Kings of Norway

writing about Brandon Taylor’s “The Late Americans” but actually about music, art, and what we give up - whole lotta footnotes, go figure. Photo for “the app” as they say.

I almost didn’t pick up The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor when I immediately spied it on the new arrivals shelf at the library. I limit myself at the library. If I am staring down four books in their neat pile, they must all be read, and typically two or three is enough. Better still, the trips when you find one book you just want to read right then and there, tucking it in your bag, something that seems special, and then the irrational and wonderful feeling of returning one thing for another. I slotted it as the final book in the bunch to read, because I felt a duty to the others I’d gone hunting.1 That is, I would go to it because I knew I’d probably tear through it. I like Brandon Taylor, his essays, his newsletter. When I read Real Life, I almost immediately packed it off in an envelope to send to Truong. It was a furious read, and I’d wished I’d kept my copy.

It’s not hard to see where this paragraph starts: which is why I was so frustrated when I began the book. The Late Americans is a novel in short pieces centering around liberal arts graduate students in (where the fuck else!?) Iowa City. I’d assumed the entire thing would’ve been the novel about the novel workshop, and I was curious. Not so: the students and townies in The Late Americans start off as angry gay men in poetry workshops, then shift to some angry gay logic and math students, a meatpacking worker, dancers, musicians, and even finance2.

Had I moved on after the first chapter, “The Late Americans”, I would’ve realized it was not The Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop novel, but the curl of I can’t do this right now was so strong in me I pushed the book onto my nightstand then went to bed. I hate doing this with books, especially when I’m galloping back into a tear. I’ll sense the spot I’ve been unable to return to about my apartment or in my backpack.

It was the last book left in the neat pile to read, though, and so I returned to it. I didn’t look the rest of the book up, the reviews, etc., so when the stories continued onward, shifting their focus onto a secondary character from the first story, I took the bait. Up until the penultimate chapter, we drop into the pushes and pulls of these men with names like Ivan, Goran, Timo, Fyodor, Noah, Daw, Seamus. They are from families with no money, or lost money, or sometimes the up and upper classes. They are mostly queer. There is a lot of sex.3 They machinate around Iowa City co-ops and coffee shops and bars and live in converted farmhouses or crappy studios. They make DIY pornography or do teardowns for money. They know they’ll have to move onto Not Iowa City. They set sights on the almost coastals like Portland and Seattle and Atlanta and Chicago, places mentioned as consolation prizes. New York is, supuesto, the goal.

When we get to the middle, wherein I decided to continue, the chapter centers on Timo. Timo is mentioned previously as a capricious partner to the half-Russian, half-Black townie, Fyodor. Held up against one of the supporting characters in his chapter, Goran, he’s positively secure and green flagged, whereas Goran throws mugs and wields financial control over his lover, Ivan.

Ivan WAS a dancer, in conservatory, until his body failed him. Goran IS a classical pianist, with money. Timo WAS a pianist until he wasn’t and works to finish his degree in Logic. In “The Kings of Norway”, we read the ins and outs of things given, things taken, the life we live for the life we want, and things accepted.

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I spent as many hours as I could playing piano when I was younger. School occupied about eight, so I’d have at least two each day after school for practicing. I’d play as much as I could during the week when people weren’t around, which is somewhat of the opposite of some of my writing practices where I consciously choose to work in third spaces (bars, coffee shops, etc. etc.) and, recently, where I’ve forced myself to write intentionally at a “workspace” of my own. I’ve managed to intimidate myself, likely from not having some intentional creative physical space for years, now. I stack books and coats and bills on the desk where I could be tapping away.

At one point a conscious decision had been made to find a teacher who I could take music seriously with. I have a memory of being shitty about this when I was, what, eight? Nine? It must’ve passed quickly though, because when I then had the option to enter competitions or get scored for whatever it is I was playing, I took it. My granddad hauled the upright in his truck to the Midwest after my parents married. My mom and my uncles learned on it in the trailer as kids. It sat in the room by the front door with my metronome and when I finished practice, I’d organize my sheet music where it was stored in the bench.

I’d get bored in study hall and slip off to whatever room had an open piano, idly sight-reading whatever was around. Sometimes I’d pack up music I’d made photocopies of from the library, sometimes the music teacher would sit me down to help a choir section get the notes. At some point I must’ve intensely relished the vague vocation of it, despite my piano teacher’s jokes:

What’s the difference between a musician and a small pizza? A small pizza can feed a family of four.4 

Goran plays piano as accompaniment to the dance classes in “The Kings of Norway.” I quite liked, and still do, playing Debussy, mentioned in Taylor’s descriptions of the dance classes. I also struggled with the Bach Inventions, not sure if I’d call them “pretentious scales”, but I would end up infuriated that I couldn’t quite make my one hand follow the other as identical point-counterpoint. I wonder now if I found myself so wary of Goran and his moods because I am deeply aware of my lack of any “well-tempered” anything. I only slammed my hands down in fury against the keys once in a lesson. Shamed, I did not do it again.

Timo follows Goran to the practice room as opposed to grading, remembers making money to pay for a nameless Ohio liberal arts college by “playing classes”. We learn that despite not really needing the money, Goran does this at Iowa:

I loved spending hours playing music. I loved having a chunk of time to be away, to absent myself. At night I’d cue up the exact moments on my Discman in Rachmaninoff and Lizst that would sometimes make me cry or sometimes make me sleep. Piano was an incredible boon to being a depressive youth: I made sure I played, but I still fucked off on any other homework or whatever I was supposed to be doing.

I continued with the book because of the tenderness (likely not very) unique to me in the stories of the creative and artistic men who Could Not Do It. In Taylor’s Iowa landscape, the “man vs. inability to make it” theme is everywhere. Timo’s storyline of: very capable pianist who gave it up, well. That got me. I opened and closed the book on my chest in bed, wanting to go on, unwilling to go on. When the chapter ended I put the book away to be finished in a few days. I wanted to go and reread. I thought about typing the entire thing out for myself.

I would like to think it is different these days and I’m sure that’s not the case. I lived in the same white, so-very-American world of art and play’s avaricious necessity. Or plainly: if you are not Good (and when we say Good, we mean Great, Excellent, Ranked), then what’s the point? I moved into high school where my placing in competitions weakened, meaning I failed. I was simply not good enough, and at this point Others Were. I burst into tears at one of the first not-perfects I got, bitterly embarrassed at feeling like I did. Who would’ve noticed, though? It wasn’t exactly high school club soccer.5 At the same time it was dawning on me I wasn’t going to get anywhere, I slipped back into the vocational playing.

One afternoon I bummed around the choir room with a binder of photocopied music, waiting on girls to show up for spring showcase auditions. It was always girls, or sometimes a girl and a boy duetting because they were dating, and if a boy WAS a good performer, he simply got a spot. I took their money because it was a way to be friendly. And because I wanted the money.

I arrived early to sit on the dingy carpet and wait for a practice room to open up, in time for the ladies’ show choir rehearsal6. They went to competitions and wore character shoes and bike shorts, did intense pageant kid makeup. It unnerved me, all that energy, which is odd because I’d mostly started my curious enjoyment of camp, drag, etc. There I sat with Squeaks and out came the director who’d chosen female arrangements of disco and was furiously clapping for them to get the marks right to the BeeGee’s “Tragedy”. In my minds eye I remember the alternating hands up and cross ball changes - it’s hard to bear, with no one to love you you’re going nowhere. Today it seems odd to put a bunch of sixteen year old girls as the representation of Barry and Maurice Gibb, but what do I know?

We watched and I tried not to move very much. At the end the girls held their smiles and the director turned to me, asking, “Well? Thoughts?” What did they want from me who walked in and walked out? I wanted the vocation and the absence, the helping hand and the vague admission of “talent”. I smiled hard and said, “Great, just great.” Then I decamped and played the hits from “Les Mis”, trying hard to let the teenage girls carry their solos over dramatic piano arrangements. I still have a bunch of these arrangements, somewhere. That year nobody ended up dreaming their uneven solo dreams.

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When I stopped playing music was about the time I was writing, a lot, in earnest. I plotted out stories in class and wrote sad poems and read “adult” books. I wrote a couple (terrible, TERRIBLE) screenplays. I went to creative writing camp. Then one day I just stopped practicing. I played the piano in the musical pit because the orchestra pianist had graduated and I had the time, and then I can’t remember playing in high school anymore. Like Timo, I’d liked the structure and rules in practice, reading music, interpretation. Like Goran, I liked picking moody pieces and choosing to play them viciously and moodily, technical prowess be damned. I wasn’t going to go to college for music and classical conservatory training was out of the question.

Every once in a while in my twenties I’d make my way to the downtown library practice rooms (blisteringly hot, seemingly always) just to see if I could muddle through some Beethoven or “Claire de Lune” again. But I’d turned to writing.

In Taylor’s book, the Iowa Workshop is every single nightmare I have about writing workshops. The protagonist in those stories is furious at the identity politic that swamps the room. I found the heavy-handedness of the whole thing (white gay man writes about WW1 and fights with women/enbys writing about abortions or whatever) wildly off-putting, but it’s possible it’s because as exaggerated as Taylor presents it, that’s what’s happening in MFA programs. I wouldn’t know. When I finally got the balls to apply to a few, 2020 happened. I got waitlisted for one and never heard from the other two.

While I was waiting to hear from them I spent a month with my mentor in San Francisco on a “residency”. Each morning we woke and walked the Kezar Track at Golden Gate Park before I embarked to his studio to read, nap, write, and finally finish a project I’d been working on for twelve years. One morning when I got an email telling me I’d been waitlisted, he gripped my arms and looked at me:

“Promise me you won’t let them take your belief in beauty away from you.”

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I wish whatever was in this section of the novel had taken up more space in the book. I wanted it too, and was disappointed with finishing it - if you want a regency-esque novel full of sex about liberal arts programs in Iowa, it really will fit the bill - but I finished it anyway. I kept the library book to copy out the portions of “The Kings Of Norway” that shook me to my core.

I wish I hadn’t let music go like that, because I’m terrified writing is the same trap. Whenever I meet adult musicians who still just DO it, I am entranced and mystified and wish I could just ask, how? I reject so fiercely this hyper-individualistic notion that we may only do things if we are GOOD or VERY PROFICIENT. I hate that we have denigrated art and play to the point where if you are not skilled enough to make it in capitalist society (which, God, have you seen the arts landscape these days?), then you might as well just stop now. Art is not for you. The joy of making, creating, expressing is only allowed if you succeed.7 

It’s heartbreaking to let go of art. It is a pain and loss I do not know how to articulate, which is truly some sort of Hadean exercise for someone who for so long didn’t mind calling themselves a “writer”. Words fail you. I think I do not want to fight for it anymore, and I want it to remain, and I barely want to write about it: the old joke of, stop writing things about how hard writing is!

To cleave back the joy and fun and escape and fantasy of writing and creating away from the notion of achievement or success is a deep hope, now. That Taylor’s narrative on people who gave up music struck that, while driving me farther away from whatever writing workshop industrial complex must mean there are many of us out there, like this. Also, if the world aligned to put me in a spot to learn, teach, write, and take space, I’d take it.

Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe the trick is to just keep playing and keep very close the little validations: competency, the ability to bop around between technical proficiency and fuck off expression fun, the equivalents of girls with $5 patting me on the head (girls letting me read poems? I don’t know.) I’m listening to the music I used to listen to and want to play, again. It is really something to unearth the deep feeling of this, to remember you still love something.

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A really rough go at what I assume people try to do with literary reviews these days. If you want to talk about “The Late Americans”, smash that reply button, lol. I’ll probably read it again in a few years. And “Real Life” deserved every accolade it got. We can’t love them all.