Percussive prose

"I had a traditional musical education, in a provincial English cathedral town," begins James Wood in "The Fun Stuff" in the Nov. 29 New Yorker, and he follows with a sentence that makes me smile all over:

I was sent off to an ancient piano teacher with the requisite halitosis, who lashed with a ruler at my knuckles as if they were wasps; I added the trumpet a few years later, and had lessons with a younger, cheerier man, who told me that the best way to make the instrument 'sound' was to imagine spitting paper pellets down the mouthpiece at the school bully.

I relish the specificity of the nouns (halitosis, wasps, paper pellets, bully) and the vividness of the verbs (lashed, spitting), but most of all I love Wood's careful attention to sound and rhythm. Listen to the hissing sibilants from "requisite halitosis" through "wasps"; hear the rhythmic slapping of ruler on wrists in "who lashed with a ruler at my knuckles as if they were wasps."

This passage appears at the beginning of an essay (subtitle: "My Life as Keith Moon") in which Wood examines the seductive draw of the drums: "Noise, speed, rebellion: everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood," and Keith Moon was "pure, irresponsible, restless childishness." Wood analyzes Moon's drumming with all the rigor and insight he usually applies to great literature, concluding that Moon was "the drummer of enjambment." Wood explains the connection between drumming and writing:

For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body surrenders its awful self-consciousness.

I don't know about you, but reading James Wood's sentences really makes me want to hand him a drum kit and see what he can do.