I’ve just finished reading The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker. Baker’s narrator is poet Paul Chowder, who’s had a pretty good career but hasn’t written any new poems for quite some time. So he’s putting together an anthology of poems, but is unable to write the anthology’s introduction. His editor is getting impatient. The woman Chowder loves, Roz, has recently moved out of his house, and that isn’t helping the situation either.
I’ve never read any of Baker’s novels before, but I think it’s great. It’s very funny. And I’ve learned a lot from it about poetry and poets that I did not know. Chowder believes that the four-beat line is the natural and proper line for English poetry, not iambic pentameter. In fact, he says pentameter is not actually a five-beat line, but a three-beat line — a kind of slow waltz. Never thought of it that way, but if I try, I think I can hear it that way.
One of the things Chowder does, when he comes across a “scrap of poetry” he likes, is to set it to music. He does this several times throughout the book and includes a musical staff and all the notes. I’m not a good enough sight reader to sing the tunes accurately, but they look good to me.
One thing that strikes me odd is Chowder’s musical notation. He uses the flat symbol (looks kind of like a lower-case b) where most people would use a sharp (#). For instance, on page 3 of the hardcover edition he has the note F flat, which is a real note, but I think most people would write it as E#, which is the same note — a half step between E and F.
I”m not going to say author Baker doesn’t know what he’s doing. He went to the Eastman School of Music. But it does seem unorthodox to me.
And in more than one case, he writes the note C flat — which I’m almost positive is wrong. To my knowledge, there is no note called C flat (or B sharp, which is the same thing). That’s because, on the musical scale, there is no note a half-step between B and C. They’re already only a half step apart.
So what is Baker doing here? Surely he’s not making a mistake. Is he having Chowder make this mistake, or at least use unorthodox notation, to say something about his character or state of mind? I don’t know. I wonder if anybody else has written about this. I haven’t read any reviews of or critical essays about the book, so I don’t know. But I’m going to look it up.
Postscript 1: I might have add a big fat “Never mind!” here to a substantial part of what I wrote above. Went back and noticed that Nicholson/Chowder wrote at least some of his tunes on the bass clef part of the scale. Which means what I originally read as a C flat (no such thing) is really an E flat (perfectly legit). I don’t have the actual book with me now, but I’ll check it out tomorrow and maybe write a second postscript. Sheesh — looks like I probably made a really careless goof. More tomorrow.
Postscript 2: Well, here’s my big fat “Never mind!” Went back and looked: Indeed, poet/narrator Paul Chowder uses the bass staff in all cases when he sets lines of poetry to music. So his use of flats is correct. I’m an idiot for not noticing that right away. But I’m used to seeing melody lines on the treble staff. I wonder why Baker had Chowder write them that way. Maybe Baker sang the bass parts in a choral group. Maybe the fictional Chowder did too, as part of an unwritten backstory. Maybe Baker/Chowder wants the basses to have the melody. It must mean something. I might look into this further.
Wordnado 