A Quick Note on Thaddeus Rutkowski's HAYWIRE (Starcherone)

by Jefferson Hansen

This coming-of-age novel begins when the Chinese-Polish narrator, who lives in Appalachia, is in about junior high. It ends with him as a married man in his mid-20's or so. Obviously, his character changes as the book unfolds. Rutkowski presents this change in the typical fashion: our main character behaves in a progressively more grown-up fashion, he responds to people in a different way, he understands his feelings better, he is more responsible. However, Rutkowski also charts this change in another way, the way that interests me: the very texture of the language alters. In other words, Rutkowski has his narrator inhabit and use language differently the further we go into this novel. This does not always happen in coming-of-age novels: here, the very terms of the narration alter.

This passage occurs fairly early, when the narrator is about in junior high:

"Reluctantly, I pushed a button to open a circuit between the car battery and the rocket engine. A hot copper thread ignited the solid fuel, and the homemade projectile left the ground with a hiss. Almost immediately, the missile went haywire. It started to corkscrew through the air. A couple of hundred feet up, it began to pinwheel.

A second charge deployed the parachute. Wind caught the thin material and carried the rocket away. My brother and sister and I ran after the brightly colored swatch but covered only a few dozen yards before we couldn't see it anymore."

In the above passage, what interests me is the emotional flatness of the narration. The only emotion we get is the word "reluctantly." The rest is pure narration, with all emotion implied. But it's not the rock hard, just-the-facts such narration that we see in Hemingway. This boy is tender, but can't express it. There is a sense that he cares for the rocket, wants to find it and the parachute just for the sake of having it, that he does so with his brother and sister because he cares for them. This is a flat narrativity on which everything hangs. He emotes outside himself, unlike most of Hemingway's characters, who seem absorbed.

Here, we see more direct emotion and a slightly different vocabulary:

"I moved from the small city to a big city. On the way, I stopped at my parents' house. There, I gave my car to my sister, who was just old enough to drive. When I left, the car was running fine. The rear wheel held by four bolts instead of five was tight as a drum. The car cruised without blowing steam. The radio played within five miles of any transmitting station" (153).

Again, the emotion is for the most part implied, but not as much. First, we can see how much he cares for his sister because he not only gives her the car, but makes sure it is in good working order. He wants to give her something good, that works well. The flat humor of the last sentence is also characteristic. In the first quoted passage, the emphasis is almost wholly on the technical, with the implied emotion very distant. In the second, the emphasis is still on the technical, but the emotions are closer to the description.

Finally, in the second passage the vocabulary becomes a little more engaged. The phrase about the sister being "just old enough to drive" speaks volumes, as does "when I left." It reveals how he feels, what he is thinking, and so forth. With some people that age, the phrase would be, "my mom made me give the car to my sister." Here, the texture of the language reveals character—namely, a deeply caring, sweet one.

"I move with my family to a new place. It's a storefront, and it's large, compared with our old place. But it's far from the center of town. It's so far I can't place it geographically, in my mind.

The ceiling looks high, maybe fourteen feet, but when I reach up, I can touch it with my hand. My reach is about seven feet, so the ceiling must be quite low. I can't believe this, so I try again, and my hand touches solid plaster.

I notice that we've left a side door open, maybe for weeks. Anyone could have come in. But there's no evidence of illegal entry. I guess the door must have been hidden behind trees or leaves (295)".

Phrases such as "in my mind" usually don't happen early in the book. The description also becomes more deeply rooted in wonder and fantasy—a place we all often live—and moves away from the facticity of the early part of the book. The part about the ceiling seeming higher than it is points to this. Notice also the phrase "can't believe," which also points to self-consciousness. As the book moves to a finish, our narrator gets married, has a daughter, and begins to develop a deeper understanding of the world, and this is tracked, in part, in the very warp and woof of the language itself.

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Thaddeus Rutkowski webpage

Haywire is published by Starcherone books, run by Ted Pelton. A story by Pelton appears in AlteredScale.com 2.

Throttle Incursion by Vernon Frazer

Poetry recitation with improvised musical accompaniment and animated text
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Vernon Frazer posts regularly on this blog. His work appears in AlteredScale.com 1, AlteredScale.com 2, and he is editing a jazz/poetry video gallery for AlteredScale.com 3.

Here to Stay: Thomas Chapin’s "Never Let Me Go”

A Posthumous Release from one of the Great Ones 

review by Vernon Frazer

While waiting for my copy of Never Let Me Go, a 3-CD box set of Thomas Chapin’s quartet recordings, I realized that I’d heard Thomas play primarily in quartet settings, usually on the several times a month he played in Connecticut jazz clubs in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Late in 1980 or early in 1981, the freshness of his music helped bring me back to the jazz scene after a three-year hiatus that came because I found myself anticipating the soloist's next “sound of surprise” too frequently in clubs and concerts. When I heard Thomas play a familiar pattern, he'd spin it in an unexpected yet unerringly logical direction. I couldn’t anticipate his next line, even when I tried. His love of making music generated a contagious exuberance that led his rhythm sections to transcend themselves or risk falling behind. On more than one occasion, the healing power of his music lifted me from the funk of a foul day into the ecstasy of the moment. The music on these recordings characterizes the transformative powers of Thomas’s playing. Simply put, it features some of his finest playing on record. If you’ve never heard Thomas Chapin before, Never Let Me Go will introduce you to the music of one of the most accomplished and innovative saxophonists and flutists of the 1980s and 1990s. 

At the time Never Let Me Go was recorded, in 1995 and 1996, Thomas had achieved a technical mastery of his instruments that allowed him to express his ideas with a facility almost as natural as breathing. Playing at the peak of his creative powers, his work on this box set should put to rest any remaining attempts to categorize him as mainstream or avant-garde. Those who followed his music knew he was both---and much more. Thomas didn't straddle two worlds; he embraced them as part of one vast spectrum of music. He was a musical omnivore whose passion for ethnic music led him to play many wind and percussion instruments from other cultures. He performed punk rock, tango, and classical music, and backed poets, always playing his distinctive style with an spot-on sensitivity to the musical context. His intellectual and emotional capacity enabled him to to synthesize his broad musical vocabulary into a core expression appropriate to the musical moment. This box set doesn’t pretend to present the full breadth of his musical vision, but it presents him in one of his most comfortable, familiar and accessible formats, the quartet. 

Never Let Me Go emphasizes the jazz at the core of Chapin’s sensibility, and offers a musical stew with more than enough spice to heat and flavor it. The repertoire itself reflects Thomas’s taste for challenging material. His original compositions reveal the passion of his lyricism (“Sky Piece”) and his willingness to improvise within complex structures, as well as create open-ended structures that afforded him maximum creative freedom. In the fare offered here, we see the choices of material that made Thomas unique among his colleagues. In addition to his own compositions, he chooses standards you don’t commonly hear. Chapin devours the changes of the opening tunes, “I’ve Got Your Number” and “Moon Ray,” with joyful passion. On the latter, he risks playing an extended interpolation from “Nature Boy” beyond “Moon Ray’s” harmonic structure, but deftly ends the phrase within the structure and refers to the passage several choruses later during a climactic build. On the bop classic, “Red Cross,” Chapin devours the changes, incorporating pianist Peter Madsen's substitutions and building to shrieking climaxes that stretch but retain their ties to the tune’s harmonic structure and tonality. He also delves into popular music that I’ve yet to hear any other jazz musician attempt: Ray Charles’ 1962 hit, “You Don’t Know me” and the 1960s hit “Wichita Lineman.” In a live performance, he once gave “Red River Valley” a decidedly urban interpretation. Thomas also recorded several lesser-known Thelonious Monk compositions, capturing their spirit with sensitivity while adding the distinctive Chapin interpretation, a gesture of respect deeper than mere imitation. Disc 2 of this box set opens with Chapin and pianist Peter Madsen rendering Monk’s seldom-played “Ugly Beauty” as a sensitive duet. 

The other members of the rhythm section aren’t as familiar to me as Madsen. In conversations, Thomas had mentioned touring Japan with bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara, but never mentioned the quartet to me as a working unit. Thomas usually spoke in very general terms about his projects, I assume because any new artistic undertaking carries as much uncertainty as enthusiasm. But Fujiwari and Scott Colley, whose work I’m hearing for the first time, accompany Chapin with drive and empathy, as do drummers Reggie Nicholson and Matt Wilson. Among the drummers I’ve heard with Thomas, Nicholson and Wilson tend to play the deeper tones of their trap sets, compared to Michel Sarin and Steve Johns, whose work I’ve heard more frequently. 

In addition to releasing excellent and unheard material from a voice gone too soon, Never Let Me Go underscores the brilliance of Thomas Chapin’s work and reminds us that nobody in the past fourteen years has surpassed him. That he is irreplaceable is a given. Another given is that Never Let Me Go is a keeper.

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Vernon Frazer is a regular contributor to this blog and has appeared in AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2. He is currently curating a jazz-poetry gallery for AlteredScale.com 3.

Tom Cassidy — Untitled

(Click to enlarge and focus.)

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Tom Cassidy will appear in AlteredScale.com 3, out in March.

Tom Cassidy's written and drawn works have appeared in hundreds of smallpress and mainstream publications, as well as galleries and museums around the world. His works are archived in dozens of art institutions, often under his own name. With John Bennett and Scott Helmes, he co-edited Vispoeology (2007), an international anthology of visual literature for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he also co-curated None of the Above in 2009. In 1976, Tom co-founded the Portland performance poetry troupe The Impossibilists, who were reunited in April, 2008, for a series of shows by the Oregon Heritage Commission. He is currently a board member, performer, and curator for Cheap Theatre and Patrick’s Cabaret.

Leigh Herrick Interview

Leigh Herrick discusses poetry and her new book, HOME FRONT: Poems of the Bush II Years, with Tom Cassidy. They make a number of references to Minneapolis and the Twin Cities, MN, USA, for those of you not familiar with the area.








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 Leigh Herrick and Tom Cassidy are both regular contributors to this blog. Both will also appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Tom Cassidy's written and drawn works have appeared in hundreds of smallpress and mainstream publications, as well as galleries and museums around the world. His works are archived in dozens of art institutions, often under his own name. With John Bennett and Scott Helmes, he co-edited Vispoeology (2007), an international anthology of visual literature for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he also co-curated None of the Above in 2009. In 1976, Tom co-founded the Portland performance poetry troupe The Impossibilists, who were reunited in April, 2008, for a series of shows by the Oregon Heritage Commission. He is currently a board member, performer, and curator for Cheap Theatre and Patrick’s Cabaret.

Leigh Herrick is an engaged poet, writer, and recording artist who trains in Middle Eastern and Afro-Caribbean hand drumming.  She has produced two CD's: JUST WAR and MONOCLE MAN, and is at work on a third.  Herrick ’s poetry has won numerous awards and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.  Her newly released book is HOME FRONT: Poems of the Bush II Years.  For more information please visit www.LeighHerrick.com 

Leigh Herrick — Joe Hill (On Life Support)

Below is a link to Leigh Herrick's electronica and vocals rendition of a new song she wrote, in honor of  workers and Unions. Go Union!

Joe Hill (On Life Support)

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Leigh Herrick will appear in AlteredScale.com 3.

She is a poet, recording artist, and filmmaker who lives in the Twin Cities, MN, USA. She is a regular contributor to this blog.

Leigh Herrick Webpage

Crack, Crack by Julianne Davis

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Julianne Davis will appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Artist Statement: I am a self-taught artist from the UK. I enjoy writing, art, and I sometimes make short films. I have two children, both feral.