[sic]: A Memoir (25 page)
Authors: Joshua Cody
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Although it must be noted that E major, with its prickly four sharps, is a key seldom used by European composers of the "common practice" period, i.e., that part of musical history that encompasses what we usually call the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, wherein mainstream composers are writing with major and minor scales, for specific instruments (i.e., the orchestra, the string quartet, the piano) rather than for voices with or without accompanying instruments, and rather than writing with a whole plethora of different kinds of scales that we've since lost. There is no major symphony or concerto in E major by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Brahms, and just one (a symphony) by Schubert. Mahler's Fourth Symphony ends in E major, but it doesn't start there; Mahler was a composer who dismantled the notion of the key as a unifying principle. However, in qualifying the final chord of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
as the greatest E major chord in European history, I may have indulged in a freefall of irrational exuberance, because Beethoven's thirtieth piano sonata is in this key. But then again, I may not have.
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Swinburne got this, as he got so much else, wrong: what the spurned (and more than a little defensive) Aphrodite says at the opening of Euripides'
Hippolytus
is actually
"
Πολλη μεν εν βροτοισι κουκανω νυμος, Θεα
,"
which roughly translates as "I am a Goddess mighty and of high renown,
among mortals and heaven alike." She goes on to introduce herself as "
Θεα κεκλημαι Κυ'πρις
," the "Goddess of Cyprus," from whose foamy shores she famously arose: "
ουρανουεσω
," "celestial Aphrodite." In other words, she's pissed.
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Similarly, I had long heard the line "Don't you know the crime rate's going up up up up
up
?" in "Shattered,"
Some Girls'
final song, as "Don't you know the
prime rate
's going up up up up
up
?" I wish it had been "prime rate." It could have been, considering the year was 1978, the very peak of the federal funds rate, and considering that Mr. Jagger attended the London School of Economics. But Mr. Jagger is referring not to inflation, but to the paranoia and vigilantism that was so emblematic of New York of the seventies; thus he's referring back to one of the album's central thematic concerns. Incidentally, I've always found it curious that the two best songs written by white people about New York—"Shattered" and Talking Heads' "The Big Country," wherein the singer, flying cross-country, peers down at "the shapes I remember from maps; the shoreline; the whitecaps; a baseball diamond" and muses "I couldn't live there if you paid me to"—not only together form the essential love/hate dialectic the city generates in each and every one of its residents, but were the final songs on albums released within five weeks of each other. (Again, I'm considering songs written by white people
about
New York; one could argue that songs like the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," Tom Waits's "Downtown Train," Springsteen's "Incident on 57th Street," Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," or Blondie's "In the Flesh" are songs about love, loss, and desire that are
set
in New York; that the Clash's "Broadway," Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer," Elton John's "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters," even "Walk on the Wild Side" and the great ones by Dylan ["Hard Times in New York Town," among so many others] are songs more about the effect New York has on a particular character or set of characters than about the city itself—the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" even speaks of the attempt to understand the "effect on man" of the
New York Times
—and I would not say that about "Shattered," since the narrator is so abstracted. Then again, one could not say that New York's presence in any of these examples is un-incidental. And when you start thinking about the sheer number of songs written about / set in the city—even just those written by white people, including Irving Berlin, the Magnetic Fields, Rufus Wainwright, obviously the Ramones, not to mention Sinatra, the Sex Pistols, Stephen Sondheim, Suzanne Vega—your head starts spinning. Didn't somebody say that no city appears in more songs?)
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Notting Hill, a fashionable section of London, was also the scene of some particularly nasty race riots in the late 1950s, which began when a bunch of white, working-class hooligans attacked a young, white Swedish woman whose boyfriend was Jamaican. The woman, whose name was Majbritt Morrison, wrote a memoir on the incident called
Jungle West 11
.
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Look it up! Hint:
Cantos!
Not too far in! Go for it!
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I mean you can look it up online, but this was the kind of bookshop where the owner started a James Joyce society and the first guy to join was T. S. Eliot. And the comedian Woody Allen said that the Gotham Book Mart was "everyone's fantasy of what the ideal bookshop is." And if the store had once safeguarded and distributed banned books by Arthur Miller and Anaïs Nin, and if your girlfriend is somewhat intrigued by Anaïs Nin, and if you're both so young (too young, was the problem partly, what on earth can one do about that?) and enjoying conversations and flying into Manhattan, and if the Gotham Book Mart is a few thousand feet below, and if you're holding her laughterloving hand, and she's wearing black knit stockings, then you might understand why Woody Allen uses the words "fantasy" and "ideal."
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My dad's referring to the poet John Crowe Ransom, his mentor at Kenyon College. My father went to a couple of different colleges but never finished a degree. Ransom wanted him to stay and finish his degree, but my dad was restless. He told me that in their last conversation, he told Ransom that maybe he'd come back, and asked him if he'd still be there. "Oh, I'll be here," Ransom said, a bit wanly.
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You know what I mean? It's like Michelle Pfeiffer's frankly god-awful performance in this movie the father of another ex-girlfriend of mine directed, an otherwise sublime adaptation of Edith Wharton's
The Age of Innocence
, where the only way she can play a scene, apparently, is to rush through the door after having raced up six flights of off-camera stairs. But that woman is another story: that's when I was no longer simply dreaming of recovery: that was sad too, and also not only.
