I must admit I have been having a lot of fun with the audio book of Routine Apparitions. It’s almost a guilty pleasure, but I have been getting positive feedback as well as new subscribers on Substack, so I might has well own it. Playing with the themes of Routine Apparitions on X (my deceased father has an account where I enact the role of the ghost writer for the Ghost Writer), I wrote the following imaginary dialogue:

For the audio book theme I felt I needed a soundtrack to energize the podcast so I asked my dear friend, musician Victoria Theodore, if she could help me out. She immediately agreed and asked me for inspirational sources. I had already thought of two musicans that my father admired.

Günter Ohnemus, my father’s German translator, once recalled, “I remember what Keith once said on one of our walks in Munich: If I can be for just one person what Ray Charles was to me, then spending my life as a writer wasn’t in vain.”

So definitely a Ray Charles vibe was needed. And, wow, Vicki HIT that spot on with the smoking organ baseline on the soundtrack.

Then there was Coltrane. Enough said.

Curiously, for the last two years I have been doing exactly what my father did, and without thinking twice about it. That is: I keep putting Keith’s friends into the storyline of the novel Routine Apparitions. Even on X. For instance, in the above dialogue, John Veglia was a poet and friend of my father. He even featured in several of my father’s books as himself or as his alter ego Nestor Marzipan.

Thus, throughout the chapters of Routine Apparitions, I have faithfully kept up this family tradition. And for novelty, I sometimes insert myself into the story as well, after all I am part of the story of the search for my father’s missing materials.

What would have Keith thought about it? Probably he would have been tickled. But not so much about the X part.

Should you want to check out more of the underworld, Keith is available on X