The Drama and Desire of February Reading

There is still today, plus two more days, in February, but I’d rather do a lot of writing, so I’m calling it for this month’s reading activity. Here’s what I’ve read, and this post ends with something I promised to tell you.

First up, on the Kindle app, I read Bow Wow, the third (maybe last?) in Spencer Quinn’s Bowser and Birdie middle school mystery series with a dog as a narrator. I’m a fan of Quinn’s Chet and Bernie mysteries (written for adults), also narrated by a dog.

I bought Pattie Boyd’s memoir in late 2020 on my Kindle app. I don’t know if I started it then, or in 2021, but it fell victim to my pandemic inability to read. I finished it this month!

I downloaded these two short story collections by Helene Tursten to my Kindle app as soon as Princess Patti recommended them early this month. She said she smiled all the way through them, and she clearly knows me, because while I might not have picked them on my own, I found the “elderly lady,” Maud, wickedly amusing. The entire time I was reading, I knew these books were meant for Marika. When I suggested them to her, I found out she’d already read and loved them.

If you recall, I shared that I read the first two parts of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days in 2010 and made no promises about when I’d finish. This month, I reread those first two parts and completed the third part! They are strange tales, the first set during the Industrial Revolution in New York, the second also in New York just after 9/11/2001, and the third set 150 years in the future, starting in, then venturing away from, New York. I think I figured out why I stopped reading this book. Walt Whitman is a huge presence in the three stories (the person and his writing), and I remember a period when I decided to reread Whitman. I think Cunningham’s book is what motivated me. Then a whole lot of life events got in between me and going back to the Cunningham book. I’m so glad I finished it!

I have several unread Joan Didion books, and I started with this one. It’s a quick read, and its real-life vignettes take place in a part of the South with which I’m very familiar.

I blogged at length on Tuesday about this Stevie Ray Vaughan bio, and I have this to add. The reason I’m acutely aware of the dates of SRV’s death, meeting our late friend Steve, and getting our dachshund Stevie is because I have the “manager’s log” from my time at that bookstore. I was the last of several managers/assistant managers left from among its contributors, and I felt it was prudent for me to take the log when I resigned. It wasn’t an official store record, just personal conversations between managers about things that needed to be done or had been done, along with accounts of crazy things that happened at our store. I especially treasure the notes and conversations between Steve and me, and I’m glad I kept the “log.”

I’ve saved Eamon Dunphy’s biograpy Unforgettable Fire: Past, Present, and Future–The Definitive Biography of U2 for last because it’s related to the bookstore and also to the art work I shared last week with the promise of an explanation to come.

In 2019, when I undertook to write what I’ve come to call the Neverending Saga, I thought I was writing one novel. Instead, I’m now somewhere around the middle of the fifth novel–written in less than three years. For a year of that time, I worked a 60-hour-a-week job. Once I was laid off and quarantined at home, I was able to devote full time to researching and writing. I’ve done more research than I ever imagined I would, because the stories so far have included relevant events from the 1940s to (at this point) the mid-1970s. It has been a laborious act of love, and it was bringing me a lot of peace of mind and happiness during the pandemic. In 2021, those feelings came to a screaming halt. I won’t belabor the reasons, but they were a shock to my system.

The good thing is I learned valuable lessons for moving forward. The bad thing is, I doubted myself and my work for a lot of months. Part of the hard-and-fast goals I set when I decided to undertake this project meant I’d be swimming against a current of conventional wisdom. I don’t have a publisher to answer to, but to meet my personal standards, I want what I’m writing to be plausible. Part of my research is the effort to find that my perspective is, in fact, plausible.

Very often, I search my blog for information or photos from the past 18 years. On one such search, I saw a post with a picture of the book above and text that said Tim had loaned me the book. When I decided to read it this month, I tried to find that post again and couldn’t, no matter what text I used. No problem. There was a photo of the book, so I searched my Flickr photos, my LiveJournal photos, and my Word Press Photos. My searches found nothing, which was impossible. The photo had to be stored somewhere for me to have used it. Without the post, I couldn’t find the code for where it was stored.

This is where my actions begin to show signs of my Aries compulsive need to FIND THE ANSWER. The answer doesn’t matter to anyone but me. I didn’t need the answer to read the U2 book. But how could I not find a post on my blog that I remembered seeing? When I couldn’t find it through photos, I began to review every year of my blog. Since I migrated my LJ to it, I’m talking about scrolling through more than 7000 public and 150 private posts.

Ultimately, there was no such post. I talked to Tim. He thinks he may have read the book, but he has no memory of loaning it to me. I can determine by the publication date and the sticker that the book was published before I began working at the bookstore, and became a bargain book while I was at the bookstore, or again, depending on the store (one store surviving when it was bought by Barnes & Noble), several years later. So perhaps I purchased it myself and just never read it.

When I started reading it this month, I was sure that I hadn’t read it before. A wonderful result of reading it now was that something that’s a fundamental part of how I’m writing one of my storylines, a part that I think readers might take issue with because it’s not the way this story is almost always told or written, validated that I need to stop worrying about it, trust myself, my instincts, and my characters, and keep writing. Neither my story, my characters, nor my plot has any connection at all to the band U2, its members, or their story (as of circa 1987/88). It’s just that what I see as possible is, in fact, possible.

The single explanation I have for the blog post is that it never existed, that I dreamed it. It isn’t impossible. I often have dreams that feel like pretty nondescript real-life events. But I’m skeptical. For what reason would I dream about a book I’ve owned for as many as 32 years and never read, and what are the chances it would turn out to be exactly what I needed to read?

Except…  Someone recently told me that when I wonder if something is true (“I dreamed what my imagination needed to feel authentic”), I should see if the Universe sends two confirmations. The first thing that happened was that the Photo Friday theme the week of my obsession was “Desire.” I was all, Aw crap, what kind of photograph am I going to have… And then it came into my head: U2’s song “Desire.” How was that in any way helpful? What did it have to do with my writing? Why was U2 hounding me?!?

With a sigh, I looked up the lyrics to “Desire.” And then… I laughed. Fine, okay. The doll who represents my musician, pictured here in November 2020…

And the U2 lyric: Gonna go where the bright lights
And the big city meet
With a red guitar, on fire
Desire

That red guitar is vitally important to the life and destiny of this character. I wrote it red for one reason, a funny reason that has nothing to do with any guitar anyone I’ve ever known owned. That would be a spoiler, so I’ll leave it there.

To create something tangible to try to express all this, I did the painting that I used on that Photo Friday post.

Still, I wanted some rational proof that Tim loaned me the book and I subsequently wove it into a dream “post.” I had one other way to test that. I began looking through my old photo albums (from when I shot on film, not digital). I take lots of pictures when family and friends visit our homes; I never know what one of them might catch. For example, the bookshelves in The Compound dining room in the background of a photo of some friends.

There’s the U2 book. That photo is timestamped 1/29/2000. More than a full year before Tim moved to Houston and could have found a Bookstop bargain book on sale anywhere. That settled the matter for me. Call it magical. Mystical. It definitely shows why I always turn back to music for inspiration and guidance. I don’t need to understand it. I just need to say thank you.

THANK YOU!

Now I have writing to do in the library next to the fire with a little company on the table next to me.

Hope you all find the magic, the mystery, the means, and the music to keep yourself going and loving life during turbulent, confusing times. Peace.