A Dusty Reading List
I’ve recently undergone a rite of passage that many experience far earlier than I have: The loss of my last surviving parent. Dad was sharp and able up until the last couple of months. He spent most of his time in his chair, next to a stack of books, and it was a huge downer to all of us when he could no longer read. He died at home, surrounded by loved ones and relatively comfortable, so we feel lucky. Dealing with the many tasks surrounding this event required teamwork. It’s a large family, and we took the opportunity for some bonding along the way. The entire process, including the various estate concerns such as paying bills and selling the house, took around a year. Thus a second long postponed rite: the final visit to my childhood home.
Nostalgia and art often meet in the overstuffed bookshelves and cluttered closets of a family home. In my own small home, purging is a regular survival technique, but in a large shotgun Victorian that had not been emptied out since the Summer of ’63, when we moved into it, dusty, outdated household items, curled photos, forgotten hobbies and overused furniture seemed to pop out of every nook and corner. Many trips to the local charity thrift later, the house will soon be ready for a younger, more ambitious household. But what do the former inhabitants take away from it?
Many, books. We were blessed with book-loving parents, who pushed interesting books into our eager fingers. From Crockett Johnson and Maurice Sendak, to JRR Tolkien and Ernest Hemingway, and of course, Shakespeare, our parents took no chances that the ancient black and white TV we owned would colonize our little brains. I took on the job of going through the decades worth of books still in the house. Most of these looked like they had gone through a war, and they had, being passed through generations of young hands, but also propping up table legs, accruing dust like review blurbs. None were worth any real money in that condition, as far as I could see. I took several home, usually because they tapped memories, but also because they looked interesting and I wanted read them. Here was my last time. I didn’t find the mass market Lord of the Rings trilogy I spent all summer reading when I was 13 or 14. If I had, I would have grabbed them and read them again. I believe books should be functional. But they also carry magic spirits. My first copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, also a mass market paper back, sits in my studio/work room, well browned and missing a few pages, in case it might be needed for some art project.
Here’s some of what I brought home, only a few of which I’ve actually gotten to yet, from my Dad’s shelves:
A History of Jazz, Ted Gioia: This is an an amazingly compact, yet comprehensive book that reads like a dream, at least the first two chapters, on Slave dances and spirituals, and Delta blues/New Orleans jazz/Ragtime. each paragraph contains insights on how the music bubbled up from plantations, shanty bars and ghettoes to become the voice of an oppressed minority, and eventually, American culture itself. Nowadays one can simply type the songs mentioned into the Apple Music search engine as you read, and listen along. My Dad was young when jazz was young, and hung around the downtown Buffalo clubs, chatting with the (later) legends of the genre. My pay off here was that Dad had underlined and highlighted passages liberally, so I could listen and read along with him.
Buffalo Memories: The Early Years, The Buffalo News: Given to my Dad by a family friend and fellow history buff. Looking at historical photos is fascinating to me, and Buffalo, NY has a lot of history. Once one of the busiest, richest Great Lakes commercial hubs, it crashed hard about the time I was born, when the St Lawrence Seaway opened. So hard did it crash, that much of the significant architecture it contains survived, because no one had money to tear it down. Going to Buffalo to see art and architecture may be one of the cheapest, most spectacular art tourism moves you can make- it holds the world’s first curtain wall skyscraper ( Sullivan ) and more publicly available Frank Lloyd Wright buildings than anywhere in the world, for example. Many of the pictures feature the First Ward, a now quickly gentrifying working class neighborhood my family hails from, and Buffalo Central Terminal, a Deco masterpiece where uncles and grandparents worked on the New York Central railway. There were related, and more personal, photos from the First Ward in my Dad’s home, too.
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: I actually left this fairly beat up brick in WNY, but then saw it here and picked it up. I’m going through these gems for the third time in my life. There are still few stories that match these for their fulsome silences and omissions, and the sense of a complex world beyond their narrative borders. In a rough lineage of American short stories -the realism with a twist ending O. Henry stories of high school anthologies, then the subtle modernist fabulism that Fitzgerald brought, leading to the surreal humor often found in McSweeney’s, Hemingway’s stand out for bringing interior life out into the landscape, highlighting both. He used few words to do this. I was shocked to find some of the most epic in my memory clocked in at 3-4 quarto pages.
Still to read:
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, Ed. The book came with a CD of Heaney reading the ancient saga. The roots of modern literature and poetry was always of interest in my childhood home, and featured as dinner table conversation for years. My mother was a Latin teacher, and my Dad a newspaper editor. We had more words than money. I’ve read Quixote and Tristram Shandy, and I’m about to read Dante, but have never ventured farther back, to Beowulf, or even Chaucer.
A Shropshire Lad, AE Houseman: a tiny, yellowed Modern Library edition with engravings. I would often read this as a child, without really understanding it. It was probably a textbook from one of my parents’ college lit courses.
Regretfully left behind:
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway: A first edition! Now waiting for some lucky collector in a WNY AmVets thrift store. Beat to hell by too many kid fingers, encrusted with dust, a book that the failing Hemingway excised from a much larger, more epic project of the 40s, then won a 1951 Pulitzer Prize for. I have returned to Hemingway, recently re-reading The Sun Also Rises and of course the short stories. By this time, drinking and plane crash concussions were eating him away. But he was a star when my parents were married, in grad school, just before I was born. As I was growing up in the house, the recently deceased author was legend, and we teens aspired to his style and lifestyle, including the drinking. Friends went to Key West, I went to Wyoming. This beat up little hardback was part of the reason.
I brought these books home from my childhood home to put in my library. There weren’t many, and a larger stack is going out to the used bookstore next week. Some people don’t even read hard copies anymore, they just power on their Kindle. But the important thing is, books, libraries, bookstores, become a part of our lives and wind up in the cultural bloodstream, like vitamins. It’s a shame to see the book burners and intellectual fascists back in power and censorship darkening the homes of America. The book you save today, the book that formed you, might be the book that saves democracy.
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