I Was Doin' Allright

 If you click the above image you'll hear one of my favorite songs of all time, from the master, Dexter Gordon, who starred in the movie 'Round Midnight

Which, if you haven't seen, and you even remotely like jazz, you oughtta. OMGosh it's a great film.

Where I am these days we're heading into what they have dubbed June-Gloom. It's the last cool respite before summer hits Los Angeles. When I lived on the East Coast I was seldom a fan of rain, but in Los Angeles, rain, gloom, it's sort of for pretend, not real, like so many other things, and you can put on your role for the day, whether it be like Singing in the Rain, or Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon, another favorite jazz album of mine.

When I began writing, I was probably in third grade, and started writing skits along the lines of my two skit heroes at the time, Lilly Tomlin and Flip Wilson. My skits starred either a Charlie Chaplin like character, or a crotchety old lady years ahead of Momma from Carol Burnett, but just as mean. Both characters were incredibly clumsy, and I was (I guess) good at falls, ridiculous, and I used to rope my friends into performing them with me (they were always the Abbotts to my Costello), and my teacher, Miss Morrison, probably as tall and blond as a woman could be, and my ideal of perfection, always let me perform them in the class. In my early 40s I found my report card from her class, and it had something written in it about my grades not being what they should be, and me being down, and was there anything she could do. I remembered, in a flash, that was the year my sister was born, and my father was off with a girlfriend, and my mother was not coping, and my brother was discovering how alcohol and weed could help with parents like that, and I was writing comedy. Or, should I say, comedy gold. Am I right? 😉 I remember the class loving it, but also not being picked for the dodgeball team until last, so it was probably a mixed bag. 

In high school, and during my BA degree, I was writing short stories and plays, not for sharing, except with my teachers, and, in the 80s in Philly, who did you share your one-act plays with anyway? My favorite playwright may have been Eugene Ionesco

and I think my favorite play was THE RHINOCEROS, and I remember one summer directing it in the park at my local library (my friends taking the parts), to a crowd of eights, or maybe nines; there might have been nine people there. I believe one friend wrote music to go with it that she played on her electric piano, and the library wondered why they'd set up the stage.

There is a certain can-do attitude I seem to have had my whole life that I can't quite seem to shake which is probably why I'm swamped with a publishing company being run by two hapless fools who love reading, but that's for another day.

At some point after college, working with people with developmental disabilities, but having no where to go career-wise, and though I loved the people, the paperwork of social work will drown you and is boring as f~, I made the move to grad school. And in grad school, at my little suburb college that was mostly for jocks who wanted to become gym teachers, there happened to be one heck of a teacher, poet Christopher Buckley. There are two Christopher Buckleys who write(go figure), but this one is mine. And, because it was so small, it offered poetry in the fall, and fiction in the spring. And I (aside from some filthy limericks), had never written poetry. And so I needed to write some poetry, People.

And that is where I turned to my new obsession (having moved on from Eno, Bowie, and Iggy) jazz.

I don't know how I found jazz, but it was just what I needed for my poetry, very specifically, and for my writing in general.

It's about the music, and how the writing gets done. I'm obsessed with music. I tortured my poor child on the ride to school this morning with the following: Suzanne Vega, Beatles, Radiohead, Tracy Chapman, Nirvana,  and Death from Above 1979. I was trying to teach her something about music and mood. She said that none of them were bad, and none of them were good either. A diplomat.

But because I am so obsessed with music, if I can sing it, I will sing it, and when I am singing someone else's words, I cannot write my own.

And, so jazz. Not as dramatic as classical, not dentist-office or The Living Strings, though I have two of their albums too. And not modern jazz. The old, with brushes on the drums kind of jazz. And it can be light, like Brubeck, or heavy, like Davis, or somewhere nice and worn down in the groove, like Dexter Gordon.

My very first poem I wrote was about jazz, actually, about how streetlights, at night, when you're in the car, are a type of jazz, familiar and improvisational all at the same time, and they mark out time as you drive, especially if you drive over the New Jersey highways that have the gaps in them so that the car bumps, dah dah dum, dah dah dum.... and on you go, excited, or bone weary, maybe warm in your body, or gone from it: in the clouds looking down on your own route home. My first poem began life as a short story, but it was about atmosphere more than plot, and I had been unable to finish it. Then Buckley gave me one week to hand in a poem, and there you have it. It was three pages long. I remember, when it was my turn, sitting in the workshop, to read the poem. There was like 30 of us there, and Chris didn't really know any of us, and we sat in a huge circle, and he looked  around the room, everywhere but me, to see who he thought had written the poem, and he never looked at me, and then finally he asked, "Who is Dianne Pearce?" And I put up my hand, and he raised an eyebrow at me, and his face crunkled, and I thought I was already failing. And after class he stopped me to introduce himself, and tell me that I had written a good poem, and to ask if I could keep it up. And for Chris I could keep up anything. And he laughed in my actual face a few times when I wrote crap. No one was precious, nothing was precious, but the words on the page. That also helped. It's the honesty that makes us love someone, not the gifts. Or the honesty is the gifts. Who knows? I started studying poetry anyway folks, dropped fiction for quite some time and plays all together, all because my college offered poetry first. Well, and Chris, and jazz. Maybe poetry is how I can make music.

Jazz, and especially my guy Dexter, helps all of my writing. It keeps me conscious of my own pacing and my own loose grasp of form. And it settles me down into the work, when there are so many other things calling to me, especially, now that I work as a publisher and editor, there are so many pieces better than mine calling to me, that it makes it hard to justify the space for my own writing. But Dexter is my signifier; he tells me it is my time to put my wheel in the old groove on the vinyl, and see where we get.

Does music help you at all? I'd love to hear.