Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  What is it when you have an urge to produce something, to make something, and it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not? When I was a little kid, in first grade, there was a project that we had to do in class. We were supposed to make a holiday wreath. It was to be made from a bent coat hanger, tied with the plastic wrap that came from the shrouds that went over your clothes when you picked them up from the dry cleaners.

  The strange thing was that the dry cleaners that my father went to used blue-tinted plastic. On the appointed day I brought the blue plastic sheet to school. But I noticed that everybody else’s dry cleaner plastic was clean and clear. Mine was blue, and theirs was clear. I was horrified by the idea that I’d brought in the wrong raw material. The teacher gave me some extra clear plastic, but there wasn’t enough for a whole wreath. “You can take pieces of clear plastic and do part of the wreath,” she said gently, “and then alternate with the blue plastic.” I shook my head. Everybody else’s wreath was knotted with thick luscious densely packed bow-ties of clear plastic. I didn’t want to finish the blue-striped wreath, but I did. It was a shaming disappointment. My mother wanted to hang it on the door but I said no. And yet why was I raising a fuss? It doesn’t make any sense. What were we doing making plastic Christmas wreaths, anyway?

  This morning I woke up at four a.m. and read the beginning of Medea Benjamin’s book on drone warfare. Benjamin talks about meeting a thirteen-year-old girl who was begging on the road near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2002, a missile hit her house while she was outside carrying a bucket of water; it killed her mother and her two brothers. Her name was Roya. Her father, a vendor of sweets, had survived, but he did not speak. I got up and watched a video of Medea Benjamin telling the story to an audience at a library. She said that Roya’s father had carefully gathered pieces of his wife and his sons from the tree near their house and buried them. Oh, Jesus. Roya. That poor girl. Her poor father. Their lives completely demolished. I was traumatized and angry—angry at General Atomics, the company that makes drones, angry at George W. Bush, angry at Barack Obama for increasing the drone attacks fivefold after he was elected. I paced the kitchen for a while feeling powerless and ineffectual. At least Tim is writing his book.

  • • •

  I WENT TO PLANET FITNESS and had a long session on the elliptical trainer. By the time I was done, the parking lot was crowded with cars and I couldn’t remember where I’d parked. I walked up and down and then I started singing, “I lost my car in the parking lot, I lost my car in the parking lot.” Was it a song? Yes, in a way it was.

  Once I found my car, which was parked way over to the right, I started home. I saw a street sweeper—a big yellow street sweeper with an invisible pilot high up in the cab. It looked like it was driving itself. I love street sweepers, I always have, even more than garbage trucks. I love the way the big rear roller turns inward against the forward movement of the machine, flinging the mess that the front bristles have dug away from the curb up into some inner holding area. “Sweeper” was one of the first words I said, according to my mother’s stories. “Sweeper” and “lung lord.” “Lung lord” was how I said “lawnmower.”

  I lit a Ramones cigar, from Honduras—one of the shorter cigars in the grab bag—and I pressed the button on my recorder and sang, “Street sweeper baby, coming down the street. Spinning those bristles and keeping it neat.” That’s definitely a song. When I got home I grabbed my guitar and went up to the barn and clutched out a few chords and matched the chords to the melody, and I was in business, in a primitive sort of way. It was very windy and the barn creaked—I could hear the joists moving and twisting—but I ignored the wind’s white eyeballs. I spent the morning recording snippets of songs, and then I took Smack for a walk in the park near Strawbery Banke, where all the historic houses are. Strawbery Banke, is there a song in Strawbery Banke? No. I looked across the water at the submarine base. What about a song about a burning submarine? “The submarine was burning, going up in smoke.” No. “The sea warriors watched while their submarine burned.” No, definitely not, because Chuck worked on submarines and it would make Nan unhappy if I wrote a song about Chuck’s precious submarine.

  Oh, but the guitar sounded good. I couldn’t get over how good a D minor chord sounded on the guitar. Little old D minor. I once played a Mahler symphony with a D minor bassoon solo, big deal—Mahler’s interminable Sixth Symphony. But this guitar D minor was different. By shifting two fingers you can go from a D minor to some other chord with a suspended something-or-other. D minor, then strange chord, then D minor again. So beautiful. “It’s early morning and the rollers are rolling,” I sang. “The rollers are rolling in the early morning.”

  Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then those chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration.

  • • •

  IS IT POSSIBLE to write a song about the beginnings of the CIA? About the fetish of secrecy? I know a little secret about the CIA. I bet you don’t know this. I’m going to tell it to you right now. The true founder of the CIA was a poet, Archibald MacLeish. Well, that’s not quite right. MacLeish was one of the true founders, one of the early recruiters and legitimizers.

  When Franklin Roosevelt wanted to set up a bureau of secret intelligence—this was in the summer of 1941—he assigned the job of creating an intelligence agency to two highly placed people. One was William Donovan, a Republican lawyer who’d gone to Pearl Harbor to “inspect the fleet” before it was attacked and gone to London to cook up trouble and help set Europe ablaze. The other was FDR’s poet speechwriter, the man who’d won a Pulitzer Prize for saying, with great self-importance, that a poem must not mean but be: Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish had already helped Wild Bill Donovan with some of his interventionist speeches—they stayed up late in Donovan’s place in New York fashioning what Donovan would say on the radio about how convoys of American destroyers should be protecting British ships—and he was setting up a new propaganda agency called the Office of Facts and Figures, and he was, incidentally, Librarian of Congress. When Roosevelt wanted an Office of Censorship to keep the lid on bad news, he put MacLeish on the board of directors. MacLeish wanted to be in control of all government information. He was fascinated by air power—the physical air power of bombing, and also the ideological air power of propagandistic radio. He wanted us in the war, but he wanted us to fight smart, at high altitude, with careful targeting and big new weapons made in democratic factories—to fight, above all, with the really big weapon, managed truth. Elizabeth Bishop wrote dismissively of MacLeish’s “mellifluous and meaningless” speeches. The Chicago Tribune called him the Bald Bard of Balderdash.

  In August 1941, Donovan and MacLeish met on a cool porch and sketched an organizational chart for a secret agency, and afterward MacLeish sent out telegrams to academicians of war planning, including William Langer at Harvard and James Phinney Baxter at Williams: “Colonel Donovan as coordinator of information is setting up a central intelligence service with which the Library of Congress is cooperating,” MacLeish said in the telegrams. The war planners met, and one of MacLeish’s librarians produced a long document titled “Proposal for a CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE for the Federal Government Together with the Relationship of THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Thereto.” It ended up being called the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, and it did many counterproductive secret things during the war, some of which are still classified, and in 1945 Harry Truman formally abolished it and fired Donovan. But Archibald MacLeish carefully watched over the shreds of OSS intelligence that were left, in his new job as assistant secretary of state, and then a few years later Truman realized he needed a spy servi
ce after all, in order to do battle with the evil Communist conspiracy as it was manifesting itself in Greece and Italy and Southeast Asia and everywhere else. Truman wanted to overthrow Communist leaders by spreading around bribe money and napalm and ammunition, so he reconstituted the OSS. But now it was called the Central Intelligence Agency, echoing MacLeish’s original name. And some of MacLeish’s young Yale protégés from Skull and Bones, including Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton, eventually became the CIA’s senior paranoid poltergeists. So now you know. Archibald MacLeish was one of the original instigators and organizers of this bloated monstrosity of assassination and violent regime change and unaccountable underhanded ugliness and skullduggery. And drone warfare. Which is why Plato was right: poets should never get involved in politics.

  Is there a song in that? Probably not. I don’t want to know about evil, I just want to know about love. Stephen Fearing sang this song in 2007 in a hotel lobby in Paris. Listen to it on YouTube and you will be happy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiJjLdcFF6Y.

  • • •

  I SO ADMIRE people who can sing. They tell their voice to go somewhere and it just goes there. Or they say, Don’t go there, go almost there and swerve up into position at the last second. There’s an unspeakable intelligence in what they’re doing. No words can describe it.

  I went out and spent twenty dollars on sushi at Fresh Market, and then I went to the chocolate factory on Hanover Street and bought dessert: some special pistachio bark sprinkled with chili powder and cayenne pepper and cinnamon. It has magical mood-altering properties, I think, and even if it doesn’t it tastes good. On the ride home I got lucky when I was listening to my songs on shuffle: I came to something by Anna Nalick called “Breathe.” I was sitting at a stoplight and suddenly there was an amazing woman singing in my ears about how life’s like an hourglass glued to the table and what you have to do is breathe, just breathe. Something papery in me crumpled and I crunched my eyes closed and sang tunelessly along with Anna Nalick, and I listened to every word. The last time I’d thought about that song was back in 2009, when I was in a hotel room in Cincinnati after a reading.

  It was so good that I tapped the genius icon, the little atom, to make a genius playlist from songs that iTunes in its wisdom thought were like “Breathe.” The Weepies came on, another group I haven’t thought about in a while, singing that the world spins madly on, and then came another good song that I’d forgotten, by Kate Earl, called “Melody.” “Melody” is about how Kate Earl listens to songs all day long and she has nobody beside her to go ooh ooh ooh, but her skin is warm and her heart is full and the music is loud so her hips can swing. I bet they do—those woman’s hips, those hourglass hips, they don’t lie. I think “Melody” was a free single on iTunes one week, that’s how I got it. And here Kate Earl was just singing it for me. I started to dance in the car, taking a right turn into my driveway. She says something very profound and simple: “Every missing piece of me, I can find in a melody.”

  This song is a wonder. There are sleighbells in the background for some reason, who can explain it?

  Thirteen

  NAN CAME SMILINGLY OVER with Raymond and I said, “Hi, folks,” and sat them down at the kitchen table. I decanted the sushi onto plates and brought out the little soy sauce saucers so that we could each of us mix our own personal octane mix of wasabi. The best thing about sushi is the wasabi mustard—it clears your head like nothing else. We talked about the chickens for a while, and whether a fresh egg tastes different from an egg you get from the supermarket. Nan said that before she got the bantam rooster a hawk had killed two chickens, but the flyweight bantam is fierce and fearless and he protects them. Then I asked Raymond how his music was going. He said it was going okay. I asked him if he could show me how he made beats and he pulled his MPC beat-making machine from his backpack and we hooked it up to my computer speakers and he cycled through some of the presets and got a chesty kick drum going and made a quick eight-bar loop. It sounded excellent. Nan and I were rocking our heads, looking at each other with our eyebrows slightly raised while Raymond tapped on the rubber pads with his fingers and fiddled with dials.

  “So Raymond,” I said, after a while, “what would you suggest I get if I wanted to make music? Should I get one of these MPC things? I can’t spend a huge amount of money.”

  “What kind of music do you see yourself making?” said Raymond, in a grown-up sort of way.

  “Well, I bought a cheap guitar and I really like it”—I pointed at my Gibson Maestro, carelessly propped in a corner of the kitchen—“but really I’d kind of like to make a superfunky dance song that people would have to get up and dance to.”

  “There are basically two ways to go,” said Raymond, “real analog hardware or software. I use both. Hardware’s nice because you’ve got actual dials and faders and pads, but it’s pricey. Do you have vocals?”

  “Yes, I’ve got some vocals. Vocal fragments.”

  “Then you’re going to need a good microphone and a USB audio interface. The Saffire 6 is good.”

  “His grandparents gave him some money for his education,” Nan explained.

  “Thank heaven for grandparents,” I said. “My grandparents bought me a bassoon.”

  “A bassoon,” said Raymond. “Do you still play?”

  I said I’d sold it a long time ago. “And I have very limited means at the moment.”

  “Then you should just go with software. Get Logic. It’ll cost you two hundred dollars and it’s got tons of instruments.”

  “Okay.” I began taking notes. “Logic.”

  “Yeah, you can pretty much do any bizarro thing you want with it. It’s got a synth called Sculpture that makes glass and wood sounds, and sounds like bouncing marbles.”

  “Bouncing marbles,” I said, longingly, writing it down.

  Raymond pulled out his computer and showed me a song he’d been working on in Logic. The vocal tracks were blue and the other tracks were green. He touched the A key and showed me how he’d made a white-noise sweep. “There are vocals with these,” he said, “but I’ve got them muted.”

  “Play some of the vocals,” said Nan.

  Raymond hesitated. “Mom, as you know, they’re a tad explicit.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” said Nan. “We don’t mind being shocked, do we, Paul?”

  “Let me quick listen first,” said Raymond. I handed Nan the pistachio bark while Ray put on his huge studio headphones—they had a spiral cord—and he listened to his lyrics, moving his head to the side with the beat. He hit the space bar to stop the playback and grimaced. “I’m not sure. I’ll play you a little bit of the chorus.”

  He played the chorus. It was something like “Baby I got some beans in these jeans, I got some beans in these jeans!” There was something else about “crucial fluids.”

  I laughed, slightly embarrassed for Nan. “That’s good,” I said. “Very catchy. Nice hook. Let’s hear more.”

  “I’ve got another song that’s less inappropriate.” He hunted in a folder for the file.

  “This is wild and spicy,” said Nan, meaning the chocolate.

  Ray played us some of the other song. Something about “My shoes don’t want to fit and I’m waiting for the late bus. Waiting for the bus in the rain.”

  “That’s great!” I said, and I meant it.

  Nan looked proud.

  “What about your songs?” asked Raymond politely.

  I reached for my guitar and I strummed a chord. I’d tuned it carefully before dinner. “My singing is no good. I can’t do it.”

  “Come on, play us something,” said Nan.

  I played a D minor chord, alternating with the no-name chord. Then I sang a snatch of the street sweeper song and two verses of the doctor song.

  “Whoa,” said Ray. “I heard a little Radiohead action in there.”

  “It’s derivative and awful,
” I said. “It’s bad, it’s bad. It’s no good.”

  “No, no, it’s good,” said Nan sympathetically.

  I put the guitar down. “Eh, I can’t sing, but it’s fun.” I turned to Ray. “If I get Logic, will you show me some tricks?”

  “Sure, anytime,” he said. “I’ll show you how to use pitch correction. You can sound almost like Kanye West if you want.”

  “I doubt it. Boy, he’s got his hands full with Kim Kardashian.” I gathered the plastic trays that the sushi came in. “What about you, Nan? Do you sing?”

  She held her hands up. “I only sing Beatles songs.”

  “Let’s hear one,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m out of practice.”

  “At least do ‘Blackbird,’” said Raymond.

  Nan sang, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” I felt a strange lump in my throat. She finished and we all sat there.

  “Damn!” I said. “Really. Damn.”

  “That was really good, Mom,” said Raymond.

  Nan wiped something from her eye. “I guess we should be going,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”

  I shook Raymond’s hand and pointed at him. “Keep going with those songs,” I told him. “You’ve got the touch.”

  • • •

  I SPENT THE MORNING downloading Logic from Apple, which takes a long time because there are many gigabytes of sampled instruments. I also bought the Beatles doing “Blackbird,” because Nan had sung it so well and I wanted to remember how Paul McCartney did it, also some Kanye West songs and three by Radiohead. I spent two hours watching how-to videos on YouTube and ordering a manual. Logic is not self-explanatory. It’s ticklish. It does unexpected things. But, as everyone on YouTube said, once you get into it, it’s very powerful. Finally I created an instrumental track and set it to Steinway Hall Piano. Each note of a real Steinway is sampled, i.e., recorded, five or six or seven times at varying volumes and loaded into something called the EXS24 Sampler. I played a B flat chord with my headphones on, using the shift-lock keyboard, which allows you to play using the letter keys of the computer, and I was stunned by how big and true it sounded. I felt like Alfred Brendel playing Mussorgsky’s “The Old Castle,” coaxing the licorice goodness out of a vastly expensive instrument. I felt like Maurice Ravel playing “Sad Birds.” But obviously I needed a real keyboard.