Free The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle

Merman’s Disco Album , Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walkurie , Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic Youth, Youssou N’Dour, tons of the Arditti Quartet, Kurt Cobain, Suzy Solidor, John McCormack, Greek rembetiko music, Jan and Dean, Los Pinguinos del Norte , Shostakovich film scores, Some Girls , Wunderlich doing Butterfly (in luscious, spittle-ridden German), Cuban contredances, Planet Squeezebox , some croaky old Carter Family, Morton Feldman, Beatrice Lilly (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare , Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della Beata Vergine , South Pacific , Pet Sounds , Les Negresses Vertes , Dusty in Memphis , Ferrier’s Kindertötenlieder , Toots andthe Maytals, Têtes Raides , Lulu, Lulu —even Gurdjieff’s potty piano ramblings. He always makes me think of Katherine Mansfield.
    But things went AWOL from the start. Stopping for gas at Casa de Frutta, between Highways 101 and 5, I found the batteries in the boom box weren’t working. I’d held off on playing anything up to that point because it was too early in the morning for serious listening—we’d left at dawn—but now, after coffee, I was craving something. Imprecations, followed by ferocious jerking out of batteries in the Chevron parking lot. Fumbling attempts at reinstallation, in every possible permutation of plus and minus—even, despairingly, plus to plus. Bev, watching patiently, said, well, we can listen to my tapes. Tapes! I glared at her and peered into the shoebox of dusty old cassettes in the trunk. Could I survive for ten hours solely on Sylvester, the soundtrack from The Crying Game , and The Greatest Hits of Etta James ? Now, “Down in the Basement” is a major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an infuriated baby vulture.
    Back in the Taurus it went from bad to worse: the dashboard tape deck wasn’t working, either. Perhaps there had been a nuclear explosion somewhere—that, I knew, immediately shut down car electrical systems. We’d all have to swallow some potassium iodide. I resigned myself, imperfectly, to a day of protracted misery. Miles and miles of interstate wilderness (complete with a nasty tire blowout): wintry fields and irrigation ditches along 5, grayed-out almond orchards, the California state prison at Avenal. Then the three-hour eight-lane chaos of L.A.: Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Anaheim, Irvine, Long Beach, Oceanside, and Camp Pendleton. All along the southern coast the Marines were doing sea-to-land exercises. Bev, atthe wheel and the long-suffering target of my ire, turned on the radio in self-defense at one point and began flipping from station to station with the seek button—derangingly—every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart: the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the time we rolled up, exhausted, in my mother’s driveway, trundled in with the packages and admired the Christmas tree, so loaded with decorations and synthetic flocking you could hardly see the branches, my assaulted ears needed a thorough cleaning out with a washrag.
    Yuletide in San Diego was the usual: sunny and soporific, the suburban ennui immediate, dazing, and total. The cats, senile and comatose, took up most of the available seating. (They had long ago given up trying to pull low-hanging ornaments off the tree.) Charlie moped in the yard under the orange tree; Bev