To Read and Read

Roger Cohen, perhaps my favorite New York Times editorialist, was commenting on the importance of reading randomly and reading for fun in “The Harm in Hustle Culture."  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/burnout-hustle-culture-gentrification-work.html  He savors his downtime and reads according to his own pathway, delighting in connections that no algorithm could have designed for him.  With no boss, save myself, the worst tyrant of all, a special dispensation is required to read and read uninterruptedly. 

My work weak usually allows for only ten pages or so of whatever I’m in the middle of during lunch and whatever I can steal during a visit to the rest room or before I fall asleep at night.  Today, Sunday, I allowed myself to finish Mafouz’ “The Palace Walk” and proceed one-hundred-and-fifty pages into the second book, “The Palace of Desire.”  I can't think of another family in literature, where each person is so richly and convincingly examined.  Poor, idealistic Fahmy is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  None of us who walk the earth know what it is to die, but we can imagine that the evaporation of consciousness might be something not unlike what Mafouz renders, there at the end of the novel, with the contemplation of the sky. 

Chuck Berry’s original version of “Rock and Roll Music” came on as I started my routine at the gym, later in the afternoon.  It sounded wonderful, if unfairly tame.  The scene of him “down south” with people “drinking home brew from a wooden cup” conjures something plausible, and dangerous certainly, but the tone is, as he no doubt intended, smooth and measured.  I immediately craved the Beatle version, where John shreds his larynx. The residue of the many interviews I’d watched the other night was still in my mind.  I had to fumble between apps.  Did I have it in my iTunes?  Was it available on Spotify, but soon enough I had it up and it sounded as urgent as it ever had when I was ten years old.

Where else does John shred it?  This thought led me next to the fabled final song of their original U.K. album “Please, Please Me” from 1963.  As legend has it, the album was all recorded in one day and by the end he let it all go, for the final take of “Twist and Shout.”  I could see him smiling and telling the Queen to “rattle her jewelry,” but by this point I wasn’t getting much of any muscles, save my thumbs, exercised.  This was the last day the gym would be open for the next week.  Let the algorithm take over once again and get back to doing what you came to do. 

Sunday, 02/03/19