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Most of what I've been doing over the past few years has been in areas of not much interest--I seem to have a knack for that. Poetry and jazz.
I did have a novel published a few years ago -- Nick and Jake, which I wrote with my brother. It concerns Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby and Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises, now in their 50s, meeting in Paris and taking on the McCarthy committee and the CIA. We did get interviewed by Bob Edwards on public radio, but the book did not catch fire. I'm still proud of it.
Poetry - publications in some online journals, and a couple of anthologies. And there's a book that has been for some decades now the standard reference for formal poetry, The Book of Forms by Lewis Turco. In the fourth edition of the book, Turco used poems of mine to illustrate several different forms, and included as a new form, one that I invented.
But mostly, at a time when jazz is second only to opera as America's least popular music, and absolutely no one cares about it, I am devoting most of my time to a huge, idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 1950s and 60s. One of the most important independent labels of those years was a label called Prestige. Who recorded for Prestige? Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, to name a few. And there has been next to nothing written about the label. So I decided I would. But what? I'm not a musician, scholar or musicologist. I'm a pretty good researcher, but I'm not the guy who'll go out and find people and interview them -- too shy. So...a fan's notes. I decided - and thanks to the internet this discography is readily available - that I would listen, in chronological order, to everything ever recorded on Prestige, and write about the experience, one recording session at a time. I'm doing this on a blog, and collecting the blog entries in book form. To date, I've written over 300 entries. Prestige started in 1949 -- I'm now halfway through 1959. If I finish, it will go through 1971. I've self-published Listening to Prestige Vols. 1 and 2, and with any luck I'll break through to double figures in sales.
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