the gentle madness

I jealously guard my free time. Presented with the choice of browsing the hundreds of books littering my house or tackling the long list of menial chores needing attention, I choose the books. And a cup of coffee better than I deserve. Moving between the bar and the bookshelf, moving between work and bed leaves little time for anything else, like housekeeping or organizing a neglected CD collection. I doubt I have opened the black binders that hold my music twice this month. But I have scanned all of my bookshelves frequently, pulled titles down, handled them, felt their weight, opened to a favorite passage, read aloud and returned them to their place or stacked them on a table so that they were always comfortably within reach.

Books are old technology. I know they will disappear. We will eventually feed them post-apocalypse into abandoned fireplaces to heat ourselves or heat our food. Stories are the oldest technology. They don’t burn except in our eyes and ears. That is why we cling to them. We don’t want to give up on this thing, this part of us. Have you ever tried to cull your book collection? What goes first? We all have the airport book, already disintegrating on the shelf, the book we bought as a guilty pleasure to get us to Detroit, Dallas-Fort Worth or LAX. Throw it into the yard sale pile. Tell yourself you got rid of it not because you don’t want it, but because somebody else might.

So, today is a lazy Friday spent sorting music and books. The Gun Club’s Fire of Love is torching my ears. John Lee Hooker is cued up. The Replacements, Let it Be. Minutemen: Double Nickle on the Dime. These are the books I want to revisit, at this moment:

White Noise, Don Delillo

Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison

The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann

How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman

Collected Poems, E.E. Cummings

A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia

Cummings was a gift from my sister with an inscription dated 1994 and a reference to cloudbusting. The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia is the best and most complete reference book printed in the past ten years. Blood Meridian because, well…

“They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.”

Back to cummings for a second:

if learned darkness from our searched world

should wrest the rare unwisdom of thy eyes,

and if thy hands flowers of silence curled

upon a wish,to rapture should surprise

my soul slowly which on they beauty dreams

(proud though the cold perfect night whisperless

to mark,how that asleep whitely she seems

whose lips the whole of life almost do guess)

if god should send the morning;and before

my doubting window leaves softly to stir,

of thoughtful trees whom night hath pondered o’er

-and frailties of dimension do occur

about us

and birds known,scarcely to sing

(heart,could we bear the marvel of this thing?)

James Kelman wrote the strangest and most atypical novel about the post 9-11 experience in You Have To Be Careful In The Land Of The Free. Some time before that he wrote How Late It Was, How Late. Dirt, darkness, drunkenness. Blindness. Not an easy book to finish because of the Glaswegian accent and the painful struggle of its protagonist, but worth the effort. Worth it because it takes you to a world you don’t know, don’t want to know. An ugly world described so hideously and beautifully. Our world.

Which brings us to Vollmann. It takes an incredible imagination to invent a color blacker than black, with bits of blood, teeth and piss worked in. The Royal Family is every wrong turn you ever made:

“Go and make some money, bitch, said the tall man, and she fled, pretending that she was back home in Oaxaca where a big turkey dipped its neck outside her mother’s house and inside it was very dark with the dirt floor. The walls were planks stamped SUPPLY OFFICER: AIRFORCE BASE-CA. Just behind the planks, an infant cried and cried: her little nephew. She tried to see her Papa but she couldn’t. And all her little brothers were grown up. The house was empty. Where was everyone she knew? She wanted to dance for them. The ceiling planks were black from cooking. When it rained, the water came in. Quiet little flies crawled everywhere. On the cement stood one big bed for the whole family, but the bed was empty. A little girl stood rapt with crossed legs, pressing her face against the bed while she looked at white cartoon cowboys and horses. That was Beatrice. her little brother spat on the floor. So he hadn’t grown up after all. “

Enough has been written about Bastard Out of Carolina and White Noise. I’m not a critic. I’m a fan. We all have great books falling off of our shelves, enough to keep us engrossed, obsessed for every lazy Friday afternoon.  Those are books I am happy to own.