#4: Dear Mister Bezos

Dear Readers,

You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the fourth one, and it’s a school edition to celebrate the imminent end of the school year.

Boredom. I’ve put more than 20,000 miles on my car since August, driving the 60 miles between Oberlin, OH, where we live, and Heidelberg University in Tiffin, OH, where I teach. You may think I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but no. Something perverse in me wants to do nothing during the two hours and twenty minutes I’m in the car every day. I like the blank, useless time; it’s just raw time. When I do listen to audiobooks, it’s never novels. Listening to a novel while I drive to work feels off. The plot and pace of The Novel (as a genre) is not suited to the flashing, blurry feeling of being in a car, or to the car’s ability to just put you where you want or need to be.

But I do love when a novel really thinks about our car world. When characters go in what is called a “car” (horse drawn carriage) in Flaubert or James or Howells—I love that. It’s like The Novel revving up to be faster, for the twentieth century. And there are two car moments from contemporary novels that I think about pretty much every weekday during my drive. I’ll give them to you as a little bouquet, like the vase of two fake flowers on the dashboard of VW Bugs.

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (a lot of this excellent book takes place in the bus, with Veronica looking around and thinking): For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird.

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (this is toward the end, when the Tourette’s-saddled protagonist is sleep-deprived and leading a car chase): Gotta have an edge. I was beginning to obsess on edge too much: edge of car, edge of road, edge of vision and what hovered there, nagging and insubstantial. How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

Horror. Brian and I visited Ann Arbor recently, one of my favorite places (although also the site of the biggest academic humiliation of my life). It’s an ideal college town, always changing but always the same. The Borders, with its huge selection of literary journals, is gone, of course. And so is Shaman Drum, which I used to think of as the “fancy” bookstore. But Dawn Treader is still there, and that was the best one anyway. It’s a mess, and it really has the books you want if you don’t mind spending a lot of time looking for them. One of the books I got this time was Voices from the Mountains, by Guy and Candie Carawan. It’s like a scrapbook, with oral histories, photographs, songs, stories, and news reports, about and by people who worked in the coal mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, mostly in the 60s and 70s. Reading it, I fell into the misery of that world. Every day, you had to go into the mine, knowing you may be buried alive there, and if not, a horrible death would come later, through black lung. The rich mine owners made a hell on earth, and they consigned people to it.

Excellent literary poetry has been written about this. Langston Hughes:

In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines.

One of the things that drives me crazy with love for this poem is that it semi-answers its central (centered) question by making almost a song, like a coal mining song, rather than a poem, "out of that." He makes the meter BE the meaning. In Voices from the Mountains, the miners and their families, in hell, wrote songs and poems, too, and they protested and unionized. Reading it, I realized there should be protest songs about Qualcomm and Haliburton and Boeing. So I* wrote one. HERE is "Dear Mister Bezos (Why Don't You Pay Your Taxes)"--and here's the sheet music.

Glory. I love guidebooks, travel guides, brochures, catalogs. When I was a sophomore in high school, we got a brochure in the mail for Penn State Summer, a five-week program where you could take classes and do sports and be around a healthy American college. I read this brochure so many times I can reconstruct entire pages of it from memory even now, more than 20 years later. The most intimate relationship I’ve ever had with a guidebook is the Fiske Guide to Colleges 2000 (as in, the year 2000), a large paperback with a shiny deep-blue cover. In my junior and senior years of high school, I kept this book not by my bed, but in it. All the passion I had had for the Penn State Summer brochure I poured into Fiske. I read and reread it for hours every night. Like with the Penn State brochure, there are huge portions of it I still have memorized. I know the traditions and quirks of colleges in multiple states I’ve never been to. Sometimes I pretend I know less than I do, because the depth of my knowledge is just too embarrassing. For example, when we moved to Oberlin, Brian told me he had heard from some other musician that there was a bar on campus called the ’sco. I pretended to be curious, but really I knew that it was a disco where students DJ’ed, located in the basement of the student center (as described in a parenthetical in Fiske). I loved this book for the reason I love all guidebooks: there was a pulsing reality behind each item listed. You could dream of these colleges even as they existed. The ‘sco on paper is so much more beautiful than the actual ’sco: it’s a dream; it’s language!

Sincerely,
Lucy

Recommended: Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem, Voices from the Mountains, by Guy and Candie Carawan, Langston Hughes's Collected Poems.

*I can’t write songs without Brian; the only reason this is anything resembling a song is because he made up the tune, taught me how to approximately hit the notes, played all the instruments, and recorded and mixed it.