Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

Although she’s British, Minnie Driver can do a remarkably good American accent. She’s got a good ear. She can sing, too, I just found out. She’s got a song about how she wants to be taken out into the deeper water. I like it and I like her big mouth and her big jaw. She’s a bigmouthed babe. She had a fling with the man who starred in The Bourne Identity . It ended badly, as I remember. Matt Damon. He broke up with her on Oprah , which doesn’t seem like something Jason Bourne would do. Another actress who can really sing is Scarlett Johansson. She hums and wails and whispers in a song by J. Ralph called “One Whole Hour.” “I know just what it’s like,” she says, “to wait for a voice inside.” The music makes the words fit. Did Scarlett go out with Matt Damon, too? No, but he starred with her in a family movie called We Bought a Zoo . No elephants step on criminals’ heads in that movie. It’s just not done anymore.

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THE BOURNE IDENTITY has one of the best movie scores ever written. It’s by John Powell, a British composer. It begins with a big bassoon solo, sailing in over a long chord in the strings. Think of that, beginning a spy movie with a bassoon. I first saw The Bourne Identity in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. I had just been in a march against the Iraq War, which was imminent. It’s the only protest march I’ve ever been in. We took to the streets and we walked around neighborhoods in Washington shouting crude rhymes: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your oil war.” My sign said: THIS WAR WILL DO NO GOOD. The march didn’t do much good, either, unfortunately. We’re still waiting on the world to change.

Roz was with me, and when we went up to the hotel room our feet hurt from marching all day. We took off our shoes and ordered a pizza and watched The Bourne Identity and loved it, and I thought, This is about the best movie score I’ve ever heard, and I want to hear it again. So I bought it. For the percussion section, Powell uses crazy camera-shutter sounds, huge flabby drums, shakers, rattling sheets of what sounds like fiberglass or plywood, and sixty-megahertz electrical feedback hums. There’s a touch of Batucada Fantástica in it, but it’s its own thing — and there’s not a cheesy passage in the whole score. I’d give anything to have written that music. Composers have ripped off Powell’s Bourne score many times since then. You’ll suddenly hear it in a fight scene or a chase scene. I wonder whether Powell is upset at being strip-mined that way — maybe not. The movie score business has a low opinion of itself, and its leading lights seem unconcerned by everyone’s habit of adaptive reuse. Powell worked for a while with Hans Zimmer, and Hans Zimmer is one of the biggest and cheerfullest ripper-offers of them all, to the point where the Holst Foundation brought suit against him for stealing music note for note from The Planets . One of Powell’s colleagues in the Zimmer atelier was Harry Gregson-Williams. Listen to the Bourne Identity soundtrack and then watch Déjà Vu , with Denzel Washington — score by Harry Gregson-Williams. You’ll gasp at the audacity in places. It isn’t plagiarism — no spot is precisely the same — and yet it’s a theft of almost everything good about Powell’s score, harmonies, percussion, slow solos, mood builds. It’s worse than the endless classical music recyclings by John Williams, who has rifled every late Romantic pocket, and James Horner of Titanic fame. And yet Powell and Gregson-Williams were colleagues and friends under Zimmer. Maybe Powell gave his permission, I don’t know. I’d like to know. I think about this a lot.

Debussy was stolen from constantly during his lifetime, not just by Stravinsky but by everyone. His originality was smothered in a wave of second-tier Debussyism. It depressed him. In 1915 he told a friend that the Debussyists were killing him. No, as a matter of fact, tobacco was killing him.

NOW I REALLY FEEL RICH. Gene sent me an email to tell me that the University of Somewhere Far Away With a Big Football Team had ordered two hundred more copies of Only Rhyme for the fall term. “I thought you’d like to know,” he wrote. He wants to encourage me. So much of what an editor does is encouragement, flattery, and acts of kindness. They’re such good people. I’ve never had a bad experience with an editor. And now they must grope their way through the ebook revolution, squabbling with Amazon, trying to figure out how to make money. They believe in what they do. Some of them must have secret doubts. Another memoir this month, another set of blurbs to solicit, another mailing of bound galleys to people like me who don’t read them. I have guilty stacks of them in my office, each with an enthusiastic letter tucked in the front. Wave after wave of unread words. Blah, guilt!

After I made the circuit of the upper-body machines at Planet F, I sat in the car, parked in a tiny patch of shade in back near a self-seeded oak tree, and I said aloud, “What have we given to the world?” We in the United States, I meant. What do we have to be proud of? Warfarin and Risperdal and Effexor and Abilify and Hellfire missiles and supermax prisons and the revenge killing of Osama bin Laden — and the Staple Singers. Music. I’d give anything to sing like the Staple Singers. Anything I have. “Undertaker, please drive slow.” The Staple Singers is what we’ve given to the world.

I drove past the trendy pizza place where a girl with a beautiful mouth used to work. She rarely smiled. She just tucked in the corners of the pizza boxes and handed them over the counter to people with twenty-dollar bills. She didn’t have to smile. She doesn’t work there anymore, but I was shocked all over again at the memory of how lovely she was. Just a pizza girl. Now she’s off somewhere, living life, paying off her college loans, giving other people the benefit of her selfless amazing mouth.

Today I watched Coal Miner’s Daughter , with Sissy Spacek. See what I mean? Small actress, big mouth. What stunned me about the movie is that Sissy Spacek, whom I’ve never understood before because she has such a tiny nose, did all the singing in the movie. None of it was overdubbed by Loretta Lynn. It’s all Spacek’s own singing. She spent days and days with Loretta Lynn — a year together, said Loretta in the bonus video — practicing Loretta’s songs. Loretta taught Sissy all her nuances and tricks. She, Loretta, said she can’t watch the movie because it was too painful and too true. It was a larger-than-life version of her life, including all the screwed-up wrongs done by her husband, Dew — if that was his name, played by Tommy Lee Jones in dyed reddish-blond hair and eyebrows — all his drinking and carousing and philandering.

Another thing that got my attention in the movie — this was revealed in an interview that the director, Michael Apted, did with Loretta Lynn — was that Loretta wrote her songs while driving in the car to Nashville. That’s the important truth that we don’t learn anywhere in the movie but we do learn from what she tells us in the extras. She drove in her fancy Lincoln or Cadillac and she rhymed up her setbacks and her heartaches, and it all happened in her car.

I took the long way home, like Supertramp, and in the gloaming I saw a sign at a roadside farm stand. I used it in a song:

Native peaches

Fresh tomatoes

Lots and lots of corn

Hot blueberries

Cold chicken

And ridiculous amounts of porn

Then I stopped my Kia, my precious Korean Kia with one hundred and twenty-three thousand miles on it, on the road by a lumpy enormous green field. One spreading tree was left unfelled in the middle, as if in a painting by Constable. I could imagine the farmer resting his plow horse there in the shade on a hot day. Rounded shouldery boulders of last year’s hay wrapped in white plastic were stacked off to one side. Every so often someone drove by in a red Subaru or a gray pickup with a lid over the back.