The above line is from the track "Isolation" from Iggy Pop's "Blah Blah Blah" album. 'Isolation' is a song about a junkie who needs the one he loves, just for a second, to even him out. The whole line is "I need your lovin', like a fastball needs control, my empty hands in isolation."
Iggy Pop has some great lyrics, all over his long long career.
But I was actually trying to write about Bowie. "Blah Blah Blah" was produced by Bowie, who produced Iggy's best early album, "The Idiot," which is the title of the Dostoevsky book Bowie holds in his hands as he flies through the air, reading, in a poster he did for American Libraries that hung in the hallway of my house...because in it, Bowie could maybe have been mistaken for me.
Which brings me, in the kind of arcing dive pigeons can make when coming in to land on the girders of an overpass or subway trellis, back to Bowie.
But not Bowie actually. Tin Machine, his band.
And actually, I made my own wended way to Tin Machine--or more specifically, some Tin Machine lyrics--because of a Karin Fossum book. Karin Fossum is from Norway, and she writes mysteries.
I love Scandinavian mysteries. Because I am part Scottish.
OK, wait, back up.
I miss my dad. He's dead. Cancer.
Have you ever heard of Daedalus books? They're great. It is a catalog of remaindered books. I imagine that, if you are the author, they aren't so great, because you can get a never-opened hardcover for 3 dollars. Mailed to your door. Daedalus Books is based in Columbia, Maryland, where I lived with my dad and stepmother--and, on and off, any one or two of my three stepbrothers, an aloof cat (I know: redundant) and a fantastic aging standard poodle named Bart who, dead these many years, still gets blamed for most of the farts in my life.
OK, where was I (I know: good question)?
Right. Ian Rankin. Sometime after 1997, when it was published, I came across a book called "Black and Blue: An Inspector Rebus Mystery" in the Daedalus catalog. Two, maybe three bucks.
My father was first diagnosed with cancer in 1997, and by then he and my stepmother were living in Nashville, where he was from.
My father and I always had a good relationship, but as I got a little older I was trying to find more intellectual pursuits I could share with him. He was the test case: I have since attempted the same thing with the other three parental units of my American family, and have been, for the most part, successful.
But I knew he had cancer, my dad, and so I bet that in late '97 or early '98, whenever I saw this $2.97 book about an Inspector Rebus, I bet I was trying harder than usual to make my father feel how close to him I wanted to be, even if I was miles away in Maryland or Saratoga or New York City.
So the name caught me: Rebus.
My dad had a knack for cartooning and caricature. It was something he sort of put aside as he aged and became a professor and father and all that--there was always something of the 'youngun' to it for him, I think. And something of the 'drunk.'
My dad was an alcoholic. Dry some 20-odd years when he died, and proud of every hard-earned day of those decades.
But before that, he'd known where the bottom of a beer was, and he could sneak up on a glass when it thought it had the afternoon all to itself.
And his cartoon characters more often than not came from that world. Long-faced gents puking long trails of cheap beer out of huge American cars. College boys clutching school pennants almost as hard as their drinks.
Even his most debauched cartoons--that I have seen, anyway--always had a bit of good old Southern shame to them. You knew the drunkards would feel it the next day, you knew they knew, inside, that they looked liked fools. You knew they were trying hard as anything to not think of what their mother would think if she saw them.
I inherited that shame, and am extremely proud of it. It has helped me time and again to know how to try and be. Make a mistake: feel ashamed: don't do it again.
Nice and clean.
So, the 'star' of a lot of these cartoons was a character named 'Reber.' I never figured out if that was Dad drawing himself, or an amalgam of everyone, or one of his equally drunk brothers, or what. But Reber was often, if not always, around.
And Reber is pretty close to 'Rebus,' the Inspector's name. And Ian Rankin, the writer of the Rebus mysteries--and Rebus himself--are Scottish, like my dad's half of my bloodline.
Long story short (it is at this point that you laugh your drink through your nose, then curse me) I ordered the Rebus book in duplicate, and sent one to my dad.
We would read it together, talk about it, have something nice and material and discussable to talk about if there ever opened in one of our phone calls that huge hole where I would never cry "I don't want you to die" and where he would never say "I'm terrified and I will miss you."
Turns out he didn't like it that much: a little too dark for him. And Rebus, it also turns out, was a basically non-apologetic alcoholic--not one of dad's favorite detective archetypes.
But we had a good few chats about it, and he appreciated the gesture and the shared experience from so many miles and so much fear away.
I, on the other hand, was completely hooked. Turns out Black and Blue was eighth in a series, so I had to go backwards, catch up, then keep going. Have since read all 25 Rankin novels, Rebus or not, as well as all the Val McDermid's and a host of other Scottish mystery writers.
I then moved slightly south to England and Dick Francis, a genius recommendation from my stepfather. Have read all 43-plus of his--except the one co-written with his son Felix that comes out this year, after his death, which I just found out about Wiki-ing him.
But after that, and a quick jaunt to Ireland, for the Ken Bruen mysteries and a lovely discovery of "A Star Named Henry" by Roddy Doyle, I moved to were it was colder and the people were, if possible, even less emotional than Scotland: Scandinavia.
I am not sure how I got the first Henning Mankell mystery, 'Faceless Killers,' which introduced the long-serving detective Kurt Wallander. Might have been recommended by an actor friend with a similar reading addiction. But I am glad I did.
These Vikings--my mother's half of my bloodline, with a little Irish mixed from both sides to allow me to have a sense of humour, thank christ--wrote mysteries the way they made movies. Elegant, dark, not all that interested in things getting better, but pretty sure the weather would stay cold and not all that surprised when things turned to shit.
God, it was great.
Since then I have read most of the Scandinavian mysteries I could find in translation. Even books about countries near Scandinavia written by gringos. I have fully hooked my wife and stepfather and we can hear my mom drifting down the fjord towards us as we speak. I prefer the Norwegians if I am reading from the mainland, which could be because that's my background, or because they seem most capable of embracing the bleak with a joyful solemnity (once you figure that out, you'll know what to love about their work).
But the best of the best so far has been Arnaldur Indriatson, from Iceland, a country whose literary prowess, from the Sagas to Laxness, boggles the mind when held against the size of the population. Indriatson's "Voices" could be the best dark detective story. Period.
We are lucky enough to have the matriarch of a family in Baltimore we've known most of my life who, at whatever age closer to a hundred than she is to fifty, whips mystery titles back and forth at light-speed whenever we get to visit her.
I'm telling you: detectives in shit weather trying to figure out who bashed someone's brains in: no better way to keep a family engaged and interwoven.
I know Stiegg Larsson has the whole planet semi-erect and Hollywood is racing to make lesser versions of the very good Swedish films of his Millennium books, but, honestly, they're OK. Just OK. A little chatty, a little fond of themselves: I think that's why they've done so well through the West. He'll have come and gone--which is impolite because he's already gone, but you know what I mean--and long after there will still be boys and girls, men and women, ruining their next day at work or school because they absofuckinglutely cannot go to bed until they have finished an Indriatson, a Fossum, a K.O. Dahl.
Asa Larsson, a Swedish woman, is also damn good, and does the refreshing favor of having a female protagonist who doesn't solve crimes despite having to get the kids fed and the carpets from the cleaners.
But Karin Fossum. Ooh, Karin Fossum, Norwegian, manipulative, tricky, and not nearly as respectful of the reader as we gringos are used to. Great stuff. Great.
Her Inspector Sejer Mysteries are currently being devoured in rounds by me, N, my mother--when she's finished an Indriatson--and soon my stepfather. N outreads us all and is pretty much done, but we're getting there.
So there are Fossum books just laying about the place. And the one I had to read before the one I am reading now is called "Don't Look Back." Sort of a purple cover.
And "Don't look back!" is the first line to the Tin Machine song "Prisoner of Love."
You thought I'd forgotten, didn't you? Thought I'd completely lost the thread. Well, HA!
As I have mentioned before--probably with the Bad Religion lyric about the scent of unseasoned wood--I have a tendency to spiral out of control within a lyric if it gets stuck in my head. And seeing "Don't Look Back" every few hours as I wandered the apartment for days on end has damn near buried "Prisoner of Love" hilt-deep into my mind.
Bowie was in Tin Machine, a band he formed and staunchly defended as a democracy (there are some great pics from that era where he wears a shirt that says "Fuck you, I'm IN Tin Machine!) for about four years, '88-92. Lyrically there is a lot of Bowie's social conscience, Soupy Sales' sons Hunt and Tony were bass and drums, and guitarist Reeves Gabrels played certain solos with a silver vibrator. 'Bus Stop' off their first album is a pop gem, and "Goodbye Mr. Ed" off their second album has the kind of sadness only Bowie can really make you love.
Here are the lyrics:
Prisoner of Love: Bowie/Gabrels/Sales/Sales
Don't look back, whatever it takes to save your life
I believe I've belonged to you for a long time
And my heart says
no, no one but you
Like a rescue on a darkened street
Love walked into town
I was a victim of my own self-persecution
I'm a prisoner of love, but I'm coming up for air
Now don't be fooled by fools who promise you
The world and all that glitters; more fool, you.
I'm such hungry man that I beg you over and over and over and over
And I might take any highway to be there with you
Even the best men shiver in their beds
I'm loving you above every thing I have
I'm a prisoner of love--just stay square
Like a sermon on blues guitar
Love walked into town
I was drowning so slowly
One step in front of your shadow
I'm a prisoner of love, but I'm coming up for air
I smell the sickness sown in this city
That drives me to hide you, yeah, even deceive you
I'm so afraid for you that
I'll break any thug who maps out your passage to ruin
Even the best men shiver in their beds
I'm loving you above every thing I have
I'm a prisoner of love--just stay square
May or may not be poetry that you will never forget, but it has an emotional arc, and if I replace "love" with "chemo" I get an even better idea of why this song hasn't left my head for more than five minutes since last Saturday.
But the other reason I have had this song in my head, and the reason I can wander so far down the Joycean garden path of word-associative blather, is that...I feel OK.
The first couple days after the last chemo were extremely unpleasant, as advertised.
But this eleven-day cycle really is longer. I only get ten this time to work around a weekend, but still...
...I have had three days in a row where I basically felt...OK.
Still a little poisoned, still short of breath, still unsure of I am hungry or if some drug is just telling me to eat.
But all at a level that is light-years of improvement over past stints.
My step-father had been away for a bit, so when he saw me a few days ago it was the first sighting in a month or so. He emailed when they got back to Baltimore that I looked better, that it was good to see.
I'm too close to it, find it too hard to believe. But yeah. Maybe. N has talked me through it, even gone back through our Super Fun Cancer Book! to show me how many more ailments and complaints an average day had a month ago versus now.
Dare I say it: I'm making progress?
The eleven day cycle exists because what I am getting and how much of it I am getting is still very rough, and those days immediately thereafter will stay all kinds of un-good.
But there are stretches of OK now. And some of them are kinda long.
I'm not counting chickens, and I will spend more time thinking about the marrow results when they come in, but, looking at it with a clean eye and a bellyfull of beef-fried rice...
yeah...
I'm doing OK.
