Writing essays is easy. Look at the frequency I post them, I obviously fart these things out. All they mean to me is a momentary impulse to get things down on paper. For whatever reason, it regulates my emotional welfare in the way running or sex does more fit people. It usually takes two hours for a short piece, three and a half for a long one. I post them with the intention of not thinking about them afterward - write it, post it, forget it. But after posting them I inevitably think about them all day, go back to read them and read with pride until I realize I've made twenty typos in grammar, spelling, and syntax. I correct them, and by the time they're corrected it doesn't even matter because whoever would read them already read it, and if this one sucked, there's always the next essay...
Writing fiction is hard. When you're doing it and it's working, you feel as though you're divinely inspired or a god yourself. All the world's chaos humiliates and burdens you, but on a laptop at a desk, you create your own private little world of meaning, and it's as though God dictates to you on a private hotline. And then the line goes dead, and even if one story's any good, there's another still to tell, and no guarantee that God will ever call you again, and even if he does, it may be months before those clouds of heaven open up again and give you the clarity to know you're writing is any good. And you work and you wait, but between every visit, there is no guarantee that God will ever visit again, and what you're left with is little fragments, because the translation from the story's first vision to the page's reality is stunningly untranslatable. Nietzsche said that words can only describe what's already dead in your heart, so perhaps if you believe too much in what your project, the writing never gets done.
When it's non-fiction, it's me writing, when it's fiction, it's an entirely different person. I doubt that person is god, but whomever he is, that person is not always there.
I've taken to calling him "AC Charlap" - a portmanteau of my Hebrew name. AC Charlap is Evan Tucker's alterego who never had Evan Tucker's disturbed youth: who made his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic when he was six, but now spends only eighteen weeks of every year on the podium – six for orchestras, six for operas, six for early music (Bach and before), and no more than eighteen weeks because any more feels utterly limiting for an artist of such burning creativity as himself. Another eighteen weeks of the year are spent writing Nobel Prize-worthy fiction, plays, poetry, history, and even the occasional symphony if he has a week to spare – every book he writes makes the New York Times Bestseller list and his books have initiated a new golden era of reading and writing for American society. Inner city children wander the streets quoting his poetry, graduate students hang on his every word when he lectures at colleges. The rest of the year he spends touring with his grammy-winning classical/jazz/blues/roma/bluegrass/soul band for which he's lead singer, violinist, and co-songwriter. He was an early widower who bravely raised three children by himself with the help of his many girlfriends who all get along perfectly well with one another.
I have also called him "Ivan Ticoczki," which would have been my name if my grandparents stayed in Europe. Ivan Ticoczki is, by common consensus, the worst composer of the 20th century, but he wrote an infamous 2800 page three volume memoir in which he claimed he was the most culturally significant figure in world history since King David. He was born in a small shtetl on the day Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was shot, he was photographed as a three year old next to Lenin during the October Revolution, at eight he was the personal chauffeur of Germany's foreign minister Walter Rathenau (he claimed he was fifteen) and was unwittingly responsible for Rathenau's assassination. He tended bar in the 1920s at the Moulin Rouge in Paris where he lost his virginity to Josephine Baker (they did it on the bar). He then went to Weimar Berlin and wrote the better draft of the Threepenny Opera, not Kurt Weill's watered down second draft. Ticoczki's score was entirely twelve-tone jazz which would bring the working class into the elite. Though Jewish, he tried to join the Nazi party in 1933 and was only spurned when his circumcision was discovered at a party meeting. He then emigrated to Vienna where he lived at a table in a 24 hour coffeehouse and people would surround him to hear his tabletalk witticisms. He attempted to compose a musical oratorio for orchestra and 300 member chorus whose finale would be the mass suicide of the performers. He claimed in the memoir that he survived Auschwitz but there is indisputable evidence that he lived in London during the War and had an affair with Virginia Woolf, whom he may or may not have murdered and framed to look like her suicide. ...Anyway I have a whole biography for this guy that goes up to the present day... He's currently 107 and composing an entire cycle of music for Jewish services, though he hasn't set foot in a synagogue since 1924, the work is for for 200 piece orchestra and 1000 member chorus.
He is occasionally "Rabbi Herbert Swamley," who is technically the son of my father's fake name, 'Wayne Swamley.' Herbert Swamley is a Rabbi living in Pikesville, MD who may or may never have been ordained. He has undiagnosed borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. He's worked at every Hebrew school in Baltimore and been fired from all of them yet never lacks for employment. While a teacher his students always bullied him, while an administrator for Jewish organizations he always bankrupted them, and while a pulpit rabbi his congregation literally chased him out of his own synagogue in the middle of a sermon, and while working in a Jewish media office he tried to kill his boss so that he could be the org's new spokesman. He seems to deliberately take offense in every interaction he has and speaks with a Hebrew accent so everybody just assumes he's Israeli, but in fact was born in Duluth, Minnesota to Lutheran parents, and like Rachel Dolezal decided he was 'trans-religious.'
Another is Miroslav Zuckerman-Rabinovich: Professor Zuckerman-Rabinovitch has been a Professor of Marxist Theory at the University of Bratislava since 1980 but has been on leave sinc 1993. In the mid 1980s, MZR (as he's commonly known) rose to prominence in Czechoslovakia for refusing to sign his name to a document condemning thirty-two of his colleagues fired for counterrevolutionary tendencies, though recent evidence shows he was in fact the document's author. In 1993 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Sexuality at the Freiuniversitat of Berlin on account of his treatise on perversion: "Die Geschichte der Perversionen von der urzeit bis zum Dritten Jahrtausend und von der Saülingsalter aus dem Totenstarre. Eine historische und soziologische und psychologische betrachtung über die Ursachen und Wirkungen und so weiter" which became an international bestseller. In 1999, he was appointed Distinguished Fellow of Lacanian Fetishism at the Ontological Institute of Social Action at the London School of Economics following the runaway success of his second best seller - Capitalism: A Degenerate's Instruction Manual. In 2003, he was appointed Professeur Distingue at the Sorbonne for his French bestseller: "La Dialectique, l'autre, et la jouissance dans Bush, Saddam, et Jerry Lewis." The book did not do as well in translation. In 2006, Columbia University appointed him University Professor, their highest Professorial chair given to only twenty people throughout the history of the school. In his case the Robert Guccione University Professor of Pornographic Cinema on account of his third international best-seller: The Phenomenology of Ejaculate.
A still more involved backstory is Dr. Marvin Vitebsk, Director of the Yitzhak Shamir Foundation on Security Studies and editor-in-chief of the Shamir Foundation's journal - Middle East Defense Quarterly. He's also the Sheldon Adelson Senior Fellow in Media and Education Bias at the Jabotinsky Institute, Director of International Anti-Israel Propaganda Rapid Response at the BenZion Netanyahu Foundation for Global Research, Second Executive Vice Chairman at the Kahane Committee on the Present Danger, Fourth Vice-Director of the Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schaffly Coalition for a Democratic Minority, and former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute before hitting Richard Perle over the head with a two-by-four. After getting an undergraduate degree in classics at the City College of New York which he paid for by becoming a janitor at the RAND Corporation who leaked key documents to Maoist China, he then switched allegiances and got all charges dropped by producing visual film to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara that he hit Zhou Enlai over the head with a two-by-four. Marvin then received two doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His first doctoral thesis, entitled Democracy: The American Weakness, was supervised by Allan Bloom. His second doctoral thesis - entitled The Benefits of Mutually Assured Destruction, was supervised by Albert Wohlfstetter. He was briefly a talking head in the 70s but his period as a television personality ended in 1978 when he hit the longtime AFL-CIO director George Meany on the air over the head with what was clearly a two-by-four. He then served as a Distinguished Congressional Aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington and briefly served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, until a fight with Moynihan's then Chief of Staff, Tim Russert, ended with Dr. Vitebsk hitting Mr. Russert over the head with a plywood of indeterminate length. After the Iranian Revolution he made the cover of TIME Magazine for having been the only man in CIA employ to hit both Ayatollah Khomeni and Saddam Hussein over the head - the implement with which he did so is still classified. After the fall of Communism, Dr. Vitebsk revealed himself, though some have disputed his account, being the covert CIA assassin of both the brief-tenured Soviet Premieres Andropov and Chernenko, whose deaths the Soviets pretended were due to natural causes as a way of saving face in the international arena, and which enabled the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders who enacted Glastnost and Perestroika. Once again, the implement with which he assassinated them is classified. Dr. Vitebsk now divides his time between Silver Spring and French Hill in East Jerusalem.
But my most involved backstory is Hauptmann Rinderherz (put the name through google translator...). Hauptmann Rinderherz is the 53-year-old, crew-cutted, 6’6, 350 lbs German man who’s crashed on Evan’s couch since September 2013. They met one day at bar trivia in East Baltimore, and Evan quickly learned this was a kindred spirit with a bottomless knowledge of classical music, but he'd been evicted from his apartment a week earlier. In a moment Evan endlessly regrets, Evan invited Hauptmann Rinderherz to crash on his couch for the night. Since 2013, Hauptmann Rinderherz has never left the couch except to go to the bathroom. Evan would later find out from a friend that there was, in fact, no apartment, and he’d been moving from couch to couch until his host tires enough of him to call the police. On Evan’s coffeetable is Hauptmann Rinderherz’s 400-CD collection of Carlos Kleiber and Sergiu Celibidache bootlegs, which the good Herr Hauptmann hasn't bothered organizing or even listening to because they all are found on his youtube channel, the views of which he seems to check as often as possible. From the little information Evan can get out of him, Hauptmann Rinderherz was a rising star in the East Berlin police who specialized in interrogations (only violent criminals, he always specifies, not political prisoners), but his career was tragically derailed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because he refused under oath to acknowledge he was ever a member of the Stasi, he spent two weeks in jail was disbarred from continuing his police work. He then decided to pursue the music career he abandoned at the behest of his mother who told him daily that her fondest wish for her son was to die for Germany. Hauptmann Rinderherz was a childhood prodigy who claims that as a teenager he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory under Emil Gilels, but Evan has yet to see Hauptmann Rinderherz approach a piano or even hear him speak a word of Russian. For ten years after the wall fell, Herr Hauptmann made his living operating a floor-buffer in the lobby of the Berlin Philharmonie. But when Simon Rattle was elected the next leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1999, Hauptmann Rinderherz was so disgusted he elected to leave Berlin for America. Hauptmann Rinderherz lived for the next few years as a hobo, jumping coal train to coal train through all the American cities until he caught an episode of The Wire through the window of a Radio Shack in Toledo. He immediately realized that of all American cities, Baltimore alone had the gritty dinginess to remind him of the good old days of East Berlin when everybody was banded together in the communal solidarity of mutual misery.
There are still others. 'Ferdinand Dickisch' was the suggestion of one friend, and I have yet to find a backstory for him. A friend of my parents recently suggested the pseudonym "Pierre Saponite" - since Evan means 'rock' in Hebrew ("pierre" en francais), and Saponite is the name on a 19th century poster of a French detergent ad in my parents' living room. I haven't decided on a biography yet, but I'm thinking he's a playboy intellectual who flies to warzones in a chartered plane immaculately tailored and coiffed, then writes articles about his experiences and plagiarizes in all them.
Whomever this muse is, their presence in my life is fleeting, and I like to think they are on a beach in the Big Sur around Carmel, and eventually they will come back, tanned, rested, and ready, and we will write something more than a backstory.
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