Beat It, Rufus by Noah Van Sciver

Noah Van Sciver has a muse of cringe and self-obsession; that can't be easy. His characters often have boundless and unsupported faith in their own meagre abilities, a disinclination to look solidly at the world that actually exists, and a pugnacious optimism untethered by any kind of sense or reason. Fante Bukowski is his most famous example.

Rufus Baxter is another in that mold. He was the guitarist and asshole driving force of the hair metal band Funky Cool, almost forty years ago, when they got a deal with an exploitative minor-league label to record a cassette-only release before a plane crash killed the other two-thirds of the band. Since then, apparently, he's been gigging constantly, with no actual success. He has an agent...who books him for things like weddings two states away on one day's notice, because that's all Rufus is good for.

Rufus, of course, believes he's the last great rocker, a titan of the industry, a man who's had a few bad breaks (ancient car on the verge of death, living in a storage unit because he has no money, no friends or family or support structure of any kind). He's wrong. Comprehensively wrong, in almost every possibly way. But he's a Van Sciver main character, so realizing that will never happen.

Beat It, Rufus is the story of Rufus's cross-country odyssey over a few days. It follows the usual pattern: he loses what little he has, and goes on an epic journey to reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his (the expected massive royalties from that cassette), having various adventures and losing even more along the way. He reconnects with the girlfriend he had just before he "hit big," is repeatedly visited by the devil (and, much later and to less effect, the angel) on his shoulder, plays a random show with a random band, tracks down the office of that (long-failed) record label, and learns that one of his two bandmates actually survived the crash.

That bandmate, "Doing it to the Max" Eckhart, is an actually successful musician, with a big house and a home studio and a bestselling "how I recovered" memoir and a thriving career writing jingles - all the things Rufus reflexively loathes, but takes advantage of at the end of his draining and self-destructive odyssey.

It all ends in a "Lady and the Tiger" ending - Rufus is scheming to steal from and take advantage of Max, even as Max is willing to help out Rufus in ways that we readers think would actually be more productive and useful.

But that's the point of characters like Rufus: they don't learn, they can't learn. The humor is because they always do the wrong thing. I find that kind of humor wearying, especially when, as with Van Sciver, it's pitched in a relatively realistic mode - Rufus isn't a cartoon to bounce back up from any hardship, but a real person in a real world, getting older and hurtling headlong toward the kind of death that will leave people vaguely happy but uneasy about it.

This is funny, and realistic: it moves well, Rufus is entirely believable, and the various scenes are all told well. But he's so self-delusional, such an asshole, that I felt like I needed a bath when I was done reading it. How any reader responds to it will largely depend on how much they like cringe comedy: this is all cringe, all the time.

Better Things: The Mermaid Parade

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This week is something almost random. As always, it's a song I love, and think I might have something to say about. But it's not famous - it's just a song I found, and that spoke to me, and that I've kept listening to for years.

It's The Mermaid Parade by Phosphorescent, a 2010 song that, as is so common for this series, is yet another song about a breakup.

No, I wound up walking
out by the ocean today
and there were naked women
dancing in the Mermaid Parade.

It's a story-song, but the story is short and specific: the singer is in NYC, soon after a Mexican vacation with his wife Amanda. She's in LA - we don't know if that's where they both live, or she's there for some other reason, just that's where she is. And he buys a ticket to go see her, but ends up missing his flight, and we think giving up on the marriage, to instead watch the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.(Which is still going strong; this year's version just happened a week ago.)

Like so many of the best break-up songs, we don't know why. We don't know whose "fault" it is. We just get the emotion, the moment, the brokenness.

but god damn it, Amanda;
oh, god damn it all.

It's a song about how things can break, irrevocably, in a short time. It doesn't say why or how it broke...but I have to wonder if "those naked women dancing" had something to do with it....

Quote of the Hour: Late-Night Excursions

To find oneself locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-colored pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience, and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity than most men. His was a fiery and an arrogant soul, and he seethed in furious rebellion against the intolerable position into which Fate had manoeuvred him. He even went so far as to give the front door a petulant kick. Finding, however, that this hurt his toes and accomplished no useful end, he addressed himself to the task of ascertaining whether there was any way of getting in - short of banging the knocker and rousing the house, a line of action which did not recommend itself to him.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith, pp.253-4

Quote of the Hour: Visitor's Seat

He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.

 - Raymond Chandler, The High Window, pp.1005 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Succession

It was such a relief that they [her parents] were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.

 - Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p.12

Quote of the Hour: Courage!

Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.114

Quote of the Hour: Not Quite a Credo

 "....Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."

 - The Continental Op, speaking in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, p.342 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: There Was Only One Catch

Corky was one of the artists. A portrait-painter, he called himself, but he hadn't painted any portraits. He was sitting on the side-lines with a blanket over his shoulders, waiting for a chance to get into the game. You see, the catch about portrait-painting - I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start painting portraits trill people come along and ask you to, and they won't come along and ask you to until you've painted a lot first. That makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Leave It to Jeeves," pp.11-12 in My Man Jeeves

Quote of the Hour: Gossip

In this rich African setting were jumbled together, for a few days, people of every race and temper, all involved in one way or another in that complex of hysteria and apathy, majesty and farce; a company shot through with every degree of animosity and suspicion. There were continual rumors born of the general uncertainty; rumors about the date and place of every ceremony; rumors of dissention in high places; rumors that, in the absence at Addis Ababa of all the responsible officials, the interior was seething with brigandage; rumors that Sir Percival Phillips had used the legation wireless; that the Ethiopian Minister to Paris had been refused admittance to Addis Ababa; that the royal coachman had not had his wages for two months and had given in his notice; that the airmen from Aden were secretly prospecting for a service between the capital and the coast; that one of the legations had refused to receive the empress's first lady-in-waiting; above all, there was the great Flea Sandal and the Indiscretion about the Duke of Gloucester's Cook.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Remote People, pp.228-229 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: In Which a Narrator Denies Being Scared

But it was very quiet in the house. I had never noticed all the noises when there were people. I was not scared, of course, but it was a little spooky. More spooky yet were the noises that interrupted the silence. House noises. The house itself made sounds. Some of them I could figure out, like the refrigerator, apparently there is a motor in refrigerators, and it goes on and off. I had never noticed it before. Then, there were sounds that the house itself seemed to make. Creaks, and thumps, and clicks. This did not scare me, but I could imagine a person not as brave as I am, a person around my age, someone who has never been alone in their house at night, possibly being a little nervous.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, pp.74-75

Quote of the Hour: The Divide

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn't see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.854 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Non-Conformists

Only two girls in my grade came from there - the Raybern sisters, twins - and though they were impeccably neat, they wore homemade calf-length skirts, pleated button-down blouses and belted cardigans as if they were already spinsters. If they had been smart we would have understood them, but they were C students, and therefore weird for no real reason.

 -Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels, p.62

Quote of the Hour: A Flock of Newsmen

Reporters in large groups are ill at ease, and they try to make up for it by acting too easy. Each is preoccupied with his own time situation - his paper's deadlines and the accessibility of telephones. Each, before a public conference, shapes in his mind what would make a good story if the principal said it, and how he can trap him into saying it. If the principal delays his appearance, the reporter begins to wonder whether he will have time to write the story, Then, with further delay, he begins to wonder if he will have time to telephone. Next he gets angry, He resents his subjection to the whims of his inferiors, and he vents his resentment by a show of elaborate contempt.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.315 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Commercial Premises

My rubber heels slithered on the sidewalk as I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building. A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilt elevator. There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth. Numbers with names and numbers without names. Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer - if the postal inspectors didn't catch up with them first. A nasty building. A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, pp. 717-718 in Stories & Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Leaks, Repairs of, Completely Useless

First, a complaint is made to the landlord, which grumbled up through the staff until it reaches some faceless creature in a faraway office block. A complaint made in this manner functions as a sort of invocation, which (after a waiting period somewhere between three days and forever) summons an extraordinarily unprepared-looking old man carrying a small tube of sealant. He doesn't tell anyone that he's arrived, but one can see him through the window staring at the street and whistling through his teeth in the way tradesmen do when they know they're about to disappoint you. Eventually, when he's exhausted the full length of time someone can stand on a street staring at the floor without looking suspicious, he sighs, and begins to plug up whatever cracks and gaps he can find with silicone. As soon as he has left,. the thumping and rumbling of subterranean London begins to dislodge his efforts, and a few days later the tiles are as permeable as ever.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, p. 129