(Flushing, Queens, on Feb. 10. Photo by me.)
I don’t write much about my dreams here, but a powerful one hit me in New York. On Friday night, I was there to cover the special congressional election to replace George Santos — more about that here. After Tom Suozzi voted at his hometown precinct, I stuck around to talk to voters; after they got tired of me I headed to the Roslyn, a hotel with almost no other guests that night, and a built-in music venue. When I checked in, the yelps and power chords of the boomer songwriter Willie Nile were buzzing in the lobby. I’d just missed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but who doesn’t like new music? I caught a couple songs and went to bed.
In the dream, I was helping clean out my parents’ home before a move. It was not exactly their home, and in the real world, they are not moving. Like all the homes I’ve seen in dreams, it was an amalgam of places and furniture, but this one brimmed with useless stuff. I had a plane ticket (this part was realistic), which gave me a schedule and a hard out.
But I was never going to make it. With no distractions, I’d open a chest drawer and pull out the contents. Cords, playing cards, unidentifiable books. I’d clear it, enter a new room. More stuff. No time to organize it, all of it going into moving boxes. It didn’t end until I woke up, saw an unfamiliar ceiling, and remembered that I was in Long Island.
No real mystery in this dream. I’ve written here before about unbuilding my collections. What had started as a small CD library packed into a built-in shelf of my childhood bedroom became, by 2010, around 3000 albums, ripped into mp3 files before they degraded. What started as two small book collections — one in my parents’ house, a “greatest hits” in my college dorm room — would fill five leaning bookshelves in my own home. Leftovers that didn’t fit were in five-foot high stacks in a guest room. Clothes were crammed into two closets. Nothing was organized. Nothing got organized until I relocated to Los Angeles and wanted to let friends stay in the place.
Anyone who knows me well enough to have visited the house saw this, all of them getting my explanation: I’d clean up when I had time. In the long run, that was true. But I could have started earlier, and I didn’t need to own so much. There’s a popular ongoing social media panic about owning physical media, which goes like this: Media companies have created the illusion of infinite content, but they can pull it down whenever they want. Need a write-off? Need people to forget that the show made ironic blackface jokes? Delete it, and the only people who’ll remember it are the collectors, little Isaac Leibowitzs who could save most-nuclear civilization if they store enough books in the closet.
Every week, I track the books I’ve purchased; these are usually Kindle versions that I can delete but theoretically re-download if I ever want to read them again. But this built-in evanescence has helped me build a healthier relationship with my collections. “It’s not hoarding if it’s books” is a little slogan I’ve seen on mugs and fridge magnets in book stores; but it is hoarding. You can only read one thing at a time, wear one shirt, listen to one album. The cliché is that buying a book or an album is really a purchase of time, the assumption that you will have a free, ideally rainy day to get through the thing. Keeping it around is buying — what? The message, to the fairly few people who ever enter your house, that you read it; the idea that you could re-read it and find something new, or remember how you first felt when you cracked the spine. I have a vivid memory of a sick day, when I was 15 years old, that I used to read all of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics in order. Do I really want to re-live that? No. For me, now, it’s consume and move on, save the books that are irreplaceable because they’re signed by someone dead or out of print.
Anyway: This is where my mind’s been wandering over the last couple of weeks, as my travel schedule balances out and I have time, and as I read “The Sheltering Sky.” This is one of the two or three best-known bits from the novel, but it stopped me cold.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Thank you for enjoying the latest edition of Dave Punches Through His Existential Dread. I’ll wrap this up so I can start in on the next edition and drag myself back to a schedule. My other thoughts on New York: I don’t know how every third Long Island driver doesn’t have an embolism and peel off the road. People honk at you the moment that a light changes.
The Best Thing I Read: Another Bloomsbury GENRE book, Lior Phillips’s “South African Popular Music.” This wasn’t at the top of my list. I had a decent working knowledge of South African music, the sort every Pitchfork reader gets. The canon: “The Indestructible Beat of Soweto,” anything by Hugh Makela or Miriam Makeba, and the two early western pastiches, “Graceland” and “Duck Rock.” Jangling guitars? Xhosa tongue-clicks? All set, thanks.
Phillips, who has the biggest topic covered by any of these books, devours everything. She starts with a pocket history of the region’s colonization and ends with the unfortunate popularity of Die Antwoord.
Books read
Charles Portis, “True Grit”
Carrie Fisher, “Wishful Drinking”
Friedrich Nietsche, "Twilight of the Idols"
Lior Phillips, “South African Popular Music”
Books purchased
John Dolan, “Erdogan Pizza: War Nerd Dispatches from a Violent and Grotesque World”
Helen Marshall, “Gifts for the One Who Comes After”
The Best Thing I Heard: Yep, a Hugh Masekela song.
The Best Thing I Watched: Nothing! Didn’t have time.
The Best Thing I Played: Fine. I finished “Alan Wake II,” so I technically had time to watch a movie, but didn’t use it. Much more important to finish the surrealistic dream adventure of Alan Wake, the suspense author trapped in his own story, and Saga, the FBI agent who unravels his mystery. Both use flashlights to illuminate “the taken,” the shadowy bruisers haunting these worlds; mostly humans, a couple of wolves. Both collect guns and ammo to blow away the illuminated taken, and the game’s difficulty is tied to how many bullets it takes to down them. Both heroes solve puzzles, Saga by collecting evidence to put in her “mind space” wall and Alan by coming up with plot threads that can change the Manhattan dream world he’s stuck in. There is a great deal of running around muddy forests to collect dolls that let you solve puzzles. Fun, but maybe you understand why my main distraction these days is reading.