Bedside Playlist
My reading is like my life—as I get older,
it seems more and more to go in and out of focus. It’s
appealingly spastic. The shuffle is turned on. I’m no
longer prone to those “projects” I had when I
was younger: the summer of reading every bit of prose and
poetry by Borges; the Year of the Objectivists; my long trips
on the Rimbaud railway; the unaccredited seminar on Philip
Roth. Either I’ve gotten lazy or I’ve developed
some sort of latent ADD. Most likely both.
I mean, I still have these long encounters with certain writers,
but they seem more like obsessions, more or less unwilled.
They seem to be about entertainment and pleasure, as opposed
to education. Like reading all twenty of Patrick O’Brian’s
Master & Commander novels, or all of Alan Furst’s
WWII espionage thrillers. Or reading everything by Kenneth
Koch—because who wouldn’t want to hang out with
a guy who says yes to it all?
Otherwise, books seem to come my way more or less accidentally
now. Sometimes recommended by friends—like William Boyd’s
Any Human Heart, which I just finished—so remarkably
smart and funny and saddening and alert: a picaresque novel
in the form of a 65-year journal kept by an Englishman named
Logan Mountstuart, an everyman who prowls sometimes uneasily,
sometimes happily around the edges of 20th century history
and celebrity. That one was loaned to me by Will Schmitt and
Rachel Nardin—thank you, dear pals!
And a bunch of things given to me by the people who’ve
written them—a fantastic bit of ventriloquism called
If You Want Me To Stay, by the novelist Michael Parker,
an essay/memoir on “shame” by Robert Polito that
appeared in the magazine Black Clock recently, David
Wojahn’s Interrogation Palace (a selected poems
that shows why he may be the best American poet to blend personal
life and history over the last 25 years). In March, Jeff Shotts,
my editor at Graywolf, sent me a copy of Linda Gregg’s
In The Middle Distance—and I keep coming back
to it---I love its spare, elemental voice, its calm brio in
the service of curiosity and just trying to figure things
out. It’s becoming one of those books that has some
weird, inexplicable importance in my life. It feels necessary
to have. The same with Steve Berg’s Elegy On Hats
and his translations/versions of Rimbaud collected in “…still
unilluminated I…”—the rightfulness
of the feeling, Berg’s all out giving-in and force.
And then there are those books picked up on a whim. Cambridge
has one great used book store left, Rodney’s, in Central
Square near where I live. I bought a book there this winter
called Lartigue’s Riviera, a collection of
photos by the French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue—pictures
of lovely, indolent rich folk taken from 1906 (at the age
of 12, with his first camera!) until 1984. The photos are
so fresh you would want to live inside them forever. You would
give everything to be a droplet of water on the very tan back
of Chou Valton on the Plage de la Garoupe. I am not at all
entranced by the lives of the leisure class, but the subject
matter here is almost beside the point—Lartigue seems
to live so totally inside his joy that it allows everyone
in the picture to fully inhabit his or her body. It’s
a good thing to feel in late February in a dank, door-rattling
New England wind.
That being-alive-inside-this-body is the feeling I get from
the books I love. It’s what I’ve gotten this past
year from Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, Donald
Revell’s Pennyweight Windows and Dean Young’s
Elegy On Toy Piano. It’s in Kathryn Davis’s
novel The Thin Place, which I just started reading
(and which has a first paragraph that’s beautiful, just
better than any I’ve read in a long, long time). That
feeling is its own kind of self-propelling music.
And, yeah, I have an iPod by my bedside. Recently Played:
Jolie Holland, James McMurtry, Neko Case, The New Pornographers,
Neil Young, The McGarrigles, Spoon, Townes Van Zandt, Okkervil
River, Rene Fleming and, of course, Dylan. Like Edwin Denby
says, “an adult looks new in the weather’s motion.”
