I love titles. I love the specific flavors, the promises, the mysteries. I must drive my friends and students crazy sometimes going over the titles of the pieces we read or listen to. As a boy, I remember trying to figure out the meaning of Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand," a title I found so attractive, so racy, so compelling and evocative of who-knows-what. I knew I wanted to know her, that cowgirl, and have the same desiring-yet-dismissive attitude that I heard in Neil's voice. (That mood seemed so worldly then.) Eventually, listening to the song over and over, I settled on a rich-girl-in-Malibu-caught-playing-games image, and I still hold to that.
I love titles, sometimes more than I love the book, the album, song, whatever, that each belongs to. When I see a book title that triggers my horde of . . . what? synapses? hobgoblins & sprites? . . . up in that cauldron-of-plenty I call my skull, I don't want to open that book at all. I keep the cover closed and let myself just roam through the field of possibilities. I want to consider the story I might write if I had that title to guide me. Eventually, I'll open the dust jacket, read the blurbs, check out the bio, and read a few pages at the beginning and in the middle to see what I'd be getting into, to see if that writer rises to my expectations for that title. Pretty dodgy? What gall, since I've never written a book, and yet I'm expecting the published authors to match or surpass my bare imaginings. I'm a very appreciative and generous reader, but when we're talking about the imagination, I don't respect too many boundaries . . . at least in the privacy of my own head. (I wouldn't stoop to plagiarism, of course, because such theft is obviously wrong and an admission of creative bankruptcy. I may sin creatively as a procrastinator, a would-be perfectionist, and a shameless ham, but I'm no deadbeat cheat-thief.)
Notice: just thinking about titles and their suggestive powers has me pounding the drum, even if the music turns out cacophonic. Rein in the metaphors? I'd rather let the contact high of a good title spur me to produce even bad prose; I can always revise and refine later. Let the floodgates open. Yes, I am mixing my metaphors. I'm no Pablo Neruda, but the best lesson he teaches is to allow--even to court--exuberance and possibly incoherent or puzzling associations and juxtapositions. (Neruda will also teach you to reflect and revise, reflect and revise, but that's the subject of another blog.) In other words, when the Muse nudges, sing as best you can.
"Harpoon Shopping": I haven't even addressed my title for this blog-entry yet.
A friend of mine, a fellow aficionado of Melville and hands-on literary responses, was trying to get me to visit Back East with a special trip to Nantucket. I had to decline, reluctantly, and in the back & forth of our correspondence he lamented that he'd been planning to take me "harpoon shopping," much in the spirit of Ishmael and Queequeg, of Melville and Hawthorne, his muse at the time. The potential homosocial implications are obvious, but so what? We'd quest through Nantucket and New Bedford seeking some old iron implement of destruction, possible corkscrewed by use and abuse, probably fake and overpriced. Still, we'd be able to hold the proper tool to accompany Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, for wouldn't the story come alive just that much more if we could heft such a harpoon in our own hands? When my friend insisted that he'd take his wife instead on that shopping trip, she declined vehemently, and something in that moment, the triangulation of characters and cross-purposes, demands a story from me. Not the actual events, not non-fiction, but something fictional, something made-up to catch some emotional resonance in a net of words. Her tone (which I did overhear while on the phone) and the phrase itself have sparked some sort of story-idea that I haven't yet written or fully realized.
And that's fine. I love having unwritten stories in my head. And yet . . . right? I have written very little of all that I've a mind to, so I really ought to take that title and fish that appropriate story out of that cauldron-of-plenty in my skull. Instead, I'm writing a blog about a story I'll probably never write. I should be harder on myself? I should just laugh at myself, with compassion? Am I squandering my creative resources? Again, who cares? I'm having fun thinking about and yakking about all of the above. Good enough for now. (But not good enough forever.)
"Harpoon Shopping" also reminds me of a rock song I wrote back in my early 20's during the mid-80's: frustrated desire in 4/4 time, painfully obvious unconscious imagery. I mean, "a harpoon in the cellar / Lying underneath a tarp"? What was I thinking I was thinking? Was I describing a murder-mystery or sewing a full-length Freudian slip? I can't even recall the melody now, though I still sing these lyrics to any tune that seems appropriate at the time. Good, bad, and ugly--here's that old, aging, definitely dated chunk of song:
BETTER AT BREAKFAST
I left the harpoon in the cellar
Lying underneath a tarp
You would never be a suspect
Without this pin-up of your heart
Found in the trunk up in the attic
That you never used to lock
If you always ring the bellboy
There's room enough for talk
Things can be seen as simple as that
A round of applause against the crack of a bat
Was this love gone wrong pawned from the start?
Why would you want to leave me with a broken heart?
Why would you want to leave me with a broken heart?
But the friend of a friend once said
I'll bet she's better at breakfast than bed . . . .
[Repeat Everything.]
I'll confess: I'm not even sure what that last line means, really. I do think it's concretely suggestive with the contrast of "breakfast" and "bed," with the bitterness of tone, and so I think there's a focused and fairly limited set of meanings possible. And that's not the same as not having any meaning at all; I wasn't writing nonsense, but I wasn't writing an essay either. Rather, the meaning is a little loose, a little more suggestive than asserted, and so dependent upon the reader or listener to work out the meaning for herself or himself in the context of the whole song, the whole story. That's how any story, any poem, any piece of art--good or bad--works, right? That's how it all works for me.
The three words surfaced one day in my head--"Better at Breakfast"--and the alliteration and suggestiveness held them there, front and center, until I wrote the song to fit them. There were more lyrics, but they've sunk into the morass of memory. I'd written this song and a collection of others without any formal musical training, I'll confess, but with the absolute need to match lyrics to the distinct tunes in my head; I called the whole thing, an album's worth, "B-Side," which says it all. Too many tales of fickle women; too much self-destruction and anger. I was in my early 20's, so go figure. Here are some of the titles from that imagined, unrealized album: B-Side, Better at Breakfast, I Have a Girl, How Can You Tell, Maximum Security, This Must Be the Place, Not Wanted, The Perfect Crime, Permanent Press, Rome Fell, Shotgun Wedding, and Woke Up Knowing. I never did finish the lyrics or tune to these lines that--perhaps too well--stand in for all those lost songs: "Mexicali Rose / By any other name . . . / You mix the drinks / But they taste the same." I never quit my day-job. Give me some credit for that.
Note: I originally posted a version of "Harpoon Shopping" on a myspace page back in September, 2007.
