READING: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

I spent the last month in a near trance-like state -- eating at odd hours, rarely leaving the house, barely capable of carrying on a conversation -- because I was intensely focused on finishing the final mixes for the new Last Names record.

Meanwhile, I was slowly working my way through Haruki Murakami's new novel, 1Q84. The book resonated so much with my situation, I was afraid it might shatter every glass in the house.

The two main characters, Aomame (translates to green peas) and Tengo, find themselves drawn into a slightly different version of reality -- one in which there are two moons in the sky -- without understanding why they're there, or what it means that the world has (slightly) changed, or how to get back to the reality they left behind. No one else seems to notice the changes, so it's a deeply odd and isolating situation.

Working on round after round of mixes, you get the same feeling. You're focused on specific properties of sound, frequency details that no one else pays attention to, and even when you walk away from the desk, you hone in on them. The car engine is too rumbly (needs a high pass filter?); the person you're talking to is too muddled (check the low mids); the doorbell pings too loud and doesn't ring long enough (add compression, find a good attack and release). It's impossible to remember what it was like before you were lost to mixing, and impossible to imagine what it will be like when you're done. You're just stuck, staring at two moons in the sky.

I read slowly, and worked slowly, and now, whenever I think back on the record, I'll picture scenes from the book.

READING: The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

A few years ago, Darbie got me the first third of the New York Review Classics catalogue. The series, described by the NYRB as "an innovative list of fiction and nonfiction for discerning and adventurous readers," is full of interesting, overlooked, often out-of-print oddities, the kinds of things that fall into the "strangely compelling" category.

The Peregrine details a winter J.A. Baker spent obsessively shadowing two peregrines, a falcon (female) and a tiercel (male), near his home in the English countryside. It's strange. He doesn't explain the origins of his interest, doesn't give any details about his personal life, doesn't once, in the course of the book, describe an interaction with another human. His fixation is complete, and works slowly to transform his consciousness. "Wherever he goes, this winter," he writes early in the book:

I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

Later, his transformation progressing, he describes himself investigating the corpse of a woodpigeon recently killed by the tiercel:

I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.

It wasn't surprising to learn that, after writing The Peregrine, Baker wrote one more book, The Hill of Summer, then disappeared into obscurity. From the cover page: "...he appears to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life. Little else, including the exact year of his death, is known..."

Shortly after reading The Peregrine, I took a walk by the Hudson and flushed a red-tailed hawk. I watched him alight in a tree fifty yards ahead, kept my eyes on his outline, and started slowly approaching him. He wasn't startled by passing cars, but when I got anywhere near, he took off again. I followed him from tree to tree for an hour, trying, and failing, to get close without annoying him and pushing him away. Once, when I lost him high in the branches of a black locust, I noticed a mob of crows cawing in agitation and knew, after reading Baker, to look there for my hawk. I think I'll look for him again later this week...

Reading The Peregrine made me want to revisit another NYRB book I read a while ago: The Goshawk by T.H. White. Rather than tracking a hawk in the wild, White (the author of The Once and Future King) attempts to train one using a book called Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, which was written in 1619. The method requires the austringer (is to hawk as falconer is to falcon) to "watch" the hawk, which means sitting with her on his glove, preventing her from sleeping until she loses the will to resist and agrees to eat from his hand, and thereby "breaking" her. White watches Gos (his goshawk) for four sleepless nights before he has any success, and he and the hawk end up sharing in a strange delirium, which continues through various trials and travails.

In the post-script, written years later, White concedes that using instructions from 1619 for anything, including hawking, may not be the best idea:

Imagine the Tudor staircase in a country house, with all its coats-of-arms and carved balusters and heraldic griffins: compare it mentally with the chromium staircase in a modern hotel: and you will have imagined the difference between what I had been doing to Gos and what a reasonable austringer would do today.

Part of what makes me love both The Goshawk and The Peregrine is precisely that they're not reasonable. They're not written by reasonable people. Rather, both beautifully chronicle the dedicated pursuit of unreason.

READING: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry

I went to Dallas for my sister's wedding, and while I was there, I stopped at Half Price Books. I shipped most of my acquisitions and I'm still awaiting their arrival, so I'll post about them later. I wanted to read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen in Texas, so I carried it with me and finished it on the plane. It was the right choice.

Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, sits in a Dairy Queen in his hometown of Archer City reading the Walter Benjamin essay "The Storyteller," and begins reflecting on his sixty-plus years as a Texan. He writes about the effect of wide-open skies on the psyche, the spartan and silent nature of cowboys, his memories of favorite drugstore paperbacks, his finds in dearly-departed New York City bookstores. He tells stories about his grandparents, about a local dairy farmer who milks his cows before committing suicide (why?), about riding half the day to pick up the mail as a kid. He imagines how those stories might relate to "The Storyteller." How does a small town in desolate West Texas compare to, and prepare someone for, the ideas of Walter Benjamin? As a reading-obsessed Texas native, it's question I'm familiar with.

McMurtry has spent his reading life imagining and trying to understand Europe, and his writing life coming to terms with the fact that the American West doesn't have the historical depth to produce anything on par with the best Europe has to offer. A voracious reader from a young age, McMurty describes how, after a quadruple bypass surgery, he lost the will and desire to read, how he's never fully recovered it. For a while, the only books he could pick up were "the White Nile of Proust" and "the Blue Nile of Virginia Woolf." You can feel the weight of his loss.

Next time I'm in Texas, I'm going to spend a few days in Archer City: McMurtry helped turn it into a town full of books. He's been buying up casualty stock from dying urban bookstores and libraries in an attempt to keep the thrill of the find alive. There's so much, he can't even come close to sorting it all. It sounds like a book hunter's paradise...

Books it made me want to read:
Grasslands by Richard Manning
Sky Determines by Ross Calvin
Tent Life in Siberia by George Kennan

READING: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin

A sudden decision to write a series of songs about the concept of wilderness led me to pick up this book that's been lingering unread on my bedside table for months.

It's a series of essays, each of which deals in some way with trees. It's captivating, and you can really imagine what it's like to wander deep in ancient forests and to feel their dark and arcane magic. It's also full of interesting anecdotes, histories, and insights into the diverse and particular varieties and cultures of the woods.

It gets into the difference between ash and willow, between coppicing and pollarding, between root and burl. Deakin attends an ancient ritual, enacted every year, whereby the British woodland poor reassert their right to pollards cut from manorial forests, chanting "Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!" He describes the contrast between the shady world of burl dealing, where shotgun-toting schemers soak rare walnut deformities in water to increase their weight before selling, and the sterile burl libraries where the slivers are kept, barcoded and serialized, before they are applied by hand to the interiors of Jaguar XJ6s. He helps artist David Nash chase one of his creations, a giant wooden boulder, as it wanders up and down a tidal estuary. He tracks down wild Ur-apples in Kazakhstan, and explains how they gave birth to all modern cultivars. He watches birds, catches moths, and follows green roads, holloways, drovers roads, and ridgeways, all of which existed long before any kind of plan or pavement.

This book made me want to do a lot of walking around, to watch trees patiently -- for years even -- as they grow and change, and to learn lost arts, like laying a hedge or building a bender. I finished it feeling profoundly sad: I know I'm going to miss Roger Deakin.

Books it made me want to read:

King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz

A Million Wild Acres by Eric Rolls

The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

From the Top

"The lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me."

-- Walt Whitman in "Democratic Vistas" --

I have no memory of my first time reading the Walt Whitman essay "Democratic Vistas." I have a bedside-table notebook for cribbing good lines, and when I was flipping through it a few weeks ago, I found I'd written "running like a half-hid warp" on two consecutive pages. I liked the ring of it, but had no idea of the context or the source.

Now that I am out in the cold, this happens a lot: I read something, begin to follow the thread of a thought, and then put it away, forget it entirely. The impulse to seek out any and all interesting things is still strong, but it isn't matched by the structure or discipline necessary to arrive at understanding. Bones, but no skeleton. What do I like about the idea of a "half-hid warp"? What does it mean to me?

In "Democratic Vistas," wild-eyed Whitman, prophet and polemicist, predicts and/or summons a national literature to bond America, calling for "native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it... a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States."

In his characteristic breathlessness, Whitman rushes to conflate everything: suddenly he's writing not just about literature but about moral character, the intellectual bases for common culture, and human connection. Write right, read enough, learn to put it altogether, and, almost mystically, we will find friendship, love, and blissful unity. A footnote reads: "I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degree hitherto unknown..."

I'll skip the discussion of "threads of manly friendship" for now. Is Whitman's confidence justified? Over a hundred years later can I see the half-hid warp?

There is so much to read, so much to see, and so much to listen to that I have a hard time sensing continuity beneath my own interests let alone beneath "the worldly interests of America." It's hard not to feel isolated. I'm filling notebooks with endless, lonely fragments, and yet...

The past few months, I've been trying to write songs for a new Bishop Allen record, and my trouble finishing thoughts has made it impossible. In an attempt to help, my wife Darbie pointed me to a series of now-defunct blogs on the New York Times called Measure for Measure in which songwriters write about songwriting. I read every post, many of which proved useful. From an Andrew Bird post: "The only thing that separates a mess of seemingly disparate observations and a song is a moment of excessive confidence."

Maybe we don't have, as Whitman imagined, "a whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief." But I can have a moment of excessive confidence and write a song. I can pick up a thread and connect it to any other. I can, through a force of will, through refinement of sensibility, through a million tiny imagined connections, create a half-hid warp of my own.

Were Whitman alive, he would doubtless remain "haunted by the lack of a common skeleton," but he'd also be into blogs. He championed individuality, loved clamor, urged everyone to make as much noise as possible. He rewrote the same books over and over again, a tendency better suited to liquid type than to typesetting. He'd probably even appreciate the fact that this, my first post, will always come last on the blog. It's writing turned upside-down. Literally.