Harvey Pekar,  a regular guy with extraordinary talents, dead this morning at 70. Okay, not so regular. His obsessions, his cynicism, his politics, his love of the comic form, will be missed.

The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ short story issue has generated lots of comment, much of it in the why-wasn’t-so-and-so included? category, some of it in the why-wasn’t-I included? category, the best of it in the (sorta) latter category and self-deprecating in a satiric way. And, of course, there was some that made no sense at all.

While we loved and marveled at most of the stories — okay, we saw Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” as a gimmick built on two pronouns and  misleading in its intent to impart double meaning (and we love Foer’s novels) — we couldn’t help notice that none of them addressed the day’s biggest issue: the economic downturn and its effect on the lives of everyday, let alone well-off Americans. Sure, Salvatore Scibona’s “The Kid” gives us an American soldier who orphans his foreign-born  child after an ill-advised marriage. And ZZ Packer’s “Dayward”  uses Reconstruction-era black children to suggest modern-day lessons. There’s certainly poverty and displacement there. But where are the stories of a struggling middle-class? Where are the stories of homes lost, incomes destroyed, the frustrations of futile job searching, the loss of love and respect and the psychology of imposed failure? Where are this generation’s Steinbecks, Orwells, Algrens, Zolas, Lewises, Faulkners? Are we so afraid of class distinction in this country, of making someone who’s still comfortably positioned uncomfortable, that we can’t even acknowledge what’s going on right before our very eyes?

Almost all of these tales are about difficulties in relationships. Nothing is more damaging to relationship stability than economic failure and displacement. Can the most common story of our time also be the most ignored?

It’s true that this New Yorker issue included only eight of the 20 stories. We’ll be looking closely through the others for a contemporary realism that deals with more than the frustrations of party anxiety among the Hollywood wannabe set or the professional-class’ social climbing and the Porsche mechanics they left behind. Great literature, literature that changes culture and political direction, has always portrayed the struggles of common people in difficult times. The characters –and subjects — in the contemporary stories here may be what we’ve come to accept as common people. But there is no sense of what the greatest recession since the depression  is doing –specifically and in detail — to their lives. Certainly there are writers out there adressing these subjects (and no, I’m not one of them…shame). Where are the publishers with the guts to get them in print?–Cabbage Rabbit

Those of us who are not fathers or husbands understand Father’s Day through memories and envy. Neither of  those mental activities are exclusively positive, at least in the case of fathers. Even as fatherhood has evolved, its old stereotypes haunt our relationship to and understanding of the title: fathers are macho, missing and manly in all the worst sense of the world.  I remember my father, a man whose favorite pet name for me was “stupe”  second only to “dumb shit.” As Leonard Cohen sings, “It’s Father’s Day and everybody’s wounded.”

So it seemed a good time to pour quickly through Michael Chabon’s Manhood For Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son to get some insight on the profession. We know Chabon to be a smart,  entertaining writer, one who understands the tribulations of male coming of age (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)   and who has a detail-oriented eye for truth (The Final Solution: A Story of Detection). Chabon, a twice-married man with four children, also has a knack for expressing a thoroughly modern view of cultural issues.

What you’ll find in Manhood are expressions of Chabon’s own fathering in light of his childhood. (Mostly missing is Chabon’s own father — the writer’s parents divorced when he was 11 — other than a mention that dad was an obsessive collector; Chabon’s ex-father-in-law is discussed in terms of his acceptance of his son-in-law into something of a man’s club) . Much of what Chabon says is based on a kind of personal nostalgia and how some of the things he enjoyed, namely freedom, have been taken –  by him — from his kids. His essay “The Wilderness of Childhood” recalls a small patch of woods that held mystery and escape in his childhood, the kind of place that doesn’t exist or would be otherwise denied if it did exist, to his children. He laments the evolution of Legos from simple building blocks to “a strange geometry of irregular polygons, a vast bestiary of hybrid pieces, custom pieces, blanks and inverts, clears and pearlescents” that seem more about marketing than creativity. He feels badly for his children and the amount of commercial “crap” they have to put up with, some of which he saw in his own childhood.

He defines his role simply. “I’m a father. Being a hypocrite is my job,” and he proves it by using everything from marijuana to Wacky Packages. In the chapter “A Textbook Father,” one that chronicles his reaction when observing boys staring at his twelve -year-old daughter walking down a hallway, he acknowledges how difficult it is to be exceptional. “It turns nout there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland, and the ninth is exactly like the others, only more so.”

He also acknowledges that being a man sometimes means putting your children at risk. In a chapter called “The Binding of Issac,” he describes that seemingly now-forgotten November night when Barack Obama walked onto the stage at Grant Park with his family and we all began to wonder at the meaning of his victory. He sees Obama’s children as everyone’s children and the realization that their perfect innocence of pain misfortune and sorrow will someday be betrayed. (How difficult this is for the President and his children is being made abundantly clear now by shameless attacks from the right.) Betrayal is a father’s fate and something of his duty. A certain kind of honesty is required to realize this. “I have abandoned my children a thousand times,” Chabon writes, “failed them, left their care and comfort to others … or neglected their needs in the name of something I told myself merited the sacrifice. All that was in the very nature of fatherhood; it came with the territory.” It’s for this kind of insight, we read great  writers. While much of what Chabon says in this volume has been said well before, it’s these exceptional moments that make Manhood worth reading, on Father’s Day or any other.–Cabbage Rabbit

There’s been much blog ado over The New Yorker’s “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40.” Check out the gnashing here, here and here (we promise to complain more in a later post). However the writers learned their craft, they learned to write first sentences well. In fact, we found the lead sentence to be the best part of most of the stories. Clue to craft: Those with the least interesting first sentences tended to be the least interesting stories. As a service to our readers, we’ve taken the first sentence of each of the eight stories and put them together in no particular order, to make a free-association poem of a quality no more dubious than the stories themselves.–Cabbage Rabbit

Max had a name for what had happened to his son: the Accident.

The boy and his twin brother grew up on the streets of Northside,

down in the little choke valley, befouled by industry,

between university hill to the southeast and the neighborhood to the north,

College Hill, which had no college, despite its name,

only modest white houses hinting at the white suburbs to come.

The boy wore a black parka, a matching ski cap, bluejeans, and sneakers;

he appeared to be five years old; and he was weeping.

He hadn’t heard from Kate Lotvelt in two weeks. Early yet, the morning clouds,

the color of silver fox,

and Lazarus was running. Lucky diary! Undeserving diary!

People say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case.

Rereading Douglas Coupland’s  Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture reminded this baby boomer how important and, in its way, groundbreaking the book was when published in 1991. Not that it received much attention, despite its title,  at release. No major reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker or The Los Angeles Times (somebody please prove me wrong about this). Only culture critic Robin Abcarian of the LA Times seemed to catch on and then, months behind the book’s release, only in light of his second novel.

The book was different even in its design. It’s use of margin slogans and illustrations separated it from the previous generation of literature. Also in the margins were the defining terms of the times, such as  “MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who never held one.” And “NUTRITIONAL SLUMMING: Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics.” Even its off-beat size (8″x9″) made it stand out.

But writers, particularly those interested in marketing, were quick to catch on to the idea of Generation X that prior to the novel had been the province of punk rock and those unable to find a suitable label for any generation of teens that came after (and sometimes including) the boomers.

Coupland defines the subject generation  not quite a third of the way into the book when Andrew tells the story of his working at a “teenybopper magazine” in Japan and seeing the alienation of its same-age generation, those for whom the prevailing culture, as one of his Japanese colleagues puts it, “murder my ambition.”

“…shin jin rui – that’s what the Japanese newspapers call people like those kids in their twenties at the office –  new human beings. It’s hard to explain. We have the same group over here and it’s just as large, but it doesn’t have a name — an X generation — purposefully hiding itself. There’s more space over here [in the U.S.] to hide in — to get lost in — to use as camouflage. You’re not allowed to disappear in Japan.”

This disappearing act is less related to generation than to class (see “McJobs” and “Nutritional Slumming” above). Near the end of the book, Andrew sees this invisibility being shared by his entire family. He’s lit hundreds (”maybe thousands”) of candles in the family living room for the holiday celebration. The effect is revelatory, “the normally dreary living room covered with a molten living cake-icing of white fire, all surfaces devoured in flame — a dazzling fleeting empire of ideal light.” But once the candles are snuffed, life reverts to normal. And that’s when the true revelation rises.

“But I get this feeling –

“It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it boils down to the fact that we’re middle class.

“You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happiness es are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

While Coupland is credited with painting the alienation of a certain generation, he’s also defined it for all contemporary generations, a definition that speaks to class struggle and middle-class envy leading to unfullfillment. Some of this class consciousness exists in  Generation A but its alienation is a separation more from nature and emotional experience caused by a dependence on technology, much of it pharmacological. Telling stories is central to both books but there’s a difference. The stories in A are all about plot. In X, they’re all about character. In X, Coupland explains story-telling in terms of “the letter inside us,” an idea he credits to Rilke, and that “only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.” He also uses Rilke to define the separation from reality felt by the alienated, a theme that pervades both books.

Coupland’s excellent first novel, badly misunderstood when it first came out (by this dumb bunny,  too)  spawned a curse of generational considerations, mostly on the negative side of opportunity and abundance, that we can’t seem to escape. Film critic A.O. Scott bemoaned (enough whining!) this curse in a piece that references Sam Lipsyte’s timely book The Ask. Scott suggests that Generation X –those slackers — are having a mid-life crisis.  But what they’re going through — what most of us are going through — is more like Coupland’s middle-class invisibility. How can you be someone, at any age,  when no one can see you? Generation A is not only less of a novel for its failure to make the label stick (”Generation A” comes from an address given by Kurt Vonnegut at Syracuse University in 1994) but also for making its five central characters circumstantial celebrities, something that will never happen to X’s Andy, Claire and Dag, midlife crisis or not.   –Cabbage Rabbit

The death of the great pianist Hank Jones on Sunday, May 16 at the age of 91 has been followed by controversy. New York Times reporters Corey Kilgannon and Andy Newman visited Jones’ room at 108th St. and Broadway in NYC after his death and painted a picture of a spartan existence. It’s unclear whether or not the description of Jones’ living conditions in a 12 x 12 foot room were meant to invoke sympathy or make some kind of statement on the fate of older jazz musicians in today’s culture. What it did was release a barrage of negative comments.

The reporters speak of Jones “unmade bed” ( he died in a Bronx hospice), a clutter of sheet music, awards and recordings of Chopin, Debussy and Ravel. The closet was filled with “designer neck ties and sharp-looking suits” and there was a book of Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the bed stand. The Yamaha electric piano Jones used for practice sported a pair of head phones.

Some making comments took the bait: “No one commented on how sad this is. Sad that he lived alone, sad that he died alone, sad that his life of charm and sophistication (the music, the recordings, the clothes, the elegance, even in a simple room) appeared not to contain the many things most people cherish.” But many were angry. “There is something very untoward about going into this gentleman’s room less than two days after he passed away and opening up his life to the entire world, presumably before he has had a chance to be mourned and buried by his family and friends,” spoke one of the more polite. I was at first saddened, then outraged, to read the Hank Jones piece by Corey Kilgannon and Andy Newman. Why was it deemed appropriate — under any circumstance—to compromise the privacy of and report on and photograph the dismantling of a man’s life possessions; and to do so in such an-ill fitting, misleading and exploitive (sic) manner and tone. ”

There’s a lot of insight to be gained from these comments and the Rabbit encourages reading them. Especially interesting is the attempt by Kilgannon to explain his motivation (comment #34) and the following comment (#35) from renowned bassist and Jones’ collaborator Charlie Haden and wife Ruth Cameron ripping our intrepid reporter a new one (also #30). There’s a long comment from Jones’ long time manger Jean-Pierre LeDuc, an even longer one from his surviving niece and nephew and a couple from his close friends who provide context to Mr. Jones’ living conditions (#26 and #32). Seems he had a home in upstate New York, a wife who lived in an assisted care facility and frequent contact with friends and family.

The Rabbit thinks that a man as gentlemanly and graceful (like his playing) as Mr. Jones would have been confused, if not disturbed, by this attention (I was introduced to Mr. Jones once and heard him perform a handful of times). Those we knew who knew Mr. Jones spoke of him with the highest respect. He was a gentleman in all regards.

I’ve found myself projecting my own thoughts on this scenario. Though acclaimed, he was less visible in the formidable shadows of his younger brothers Thad and Elvin and never once, in true gentlemanly style, seemed to mind. Some of his most heard work was in the background–accompanying Marilyn Monroe’s famous birthday song to President Kennedy and, for some of us our first exposure to piano-playing of the type, his work at CBS, notably with the Captain Kangaroo show. Of course, the jazz audience is well-familiar with his work, considering the bulk of his recorded output dating back to the 1940s.

The New York Times story made us think of him as something of an aesthetic and ascetic, someone who lived modestly and in service to his art. Of course, this notion is completely false. Jones was anything but a recluse, traveling and performing late into his life. And he certainly wasn’t invisible to the jazz audience considering the sizable extent of his recording career, especially in his senior years, not to mention a life-long commitment to live performance .

The whole affair made us realize the power of printed stories, the importance of complete context and how much our conception of artists is connected to what we wish they were. It’s important to connect the music and the musician but it is also important to separate the two as well. As to the former, here’s hoping someone somewhere heard a full accounting from Mr. Jones  regarding his formative years in Detroit, his stints with Hot Lips Page and Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, his role of accompanist for great vocalists, his ability to record with all kinds of musicians (remember the Great Jazz Trio when he worked with Tony Williams, Buster Williams and Al Foster among many others?) his views on what’s changed between 1945 and 1995. As for the latter, here’s hoping I can find my copy of Hank Jones Live at Maybeck Recital Hall.–Cabbage Rabbit

Fortune magazine has allegedly rejected a cover illustration that Chris Ware provided. Check it out…seems it might strike a little too close to home for the pro-finance cheerleaders at Fortune. Our favorite part of the drawing? The chopper dropping cash on the 500 edifice? The Chinese off-loading dollars? Or that tea pot aboil, surrounded by bulbous, flag-waving figures? It’s hard to see all the details, even in the enlargement. Surely some capitalist will see a profitable poster opportunity here. That is, if the Fortune attorneys will allow it.–Cabbage Rabbit

With the premier this Sunday (April 11) of Treme, HBO’s new dramatic series on post-Katrina jazz in New Orleans, the Rabbit reprints his feature from the 2006 Playboy Jazz Festival program, published in June of that year (some nine months after the disaster) that focused on the heroic and self-sacrificing efforts to save New Orleans music scene. Note to friends with HBO: What are you doing Sunday night? (At left: Official poster of the 2010 New Orleans Jazz Festival; “Congo Square 2010: ‘Say Uncle, ‘ A portrait of Lionel Batiste” by Terrance Osborne”

Goin’ Home: Jazz Returns to New Orleans

by Bill Kohlhaase

–One of my pleasantest memories as a kid growing up in New Orleans was how a bunch of us kids, playing, would suddenly hear sounds. It was like a phenomenon, like the Aurora Borealis…music could come on you any time like that. The city was full of the sounds of music…”–Danny Barker quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff”s “Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It” (Dover)

Jazz is a citizen of the world. But its home will always be New Orleans.

Sure New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, not to mention hundreds of other cities around the globe, have given the music a place to hang its hat, to freshen up, to come out swinging. They’ve given it progeny. But New Orleans is where jazz was conceived, where it was born. The city has produced an endless stream of famous musicians, from Louis Armstrong to the Marsalis brothers as well as hosts of lesser known but important artists from Buddy Bolden to Narvin Kimball. New Orleans is the jazz world’s heart and soul.

Hurricane Katrina struck deep at that heart. To jazz fans, it was as if somebody had gone after their mother. As the horror stories from along the Gulf Coast began to sink in, lovers of the music, people in and out of New Orleans to whom jazz is life itself, began to ask what about the musicians? What about the clubs? What about the history?

News of the hurricane’s cultural devastation was slow to follow the headlines. Good news was tempered by bad. Though 80 per cent of the city ended up under water, many of the city’s oldest areas, from Bywater to the French Quarter to St. Charles Avenue in Uptown and Carrolton were left intact. But much of the Ninth Ward including the historic Holy Cross neighborhood, were in shambles. Musicians survived but they were scattered across the country, some with no plans or means of returning.  Clubs in the French Quarter reopened some few weeks after the hurricane. But many of them made do with rock and cover bands or no music at all. Preservation Hall survived with minimal damage. Yet, with so many musicians displaced and no audience, it stayed closed for months.

It seemed then that jazz in New Orleans might never recover. But today, with the annual Jazz Fest and French Quarter Music festivals behind us, with the reopening of Preservation Hall, with musicians returning to the city to play community events in the  streets and clubs and parks and churches, with dozens of organizations and thousands of people dedicating themselves to the cause of music in New Orleans, there is hope. The city may never be the same. But its musical spirit survives.

That spirit permeates American culture. It exists, not just in hundreds of recordings and contemporary performances of New Orleans musicians, but in all the arts, visual and written.  The city, as favorite son Wynton Marsalis has often explained, is “the original melting pot” with its mix of Spanish, French, British, West African and American people.  New Orleans jazz, as Marsalis preaches, “objectifies the fundamental principles of American democracy.”  It is not about the blues but about triumph over the blues. Its spirit resides in community and, as anyone who’s heard the Preservation Hall Jazz Band or attended a jazz funeral will attest, is all about celebration.

“New Orleans music has always been about overcoming adversity,” says Preservation Hall director and bassist Ben Jaffe. “Even during life’s most painful times, New Orleans has found a way to discover the joy in life. There’s no place, no music like it.”

Clarinetist, New Orleans native and professor of African-American music at Xavier University, Dr. Michael White, knows this joy. When he first heard the recorded music of legendary clarinetist George Lewis, sounding “like everything it meant to live in New Orleans,” his life changed. White was an upstart kid when he played his first public performance in Jackson Square with trumpeter Thomas “Kid” Valentine, a contemporary of Louis Armstrong. That experience set him on a course that hasn’t changed since.

“New Orleans is the music’s spiritual center,” White declares. “It has a magical quality. Maybe it comes from the West African tradition, but there’s something in the music that’s very powerful, that can change lives. The spirit of this music can make you reinterpret your life, it makes you feel liberated, it gives you a true sense of freedom.”

It didn’t take long for that spirit to assert itself in the aftermath of Katrina. The jazz community came together just three weeks after the disaster in the “Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert,” a nationally-televised event from New York’s Lincoln Center which raised over $2 million in a single night to help New Orleans area musicians and musical organizations. Money continues to come in from sales of the concert recording on Blue Note Records.

The good news, like a cornet solo, has since continued to build. Early this year, it was announced that the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, spurred by support from Festival Productions and AEG Louisiana Productions, as well as major corporate sponsorship from Shell Oil Company, would go on as usual, putting an end to rumors that one of America’s largest and most important musical gatherings would disappear. Other corporate sponsors–a list ranging from American Express to New Orleans food producer Zatarain’s–jumped on board. Despite the exodus of local musicians and a host of big names including Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Ani DiFranco, the somewhat trimmer Festival announced that 90 per cent of its acts would be from Louisiana.

Charitable efforts blossomed. Within days of the disaster, Jaffe and his wife Sarah founded the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund. “I started getting calls right away from musicians asking about money, asking about work. We moved the guys in our band to New York and it became apparent just what had been lost. Five of the nine members came in borrowed clothes. They couldn’t even access their ATM accounts. They’d lost their homes, their cars, their instruments; everything. I knew that we were in a unique position to help the music community.”

By of the end of April when this story was written, the Relief Fund had collected nearly $1 million and had distributed some $600,000 to some 800 musicians. Preservation Hall reopened during Jazz Fest, with a benefit for the Fund. “Every day there’s a little more hope,” Jaffe says.

Late last year, word came that Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. had partnered with Habitat For Humanity to build a “Musicians Village” of 81 homes in the upper ninth ward for displaced musicians. (Habitat is building some 300 homes in the area). The Village will also be the site of the “Ellis Marsalis Center For Music,” a gathering place for the musical community with performance spaces and recording facilities. President Bush visited the site in April and the Dave Matthews Band recently offered a $1.5 million challenge grant to the Village in the hopes of spurring further donations. At press time, three homes had been completed and the Village’s first residents were scheduled to move in sometime during May.

The loss of housing is one of New Orleans’ biggest problems and the toll on its musicians has been high. A Wall Street Journal article in April claimed that dozens of the better known musicians, from Cyril Neville to percussionist Bill Summers, we’re forced to leave the city and didn’t intend to move back. Many said the pay was better elsewhere. New Orleans’ loss was the rest of America’s gain.

It’s not the first time that New Orleans has seen an exodus of its musical talent. It happened in 1917 when the United States Navy shut down the Storyville district and its bordello-based nightlife. Jazz musicians started working the riverboats that carried them north. But the music went on in New Orleans, seeping into the culture in the form of parades, community concerts and even funerals. Housing, such as it was, remained for the ambitious musicians who stayed back and were willing to subsidize their income with day jobs.

With so many homes and businesses destroyed, things are different now. Even if their homes stand, their incomes have vanished. “It’s very important to the culture of the city to get the musicians back,” says Dr. White. “Without them, the soul and spirit of the tradition are gone.”

White’s own story illustrates how difficult the situation is. He evacuated his mother and an aunt to Houston where they remain. The shell of his house, located “right on the canals” is still standing but uninhabitable. He lost a priceless collection of jazz recordings, historical instruments and memorabilia in the deluge.  Between ever-changing bureaucratic rules and insurance company foot-dragging, he’s in a state of limbo that finds him commuting between Houston to take care of his relatives and New Orleans where he works. “We just don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “We keep hearing proposals, rumors of buyouts. I try not to go back to the house when I’m in town. It’s just too depressing. If it weren’t for the music, I would be coming back at all.”

Indeed, when it comes to musicians, New Orleans loss has been other cities’ gain. The pianist, Willie Tee Turbinton, once a fixture at Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club has moved off to New Jersey where he is an artist in residence at Princeton University. The pianist Henry Butler has move to the Denver area. Some members of Los Hombres Caliente have set up shop in Portland, effectively splintering the band.

Housing is not the only problem. Musicians need the opportunity to make a living. That’s the goal of Bring It On Home, a grass roots organization designed to create performance opportunities. The group was founded by guitarist-banjo-player and leader of The Creole Jazz Serenaders, Don Vappie, cultural historian Milly Vappie and community activist Bo Gallup.

“When I got back home after the hurricane,” says musician and Louisiana native Vappie, “I realized that it wasn’t just houses that were destroyed, the work in the region was gone as well. The clubs were gone, the casino gigs were gone, the convention gigs. So we came up with the simple idea of subsidizing performances, creating jobs for musicians getting some into their pockets. If there’s enough work, the guys will come back.”

Under the auspices of the St. Tammany Art Association, the group started with out-of-pocket expenses to sponsor fundraisers in Bogue Falya Park last fall and during Mardi Gras. Their “Rent Party,” with some 25 local musicians held in April at the relocated Howlin’ Wolf club, raised tens of thousands of dollars and brought offers to take the Rent Party on the road. Documentary film-maker Glen Pitre was there with a crew to record the event for an upcoming PBS special

The area’s clubs are again embracing jazz even if doing so at a loss. Snug Harbor, once the performance home of pianist Ellis Marsalis, is back on line as is the Funky Butt and the Home Court Café with its traditional jazz. Zea’s Rotesserie hosts Bring It On Home events two nights a week. Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club is hosting music again, though it’s lost its headliner. “You can still go out and hear live music in New Orleans any day of the week,” says Jaffe.

Tipitina’s, one of New Orleans most active clubs over the last 40 years, has formed its own foundation dedicated to finding housing for returning musicians, restoring their homes and putting instruments into the hands of music students. Fats Domino, whose rescue put focus on the New Orleans music scene, announced that the proceeds of his new release, “Live & Kickin’” will go to the Foundation. During daylight hours, the club serves as a community center for musicians, a place where they can learn business skill and network with other music professionals. Habitat For Humanity recently hosted an application workshop there for musicians interested in housing opportunities in its Musicians Village.

Clubs aren’t the only businesses struggling to survive. New Orleans-based recording companies also took a hit from the storm. Jaffe reports that Preservation Hall Records lost much of its inventory and all of its employees due to relocation. “[The label] is still up and running but we’ve had to pare it back severely. Almost all of our releases have been pushed back.”

New Orleans most visible jazz label, Basin Street Records, home to Dr. White, Los Hombres Caliente, Kermit Ruffins, Henry Butler, Jason Marsalis and others has faced even harsher circumstances. The company lost some 15,000 CDs, its offices and everything in them. Most of its staff relocated out of the city. Still, label founder Mark Samuels sees a silver lining. “The hurricane put the music and our artists in the spotlight. Irvin [Mayfield] was on ‘Larry King Live’, there have been segments on ‘Good Morning America’, we’ve been interviewed by the New York Times, the Wall St. Journal and USA Today. The exposure’s been unbelievable.”

Trumpeter Mayfield, who lost his father to Katrina, heads one of the most far-reaching of the organizations trying to keep the spirit of the Bayou City’s jazz alive. His 16-piece New Orleans Jazz Orchestra serves as a vehicle to bring the tradition to students and audiences around the world. Mayfield has also helped raise money for other relief organizations, notably The Recording Academy’s MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund. Mayfield’s commitment is not just to jazz, but an entire culture.

Reasons to be concerned for that culture remain. Dr. Thomas Brothers, associate professor of music at Duke University and the author of the recent book “Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans” (W.W. Norton & Company) says the future of jazz in New Orleans is at a turning point. “New Orleans has been, for the entire 20th century, the most important city for vernacular music in the country.  That status is in real danger right now.  My great fear is that a century from now some musicologist will look back on Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and see that it caused the end of New Orleans as a very special place for music.”

But the resolve in New Orleans remains high and people are taking inspiration from its music. “Improvisation is a central characteristic of the New Orleans sound,” says Dr. White. “Everything has changed in New Orleans so it’s time to take a cue from the music, to improvise, to dance around the things life has thrown in front of us. The New Orleans jazz funeral is a great metaphor. The music is slow and somber, until the body is laid to rest, then the music turns uptempo and becomes joyous. It celebrates the person going on to a greater reward. Life as we know it has died in New Orleans. It’s time now to celebrate the new life, the transition, that from here things can only get better.”

Short story writers are most like magicians, plying their craft with illusion and misdirection. Both want their audiences to believe what they present, to think it as real. They don’t want them to notice or even think about what goes on to make the magic.

Which makes Thomas Lynch a magical story writer. The poet and essayist’s first book of fiction is deep and convincing, full of mystery and wonder. Even when writing from a female point of view, Lynch makes us see what he wants us to see and, more importantly, feel what he wants us to feel. If there’s a trick to what he does it’s to make us think  that writing is no trick at all.

The characters here–a man taking his father’s ashes in a Thermos to be dispersed,  another man who befriends a young girl after her father’s death only to see her murdered, a casket salesman remembering his three wives, a widow attracted to a younger woman–spend their time in the present considering their past. It’s as if they haunt their own lives. The central figure in the novella “Apparition,” a former minister who, after divorce, writes a self-help best seller entitled Good Riddance, comes to an anti-realization after considering all the realizations he’s experienced.  The divorce gave him new life. It came as a kind of death.

A somber air, like that of a funeral home, resides over everything here. This is a book of cancers, hemorrhages and shot-gun blasts. Lynch’s day-job, if you can call being a mortician a day job, gives him insight into a certain trade–remember that casket salesman?–as well as a hard view of life’s mysteries. If his characters seem like ghosts it’s because so many spirits move through their lives. Sadness is so widely held that it becomes something matter-of-fact.

Fishing and hunting, with a nod to Hemingway, become symbols of mens’ understanding and relationship to each other as well as a metaphor of death. The story “Catch and Release” is a snap shot of high-end outdoors men escaping their lives in the woods and streams. The woods and streams are full of such men, all looking to take something. Its narrator recalls catching his first fish and the awful choice it presents: “Kill it, eat it, show his mother. Let it go.” The release of his father’s ashes, in an unexpected way, only extends the metaphor (for an excellent father-son-fishing relationship memoir see John McPhee’s “The Patch” in the February 8, 2010 edition of The New Yorker).

The only story in which in which the smoke and mirrors don’t completely hide Lynch’s masterful sleight-of-hand is the one that most closely mirrors Lynch’s experience. “Bloodsport” goes into great detail of the pathologist’s and mortician’s art, so much so that it feels as if Lynch is manipulating us. “Stuffing the open cranium with cotton, fitting the skullcap back in place and easing the scalp back over the skull…” It’s all part of the process of embalming, laying out the dead, the funeral and all part of “the larger concept of a death in the family,” making it more of a “manageable prospect.” It’s as if Lynch has pulled back the wizard’s curtain and revealed a corpse.

“Matinee de Septembre” also exposes  Lynch’s craft but in another way. He writes in the person of a 40-year-old woman, the widow of a respected older poet, and his character is a male fantasy of what a 40-year-old woman should be: “she had the bosom of a woman half her age. She looked in good in no bra or a Wonderbra, pantsuits or little black dresses, vintage lingerie or plaid pajamas.” Of course, she finds something more attractive, younger, and this person, also a woman, becomes an object of imagination and fixation, another step toward an end.

The longer Lynch’s stories, the better.  The novella “Apparition” takes its time and the telling is done so well we want it to go on. Lynch makes his character’s evolution so believable that we agree with it every step of the way, even at end when he concludes that all those former conclusions may have been misguided. This is true throughout the book. Lynch’s experience as a poet gives his writing musical tones and he exploits the sound of language unabashedly. “Primrose, Maple, hemlock, Helen…” the casket salesman thinks as he walks. The narrator of “Apparition” considers how far he’s come: “the little clapboard manse on Cory Street behind the church to this three-story palace with its towers and turrents, bay windows and balconies, its dozen cut-brick chimneys…” Lynch also has a good ear for the topical and trendy thinking. “Some divorces, like some marriages,  are made in heaven,” writes the lead in “Apparition” in one of his self-help books. The wealthy widow of “Matinee” thinks the first-class section of her flight hold “Bigger seats for bigger asses….big, fat balding asses whose wives only traveled with them for the shopping ops, the change of scenery and the chance of meeting someone really interesting.” It’s moments like these, when Lych’s characters see the illusions that they themselves accept as reality, that makes reading him a magical experience.–Cabbage Rabbit

In his New York Times review of Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, Todd Pruzan explains how Raymond Carver “advanced a literary genre with ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’  The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but ‘vaguely titled fiction’: stories concealing their intensity and anxiety behind titles full of pronouns and ennui, signifying nothing much about their narratives.”  As examples, he cites Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, Lorrie Moore’s People Like That Are the Only People Here and Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

Meloy actually goes Pruzan and Carver one (or two or three) better.  She not only borrows Carver’s technique (or was it Gordon Lish’s?) for titling her book  (the story titles are more to the point),  she mirrors his simple narratives and working class  protagonists. At times, her stories reminded me of  Annie Proulx, Richard Ford (who wrote a blurb for her book) , even Joyce Carol Oates.

Indeed, the book’s first tale of a gimpy, modern- day cowboy who falls in love with a young, traveling  attorney seemed like something Proulx might have done and done better. It immediately set me to thinking. Do MFA programs –Meloy took hers at UCIrvine, a school which produced Michael Chabon, Alice Sebold and, back somewhat, Richard Ford–teach imitation disguised as learning by example? There’s nothing wrong with learning from other writers. But how do you avoid sounding like them?

The second story, an abrupt coming of age for a 15-year-old girl triggered by an aggressive older man and her father’s compliance, all with the added tension (and metaphor) of firearms, was artfully disturbing but still came across as an Oates-meets-Ford story. At that point we put the book down.

That was a mistake. Picking it up again, we found Meloy master of her own voice in the remaining nine stories. They’re simply told and suggest all the complications and moral questions that salt even the blandest lives. Nor, as we feared, was she exclusively a Montana regional author (she was born and raised in Helena but now lives in L.A.). Her stories take us to working class  Connecticut in the 1970s and upper class Argentina.  There’s intrigue in the strange mystery of  intercom pranks in “Lovely Rita” and wise, generational contrasts of romance and reality between a grade school student  and her mother in “Nine.”

Meloy’s craft comes from her matter-of-fact voice, as easy and gentle as a soft rain, even if a storm is lurking in the distance. Disease and death pay quick and lasting visits, fidelity is challenged and even children aren’t quite sure what to make of their lives even as they seem routine. She infrequently spices dialogue with terrible insight, masked as down-home homily: “the whole soul mates idea,” explains one woman, ” is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”

What Meloy does best is inject a benign tension into her stories, tension that starts passively enough and builds into a sort of personal horror. In the last story, “O Tannenbaum,” which does take place in Montana, the fears and resentment between two couples, one traveling home with their daughter after cutting a Christmas tree, the other stranded in the snow, grows as Meloy reveals their reflected and assumed histories.As she does in many of the stories, the author employs a child, not only to show what is at risk, but to heighten the fearful and innocent qualities of action.

One other Carver comparison: Meloy seems so comfortable telling her stories from a working class perspective, one has to wonder if the details come from experience or research. If it’s the later, she’s done a great job (she’s reportedly now working on a novel set in post-war London). As author Dagoberto Gilb pointed out, Carver wrote about working class anti-heroes from his experience as a hard-scrabble graduate student, then applied the principles of struggle to the working class characters. Maybe we should be wondering what Meloy’s student days were like?–Cabbage Rabbit

Note: Why is it that in their book jacket blurbs, author’s are so reticent to note their education? Maybe they don’t want their craft to be thought of as manufactured? We discovered Meloy’s MFA school in a Wikipedia article, not necessarily a source the Rabbit likes to quote unconfirmed. We could not confirm it anywhere on her web site  and, as noted, it’s missing from her bio on the book’s jacket.  More Google searching to follow…