This
Journal

October
1999

Thursday night.

I'm just back from a Lucinda Williams concert. My ears are kind of buzzing, probably from the concert but the loud radio on the way back didn't help either. Silly me. I've got earplugs around here somewhere...from back when I was seeing Sonic Youth every chance I got. Very handy. But I didn't think I'd need them tonight cuz it's just a little old country rock and blues thing.

Didn't know if I'd be up for it after a full, labor-intensive day at school, but the cool, casual drive down Sheridan Road kind of revived me. When I got to the Riviera I lucked out with a great parking space right down from the theater in front of old defunct Goldblatts. I beat Erin, so I just hung around until she strolled into the scene. Then we marched off for food and found a good Chinese place just up Broadway. The area around the Riv is kind of beat. Sidewalk.com says,

Not that Uptown changed much for the better with the prosperity of the Riv. Still surrounded by Army-Navy surplus and liquor and convenience stores, the Riviera's environs leave much to be desired. Though many police circulate in the neighborhood and more are generally around during shows, Uptown still is not the sort of place where you want to be too far away from a well-lit corner.

We sat in the smokey balcony, not too far from the stage. The Riv only has seats in the balcony. And we had plenty of company, all the old folks and couples who love the music but don't need the jostling of the smokey main floor. Erin is, no doubt, young enough to handle the main floor...but even she had had a full day's work.

Well, what about the music? If you don't know or care about Lucinda Williams, skip this paragraph. After an interesting start with the older "Pineola", it became clear that she was gonna play the recent album (Car Wheels on a Gravel Road), and she did - just about every tune (though I don't remember "Jackson"). Her band is wonderful and loud. The guitarist from Denver (somebody Vaughn?) had a cool psycho Buddy Holly act and could play to back it up. The other guitarist was just plain good. The drummer from Ireland "keeps it all together" (she says) and really stood out in the pounding blues jam of "Joy", which I thought would be the end of the set. But then there was an encore of modest but pretty, unfamiliar stuff. And then an encore after the encore that began with "Concrete and Barbed Wire" and ended with a suitably creepy Howlin' Wolf tune ("Come To Me Baby", if I remember) which she says is coming out soon on a tribute album. Have I mentioned that this lady can sing? I don't have to if you don't know her. I don't have to if you already do. She did not disapppoint. And I am very grateful for Erin's company on my rare foray out into the big wide world.(I wouldn't have done it without her.) I hope she had as good a time as I did, though it can't be too big a thrill to hangout with yr old English teacher. No, it really can't.

I should get to bed and try to sleep off the pack of cigarettes I must have ingested this evening. We've got a half-day at school tomorrow, so if I manage to get out of bed and into homeroom I should be able to navigate through a morning of twenty minute classes. We'll see.

Friday.

So I was awake, out of bed, up, and out the door in pretty good time this morning. (Though I missed morning prayer and Mass, as I have each day this week.) We had a long homeroom for the last day of Street Scenes returns. We had some other business as well. So I was filling out return sheets and passing out yearbooks and ID cards, and somewhere in the midst of that I noticed a pain in my upper back...one of those things where when you breathe in it hurts like hell. So I tried not to breathe, but that doesn't work too well. I've had this before and I think the doc called it "inter-costal chondria" or something. But it seems to be more in the muscle than in the ribs. Go figure. (This is the hypochondriac speaking.....what's with that root "chondria"?)

So I took it easy this afternoon. I'm good at that anyhow. But I did get in some reading of Birkerts' book on "the fate of reading in an electronic age". Here's a moment of recognition; he's describing an experience that perfectly mirrors some of my own reading memories from adolescence and a little beyond:

"I remember so clearly the shock I would feel whenever I looked up from the vortex of the page and faced the strangely immobile world around me. My room, the trees outside the window - everything seemed so dense, so saturated with itself. Never since have I known it so intensely, this colliding of realities, the current of mystery leaping the gap between them. In affording this dissociation, reading was like a drug. I knew even then, in my early teen years, that what I did in my privacy was in some way a betrayal of the dominant order of things, an excitement slightly suspect at its core."

There he catches much of reading's power over the early me. I remember reading many books the way an alcoholic sucks down booze. I remember reading a few books that sucked me down. To rise from those was to enter the same old world with new eyes and a subtly altered heart. But nobody ever seemed to notice my changes. After all, I was just a kid, just becoming a person.

These are the kind of powerful yet ephemeral experiences that shape a life's directions. Needless to say, not everyone has these experiences with reading. (Part of Birkerts' Big Idea is that fewer and fewer people will have them because the electronic media is leading us and our world in another direction.) I tell my students that if they haven't felt this "reading high" yet, they will: just keep reading. Read good stuff. If you don't read, you risk never getting it and losing out on a uniquely human, life-changing pleasure. Reading is a subversive activity. It made me the weirdo that I am today.

With one day's reading
a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound