Book and Music, By...

As I write this today I am listening to a collection of music that I own but haven't heard yet.  Every Tuesday I lengthen this listen:  my Starbucks Rewards app on my phone holds up a red-circled "1" like an auction bidder, and I go in to check the notification and find a free iTunes song waiting for my redeem, and every Tuesday iTunes itself features a free song for downloading from the home page.  The current playlist of new stuff looks like this:

• "Amsterdam" by Imagine Dragons
• "If Only" by Dave Matthews Band
• "My Dear" by Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics
• "How Do You Ruin Me?" by Black Prairie
• "Trouble" by Jose James

I don't know if any of these songs or the artists singing them are the latest "in" thing.  It's free music.  It's not likely I'll remember the songs or the artists in the morning.  Music is my one-night stand.  That explains why I probably knew who Amy Winehouse was but couldn't remember who she was when her death was announced.  Unless your name is Bruce Springsteen or Mary Chapin Carpenter, I probably love you, but not enough to marry your music.

It's free.  I'm no judge, going either way.

*****

I am reading a LOT of library books this year.  More than I ever have since I was a kid.  When I was a kid, all the way up to when my mother passed away, I hoarded books.  At one point in Missouri I had over 500 books, most of them literature (technically, I still have them--they're in storage in Missouri with a collection of other things), and I organized them by color.  I expected to live out my life in Missouri, even though my life of nomad behavior pointed to moving again at least once more in my life.  When my mother died, though, something no longer connected there.  I read books and donated them to the library.  I packed up the unread ones when I moved to California, and when I read most books in California I donated them to the library, sold them in my last weeks in San Francisco, or "set them free" through an application called BookCrossing.  I still considered books precious and requiring a physical care, but I could let them go when I read them, with few exceptions.

This year I've evolved again...books, through reading them, are starting to morph into the vehicles that I am sure they have been all along.  Don't get me wrong--I would not arbitrarily deface or destroy a book, but I am learning of ways where it is acceptable to do so:

• If you have decided to journey a substantial length of a mountain range on foot, and your backpack starts out too heavy; read Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" for particulars on burning your books along the trail for fire starters;
• If you want to write in a book but you don't want others reading what you have written, tuck your secrets in the negative spaces of others' books; read "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje;
• If you want to pack a fat novel that you've always wanted to read but it won't fit in your bicycle's handlebar pack, slice up the book and pack it in your backpack, deep in the gaps...but don't toss the wrong section; ask Willie Weir in his blog of his experience of reading "Atlas Shrugged" in cycling through South America.

Or just borrow a book from the library and return it after.  Whichever is lighter and fits the journey.  Borrowing a book from the library preserves it, yes, but...someday (I write this smacking my lips in some sort of lust) I want to be on a journey where a book becomes that one-night stand, that song that I remember but can't name, either by title or artist.

Onward, dear reader.

Into the Wild: Bukowski and Drinking

A few weeks back I wrote on my brother from another mother, that fella from the Midwest too, Monsieur Hemingway.  I particularly loved his letters back to his home and family from Paris, a love of mine that normally leads me to North Beach, of all places.  It ain't Paris.  Hell, it ain't even Italy (but don't tell the wait-staff that--I want them to keepa speakin'-a Italian, ifa you knowa what I mean).  But North Beach manifests in a great cafe culture.  You order a drink or two or cannoli or two and you sit with your book or your journal and you watch the world.  You hope other artists show up.  You hope to overhear a great debate about the writings of Sartre and Camus.  Or, barring all of that, Jo, you snob, you just listen and let the world wash over.

Probably the only disappointing aspect of Charles Bukowski's is something inconsistent with Hemingway--and that's a hatred of baseball.  Bukowski was not a baseball guy.  I can forgive him for it.  I have forgiven him for it about two hundred times since I moved here.  Not everyone likes baseball, after all.  The number one complaint that I've heard is that it's a slow sport.  (Usually the people who say this to me don't watch hockey either, which I would think would be the polar opposite of baseball, but watch football instead, a sport where much of each quarter is spent slamming into each other at the 45-yard-line just trying to get a down.)  Still, I'm trying to be open-minded.  So it's okay that Bukowski likes the ponies instead of sluggers or hurlers.  I'm fine with that.

I found Bukowski's "Sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way" about the same time that I found the Vesuvio Cafe.  But one at a time, gentle reader.

When I first moved to California in 2004 I was unemployed by my own hand as well, and living in Sunnyvale with my roommate, my brother.  My writing cafes were on Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale and off of Dana in Mountain View.  I would park the car, unpack my HP laptop, and go sit with caffeine for two hours and write emails back to people I missed in Missouri.  On one of those sojourns in Mountain View I wandered around and found a two story bookstore in Mountain View one afternoon, a bookstore I found out was later a California chain called Books, Inc.  (It's still there, by the way.  Yes, I'm just as shocked as you are.)  I wandered around as I normally do with my book selection process, trying to find the best book to leave with, when I picked up the Bukowski volume, read the first page, and knew I was done shopping.  I took Bukowski back to the cafe with me and didn't bother with the laptop.  I just spent two hours reading his gruff, sympathetic voice.

Since buying that book in 2004, I've dabbled in it.  This year I sat down and read him every morning, after finishing my morning pages, one poem at a time, until I was done.  I knew I couldn't keep him, and I knew where I wanted to give him away.

The Vesuvio.

On another trip to Books, Inc (that was lethal stuff, finding that bookstore) in 2004 I came across a book chock full of San Francisco cafes, and I decided that while I didn't want to learn how to park in San Francisco, I did want to learn how to get around there.  North Beach, while a hike from the N-line (I didn't take buses until I moved to San Francisco in 2006), was a favorite.  I loved the beat culture--I had brought "On the Road" with me from Missouri as a part of a small, migrant collection.  Walking up Columbus, I found City Lights Books and one of the cafes in the cafe book that I could write on and cross off the list, Vesuvio.

I know that seasoned San Franciscans will probably disagree with me, but I don't think it would be much of a stretch to call Vesuvio a dive bar.  The space is dark despite a wall of windows, decoupaged from floor to ceiling with any manner and color of coasters, flyers, paraphernalia, and statements.  I walked in, and, miles from home had no desire to get drunk--the only thing I could get without alcohol was coffee or juice.  I went with coffee, a dollar a cup in 2004, and climbed up the narrow stairs to the second floor.  The Vesuvio, in all of it's funkiness, looks out over Jack Kerouac Alley to City Lights and to engraved sidewalk blocks with Ferlinghetti verses stamped in them.  Color, like a coat, is everywhere, and crammed.

I haven't been back since that writing in Vesuvio, until this past Saturday.

Once a year San Francisco has an event called Santa Con, a self-made, city-wide convention of men and women who want to dress up like Santa for a day and go revel in the streets.  There were groups of them at Vesuvio Saturday.  Across from me, completely unrelated to the revels, were two women with a pit bull in the booth with them, talking about the DVD boxed sets available of the Real Housewives and Jersey Shore.

Ah, but in front of me, dear reader, was another scholar, deep in a book, sipping his coffee, and doing his level best.  Level best at what, you ask?  Beats me.  Beat poetry.  Take a beat.  Prop Bukowski against the window.  Write with a vodka cranberry.  Pack up, leave Charles for a hope of a scholar, and walk out into the night.

Just the way Bukowski would have done.

Onward.

Into the Wild: Kingsolver by the Sea

This past Friday I turned yet another book loose into the wild through the BookCrossing program.  I'm trying to find places that would be appropriate for the theme of the book (my last release was a book of poems by Mary Oliver, who writes primarily about nature, so I put her on a park bench at the top of the Pablo stairs), and since Kingsolver's book is titled "High Tide in Tucson" I thought I should take the book where tide and land meet, to Ocean Beach.

I'm perfecting the art of this kind of book release with each drop.  Ocean Beach is usually pretty populated, save for days that it's raining or there's the threat of tsunami (I've been there at both).  I know that my chances are better for getting stopped when I try places like this, but I also know how to pace things so that I can walk away from the book without revealing ties to it.  Today was a calm and cool day, and the population sparse, so I just dropped it on the bench.

I have dropped thirteen books so far with this program, and no one has registered them found and/or added notes.  This business is a haphazard one, very much a "message in a bottle" technique.  I can only hope that they aren't discarded--that someone finds them and enjoys them.  And if it's just the homeless finding them, well, at least I'm giving the homeless something at last.  And I'm giving them something that doesn't enable them to drink or get high.

BookCrossing has another type of release, called a "controlled release," where you go on the site and see if anyone wants your specific book and you send it to them.  I'm saving that for a mood booster--just leaving books and never hearing back can border on the "imaginary friend" side after a while.  And some of these books have me perplexed as to where to leave them; where, in God's name, am I going to drop the Reagan biography in Northern California without someone torching it?  That one may go to the library, she says with a wan smile.

In other notes:  I actually walked the three and a half miles from my apartment to the ocean to place this item, a refreshing walk in the cool morning through the forest of Golden Gate Park.  As I passed I was warned that coyotes had recently been spotted in the outer reaches, I passed a crowd of people heading to a bluegrass festival that wasn't strictly such, and I had the opportunity to see a newly-minted windmill on the approach to the sand.

I love the copper band around the rim, but...couldn't they have made the windows bigger?  I don't know my maritime architectural requirements.  It just seems as though with the view this building affords that windows so small are limiting the occupants.

Books next to release in the wild:

• "Dutch:  A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" by Edmund Morris.  Currently on page 500, with 192 readable pages to go and clearing about 100 pages a weekend;
• "Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way," a collection of poems by Charles Bukowski.  Currently on page 109, savoring at no discernible rate of consumption, but I know where I'm putting this one upon completion, and am looking forward to the drop--a location that I haven't been to in six years.

Onward, dear reader.