Happy Friday, dear reader! Now regular readers may recall that I have a fondness for cover songs. With reader recommendations, I compiled and later wrote about this killer collection of covers. I also wrote about Tipitina, the crème de la crème of cover songs, IMHO. So when I tuned in to NPR All Songs Considered (as I do ritualistically) last Friday to learn that Cat Power covered the entire 1966 Bob Dylan “At Royal Albert Hall” album*, I planned to devote all my earbud hours this week listening to the dialogue between Dylan and Cat Power. Then two things happened.
First, while the Cat Power album is well-executed and worthy of exploration, it’s a rather literal interpretation of the Dylan concert. And frankly, the departures from Dylan are not particularly interesting. I mean, it’s a cool project, she'll be touring on the album this spring and I might pay my respects. But, yeah, not much to write about.
Second, I got a nasty cold. It’s inevitable. I work in a cesspool of germs and anxiety. Such is my lot in life. Getting sick sucks. But the silver lining is that when sick, I allow myself to be a total pile. Ordinarily, I watch comfort shows and read bubble gum while chugging as much water as I can stomach. But this doozy of a cold seems to be undermining my focus, leaving me unable to maintain interest through a Netflix episode or a light read. Much to my chagrin, I found myself swiping through YouTube shorts and, consequently, feeling yet sicker. What was to be done?
I tried to read Bukowski. Short form. Jocular. Nah.
I tried Emily Dickinson. Not even close.
I tried to read a short collection of essays about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, edited by Donald Kagan because a) it was published in the same year as the Dylan concert, b) it’s been sitting on my bookshelf since I took a class with Kagan a lifetime ago, and c) I’ve been told that fellas of my demographic are nuts deep in thinking about the fall of Rome. Yup, yer boy had a lil’ FOMO. The essays are short, only a few pages each. But when I got to the essay on how “race mixing”, leading to an influx of “oriental blood in their veins”, was, in one scholar’s view, the cause for the decline of Rome, I firmly concluded that the fall of civilization, especially this account of it, was hardly going to buoy my spirits.
So there I was, yesterday, wife at work, kid at the park, home alone in a quiet flat, an otherwise cherished rarity, sick and tired and agitated. So I took to the tried, true, and tested solution: I brewed coffee.
Ya know how stuff can taste kinda off when you're sick? Well this coffee, my familiar brew, tasted Shasta McNasty. On the inauspicious occasion when I end up with a cup o’ noxious java in my paws, I giggle at an Abraham Lincoln witticism when he was served a cup of coffee: “if this is tea, please bring me some coffee, but if it is coffee, please bring me some tea.”
Now whether Lincoln said that or whether he is the first to have said it is of no matter to me. I LOL at it all the same. But this time, Honest Abe gave me an idea…
Since illness had so thoroughly sidelined my attention span, I reckoned I would reconnect with Garner’s Quotations. Dwight Garner is a longtime writer, editor, and book critic for the New York Times. The book opens, appropriately, with an Emerson quote:
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul.
Then Garner explains:
For nearly four decades, I’ve kept what’s known as a commonplace book. It’s where I write down favorite sentences from novels, stories, poems and songs, from plays and movies, from overheard conversations. Lines that made me sit up in my seat; lines that jolted me awake…
I am no special fan of most books of quotations…They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched onto throw pillows or ladled, like soup, over the credulous soul…
“Garner’s Quotations” is an attempt to break with the conventions of commonplace books and volumes of quotations. For one thing, it contains only a small selection of the material I’ve hoarded. For another, in arranging these sentences I’ve gone by feel, not by category. I’ve tried to let the comments speak to one another and perhaps throw off unexpected sparks.
Crippled by illness, I could not get my mind to spark this week. But I did enjoy a great many jolts from Garner. I’ll share just ten nuggets which I hope will lift your spirits as you slide into your weekend:
When you’re buying books, you’re optimistically thinking you’re buying time to read them.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Oh, fuck, not another elf!
-Hugo Dyson, as JRR Tolkien read aloud an early draft of Lord of the Rings
Say what you will about Charles Manson; he really empowered women to pursue excellence in traditionally male dominated fields.
-Caitlin Flanigan, in The Atlantic
Your back is the my favorite part about you,
the part furthest away from your mouth.
-Louise Glück
Neither am I.
-Peter Cook, responding to the boast, “I’m writing a novel.”
Treat everyone you meet like they are God in drag.
-Baba Ram Dass
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
-Charlie Parker
Go where the silence is and say something.
-Amy Goodman’s advice for journalists, in the Columbia Journalism Review
It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.
-Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Don’t treat him like God. It wigs him out. Don’t dive into his soul, he finds that insulting.
-Advice given to interviewers by Bob Dylan’s office
Garner’s Quotations, incidentally, makes for a sweet holiday gift. You heard it here first.
A’ight. I’m going back to bed, where I may well spend the rest of the day with my commonplace book…and my YouTube Shorts.
Yours,
DL
*Fun fact: The Dylan Albert Hall album was recorded a couple hundred miles away in Manchester. The actual Albert Hall concert was released 30 years later.
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.