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Visiting My Papers at Yale |
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Two summers ago I was in New England again, attending a literary conference at The University of Rhode Island, and then doing readings up and down the East Coast for my newest book. Since my rented car would take me right past New Haven, I decided to stop into the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University to look at my papers.
At my age, one begins thinking about collecting what one has carelessly left lying around for decades: at summer cottages, in notebooks, presented to old boyfriends, in hard drives all over the world. I know there are stories, reviews, essays, and poems, out there somewhere. I thought maybe someday someone would say, Hey Felice, what about a Collected Poetry? I’d only published two books of poems, The Deformity Lover, and Window Elegies, a chapbook. Another hundred had appeared in print since then, the last being “His Diagnosis” about my friend, Robert Ferro. After that, poetry was no longer possible for me. But there were earlier poems, many I’d left unfinished, hanging. They were inside spiral metal notebooks with chartreuse covers, and those notebooks were at Yale.
Just to clarify, I didn’t go to Yale; my papers went there. I was barely sixteen when I graduated high school. My folks made it clear I wasn’t going away anywhere and in fact that I was staying home and working for my father. Unknown to them, my college counselor had applied me to The City University of New York, and I’d gotten past the rigorous requirements and into Queens College, a free school; I’d even gotten a small scholarship. So that’s where I went. I moved to Alphabet City among immigrants and cockroaches, junkies and thieves, and I went to college taking two trains and a bus each way.
However thanks to scholars George Stambolian, Jonathan Katz and John Boswell, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which collects American Writing Groups like the Transcendentalists and Gertrude Stein’s Paris circle, collected the works of the Violet Quill Club, the writing group being honored tonight.
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New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families |
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Colm Toibim , Scribners, $26.00
If Hell exists, there is a special place there for critics and reviewers who write that a collection of essays or stories or in fact of anything is “uneven.” Clearly the author or editor or compiler believed there was an overriding, cohering theme, or concept to the book and I bet that she/he actually took a great deal longer to think about and arrange the works exactly so in a particular sequence. A lot longer than the lazy reviewer apparently did to bother to figure out what that sequence was and why it was important. Colm Toibin’s collection of essays about writers sidesteps that by making its concept immediately available in its subtitle just so no one can miss it: “Writers and Their Families;” it is against this idea, among other things, that the critic ought to judge its contents.
It’s not the tightest of concepts, and Toibin doesn’t always work it out that well. Furthermore, his editor and publisher did him no favor with that title, which smacks of the trendiest Boerum Hill authorettes. It’s false advertising. There are no new ways to kill your mother inside this book -- sorry. Nor old ones made new and prosecution-proof either. None of the writers herein actually did kill their mothers although many would have liked to. Actually, fathers are more often targeted than mothers, and reading some of these essays, believe me, you will be, as I was, rooting for the son for to get out the ax.
John Butler Yeats, father of poet William Butler and artist Jack Yeats looms high on the list. A man of Cyclopean ego, he became a painter when one son succeeded in that field, and then switched to being a poet and playwright when son Willy succeeded in that area. Worse yet, he insisted that his famous son read, comment upon, correct and then agent his plays around Ireland, while he lazed about in New York City saloons being semi-famous. Homicidally annoying! No wonder Yeats eventually gave up on the Irish and married an Englishwoman named George. I might have myself.
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IN WHICH THE AVERAGE OF THE PARTICULAR IS EQUAL
TO THE SPECIFIC: AND INDEED IN SEVERAL CASES PERILOUS
by Felice Picano
. . . seven, eight, nine people in front of me. There were fifteen when I arrived. That's progress. Two seventeen p.m. now. I've already been here for fifteen minutes. Only two minutes late to be here. Could this be the line for those who came -- or rather those who were supposed to come -- at two o'clock? Or is it, somehow, for others. Those due later. Say, at two-fifteen? Am I on the right line?
Only one line. Must be the right one.
No, time isn't what matters in these situations. It's something else. It's . . . .
Ah! Another person has left the line and gone up to the clerk's window. Clerk number one, I call him, and not only because he is one of two, or because he is the first of the two clerks, that I noticed when I arrived, although that alone would make sense and be significant for him to warrant the name, wouldn't it? And after all, he is straight ahead off this line, while the other clerk, number two, evidently, is kind of off to one side, which is I suppose why I only noticed him later on.
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by Felice Picano
Both women had stepped away from the table. Lizabeth, his agent, to the restroom, Andrea Kelton, the editor who'd just said the words to make him float on air while seated still on the big moderne banquette, had received a phone call from her office, and had wandered off somewhere at the far end of the restaurant trying to get better wireless reception. Leaving Niels LLewellyn alone to sit and gloat. Around him: the delicate tinkle of crystal and silver against porcelain in the overpriced eatery, and it's otherwise artful sonic decor of swirling waters covering the multi-million-dollar deals being proposed and sealed by the industrial and media movers and shakers about the big, posh, water-hushed room.
It was something to savor, as had been Kelton's words, "this is unquestionably your breakthrough book. We're so proud to be involved!" Followed rapidly by further indications of how proud they actually were, including the stunning figures of the enormous first printing the company had settled upon, the pre-publication acceptance as a "main selection" by the book club, with its own concomitant huge printing, and even -- he was to expect it as soon as this week -- an unprecedented further advance upon his advance of a year past, actual cash more than double what he'd received, as though confirming the success of a novel not yet in print, never mind one liable to ever succumb to the vagaries of the marketplace.
Lizabeth returned first, and confirmed the second advance and pre-sale, and huge printing all meant there were to be no vagaries of the marketplace at all now. They -- she and he, together for twenty-six long years, through wheat and chaff -- had been elevated, as though on an enormous dose of morphine, a good half foot so far above the buy-and-sell mentality that had so enclosed them all of their professional and personal relationship. Niels was now about to become a "personage," and she too, at least in the "industry" a correlative mini-personage. They toasted each other's good sense and tenacity and lifted a glass edge toward whatever literary gods there still might be in this ghastly age, to help them ever onward.
Then Kelton was back, closing the phone and saying, "The advertisements are set now for a national vend. Six major newspapers and three magazines," and Niels sank back into the banquette and listened almost as though he were not the major reason, but instead some hanger on, or better yet and ironically, given his age, a child, as the glories of his immediate future were trotted out in all the brightest colors with metaphorical pennants excitedly set to fly in front of him.
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Montreux Jazz Festival –1976 –Nina Simone |
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for ClassicalTV.com
The nearly breathless phone was from my High School friend Jerry Blatt, Bette Midler’s manager. Nina Simone was in town and would be playing one night only at the Village Vanguard. It was by invitation only and I should tell Art D’Lugoff or whoever was at the door that I was with Bette. Simone, that great singer/pianist/composer, had been battling the I.R.S. and had fled to the Caribbean in 1973 and then taken up residence in France. This trip to New York and the one night concert was totally hush-hush.
The Vanguard was packed and excitement filled the air. Looking only a bit older then when I’d last seen her at the Newport Jazz Festival, almost twenty years before, Simone entered the room, dressed head to toe like an African priestess. “Hello friends,” she said. She was alone, without her famous band. She sat at the piano which had defined her life from when she’d been a child prodigy in North Carolina through her years as a classical pianist at the Julliard School to today. In the midst of one of her jazz/soul concerts Simone was known to toss off a perfect minute-long Bach Gigue or Debussy Etude. But then when Nina Simone was on stage, it wasn’t just a concert, it was a happening, a visitation, a revelation, a political lesson, and a communion. This night would be no different.
She began her concert with standards: "Someone to Watch over Me," "My Baby Just Cares for Me," and “My Funny Valentine,” mentioning other Jazz musicians. Then she stopped, as though receiving a communication from Beyond, and began caressing the piano keys in what I knew was the intro to her cover of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Except tonight the opening word was extended, riffed on, scatted, moaned, and suffered through for maybe four minutes. By the time she had reached the second word, I’ll bet everyone in the club understood what it meant to be a person of color in America.
Simone didn’t even wait for applause but sailed into "Little Girl Blue" then “Mississippi Goddam”, and “Four Women.” Ending that set with her trenchant :"I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free." It had been an extraordinary journey into her and our heart of darkness. Then she was gone.
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