a place in the middle of the map
It's not a house, said Judas Priest, It's not a house it's a home
Summer days are long but the weeks are short. I’m down here in Sewanee, TN, directing this MFA summer program and our session is somehow already half over. I turn 42 on Saturday. Seems fine?
A few quick media hits: I was interviewed by my friend Taylor Lewandowski for the Brooklyn Rail, and appeared on this podcast with my friend & colleague, Emily Adrian. The Cosmic Library podcast, which I joined as part of the cast of season five, has now posted all of its episodes. I wrote a letter about my love of writing longhand for Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer. I will be reading at Mirror House Nashville’s farewell show on 6/28 with my friend Hilary Bell, though I daresay the big draw for that one will be the music sets by the Styrofoam Winos and Cassie Berman. Reboot is out there living its life. I’m basically done being a novelist for now. Back to being a professor and an admin, book critic for a few hours here and there. Come fall I will be a novelist again at 4 or 5 festivals around the country but I’m not yet supposed to say which ones.
It feels like a lifetime ago that I drove across the country when in fact it was barely a month. I left Portland on 5/22, arrived in Sewanee on 6/1. I love the sound system in my car. Kicked things off with my dad’s burned CD of Beggars Banquet (little ritual I have) then went for the Slanted & Enchanted b-sides disc, some Dead shows, playlists that friends made for me, the Spectrum ‘97 box (start with disc 2, perfect hour of music) and plenty of Dylan. All of it for more hours per day than I would have thought I had the capacity for, which is saying something because I already knew I have far more capacity than most people for listening to music as a primary activity, so it was a surprise to surprise myself with wanting even more. Not background noise, not filler, not vibe-set. It’s main thing like reading a book. Well I guess driving is the main thing, but the attention that requires pays dividends all around, so your ears and mind and heart are all keyed up and tuned in and can take you to this other place that also is exactly where you are. The car is a cave in the deep woods of the highway, velocity for trees and stone.
I went by myself to see a late showing of I Saw the TV Glow at the local indie theater in Salt Lake City. I thought it was great and I loved how Lynch-ishly inscrutable it was, like it could have meant anything or nothing or fragments of lots of things or whatever I needed it to, which could also be nothing beyond being some arresting images in a beautiful punishing sequence. Then the group of young queer kids who’d sat in front of me said on their way out of the theater, “Well that was a bit obvious as a metaphor for trans experience, but it was fun at least.” I thought, Oh.
Stellar tacos in Green River, Utah (thank you, Emily). Spent a couple days with my sister in Golden, CO (that’s her dog and fire up above). Caught a bluegrass band in Wichita at a dive bar called John Barleycorn’s where the door guy kind of lied about the food menu because he thought if I left to eat somewhere else I might not come back for the show. It was ten bucks to get in and they only had microwaveable pizzas and bags of chips and I was pissed but then some guy had a smoker hitched to the back of his car and got some red hots cooking and that’s what I had for dinner, $4 whiskey sodas, band was fine.
Bought a couple of bloodstones at a crystal shop in a small Colorado town I forget the name of (near Rifle) that caught my eye because the user reviews on Google maps made the owner sound insane. People accused her of charging too much, of following them around the store as though they were shoplifting. But these were all locals complaining and she responded to each one, reminded them that in fact they HAD shoplifted, or were drunk at the time, etc. She called them by their names. The owner wasn’t there but I had a nice conversation with the woman who was. She gave me a free selenite to go with my bloodstones.
I became a devotee of the LOVE’s gas station chain. I downloaded their app which gets you 10 cents off every gallon of gas you buy at LOVE’s. A few days into the trip I bought a purple honeycomb silicon seat pad from the section of their store that’s just for truckers. My lower back pain drained away so quickly it felt like pulling the plug at the end of a bath. Whirlpool at the base of my spine, going & gone.
I spent several days in Tulsa in the archives of the Bob Dylan Center, which was a truly special experience that I’m trying to write about elsewhere so hopefully there’ll be a link to share later this summer but I can tell you that the public-facing portion of the Center, ie the museum, is worth the trip. There are four or five major exhibits spread across the two floors. Tons to see, hear, read, do. I spent about four hours in there, could have spent three more. You could do it in two if you had to. You’d get the gist.
But I was going to tell you about the listening room. Ralston is one of the jewels in Sewanee’s crown and one of my favorite things about being here is booking listening sessions. There are plain wood chairs that all face the portrait of the guy the room is named for and I love to sit there in the stillness at the center of the sound. You can ask them for anything. Tracy O’Neill came to visit our program & read from her excellent new memoir so while she was here I booked a session for us. She chose Mahalia Jackson, a London Symphony Orchestra performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and the Rolling Stones. The following week, I booked a session for my fiction class. I asked each student to choose a song, sequenced their selections, and then, since there are only 8 of them and we had a whole hour, added some stuff that I thought would show off what the space is capable of. You can check out our playlist here.
I’ve long felt that the Silver Jews’ “The Poor, the Fair, and the Good” is one of David Berman’s most profound compositions and hearing it in this room confirmed this belief forever. Talk about a house with many mansions. I could spend days wandering around inside this song. The spareness of the lyrics in terms of total line-count relative to the complexity of image and thought contained within each line, and the way that supersaturation is expressed by the dense layers of the music, its ambling tension and push-pull builds and the sea of it all parting for the duet vocal to kick in at 1:20—it’s exquisite. It’s unreal. Just as it’s unreal that Tanglewood Numbers is 19 years old or that David has been gone for five.
My friend Daniela made a record with her group, The Pettifoggers. She wrote to me the other day with a writing question and mentioned in passing that she’d put out this record, Small Claims, last year. So I threw it on and hot damn. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. This issue’s title comes from her song “Nebraska”, an ode to her home state, a big patch of map that I did not drive through in May, indeed have only ever been once, a decade ago now. Story for another day.
In my car there are now two Dylan CDs that I picked up for two bucks apiece in a record store in West Nashville: John Wesley Harding and Time Out of Mind. Thirty years between them: ‘67 and ‘97. JWH came out the same year as Surrealistic Pillow, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Are You Experienced? TOoM came out the same year as OK Computer, Wu-Tang Forever, and Brighten the Corners. I put JWH into the player right away and ended up listening to it straight through nine or ten times. It just kept restarting when it finished and I couldn’t see a reason to turn it off. Increasingly convinced it’s a top 5 Dylan record. I ended up lending it to my friend Jamie, so now TOoM is on the loop. Every time I listen to “Highlands” it gets weirder—both better and worse at once but always deeper. The thing that I thought I Saw the TV Glow was is what this actually is. And “Standing in the Doorway” belongs in any conversation about Dylan’s say 20 best songs.
Last time I mentioned Sofia Wolfson’s Imposing on a Hometown but it wasn’t out yet. Now it is. I’ve been listening to it constantly, to the point where I’m starting to suspect it’ll be my most-played album of the year when the stats come in. Spotify doesn’t know about the CD player in my car. Bob better watch his ass.
Pair of high-energy Dead shows from April ‘89 (thank you, Adam) and this slow loopy one from Portland, OR July 26, 1972, never officially released. It came on the satellite radio channel while I was trying to get out of Arkansas my last night on the road. I couldn’t believe the molasses in “El Paso” and Bobby feuding with the sound guy basically all night. They hit “Tennessee Jed” just as I hit the bridge over the Mississippi and crossed into Memphis. Signs and wonders, man. But you can believe anything when you’ve been alone in a car for long enough. That’s kind of the whole point.
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Thanks as always for reading. Some highlights/outtakes:
Enjoyed the piece.
I 100% love that listening room. Hearing 'These Eyes' there brought me suddenly to tears it was so live and rich and good.