All This Useless Beauty
A wild night with Elvis Costello, James Joyce, and the Last Days of Humanities
In 1996, my betrothed and I were sharing a room near Times Square. The rent was $800 a month, and we were just around the corner from the Grace Building, which, on its 40th floor overlooking Bryant Park, housed the Ph.D. Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. One of my teachers ended up at Harvard, and most of the others are at one with the cosmos. They were all fascinating people, eccentrics who wrote books on allegory, the 30s, the 60s, Pragmatism, Milton (the last name), and textual scholarship, loose and baggy monsters of novels and the unacknowledged legislators known as poets. There was still an idea that some literature was great and it came from outside of us. We had to reach out to it if we wanted to know it. It was our job to interpret. There was no ideology. Liberalism and Marxism were things to know, ideas among many. One of my teachers would write in The New Yorker that literature didn’t make you wise. When I was his student, he wrote, in the Times Magazine, that people shouldn’t write dissertations, and he later put this in a book.
I proceeded as if that couldn’t possibly be true. I wanted to fill my head with books and study with people who knew things I didn’t know. I got to know two of the pioneers of Queer Theory. I studied Proust and watched The X-Files with one of them and wrote a dissertation with the other, a poet, a painter, a pianist—one of the most creative and productive people I have ever known. One of them passed on and the other is still out there, writing his thousandth book, making music, poetry, essays, all of it more truly and more strange.
I was 23, ironic and idealistic, and freelancing for The Village Voice, back when that was a thing. In 2023, it is a widely accepted idea that the humanities are useless, even among some prominent people in the humanities. In 1996, I had written for the Voice about the theatre, about the CUNY budget crisis, about my jazz heroes. Shortly after I graduated from college, I interviewed Sonny Rollins for a cover story. The poets, the musicians, and the scholars were all out there to teach me. I knew it was hard to get a job, nearly impossible to get tenure, and hard to make a living as a writer, but this is where I was. The world was about to change. I had not sent my first email. I knew nothing about computers. There was so much I wanted to learn, and it was an analog experience with books and teachers.
My worlds came together one spring night in 1996. At the Supper Club, three blocks from my little room, I reviewed an Elvis Costello show for the Voice, a duo with pianist Steve Nieve. In a single night, I wrote the Costello review and I finished a seminar paper for a course on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book that resists comprehension but invites interpretation everywhere you look. The guy who taught it, a thoroughly brilliant and imposing figure, seemed to be the one person on earth who truly got this book—if that was even possible—and one semester was not enough, but it was something. He is also the person responsible for publishing Lord of the Flies in America. He wrote an afterword and chose a flat fee over royalties. He had one fraying suit he wore to every class. He sang opera and Irish ballads with sonorous fluency. Finnegans Wake is really one extended song that includes quotations from other songs in all languages. If you get the music, you get the Wake. I once made a reference to the Wake at the Voice and my editor inserted an apostrophe. There is no apostrophe. It is a message for all the Finnegans to awaken. It is like Bottom’s dream with no Bottom. This was my useless humanities education at work.
Elvis Costello had a hell of a night. He had to chastise the crowd for chatting it up during his show just because they were in the presence of a bar. Elvis isn’t just one of our finest singer-songwriters. He also knows what it feels like to teach college. And he also understood the whole idea of the uselessness of the humanities. He was, at the time, common law married to Cait O’Riordan, who was studying Classics at Cambridge. She had been a member of The Pogues, and Elvis produced their album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. He never produced another artist after that. “You can only marry the bass player once,” he said. Elvis could already see that the world was going downhill. Disney had taken over Times Square. He saw Goofy and asked if it was our mayor. (If he only knew!) He had already sung with a string quartet, then went back to rock and roll. He was inspired by the misuss’s scholarly quest, and thought that the best the arts could come up with could only lead to disappointment. He was promoting his final album with The Attractions. The album was called All This Useless Beauty, and he sang the title track.