The Paul Chowder Chronicles by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

3

SOME PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW very well are coming for tea today. I washed the dust off the teapot and found a couple of tea bags and wiped down my grandmother’s tea tray. These semiformal social events destroy me. I spent two hours straightening the living room and making sure the downstairs bathroom was usable. The vacuum cleaner hose is extremely kinked and gets clogged easily, and I had to repair the sweeper attachment with duct tape. Why did I say tea? Because I wanted to be welcoming and I didn’t want to give them dinner or lunch or drinks. I should have just said come and sit in the yard and have a beer and some chips and some green guacamole squirted from a plastic pouch—I would be happier and probably they would be happier.

One is a poet I met in Cincinnati when I gave a reading there last year—a woman with a friendly, loud laugh and dramatic lipstick—and one is I think her boyfriend, who is a filmmaker, and they want to make some kind of documentary about rhyme. Because I published an anthology, Only Rhyme, a few years ago, they think I can help them, perhaps with raising money or suggesting people to interview. They’ve got their project up on Kickstarter. And I want to say, Good luck, I can’t help you very much, I’ll give thirty dollars to your Kickstarter fund, but I don’t know anything useful about poetry anymore. I love it, sort of, but I also don’t love it and don’t understand it, and every day I live, it seems more mysterious and farther away from me. But I won’t say that, of course. I’ll just pour the tea and hand around the plate of shortbread cookies.

—

HEY, JUNIOR BIRDMEN. I’m Paul Chowder and I’m here in the blindingness of noon near the chicken hut talking only to you about the things that need to be talked about. You know what they are. Love and fame and nothingness and sunken cathedrals and the Sears traveling sprinkler. Nan will be home tomorrow.

I want to be starting out. I want to be speaking in a foreign language. I want to offer an alternate route. I want to amass ragged armfuls of lucid confusion that make you keel over.

I want to write songs. Not poems anymore—songs. In fact, I made up another song in the car yesterday. It’s a protest song. This is how it goes: “I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, baby, and I’m not killing anyone.” The tune has a little of the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” in it.

The most useful thing I learned when I was in music school was not the augmented sixth chord, or how to write a canon at the half step, or how to scrape a certain part of the reed to make the high D easier in the bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring.

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