something about Richard Yates’s “Liars in Love”

Yates's superb short-story collection Liars in Love hits many of his best themes: fragile and fraught relationships, co-dependence and emotional distance, dignity and humiliation.

 

My favorite story in this collection is probably "Trying Out for The Race," in which two single mothers and their two children share a house in the suburbs. Elizabeth's daughter Nancy is close in age to Lucy's son, Russell. In one scene, Nancy kids Russel after he throws a tantrum about his mom going out for the evening. Russell, embarrassed, silently compares himself to the boy next door, Harry:

School as yet had produced no real friends for Russell, and he worried about that, but Harry Snyder was the boy next door, and so a casual, loafing kind of friendship had been easy to achieve with him. One day they were intently hunkered down over many tin soldiers in the basement of Harry's house when Mrs. Snyder came to the stairs and called down "Russell, you'll have to go home now. Harry has to come up and get ready because we're all going for a drive to Mount Vernon."

"Aw, Mom, now? You mean now?"

"Certainly, I meant 'now.' Your father wanted to get started an hour ago."

And that was when Harry went into action. In three swift, merciless kicks he sent soldiers flying in all directions, ruining formations that had been all afternoon in the making and he howled and flailed and cried like someone half his age, while Russell looked away in a wincing smile of embarrassment.

"Harry!" Mrs. Snyder called. "Harry, I want you to stop this right now. Do you hear me?"

But he didn't stop until long after she'd come down and led him tragically upstairs; when Russell crept out for home he could still hear the terrible sound of it ringing across the yellow grass.

Even so, there was an important difference. Harry had cried because he wanted his mother to leave him alone; Russell had cried because he didn't—and therein lay the very definition of a mother's boy.

That is so good. I found more perfect prose in "Saying Goodbye to Sally" when Jack, the would-be protagonist, gets sloppy drunk at a party:

Jack did his best to leave the room quickly but kept veering sideways against the near wall; then he decided it might be helpful to use the wall for support and guidance, letting one shoulder slide heavily along it while he gave his whole attention to lifting and placing his feet in the deep champagne-colored carpet. He knew dimly that Ralph had finished at the fireplace, had lurched past him muttering "Come on" and gone away into the hall, leaving him alone in this treacherously unstable but mercifully open room; he could see too that the bright doorway was very near now—only a few more steps—but his knees had begun to soften and buckle. He thought he could feel his shoulder sliding down the wall, rather than along it; then the tilting yellow carpet came slowly closer until it offered itself up as a logical, necessary surface for his hands, and for the side of his face.

These short stories exhibit all of the American master's gifts.

 

I went on a Yates binge, working my way through his bibliography after years ago having read his masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, as well as The Easter Parade and the posthumous collection, The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates. I also previously posted about Disturbing the Peace, A Special Providence, and Cold Spring Harbor.

 

Note: Liars in Love was published in 1981; Yates died in 1992.

an exercise combining some junk

Bots starve connections between systems and promises. Time burials on sidewalks under oceans. A sun-star sound skyward goes to extraordinary measures to control. Mind separates from brain, free mind brain damage.

At the creek behind the park four sightless girls bled themselves into the stream, bleeding blind we saw them arranged there unsatisfied and timing. Find the girls again.

That night we awake with ant feet, spiders for hands, we wake with these and midnight mouth, then swept into the arms of grandfather running to the emergency room through a yellow-eyed doorway.

about trying make a buck singing in public

A guy sets up a mic and sings for money out here Saturday mornings. I heard him every weekend for a while. He's a bad singer, clips all the words so he doesn't have to hold a note. He thinks his best song is "My Girl" by The Temptations. But because he's chopping off all the notes, that song only highlights his inadequacy. The original's strength is it has such strong phrasing.

a review of some San Antonio metal band

What starts off as punishing soon turns grueling

Mass of Amara's Earth-puncturing rhythm section contrasts sequences of clean, note-holding singing. That contrast, along with synths and glitches for atmosphere, is what melodic progressive metal is made of.

Most of this music isn't for me, but I appreciate parts of the young San Antonio band's second EP, "Through the Ether." Those parts include "Ascended." The verse riff is the album's coolest. Then the savage parts come one after another.

The rhythm section, with the low-end guitars and bass punctuating the drums, brings the highlights.

Melodic, progressive metal like this sounds highly produced, with silence-stripping and all. And the clean singer is not a character telling a story; they close their eyes and try like hell to hold the notes and make the rest more marketable.

Taste: there’s no accounting for it.

The band says this: "The inspiration behind the EP title, 'Through the Ether,' is derived from the infinite unconscious that we can tap into in a time when we are ready to heal a part of ourselves, as well as to acquire information about what we are capable of."

 

 

"Through the Ether" was self-released on June 14, 2024.

 

something else about the movie “The Master”

In the last scene with both Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), Dodd tells Freddie to leave him forever, saying, "Go to that landless latitude, and good luck—for if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world."

Lancaster and Freddie are drawn to each other. Lancaster suggests a few times that he and Freddie are cosmically connected, that they knew each other in a previous life. Both Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd improvise in life.

But Lancaster feels the pressure of his followers' expectations, their fragile devotion, and his determined spouse, Peggy (Amy Adams).

Freddie represents something like freedom. He is wild. He gets out of control and does not try to control others. He seems to have no views. And he claims to do what he wants.

His relationship with Dodd is Freddie's only meaningful one since before the war when he courted a young girl. The relationship with Dodd gave Freddie a taste of intimacy.

But Dodd cannot pursue life with Freddie. Freddie is too damaged, too unstable, too uncontrollable, and Lancaster has too many commitments. Moreover, Peggy will not allow it. So Lancaster will carry on without him, and Freddie will drift away alone.

Notes:

• Peggy is an ominous, constant source of pressure. She immediately puts a stop to nudity at meetings of The Cause, and she pushes him away from Freddie.
• Freddie experiences intimacy when Doris (Madisen Beaty) sings to him. And he experiences intimacy again during the Lancaster-Freddie processing scene, among others. And early in the movie, we see Freddie pretending to have sex on the beach with a woman shaped from sand; the movie ends with a shot of Freddie lying still, almost sweetly, next to the sand woman on the beach.
• Now I am patting myself on the back for my 2013 post, "about the film "The Master," noting something that is beautifully expanded on in this piece in The New Yorker: “The Astonishing Power of ‘The Master’” by Richard Brody, September10, 2012.
  

 

a music review: “Unessential Oils” by Warren Spicer, the guy from Plants and Animals

Montreal rolled in the 2000s, producing bands like Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, and Warren Spicer's band Plants and Animals.

 

"Unessential Oils," Spicer's first solo effort, represents a vibe more than a vision. Spicer said, "The process was the therapy of working through. The result is more a document than construction. It's what happened, not what I made happen."

It absolutely sounds like an album of therapeutic chilling. You put it on and soak.

See Spicer shaving in the tub? The album includes the downbeat song, "Suds." He sings, "And every day I'm trying to get back to that / I'm like a monk in deep meditation / Oh, I’m safe inside—oh, inside my suds, left alone with a cold beer in a hot bathtub / Send me back to sleep, and when I get on my feet, I'll be a new man."

Spicer and his collaborators coax tracks. The quiet performances emphasize delicate, shimmering percussion.

The vocal textures the sedated music with hints of strain. Spicer sings about release and holds on to his intensity.

My favorite song is the opener, "Distrust the Magician." This sounds brutally chill.

Chords ripple under slippery drums and cymbals that sound like sun through crystal windchimes. "I'm above you now," Spicer sings, sounding painfully removed. And I love how the drums syncopate in the outro. So good.

Album single "Chameleon" features a Latin jazz rhythm and numbed chords that lift the refrain's vocal melody: "Oh babe, I love you a lot / Oh babe, I need you now / And we could have a lot of fun just putting trouble on the run / I know we've got a lot to do, and you and me are trouble at the best of times / But living is a lot of fun—hiding like chameleon."

And you can relate to the words in "Solutions to My Gloom," where Spicer meditates on the sense of doom felt even in everyday, low-pressure situations. "In fact, I like it here in the waiting room / A sensе of impending doom / scroll and creep through the punctured skin / Solutions to my gloom." This, sung to the song's breathy, layered arrangement.

 

"Don't Go to Bed When You're Mad" wakes from sedation and expands time. The instrumentation gently pulls at Spicer's wavering, detached vocal. The music is a helium-filled balloon, and his voice is the little string you hold on to. A guitar picks out meandering trails of freed melodic thoughts.

 

"Unessential Oils" is an exhale—or an attempt at one. Take a deep breath.

 

Secret City Records released "Unessential Oils" on May 31, 2024.

 

Note: I reviewed an album by Plants and Animals guitar player Nicolas Basque and his bandBibi Club and the 2020 Plants and Animals album, "The Jungle."

 

about a guy like Ernest Tubb

He wears bright orange and a slick smile. His big, blue eyes closed all the doors in the building. You look out the window and see the sky making faces like feeling the rain coming.

 

(posts) a poem, "Love Poem With Toast"

Love Poem With Toast
    —Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

 

an exercise about vertigo: "I am living in hell's dead body"

The host, made by a robot and cloned a thousand times, asked me: "Do you want to see a woman without a head?" I am living in hell's dead body. She did not die here old with us; the body stopped moving, but that is in this world only.

The younger model could not be saved emotionally and was not even physically or mentally salvageable. The girl and her fetus were in the photos, and some of the photos are still for sale.

The machine sky fell, and blood and sex were currency. We slept and cried and took drugs to get through the few remaining days after that.

The 12 Triangles cannot change shape, but the silver seller's creation is 40 to 3 for new life, and to 4 without ego.