The Year in: Vampires

Part VI

By the spring, things were getting out of hand. Vampires started showing up in my non-vampire reading, always bringing with them a whiff of foreign places—from Emily Brontë’s dark little visitor to the Earnshaws, to Walter Pater’s travels among the relics of the Italian Renaissance, to James Merrill’s account of a dinner party full of vaguely European guests. I took each new sighting as a sign that I was on the path of something grave and monstrous.

But it should have been clear that my thinking had become corrupted when vampires began to infiltrate texts that featured no vampires before I picked them up. I came across a copy of Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which I had been meaning to read ever since it was assigned to me in a college class years earlier, and got through the first ten pages or so. Here is an excerpt from my notes:

The movement to the Christian secret of responsibility, the self that responds, is not a full break with the pre-Christian demonic secret. Rather, it is a secret that rises on the back of the old mystery, “repressing what remains its foundation” (p. 7). The vampire is a demon who inverts this position, feeding on the subverted subject of Christian responsibility. Thus the vampire embodies that “infinite alterity” that “regards without being seen,” while at the same time distorting it. Divorced from the passage of time, he gains an exterior position to history, and feels no obligation to respond to the Other, who is trapped in history’s flow. Thus the vampire inverts his relation to the history of Christian responsibility and the pre-Christian demonic mystery, or rather inverts within himself the relationship between…

It continues in this vein for a frightening length.

[to be continued]

Musical Oddities IV

I saw part of a TV interview with the jazz pianist Bill Evans from about 1971 in which the interviewer, who I think was Swedish, asked Evans if he had a favorite classical composer. Evans said J.S. Bach. That's what all the jazz musicians say, the interviewer said.

It's easy to dismiss Evans's answer, as the interviewer did, for being too obvious. But far from doing that, I'd like to offer it as a piece of evidence for a theory I've been developing: that the deceased jazz pianist Bill Evans is actually the same person as the deceased classical pianist Glenn Gould. At the least, I see them as two sides of the same coin. There are the superficial resemblances: the severe profiles, the dark slicked-back hair, the studied elusiveness. Evans was born three years before Gould, and died two years before him.

But something about their playing unites them too. Bach was of course the most important composer to Gould. Though their sounds were radically different from one another, Gould and Evans were both committed to a kind of lucid polyphony that mirrored one another while setting them apart from other musicians of their time. Gould said that he was only interested in contrapuntal music; Evans, for his part, solved the limitations of bop by creating a contrapuntal style of group improvisation. Later he went a step further by recording an album in which he by himself was all the multiple voices—breaking the jazz taboo against overdubbing by making a whole album of overdubs—and he recorded it on Gould's favorite piano.

Gould was notoriously indifferent to contemporary music, but public about his admiration for Evans. And I think what happened between Gould's first and last recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations—the bookends of his career—was jazz phrasing; in 1981 he stretched time and hid or hit notes in a way that would not have made sense in 1955. It might not be a stretch to say that what made Gould himself was Evans, and what made Evans himself was Gould.