In an essay on her childhood reading of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, Ali Smith disputes the idea of reading as an escape, an alternative to life, something that takes you out of yourself. When we read a book we love, she says, when we are fully engaged with it, far from escaping we are being taken into ourselves; and the experience of reading that book will be remembered as a vivid, thrilling part of our life, not as an alternative to it. It is being alive.
Which is how – and why – I read so much.
A funny thing happened after the Village Voice published my rave review of Marshall Berman’s 1982 book, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. The author called me up, and within months we became such fast friends that, three decades later, I found myself delivering a eulogy that nabbed me the only Dissent byline of my career. Not that it was all that strange Marshall Berman called — he often telephoned people he knew slightly if at all, including me several times before then. And obviously there was nothing humorous about the sudden loss of a 72-year-old polymath whose intellectual fecundity was unimpaired by that dent in his skull, souvenir of the botched 1989 brain abscess operation his second wife browbeat the hospital into fixing. Nor, I should add, did my eulogy close an SRO funeral. That honor went to Marshall’s second son, Elijah Tax-Berman, a blunt 29-year-old I’d known since he left the incubator. His flow leaning Run-DMC, Eli nailed it. At the cemetery, he was still shoveling dirt into his father’s grave after the rest of us fell back.
Marshall’s call came during the crucial turning point of a life that was pretty tumultuous for someone who resided in one West End Avenue apartment and taught at one no-longer-free public university for all the time I knew him. Professionally, the turning point was a triumph. Although Marshall’s masterwork was assigned a supercilious pan in The New York Times Book Review, All That Is Solid enjoyed a trajectory more in keeping with the fondly skeptical daily Times review John Leonard ended with the perfect “I love this book and wish that I believed it.” Spurned in France and Germany but translated into many humbler tongues, the book made him a hero in Brazil, Norway, and other nations where socialism had a life. Personally, however, the turning point was a catastrophe: the December 1980 murder of Marshall’s five-year-old son Marc by his first wife, who threw the child out of their sixth-floor window and then jumped herself (he died and she didn’t). That, Marshall explained on the phone, was why he hadn’t called in a while.
On a wet, gray, and horrible Midwest day last winter, I tried to explain the geographical logistics of my life to a childhood friend. I work two hours away from my partner, which means we have to lease two apartments. “But which one is home?” she asked.
Home? I flipped through an internal rolodex of the places life had thrown me, where I’d stayed long enough to have an address. Boston, where I was born. The desert east of Los Angeles, where the sun carved deep lines into my forehead and I learned what it means to call a sky “blue.” The San Francisco Bay Area. The Hudson Valley. Chicago’s South Side. The stretch of cornfields and manufacturing plants and wide-open prairie just beyond the farthest northern reaches of Chicagoland’s suburban sprawl. All of them were home at one point, and none of them are Home.
Folk wisdom holds the trade-off between breadth and depth to be a cruel one: “jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” and so forth. And a lot of thinking in current pop-psychology agrees. To attain genuine excellence in any area — sports, music, science, whatever — you have to specialize, and specialize early: That’s the message. If you don’t, others will have a head start on you in the 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” supposedly necessary for breakout achievement.
But this message is perversely wrong — so David Epstein seeks to persuade us in “Range.” Becoming a champion, a virtuoso or a Nobel laureate does not require early and narrow specialization. Quite the contrary in many cases. Breadth is the ally of depth, not its enemy. In the most rewarding domains of life, generalists are better positioned than specialists to excel.
In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with his life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets. Harrison was a man of gluttonous appetites for sadness, for food, for a 1982 Petrus, for full immersion (if not reclusion) in nature, for the legs of a young woman not his wife that he could throw his arms around and declare that he’d found a reason to go on living. His resonant, necessary poems are even hungrier, and more demanding of proof that living matters. These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line. Harrison digs in the dirt and finds the stars.
In the 21st century, the creative act of authorship is the magic moment of the liberated and expressive self that is simultaneously more idolised and tantalising than ever before. The enigma of creativity – whence does inspiration spring? – remains at once the key to its allure and also its bewitching riddle. How to explain Shakespeare’s sonnets? Where is the wellspring of Moby-Dick? And what is the spell of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel?
Collecting vinyl is an arduous task. And focusing in on horror soundtracks can often be very frustrating. The field is so wide and vast, it's imperative to lock in on one artist or sub-genre when building your record collection. But how do you know what you're even looking for? A lot of the best scores are long out of print. Many never before pressed. There are also a lot of re-issues and reprints, some of which are worth as much as the original releases. Blood on Black Wax comes as the perfect field guide, breaking down what's available, what's been released in the past, and why certain records should be sought out, even if the movie they are attached to is not worth revisiting or even watching. It's an impassioned love letter to the craft of movie music, paying as much attention to the score as the individuals behind each scary note.
This is an urgent, important book. It contains a warning: you thought racism might be on its way out of science? That the arc of society, bending towards more progressive, tolerant values, had long banished the scientific search for ways in which one grouping of people is inherently more talented, clever or physically able than another? You thought wrong.
The idea of a lexicon to lampoon the power and celebrate the pleasure of language – whether through spoof, elegy, pun, satire or simply to mark the thrill of etymological pursuit – is here to stay. Challenge your lethologica today, dig deep into your inner anemoiac and see what freshly minted coinage you can add to our vernacular.
He must stir himself. No more hiding
Behind the skill of hands
That are not his.