If you didn’t read this week’s post “Raised by Literature” I will read it to you now, below, in a dramatic and enthusiastic fashion. 👇
Reading commences as soon as you hit play. Enjoy! 🫡
Notes from the Captain
Crew, let us begin with a quote from Tom Verlaine about books:
“There's no obsession with "books" per se but when I was young...well in fact..even now!...I felt so inarticulate that when i read a great description of anything anywhere...it was really inspiring. When I was about twelve, Someone told me about this place called the Book Barn; this was a barn literally filled with books. And I thought, 'holy mackerel,' I didn’t know places like this existed. And I bought this paperback on jazz for two cents that I thought was amazing. I’d already started liking jazz at that point. And later, my high school girlfriend and I were going there every couple of months. One thing I found there was this book called Zen Bone, Zen Flesh. This was the first kind of paperback, I guess in the late 50s, of zen poems. And this was where I thought, this is how I think. Everything about this book was all a big “Aha” to me.Tom Verlaine, from this interview
‘This is how I think”.
You can get so much from books. All kinds of books, not just zen poetry books.
But…
Let’s discuss the elephant in the room. My living room. My life, I guess.
I didn’t notice until after I uploaded and watched the video how few female authors I featured. Not just in this video, but how few there are on my bookshelf. I just randomly picked books I loved, so it wasn’t a conscious choice to avoid the women on my shelves, but wow. To watch this video, you’d think I don’t own any books by women authors at all. But I do! Lots! Joan Didion, I’m so sorry.
Confession time.
I have known about this hole for a while, and in the past ten years (maybe fifteen?), I’ve made an effort to seek out MORE women’s words. It’s fine to have Maya Angelou and Susan Orlean and Jane Austen on my shelves, but I want to know the voices that are passing me by. I want more and new.
Time to do some digging. I must find more. Time to fill my brain with women.1
I sound defensive. Am I defensive? I don’t know. It just shocked me watching today’s video back how skewed my ‘raised by literature’ life has been toward male authors. Is it because I’m Generation X? Am I a product of my time? How do I bring myself into THIS time? How?
By exploration. That’s always my answer to everything. Standing on the sidewalk, digging through carts of secondhand bookshops. This is how we build ourselves with books.
I have always read the words of women—don’t worry, it hasn’t been a total bust. But I wonder why—she says, looking at her bookshelf—I wonder why I have so many female poets on my shelves? Are women just better poets? Do I gravitate toward the emotion of poetry and women expressing that better? Do men do landscape better? Those last five words are utter bullshit, as was the sentence before. Right?
I wonder why many of the women’s voices I have on my shelves are biographies or books by women who are total lady bosses at non-fiction? In my childhood, my TWO FAVORITE authors were Beverly Cleary as a little girl and Judy Blume as a teen, and they were fiction, so why don’t I have more women’s fiction as an adult?
The grown-up novels. The literature of my adulthood. That’s where I fall down. That’s what I need to fix.
I think back to university, where I majored in literary studies. I’m trying very hard to think of female writers we covered, but the majority were men. I remember doing Sense and Sensibility. Um… Sylvia Plath in the poetry.
This is a hole! A GIANT HOLE.
A real rabbit hole, that I must fall down and go through all the tunnels. The whole burrow.
What fun!
Do you have any recommendations? Click the button below and leave a suggestion in the comments.
Meanwhile, keep reading. Keep adding books to your life.
All the genres, all the words.
See you in the stacks!
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Thangs from this episode…
👩✈️ The Tom Verlaine Book Sale
“At the Tom Verlaine Book Sale” - the article that inspired the post. There were two garages to riffle through - one with books for $5 and one with books for $10. This would’ve been a lovely day out for me, but I would’ve needed some kind of cart to carry the haul.
“I survived the Tom Verlaine Book Sale” - HellGate
Punk Rock Cart Shark: What We Learned Looking Through Tom Verlaine’s 50,000 Books - Brooklyn Man
“Tom Verlaine was the Strand’s Best Customer” - Here’s a story about Tom Verlaine and The Strand (he used to work there back in the day). It sounds like he used to turn his books over, keep ‘em moving! And that he had a storage locker. “I won’t have time to read any of it.” … sad, but true. Recommended read.
“Television on Print: A literary conversation with Tom Verlaine” - An interview with Dusted where he talks about books and his relationship to them (it’s where I got the quote above and below from)
TV: The way I look at it, when I’m in London, I amass three pretty hefty boxes of books in a year and a half, things you’d find there that were two bucks that were never published here. And five years later, they’re still sitting around in my apartment, and I think, well, I haven’t read them yet, so should I put them in my storage locker, what do I do with them? So every few years, I sell off boxes of stuff. But that might have to do with age, because I won’t have time to read any of it.
👩✈️ Tom Verlaine
If you’re unfamiliar with his work—or the man—here are some tidbits and primers to bring you up to speed.
While he cannot be accused of making too much (he didn’t really churn out stuff), his influence on the scene was immense. If you’re into labels, he’s regarded as a sort of icon of avant-garde… rock? His guitar wizardry is way more than rock or punk, and he was way more than a guitar player. He knew his way around lyrics and songwriting, too.
He was, in short, the real deal.
“Tom Verlaine: Television’s perfectionist guitar genius always kept punk guessing” - The Guardian
Patti Smith wrote a little thing after his passing in the New Yorker.
“There was no one like Tom. He possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music.”
Examining each other’s bookcases, we were amazed to find that our books were nearly identical, even those by authors difficult to find. Cossery, Hedayat, Tutuola, Mrabet. We were both independent literary scouts, and we came to share our secret sources.
The NYT put together a playlist of what they consider essential songs, which gives a nice and rounded picture. It was included as part of this article after his passing.
And here’s a bonus: “10 Things I love about Tom Verlaine”, which I found lovely.
👩✈️ Endpapers
I had posted some stuff on endpapers in Monday’s post (and mentioned in the main story). Endpapers are just another thing that fascinates me. They’re like the easter eggs of the book world, sometimes just cool patterns, and others… an additional character to the story.
Here’s a really… um… dry video about everything you ever wanted to know about endpapers. All of them. Like… not just the pattern part. The history and the extra sheets for scribbling etc.
👩✈️ Books winked at in the post
You might have seen the Spike Jonze movie adaptation. Here’s a video about the guy who worked on bringing the monsters to life. I think my favorite bit is him telling the story of talking with Maurice on the phone. And of course, they went with Henson for making the puppets themselves, and the designer ended up being in one of the costumes.
“Wild Things one was such a success. Go to hell. Go to hell.” - Maurice Sendak responding to the question why no Wild Things 2?
I’ve never read Harry Potter, (I read halfway through the first book a few years ago on vacation) but I’ve played all the X-Box Lego versions of each book and I know the story. Lol. I know that doesn’t count.
🦁 The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
The first time I tasted Turkish Delight I felt betrayed. BETRAYED! It was disgusting. I’m sure there are some quality versions that taste delicious, but the book totally overhyped Turkish Delight. That said, I read this book a gazillion times (and the Chronicles of Narnia as a whole, but this one was the one that held my imagination)
Here’s a story: C.S. Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight. Can report that this Australian kid also got fooled.
And here’s a recipe for authentic Turkish Delight from Narnia
🙋♀️ Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret
I don’t think I can overstate the impact this book had on girls my age. I vividly remember being at tennis for school sports in summer and sitting around our backpacks (you had to wait for court time) and reading to each other. The “I must, I must” increase the bust chant was a running joke for a while.
“Judy Blume Goes All the Way” - The Atlantic
Here’s a story about the book being made into a movie. - NYT
And here’s the trailer for the movie 👇
This book. I can’t tell you how many times I read it as a child. I had never heard of buttermilk and imagined it to be the most delicious thing ever. Much like the Turkish Delight fiasco, I had no idea.
How E.B. White Spun Charlotte’s Web - NPR
👩✈️ John Clarke
Thanks for listening/watching and sharing. If I missed anything you were curious about from the post—or just in general—feel free to leave a comment for the Captain.
Do. Make. Be.
🫡
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
I read The Dutch House and Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead in the past year and you should read those. Both were incredible, The Dutch House in particular.
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