A Return to Turning Pages: March 24-30

Books

• Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years Vol. 1 by Mark Lewisohn (started): Lewisohn is apparently the Robert Caro of music biographers, and that was really all I needed to hear to pick up this first of three projected volumes. It takes a close look at John, Paul, George, and Ringo basically right up to the moment they become the most popular band the world has ever known. I'm still in the early pages, but so far so good. Class, Irish heritage, and mixed-religion marriages play a large role so far.
  
• Carrie by Stephen King (started): I love a reading project, and this represents the start of one I'm undertaking with my buddy Rufus – all of Stephen King, in order.
  
  I first read Carrie in the fifth grade. I had watched Kubrick's The Shining at a sleepover at my friend Brian's house, which had no small passing resemblance to the Overlook Hotel, and we were hooked. We used D.E.A.R. time for the rest of that year reading King's novels, and Carrie was the second one I got to (after The Shining, of course). Now, fifth grade was also the year that they separated the boys from the girls in my small Catholic grammar school and talked to the boys about erections and all we knew was that the girls emerged from their talk with what looked like goody bags. All of which is to say that the opening scene of Carrie was the first time I heard about girls getting their period. (I still remember looking up the word "period" in the dictionary...) I was bewildered, but I couldn't say anything to my parents for fear of their rethinking letting me read King's books and my sisters had already left home for college by that point.
  
  I suppose I can't really be surprised that this time through the book is a bit of a revelation. I have no memory of the mixing in of the subsequent "studies" of what happened in Chamberlain, and I really like the impact of the verisimilitude they bring with them. If telekinesis really exists as a scientific phenomenon in this world, then we both leave behind the possibility that this is a function of magic of some sort and we open the door to the possibility that other "magical" elements might also be allowed. It makes me wonder if Carrie is, in fact, the spawn of Satan as her mother describes her. The evidence that points to such a reading can be explained away as the hyper-Puritanical rantings of a madwoman, but, again, if telekinesis is foregrounded and "rational" than so too can be the coupling of a woman and the devil.
  
  I'm also really enjoying the examination of class that underlies much of the depiction of the town and especially the students that populate Carrie's high school. I also love the ugliness that the students are capable of - a depiction of the dark side of adolescence that somehow feels less fantastic here than it does in subsequent treatments by other authors and filmmakers.
  
• Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music by Greil Marcus (started): Reading this one with my book club, and I've been pretty open about my disdain for Marcus for years. I found his prose needlessly ornate and awfully close to inscrutable, but the start of this volume has been something of a revelation for me. His chapter on Robert Johnson can still be a bit much at times, but his opening chapter on Harmonica Frank, whom I had never heard of, was pretty great. I particularly liked when Marcus digressed into literary analysis and started to talk about Huck Finn and Ahab as two interrelated American archetypes. It got me started thinking about other American archetypes (Gatsby, Willie Loman...) and I thought how much fun it would be to build a class around this approach. There's a good book in it - though I suspect it's already been written by someone.
• The Optimist: A Case for the Fly Fishing Life by David Coggins (read): A quick read about fly fishing, patience, optimism, the quiet, travel, and escape. It's another small dream of mine to learn to fly fish, but I'm not actually sure I'd like it. I know I like the idea of it.
• The Believer: A Year in the Fly Fishing Life by David Coggins (read) - This one reads more like a travel book to my mind, and leaves me wanting to read some Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, both of whom I've been aware of but never actually checked out.

Music

• Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan: I'm not sure what I can say about this album that hasn't already been said, but I will share that the two Dylan lines that continually come back to me as truth are "Everybody must get stoned," and "You're gonna have to serve somebody."
• Appalachia Borealis, Phil Cook: recommended by my buddy Andy, and I really love the opening track "Rise." It's quiet and bluesy with grace notes of gospel and Aaron Copland and I love it. It makes me wish I could play the piano.
• Mellow Dream, Ryo Fukui: Branching out from Fukui's Scenery, which I really love, and while I don't find this album as compelling, it's a good record for a rainy day.
• We saw a children's chorus perform at a local church this week, and the program featured Benjamin Britten's Missa Brevis, three short pieces by a local composer that I quite liked, Camille Saint-Saëns' "Romance in F Maj, Op. 36" for french horn and piano, and four songs from Brahms' Opus 17. It was an interesting program, and I found myself mostly watching a few of the singers: the big uncomfortable kid who I'm not convinced actually sang at any point and certainly hit more yawns than notes, the girl who kept looking at her sister and was constantly about to break into laughter, the other girl who kept looking to her mom (who was beaming with pride). My kids mostly hung with it, though the got sleepy as it wore on.

Articles and Episodes

• This Old House, S37:E12-16: They finished the Victorian in Belmont, MA, and I have to say it's probably my favorite house I've seen them do so far. I quibble with some stylistic choices by the designer who clearly loved being on camera and bought lots of new outfits for these chances to be seen, but it comes together really well.
  
  I'm now on the hunt for a Silva Brothers t-shirt
  
• Would I Lie To You? S17:E02: Lucy Beaumont is incredible on this show. Her ditzy act is brilliant.
  
• "I Finally Played a Pro Tournament", Grant Horvat Golf: I've been fascinated by YouTube golf for the past couple of years, and Grant Horvat seems like he is the nicest guy of the bunch of golfer/influencers that I've seen. He also has a beautiful swing that I'd kill for. I've admired his choice to avoid competitive golf out of his self-knowledge that he doesn't like the pressure, but I've also long wondered how he'd really do compared to some "real" players. At least one version of an answer is here.
  
• "A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible" by David Brooks (New York Times):

"I don’t like to write but I want to write. Getting up and trudging into that office is just what I do. It’s the daily activity that gives structure and meaning to life. I don’t enjoy it, but I care about it."

I've heard this before from others – they don't like writing, but they like having written. Maybe the real question is a bit more prosaic than what Brooks offers: what are the things for which you're willing to do other unpleasant things?

• "Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?" an interview with Frost's most recent biographer Adam Plunkett (The Paris Review): (Spoiler alert) YES! and far more subtle and complex than he's given credit for.

"That people tend to rest in easy interpretations of his poems comes in part from the idea that the man who was writing the poetry was in some way simple. But Frost’s simplicity has much more in common with Horace’s phrase “the art that hides art” than with the simplicity of somebody repeating old folk sayings. Yet his sophistication is not the same as that of the intelligentsia. And that’s part of what makes Frost so interesting, that there’s a conflict within him between the life of the mind and a kind of embodied, distributed knowledge that he did not think correlated well with higher education, nor, really, with any of the standard American systems for conferring sophistication. Part of what makes the poetry so good, when it’s good, is that he has a tremendous amount of respect for the sort of person who knows how to mend a wall."

• "Long Horizons: Bruce Chatwin's Apocalyptic Imagination" by Helen Rouner (Commonweal Magazine):

“The desire for discovery—for Chatwin, the essence of being alive—inevitably finds what already has been killed off.”

Shortly after putting aside Coggins, this article on Chatwin popped up on Arts & Letters Daily and so I had to dip a toe. This is a darker than expected take on Chatwin, though I haven't read him yet so maybe it's merely correct. Either way, now I want to watch Nomad, Werner Herzog's film about Chatwin, too.