NOTES

Intro

It happened this way. I was talking one day about having Art Garfunkel’s library on my Favorites list.

Why?

I don’t know. I just discovered it while surfing and it fascinated me. Garfunkel is a really well-read man, taking in, it seems, several books a week.

And he, like me, has kept a list.

My son said it would be cool if I put my list on my site. “People can see your development, your influences,” he said.

I thought about it and agreed. What follows is the list of books I’ve read since 1972. In other sections of my site, I’ve talked about books I read as a child and teenager. (Hey, I was such a nerd that, after working all morning in the hayfields, I ate lunch and read for an hour while the other farmhands napped! Then we went back to the fields at 2 and worked till five and I read at night.)

Growing up, I read a lot of science fiction and horror stories. I also read a lot of the classics like Ivanhoe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and others.

In college, I majored in English so I read dozens of books ranging from Beowulf and Canterbury Tales to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, for the vast majority of folks like us, the wonderful thing about college is that you have to read works that you never would otherwise. William Blake is not an easy read. But his lines as well as lines from Shakespeare, Keats and others have stayed with me ever since, looming in the back stage of my consciousness, providing subtle direction.

And they were there as I wrote The Perfect Song.

At the same time, I had an English professor, Rudy Behar, a neurotic and colorful teacher and literature lover, say something that was positively profound to an 18-year-old seeking big answers. He said even such supposed “hack writers” as Mickey Spillane knew their Shakespeare. Behar was the first person I ever heard acknowledge that such “B grade” writers were worth mentioning and that they read a lot and worked at their craft. (More on Spillane and the “hard-boiled” writers later).

Professors like Larry Uffelman, Jay Gertzman, Larry Biddison, and others opened big, wonderful doors to the worlds of writers up through the centuries and those worlds have been inside me ever since.

When I graduated, I took a major, radical turn.

To the left.

To the right.

And even straight to Hell.

What an adventure!

More later.

1972

Ernest Hemingway

To Have and Have Not

A Moveable Feast

The Sun Also Rises

The Old Man And The Sea

Short Stories

I have always been drawn to Hemingway, for much the same reason everyone else is. He lived big. He lived his art. He was an ambulance driver in World War I and was injured in France. He hung out there and was discovered by Gertrude Stein. He was a reporter. He loved boxing and bullfights. At love itself, he was lousy.

He understood PR, much like Beasely. There is the story of him in a 1954 plane crash while on a safari in Africa. At this time he was one of the most recognized men in the world. The newspapers reported that he was dead. But 48 hours later, it was reported, he walked out of the jungle eating a banana. How cool is that?

The real story is that he and his wife were found, took another plane, and it too, crashed.

Hemingway loved nature. He hunted and fished and understood the laws of nature, and therefore better understood the weaknesses of man. He was very important to me --his writing style which I studied consciously and unconsciously -- and his lifestyle. An Idaho man who had a home in Cuba.

He was a world traveler who saw and wrote about the world differently than anyone before him, and ultimately killed himself. He understood the power of rhythm and silence in writing. As in music, what is not said is just as important as what is said.

Hemingway labored hard at writing. Everything he deleted contributed to what he left on the page.

A brilliant man who understood truth and bullshit, art and image. He won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.

Edgar Allan Poe

Tales & Poems

Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe

I read a lot of Poe when I was a kid. One of my most treasured volumes was a thick, worn out book with maroon covers a friend’s mother gave me because I was a “book reader.” (I grew up in a rural area. Very few boys read--especially books). The volume contained all of Poe’s writings—poetry, short stories, essays. I read the whole thing. As a teenager I went back to Poe (what better writer for teenagers than the moody, morbid, romantic and at times gruesome Poe)?

Poe was the prototype of the screwed up, alcoholic, always-broke writer. But he was brilliant. He created the modern mystery story and he understood the dark side of the human psyche like few others.

For pure brilliance laced with erudition and the haunting yearnings of the romantic, read his poems.

He really like the word “singular.”

My favorite Poe story is "Tell-Tale Heart." Poe understood jealousy. He understood conscience and that our unconscious is as powerful as evil itself. What we create in our mind can save us . . . or kill us.

My favorite Poe poem? The Raven, of course. "Once upon a midnight dreary

While I pondered weak and weary . . ."

Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn and critical Essays

Mark Twain In Eruption

Mark Twain’s America

The Mysterious Stranger & Critics

Miscellaneous Essays

Letters to the Earth

Short Stories

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court

A lot of people put Mark Twain and the brooding Poe at opposite ends of the American literature poles, but there are a lot of similarities. Twain saw the dark side of man but he turned it into humor. Later in life, with The Stranger, he didn’t even both with humor. He worked at the theme of life being “a dream within a dream” just as Poe did. Both of them looked deep enough within that they could postulate with a fair degree of confidence that life just might be an alternate reality.

Growing up I lived fairly close to Elmira so I visited Twain’s grave a couple of times. Twain fans know he spent his summers in Elmira where his wife’s family lived. When I worked as assistant PR director at Elmira College, part of my job was to show visitors the Mark Twain study, a small octagonal building where he wrote many of his most important works. The study was given to the college by the Langdon family and moved to the campus.

Giving these tours gave me a whole new appreciation for Twain’s popularity. Visitors came in from Europe, Japan, and of course all over the United States. At the time, I was among the few people allowed inside the study.

My years as a reporter had hardened me and polished my cynical edge, so one part of me said, yes, this is Mark Twain’s study. In this cozy, octagonal building, he wrote some of the most important works in the English language. In fact, Twain so effectively captured American dialogue that he reinvented American writing. This building was so filled with smoke from his pipe and cigars that he had to open the windows to air it out so he could see the paper he was writing on.

The other part of me said “holy shit, I’m sitting where Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn!” One of the most famous characters in American literature – any literature – came to life right here.

I do, looking back, feel privileged.

I could write hundreds of pages about Twain the rebel, the protester, the seeker, the man who railed at God, who was the most sensitive, cynical, and funniest men on earth. But others have done that already.

Next week: how I gained and lost the only book of its kind in the world.

Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn and critical Essays

Mark Twain In Eruption

Mark Twain’s America

The Mysterious Stranger & Critics

Miscellaneous Essays

Letters to the Earth

Short Stories

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court

I do, looking back, feel privileged.

Next week: how I gained and lost the only book of its kind in the world.

* * *

Mark Twain Visual by www.PDImages.com

As I stood on the sidewalk looking at the Mark Twain Study recently, one of my most tragic book stories came back to me. In 1979 Dr. Herbert Wisbey, a respected Elmira College history professor, and Bob Jerome, a successful men’s clothing store owner and Twain scholar co-authored the book, Mark Twain In Elmira. I was the assistant PR director at Elmira College, and given my interest in Twain, I was friends with both of them.

After a lot of negotiating, I finally coordinated a photo shoot of Bob, Herb, and Jervis Langdon, Mark Twain’s nephew for. Bob and Herb were no problem, but Jervis was kind of a recluse in his later years. However, I was able to pose them holding the book in front of the Mark Twain Study. I needed a picture because I was working on an article about the book’s publication.

The book was a very big deal in the Twain world. No one had done a full-length study of Twain’s life in Elmira and the city’s influence on him. And there were a lot of influences.

After I took the pictures, I was brazen enough to ask each of them—Wisby, Jerome and Jervis Langdon—to sign my copy of the book.

In his later years, Langdon was not accessible at all to the public. I was lucky to get him to sign it.

Maybe Jervis Langdon signed other copies of the book. Maybe Bob and Herb were in the same place at one time and signed a copy of the book.

But at no other time –anywhere – were all three men in the same place again to sign the book.

I had the world’s only copy of Mark Twain in Elmira signed by both authors and Jervis Langdon, Mark Twain’s nephew. In the Twain world, it was worth a lot of money.

Years later, through the negligence of a contractor working on our house, our basement flooded. I had all my books in my office in the basement. Mark Twain In Elmira was one of the books among the collection that was soaked.

It was totally ruined.

It was one of those lessons that was added to other lessons whose message is: never put too much monetary or emotional value on any earthly object. They will eventually leave you, or you will leave them.

“Ownership” is very temporary.

1972	Stories	Carson McCullers
1972	Play It As It Lays	Joan Didion
1972	Escape Into Reality
1972	Stories	Joyce Carol Oates
1972	A Confederate General in Big Sur	Richard Brautigan
1972	Watermelon Sugar	Richard Brautigan
1972	Player Piano	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
1972	Ida	Gertrude Stein
1972	Anti - Story	Short Stories
1972	Grendel	John Gardner
1972	Jonathan Livingston Seagull	Richard Bach
1972	The Savage God	A. Alvarez
1972	A World Beyond	Jeane Montgomery
1972	Stories	Flannery O' Connor

I was all over the place in 1972. Somewhere along the line I’d read Carson McCullers Reflections in a Golden Eye and was fascinated with the characters and dark tones. I moved from McCullers’ southern gothic feel to Joan Didion’s intellectual playfulness. Escape into Reality is literary criticism of Vladimir Nabokov’s works. I had read Lolita and a couple other novels. For years I was into what critics said about works. Now I’m not. I’d rather judge for myself. I will say, though, the criticisms of various works, including Twain, Poe and others, helped guide me, and show me different points of view, some insightful and some just plain dumb. Such is academia. It supports equally those with brains and insights and those totally without a clue. There are precious few of the former and great herds of the latter.

I had also previously read some of Joyce Carol Oates writings and picked up her stories. They felt right at the time. I can’t read her now. In my Muse section in my travelogue I talk at length about Richard Brautigan, a man with a great sense of humor, excellent use of language and concern for the environment. He committed suicide at a fairly young age.

Though I may not have written all of the titles down, I read just about everything Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote. I discovered him with Slaughterhouse Five in college and moved through several books in succession. Vonnegut had such a different take on life. He approached things from a new and sometimes wacky angle. I don’t know if his works will survive a couple generations but Slaughterhouse Five should be required reading for everyone, especially in these times when our nation’s leaders see us as an imperialist country.

Somehow Gertrude Stein slipped into the mix, along with Anti-Story, a collection of experimental short stories, most of which were quickly –and rightly--forgotten.

Grendel, by John Gardner, is the Beowulf story from the villian’s point of view. It was the first of many Gardner books I would read.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a brief, wonderful allegory about fighting against all odds to overcome obstacles in this life and the next. I read it several times. I know it was somewhere, somehow an influence as I wrote The Perfect Song.

The Savage God was a bleak study of suicide, a popular book at the time. A World Beyond was my second or third Jeanne Montgomery book. The psychic made her career on the fact that she predicted John Kennedy’s assassination. I don’t think her track record was too good in the decades after that, but she wrote some pretty interesting books based on her psychic abilities. Some of it was good. A lot of it was mixed up tripe.

I finished the year reading short stories by Flannery O’Connor. I would like to go back and read more of her. I know I would appreciate her writing skills and her insights more now.

1973	House of Incest	Nin
1973	Kafka	Stories & Critics
1973	Museums & Women	Updike
1973	A Separate Reality	Casteneda
1973	Under A Glass Bell	Nin
1973	Novel of the Future	Nin
1973	Stories	Borges
1973	On The Road	Kerouac
1973	Life On The Mississippi	Twain
1973	Fiction & the Figures of Life	Gass
1973	Children of the Allatross	Nin
1973	Man & His Symbol	Jung

I read a lot in 1972-73. I was managing the Pipe Den, a small tobacco store in the Arnot Mall in Horsheads, NY. Aside from dusting pipes and surreal conversations with Bernie, the Record Store manager, there wasn’t much to do but read. I had been introduced to the works of Anais Nin by the young female manager of Walden Books. When I read House of Incest I was blown away. For some reason, I see I went back to Kafka, who I read in college, then to John Updike. I had read a fair amount of Updike.

Then I discovered Carlos Casteneda. The late 60s and 70s were a time of self-searching, and for us intent on finding larger answers, there was no path too exotic or strange. I continued to return to Casteneda as new titles appeared. Don Juan was just way too cool.

I was too young to read Borges. He was too complex and subtle for me. I would like to go back to him now.

This was my second reading of On The Road. I had read it in college just before I was able to spend a day with Allen Ginsberg when he visited the Mansfield University campus in 1970. Kerouac had died a year earlier and Ginsberg was still mourning the loss of his friend. On The Road is one of the great “road trip” novels. The characters, the breathless gotta-move feel was 20 th century Twain.

So I guess it was natural that I moved to Life On The Mississippi, Twain’s memories of what he called the best years of his life, constantly moving up and down the great river, learning about the live of the river and the lives of those along the river.

I’m not sure how William Gass wedged his way into my reading but I moved quickly back to Nin, then to my greatest discovery – the psychologist Carl Jung.

Man and His Symbol opened the doors to vast, wonderful, boundless new worlds. Jung was brilliant and I would find myself drawn back to him over and over. Like millions of other young people, I was looking for a purpose in my early 20s. I was looking for reasons and a meaning. Jung isn’t easy but he’s good. He was way ahead of the pack. He was a student and partner of Freud who broke away to pursue his own vision and studies. Scholars, psychologists, physicists and others are still catching up with him. By looking into the past he found the archetypes. He found the collective unconscious. He found new ways of looking and life and the universe.

He was part of that small circle of geniuses that included Einstein and Picasso who through science and art were introducing us to a brave new world of atoms, relativity and the atom bomb.

Jung inspired Joseph Campbell who inspired George Lucas.