Sunday Scribbling #121: Solace

When I saw this week’s Scribble prompt—solace—I met it with competing waves of satire and fatigue (given my love/hate relationship with the Scribblers’ prompts, a good, even a bad, therapist would tell me those reactions are just two sides of the same coin). My satirical side’s first reaction was to write a piece on s(h)o(e)lace(s), but my tired side wasn’t sure I was up to sustained levity. Why so tired, you ask? More than likely my endless troglodytic inability to post a YouTube video to this blog of Lone Justice/Maria McKee doing a kickass version of “I Found Love.” My failed attempts are either out there somewhere in the cybernetic ethers or about to descend in one fell swoop on Murat-ville in endless repetitions. And then I’ll be like Melinda Dillon’s character Teresa Perrone in “Absence of Malice,” running up and down the street in my nightie trying to pick up all the papers before the burbanites walk out to find the hoohaa in their midst. That’s a badly worn nightie and metaphor, thank you.

Yes, YouTube is one source of solace when I’m feeling a desire to reach across decades to my still burgeoning adolescence. I was hardly a chronological adolescent when I first saw Ms McKee whoopin’ it up, most likely during one of my late night visits with MTV when it was MTV. I shudder to think what happened to the lass in the intervening years. A quick Google check on her status revealed a someone I could not recognize in the least, a post-Goth Goth, I cannot imagine her as the demented cheerleader Muhammad Ali speaking in tongues dervish that woke me up one foggy night back in Reagan Land. Miss “Essence of a Thing” Alister recently revealed her avatar (her divine eye) to her readership: I’d say that Ms “I Found Love” chica comes as close as anything to embodying my avatar, right on down to the fine and dandy Goodwill couture, and most assuredly the hopping around like a devil may care damn fool. Sorry I’m adding to the labor of reading this ditty, but if you wanna check out my avatar in action, click here.

Yes, music is certainly one of my shoelaces, all the way back to my toddlerdom, when my mother was selling records downtown at Tres Leches Music Company, sometimes parking me in a listening booth with a stack of 45s, a practice that continues to this day on occasion down at the Rio Tres Leches Starbucks HearMusic store with its bottomless vault of music for sampling. My father was also in the music business as a sales rep for Decca Records (long before they ever signed The Who), so it’s no surprise that my first photo studio portraits show me chewing on a piece of 45 rpm vinyl. Not even an archivist’s magnifying lens could reveal the title of that auditory morsel. I suspect it’s my “Rosebud,” if nothing else.

But, lazy (and inept) ass that I am today, I’m settling for a list of something else that has given, and continues to give, me shoelaces through the ages—los libros. In keeping with my penchant for Hit Lists, I’ve even ranked them, 1 to 50, titles purloined from a larger list my son asked for a year ago, my list of books he should read at some point in his life.

The list represents bonds of slavish devotion: it is in no way erudite, nor is it a critic’s or scholar’s list, and on any other day, it could change, though not much. It could also be called The 50 Books on My Top Twenty List.

Without further ado, I give you, The 50 Shoelaces:

01. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)

02. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

03. The Collected Stories (Grace Paley)

04. All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)

05. Tropic of Capricorn (Henry Miller)

06. Coming Through Slaughter (Michael Ondaatje)

07. Rimbaud in Abyssinia (Alain Borer)

08. Edisto (Padgett Powell)

09. A Woman Named Drown (Padgett Powell)

10. The Alexandria Quartet (Lawrence Durrell)

11. Aliens of Affection/Typical (Padgett Powell)

12. Nothing Like the Sun (Anthony Burgess)

13. All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)

14. The Iliad and the Odyssey (Homer: Robert Fitzgerald translations)

15. American Noise (Campbell McGrath)

16. The Book of Bebb (Frederick Buechner)

17. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)

18. The Tennis Handsome (Barry Hannah)

19. Study of the World’s Body (David St. John)

20. V (Thomas Pynchon)

21. Collected Works (Jane Austen)

22. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)

23. The Sunlight Dialogues (John Gardner)

24. Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)

25. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

26. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

27. The Raj Quartet (Paul Scott)

28. The Simple Truth (Philip Levine)

29. The Crossing (Cormac McCarthy)

30. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez)

31. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

32. The Geography of the Imagination (Guy Davenport)

33. Collected Stories (Flannery O’Connor)

34. The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)

35. Junkets on a Sad Planet (Tom Clark)

36. A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

37. The Rainbow (D H Lawrence)

38. Cane (Jean Toomer)

39. High Lonesome (Barry Hannah)

40. Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)

41. The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Mina Loy)

42. The Way That Water Enters Stone (John Dufresne)

43. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez)

44. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)

45. Collected Fictions (Jorge Luis Borges)

46. Collected Stories (Mavis Gallant)

47. The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)

48. Man of Light (Henri Corbin)

49. Never in a Hurry (Naomi Shihab Nye)

50. From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger (Lorna Dee Cervantes)

Yes, lots of good folks missing. I may have liked ‘em, even liked ‘em a lot, but I didn’t have a crush on them—at least not enough to crack the Top 50/20.

I think I just worked harder than I would have with my s(h)o(e)lace(s) idea. C’est la vie.