Love in the Library (Jimmy Buffett)

You are not reading enough
Has the Internet killed the joys of sitting down with a good book?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The pile is waiting. The pile is getting higher. The pile looks impressive, probably isn't, still feels slightly overwhelming, vaguely threatening, even as it sighs, waits, drums its fingers on the inside of my skull, promising all manner of wonder and insight and syntactical bliss if I'd just, please, maybe, right now, even for just an hour or three, pay it some serious, focused attention. Please? It's a bit of a problem. More than that, it's a moral, ethical, personal issue, a deep indignity of the soul, a painful twist to the nipple of my id.

See, I love books. Admire and appreciate and adore. Was a lit major at Berkeley, read voraciously, still love to read, still like to consider myself a big consumer of books and deep thinker about bookish issues and ideas and authoralia.

And yet, if I'm painfully honest, I have to admit it: I barely read books anymore. Not nearly like I used to, anyway. Not for a long, long time. And chances are, if you're at all addicted to the new media vortex, neither do you.

It's become a social conundrum, a cultural sore spot, a morose sign of the times. The question has been posed by agents and writers and a confused, hyperconsolidating publishing industry: What happened to all the readers? What happened to the culture of books? And the hint of fatalism, just underneath: If few truly read anymore, what of the state of the American mind? How much more dumbing down can we possibly stand?

Oh sure, books still sell, product is moving like crazy, but by and large it's truckloads of self-help and how-to flooding over a precious handful of sure-hit novelists, topped off with the grand cherry that is Oprah, single handedly keeping the tepid melodramatic coming-of-age family saga alive. In between, 18 zillion copies of "Eat, Pray, Love."

But overall, the message is bleak: Fewer writers of real talent are being discovered, fewer publishers are willing to take any sort of risk, and serious, literary-minded reading, that glorious pastime, that fine personal art, the immersive and transportive and beautiful intellectual fertilizer, appears to be giving way to the more addictive but far less nourishing hellbeast of new media and the Net.

It's an easy beast to blame. I skimmed through Nicholas Carr's fascinating and depressing piece in the recent Atlantic Monthly ("Is Google Making Us Stupid?"), which talks up, among other things, the downfall of deep reading, of spending uninterrupted hours immersed in a literary tome or even a long essay, a victim to modern media's vicious ADD, short-attention-span approach to engaging the world of ideas.

Carr's upshot: The Net might actually be rewiring our brains, changing the way we read because it's changing the way we think, forcibly adapting us to tolerate only bite-sized summations and simplified blips at the expense of deeper thought, of the ability to parse ideas, to sink in for a long, committed intellectual journey.

Proof? That's easy: Just try to sit down with that dense copy of W.G. Sebald or Haruki Murakami after spending any portion of your week online, and watch as your Net-addled brain becomes almost instantly anxious and frustrated, eager after just a couple thousand words to jump away, ogle pictures, watch dumb teens humiliate themselves on YouTube, buy some shoes.
Christ, if TV numbs you out, encourages a passive, flaccid state of intellectual disengagement, the Net does the opposite, slamming so many tiny shots of pseudo-meaning and media and nothingness into your brain over the course of a few hours, it's like getting stung by a swarm of horny bees.

It seems all dour and dreary and unfortunate because not a week goes by that you don't hear about some gloomy book fair or publishing industry merger or the death of a legendary independent bookstore that just couldn't compete not only with Amazon, but with a generation trained to read nothing more challenging or lengthy than grammatically mangled e-mails or snarky text messages or snide 300-word pop culture takedowns on Gawker.

Ah, but I do believe all is not lost. There is lingering hope. I am moderately sure a brain thusly amped on the wicked energy drink of the Web can, through honest time spent, through forcibly yanking the Ethernet cable out of one's cerebral cortex, be re-rewired, untrained, re-addicted to the deeper juice. In fact, it isn't that difficult, really. We just like to think it is.

I can personally attest. About a year ago the most astounding thing happened: The hard drive on my MacBook suffered a rare and painful meltdown when I was away on vacation. I was, much to my initial horror, to be e-mail/Net-free for over a week. What was I missing? Who was e-mailing? What about all the blogs and the news and the Significant Global Happenings? What of all the salacious offerings of nubile flesh and social wonderment stroking my in-box as I sat there, entirely cut off and adrift?

Mercifully, the yoga kicked in and I quickly shrugged, sighed, noted the incredible opportunity, the gods trying to tell me to unplug. I hit the bookstore and bought three thick, sticky literary novels like a misguided vegan buys some grass-fed steaks for the first time, and devoured them whole.

As I did so, an amazing thing happened. Time slowed down. The brain quickly returned to its normal breathing. The mental seizures and the near-constant desire to click away and leap to something different, faded and soon vanished. And the books I so loved suddenly moved from the bottom of the intellectual priority list straight back to their original, top-tiered state of grace.
I vowed to never let them drop so low again.

Even though, right now, they have. Even though, right now, even as I add to the glorious pile of must-reads on my desk, I realize I've been sucked back into Net-time again, back to the world of instant feedback and clickable everything, as the pile grows heavy and scornful and lonely. Ah but here again, an opportunity. For it is here that I remember the most wonderfully humbling lesson of all ...

When I finally got my precious MacBook back, when all e-mail was restored and all Net access was re-granted and I was able to dive back into the perky digital maelstrom, when I spent a few hours and got all caught up, it finally hit me: I'd missed exactly nothing. The world was exactly the same. The beautiful churn continued, same as it ever was, with or without me. Isn't that fantastic? Someone should write a book about it.

SONG: Love in the Library by Jimmy Buffett

BOOK: The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World by Guillaume de Laubier, James H. Billington (photographer)

POEM: In the Library by Charles Simic

for Octavio

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

QUOTE: "To those with ears to hear, libraries are really very noisy places. On their shelves we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old conversation that makes up our civilization." ~ Timothy Healy

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Bruce Springsteen)

Boardwalk fixture and Springsteen song legend Madam Marie, the seaside clairvoyant immortalized in "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," died last Friday [June 27, 2008] at age 93, great-granddaughter Sally Castello told the Asbury Park Press.

The medium, whose real name was Marie Castello, was an iconic presence along the Asbury Park boardwalk, performing her palm reading next door to Springsteen's old Jersey Shore haunt, the Stone Pony.

"Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do?" Springsteen sang in the track off his 1973 sophomore release, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.

He was so fond of Castello that he always dropped by her small stand to say hello whenever he was in town.

"I'd sit across from her on the metal guard rail bordering the beach, and watched as she led the day-trippers into the small back room where she would unlock a few of the mysteries of their future," Springsteen writes in tribute on his website. "She always told me mine looked pretty good—she was right.

"Over here on E Street, we will miss her."

SONG: 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) by Bruce Springsteen

BOOK: The Fortune Telling Book: Reading Crystal Balls, Tea Leaves, Playing Cards, and Everyday Omens of Love and Luck by Gillian Kemp

POEM: Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic

I liked my little hole,

Its window facing a brick wall.

Next door there was a piano.

A few evenings a month

a crippled old man came to play

"My Blue Heaven."

Mostly, though, it was quiet.

Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat

Catching his fly with a web

Of cigarette smoke and revery.

So dark,

I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.

The "Gypsy" fortuneteller,

Whose storefront is on the corner,

Going to pee after a night of love.

Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.

So near it was, I thought

For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

QUOTE: "A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." ~ Jean de La Fontaine

Mister Whisper (Dory Previn)

From The Times
February 2, 2008
Dory Previn was queen of the Seventies confessional songwriters.
Has time eased the pain?
Bob Stanley

An irregular inclusion on Terry Wogan's breakfast show over the years has been a quaint song about a girl's bumbling advances to a date: "Would you like to stay 'til sunrise? It's completely your decision." In spite of the prettiness of the melody, though, it is clear there is more to the song than freshman student embarrassment. Wogan is wont to comment: "Here comes that strange lady again."

Jarvis Cocker, picking The Lady with the Braid as a Desert Island Disc, said: "I remember very vividly first hearing this record. I had moved to London. I was living in this squat and I was trying to put a curtain rail up. I was listening to the radio and it's one of those moments where you have to stop what you're doing and pay full attention."

A clue to the song's subtle power is in the name of the performer, Dory Previn. She was the wife of Andre Previn in the Sixties, and worked with him on music for films such as Inside Daisy Clover, Valley of the Dolls, and The Sterile Cuckoo – which won her an Oscar. When Andre left Dory for Mia Farrow she had a breakdown. One way out of her crisis was songwriting for herself, not for the movies. She was already in her mid-forties by the time her first, deeply confessional LP, On My Way to Where, came out in 1970. "They were all based on true experiences," she tells me. "The music I write for films is not. These songs were for me. I know myself better than anyone else, so it helped me. It was self-revelation."

Songwriting as self-help therapy after a break-up or a breakdown has produced some of pop's more startling works. The splendour of Amy Winehouse's Back to Black can be pinned on her jagged relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil. Thirty years previously, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours documented two disintegrating relationships – within the band, as they were recording – with trillion-selling melodies such as Go Your Own Way and Dreams. Yet the drawn-out demise of Abba's two couplings, laid bare on 1981's The Visitors, produced one of their worst-selling albums; maybe if the reticent Swedes would admit that songs such as One of Us and the eerie Like an Angel Passing Through My Room aren't fictional, they could gain kudos.

Dory would not back away from admitting that The Lady with the Braid et al are autobiographical. "There's nothing I wouldn't say. I don't want to sound like I'm always talking about myself, but I've been there. In life and on stage. I've been in mental hospitals, I've been up and down those stairs." Her New Jersey upbringing is still audible in her voice. She was born in 1925 and, after a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, decided to become a chorus girl.

"When I was a kid I was the star of Woodbridge, New Jersey. I thought I could do the same thing in other towns, so I did. I was a walk-on and each night I'd add things and get laughs. I was getting more laughs than [main act] Rust Hills, the comedian. One day he said `I wanna talk to you, in my office.' I thought he was going to say what a good job I was doing but he said, `Don't do that again, ever.' He got me fired. I've got his picture on the wall. When I get bum raps I like to hang 'em on the wall!"

Chastened, she took a train to Hollywood in the late Fifties where she landed a job at MGM. "Andre was head of the musical department at MGM. We became partners. "It was nice. He was a bit miffed when I showed up because in those days women didn't know very much, apparently. He said, `Show me something.' So I played some material I'd been doing – I was very shy about this – and he said, `These are good.'

"Like I didn't know! Next thing we got married." For a while life was sweet. "I'm not the kind of person where things happen and everything's wonderful. But me and Andre started fooling around, I asked if he would accompany me, and suddenly we were doing a movie. We did songs for Judy Garland and men and women of that ilk. It was wonderful."

At this point, Mia Farrow arrived on the scene. Dory expressed her outrage in Beware of Young Girls a few years later: "She was my friend, my friend/ oh what a rare and happy pair, she inevitably said/ as she glanced at my unmade bed."

"Andre and I were married. But he had a long-term commitment to work, not to marriage. I understand that. She was young and beautiful and blah, blah, blah. "He went to South America or somewhere and got a divorce. It frightened me, being alone, having to write with people I didn't know."

Does she know if Farrow ever heard the song? "With her ego? Of course she did. She's probably got the record framed in the bathroom! It's OK. These experiences do us a lot of good. I got through."

Though she was twice their age, Dory Previn made albums that sat well on sensitive student shelves in the early Seventies alongside the work of Janis Ian and Laura Nyro. "Who else was I listening to? I was listening to myself. If your father says you're not his child, if your mother had terrible experiences, a life like that is so outrageous . . . you begin to reveal in songs what you don't reveal even to your friends."

Stories surfaced from her memory such as Left Hand Lost, a song about being born "sinister" but being forced by the nuns at her school to write with her right hand. "Yes, they hit me, those darling girls. When you write a song, you can get an answer to something that's been bugging you for years. Over time I'd begin to feel I wasn't using my correct hand, like I needed to get a better grasp on a pen, on a word, an idea. It resulted in my nervous breakdown."

Like those of Harry Nilsson or Randy Newman, Dory's songs drew largely on Americana, leavened with black humour. From the same year as On My Way to Where was John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, which was shorter on laughs. The breakdown in Lennon's case was partly owing to his split with the Beatles, and he tried primal scream therapy to write songs such as God, Mother and My Mummy's Dead.

Maybe it was something in the posthippy 1970s air; Dory Previn's Twenty Mile Zone was about an occasion on which she "was screaming in fury and frustration in the car. This `shout' therapy lead to the unwanted attentions of the law."

Lennon's childhood had been a mess – abandoned by his mother, she was later killed in a car accident within weeks of them reuniting. Previn likewise had an alcoholic father. That relationship is recounted in the extremely unsettling With My Daddy in the Attic.

"He locked my mother and me up in a room for several weeks. He was like a lover but I wasn't old enough then to understand. It was tough stuff. Later I realised it wasn't just me – I was it for him. My mother was ignored. When she had another child it was better because she had someone too."

Even now it seems hard for her to break out of her mental binds. Trying to explain where she lives these days, she says: "That's a question that's hard for me to answer. I'm where I live. I'm in the country, on a farm, with horses. Where I live inside myself, that's quite a different question."

It seems hard to square this person with someone who could have played Carnegie Hall with just a piano. "They had to escort me down the stairs, I was so nervous I couldn't stand up. I was on stage, alone! Strange? I can't begin to tell you... The best part was that I was a strictly raised Catholic singing on stage to a whole row of nuns. They must have planned it, because when I sang Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister? they all got up and walked out! All in their nunny caps. Everyone started laughing."

We're Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx in 1976 is Previn's most recent album. Her autobiography, Midnight Baby, was published in 1977, and music took a backseat. In 1997 she was working once more with Andre Previn on a piece called The Magic Number, performed by the New York Philharmonic. This could have felt like "closure".

Art therapy for Dory Previn now consists of keeping a small pile of books handy "so that if a thought goes through my head I can look into it to see if I can make sense of it. I've got this Pope encyclopaedia by my bed, though I'm not religious at all. And The Book of Lilith, which I love; one called Mind Prophecies, and one of my own to remind myself that I can do it."

Yet in spite of all the red raw confession in her songwriting, I start to think I may have been prying too much. "Listen," she laughs, a little fiercely. "The world has delved into my life. It knows all my secrets! That's what I'm here for."

The Art of Dory Previn, compiled from her 1970-72 albums, is out on EMI.

[ Lipster article added 2/25/08 ]

I am a long-time fan of the music and writings of Dory Previn, possessing all of her *albums* - I was actually turned on to her songs by one of my college roommates, Mary Grace, who herself experienced emotional tugs-of-war. When we met, MG had already attempted suicide once (with a piece of glass from a deliberately-shattered Noxema jar) and been hospitalized twice - she was bright and witty and talented (could play all of Joni Mitchell's Blue piano pieces), except when life got too hard for her... and then she turned fragile and despondent and weary.

Living with her pendulumed between entertaining and stressful, as I never knew when her good times would downwardly spiral into surrender - one evening I came home from a campus lecture to find MG had taken too many pills, because she'd had a fight with her boyfriend coupled with one of our newborn kittens dying in addition to getting a C on a test she was confident she would ace... events sure to be painful to all of us, but to her the combination was insurmountable. I called the emergency number (I don't even think they had 911 back then) and rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital, where they pumped her stomach and kept her for observation a few days - her parents came down, took her back to Atlanta and checked her into another hospital, where she stayed for months.

I visited a few times and then we lost touch - when I listen to or hear of Dory Previn, I'm also painfully reminded of MG's struggles with reality and over-sensitivities to this world. I'm a firm believer that we all have our own "twenty-mile zone" - it's just that some of us are able to scream it off in more "acceptable", and therefore sanity-preserving, ways.

SONG: Mister Whisper by Dory Previn

BOOK(S): On My Way to Where by Dory Previn

Midnight Baby by Dory Previn

Bog-trotter: an autobiography with lyrics by Dory Previn

POEM: Stone by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill-
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

QUOTE: "Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?" ~ Calvin and Hobbes