Host Gil Roth talks about burning libraries, Geoff Dyer, and Norah Jones
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 2 - Burning libraries.mp3
[music] Welcome to the latest episode of Virtual Memories Radio. I'm your host, Gil Roth. Thanks for humoring me. I had planned to record this session last week, but I was KO'd by a stomach bug for a few days. I rallied enough by Sunday that I was able to enjoy the heck out of the giant Super Bowl went over the Patriots, but it did keep me from attending our neighbor's party for the big game or from partaking in my wife's awesome touchdown chili. But I'm fine now, or so I tell myself. [music] We touched the walls of a city, streets and didn't explain. Sadly so does our ways. I've never asked him why. [music] This episode's music is from a neat little album called "Rome" by Danger Mouse and Danielle Lupe. It's Rome like the city, not the B-52 song. It's sort of like the score for a modern spaghetti Western movie that doesn't actually exist. It uses a lot of old performers in the chorus from Ennio Marcona's soundtracks for Sergio Leone's "Flix." It was even recorded on vintage equipment, but some of the songs have vocals by Jack White and a couple like this one have Nora Jones on them. I've never been a big fan of hers, but I like the icy dreaminess of this song. So I thought I'd share. Rome's just 35 minutes long and only six of the 15 tracks feature either of the singers, but I put this one in heavy rotation for a while. If you come over sometime, I'll play it for you. [ Music ] I've been thinking about libraries lately. It's not the most exciting of topics, but I figure if you're willing to spend 10 minutes or so listening to this podcast once a month, you probably got low standards for thrills. So libraries. In the middle of January, my brother's house caught fire and burned down. He and his family got out safe and sound, but the place was a total loss. My wife and I made a trek after St. Louis to visit them the weekend before last. It was a trip we planned back in December, not in response to the fire or anything. And Boaz and Jane were wonderful hosts, especially into the circumstances. I mean, it was just like 10 days earlier that they'd lost everything. And now they were living in the Shabbat house of their synagogue. All things considered, they were holding up pretty well. The house is a great spread, but it's not home, you know? The kids were great too. Amy and I made a mall run to buy them a bunch of goofy props on Friday and the kids put on a play for us in the evening. They're just natural performers, the two older ones. Maybe it's just my inner stand-up comic talking, but I have to say, I much rather watch my 12 and nine-year-old nieces do some shtick over any UCB improv troupe, but that's just me. Anyway, they're getting their lives back in order, working with the insurance company, getting quotes for demolition, rebuild and all, and trying to figure out where they're going to live for the next few months. All the while, they're holding down teaching jobs and raising the aforementioned 12 and nine-year-old, as well as the one-year-old. But I know what you're thinking, how does this affect Gil? Well, the first day after the fire, once we knew they were safe, my wife and I had talked about a fairly standard set of topics, you know, escape routes here at home, how to get the dogs down from the second floor if there's no access to the stairs, how to set up off-site backups for her digital photography files, you know, the same sort of stuff you would talk about if one of your loved ones had lost everything in a fire. And ever since then, I've been thinking about my library. See, there are more than 1,200 books downstairs here at virtual memories of states, and if they all went up in smoke, I've been wondering, how would I rebuild, assuming insurance even covers it? I've always collected books. Actually, collect isn't the right term. It's not like I hunt down first editions or signed copies of stuff. Let's go with accumulated. I've always accumulated books. That's better. The thing is, for the last year or two, the flow of incoming books has really slacked off, and I've been putting a lot of books from the shelf in a big-to-sell pile. And that process, it sort of consists of breaking the library down into a couple of classes. The books I've read, and I'll go back to again and again, the books I plan to read, even though I haven't gotten to them yet, books I've read, and I know I'll never go back to. And the books I know I'll never get around to reading, for one reason or another. The tough part's been identifying which or which. I'm not sure what really led to this urge to purge, you know? I've been telling myself it's a recognition of mortality. This honest admission that there are things I'll never do before I die, and I just manifest them in books that I've bought in a more hopeful time, or a more pretentious time, knowing my literary tastes. In other words, it's my version of a mid-life crisis. And frankly, I find this preferable to my dad's philandering and conspicuous consumption back in the '70s and '80s, but different time, different people, different childhoods, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, I don't even get why I accumulated quite so many books over the decades. It's like it was some cargo cult thing, this idea that they'll accompany me into the next world or something. But now I understand that the point of all this reading, for me, it's to live better in this world, not to have stuffed shelves in the next. Anyway, after the fire at my brother's place, I'm sort of seeing the problem from the other direction. I'm looking at all these books, and I'm thinking, if I had to start over again, if they were all gone, which books would I want to reread? Which ones would I buy just for the promise of finally getting around to them? In the next episode, Boaz and I are going to have a conversation about this in terms of which books each of us would choose to start rebuilding our libraries. Not back and forth like a fantasy football draft, which I admit would be awesome to see who gets Shakespeare, who gets the Trigetians, et cetera. But it'd be more like a Venn diagram where we kind of figure out where we overlap and where we differ and what that may say about each of us. I was hoping to record it during this past visit, but, you know, he was a little busy at the time. I think it was just an excuse. For now, I'm still ruminating on what it means to even have a library and why I may be trying to clean mine up. But I'm starting to rethink it. Maybe it's after the shock of the fire and seeing Bo and how well he and the family are getting by. But also, see, this weekend when I was recovering from that stomach bug, I read a five books interview with Jeff Dyer and it kind of got me rethinking this whole notion of getting these shelves down to their essentials. See, five books is a great series of interviews by this website called The Browser. An author selects five really good books in a field he's associated with and he and the interviewer talk through each one. I can't even do justice to the sheer variety of authors and topics, so I advise you to check it out sometime. It's at thebrowser.com/interviews. Go, go, go, I'll wait. Okay, this particular one, as mentioned, was with Jeff Dyer and it was about unusual histories. They have topics like that. I never read any of Mr. Dyer's stuff, but I've heard really good things about his essays, so I'm probably going to end up adding him to the to-do shelf, I'm sure. And one of his five books is actually one that I've been interested in reading for a while. That said, for a guy who's trying to rationalize his library, it doesn't really make sense for me to go and buy Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I mean, it's a 1,200-page travel/history book about Yugoslavia in the 1930s. Am I going to get to this anytime soon? Or is it something to look forward to when I'm old? This pal of mine from my childhood loved that book and he loaned me his copy years ago, knowing some of my interest at the time. I must have given it back to him because I'm sure I would know exactly where it is on the bookshelf if it was still here. Anyway, there was this exchange in the interview that really got me wondering about what I'm doing when I take books off the shelf. When I try and remove instead of ad. Five Books Person says, "We've limited you to five books here, "but we're sitting in your study in London "and case with bookshelves on all four walls "at the risk of being obvious. "How important is reading to you as a writer?" And Dyer says, "I guess one of the disappointing things "about life, or my life generally, "is the way that I seem to read less as I get older. "Physically, I don't feel like I've got less time now, "but it's just more difficult to arrive at that time. "One thing I don't feel bad about is the way "that I read far fewer novels, far less fiction now. "I think that conforms to a broader actuarial norm. "More and more, I'm reading nonfiction." Five Books asks, "How important to you is your library, "this physical library. "Do you think it encapsulates your personality "as some people like to think libraries do?" "Oh yes," Dyer says. "This is my great achievement, my library. "This is all I've got to show for my life. "I really love being in this room. "I love the way they're arranged. "It's also important to me. "Ever since I was at Oxford and found I couldn't read "in the Bodleian, I've never been able to read "in reference libraries and I haven't made much use "of lending libraries because I like to annotate books. "So I like to read my own books and I keep them. "Obviously it's far less important now with the internet, "but as a resource for me, it's fantastic, "having all of this at my fingertips. "It's a source of daily joy to me, "this huge collection of books. "I was really touched by that passage. "It made me think about how that library downstairs "represents just so much of my history "where a book came from, who I was when I bought it. "Can I part with all that? "And what if like my brother I'm forced to someday?" That said, one of the reasons I'm less wedded to the notion of holding on to individual books is because, well, unlike Mr. Dyer, I don't tend to keep margin notes. And you want to know why? It's because I am afraid that someone, somewhere, will look at my notes and discover that I am a Zuto intellectual fraud, that I'm some guy who makes trite observations about the most obvious aspects of an author's work. You know, when you open a high schooler's copy of the sound and the fury and there's a section that's underlined with symbolism written in the margin, that's what I'm afraid they'll see. So instead, I just dog your pages and hope you want to go back to them later on, I could figure out why. And maybe it'll create an error mystique for my biographers to deal with someday, I don't know. Like everything else I do, get right down to this podcast. It's all a manifestation of my anxiety. ♪ All the cries ♪ ♪ But then they ask when they're gonna see them ♪ ♪ Then they're gonna ask to feel the ghosts ♪ ♪ The walls and dreams are like our mind ♪ ♪ At last, no one's coming ♪ ♪ Hey man, they never looked back ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ With blinding stars in their eyes ♪ ♪ But all they saw was black ♪ ♪ Pulled them open to seeing like a sleur of evil ♪ ♪ But the parts are bleeding ♪ ♪ It's not a mess, so be honest with me ♪ ♪ We can't afford to ignore that I'm the disease ♪ ♪ Practical since we had to be in ♪ ♪ When they were only came back to me and they tried ♪ ♪ Oh they tried ♪ ♪ And when you've fallen through the land ♪ ♪ Wind up on your back ♪ (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]