymore.”
That was right, Musk thought. He had bought the whole city and could probably ensure that.
“Anything else?” Musk asked. “Do you have anything really imaginative?” I, the author, made him say.
“I’ve always thought it’d be fun to have real-life Huxley birds?” I made Glover reply.
“What are Huxley birds?”
“They’re the parrots in his novel Island that just say over and over “Be Here Now!”
“Like Ram Dass?” Musk replied.
“It’s a perennial philosophy, but yeah,” Glover said.
“Well,” Musk said, “Let’s give ‘er a try.”
“Any song requests?” Glover replied.
“Yeah,” Musk said, “Can you play your song ‘California’ but change it to Boca Chica?”
“Sure, man,” said Glover. And he started to sing:
She want to move to Boca Chica
She must've fucking found her mind
There was only one complaint. A woman named Emma Allen, the editor of The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section, Zoomed me after she read this far in the story.
“Listen,” she said, her eyes either gleaming or burning, I couldn’t tell which, it was a poorly lit Zoom, “I feel like I’m just reading a gigantic jiveass pastiche.”
She was right. Read so far, it was like reading an overlong, pretentious, post-post-modern, reproduction of Barthelme, but I thought it best not to mention that.
“I know it’s getting too long to be a Shouts,” I replied, “But maybe it can be a novella? Like Simon Rich’s Sell Out?”
“No offense,” she said, “but you’re no Simon Rich.”
“Okay, I’ll just publish it on my Substack,” I said.
I must say that decision improved the concept. Without an editor, or a publisher, I wouldn’t have to worry if the piece became too imaginative. I sang to myself:
Got a little story
Ain’t it pretty
By now I have exercised my proprietorship so artfully and if I do say so myself so imaginatively that I wondered if I was enjoying myself too much. I had only spent a few hours on this draft. How long did Barthelme spend?
So I decided to follow the structure of the story and have Musk shoot six thousand of the Huxley parrots. This gave me great satisfaction as I came up with the parrots idea earlier in the writing process without planning to use it later this way, which suggests I’m channeling the genius of Barthelme in my subconscious or whatever you call the thing inside of us that writes, our soul, the Self, my Muse, a daemon?
Then I decided that along with publishing the story on my Substack, I would also self-publish it on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. Or maybe perhaps as part of a book called It’s Not Just Pastiche, Capeesh? which would pair my favorite pieces of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and whatever can’t be defined by those three extant forms, with my own versions of them.
And then I decided I would also sell NFTs of the original Google documents’ Draftbacks for each story, which lets you playback the revision history of any Google Doc so that buyers can see how the story was written and edited, and maybe I would make some real money for once.
Then I realized about here that I had probably lost many of the readers’ interest and the connection to Barthelme’s story was becoming tenuous, and I thought about how I probably will never be a famous or successful writer, but that maybe if I had a child that child could do what David Fincher did for his father, which is, turn his unknown screenplay about Citizen Kane into a realized movie, even if it was nominated for too many Oscar awards, from some points of view.
The man whose parrots I’d shot came to see me.
“You shot my birds,” Aldous Huxley said.
“I did yeah,” I replied.
“Good,” Huxley said.
“Good? So does that mean, you don’t want to bust me over the head with a short length of pipe?”
“No, I still do,” he said, and he showed me the short length of the pipe he had brought along for the purpose.
“But why?”
“Because you misquoted my birds. They say ‘Here and now.’ That’s the trouble with you post-post-modern writers, you haven’t even read enough of the works you reference. At least Donald read what he wrote about.”
“Did he though? He seems like an egomaniac.”
“He was an egomaniac who read.”
“You know,” I said, “I own this story, and this sentence, and the sentences you just said, and the ones that come next; and by extension this little city, its local library, its bookstore, and its mail people who deliver books from Amazon. All mine. I could rewrite what I wrote or rewrite what you had your birds say in any of the books that get here.”
“You would do that.”
“I guess I could try to do better.”
“You can. You’re a kind and benevolent and good-hearted-man,” I made him say. “I guess that’s it. You’re making me praise you and there will be no end to the inflation of your ego.”
He went away sad with his explication. And I was not any happier either. I think I need to be struck with that bad-looking piece of pipe he had there. But I was 1,712 words ahead of the game, in a sense. So I owned this little story which was very, very pretty and I couldn’t think of any more new innovations just then or none that wouldn’t get me tweeted about like that New Yorker fiction writer who rewrote a version of a previous story too and published it there, but I can’t remember its title, or the name of the writer, or the name of the writer who tweeted that it was bad, because I am not as good a rememberer or writer as Donald Barthelme or even his brothers. Also, I found it challenging to Google.
The thing is, someone had fallen in love with my wife. She lived in the same part of Los Angeles as me near Vermont Avenue, near the Skylight Bookstore, which I no longer shopped in due to the pandemic, and because I am lazy, and enjoy having things delivered to me.
She is smaller than I am and even though we’re separated I still think I have never seen that much goodness in a woman’s face before.
“I will fall in love with you again,” she said, “because it’s your story.”
“Well, that’s great news,” I said. “Tell me, do you love me?”
“Yes,” she said, “Because you are wise and kind and handsome and we will have lovely children together.”
But it still didn’t feel like she was telling me the truth.
I ordered a Postmates delivery of chicken wings from Ye Rustic Inn, hot, ranch dressing, extra crispy. I did that just out of sadness. I was humiliating myself again turning fiction into non-fiction. I thought:
I don’t really own this story
Awful pity
Can’t help myself
Can hurt myself though
Publish pastiches of copyrighted stories
Mess ‘em up
Be too imaginative
Best to leave ‘em alone?
Who decides?
Donald’s story is Donald’s story and coveting
Is not nice.
But I ate the Ye Rustic Inn chicken wings, as well as a burger and fries from Burgers Never Say Die, also delivered, and kept pastiching, or doing whatever I am doing with “I Bought a Little City” by Donald Barthelme. I’ll likely take a bath on self-publishing this book, there’s no denying it, and I might never learn what I should probably learn, which is don’t be derivative when you think you are being imaginative. A lot of other writers already know that, but I have never doubted for a minute that a lot of other writers are smarter than me, and figure things out quicker, and have more talent and a better feel for what’s truly publishable or desired by readers on their side. There’s no doubt I went wrong by being too falsely imaginative, although really I thought I was guarding against that. I thought I did a lot, I thought I was being fresh here. But other writers do a lot more imaginative things, every day, just in one sentence, just in one little word, any word, than I did with this whole story. But they’ve got a better imagination than I do. I am still going to covet other writers whose writing I like more than my own. That’s torment. Will still covet other writers’ writing more than my own, and definitely always will.
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’m content to know all of us are a manifestation of whatever you call God or the mystery and all our writing is a manifestation of Its imagination. Is that powerful?
So what will happen next? What will happen is that I will look for other writers’ works of fiction and non-fiction and poetry and writings not defined as any of those three extant forms, and I will do whatever I want with them, and I will do it quite conspicuously, and when they ask me if it’s copyright infringement, I will say, I don’t care anymore, my wife is gone.
Okay, that’s the eighty-ninth Shuffle Synchronicities.