You gotta find what you like and let it kill you.

In honor of Kinky Friedman’s b-day, all the music in his books

He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day.

Borges, “Funes the Memorius,” in Labyrinths. First read in October 1993. First understood this October 1st.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake for a long time before he remembered his heart was broken.

Hemingway, “Ten Indians,” in Men Without Women

Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity … In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years.

Borges, The Library of Babel. Me too.

Then how long will it last, this love? (in jest)
I don’t know.
Three weeks, three years, three decades … ?
You are like all the others … trying to shorten eternity with numbers (spoken quietly, but with intense feeling)

Lawrence Durell, Justine (1957). Book 1 of The Alexandria Quartet.

Cataloguing Cultural References in 'Oscar Wao'

Of course, that’s part of the beauty of the novel. Diaz’s sexy cartwheeling Spanglish prose drives the story, but at heart, this is a geeky book about a nerdy boy. Oscar’s world sags under his myriad sci-fi inscrutables, heavy badges of geekitude that isolate him from every living girl on his lonely planet. Diaz references hundreds of points of culture, both superstars and blips, and they pour out of nearly every chapter in the book. Only a reader as geeky as Oscar could catch ‘em all, if you will.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls—
Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

David Markson, The Last Novel

Books That Unlock Other Books

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world.

From Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library

To me, an unread book is always an unlocked world. It sits on the same shelf as the read books, with worlds that I’ve entered and characters who’s stories have become mine. And sometimes it sits there for years, unread.

Recently I’ve come to realize that there are some books that “unlock” other books—so that this fifth, tenth, fifteenth time that I pick up the unread book, is the last time it stays unread. Because a book I’ve just finished led me straight there and I’m now ready, prepared, to enter that world.

Sometimes there’s a strict logic to the connection between the two books, sometimes there’s nothing more than a feeling.

So I finally read Alberto Moravia’s Contempt after years of it sitting on my shelf and years more of loving Godard’s adaptation, because I’d just finished Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs and something about Thomas Abbey in The Land of Laughs led me immediately to Molteni in Contempt. Prior to this, I’d started Contempt about six or seven times, always stopping after a few pages.

Then from Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian Novel to the first book of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Justine. I’ve tried to read Justine about ten, twelve times before, never making it past the first page. Now I’m on my way to book two of the Quartet. Because I’m just in that sort of mood now. Which I wasn’t before My Life as a Russian Novel.

In both those most recent experiences, I didn’t know what would come next—I didn’t start Carroll thinking of Moravia, or Carrère thinking of Durrell. It just worked out that way.

But I’m wondering now if the book that unlocks other books, could work in reverse. If I could pick a book that I’ve never been able to get through, but have always wanted to read, and locate the one book that would unlock its world for me.

Because I’m trying to work up the courage for Musil. For a Los Angeles to Frankfurt and Frankfurt back to Los Angeles flight in October. And I’ve been told I’m just not ready for Musil. Years ago.

Unlocking The Man Without Qualities. There must be a book out there that will.

Valla

The whole temper of her personality seemed to be changing; for the first time she had become reflective, thoughtful, and full of the echoes of a sweetness with which a woman can always afford to spend upon the man she does not love.

Lawrence Durell, Justine (1957). Book 1 of The Alexandria Quartet.

Shelving Simenon

A week ago I went to the local bookshop looking for a book by Georges Simenon. I still haven’t gotten to the Magriet stories but I’m a fan of the romans durs and wanted another one of the volumes put out by the New York Review Books.

There was nothing in stock, of course.

I wanted to read only Simenon that weekend. Before I visited the bookstore I’d looked up and down my library at home to see if I could find anything that drew me in. No luck.

I came home with that sense that’s one part disappointment, one part anger that the book you want to read is simply out of hand.

I looked back in my library.

Where I found shelved, an unread Simenon. The Strangers in the House.

A story about a man with a house full of books, who doesn’t know what lies under his own roof.

The right book at the right time—I never fail to find it.

Valla

For 30 years, ten months, and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at.

Raymond Chandler on Cissy Pascal, quoted in “Burning Witches” by Michael Rogin, London Review of Books (Sept 1997). One of my lost habits from grad school is faithfully reading the LRB. This is from Michaelmas 1997, St Antony’s Common Room.

I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other.

Lawrence Durell, Justine (1957). Book 1 of The Alexandria Quartet.

Then I waited for her in the street, on Broadway, and as she came towards me this second time she took complete possession of me. In the booth, at Chin Lee’s, she became still another person. She became—and this was really the secret of her irresistible charm—she became vague.

Henry Miller, Sexus. Book 1 of The Rosy Crucifixion.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. This is a book I think can only be read at a one age—one specific year—in life. Read in that year, nothing is truer.

Kiki/Man Ray

“Well,” Whit said, “thanks to your daughter, the script’s laying out in my head well enough for me to give you some highlights.” Phoebe sipped her red Dubonnet with a lemon twist while Whit took Jack through scenes showing Kiki’s bastard girlhood and how she became the avant-garde’s muse, posing nude for Montparnasse artists, beginning her love affair with Man Ray, singing her risqué songs for the demimonde at their favorite nightclub. The trip to New York for a screen test that led nowhere but straight back to Paris. American dollars turning shadowy, low-rent Montparnasse into everything anathema to its pioneer bohemians—a prosperous, brightly lit tourist destination, with only Kiki enduring as before.”

Randy Sue Coburn, Owl Island

(Man Ray born 8/27/1890)