These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Whatever his faults, a lack of graciousness isn’t one, nor a lack of patience with anyone but himself, for whom he has none. “When Miles started doing funk-Stockhausen,” he tells her, “did someone say suspiciously, Gone all musique concrète on us then, have you?”

“Probably someone did,” she says, “or perhaps they just called it futuristic rhythm and blues.”

“Look, the whole century has been about black and white fucking,” and leaning in the doorway of his room she raises an eyebrow but he won’t back down. “Absolutely! I’ll bet,” he says of the novel, “Molly Bloom really is a black girl and he just doesn’t tell us. New York Jews like Gershwin, Kern, Arlen cumming southern Negro music while Duke Ellington ravishes Nineteenth Century Europeans like Debussy — rather the whole bloody point of it all, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“But of course,” he insists, “and I’m the new white Duke for the Old World in a new century, stealing the remains of black music and smashing it for good. Writing and singing it like a white limey, because what could survive that? And I should bloody well hope some Yank spade out there is doing the same to the remains of white european music. To everything there’s a reaction. Anticipate the reaction.”

“That sounds like something from one of the Professor’s cards.”

“First rule of cultural warfare.”

“Perhaps you should just be the You for a new century.”