As a bookwormy kid, I was, of course, very comfortable and conversant with the past.
With the exception of The Baby-Sitters Club series, which released new books periodically that I would greedily read in one sitting once I got them home from the Waldenbooks in the mall, a good chunk of what I chose to read for my own enjoyment or was assigned to read in school was old. From the ’70s trashy VC Andrews stuff I snuck from my own babysitter to, later, the Fitzgerald and Hemingway I came to adore in high school, it just seemed a given that books = the past.
I suppose learning about the past is an inescapable part of most kids’ education, both formal—historic dates, classic texts, facts and figures that had been safely proven and deemed true long ago—and informal—family stories that get repeated over and over, solidifying the sense of This is Who We Art and This Is Where We Came From.
My dad in particular, though, always seemed intensely invested in preserving the past. Though that tendency was definitely exacerbated by my mom’s death in 1987, even before her cancer showed up, he relished showing family movies on 8mm film, listening to cassette tape recordings of former musical triumphs (most notably the recording of a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar that he conducted the pit band for in the summer of ’79), and telling stories of his (extremely mild and benign!) college exploits. Family vacations rarely deviated from the predictable routes to the same destinations we drove and redrove around the Midwest every spring break, summer vacation, and winter holiday we had free.
Perhaps that’s why, aside from other obvious reasons, my mother’s death was so intensely shocking and disruptive to our family system—it was a thing that was unavoidably happening in the Present. Her illness interrupted our preferred location in the past tense.
And then as I unconsciously tried to heal the grief of everyone around me, always aiming to be both a model student and a model daughter, I dove into the past with alacrity. “These are the things that YOU used to like? These are the things that were vital and important and current for YOU? Great, then they shall be my favorites, too.”
I only bring up these details to contextualize the disproportionate and late-blooming shock I felt after reading Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (twice, back-to-back) in the summer of 2001 when I realized, “holy shit—he just wrote this. This is new.”
Like, of course I knew that there were new books being written by still-living authors all the time. I guess, as a young woman in her late teens and early 20s living in Indiana, I just didn’t have the sense that any of it was for me. I was snobby enough, too, to have assumed that all the good work had somehow already been used up by authors of the past.
“I just don’t really like much of anything written after the 1920s,” I was known to simper, when I would even give the 20th century the time of day at all.
What can I say, I was tons of fun throughout high school and college.
And yet, only a few months after I graduated from Indiana University, I had this Eggers book in my hands. It was full of pyrotechnic wordsmithery, pop culture references, and postmodern meta-level tweaking of the very form of a memoir, but was also aching with trauma as it recounted the deaths of his parents and the responsibility he had to assume for his kid brother. Not to mention, the author was barely that much older than I was and had, like me, grown up just outside Chicago. It was all so exciting! I very, very self-consciously thought to myself, with something akin to mystical reverence, that surely this is what it must have felt like to have been alive when Fitzgerald had first published This Side of Paradise.
I haven’t reread A Heartbreaking Work in quite a long while, so I have no idea what I’d think of it now, but I don’t care. I loved it then and it woke me up to the idea that it was possible for good art, art that would be important to me, to be made right now.
As the years went on and I became more conversant with a tiny fraction of the new fiction being published, as well as music and movies, of course, I became consumed with the thought that, in all likelihood, someone out there was currently busy writing a book, or recording a song, or scribbling a screenplay, that would come to mean the world to me a year later, maybe even ten years later. That, while I was folding laundry or otherwise going about the mundane business of my daily life, someone out there was making something that would catch up with me in the future, that would be profoundly meaningful both for the way it touched my heart and for the fact that it, in some respect, was new enough to still have the stardust of its own inspiration and creation on it.
Like, currently, Mark Knopfler’s Tracker.
I’ve never really known the music of Dire Straits and was only relatively recently introduced to Knopfler’s solo work by my boyfriend. I started to joke with him a year or two ago that I knew he was really getting down to business with his own writing projects when Shangri-La started going into heavy rotation on the stereo. So, though I expected to hear Tracker on in the background while we were making dinner or reading before bedtime, it came as pretty much a complete surprise when it started to dominate my own precious listening time on morning and evening train commutes.
It’s all I want to listen to right now. And, it just came out in March! His last solo album was released in 2012, so that means that while I spent the last three years taking care of my sister and starting up this blog and playing in my band, he was holed up somewhere in the UK working on this magnificent collection of songs. This obsession with simultaneity is always a sure sign that I’m really a goner for something or someone; when I start asking, “so how old were you in this year? What grade were you in at school? This is how old I was. This is what I was up to. How funny to think it was happening at the same time!” then you know I’m really smitten.
Even though I’ve just written this whole blog post in preface to talking about how much I love the album, I don’t really even want to write that much about it for fear of breaking the spell. Do you honestly need me to describe in flowery language the burnished tone of Knopfler’s Les Paul guitar in order for me to convey how good the album is? Do you need a track-by-track analysis of his lyrical themes, or comparisons to other songs that kinda hit a similar vibe to the one he’s bringing to life here? Truly, the most accurate description of this album, to me, is not a description of this album at all. It’s this terrific quote from Bill Murray, talking about acting in Wes Anderson’s films:
Well, it’s like if someone plays an instrument, say, a guitar. A young player can play it, and if he wants to play a high note, or a fast rhythm, it has a certain [makes twangy noise] desperate quality to it. But when you get a really sophisticated player playing those notes, he can play those same notes in a tempo where there’s space in between. You can see that there’s actually a process where his interior state is so quick, that he can find time other people can’t find. A young player can go [makes clumsy blip sounds], whereas a real player can go [makes smooth blip sounds]. You can notice the difference, and it’s like with that fast pace of Wes’s movies. If you’re real quiet, your whole body will be quiet, and there’ll be echo, and resonance. It’s like your head, or your chest, is a guitar box.
But when you get a really sophisticated player playing those notes, he can play those same notes in a tempo where there’s space in between. You can see that there’s actually a process where his interior state is so quick, that he can find time other people can’t find.
That’s Tracker exactly. Much like my well-documented admiration for Mark Eitzel, right now Mark Knopfler and his music are fulfilling a major need for me to hear what it sounds like when highly trained, highly skilled, highly tasteful musicians make music as grown-ups, for grown-ups. It’s the sound of supreme mastery held lightly, finding time that other people can’t find. I feel oh so lucky and oh so grateful to be sharing my own time with it today.
Queen of Peaches 