Perennials

In honor of the newly-blown spring that is surely just around the corner, I’m writing today about literary perennials, those constants we couldn’t do without, the volumes that get read and reread and kept close to us no matter what.

When I moved from New York to Ohio recently, I had to put about 98% of my library in storage. I went through my books carefully, making mostly sage but sometimes rash decisions about what I would need with me. I held each book, thought, “will I miss this for the next 6 months to a year?” and boxed them accordingly.

Of the “I will miss them so terribly I can’t bear to be parted from them” box, there are some that are so important to me they can’t even live on the shelf. Following are some pictures I’ve taken from my desk over the past few months.

 

 

 

I don’t know if you could see, but there are certain titles that never leave the desk; while I do keep my “books in waiting” there as well, The Elements of Style (Strunk and White), The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume II (1923-1925), Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, selected books by Beatrix Potter, and Jane Eyre are always immediately to hand, along with a book of maps of Vienna, just because.

Why? Oh, different reasons. The Elements of Style for any sudden questions of grammar or formatting, Hemingway’s letters because I find the story of his early struggles inspirational (living above a sawmill, able to afford no entertainment other than long walks, writing in a cold garret, and above all his quest for truth and style) and comforting. If a Great Writer once felt as I do, as insecure and unsure, then maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for me yet.

Beatrix Potter because those were the stories I first loved and understood on the level of “a story.” Also they’re cute. Jane Eyre because I reread it every year and now I have a beautiful early edition…I have a different relationship with Jane every time I go through that novel. (I wrote a little bit about my love for that novel in an earlier post).

And Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, a book-length interview edited by Alan Licht, because reading his views on art, creativity, and productivity are like taking the hand of someone familiar. My copy is beaten up and signed by the artist; I can dip into it at random and always pull up something I needed to read in that moment. Stuff like:

Q: Do you think a song is every really finished?

A: I feel like a song is completed when the writing is done and I present it to a friend, partner, or group of musicians. Then it’s completed when we record together and finish mixing. Then it’s completed each and every time someone listens. I think that a song, for the most part, is completed by the listening experience. It enters in people’s brains and mutates and then might get completed again–in their dreams, in mix tapes that they make, or in new listening experiences that they have. So it isn’t ever finished because there’s never going to be a definitive listening experience.

and

Q: Overall, what effect do you think the audience has on your work? 

A: I feel the value of my work is determined very precisely by the audience. What does entertainment mean, anyway, and what’s the difference between that and art? I would say the main difference is that art isn’t necessarily funded by the consumer, but entertainment always is. In that way, entertainment is a million times more important to me than art, and being an entertainer is more important to me than being an artist. The relationship with the audience is so direct, while the government or rich collectors are going to pay for something that is art rather than the person who is actually going to have a relationship with the piece. That’s what’s most important to me about what I do. I think of entertainment as being very serious and important, from Laurel and Hardy upward. It has to do with emotions of release, giving up, or extreme hilarity and absurdity.

It’s rewarding when I find a broader audience that doesn’t think I’m too crazy. [I’m] trying to make something for that audience to experience, also knowing that at some level I will be sharing the experience. My absolute, purest particular taste would not be something that could be appreciated on a grand scale. It just wouldn’t. If I really made a record just to serve myself I would end up in a dark, wet room, you know? That’s not really where I want to be. That’s why it’s more important to me to make a record that serves itself and its audience well. A good record should involve my needs, the listeners’ needs, and the needs of the other people who worked on the record. If I manage that, I feel I’ve accomplished something; but ultimately it is the audience that holds the lion’s share of determining if a record is worthwhile. The only way for my entire audience to appreciate the music is if they come to it of their own accord and find something in it that satisfies them as individuals. I’ll do what I do, and they’ll do what they do, and hopefully a mutual understanding can be formed.

 

One thing I value about him as a musician and a performer is the depth of thought which goes into each presentation of and interaction with his work. It creates music that  can stand up to (and rewards) close listening, repeat listening. As this book, for me, rewards rereading.

Ok, so….what else? What other treasures did I skim from the top of the chaos of my library?

100 Years of Solitude, a book so close to perfect it seems not written but made, something simply plucked, pre-formed, out of the sky.

As a matter of fact, I got a nasty shock reading this Paris Review interview: Marquez talks about writing about Macondo. He talks about it being hard to write about. He writes about different attempts to write this book, none of which were right. I just…..that blew my mind. 100 Year of Solitude was in fact written, and written by a human hand. I know that statement seems hyperbolic, but sometimes when I read this novel, it seems like it must have always existed, timeless, just out of sight.

I wrote about Macondo’s wondrous bookseller here.

His collected short stories also escaped the storage unit.

I kept both of Alex Ross’s books close; when writing about music I frequently turn both to The Rest is Noise and Listen to This. Incomparable resources, both, and entertaining, informative and lovingly indulgent. (Wrote briefly about the opening essay of Listen to This here).

A Moveable Feast accompanied me, as well as Hemingway’s collected short stories. I mentioned before that I find companionship and solidarity and comfort from his descriptions of his early writing, before anyone knew who he was besides his wife and Gertrude Stein.

Other than that, I brought home works I find myself dipping in and out of….a lot of short stories, for example. In addition to those of Hemingway and Marquez, I keep close those of Annie Proulx, Colm Toibin, Ann Beattie, DH Lawrence, and Eudora Welty. The poetry of Rilke and Walt Whitman. The Fran Lebowitz Reader, because she will never not be funny, and she’s always there when I start missing New York.

Also, that book has the BEST. COVER PHOTO. EVER.

What books do I regret locking away for a season? What do I keep thinking of ruefully, wishing I had close at hand? Consider the Lobster, the amazing book of essays by David Foster Wallace, and The Giver, which has been one of my favorite books since I was about 8.

A Tale of Two Cities (unaccountably). For Whom the Bell Tolls. Never Let Me Go. No Country for Old Men. Winter’s Bone. 

I daydream about being reunited with my library. The day after I move to my next place, I’ll let the clothes sit in the suitcase and leave the cups and saucers wrapped in newspaper. I’ll sit amid towers of alphabetized boxes and pull out each volume and move my hands over the cover. I’ll flip a few pages. I’ll greet each book like an old friend (which each one is). I’ll combine them with the books mentioned above, and the books I’ve acquired since I moved (Oh, how they’ll have to move aside for Infinite Jest). 

I think of them, cold in their boxes, waiting for me.

This may sound melodramatic to some, but to others this will make perfect sense: I miss them every day.

Perennial forget-me-nots, appropriately.

An Excess of Feeling

I’ve been reading Alex Ross’s Listen to This, a collection of his essays for The New Yorker. I knew I would like it–I love both his previous book and his blog (both titled The  Rest is Noise)–and for the most part I found exactly what I wanted to find. Listen to This a fabulous exploration of music, from Radiohead to Brahms to Bob Dylan to John Cage, even in tone but cheeky in places  (often surprisingly so).

What I didn’t expect, though, really, is the shiver of recognition I got when reading his introductory essay. Originally meant to open his first book, he released it as a standalone piece, which he describes as a “memoir turned manifesto,” and one which actually directly addresses what a strange feeling it is to love classical music in our time. Or….more than that. To feel that classical music is important and relevant in our time. To be a classically trained person in our time. To be young and to love this music.

Sometimes the gulf between “us” (those of us to whom the term “oldies” means Franco-Flemish polyphony) and “them” (those to whom it means “Elvis”) feels impassable and extreme, an abyss composed of willful ignorance on the one side and dedication to irrelevance on the other. Friends who wax rhapsodic about schools of architecture or Duchamp or the poet Burns shut up tighter than clams when I start talking about Brahms. And it’s more than silence; it’s a peculiar look people get. A not-quite-smirk, with knowingly raised eyebrows and a gleam to their eyes that somehow says, “how cute.” It seems to say, “how adorable that you have devoted all your time to a dead art.” It seems to say, “she might as well be teaching penguins to speak Latin.”

And I want to say that I just don’t understand it.

Because there’s this feeling I get sometimes, and I want to believe that everyone has felt it. I want to believe that we all know the flush of suffused joy, or elegant melancholy, or unmitigated and primal power, that classical music has given me. That moment where the boundaries of the self disappear and you, in the words of Charlie from Perks of Being a Wallflower, feel “infinite”. It can happen in a concert hall, or at home listening to records, or walking down the street with your headphones on, and somehow the peculiar magic of place (the weather, the views, the people) meets the peculiar magic of music and there is a moment of absolutely pure feeling. 

In his essay (also called “Listen to This”), Ross cites Greg Sandow, another critic, who says that “the classical community needs to speak more from the heart about what the music means,” but acknowledges that “he admits that it’s easier to analyze his ardor than to express it.” How to convey the sense of being lifted up, being made to wonder, being made to confront darkness, even death, through sound….how to do all of that and not seem like a complete nut? It would seem overwritten and florid, and somehow less true. Sparing, almost terse descriptions, with room for others to insert their experience and interpretation, seems a more fitting style for writing about music, but that makes the music itself seem less vital.

Because it is vital.

I just finished reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the searing novel by Carson McCullers. It’s almost scourging, in a way, focusing on tensions in a small Southern town in 1920s, leaving no aspect of humanity unexplored, or unexploited. One of the central characters is a young girl named Mick Kelly, who lacks any sort of musical training whatsoever, but falls in love with it, and decides she has to dedicate her life to it. In this excerpt, she hears Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica”, for the first time.

“How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or a march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only the first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her–the real plain her.

She could not listen good enough to hear it all. The music boiled inside her. Which? To hang on to certain wonderful parts and think them over so that later she would not forget–or should she let go and listen to each part that came without thinking or trying to remember? Golly! The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough. Then at last the opening music came again, with all the different instruments bunched together for each note  like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart. And the first part was over.

The music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms held tight around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. It might have been five minutes she listened or half the night. The second part was black-colored–a slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before. One of those horn kind of instruments played a sad and silver tune. Then the music rose up angry and with excitement underneath. And finally the black march again.

But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved the best–glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

It was over, and she sat very stuff with her arms around her knees. Another program came on the radio and she put her fingers in her ears. the music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.

The radio and the light in the house were turned off. The night was very dark. Suddenly Mick began hitting her thigh with her fists. She pounded the same muscle with all her strength until the tears came down her face. But she could not feel this hard enough. The rocks under the brush were sharp. She grabbed a handful of the and began scraping them up and down on the same spot until her hand was bloody. Then she fell back to the ground and lay looking up at the night. With the fiery hurt in her leg she felt better. She was limp on the wet grass, and after a while her breath came slow and easy again.

Whey hadn’t the explorers known by looking at the sky that the world was round? The sky was curved, like the inside of a huge glass ball, very dark blue with the sprinkles of bright stars. The night was quiet. There was the smell of warm cedars. She was not trying to think of the music at all when it came back to her. The first part happened in her mind just as it had been played. She listened in a quiet, slow way and thought the notes out like a problem in geometry so she would remember. She could see the shape of the sounds very clear and she would not forget them.

Here is what Mick Kelly heard: this is Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra playing Beethoven 3 (never dismiss a youth orchestra out of hand; their performances are sometimes the most stunning and energetic. And this one is technically unbelievable, to boot).

I was going to end this with a list of  pieces that I find immensely powerful, the pieces that make me feel infinite, but everything I wanted to say was already covered by Beethoven–and isn’t that always the problem with talking about music? In the end, the only think that can adequately do justice to the music is the music itself.

Here’s Leonard Bernstein discussing the symphony (notable: his incredible conductor’s hair):

Here’s Ross, discussing the Eroica in the essay that prompted me to write this (you can read the whole thing here):

“The first music that I loved to the point of distraction was Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. My parents had a disk of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic—one of a series of Music-Appreciation Records put out by the Book-of-the-Month Club. A companion record provided Bernstein’s analysis of the symphony, a road map to its forty-five-minute sprawl. I now had names for the shapes that I perceived. (The conductor’s “Joy of Music” and “Infinite Variety of Music” remain the best introductory books of their kind.) Bernstein drew attention to something that happens about ten seconds in—a C-sharp that unexpectedly sounds against the plain E-flat-major harmony. “There has been a stab of intrusive otherness,” he said, cryptically but seductively, in his nicotine baritone. Over and over, I listened to this note of otherness. I bought a score and deciphered the notation. I learned some time-beating gestures from Max Rudolf’s conducting manual. I held my family hostage in the living room as I led the record player in a searingly intense performance of the “Eroica.”

….

I don’t identify with the listener who responds to the “Eroica” by saying, “Ah, civilization.” That wasn’t what Beethoven wanted: his intention was to shake the European mind. I don’t listen to music to be civilized; sometimes, I listen precisely to escape the ordered world. What I love about the “Eroica” is the way it manages to have it all, uniting Romanticism and Enlightenment, civilization and revolution, brain and body, order and chaos. It knows which way you think the music is going and veers triumphantly in the wrong direction. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen once wrote a monologue for the spirit of Music, in which he or she or it says, ‘I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it.'”

And these are the words of Beethoven himself, in his “Heiligenstadt Testament”, a will of sorts, written to his brothers. He wrote this letter in 1802, and composed the “Eroica” in 1803. He talks about his encroaching deafness with despair, saying that only his art held him back from suicide. “It seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce,” he says, “and so I endured this wretched existence.” 

It’s not so much what he says here, but the way in which he says it–that tone of struggle and passion, and of immediacy. His music still feels immediate, and sincere, and necessary.

If he exhibits an excess of feeling, well, that’s what he composed, and that’s what I feel when I listen. And that’s what I wish others to feel. This great excess of feeling.

“Born with a fiery lively temperament, inclined even for the amusements of society, I was early forced to isolate myself, to lead a solitary life. If now and again I tried for once to give the go-by to all of this, O how rudely was I repulsed by the redoubled mournful experience of my defective hearing; but not yet could I bring myself to say to people ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’ O how should I then bring myself to admit the weakness of a sense which I once possessed in the greatest perfection, a perfection such as few assuredly of my profession have yet possessed it in – O I cannot do it! forgive me then, if you see me shrink away when I would fain mingle among you. Double pain does my misfortune give me, in making me misunderstood. Recreation in human society, the more delicate passages of conversation, confidential outpourings, none of these are for me; all alone, almost only so much as the sheerest necessity demands can I bring myself to venture into society; I must live like an exile; if I venture into company a burning dread falls on me, the dreadful risk of letting my condition be perceived. So it was these last six months which I passed in the country, being ordered by my sensible physician to spare my hearing as much as possible. He fell in with what has now become almost my natural disposition, though sometimes, carried away by the craving for society, I let myself be misled into it; but what humiliation when someone stood by me and heard a flute in the distance, and I heard nothing, or when someone heard the herd-boy singing, and I again heard nothing. Such occurrences brought me nigh to despair, a little more and I had put an end to my own life – only it, my art, held me back. O it seemed to me impossible to quit the world until I had produced all I felt it in me to produce; and so I reprieved this wretched life – truly wretched, a body so sensitive that a change of any rapidity may alter my state from very good to very bad. Patience – that’s the word, she it is I must take for my guide; I have done so – lasting I hope shall be my resolve to endure, till it please the inexorable Parcæ to sever the thread. It may be things will go better, may be not; I am prepared – already in my twenty-eighth year forced – to turn philosopher: it is not easy, for an artist harder than for anyone. O God, Thou seest into my inward part, Thou art acquainted with it, Thou knowest that love to man and the inclination to beneficence dwell therein. O my fellow-men, when hereafter you read this, think that you have done me wrong; and the unfortunate, let him console himself by finding a companion in misfortune, who, despite all natural obstacles, has yet done everything in his power to take rank amongst good artists and good men.”