Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer #16: The Old Man Sang the Blues

After a brief spell out, I began to write stories about Sossity Chandler again. "The Old Man Sang the Blues" plugged into my love of blues. I play the blues. I've studied them, lived them, and listened to them for years. I think I do it pretty well. A couple of times I played them in a hookah lounge and coffee bar where the audience was primarily African-American. After three pieces by Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson, and Son House, more than one African-American came up and expressed appreciation; one guy said, "Hey, man, I really like the way you play the blues." Blues is an American art form with a beauty and subtlety I think is unrivaled in popular musical forms.

Sossity, my character, does the same. One night in her struggling years, she plays a rough bar in a small town in central Indiana. At intermission, a man invites her to his table and buys her a drink. She is astonished and thrilled to find out he is River Coleman, a bluesman she venerates and whose style has influenced how she plays guitar. She does a couple of his songs during the second half of the show and talks with him. He comments, "Girlie, if I was your age again, I’d be using all my charms to win you over." Her reply:  "If you were my age, you wouldn’t have to try very hard." This exchanged becomes significant later in the story.

Sossity writes Coleman, who is old, not very well off, 
and dependent on relatives. She visits him

when she can. After she makes it big, she supports him and, when he falls ill, arranges for medical attention. He dies and, in appreciation for her care and love, leaves the rights to all his songs to her in his will. Sossity publishes them, studies them, and records an album of her doing his songs. She lectures on his guitar style and mode of songwriting. She does a presentation on him at a blues seminar at Oxford University. This is where the trouble starts.

An attractive young couple related to Coleman appears and tell Sossity they have a legal claim to his music. They own a song he wrote that is not included in the catalog Sossity has. Their legal claim is that Coleman gave her rights to his "complete works" and she does not have the complete works. Therefore, the will is nullified and the rights will revert to them. She asks her lawyer if this is true. He tells her that in the real world such a claim would be preposterous, but in the world of the legal they have a strong case. Crestfallen, she contemplates what to do, remembering how she cared for Coleman because his relatives would not, showed him love and respect in his older days, and championed his music. Now she faces the threat that the music she promoted will be torn from her by a legal technicality.

At night she sleeps. In her dream, she is young, in a club in Harlem, sitting at the table of a young,handsome River Coleman. But she is also there as her present self. The modern Sossity is present within the 1950s Sossity and both are aware of each other. She is able to have an exchange with herself:

            “You coming to my place after the show?” [Coleman asks}

            “Sure I am.”

            “That’ll put some spark into what I play tonight.”

            “What you play tonight will put some spark into me.”

            Good answer, Sossity thought. My fifties self can get her game on pretty well—comes from playing in bars and getting hit on so much.

            Comes from being a lady, her other self answered, which is something you are not.

            Sossity withdrew more in order to observe and experience.

            “How are the gigs coming along?” she asked.

            “Good. I’m booked pretty much for the rest of the year and with some high-class shows. And Bluesville Records is thinking about giving me a recording contract.”  

            “That’s sweet.”

            “I’m doing a new song for you, Sossity. I just wrote it tonight.”

            “What is it? What’s it called?”

            “You’ll find out.” He squeezed her thigh.

            The jazz band played a half hour. River excused himself and went backstage to tune up.

            He’s quite a man, Sossity told herself.

            At least we can agree on that, her other self answered, puffing her cigarette.

Sossity's 1950s Self

Jorge Luis Borges’s fabulous story, "The Garden of the Forking Paths," tells us there are infinite possibilities to life. Sossity sees a way her life could have gone and, in another world, did go. One of my friends, who helps me edit, says this confused him. Maybe, but the concept of talking to another you from another life that exists in another realm of possibility seemed cool. We can, and perhaps do, live multiple lives. Sossity, in her dream, stumbles into one where she realizes what she said to River Coleman the first time she met him.

When she wakes up she finds a copy of the missing song, written in longhand, beside her bed. Coleman's relatives no longer have a case as Sossity does indeed have his complete works. As she plays that night at Oxford, she senses he is near. Love, she often told herself, is stronger than death.

"The Old Man Sang the Blues" is available in a print book you can get on the internet, an anthology titled Dreamspell Goddess. Lots of good stories contained therein.

For more information on books and goodreads, check out my Writer's Page. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of my stories are about music. The story Strange Brew is about a rock star in the 1970s who likes the blues, gets to open for the Rolling Stones a couple of time but happens to meet a mentally unbalanced witch who falls in love with him and transports him back to the time of Robert Johnson and Kokomo Arnold. Now there is another blues singer named Kokomo Dave. Here's some footage of him (of me) playing blues at the a local farmer's market:  Kokomo Dave Landrum. (I don't really play under that name, but for this it just seems like a good handle.) Listen to him play. He's pretty good.

I would love to hear your comments. Blues? Does anyone play? Who is your favorite figure from the blues world?

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #15: Mother Earth and Pretentious Seminarians, or "The Gaia Contract"

 

Gaia

I began to run dry on story ideas for my ongoing character and started to write tales without her benevolent presence—without the subject of music, a thing I know a lot about;  without the struggles and ironies of being a musician;  without the conflicts one runs into when playing gigs.  But there are other things going in the world, and the past always generously supplies. I came up with the idea for a story called "The Gaia Contract."  The past supplied again.

I attended a college that had a seminary attached to it. Seminarians, training for ministry, can be good, kind, thoughtful people; but they can also be pretentious prigs. And the pretentious ones are the ones you remember. What struck me as annoying is that the seminarians I knew were so—well, Shakespeare would have called them "precise." To be a "precisian" in his day was to be someone who had an extremely narrow theological approach and would not vary from it at all. A precisian's beliefs were set in stone and any slight variance, any open-minded interpretation, any deviation from what they considered the orthodox norm was off-limits to their thinking.

I knew one guy who wouldn't let his kids watch cartoons because cartoons presented a false picture of God's creation:  animals can't talk. Another told me he never read Shakespeare because Shakespeare was a moral relativist. A line in Hamlet said, "There is nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so."  It was pointless to try to say that cartoons were harmless entertainment, like fairy tales, or that something Shakespeare has a character say does not necessarily reflect his personal views on a matter. But arguing with these pastors-in-training proved a pointless endeavor. They were impervious to other viewpoints.

One friend was so pious he would 

never call a stretch of winding

road outside of town "the Devil's backbone." Everyone around there used the nickname, but he probably thought using the Devil's name to characterize landscape constituted something evil. He did not celebrate Christmas, Halloween, or Easter, saying there were holidays with pagan roots.

As I thought on this, a story formed. What if someone ran up against a pagan god or goddess and got obnoxious with them? In my story, the character of Bob becomes hypercritical of an organic farm called Gaia Farms. And the people there, neopagans, worship the ancient goddess of earth and soil. Bob tells the narrator they sacrifice animals. He replies they are vegans. Bob insists that in ancient times, Gaia's followers spilled human or animal blood on the furrows of fields to ensure good crops. Bob eventually becomes pastor of a small church near the farm.

The narrator gets a call that Bob has been killed. An automobile accident severs an artery in his leg. Leaving a trail of blood, he crawls across the fields of—you guessed it—Gaia Farms while a worship of the goddess is going on. The people try to help him, but it's too late. When the wife in the couple that owns the farm starts to make a disclaimer, the narrator holds up his hand and says she doesn't need to say anything. It was an accident. But, at the same time, it's not good to bad-mouth Mother Nature.

The story was an ironic take on closed-mindedness and pretense. It got published in decomP magazine. I read, a week later, that a site on the internet rated decomP as one of the ten best literary sites on the web, which encouraged me (and boosted my ego, I will admit).

So I was not writing songs about music or about Sossity Chandler, my ongoing character. Maybe I had become too dependent on her. What followed was a series of stories that went off in new directions. More on this to come.

Here is a link to read "The Gaia Contract."

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Summer reading:  What do the Brothers Grimm have to say for science fiction?  Read my novella, Mother Hulda.

I would love to hear your comments and observations. Have you ever run up against pretentious people?  Written about them? What did you say?

Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer, #14: Writing As Revenge and Healing

Everyone has heard the old joke, "Don't get on the wrong side of a writer or they'll write you in as a character." It's true. John Gardner did not like the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, so he makes a character in his novel, Grendel—the character is Grendel himself—spout off and espouse that philosophy. If you know anything about Grendel from Beowulf, which Gardner's novel is based on, you know he was not a particularly likeable creature. Neither is Gardener's character and he becomes, in effect, a surrogate Sartre. Other examples exist, and one existed for me. Now, a certain amount of gleeful ill-will enlivens making a crappy character out of a person who has done you wrong. But doing can also be a lesson in life. It comes from recognition of someone's stupidity or egotism, and yet is written, like all good satire, in order to correct.

My story, "InnerSpace," is about Sossity Chandler, my ongoing character. She comes to a lounge called InnerSpace to do a fundraising concert. Before becoming a rock superstar, Sossity had played in the lounge and had been irritated by the host who did the shows, named Dallas. One night he comes on to her, and she has decided she'll go along with him, until he asks her, "So, do you want to spend the night with a future rock star?" Sossity almost laughs at him and says she has to go. A few weeks later, she asks if he would like to play blues. He agrees but, both times, backs out at the last minute, saying his guitar is messed up and he can't get it in tune. She realizes he had no intention whatsoever of playing blues with her and decides he is not worth her time. Later, Sossity makes it as a rock star. Dallas doesn't get the big break and remains a local player.

Once I asked a musician twice if he wanted to do some blues. Both times he agreed, and both times he backed out at the last minute. A girl told me he had asked her if she "wanted to spend the night with a future rock star" after I told her my story of him backing out of a blues jam. The guy went on to pursue a career as a rock star but never made it. Out of annoyance and amusement, I decided to write him up as a character.

Sossity plays a gig with the same guy years later. When she does a blues number, he is not able to keep up with her, gets the rhythm all wrong, and can't do a lead break when the time comes. She realizes he is an inferior musician. His arrogance toward her was designed to cover up his incompetence as a musician. He miffs all the five blues numbers they do together. Sossity covers for him. She also has an epiphany, a moment of enlightenment.

I think it was Captain Kangaroo (that great philosopher) who said that misbehavior by a child is not a challenge but a cry for help. I've often wondered if the same is true about arrogance, bullying, egotism, and snarkiness. Maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time these things are a camouflage for inadequacies people feel; or cover-ups for what they know is true but don't want to admit. Dallas is not a good musician. He can't play blues. He can't keep rhythm. His façade of superiority has been built to hide the fact. His failure to succeed in the musical world is proof of this. Sossity realizes as much and sees it as a learning experience. Though chagrined by his past misbehavior, she tells her boyfriend as they settle down to bed that night, "'He's a real jerk-off but I feel bad for him.'"

Writing is said to be therapeutic. It's a way to get bad things out of you. For years, when I was learning the craft, I did "morning pages" as suggested Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. When I wrote about certain phases of my past, I astonished myself at how the writing so easily turned angry, vulgar, and resentful.

It's not good to be angry. It's even worse to be angry and not know you're angry. 

Writing those pages, and writing stories, got the anger out of me. Remembering those mild insults from an ego-driven musical want-to-be who never made it big and never will supplied the material for the story, yet not in a gleeful, vindictive way. It's sad that people are like he was back then. The same thing can be said for people who displayed less-than-ideal attitudes in graduate school. A lot of them are detritus now as well. The stellar scholarly projects they thought they would do never materialized. Those in writer's group who arrogantly criticized my early work are still in writer's group and have published nothing. And so it goes. Writing can get these hurts out. At the same time, it creates healing rather than anger.

"InnerSpace" appeared in 34^th Parallel, which is a print magazine. That story marked the first time I got my name on the cover of a magazine. You can order a hard copy or get it online.

ShadowCity is a great summer read.

Other titles are available.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #13: Wherein I Write a Real, Genuine Horror Stor

In an earlier post, I said that I did not write what is called "dark horror" and that the stories I do that fall in that genre are mostly "soft horror"—with a happy ending and one where the evil forces are defeated and the good guys win, though it might be a hard-fought and costly battle. I did do one story that is more traditional, where the evil creature dominates and the protagonist is captured by a sinister tormentor in the end of the tale.

I like to write about people who teach literature. Of course, it's what I've done for a living many years, and Hemingway said write about what you know. A literature teacher, Scott Sheridan, meets an attractive woman, Lucinda Arnold, at a book sale. Scott likes his work, but he is vexed by the politics, the bullying, and the egotistic blathering of those who have rank on him in the Literature Department—in other words, I paint an accurate picture of what it's like to work in the academic world!

He and Lucinda talk about books, read together, and, 

soon, are sleeping together. It's a nice relationship. Scott is up for tenure has is nervous because a capricious colleague named Pauline who outranks him is insinuating she might block his tenure—meaning he will have less money and less security. Her reasons are simply that she has power over him and enjoys exercising it and watching him squirm (as often happens in the academic world). Lucinda visits him is introduced.

They talk about Chaucer. Pauline mentions the "Reeve's Tale" one of the Canterbury Tales and notes that the main character in it has a "boil" on his leg. Lucinda corrects her: it's "The Cook's Tale," not "The Reeve's Tale," and it's not a boil. Pauline insists she is right. Lucinda recites a line: “Greet harm was it, as it thoughte me, / That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.” She says a "mormal" was an abscess, a sore that would not heal. Pauline insists Lucinda is wrong and mocks her, saying since she works in a bookstore at least she's around books a lot. Scott is amazed at how accurately she pronounces the Middle English words. Later on, a colleague says he has seen Lucinda somewhere but can't quite recall where.

Charles Dickens

Soon Pauline gets a lesion on her face. It won't heal, spreads, and she dies of infection. Another hostile colleague begins to gain weight so much that before the tenure hearing he is confined to a wheelchair. His obesity necessitates knee surgery. With two hostile colleagues gone, Scott sails through his tenure hearing. Lucinda also begins giving him to books. He reads, they talk about the books, which gets her sexually excited, and they make love. When he fails to finish a book on time, she gets cross and says she will see him when he gets it read.

Soon, too, his friend Mike says he has figured out where he saw Lucinda before and shows Scott a photograph of several Victorian writer's, including Charles Dickens. Behind him, smiling, hands on his shoulders, is a woman who looks like Lucinda's twin. He thinks it must be an ancestor; she is wearing a large onyx ring Lucinda wears, but he knows it could be a family heirloom passed down to her.

After he tells Lucinda, they talk books and go to bed, as usual. He has noticed that their lovemaking often follows the contours to what they have read. Tonight they read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a violent and rather grim text. Their embrace is violence and dark. When he turns to face her after post-coital dozing, she tells him she is indeed the women in the photo, has lived a long life, and stays alive by means of books she had lovers read to her. He dismisses it as psychosis, but she proves her statement to him in a most unpleasant fashion:

The dim light around her quivered and she in a dark flash she changed. Her skin became green, her eyes feline and red, mouth fanged, fingers claws, hair writhing like snakes.  He tried to get up, but her arms held him down with superhuman strength. Fire flashed from her eyes and her tongue, cloven like a snake’s, shot out at him and left a track of foul-tasting slime from his chin to his nose. He tried to scream but fear had paralyzed him so he could not make a sound. 

Then she was herself again.

 Since he doesn't seem quite convinced, she then transforms into a blob-like, slimy creature was oily pink skin, a shapeless mouth, and tentacles. Scott is convinced. She is succubus who thrives not off of sex but off of reading. He has become her captive. He dares not disobey her. She tells him she has had lots of men in her care:  Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and others. And, she reminds him, she eliminated the two colleagues who threatened his tenure. He needs to be thankful. She tells him, "I am your friend and lover, Scott.  Don’t be afraid of me.  You don’t need to be—as long as you keep reading.”

She leaves. Stunned, shaken, Scott begins the book she has left him to read:  Bag of Bones by Stephen King. It is 800 pages long. But he has no choice. He begins reading as dawn breaks over the horizon.

I don't like writing dark horror. I don't like to see the monsters win. But, it is a good exercise. You have to know how write in all sorts of genres. And the market for this sort of horror is good. Negative capability enables one to see many facets of a matter without necessarily being committed to one. So it is with me and dark horror.

For titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Daemons, possession, the occult? Look at The Prophetess. Horror from the New Testament! Really!

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #12: Art and Inspiration

Flaming June by Sir Frederich Leighton

One of the great events of my life (and by this you will get to see what a geek I am) was visiting the Tate Museum in London. Art I had seen in glossy picture books, in encyclopedia articles, and on the internet, was suddenly there before me in all its glory. When I say that, I don't simply mean it was glorious and beautiful, though it was. The color and texture of a painting can never be fully expressed in a reproduction, no matter how good the photography or dense the pixel matrix might be. An example I saw was Frederic Leighton's painting, Flaming June. I had seen posters of it. A friend of mine has a reproduction of the work in his living room. But when I looked on the work itself, amazement struck me. The colors knocked my eyes out! It glowed and radiated color. No copy I had beheld came even a little close to conveying the richness of the painting from 1895.
.

It inspired me so much that, a couple of days later, on the flight back from England, I began writing.

I have a particular gift that I can write most anywhere and at any time when I have an idea. Author Louis L'Amour once said he could write on a bus or train or in the middle of Times Square. I can do that as well. Distractions don't bother me. In fact, they help. My brain welcomes minor distractions, background sounds, and "grey noise." One of my friends clarified it for me once when she said she liked to write and plan in public places where there is background noise because, "I have monkeys running around in my head. If the monkeys have something to listen to, they quiet down." I began writing on the airplane.

I write in longhand. Sitting next to my dear and loving wife, on that eight-hour flight from Heathrow to Pearson International Airport in Toronto, I began writing a story about Sossity walking through a small private museum and running into the ghost of Jemima Martindale, a woman artist from the 1700s, little known, who did capable art and ended up committing suicide. Sossity is intrigued. She later meets Jemima at the Tate and learns her story. She wanted to paint, her husband forbade her. Eventually, she went to Saint Ives, England, learned to paint, and also got pregnant. She has the child, but after her husband kills her lover in duel, she hangs herself.

Saint Ives, England

Sossity goes to a museum in Saint Ives and meets Rosie, a docent studying to be a painter who gives tours of the museum. They find a painting, Andromeda, by Jemima Martindale. Sossity discovers, to her chagrin, that it has been sold. But she feels something there she must investigate. She talks Rosie into letting her into the museum at night. Jemima appears and instructs Sossity to remove a board on the back of the frame. Behind the painting are Jemima's drawings and her journal as well. She also learns Rosie is a descendent of the son Jemima had out of wedlock. Sossity takes the documents.

She wanted to buy the painting, but since a German art dealer has already closed the deal on it, she is stymied in this. Jemima comes to the rescues, haunts and torments him, until he asks to get out of the contract. Sossity buys the painting. She also arranges to have Jemima's diary published. At the same time, a historian discovers the diary of the doctor who did the autopsy on Jemima Martindale and who was bribed by her husband to cover up the truth. He reveals it was a suicide. The two documents spark interest in Jemima and her art. Soon she is the focus of study and re-evaluation. Her work is saved from obscurity by this. Sossity keeps the painting in her home and, when she looks at it, feels the influence of Jemima, who has finally gone on her rest and her reward.

Art can inspire. In fact, art has inspired me as much as reading has. Poet Scott Cairns once remarked that he often gets ideas for poems by reading theological books or lives of the saints. He once quipped that someday he'll actually finish one of those books without the interruption of inspiration for a poem during the reading. I feel the same way about art. I always carry a moleskin when I got to a museum. Ideas for poems or stories inevitably following looking at art.

Many things can provide ideas for stories. Reading is the most common thing. Walking in nature is another. Art, a visual medium, can do the same. But I've found it doesn't work as a source of ideas, inspiration, or as a starting point, when viewed online or in a book. You have to be there. You need to see the vitality the artist put into the work. Then it comes alive. 

Has art ever inspired you to write a poem or a story?

Do you think viewing art is a pathway to creation of other works of art?

Is printed art or art reproduced on line equal to the actual work of art?  What is your experience in this?

The story appeared in the journal, Monday Night, still in print.  Here a link to it. I think it's a pretty good tale--for being written on an airplane crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

For more books on art, love, and the supernatural check out my Writer's Page.