you can count on, you can count on that. If this were not the
common, current practice - if triviality and deceit were not
the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remarkable in who I am or how I got the way that I am.
It must be admit ed that those who want me to account for
myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their
projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or
arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become
accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most
respects but not al I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kil
the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,
alone in a small room.
xi i
Music 1
I studied music when I was a child, the piano as taught by
Mrs. Smith. She was old with white hair. She represented
culture with every gesture while I was just a plebe kid. But I
learned: discipline and patience from Czerny, the way ideas
can move through sound from Bach, how to say “Fuck you”
from Mozart. Mrs. Smith might have thought herself the
reigning sensibility, and she did get between the student and
the music with a stunning regularity, but if you could hear you
could learn and if you learned it in your body you knew it
forever. The fingers were the wells of musical memory, and
they provided a map for the cognitive faculties. I can remember writing out the notes and eventually grasping the nature of the piano, percussive and string, the richness and range of
the sound. I wanted music in writing but not the way Verlaine
did, not in the syllables themselves; anything pronounced
would have sound and most sound is musical; no, in a different
way. I recognized early on how the great classical composers,
but especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without
using any words at al . Repetition, variation, risk, originality,
and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I
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wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems
by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paperback books with the English translations reading like prose poems - and I'd recognize that the power of the poems was
not unlike the power of music. For a while, I hoped to be a
pianist, and my mother took me into Philadelphia, the big
city, to study with someone a great deal more pretentious and
more expensive than Mrs. Smith. But then I tried to master
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for which I had developed a somewhat warped passion, and could not. That failure told me that I could not be a musician, although I continued
to study music in col ege.
The problem with that part of my musical education was
that I stopped playing piano, and Bennington, the college I
went to, insisted that one play an instrument. I didn’t like my
piano teacher, and I wasn’t going to play or spend one minute
of one day with him hovering over my shoulder and condemning me with a baronial English that left my prior teachers in my mind as plain-speaking people. I loved the theory classes. Mine was with the composer Vivian fine. The first
assignment, which was lovely, was to write a piece for salt and
pepper shakers. I wrote music away from the piano for the
piano, but after the first piano lesson I never deigned to darken
the piano teacher’s doorway again. At the end of the year, this
strategy of noncompliance turned out to be the equivalent of
not attending physical education in high schooclass="underline" you couldn’t
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Music 1
graduate without having done the awful crap. When my
adviser, also a musician but never a teacher of music to me,
asked me why I hadn’t shown up for any of the piano
lessons, I felt awkward and stupid but I gave him an honest
answer: “I don’t like the asshole. ” My adviser smiled with
one of his this-is-too-good-to-be-true looks - he was amused
- and said he’d take care of it. He must have, or I would not
have passed.
My adviser, the composer Louis Callabro, taught me a lot
about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization
- I’d bring the poems, the short stories, every now and then a
novel. Lou was a drunkard, much more his style than being
an alcoholic. I had met him without knowing it on first
ar iving at Bennington. I loved the old music building and
sort of haunted it. He came out of his studio, pissing drunk,
stared at me, and said, “Never sleep with a man if you want
to be his friend. ” I adored the guy. Eventually I’d show him
my music and he’d show me his short stories. It was a new
version of I’l -show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. I later
understood that the all-girl Bennington’s expectation was that
the girl, the woman, any female student, should learn how to
be the mistress of an artist, not the artist herself: this in the
college that was the early home of Martha Graham. The
equality between Lou and myself, our mutual recognition,
was no part of the school’s agenda. This is not to suggest that
Lou did not screw his students: he did; they al did. I always
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Heartbreak
thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I
never slept with faculty members, only their wives.
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Music 2
Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for
memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got
a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could
never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was Tales from the Vienna Wods by
Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece
was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even
though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics
at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there
was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my
mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and
smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with Tales were like a drum corps around the shrinking room. Later, cousins told me about their father’s sexual
molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the
youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond
and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he
stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children
when they were very young, including when they were infants
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Heartbreak