library conspiracy

I. Wee Old Scottish Women Have Secrets, Too
A mystery:

GEORGIA GRAINGER HAD ONLY BEEN working at Charleston Library in Dundee, Scotland, for six weeks when she was met with a mystery. One of the library’s customers, an older woman, approached her with a question and an open book. “Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen?” she asked. “It seems odd.” The customer opened the book to the relevant page and showed Grainger—sure enough, the 7 had been scored through with a pen. Another book, which the reader planned to take home that day, had exactly the same markings on the same page.

Spoiler, the solution is perfect: the markings are ways for some elderly readers of the town to keep track of what they've already borrowed. When I was a library clerk, I got that kind of inquiry all the time: "Have I checked this out before? It looks familiar, but I'm not sure." There are only so many ways to write JAMES PATTERSON across the cover, I guess.

But also, I feel like these readers are living out some beautiful (if, to me, unenviable) echo of commedia dell'arte. The stories are different, but the same characters recur again and again. People, in truth, mostly want the same things over and over, especially when it comes to entertainment. But that's a different essay, and one which probably blathers on and on about the importance of experts or critics or (God forbid) the Vagaries (But Necessities) of High-Lo Distinctions.

II. Denis Johnson's Morsels of Moral Mortality
On Denis Johnson. Again. Because I love him and want to write about him but might have to drag a different author to do so and do not want to do that. So. On Denis Johnson, by someone else.

We are in “a world without forward or backward, without logic, like the world of dreams,” Johnson tells us, and the trick is that he is not only referring to his characters but also to himself. I think of Schrödinger’s Cat, the famous thought experiment that seeks to explain quantum mechanics and the role of the observer in determining outcome; Johnson is up to something similar. All the deaths, all the ghosts and manifestations, the assertions of the dying—what do they mean, how are they heightened, when the teller, too, is dying, if not exactly in the context of the tale?

III. Speaking of Former Alcoholics
Recovered addicts often seem to act as the mystics of our modern age, the only folk riddled with desire enough to know that all these earthly goods, they disappoint. Leslie Jamison has a new book about her recovery from alcoholism, and it looks promising (an excerpt):

At times, it seemed my relationship wasn’t to a Higher Power but to the act of prayer itself — a ritualized cry of longing and insufficiency — as if my faith were a catalogue of places I’d gotten on my knees, a hundred bathrooms where I’d knelt on cold tiles with thin ribbons of grout under my shins; or crouched on a foot-worn bathmat, facing the eye-level skyline of my mother’s bubble bath, jars of pearly peach and vanilla. In those bathrooms, God wasn’t faceless omnipotence but proximate particulars, grout and soap — the things that had always been there, right in front of me.

IV. All Poets Hit a Wall, an Interview with Octogenarian Donald Hall

BLVR: You’re no longer writing poetry—“Not enough testosterone,” you’ve said—but you think that writing prose is a different ballgame: “I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was.” I know some prose writers who might find that emasculating. What exactly does poetry tap into for you that prose doesn’t? 

DH: My doorway into poetry is its sound. It is rhythm, in line breaks and sentence structure, and in adjacent diphthongs that please the erotic mouth. In prose, rhythm and sentence structure contribute to expression, but the sound is less controlled, less effective. Sitting in a chair, silently reading somebody else’s good poems, my throat gets tired, my mouth exhausted.

V. Opinion
None. At least, none (kill standardized testing! read more poetry! Mike Pence is also scary! war is bad! poetry: seriously, some of it is good!) worth sharing. Have a great weekend.