Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction
Next week, we’re playing our first gig at Piano’s on the Lower East Side. I’m not sure what the sound will be like but I do know that it’s a great club with a great atmosphere. As part of that gig, I decided to do something different and, rather than just get up there and play a show, incorporate a little theater into the show, and perhaps more broadly, the idea of the show.
To that end, we’re calling this next group of shows “An Autumn Symposium”. At first, that’s all it was going to be. Just a little branding mechanism. Something to link the show that we’re playing next Wednesday and then the subsequent gig that we’re playing at Rockwood on Thursday, December 3rd at 9pm.
But then I was remembering that Bronwen, one of the singers in the band and a teacher during the day, had spent all this time a few months ago putting together a course reader for her students and the beginning of the school year. And then I was remembering the old days when John used to work at The Copy Shop and you’d go there or to the book shop above it to pick up your course reader for class and how you’d have all these photocopied pages in your hand, excerpts from books and articles, how that experience felt cool and home-made and like your teacher or professor had spent some time actually thinking about things and was leading you on this strange photocopied path through some place new.
So, anyway, I decided to make a course reader myself and I decided on two lessons for these two shows and the first lesson is going to be “Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction: Themes from Saul Bellow” and I got in touch with noted cultural historian, Frederick Pettigrew, to write an introductory essay. We had coffee on the Upper West Side by Columbia where he teaches. And I told him I was looking about some of the ideas that I had and that I was looking for some kind of introduction to the whole thing, maybe like Nat Hentoff wrote on the sleeve of some Bob Dylan records I remember. You remember those essays that people would write on records in the 60s and 70s. They’d be all beat prose and poetry. Rambling run-on sentences and you’d imagine some horn-rimmed glasses guy with a fuzzy goatee, smoking cigarettes and drinking and sleeping with his students and he’d be a person that people referred to as a “cat” and he’d frequent the jazz clubs and his apartment would be very messy and there would be books everywhere. He’d have written one great novel and then years later a spartan little book of poems and then he’d be working on some translation of an obscure German writer that you’d never heard about and your heart kind of sank when he told you that was what he was working on because it was the same old story, as they say and as you know. That story being the story of squandered youth and unrealized potential.
Doctor Pettigrew understood what I was saying and he wrote this great little essay that you’ll get to read later. And the point of the whole thing is both silly (me being weird) and somewhat serious. And it really does relate to notions of heroism in fiction and what it means and how maybe we misrepresent things second of all and first of all we tell stories to make ourselves the hero. Because we are working our way through life with this concept of heroism which is also about mortality. It’s about meaning. It’s about, “There must be a narrative here that has me doing something heroic at its climax and ultimate moment and that must be why it’s okay that I’ll die and evaporate or dissolve into the earth one day.” And then some older people reading this will perhaps scoff or laugh. Maybe a small chuckle. They’ll say, “Geez, Sam is really dark and a downer and why’s he got to be so darn melancholy.” Which is maybe true but, of course, missing the point. I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not saying, “It’s so sad that we’re going to die.” I’m saying that people have these concepts of narratives and they give their lives stories and stories have protagonists and the reasons are because the time is finite, not infinite, and we want there to be a story to our lives and a plot.
And in the midst of that are storytellers – singers and songwriters and writers and producers and creative people and also everyone – and we tell big stories and weave in larger narratives and try to make big human truths from these things and the other point of the idea, and specifically pulling from Saul Bellow, is that there are always more sides to a story than the one being presented. And life isn’t neat and doesn’t fit in boxes with brown ribbons up on the shelf in the hall closet. You can say, “Oh, that’s my youth” or something to that effect but that’s now how it works in reality. And when you do say, “Oh that’s my youth” or something to that effect, maybe you shouldn’t be trusted. Because, whether it’s a book or a song or a film or a bunch of people sitting around the metaphorical campfire, you’re still presenting just one side of that story. And it’s not good or bad. We’re all just being human. It just is. And it is and is and is.
So, anyway, that’s what we’ll be presenting in this course reader next Wednesday and there are excerpts from books I’ve been reading. One of them is Becker’s “Denial of Death” that my friend, Mary Ellen, gave me. And then others are from the Bellow books I’ve read this year. And then some stuff from Rilke because that’s always good and, as cliche as it may be, the guy dropped some very beautiful knowledge and reality in his letters. And a few other things. And the first 20 people will get a copy for free and they’ll be strange and weird and you probably won’t read all the way through but you’ll maybe pick up one or two things and then it’s also art and it will have traveled its way into your life somehow.
Enjoy yourselves, mates.
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