I feel like such a mean girl. Here today is Bruce Springsteen's 65th birthday, and everyone is wishing him well, and making lists of their favorite songs by him. Me, when I thought of my favorite song, it was an easy choice, but forgive me, Boss, my favorite version of it isn't the original one recorded, nor even the live one a couple years later with just the keyboard. I'm sure I'd be kicked out of New Jersey to admit that my favorite version of my favorite Bruce song--For You--is the highly edited one from Manfred Mann's Earth Band. There is no doubt, Bruce Springsteen tells a hell of a story, as his entire catalog proves. He paints pictures that are instantly recognizable truths to all of us. But sometimes, early in his career, I felt like he got a little tangled up in his words. I didn't mind so much that Manfred Mann cut that song down to its core, bringing out the passion and the desperation, but leaving out a few of the more clunky phrases. (But bless them for leaving in that line in one of their other Springsteen covers, so that for decades music fans could wonder what the hell it meant to be "Wrapped up like the Deuce.") I feel like the original lyrics focus more on the suicidal woman, but the sparer edited version focuses on the action, the determined attempt to reach through her despair, and the outpouring of emotion that represents. The original sounds very much about "her," whoever she is. I always felt like the cover was being sung to me, the listener. I get drawn in every time.
I made a point within the first week of writing to make these essays short. I don't want them to be a drag to read. They are supposed to be fast and digestible, even when I wander into heavy subjects. I self-edit compulsively. I delete at least a quarter of what I write, on average. I read it over and over, and I will agonize over articles and conjunctions and tenses, until it is as perfect as I can make something I'm writing right before I go to bed. I think if I'm going to have the chutzpah to critique a 24 year old Bruce Springsteen, and say that he should have edited a tad, then I have no excuse whatsoever to just write a couple pages of dreck and turn it loose to the world. The hardest part is re-reading a day or two later (yes, I do it), and finding typos or grammatical errors, or worse, learning later that I have key details wrong that change the entire tenor of the scene I was trying to describe. It is my greatest challenge to leave those posts alone, as snapshots in time.
When I rearranged the rooms upstairs, clearing out what was half office, half dumping grounds, I pulled out my bookshelf full of trashy romance that I admit without shame that I collect, and moved it to my room. Buried among the yellowing books is a stack of white paper an inch thick or more, of one of the earliest books I ever tried to write. In my early 20s, I wanted desperately to write a Medieval romance, and I researched it, and I had a hundred double-spaced pages written, give or take. I had sent this half-manuscript to my mother for editing. She had written in red felt tip on the first page that at first she was just going to look for typos and grammatical errors, but she got so wrapped up in the story that it became too much fun not to let loose and help add to it. I miss having that collaborative give and take. I need to bring back some of my previous attempts at fiction, to see whether she can help me edit some life back into them.
(I keep looking to see whether I already used this photo of my mother's handsome kitty boy, who crawled out of a wildfire burn zone last year, looking thin and dehydrated and smelling of smoke, and giving her that look that said he came for her. Seems right for tonight.)
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