1998 all over again

I have only ever liked three musical groups enough to consistently buy their CD singles when I come across them (a measure of high respect if there ever was one): PJ Harvey, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós. Two of these groups released my favorite albums from them in 1997-98: Radiohead’s OK Computer and Harvey’s Is This Desire? Along with other, similarly haunting albums like the second Portishead album, 1998 was probably my best year in terms of atmospheric music for fall. As October arrived, I had plenty of melancholy, stirring music to listen to as I drove through the bleak Connecticut countryside.

In fact, the years around this time were probably my best falls per se overall, by which I mean that I was old enough to appreciate the beauty of the New England foliage, had a car in which to zip past the pumpkin patches and whatnot, and a good stock of music and literature to form the gloomy mental backdrop to how I saw everything. You’d think that being in Munich for five falls would have topped that, what with the Oktoberfest and it being the home of Rilke and Orff and everything, but in retrospect, Connecticut was the most autumnally satisfying place I’ve lived. As I discovered to my dismay, in Germany, the leaves don’t really all turn colors and fall, like they do in New England. They sort of individually rot and gradually surrender over the course of several months. It’s not particularly picturesque.

Anyway, my pleasant seasonal moods have taken a serious hit in the last few years, because I live in the frigging tropical rain forest. It’s hard to work up a real “halloweeny” feeling when you’re sweating like a pig in a Thai swamp. But luckily, two albums have just arrived that have saved my season: PJ Harvey’s White Chalk and Radiohead’s In Rainbows. To be honest I could have illegally downloaded both of them, but seeing that these are two of my very favorite artists, whose singles I’ve even gone to the trouble of buying, I paid to download the albums. They are both good, but the Harvey in particular is incredible.

It’s one of those old-fashioned, cohesive vinyl-LP sort of albums that barely goes over the 30-minute mark, but when it’s done, you can’t help pressing play again. Like a Beatles album or whatever. I have no words to describe how good White Chalk is. It’s precisely what the cover photo suggests: PJ Harvey channeling Emily Dickenson, or the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Most of the songs have rather quiet piano or dulcimer or whatever backing, and sound as if they were recorded on wax cylinders by some Victorian madwoman. There’s one particular line on the album that gives me chills every time I hear it. I won’t demean it by telling you which one it is. And so - and this is the point I’ve been laboriously leading up to - thanks to the ineffably great talents of the unfathomably great PJ Harvey, I have for the last two days sat here in sultry Bangkok feeling perfectly, exquisitely, joyfully “halloweeny”. The depth of my gratitude is inexpressible.

Mysteries of the Third Dimension

I love to draw, but I usually just doodle in pencil, and unless you count a few failed attempts to jazz up my résumé with fancy formatting, the last straight line I successfully drew on the computer involved the Logo turtle and an Apple II. However, I just completed my first 3-D building model in a program called Google SketchUp, which is the program used to insert 3D buildings into Google Earth, and which purports to make this sort of thing easy. It does. I just downloaded the program like an hour ago, and I’ve already made my own clumsy Romanesque chapel type thing. I normally hate online training videos, but the beginner tutorials they’ve got for this program were pretty helpful - at least the first few. After that, they went a little over my head and it was like that Troy McClure home improvement video on the Simpsons: “First, patch the cracks in the slab using a latex patching compound and a patching trowel... Now parge the lath!” Anyway, it seems like it’d be an ideal tool to create an entire Gormenghast of twisted castle architecture, but I’ll probably be lucky to end up drawing anything more complicated than a bunch of stacked crates. We’ll see.

Mi Biblioteca Personal

The other day, I unpacked and set up my bookshelves. This was an unexpectedly emotional process for me. I hadn’t seen my precious, precious books in months during our move from the Lump to Bangkok, and I suppose I was subconsciously worried that I’d never see them again. Or that they’d all be moldy and damp and wrinkled. In fact, some of them are a tad discolored from some sort of mold, but overall they’re in tiptop shape, and since I actually took the precaution of wrapping my most expensive and treasured books (the Gothic Bible, for example), those came through just fine.

Adding to my verklemmt response to putting my books out was the fact that I’ve had these bookshelves for the past two years, but I never really got to face them in their fully-stocked glory, because they were in a closet. Seeing all my books finally on shelves out in the open, and marshalling them up and down a bit, I realized how much they mean to me. I also realized with a surge of pride that I shouldn’t have been worried at all, because since I’ve read almost every page of these books (aside from, obviously, a few bricks like “Increasing your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary” and “Orlando Furioso Part Two”), it wouldn’t really matter if something happened to these books, because they are now, in some way, inside my head and make up who I am. I’ve been lucky enough to have money and time to read for pleasure for most of my life, which many people throughout history might not have had.

I’d ideally like to spend months and months describing to the world each book on these shelves and why I love them, in the style of Borges’ Biblioteca Personal - but at some point, reading someone else’s favorite books becomes like listening to the story of someone else’s dream. The intense personal associations that make dreams or lists of favorite things so vivid also make them dull reading. I mean, how could I possibly convey what I feel about Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics? Words fail me.

So I’ll content myself for now with posting this picture of a couple of the best shelves. It doesn’t do them justice. Most of the pictures I took were too blurry to read the titles well. Maybe I’ll take some with a tripod or something later. Anyway, I’ll stop going on about how happy I am to see my books. And yes, you’ll notice that I sometimes arrange my books by color and size, like Pepys. I know it’s not the best filing system, but dammit if it’s good enough for Pepys it’s good enough for me.