Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  I went to the music department at Best Buy and stood there for a while. “Any questions at all?” said the salesman. He was a young, friendly bass player who was going to Berklee College of Music in Boston.

  I said I wanted a MIDI keyboard to hook up with Logic.

  “What size are you thinking?”

  “I guess the traditional eighty-eight keys, because that’s the number I’m used to.”

  He showed me some eighty-eight-key MIDI keyboards. They cost a fortune.

  “Thanks, let me study these,” I said. Two children were plinking loudly and tunelessly on some portable clavichords in a different aisle. Eventually the noise began to get to me, and I went into a small glass-walled room filled with drum sets and maracas where it was quiet. Did I want to spend a vast sum for a full eighty-eight-key keyboard, a real piano-size keyboard, or did I want to get something smaller and less expensive? I decided I didn’t need all eighty-eight keys, because honestly I never liked the very low and very high notes on the piano anyway—both extremes are harsh in different ways. I walked back out into the noise.

  “On second thought, I think I want something more compact,” I said. The salesman tapped on a box that held the Axiom forty-nine-key keyboard. “I have an Axiom 61 and I love it,” he said. “It’s a real workhorse. The classes at Berklee use the Axiom 49 and they’ve never had any problems.”

  So I bought it. I also bought a big book of Prince songs. I almost bought a Blue microphone as well, which had a lovely retro design. It was on display under glass near the cash register, but I restrained myself. The keyboard was enough for now. It had “aftertouch,” something that real wooden pianos don’t have. After you play a note, if you press down harder on the key it will detect your increased finger pressure. The keyboard was a hundred times less expensive than a Steinway Hall piano, and it was made of plastic, but it had aftertouch.

  • • •

  HEY THERE, PEOPLE, and welcome. This is the Poetry Pebble Tumble, and I’m your host, Paul. Tonight we convene by the light of a small, very round moon that has things to tell us, with a star near it like a pasted-on beauty mark.

  I’m smoking a limited-edition Viaje Summerfest cigar. Wow, is it strong. Strong and full of brown tuneful certainty. It’s sold with loose weedy leaves poking out the end, which makes it seem exotic until you wrench them off with a turn of the wrist and roast the tip. It’s my ganja. Here’s to you, Bob Marley, you reconciler of opposites, you peacemaker. “One love.” You said it all in a single phrase.

  I’m totally stoned on this Viaje cigar. Man! Why do people need medical marijuana when there are these tightly wrapped cylinders of bliss from Latin America? I could get high thinking about the word “intrinsic.”

  Once in music school I was out in a Frisbee field with two friends, a clarinet player and a bassoonist. I was starting to be full of the desire to write poems, and I thought real poets talked about words all the time, so I asked a pretentious question, as poets are permitted to do. I said: Offhand, what’s your favorite word? The clarinetist said, I don’t know, what’s yours?

  “Inscrutable,” I said. I gave it a big throat-wiggle of inscrutability when I said it. My two friends said, No, “inscrutable” is not that great. I was stung by their dismissal, but I didn’t say so, and when my friend the bassoonist said that “cash” was his favorite word, I said, Oh yeah, cash, legal tender is the night, baby. And when the clarinet player said “kegger,” I said, Oh yeah, “kegger,” that’s very good. I’m not going to be a naysayer of other people’s pet words. That’s not my role. Plus “inscrutable” isn’t as good as their two. It would be nice to record the particular clunk that a Frisbee makes when it angles hard into the grass and use it in a rhythm track. Prince uses those great damped piano thumps in “Let’s Go Crazy.”

  My role is to be here in the side yard when the moon is swimming in the deep end of the sky with the treeshapes near it. It’s a full twelve feet deep under the nightpool and there’s a moon ring down there, and I’m swimming down toward it and I hear the high vacuumacious sound in my eardrums and I feel the tautness pulling between my toes and I’m thankful that all my thoughts are nonsexual, and that I can sit here with my mouth open and my eyes slitted.

  There are only so many nights like this. The middle of summertime, and even though it’s late, a cricket like a bartender with a rag in his hand is mopping the surfaces of sound. Just one. The rest of the crickets are silent. Their abdomens are sore and chafed and they don’t want to chirp anymore, they want to rest. As do I. Even this one that I’m listening to is getting drowsy. He goes: chert chert chert. And then there’s a long pause while he sits and lets things droop, wondering if anyone’s listening. And then chert chert chert chert chert. And then another long pause. Birds by day, crickets by night, singing away.

  I’m staring right at the fucking moon and I don’t care who knows it. I’ve heard so many different Logic sounds come from my computer and through my headphones I almost can’t stand it. I’m drunk with sound, like the thirteen-year-old Brazilian girl. If I want to write something with marimba I can have marimba. If I want Balinese gamelan there’s gamelan. Chinese guzheng zither? It’s there. Japanese shakuhachi flute? Sure. There are innumerable kick drums, some real and some synthesized, and as for electric guitar—I’ve got Twangy Guitar, and New Surf Lead Guitar, and Nice Crunch Guitar, and Dirty Rotor Guitar, and dozens of others. Too much, almost. Everything’s beautifully sampled. Debussy would have gone batshit if he’d had Logic on his computer. The history of music would have been completely different.

  Fourteen

  I NEED A MICROPHONE, THOUGH. I need a really good stereo microphone. I spent an hour this morning reading about microphones and hunting around on the B&H website. B&H is an electronics store in New York where expensive purchases scoot around in plastic bins on rollers over your head. I bought a camcorder there once. It’s run by Hasidic Jews with hats who know everything. The prices are cheaper on Amazon than at B&H, but that’s because Amazon is using its stock price to take over all of retailing and bankrupt the world.

  I’m not sure whether I want to get two monophonic hundred-dollar Studio Projects B1 microphones, one for the right track and one for the left, each of which would float in a rubber spiderweb shockmount on a tandem microphone rack, powered by phantom power from a Saffire 6 USB interface, or whether I want a single shotgun stereo microphone by Audio-Technica that was developed for broadcasters to cover the Olympics. The Audio-Technica shotgun costs about seven hundred dollars, which is obscene, but once you enter the B&H world of microphones, it seems like a reasonable price.

  “You float like a feather,” sings Radiohead, “In a beautiful world.” I’ve listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I’m not sure I hear it myself, but I was pleased and touched. Sometimes that’s what you need, just a quick, casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in the Garden State soundtrack. Now, that’s a soundtrack. They were all just songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And there’s that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile.

  If you’re a woman and you want to make it in movies, that’s what you need: an enormous mouth. Because you’re talking. Somewhere above you is a big, sensitive microphone on a boom pole that is listening to what you say. You have to have a really big stretchy Carly Simon mouth with big lips that want to be open all the time. And you want to have teeth that go on forever. You don’t just have bicuspids, you have tricuspids and quadricuspids. Look at Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow. The men, too. Tom Cruise, huge mouth. Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Sinatra—all bigmouthed men. Brad Pitt, fairly big mouth. You don’t need to be tall. Natalie Portman is tiny. When she became the black swan she was
so terribly thin I worried about her. Her mouth was bigger than ever. And lately, in No Strings Attached, she’s still beautiful but her hair looks tired and she’s perhaps wearing too much eye makeup. Her great moment was when she handed over the headphones and smiled in Garden State.

  The bad guys in movies have small mouths. Good poets often have small mouths, too, whereas good singers have big mouths. Think of Whitney Houston: small face, big mouth. Good poets often have beards, which make their mouths exceedingly small, sometimes invisible. Robert Browning had a very tiny mouth, I think. Stanley Kunitz, medium-size mouth. It’s a completely different approach to utterance. Maybe that’s the fundamental difference. I have a small mouth, and it’s slightly asymmetrical. Even before I smoked a cigar I talked like a cigar smoker.

  What a disgusting habit. I love it.

  • • •

  I’VE BEEN READING UP on anemia. I was surprised to learn that blackstrap molasses has more iron than anything except meat—much more iron than collards. Spinach is nothing, forget spinach. Roz doesn’t eat meat.

  I watched some Logic tutorials by Matt Shadetek, who teaches at a music school in Manhattan called Dubspot, and I learned how to use the chord memorizer. The chord memorizer allows you to play any sort of chord you want by playing a single key, even chords that are so widely spaced that a single pianist couldn’t play them. I layered some impressionistic sounds and loaded them in the chord memorizer and recorded a little piece. When I listened to it I realized that the harmony sounded alarmingly like Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” I guess that’s not too surprising, since it’s my favorite piece of music. On top of it, into the computer’s tinny microphone, I sang, “Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Drown it with good.”

  My voice was small and scratchy. I like the idea of having a scratchy voice.

  Time to take the dog for a walk.

  • • •

  AT FRESH MARKET I bought a jar of pesto, a shrink-wrapped hunk of Parmesan cheese, and a blue box of cellentani pasta—the spiral kind that holds the pesto best. I thought of writing a dance song in which there would be a sudden silence and then a low voice, like the voice in “Low Rider,” would intone the names of kinds of pasta. “Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum—rigatoni. Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum—rigatoni.” Then: “Cellentani! Cellentani! Cellentani!” I paused in the bulk-food aisle, looking at the plastic canisters of sesame seeds and poppy seeds, and I thought of Roz wanting to eat the sidewalk. I bought a big jug of Brer Rabbit blackstrap molasses, which is in the baking aisle. On the way home I listened to part of a Sodajerker podcast interview with Jimmy Webb, who wrote “Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain,” and then I sent Roz a text: “The internet says that blackstrap molasses contains more iron than the Lusitania. I bought a jug of it for you in case you need it. I can drop it by anytime if you’re feeling anemic. Love P”

  She wrote back, “Thanks, that’s good to know.”

  Why is it that certain timbres of speaking voice are pleasing and others aren’t? Think of Bob Edwards. He was fired from NPR. Why? We don’t know. “Hi, I’m Bob Edwards and this is Morning Edition.” Every day we were there with the radio on, listening with our coffee and our bagel. It was a glorious thing to listen to Bob Edwards on Morning Edition, because he had a little bit of pain and suffering in his voice. There were nicks and dings on his vocal cords. They met and vibrated and did what they needed to do to get the sound of his words out, but they were slightly damaged, and the damage made for interesting whispery overtones. His voice wasn’t as damaged as Melanie’s, who did the roller-skate song. Not as damaged as Meatloaf’s. But it was definitely timeworn, and we loved that.

  Bob Edwards talked into a big, expensive studio microphone, and here’s the scandal. His microphone, like most in the talk radio business, like most in the music recording business, was a monophonic microphone.

  Monophonic sound. What a vile and diseased thing. I’ve got “mono” voice. Mono! No, we don’t want that. We want it in stereo, obviously. For at least forty years we’ve wanted it in stereo. Ever since I was a kid we’ve wanted it in stereo. Don’t tell me that you’re recording voices in mono. That’s just plain awful. That’s criminal. And yet the sound engineers persist. The singer sings her lungs out and she listens to the take and she wonders why her big chorus sounds so thin on tape when she knows it sounded so full and phat when she sang it. Well, it’s obvious. She sounds thin because she’s singing into a very fancy, very expensive, very mono microphone. She says, “Phil, can you beef up the sound a little?” So the sound engineer does his usual tricks—he doubles the vocals, or he adds some reverb, or he cranks up the compression. Maybe he runs it through a special filter called an exciter that adds some glitter to the upper end. But he can’t change the fundamental fact that he’s manipulating a mono signal.

  I ordered the seven-hundred-dollar stereo shotgun from B&H. It’s time to get serious.

  Fifteen

  THIS IS WHAT I MEAN. The experts do not know what they’re talking about. They say we should eat margarine, not butter, and that if you can pinch an inch of your husband’s arm, chances are he’s too fat. And then they say margarine’s bad because it’s full of trans fat. They say drinking destroys brain cells, and then that turns out to be totally bogus, based on no research, and we’re supposed to have two drinks a day. They say spinach is full of iron, when really they should be talking about molasses. Same with the singing voice. They record the vox humana as vox humono because it’s always been done that way. It allows them to place the voice at dead center in the stereo space. If the lead singer sways from side to side, carried away by the beat, the sound stands still. That’s very convenient, but it’s wrong. Of all sounds, the human voice is the sound that we hear best, just as faces are the sights we see best. The slight skeptical contraction at the corners of the eyes, the tiny, indulgent almost smile—we’re immediately aware of those clues, because we’re born experts at reading faces. And likewise we hear a hundred subtle clues in a singing voice, clues about love and regret and rapture, and some of those clues are dulled or lost in mono.

  Stereo recording was the biggest revelation of my life, bigger than any poem. Listening to our mono record player was pleasant, but everything was tinny and far away. When I was six I had a record of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf—the part of the grandfather is played by the bassoon—and a record of Brazilian drumming called Batucada Fantástica, and I played my father’s copy of Bach’s Art of the Fugue. I was taking piano lessons by then, and I was fascinated by the idea of inverting a melody, making the notes go down when they originally went up, and up when they originally went down. Then the craziness hit. The Beatles hit, and Leonard Bernstein hit, and 2001: A Space Odyssey used Strauss’s Zarathustra, and my father subscribed to Stereo Review, and I began drumming Batucada Fantástica rhythms on a large cardboard tube. One summer we got a set of Bose 501 speakers and a minimalist AR turntable with a visible rubber band that turned the platter—AR stood for Acoustic Research—and a Yamaha stereo receiver, and a set of white JVC headphones. Both earpieces had volume dials, so that you could crank the volume up or down on each side. I put the headphones on, and I lowered the needle on Zubin Mehta conducting The Rite of Spring, and suddenly I was there, enclosed in the oxygenated spatial spread of stereophonic sound. I was there with the panicked piccolo, and the bass clarinet was a few feet away, and the timpani surged over to the left, mallets going so fast you couldn’t see them. I couldn’t believe how big a world it was—how much bigger and better stereo was than mono. The human ear had figured out something many eons ago, millions of years ago, in the sacred springtime of the world, long before there were humans, in fact—something basic that very smart scientists took a while to figure out: You need two ears. You need to sample how a sound changes when you move your head slightly. If you move your head, then you can determine what’s behind you and what’s in f
ront of you. You hear a cracking twig somewhere off to the far right. Something’s out there. Is it a barking deer? No, it’s Igor Stravinsky, giving us the super-high-pitched bassoon solo that begins the convulsion.

  • • •

  THE RITE OF SPRING caused problems for Debussy. It blew him out of the water. It frightened him. It made him feel old. It used motifs and harmonic innovations that Debussy had first used in “Nuages,” but it went much further with them. There’s a photo of Debussy and Stravinsky side by side in Debussy’s apartment. I assume they’ve just played the four-hand piano reduction of The Rite of Spring together. Debussy, standing, looks thoughtful, perhaps tired. He’s sinking. He knows he’s got cancer. He’s been taking morphine and cocaine. Hokusai’s wave is hanging on the wall behind him. Stravinsky looks arrogant and cocky. Stravinsky was, in fact, arrogant and cocky. He was a cold man. He was not nice to his children. Robert Craft wrote that he was surprised, years later, when Stravinsky clanged on a wineglass with his knife to summon a waiter.

  For a while, everything Stravinsky did, he did with Debussy in mind. I think that’s why he chose the bassoon to play the solo that begins The Rite of Spring. It’s a simple pagan melody—you can play it all on the white keys of the piano—and the logical instrument to play it would be a flute. Ah, but he couldn’t: Debussy had already created a sensation with Afternoon of a Faun, inspired by Mallarmé’s frisky erotic poem, which begins with—what instrument of the orchestra? Anyone. A solo flute, exactly. Debussy’s flute was a lithe, twisty, innocently suggestive danseuse, who went here and there, through some sharps and flats, showing a bit of leotard, and then the orchestra came in to help out, and then the solo flute returned. Stravinsky’s beginning was a sort of ironic commentary on Debussy’s flute. He knew the bassoon could do it—he’d already had a success with the huge bassoon solo in The Firebird Suite, which is a berceuse, a lullaby: a very simple solo in the mid-range of the bassoon that begins on a B flat and goes no higher than a high F. I played it once with a youth orchestra, doing my best to sound like Bernie Garfield in Philadelphia. It’s warm and loving and faintly exotic and soft-feathered over the violas, and then the whole orchestra comes in with a chord that’s impossibly lush and chromatic, chromaticism that Liszt, Chopin, Mussorgsky, and Scriabin might have come up with if they’d all been locked in a water closet together for several days, and then he goes back to Firebirding sadly and plainly with the bassoon. That’s the way the Russians would do it. Rimsky-Korsakov would have done it that way. The bassoon is mother Russia, souped up for export to Paris.