Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

SOME PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW very well are coming for tea today. I washed the dust off the teapot and found a couple of tea bags and wiped down my grandmother’s tea tray. These semiformal social events destroy me. I spent two hours straightening the living room and making sure the downstairs bathroom was usable. The vacuum cleaner hose is extremely kinked and gets clogged easily, and I had to repair the sweeper attachment with duct tape. Why did I say tea? Because I wanted to be welcoming and I didn’t want to give them dinner or lunch or drinks. I should have just said come and sit in the yard and have a beer and some chips and some green guacamole squirted from a plastic pouch — I would be happier and probably they would be happier.

One is a poet I met in Cincinnati when I gave a reading there last year — a woman with a friendly, loud laugh and dramatic lipstick — and one is I think her boyfriend, who is a filmmaker, and they want to make some kind of documentary about rhyme. Because I published an anthology, Only Rhyme , a few years ago, they think I can help them, perhaps with raising money or suggesting people to interview. They’ve got their project up on Kickstarter. And I want to say, Good luck, I can’t help you very much, I’ll give thirty dollars to your Kickstarter fund, but I don’t know anything useful about poetry anymore. I love it, sort of, but I also don’t love it and don’t understand it, and every day I live, it seems more mysterious and farther away from me. But I won’t say that, of course. I’ll just pour the tea and hand around the plate of shortbread cookies.

• • •

HEY, JUNIOR BIRDMEN. I’m Paul Chowder and I’m here in the blindingness of noon near the chicken hut talking only to you about the things that need to be talked about. You know what they are. Love and fame and nothingness and sunken cathedrals and the Sears traveling sprinkler. Nan will be home tomorrow.

I want to be starting out. I want to be speaking in a foreign language. I want to offer an alternate route. I want to amass ragged armfuls of lucid confusion that make you keel over.

I want to write songs. Not poems anymore — songs. In fact, I made up another song in the car yesterday. It’s a protest song. This is how it goes: “I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, baby, and I’m not killing anyone.” The tune has a little of the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” in it.

The most useful thing I learned when I was in music school was not the augmented sixth chord, or how to write a canon at the half step, or how to scrape a certain part of the reed to make the high D easier in the bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring . The most useful thing I learned, I learned in orchestration class. The teacher said, “Here’s the first thing you need to know: The orchestra doesn’t play in tune. That’s what makes it sound like an orchestra. It can’t be perfectly in tune. If it was perfectly in tune, it would have an entirely different sound. It’s a collective musical instrument that is always slightly out of tune with itself.”

Which is also true, in a different way, of the piano. The piano is tuned to be slightly out of tune — that’s part of what gives it its character. The mis-tuning is called “equal temperament.” Also, wood is a complicated, tissuey substance, with columns of water in it, and sound travels from the piano wires through these long cellusonic resonators, and when it flares out into the auditorium, it’s messed up slightly. It’s been batted around — and now it’s warmer, with a mist of imprecision over it. The timber has fogged the timbre, thereby creating the necessary out-of-tuneness, the naturalness, the untrue trueness of piano sound, or orchestral sound. That’s what music relies on: the singularity of every utterance.

• • •

IT TURNED OUT the Kickstarter couple weren’t very interested in the shortbread cookies. They’d brought a video camera and lights, and they wanted to interview me about the history of rhyme. I said that part of what happened to rhyme in the twentieth century was that there was so much brilliant recorded lyricizing by Cole Porter, by Leiber and Stoller, by Mann and Weil, by Lennon and McCartney, and etcetera, that by the sixties and seventies the old Ella Wheeler Wilcox approach, the Sara Teasdale approach, the A. E. Housman approach, the Robert Frost approach, didn’t make sense anymore, and the poets had to figure out what they could do that was artier and more elevated. And what they did was to ditch the badminton net — they ditched rhyme altogether.

As I was talking, it occurred to me that what was so appealing about song lyrics was that the music fogs over the consonants and dissolves them. “All you need is the same vowel sound and you’ve got a rhyme,” I heard myself saying. “It’s very liberating.” I got my speakers and played the videomakers a song I like by Stephen Fearing, “Black Silk Gown.” Stephen Fearing sings, “The night is shot with diamonds, above these dark New England towns, / And the highway drawn beneath me like a black silk gown.” If it was a printed poem, the rhyme of “towns” and “gown” wouldn’t sound quite right, but with the music going, it’s perfect. In the studio, Fearing installs a tiny microphone inside his acoustic guitar, and the sounds he plucks from it are very big. He’s a monkey-fingered madman guitar player.

After they packed up their video equipment and left, I drove to Planet Fitness and used the machines there, watching the newscasters move their mouths on the bank of television screens and listening to Donovan sing “Universal Soldier.” It is a good protest song, written by Buffy Sainte-Marie. Then I got in the car and drank some Pellegrino and sweated. I sat bent over with my head on the steering wheel and let all of my self and my mind flow into my lips, so that they were swollen with unvoiced words. I thought of male actors with big lips and how if I had big lips I could stand with a slight frown and ploof out my full set of lips and maybe that would be attractive to women, since women seemed to like James Dean and other sexually ambiguous people. My lips felt like a horse’s lips. Just give me an apple and I’ll wimble at it. Hi, I’m Harry Connick, Jr. I would really like to be Harry Connick, Jr.

Time now to get my frequent burrito card punched again at Dos Amigos Burritos.

• • •

IT’S ALWAYS BETTER to start fresh than to rewrite. The cult of rewriting has practically sunk poetry. For instance, right now, hell, I could begin a poem with “I dusted the side table with one of her underpants.” That’s not a bad beginning. I could take it from there. It’s true. I have an old pair of Roz’s underpants, and sometimes if I have to make the living room presentable for teatime guests I squirt some Old English furniture polish on my grandmother’s table, which was unfortunately refinished at one point with polyurethane, and I polish it to a nice shine.

Today I thought, My birthday is coming up, and nobody knows I want a guitar: I’ll just go to Best Buy and buy myself one. So I did, admiring as I drove into the parking lot the splendid striped colors of the new sign at the Old Navy store, which is trying to relaunch itself in a changed world. Best Buy is faltering a bit, too, I’d read — nobody is buying CDs, and Netflix and other movie streamers have destroyed the DVD business, and videogame sales are off. But there was plenty of noise in the music department, and my guitar was still there. It was a Gibson Maestro. The word “Maestro” was in fifties handwriting script, and the box said: “Everything you need is right here!” I rested it on the roof of my car and tore it open. Inside was a black guitar with six strings, a black case, a strap, some picks, and a warranty. Hah, a warranty. How many of these warranty cards have I seen and thrown out in my life? A hundred? I knew the guitar would never break, and it hasn’t.