The million-folded tyrannies
Of forever damaged families–
Youth soiled and casually twisted
In the flicker of this mordial dark,
Drinking tear fed memories
Of stolen dreams and borrowed themes,
Quick cut from a television life–
A punch line, no joke, a lie, a kiss,
Lost trust, now murder, and revenge—again.
All re-torn fabric that will not be re-sewn,
Nor helped by the documented kindness
Of our paper-built bureaucracies.

They mean well, we all do, want the best
We can, and spend as little as we might
To get by, to get–what is it we want again?
While generous with our time and money—
Just not now, later. I’ll call. Why me?
We buy heaven on a stick and lick,
Voting for promises and believing lies—
Not what you said it was I wanted—
Why do they always lie? Don’t they know?
I never really knew them. Who are they?
I was only trying to help. It’s not my fault.
I tried. But they suddenly stopped!

She was still breathing when I left.
He looks so peaceful now–
No more cursing in the dark.
She said she would not do it over.
She was tired and done.
He wished he could have it all back—
To try once more. To step again
Upon the rail and jump. He would fly.
She saw no point. The pews were empty.
All of the words and no meaning.
The sun-bit water once welcomed

his shattering splash.
He would swim this time, away.

Like a paving stone on a walk at night–no, more like a book left down on the floor where you were reading it while trying to stretch the pain from your back so you could sleep–I stumbled upon a book shop in Derbyshire the other day. I have never much been to Derbyshire, having missed those roads as I drove through England back in 1978. This particular bookshop was there at that time but in no better shape than my own little effort in Boston, right down to trying to survive by selling textbooks on the side. No, I stumbled upon Scarthin books in Cromford because I spend too much time on the internet these days. I was researching what others considered to be the best bookshops.

It’s all very disappointing to a glass-half-empty sort like myself. So many people who love books and want to work for themselves try to start book shops and fail most often by losing sight of what it is they love. I did, and I know the impulses. I failed repeatedly. But I am a stubborn guy. And then I had more success than most and I loved 90% of every minute of it and wish I were still in that war, but I am not and that is that. But, as I recall the many hundreds of bookshops I have physically explored over the years, and now consider the pale presence on the internet of those who remain as I dawdle through the ether, I am struck more severely by my own failure to accomplish in the end what was in my mind at the time.

This is all for a creative purpose. I do succumb to self-pity now and again, but I keep busy enough to avoid it generally and I have just been re-writing the third book in the HOUND series and there is a development in the plot which I don’t want to go into just now which makes me reconsider my own deeds and re-judge the values I placed or misplaced on things. And thus I found Sean Dodson’s article on the ten best bookshops in the world (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jan/11/bestukbookshops). And there I found Scarthin Books.

Now, you understand that I am judging this place from afar. But that is part of the point.

What I found amidst a list of profligate booksellers who seem to be rapt by there own appearances or terribly over-financed, or perhaps just extremely lucky in the lottery of life, is a bookseller who appears to have had and still has much the same motivation as myself. This is something of a shock. I like to think I am so unique. After all, it is one of the identification points of my generation. I disparage others who think they are special, but secretly (or not so secretly) think that way of myself.

Of all the book joints in all the towns in all the world, I think I would like to walk into the Scarthin. How do I know? Well, I’ve spent a couple of hours on their web site. I see the kind of books they sell. I have read what they have to say. There’s a swell piece on ‘the ecology of books.’ Another on the British weather. Another on ‘Cistercian Cricket.’ These are all under the heading ‘Whimseys’ along with a ballad I love. There’s more under ‘Conceits.’ By the time I got to ‘Dave’s Diatribes’ I was thinking I might have lost a brother in some parallel universe. I don’t have to agree with every nick or nonce (there is a bit on ‘health and healing’ and another on ‘shamanism’ that gave me pause…but then I have many lovely relatives who are Catholics and worse) and I can say that I feel like I could have comfortably spent my thirty years there instead of the old Avenue Victor Hugo. And this makes me re-think what I have rethought time and again, but with a keener edge.

Bookselling is a profession, like doctoring and lawyering. You don’t have to agree with the law to understand the necessity of it and the need of good counsel. A doctor needn’t make a living off of botox and sugar pills. A bookseller can be catholic without being Catholic. What is important to making a profession worthwhile is the investment of your own being in the effort. If you do it for the money you’re both a fool and an idiot. You live such a brief time, how could you waste it shuffling paper on a desk to fill the maw of some bureaucracy instead of kicking at the leaves on a walk in the woods?

If you’d been in as many of the homes of the wealthy as I have you’d appreciate the judgment. Most of them are as stupid as the rest of us and they live in constant fear of being discovered. They are very defensive about their money because they haven’t a clue how it came to be in their pockets. Trust funds and tax breaks do not give them confidence in their worth. (Thinking of Britain now—that is the great trick of the class system there. They have fashioned a duty out of their position which saves them the angst.)

When you buy a library from someone who has had the means and the time to enjoy the best literature our culture has to offer, and you find leather bound tomes which have never been read and Danielle Steel paperbacks with their spines curled you know where you are, just as you know when a bookseller is a biz-niz person or a professional by what they purvey. (I re-spell business to keep it apart from what can be an honorable craft).

As I have said elsewhere, booksellers are as responsible for the demise of bookselling as anyone. You cannot treat books as accounting tricks and keep your principles anymore than you can handle crap without getting the stink on your fingers. You cannot lose a little integrity on every sale but make it up in volume. It’s fine to sell a bestseller, but if that’s what you are in business for, you’ve made a mistake. The margins are terrible and the third rung of hell is just ahead.

I want to believe that this place is what I have taken it to be, sight unseen. Like an internet love affair. There is something invigorating about wishful thinking. It’s so easy not to do. Why be disappointed? Accept your lot. It’s more convenient to accept what you have or are told you must have instead of what you want. It’s one of the few graces of my self-centered generation that we want so much. It moves us. Often to extremes or poor choices, but it moves us. What won me to the Scarthin from the first was the sub-head to the home page: “Britain’s most enjoyable Bookshop.” My god, these folk are nearly American! Who else places joy (re happiness) in the casus belli of their founding document.

I imagine the good people of the Scarthin might be unhappy with this last assessment. They must forgive me my own prejudices.

I am now saving my pennies and have set my sights across my compass to the east. I will find a bed at the Town Head Farmhouse or some such in Cromford some day sooner than later and visit a bookshop in that neighborhood.

When Andrew Wyeth died I found myself reviewing many past thoughts and realizing a few new ones. He was by far the preeminent painter of my time, one of the first living painters I became aware of as a youth. I cannot remember the exact text, but his work was the cause of the first argument I ever had about art, and subsequently many others. His father, the fabulous N.C. Wyeth, had filled the dreams of my childhood with colors that challenged the nature of the ordinary. And that path lead back and beyond to the great Howard Pyle. Andrew Wyeth’s personal life made the national and world news. Books of his work were bestsellers and helped pay my rent during the 1970’s as I started life as a professional bookseller. But his greater importance to me was, from the first, that he made me think.

I should note that I was not always on his side. There was a vein of tragedy that ran through his work that chilled me deeper than I could find words to describe or easily cope with. When I was younger, this bleak awareness was off-putting and somehow unacceptable. But as I grew older I found an empathy for it, if not sympathy, and finally had the pleasure of re-discovery that comes when you take a fresh look at something you have taken for granted. (I have always accepted the judgment that his father’s death while crossing those railroad tracks at Chadds Ford with Andrew’s nephew Newell in 1945 was the key to that dark core. David Michaelis, who once worked at our bookshop, wrote a fine biography of N.C. Wyeth and touched on some of this.)

Lately, I have been driving south from Boston to carry my son and all his gear to and from college twice a year, and one of my daughters is working in that direction now as well, so I have good cause to stop by the wonderful Brandywine River Museum at Chadds Ford in passing and see the work of the Wyeth clan up close. It would be well worth the effort without the convenient excuse. And it is on those journeys that I have been able to come to terms with many of my previous reservations.

I have favorites: “Roasted Chestnuts,” “Cape Coat,” “Faraway,” “Snow Hill,” “Trodden Weed,” and many more. He made prolific use of his 91 years. Each time I have finally seen the original of a reproduction I liked before, I am enthralled.

My purpose here, certainly an extension of the arguments I have engaged in the past, is to say outright that Wyeth was the greatest artist of my time, and one of the greatest of any time–in easy company now with Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Caravaggio. The great pleasure of intimate exposure to his work at the Brandywine has made me understand this. And this awareness has, in turn, transferred itself to a personal sense of hope at a time of waning expectations. The world will not devolve into a primitive state of universal slavery–at least not without a fight.

Perception is the cutting edge of awareness and thus of life. We are numbed if not deadened by the humdrum of necessity. Our perceptions are dulled by repetition and order. The artist becomes the agent provocateur, the translator, the proxy, nay the Cyrano to our Christian in our appreciation of life.

Wyeth is reported to have said, “I put this pink tone on her shoulder–and it almost blew me across the room.” Our eyes are fixed by a simple color and thus by the twisted figure in the grass and thus a world we would not otherwise know.

The spirit of great art is not just the individual perception of the world but the statement that such unique perception is important and necessary. When this creative act is carried out within an established cultural context which is hostile to an individual artist’s nature, it is often the catalyst to even greater work. This was the case of Rembrandt who was both trapped and financed by the Burghers of Holland. Velasquez was a slave to Royal Hapsburg whim and yet he found space for his art within the lines of the Inquisition. Caravaggio existed at the very fringe of Papal indulgence, and yet found the means to express his own visions.

Andrew Wyeth survived as great a challenge as any of those three. Indeed, the stamp of conformity in our media driven age is enough to steal the breath from any lesser artist. Wyeth was born into a century dominated by arbiters who despised such individual expression. Picasso was their man–intimacy replaced by pornography, color abused in an absence of nature, anarchy of line because discipline might reveal a specific awareness.

Wyeth was accused of realism. Oh my God! How could he! Regionalism! How quaint. Popularity without the sanction of authority. Inexcusable! Accessibility. Ridiculous! His sins against the church of modernism are too many to count, much less countenance.

He worked in egg tempera, a medium which would have been appreciated by any great artist of the 17th Century, but beyond the patience of post-modernism or post anything. He looked at his subject again and again, for years if necessary, until he was satisfied. He understood the subtle play and betrayal of light that is invisible to the digital palette. He listened to his subject as he worked, something lost to art students with their ears clasped by headphones. This was part of his unique ability to awake all the senses through the single faculty of sight. Wyeth’s art was not an accident. His work was a discovery, first for himself, and then, through his genius, for us.

His personal life was nobody’s business but his own. The relationship of an artist to his subject is only important through what is revealed on the canvas. Bathroom habits are irrelevant to anyone but a plumber. It is perhaps interesting that his personal life even mattered to the People magazine crowd–but of course, that is a measure of his impact on a greater audience otherwise unmoved by what they had been instructed to believe was art in our times.

I found it interesting that so many news reports of his passing in January used the words “controversial artist.” There was no true controversy–no debate that could engage the intellect in any case. Wyeth’s art was his own, unarguably, and yet an unintentional affront to the shabby aesthetics of our hollow and inflated age. At the end, he was peerless.

In his curiously bloodless memoir Books, Larry McMurtry says, “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely the information in them.” This explains as much as the author wanted if taken alone, but seen in the context of a life, it reveals a great deal more.

I say curiously bloodless because I have no doubt of McMurtry’s love, nor his ability to explain it. He is both an accomplished author and a successful bookman. His experience at those vocations is prodigious. Yet, he seems reluctant to bare his soul now in either calling. As if he is speaking to an unfriendly audience.

A few years ago I read McMurtry’s quest, Roads, with even less satisfaction. I love to drive. I was blessed with children who enjoy the journey, and my youthful joy at being on the road to somewhere was carried on through the more problematic years of being a father with the pleasure of my family. McMurtry writes of his own journeys as if he was cataloguing and even doing that in the manner of an old librarian long bored with his task.

Ah! I said to myself. Perhaps an answer to the puzzle!

I once knew a librarian–an ancient woman, perhaps forty or forty-five years old–when I was nine. She was my nemesis at the small Larchmont Public library at the time I was first discovering books. Her interest in books seemed entirely focused on preserving them in order, and my entertainment at the time was easily found in ways to create disorder. Certainly, in retrospect, I have enlarged my role in her life. I suspect she never even knew I existed beyond a dirty face that she banned from the premises on several occasions and frequently told to be quiet. But that’s the meat of it, is it not? The truth does not lie in the mere fact of my petty tricks and her ire, but in the very human chemistry I felt, and in the role I took for myself as a sort of nine-year-old juvenile delinquent cum Robin Hood.

I could never remember to bring the books I took out back again on time and was perpetually in debt to that small institution. It was necessary for me to liberate books in a way that allowed me the freedom to read them in my own good time. I became a thief. Among other things. I was also a liar. Thieves must always turn to lying in order to preserve their deeds. True, I always returned the books–all but one. And this, in itself was a larger challenge at times. Years later I discovered I had a small library-bound copy of a Mentor history series called The Age of Reason which had been overlooked on a darkened lower shelf. It caused me a great deal of angst and then again, a fine amount of remembrance.

And there we are with my critique of Mr. McMurtry again. His memoir lacks remembrance. This is a man who recreated the angst of his youth in The Last Picture Show. He could even famously recapture the west of his grandfathers and the great cattle-drives with Lonesome Dove. What then is his problem with Books?

I have known hundreds of bookmen in my life. Of course, I see them through my own lens. I am uninterested here in the majority who sell books because they haven’t the talent to deal with anything that is not uniformly square and alphabetically identifiable. Most of those are as bored of their work as the typical librarian, and just as sensitive to their weakness. They know in their cold hearts that they do not love books. Becoming a book dealer happened to them on their way to other dreams–as it did to almost all of us–but they never accepted their fate like a good lover does when they realize there is no escape.

I am interested in bookmen who love books, if for no other reason than to gain some footing on the ledges of my own psyche. Mr. McMurtry loves books. Why can’t he transfer that to his own memoir of that love affair?

I can only speculate.

His, at its core, is an unhappy relationship. He tells us it was begun in a gift of nineteen books at a time when his home was otherwise barren of even a Bible. Yet he is unsure of what titles were in that nineteen. I am positive that Mr. McMurtry could correct me on a thousand points of issue when it came to one title or another. How is it that the content of those nineteen had so little impact? I can and do forget my own phone number, but I can tell you within a very high degree of precision–say 75%–all of the books I read on my own from the age of nine to twelve. At twelve I begin to lose accuracy because I was swallowing more than two books a week.

I have always been intrigued with style. I am greatly impressed with the conjuring of an author. When I encounter a good trick I will often stop and reread the passage to see the sleight of hand again. It makes me happy.

I like detail. Patrick O’Brian books can get soggy with it, but that’s fine. Some people like detail more than others. I love the description of the whaling industry in Moby Dick and the building of the cathedral in Hugo’s Notre Dame or the battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables. But I can understand why people might skip those parts.

I am awed by the capturing of character in a few words. I was never as impressed by Fitzgerald as my teachers were because Gatsby is an empty figure despite all the trappings, Daisy is at best ‘objectified’ to use a currently popular term, and Nick is a cypher. The best characters in that too slim volume are secondary. Fitzgerald should have studied Trollope, Jane Austen, or Conrad.

What I am saying is that I enjoy content. I suppose it is alright to enjoy a book for its reputation among other readers. That’s certainly why most people read a given title to begin with. God forbid anyone should criticize F. Scott. Or Salinger. Or Roth. But I do because I’m an atheist, so God does not talk to me. He yells. And I take great joy in that as well. I don’t presume that my opinion is truth, much less fact. I am more likely to be wrong than right, in that my ignorance is profound. But I have my opinion and it is based on an experience with books which has shaped my life. It is as visceral as the love I have for my family. I don’t check it at the door with my hat because someone has told me to.

Mr. McMurtry should sit at his typewriter again, and insert a new ribbon, however difficult that is for him. He should sit down once more and tell us about his love for books. I want to know. I want details. I want slabber and stink. I want to know the kind of thing that will make me understand myself. Otherwise, what’s a book for?

Two of the greatest American authors among us today are Tom Wolfe and John McPhee, both of whom are often pigeonholed as part of the New Journalism school that arose in the 1960’s, but are in fact just plain good writers alive by chance at the same time, and both, by the nature of the academic mind, in need of tags so that their work can be more readily handled or dismissed. I am in awe of both men, and have re-read portions of their work to see if an examination of the bones might reveal the source of their magic–on a par with dissecting the golden goose.

My younger brother re-introduced me to McPhee in the early 1990’s. My brother is a geologist and was taken with several of those works which border on that territory, as well as the one on Alaska if I remember correctly. I had only read one of McPhee’s books at the time, the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed–brought to it by my own interest in lighter than air vehicles–and was not yet enamored with the man’s work. McPhee was a bit too cool on a subject that was hot to me.

We sold many of McPhee’s works at my bookshop over the years and I was well aware of the steady interest he seemed to bring even though his subject matter ranged from basketball and canoes, to oranges. I suppose I had dismissed him for his range of interest and assumed, if he wrote about so many things, he could write about none of them very well. That, of course, would have been true of a lesser writer.

Like all good writers, McPhee focuses on the individual human story and through them reveals the larger context. Thus, he is truly exploring the same territory again and again–human character. The geomorphology of the stone serves only as a stage.

The book that changed my judgment on McPhee was Rising from the Plains. This is just one part of a fine quartet which includes Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California. All of these were gathered together in the Pulitzer Prize omnibus Annals of a Former World in 1998. You won’t have qualified for a degree in geology when you have completed the course, but you will know better of the earth on which you stand. And more importantly, you will grasp a good portion of the geography of the human heart.

What quickly captured my eye with Rising from the Plains, a study of the earth we call Wyoming, was Ethel Waxham, “a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist,” as she “steps down from a train in Rawlings, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West. She arrived in 1905, when she was twenty-three. Her hair was so blond it looked white. In Massachusetts, a few months before, she had graduated from Wellesley College, and had been awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key, which now hung around her neck. Her field was classical studies. In addition to her skills in Latin and Greek, she could handle a horse expertly…” and shoot a rifle accurately and her aim was to teach school at a one-room outpost of civilization in a land of winds so great they spread the meager soil all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Another favorite book of mine is The Virginian, by Owen Wister. That phenomenal bestseller is a far better piece of literature than most academics have taken the time to appreciate (or Hollywood has bothered to remake). It is cursed by its phenomenal success–the unwashed public liked it, so how can it be good. And, perhaps worse, it is a progenitor of all the Western novels which have shaped our concept of the American West to this day. That is the connection which found its way in my brain back in the 1990’s. Could Ethel Waxham have been inspired by the heroine of The Virginian, first published in 1902 and so popular about the time that she was studying the classics in Northampton? What inspired this young woman to go west to that same territory and take up her profession? Had literature once again not only reflected the world but in so doing, changed it?

McPhee teaches writing at Princeton University, and I would love to have studied with him, but I must settle for what I can learn from his books. I can tell you a little of what I have found there, and have tried to learn: Patience–if the story is there it will rise to the surface by the force of nature beneath it; Observation–the study of a subject is not in the notions you bring to it but in the revelation of the interior; Choice–all the facts are there by the million, and too many to catalog, so what you report should be true also to the nature of what you must leave behind; and Manner–style is overrated in our time, while manner is overlooked. The manner of telling of a story is the secret that opens the reader’s mind.

The guide John McPhee chose for his expedition through time was David Love, a wise and observant professional geologist born and raised on the land to be studied. But it is in David Love’s own past that we discover our reason to care about this particular place.

I have not yet read the journals of Ethel Waxham. These are published now and I will read them soon. She is a stunningly beautiful writer. Hers is the spring water from which the story in Rising from the Plains grows. Hers is the fragile human element that finds its root in the rock and splits it, inexorably, to be viewed by us in the comfort of our chairs. Just the portions excerpted by McPhee in his own book have left me with a sort of hero worship. I cannot forget her story.

Recently I began a total re-write of the third novel in the Hound series. What I had written in previous drafts did not yet capture the story I wanted to tell. In this task I had my erstwhile hero, Henry Sullivan, a fellow who has managed to find a unique life in his own appreciation of books, extolling the virtues of McPhee’s work. I decided to take a chance and re-read my reference, and was suddenly captured by McPhee and his subject once again.

This is not always a wise move. Re-reading favorite books can be painful. Especially when the work was first encountered when we were young. But it has been less than twenty years sense my first judgment, and I bargained with the fact that I had changed less in that time than in the twenty years before.

As usual, I was wrong. I found myself moved more by the second reading than the first. I don’t want to go too far in explaining why I think this is so at this time in my life. The human comedy is always a laugh at our own expense. And though the reason for this web site is a discussion of my work, the greater and lesser purpose I have for that work, and the values which I believe inform it, I am not sure all the ingredients in the sausage should be revealed. Thank goodness there is no FDA yet for writers.

At some point I will re-write and post an appreciation of a very different author, Tom Wolfe. How great writing can be so different while drawing on the same elements is a magic worthy of many more essays, but here I would simply commend for your attention the work of John McPhee. I think especially Rising From The Plains, as my personal favorite, but take your pick. Take time. Be patient.

I do not remember who taught me the word, ‘fungible.’ I am as sure that I did not discover it in a book as I am of any memory, but I cannot recall the person who opened that window in my mind. I have a vague recollection of repeating the word aloud and being told its meaning. I believe the discovery must have been in high school because it appears in a manuscript of the time.

The importance of the word to me lay in the sudden self-awareness that others had wrestled with the amoebic edges of memory and found a word for a phenomenon I was already encountering. We often exchange actual and original purpose or intent with a better cause when we recall our actions. Price may have been the determining factor and money the motive for accepting the price, but it was, after all, the perfect gift, was it not?

I have in my mind an endless string of word associations. For example, ‘cannot’ immediately brings up a young Laurie Saunders and an intense dissection of the use of that word versus the two words ‘can not.’ Whatever the disagreement, I am sure Laurie was correct. Her sense of language was superb and I depended on her more than she knew to spot usage problems in our magazine, Galileo.

The staff was all-volunteer. We were attempting to publish a nationally distributed and competitive magazine in the genre field of science fiction, without a dime more in pocket than we could gather to pay the printer. Authors were paid out of incoming revenue from sales.

In the end, it was only our inability to pay the printer (due to other underestimated or uncalculated problems) that kept our last issue from appearing. Revenue dropped abruptly like turning off the water in a hose. Most of the fine authors in that last unpublished issue never saw payment to compensate them for all the angst of awaiting to see their words on the page. All of this is a common enough story with countless small publishers.

Another disagreement with the estimable Laurie centered on my happy use of prepositions at the end of sentences. She was much attached to the Latin rule, and I to the more common convenience. And yet another quarrel concerned the uses of ‘that’ and ‘which.’ Anyone reading my work now will quickly see the issue on display to this day.

My memories of those times when we throve (a fabulous word) on pizza and words are complicated by my own addiction to what I wanted versus what was. The drug that made it possible for us to do what we did in the hours after we had already done a days work to pay the rent and pizza bill, was a confluence of individual dreams brought to focus on a specific goal. Again a common enough story–given to baseball teams and revolutionaries. The cocaine of dreams will often shape otherwise mundane incident.

It is impossible for me to argue that what we did in those small offices was of any more importance than the pleasure of doing it. At the time I wanted to change the paradigm (another nice word.) Publishing as a whole was controlled by a very few companies and science fiction per se was in the hands of the same small group of once young visionaries who had re-established the field after World War Two. There seemed to be an opportunity there to inflict my own philosophies on the world.

I am now, as I was then, a devotee of storytelling. Much of what was published in the field of science fiction was more intent on the explication of some new scientific titbit in the context of a western in outer space or a political diatribe. I love political diatribe, you understand, but not before breakfast.

What was passing for ‘new’ in the 1970’s was the psychology based nihilism of the 1930’s brought forward with little attempt to rethink the proposition–mankind was evil and stupid. I personally did not know anyone who was evil and reading about stupid people never seemed like a good use of my time, so I rejected this school of science fiction out of hand.

I wanted to publish stories in Galileo about human beings facing imagined problems of the future that were entertaining as well as enlightening of the present. It’s what I thought storytelling was all about.

I will not speak for the purposes of Charles Ryan, Floyd Kemske, Tom Owen, or any of the others who joined me in the cause. Their dreams were each unique to themselves. As the erstwhile ‘publisher,’ I certainly managed to have my say more than anyone, but Charles Ryan, in his role as editor, easily had as much influence. The final product achieved each time a new issue appeared was a common effort.

I am just as certain, if each member of the staff were asked today what their purpose was, that each answer would be essentially different. Some of the same words might be employed but the heart of the answer would beat its own tune. And I am also positive that what each of us would say would be remarkably different than what we might have said at the time. That’s where fungibility comes in. Without a lie, we can individually interpret our actions faithfully to meet the value of that past in each of us.

The interest to me of this is this: the faithfully remembered past is not wrong simply because it presents an alternate gathering of attributes or characteristics–and most especially if it presents an exchange of color, or size or time of day. These last items are mundane ‘fact.’ Their importance is purely relative to the object. And this is the grammar of memory. It may be important that the tree was big, but likely unimportant that the tree was seventy-six and a half feet tall. A preposition may dangle at the end of a sentence, but it works if it gives the reader what for.

Memory is fungible because it must be. We must have the freedom to re-interpret the past to ourselves because at the moment of the original occurrence, it’s likely our minds were on other things–sex, food, money, or something even more important (?). What we do is often simply achieved by the momentum of our lives. We set our course and then eat lunch. Why we chose to accept one manuscript and not another, each of some arguable value, might have been a matter of indigestion. Whole empires have been lost for as little as that. Must we then judge ourselves for our dyspepsia? I think not.

Our lives are an accumulation. A stew. A gumbo. Hodgepodge. Gallimaufry. (Aren’t words great!) We are the cooks and it is not so presumptuous to say we are the ‘chefs’ of even such humble food as we might in the end serve.

Our efforts to direct our lives becomes with age, a task of editing. There is no time left to relive the details of our intentions, much less the minutia of our actual accomplishments.

It is now my convenient prejudice that the older we get, the better we remember.

My first awareness of what music was, was a cousin sitting on the front porch of my grandparents house in Spartanburg, South Carolina, playing away on an enormous guitar and singing in a voice which was not pretty, but made you listen.

I might have been all of seven years old, but I remember that his voice was not pretty, as well as I remember the realization at that moment–an early epiphany you might say–that music was made this way. Somehow this had escaped me until an age well after Mozart had written his first symphony. Before that, music was something that emitted from the radio.

I soon identified this music with the stories my grandfather told on that very porch. It was not self-conscious. It was not pretentious. Later on, I would come to appreciate the human values it placed out front and without irony. I have loved country music ever since.

But the first music I actually chose to listen to in my teenage years was show music from Broadway musicals. All that singing was attached to stories and in the words you could make out a great deal of what was happening without ever going to the theatre. We had a collection of that at home in Larchmont, and there were no country music stations in New York in those times. My parents were fond of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and the big bands of the forties so, naturally, I learned to appreciate those as well.

I first learned about Buddy Holly from my brother. He practiced the guitar for hours and, unlike my sister’s piano practice, it never irritated me. At the homes of friends I first heard the Beatles, but it didn’t speak to me as it seemed to speak to them. Some of the girls I pursued liked folk music and I wasted more than a few hours enduring that. When I mentioned that the better folk songs reminded me of country music ballads, I was told they were not the same and that I needed to learn something about music.

This was a hopeless idea, even if very true. I had no facility with music myself. I simply enjoyed listening and what I like to listen to most were the ballads. The stories.

In college I was introduced to classical music by a roommate. I discovered Beethoven and a new world in Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and Sibelius. While playing that music, I was able to write. I was undisciplined and the music kept me in place long enough to finish more than I otherwise would have. Sometimes I put a country record on my old KLH, but my roommates were not amused.

Thankfully another good friend introduced me to the blues of Robert Johnson. But blues has a way with the psyche of a young fellow. You start to feel older than you are and write stories about things you never did.

Later, playing country music in my Boston bookshop meant enduring a constant stream of comments from customers and more directly, from the employees who were being forced to hear it as they worked. I came to understand the prejudice against Country music during those years–rejecting a great deal of it myself. Too much of it was over produced in a Rhinestone Cowboy kind of way and directed at a ‘cross-over audience’ which had no interest in much more than a beat and an obvious sentiment. This seemed an unpardonable compromise to me as a young man, as did so many other accommodations and concessions the world demanded. I was told my writing did not fit accepted standards as well. There was little patience for the ballad. Johnny Cash seemed to be ok to some people. A few accepted Patsy Cline. George Jones was a hard sell to the Boston sophisticate.

I have probably spent more hours listening to country music in the four years since I closed my bookshop than in the thirty years previous. It has been a revelation.

That world has grown. There are more fine Country singers today than ever before and the writing is often sheer genius.

And as it always was, it is the story that I love. The ballad that stretches back to our cultural roots. The simpler the better. Love, loss, longing. And a good melody to tie your ears back. No matter where your ancestors once danced around the fire, the stories were told.

About three quarters of what is played on country music stations is crap. That’s to be expected. It’s the same with almost any other musical genre except Classical–but that is because most of the classical we hear today is what has survived the hardest test–time. The ‘modern’ classical music which is forced on us by government grants and the intelligentsia and inserted between the Bach and the Rachmaninoff, has driven that audience to near oblivion. (Aw, cut it out. It’s true. It’s just not politically correct to say such things in this oh so ecumenical world). I can only hope there is a new day for such music. Maybe it will rise from the movie scores that seem to be the last vestige. But that’s another essay for some other time.

The one-quarter of Country music I love is not consistent in its arrangement or production. Much is nearly spoiled by the same over-the-top or aesthetically blind values which ruin much of modern life. But the quarter that’s good is good enough.

Importantly, there is a wide range of opinion as to just what ‘Country Music’ is. It’s true of anything worthwhile. It bespeaks the depth and the complexity of the genre. What does a ‘Boy Named Sue’ have in common with ‘Ring of Fire’?

Alan Jackson is as fine a troubadour as ever sang a ballad, but George Strait got the title song and Ernest Tubb was the original. Jennifer Nettles can sell me any song she sings. Faith Hill has become the sweet muse of Tim McGraw. Keith Whitley knew the value of the unspoken word and Brad Paisley knows when to dance. I know this moment in time will be brief. The hucksters will ruin country music like they did rock and roll–but then they have been trying for a long while now and Country is as good once as it ever was.

If I was lost on a desert island with a solar cell and an I-pod, I would have to have my Beethoven, and Robert Johnson, and Ella, and Frank, but I would need these songs as well:

• Remember When–Alan Jackson
• Stay–Sugarland
• When You Say Nothing At All–Keith Whitley
• I Need You–Tim McGraw and Faith Hill
• We Danced–Brad Paisley
• I Walk the Line–Johnny Cash
• Crazy–Patsy Cline
• Smoky Mountain Rain–Ronnie Milsap
• Today I Started Loving You Again–Merle Haggard
• Stand By Your Man–Tammy Wynette
• He Stopped Loving Her Today–George Jones
• Blue–LeAnn Rimes
• Love Me Tender–Elvis Presley
• Amarillo by Morning–George Strait
• Always on My Mind–Willie Nelson
• Your Cheatin’ Heart–Hank Williams Sr.
• I Hope You Dance–Lee Ann Womack
• Faded Love–Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
• King of the Road–Roger Miller
• The Devil Went Down to Georgia–Charlie Daniels Band
• Georgia on My Mind–Ray Charles
• I Will Always Love You–Dolly Parton
• Help Me Make it Through the Night–Kris Kristofferson
• Making Believe–Emmylou Harris
• Amanda–Waylon Jennings
• Delta Dawn–Tanya Tucker
• Desperado–The Eagles
• Breathe–Faith Hill
• Blue Moon of Kentucky–Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys
• Hello Darlin’–Conway Twitty
• Gentle on my Mind–Glen Campbell
• Walking the Floor Over You–Ernest Tubb
• The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia–Reba McEntire
• El Paso–Marty Robbins
• Should’ve Been a Cowboy–Toby Kieth
• Green, Green Grass of Home–Porter Wagoner
• Elvira–Oak Ridge Boys
• Coal Miner’s Daughter–Loretta Lynn
• Make the World Go Away–Eddy Arnold
• Will the Circle Be Unbroken–Carter Family
• Kiss An Angel Good Morning–Charlie Pride
• Ode to Billie Joe–Bobbie Gentry
• Foggy Mountain Breakdown–Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs
• Independence Day–Martina McBride
• Before the Next Teardrop Falls–Freddy Fender
• Behind Closed Doors–Charlie Rich

Now you know I’ve left someone off my list, so I’ll add them later after running the heel of my hand upside my head; and you understand that every one of these singers has another song or ten that I love nearly as well, and some of them I truly like more than others in a pinch, but today these are my picks. And for country music–still free to roam in a pre-ironic and unselfconscious universe–every road does not lead back home, and the Very Last Country Song has yet to be been written.

Photo by flicker member whittlz