I had a very full day yesterday. I took Mom to the doctor, attended a fine organ recital, lunched with Eileen, practiced organ, rehearsed with young jazzers, treadmilled and then had drinks and food with Eileen at one of our favorite local restaurants (Citi-Vu). In between I reworked an organ composition.
I am looking for ways to more precisely notate it.
It did look like this:
Now it’s more like this:
I actually just noticed that I sped up the tempo. I think I like it at the slower tempo and will probably change it back.
I spent a good amount of time yesterday trying to get Finale (the music software I use) to work for me. For some reason, the version of the document I was editing omitted the ability to use short cuts when adding articulations. After much fussing with it I ended up making a new doc which did have the short cuts and dumping the entire data into it. Sigh.
I finished reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn sitting in my Mom’s shrink’s office.
When I was visiting my brother and his wife in New Hampshire we went to see the movie, “Being Flynn,” which was based on this book.
De Niro plays the father in the story.
His presence is very strong in the movie. Earlier on the day we saw the movie, I had noticed the book in one of the bookstores my brother was taking me around to.
After seeing the movie, I thought it might be interesting to read the book.
It’s unfair to compare a good movie to an excellent book. The story that the author tells is one that seems to be embedded in his own life. It’s hard to tell how much is real and how much is invented. Even whether much is invented.
By the end of the book, I finally saw the character De Niro plays much differently. The movie, of course, took liberties with the story in the book. I have learned to forgive movies for doing that. How else can you cram a long complex story into a two hour visual experience?
But Flynn can write. Reading this book makes me want to read more of his work. His hand is sure as he uses techniques like suddenly turning the story into a movie script. He also produces some of the prose of the mythical book, The Button Man, the father is writing in the movie. One wonders if it is actually something his father wrote or that he invented. Probably the former.
He compares the book to Moby Dick.
In Moby Dick, he writes, the whale doesn’t appear until the last part of the book and then to destroy Ahab. Likewise, the son in the story (Flynn himself) doesn’t get to see The Button Man until the last part of his own book.
The book is about sorting out your own personality in relationship to your parents and your family.
It did help me to see the movie first. I’m sure it affected how I read the book. But I now much prefer the story from the book.
On discovering that the wild tale his father told him about his grandfather (his father’s father) having invented a life boat was actually true, Flynn writes
“The problem was to keep the body above the waves. The trick was to breathe only air. My grandfather’s patent was used by seven countries during both World Wars. Thousands of heads floating above the waves. I’ll be damned.”
I think this sums the book up nicely.
Flynn never really believed the stories his father told about his grandfather testing his life rafts by dropping them in the lake from a great height. But the chapter after he reads his father’s book (which he ultimately describes as dissolving into incoherence) is the one where he discovers his grandfather’s patent.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is full of the bullshit and wonderful stuff that you can discover about your family if you look long and hard enough.