final essentials
With our move now ten days away, Jennifer and I are in full-on packing mode, simultaneously surprised to have gotten so much done so far, and overwhelmed by everything we have left to do. One major hurdle which is now out of the way is packing up all of our books As you can imagine, two English professors can manage to accumulate quite a few of them, and altogether, there are probably at least forty boxes, maybe more, not counting a few stragglers. We have no idea how Jennifer’s going to shelve hers once we get to Cincinnati — since our apartment here has copious built-in bookshelves — but that’s a worry for another day.
One luxury afforded by the end being in sight is that I can stop making excuses about potentially needing a book (or, for that matter, a cd, a dvd, a guitar) before we leave, since there won’t be any time for left for leisure. That having been said, here’s the final list of books which didn’t get boxed up — a list that speaks to projects both present and future, as well as loves both new and old:
Donald Barthelme — Sixty Stories and Forty Stories
Charles Bernstein — Dark City
Ted Berrigan — The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
William S. Burroughs — Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs Reader
Jack Kerouac — On the Road and Desolation Angels
Georges Perec — Things: a Story of the Sixties & A Man Asleep
Aram Saroyan — Genesis Angels: the Story of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation
Lew Welch — Ring of Bone: Collected Poems, How I Work As a Poet
Perec and Bernstein are books I was in the midst of reading, got distracted, and will go back to finish shortly. The last three books are needed for a very tardy essay on Welch I’m currently in the midst of, which was slowed down by moving, of course, and by my work on another essay, “An Imperfect Diamond: the National Pastime Transfigured in Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff’s Yo-Yo’s with Money,” which I just wrapped up last week. The Collected Berrigan’s a remnant of that process, though it’s a pleasure in and of itself to dip into from time to time. The Burroughs and Kerouac books are needed in preparation for the Beat Generation class I’ll be teaching at the University of Cincinnati — in the case of WSB, I need to fill in some gaps in my familiarity with his work.
As for Kerouac, these two books are old friends, first read when I was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and it’s interesting to think about the ways in which my relationship to them has changed over those years; how I’ve changed as well. I’m not even teaching Desolation Angels — we’re doing On the Road, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur, with The Subterraneans as an optional text — but I wanted to go back to revisit that book before I got to the ones we’d be covering (I did reread Big Sur earlier this summer in prep for the Welch essay as well). My well-worn copy — which, honest to god, I found in the parking lot of my high school, and I can confess now, almost certainly belonged to my friend (and the guitar player in my band) Mike Hart (he must’ve left it on the hood of his car) — has a folded-up note calling me down to the guidance counselor’s office as a bookmark (on which I’ve written a list of the character’s names and their real-life analogues), and a series of tape flags (from my time working in medical records) marking favorite passages from a second read-through in my mid-twenties.
Admittedly, I was probably a little embarrassed by Kerouac’s idiosyncrasies during that last reread. In much the same way that you have to step away from your family to be able to come back to a healthy relationship with them, I needed to distance myself from ur-influences like Kerouac and Brautigan and Ginsberg in my mid-twenties. For someone whose earliest writing (practically half a lifetime ago) seemed far too close for comfort to their styles, no doubt they seemed boorish, unsophisticated, like ugly relations from the hinterlands who come to visit you and embarrass you and then go back home, but never soon enough. However, the real source of that embarrassment is one’s own faltering scratches at an aesthetic all his own. Once you’ve attained a safe distance from those nascent days, and can feel confident in your own instincts, your own tastes, then you can unabashedly love anything. Reading Kerouac now, I’m struck by how warm and elegant his rambles are, along with the already-elegiac sense of a changing America, which would, to his horror, quickly be completed. That Kerouac lived to 1969 seems like a cruel punishment — it would’ve been better if he died in the early sixties. Of course, it would’ve been better still if he had been more adaptable and could’ve persisted in the way that Burroughs and Ginsberg did.
Finally, I should mention Donald Barthelme (whose face is the third from the left above — it shouldn’t be surprising that four of the authors above made this list, and Hannah Weiner’s Open House went into the very last box I packed), whose story collections always make it onto a list like this, or get brought along on a trip when I need a reliable fall-back book to read, or are obsessively reread on insomniac nights and Sunday afternoons and during blizzards. Perfectly sized for even the shortest of attention spans, his marvelously-crafted stories provide immeasurable comfort, like visiting the homes of long-deceased relatives — in fact, they’re double time-capsules of a sort, serving as intimately-detailed reminders of not only the times in which they were written, but also my tumultuous (yet oddly wonderful, in retrospect) final year of college (1999-2000), when I first came across his work and greedily devoured everything I could find by him.
One final notable omission — because seriously, I should be packing now: I’ve finally given up on reading Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, which I’d started and was about 40 pages into before my move to Boston (in 2005) at which point I put it down and forgot about it for two years, when I was getting ready to move back to Philly. That time, I got about 150 pages into it, maybe more, but the same thing happened. So sorry, Jonathan … I’ll get around to reading your book sometime, but not while I’m in transit.
