Lotion and Pynchon

[Don Corathers]

Mr. Hoffman has apparently never heard of Richard Farina.

Don

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Romeo" <richardromeo at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 2:18 PM
Subject: Lotion and Pynchon


> fyi.  rich
>
> Copyright 2001 The Hartford Courant Company
> THE HARTFORD COURANT
>
>
> October 14, 2001 Sunday, STATEWIDE
>
> SECTION: ARTS; Pg. G8
>
> LENGTH: 988 words
>
> HEADLINE: GOOD ROCK STARS WRITE BAD BOOKS;
> SWITCH FROM COLLABORATION TO ISOLATION THEIR UNDOING
>
> BYLINE: WM. FERGUSON
>
> BODY:
> I had a dream that Rick Moody, the author of "The Ice Storm," was in the
> band Jethro Tull. Now, this dream is ridiculous on many levels. First of
> all, Moody would have been about 10 years old when Jethro Tull released
> "Aqualung," the band's defining moment. Second, Rick Moody is a cunning
and
> successful novelist. And, as everyone knows, no musician ever wrote a good
> book.
>
> This may sound impossible, but I think it might be true. I challenge
anyone
> to name a serious writer who first made a mark in music. I came up with
Paul
> Bowles, who wrote "The Sheltering Sky" and still considered himself a
failed
> composer. There's also John Barth, a founding father of the postmodern
novel
> who supported himself by drumming in jazz bands. (I spoke with Barth, and
he
> seemed to recall that Ralph Ellison might have played trumpet and that
James
> Joyce once considered a career as an opera singer.) But shouldn't there be
a
> whole pantheon of these guys? It isn't for lack of effort. In 1993, Pete
> Townshend outraged the British publishing world when he was granted a
> position as editor at Faber, which put out his book of short stories,
> "Horse's Neck." Townshend has since returned to writing rock operas. More
> recently, Graham Parker, Ray Davies, Mike Nesmith, Greg Kihn, Steve Earle,
> and Nick Cave -- all respected rock figures-- have published works of
> fiction. The reviews have been hostile: Earle's book is "clumsy, mawkish,
> and preachy," Parker wallows in "self-pity and curdled fancy," and,
compared
> with his work with the Kinks, Davies' book is simply "superfluous."    Why
> do good rock stars write bad books? For one thing, they're not exactly
> encouraged to write at all. John Lennon, the first of all rock-star
authors,
> was allowed to publish only under the broadest qualifications. Lennon's
> first
> book, "In His Own Write," came out just before the Beatles released
"Rubber
> Soul." This witty homage to Lewis Carroll is hamstrung not only by its
dust
> jacket -- "The writing Beatle!" it helpfully suggests -- but also by the
> Library of Congress, which files the book under "Nonsense Literature,
> English." The border between music and literature is poorly guarded, but
> those who take this as invitation to sashay back and forth do so at their
> peril. Literary tourism, it turns out, isn't cool.
>    For example: I played bass in a band called Lotion for most of the
'90s.
> We
> did OK, had a song on the radio for a while, but I still kept my day job
> working for magazines. And then, through weird happenstance, the band met
> Thomas Pynchon, the reclusive author of "Gravity's Rainbow." For reasons
> that still aren't clear to me, he agreed to write liner notes for our
second
> record. We thought it was a really funny and incongruous situation, and he
> evidently did, too. He was so generous about the whole thing, visiting the
> studio while we were recording and flattering us by occasionally taking
out
> a
> note pad to jot something down, that we were ignorant of our
transgression.
> We
> flew too close to the sun, and nobody else in the world thought it was
funny
> or charming or generous. The alternative press, almost without exception,
> lavished its derision on the 200 benign words that Pynchon wrote.
Mainstream
> magazines, sensing an avenue to the great man, treated the band with the
> clinical distaste of a doctor examining a patient with just the most
> interesting disease. How ever was it contracted?
>    But more than the will of the critics preserves the separation of
> musicians
> and authors. "Writing," Barth points out, "is essentially a solitary act."
> To this day, Barth still needs to cram wax in his ears before he can write
> (a
> habit that survives from when his children were small).
>    Writing demands an intense focus, and the rewards come only at the end
of
> the process. Music, on the other hand, gratifies the easily distracted.
Mike
> Doughty, who was the singer for the band Soul Coughing and who now
performs
> on
> his own and writes a column for the New York Press, figures musicians need
> to
> have a lot of time on their hands. "Songwriting is the sort of thing you
can
> do eight hours a day," he says. "You kind of sit around waiting for that
> third verse to finish itself. And it does."
>    This is not the case with writing. Nobody ever whiled away an afternoon
> noodling on a typewriter and staring at clouds. Even the most
insignificant
> piece of prose is excruciating. Trust me. And yet, we love books, and we
> love
> music. Can't we make this marriage work? I think so. For one thing, the
most
> recent generation of fiction writers grew up listening to college rock,
> literate artists like Talking Heads, R.E.M., Elvis Costello and the like.
I
> can detect this very sensibility, gently out of true with the mainstream,
in
> a
> number of recent writers. The finicky, hilarious over-explication of Dave
> Eggers had him pegged as a fan of They Might Be Giants long before Eggers
> actually collaborated with the band. (TMBG composed a "soundtrack" to the
> recent issue of McSweeney's, the literary journal that Eggers edits.) And
> for
> the record, Eggers claims to listen to music every moment when he's
working.
> Can it be long before members of bands like Belle & Sebastian or Tortoise
> grow
> disenchanted with the rock life and sit down at the computer to render the
> human condition?
>    As for Barth's legend as a musician, he estimates that he possessed "a
> not-bad amateur flair" for drumming. And yet his brief career in music --
he
> hoped to be an "orchestrator" -- had a lasting impact on his writing,
> particularly in his reworkings of mythology. "I take a received melody
> line," he says, "and arrange it to new purposes."
>    See there? The seed of postmodernism itself lies in a kernel of jazz
> syncopation.
>
>    Wm. Ferguson played bass in Lotion. His writing has appeared in The New
> York Times Magazine, Esquire and The New York Observer.
>
>
>
>
> GRAPHIC: PHOTO: (b&w), CHRIS BUCK / SPINART RECORDS
> PHOTO: (b&w)
> ; BILL FERGUSON, second from left, played bass with the rock band Lotion
> before turning to writing.
>
> LOAD-DATE: October 15, 2001
>
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