Traveling Sprinkler Read Online Free PDF Page B

Camels a day. In the movie, Wayne dies in a big shoot-out, with Opie of
The Andy Griffith Show
looking on sadly, but before he dies he rides for a long time on a horse-drawn streetcar. He has a talk with a fresh-faced young woman and remembers his love for Lauren Bacall. Then, just as he’s about to disembark from the streetcar, he gives the conductor a fancy whorehouse pillow that he’s been carrying around with him. “These old bones surely thank you,” says the conductor, sitting on the pillow.
    I thought of John Wayne’s red pillow as I did my sit-ups and read Léonie Adams. I got to the second-to-last line of the poem: “My every leaf leans forth upon the day.” Good line. Adams was influenced by the Elizabethan songsters. She wanted to sing densely, like Campion and Dowland. She taught at Bennington and had a brief affair with Edmund Wilson. Wilson, who was married, got her pregnant, and she had a miscarriage and grieved over it. He was such a low, mean, drunken bug of a critic. He jeered at Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
and wrote a vicious but accurate parody of Archibald MacLeish for
The New Yorker
called “The Omelet of A. MacLeish.” MacLeish was never the same after Edmund Wilson’s parody. He began writing urgent bad speeches in favor of intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and then Roosevelt asked him to be Librarian of Congress.
    I’ve been reading about protest songs on the Internet. Somebody recommended one called “Living Darfur.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    B EST B UY GIVES YOU one free lesson if you buy a guitar, so I signed up with a man who teaches progressive rock. When I think of beginning lessons again, though, it really hurts. All those years of bassoon lessons I took. All those Milde études I learned. All those years of soaking my reed in a baby food jar and croaking it to see that it was still healthy and hearing the tick tock of my red plastic Taktell metronome perched on the edge of the piano. My teacher, Bill Brown, was a student of Norman Herzberg, the great studio bassoonist in Los Angeles. You can hear Herzberg’s bassoon in
E.T.
, in
Jaws
, in Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons, and in the theme music to
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
. Herzberg was a Zen Buddhist of bassoon, and Billy Brown taught me his method of meditating while practicing. The meditation was called “long tones.”
    A long tone was a note that you played for sixteen beats of the Super-Mini-Taktell metronome. You started as softly as you could, at
pppppp
, the way you would start the low E in Tchaikovsky’s
Symphonie Pathétique
, and you held that for four beats and then you did a very slow and very perfectly graduated increase in sound, letting just the right amount of air into the reed and never varying the pitch and never adding any falsification of vibrato, and eventually you were playing as loudly as you could and yet with perfect control, for four more beats, squandering all your lung air, but you still had to keep steady and do a perfect diminuendo for four beats and go all the way back down to an extreme pianissimo for four beats. One day you’d do long tones on a low E and the next maybe you’d concentrate on a middle A flat, and you would do this for every note in the full range of the instrument. This was discipline. And while you did it you emptied your mind of everything except that note—which you were hoping would become, would truly achieve, the fully rounded bassoonistic sort of note that you’d heard the great virtuosi play, men like Herzberg, or Bernie Garfield in Philadelphia, or Maurice Allard in Paris, or Simon Kovar, wherever he was. Simon Kovar had edited a number of practice books for the bassoon, including the Milde études and the Pierné études, and he’d recorded a performance of Mozart’s bassoon concerto. He was one of our minor deities. Gabriel Pierné was a