Monthly Archives: July 2022

Anyone following this blog will recognize that I have begun a series of entries that I am calling my “alphabestiary.” I thought I might explain what I am doing.

I am currently researching and writing the seventh entry in the series, a piece about Galileo Galilei. Such a thing takes a lot of time and effort — more than you might imagine. I am about two-thirds of the way through and trying to work out a knotty problem: how to explain his trial and confinement without getting boggled up in the minutiae of 17th century Roman Catholic doctrine and Vatican law. It’s daunting.

And so, while I am working on the research and the de-clogging of that, I thought I might explain what brought all this on.

Since I was given this blog on my retirement from The Arizona Republic in 2012 — given to me by my colleagues on my leaving — I have written nearly 700 entries, which means I have written almost as much in retirement as I did when working. (As I have often said, writers never really retire, they just stop getting paid for it.) It’s an addiction. If you are a writer, you write just in the same way as how you breathe. You can’t stop or you die.

And it’s not that I have run out of subjects to write about, but after 688 blog essays (this is No. 689), I sometimes have to program a plan for coming up with new pieces if one doesn’t present itself automatically. And so, I have started the occasional alphabestiary piece.

The idea came to me after reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, a hefty book from 2007 in which James writes about historical and literary figures and arranges the biographies in alphabetical order. He covers 106 figures in the 876-page book, which is subtitled: “Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.”

James, for anyone who is unfamiliar, was an Australian-born London-based essayist, poet, TV-presenter and critic who was a ubiquitous public intellectual in England until his death in 2019. His style was distinct, breezy, witty and with many a clever turn of phrase (“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light,” he wrote about writing).

The essays in Cultural Amnesia each come in two parts: The first is fairly straight-forward potted biography, then, separated by a quote from the first part, comes an essay by James about something suggested by the biography. It might be only tangentially related, but writing about whichever person has tickled his imagination to find a buried connection.

I liked this plan a lot. I’ve read great wads of James, his TV criticism (which first brought him fame), his poetry (which is surprisingly good, even if most of it rhymes), his critical and political essays, and even when I might disagree with him, he is always an absolute pleasure to read.

And so, I stole a bit of his idea and modified it. If I have a momentary lapse in inspiration for the blog, I move to a new letter of the alphabet and find myself a subject. Inspiration, after all, doesn’t come from angels tapping you on the noggin with a magic wand — it comes from typing. Get started and the daimon swoops in unnoticed to guide your fingers on the keyboard. Inspiration is the doing, not the waiting.

In my version, I planned a single subject per alphabet letter, not the multiples that James has in his book. And I thought, to make it just a bit more interesting for me, let’s only choose names where the first and surnames begin with the same letter. AA, BB, CC, etc.

And so, I began with Ansel Adams, followed with Betty Boop, Caryl Chessman,

Denis Diderot, Edward Elgar and Federico Fellini. And I am now hard at work on Galileo Galilei. It should pop out sometime in the next week.

And so, chug, chug, the old writer keeps on moving forward, unable to stop.

As a kind of footnote, I thought I should append a list, to show just how variable the alphabet is in spitting up potential subjects. Some letters are filthy with choice, others are deserts. And while you might guess that finding an “X” could be somewhat rare, it still surprised me, making up my list of potentials, that while there are many, many “M” names, there are surprisingly few “N” possibles.

I made my list from a passel of sources. No one place online had all I needed. I searched “alliterative names” and found some, but I must have waded through a dozen sites to compile my list, which, to be honest, includes quite a few names I had never heard of — and you probably haven’t either.

I thought you might find the list entertaining, in that way lists can be. And if you can help me out by adding some I’ve missed, by all means, add them in the comment section. You may save me from having to write an essay about Qozidavlat Qoimdodov (yes, he’s real).

And so, here is my listilicious roster of names. Help me add to them.

Ansel Adams, Amy Adams, Abigail Adams, Andre Agassi, Alan Alda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Aziz Ansari, Adam Ant, Alan Arkin, Arthur Ashe, Amedeo Avogadro

Barbi Benton, Barry Bonds, Betty Boop, Brian Blessed, Backstreet Boys, Bilbo Baggins, Brigitte Bardot, Bob Barker, Beach Boys, Beastie Boys, Ben Bernanke, Bernardo Bertolucci, Benazir Bhutto, Bill Bixby, Ben Bradlee, Bill Bradley, Benjamin Bratt, Bugs Bunny, Billy Burke, Barbara Bush

Caryl Chessman, Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Chan, Christopher Columbus, Calvin Coolidge, Carlos Castaneda, Coco Chanel, Carol Channing, Cesar Chavez, Chris Christie, Charlotte Church, Cassius Clay, Chelsea Clinton, Claudette Colbert, Charles Colson, Courteney Cox, Cindy Crawford

Denis Diderot, Dorothy Dandridge, Doris Day, Dana Delany, Don DeLillo, Drea De Matteo, Dorothea Dix, Dr. Demento, Don Draper, David Duchovny, Daisy Duke

Edward Elgar, Emilio Estevez, Eddie Edwards, Eddie the Eagle, Erik Estrada

Federico Fellini, Francisco Franco, Faith Ford, Farrah Fawcett, Freddy Fender, Fionnula Flanagan, Fannie Flagg, Frances Farmer, Felix Frankfurter, Fyvush Finkel, Fannie Farmer, Frankie Frisch

Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, Grace Gummer, Galileo Galilei, George Gershwin, Gal Gadot, George Gallup, Gabrielle Giffords, Gilbert Gottfried, Graham Greene, Germaine Greer, George Gobel

Harry Houdini, Humbert Humbert, Helen Hayes, Harriet Hosmer, Howard Hawks, Hugh Hefner, Henry Heimlich, Henry Hudson, Heinrich Himmler, Hulk Hogan, Hal Holbrook, Herbert Hoover, Howard Hughes, Hubert Humphrey, Holly Hunter, Helen Hunt, Heinrich Heine

Itziar Ituño, Ivan Illich, Ilya Ivanov, Ilya Ivashka, Ivan Ilyin

Jim Jarmusch, James Joyce, Janis Joplin, Janet Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Jesse James, John Jay, Jasper Johns, James Earl Jones, January Jones, Jennifer Jones, Jim Jones

Kim Kardashian, King Kong, Kevin Kline, Killer Kowalski, Kato Kaelin, Khloe Kardashian, Ken Kesey, Klaus Kinski, Kunta Kinte, Keira Knightley, Kris Kringle, Kublai Khan

Lois Lane, Linda Lovelace, Louis L’Amour, Lucy Lawless, Lucille Le Seuer, Lee Liberace, Laura Linney, Lucy Liu, Lara Logan, Lindsay Lohan, Lyle Lovett, Lucky Luciano, Louis Lumiere, Loretta Lynn, Loretta Lynch

Marilyn Monroe, Mercedes McCambridge, Malcolm McDowell, Mad Max, Mary Magdalene, Moses Maimonides, Marilyn Manson, Mickey Mantle, Meghan Markle, Marky Mark, Mary Martin, Melissa McCarthy, Matthew McConaughey, Mitch McConnell, Mark McGwire, Margaret Mead, Mickey Mouse, Martin Milner, Mini-Me, Margaret Mitchell, Maria Montessori, Mandy Moore, Marianne Moore, Mary Tyler Moor, Michael Moore, Marion Morrison, Mike Myers, Michelangelo Merisi

Nick Nolte, Nichelle Nichols, Natalya Neidhart, Nigel Ng, Niecy Nash, Natti Natasha, Nazriya Nazim, Nicephore Niepce, Nell Newman

Ozzy Osbourne, Olive Oyl, Oona O’Neill, Olive Oatman, Olusegun Obasanjo, Olivia O’Brien, Özge Özpirinçci, Olivia Olson, Oliver Onions, Olivia Ong, Olga Ostroumova

Pablo Picasso, Parker Posey, Pete Postlethwaite, Pauley Perrette, Peter Parker, Pawel Pawlikowski, Peter Pan, Pink Panther, Pol Pot, Pope Pius IX, Paula Poundstone, Prince Philip, Punxsutawney Phil

Qin Qin, Qu Qiubai, Qi Qi, Qozidavilat Qoimdodov

Ronald Reagan, Roy Rogers, Ricky Ricardo, Robert Redford, Ralph Reed, Ryan Reynolds, Ray Rice, Robert Ripley, Richard Rodgers, Robert Rodriguez, Ray Romano, Rebecca Romijn, Ruby Rose, Rosie Ruiz, Rene Russo

Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, Simone Signoret, Sissy Spacek, Sylvester Stallone, Sam Shepard, Sheryl Sandberg, Stephanie Seymour, Sidney Sheldon, Sarah Silverman, Shel Silverstein, Sirhan Sirhan, Severus Snape, Steven Soderbergh, Suzanne Somers, Stephen Sondheim, Sonia Sotomayor, Sam Spade, Splendid Splinter, SpongeBob SquarePants, Sri Srinivasan, Saint Sebastian, Sharon Stone, Sutan of Swat

Tina Turner, Ted Turner, Tiny Tim, Terry Thomas, Tim Tebow, Tiffany Trump

Umit Ulgen, Usha Uthup, Udo Ulfkotte, Ugyen Ugyen

Vince Vaughn, Vivian Vance, Vincent Van Gogh, Vidya Vox, Victor Valdes, Val Valentino, Virginia Vallejo, Ville Valo, Victoria Vetri, Victor Vasarely, Violetta Villas, Vito Volterra, Violette Verdy, Via Vallen, Vanessa Vadim

William Wyler, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Wilson, William Wallace, Wil Wheaton, Walter White, Wicked Witch of the West, Wendy Williams, William Carlos Williams, Willy Wonka

Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, Xuxa, Xu Xin, Xie Xinfang, Xia Xuanze

Yo-Yo Ma, Yoo Yeon-seok, Yukio Yamaji, Yelena Yemchuk, Yu Yamada, Yakov Yurovsky, Yang Yang, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Yeo Yann Yann, Yohji Yamamoto, Yordan Yovkov, Yan Yuan

Zhang Ziyi, Zinedine Zidane

— So, there you have it: Homo Ludens playing with names to keep the brain sharp and engaged.

In other words…

July 8, 2022

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Translation is a funky thing. You can try to be literal and lose all the flavor, or you can try to find equivalent idiomatic expressions, or you can recast the whole thing, as if you were writing an original from a similar inspiration — your own words for a similar thought.

And unless you are brought up bilingual so that you are completely comfortable in both languages, you will always be working from a disadvantage. You can work from crib notes, or take a literal translation and recast it. Many writers these days do something of the sort. Ezra Pound did not read Chinese, but that didn’t stop him from translating Chinese poetry. Scholars may quibble with the results (or laugh outright), but the versions Pound printed are good poetry, whether or not they are good translations.

Would I rather read a poet’s regeneration or a scholar’s word-for-word? The answer is both. When it comes to poetry in languages I do not read, I’d rather have multiple versions to absorb and take in all the angles to arrive at something triangulated.

There are languages I have some familiarity with and so, I can usually read Pablo Neruda straight from the trough. And in French or German, I have some dealings with the originals, although I do not speak the languages with anything like fluency. I can read a French newspaper, but cannot always make out the spoken version. (Luckily, when in France, I have learned you don’t really need the fineries of grammar. You can speak French pretty usefully even with no verbs at all. You go to the patisserie and when it is your turn, you just say, “Deux croissants, s’il vous plait,” and you get what you want. No one before you on line has used a verb, either.)

And so, I have come to translate some poetry for myself, from German, from French or Spanish (even an occasional Latin poem), and mostly in self-defense.

I say “self-defense” because most of the translations I’ve been subjected to sound like musty old Victorian twaddle. The translators seem to love archaic word forms and odd word orders — as if written by Yoda they were.

Such things offend my ear.

It’s not that I want them to be prose, but the secret of poetry is in the metaphor and the clever turn of phrase, not in the conventional language of old poetry forms. Take the first two lines of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s Rundgesang. In German:

O Mensch! Gib acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

Which could be translated, word for word, as:

“O men! Give attention! What says the deep midnight?”

Traditional translations usually go something like:

“O Man! Take heed! What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed?”

or:

“O Man! Attend! What does deep midnight’s voice contend?”

There is the problem with the original. “O Man!” is poetic cliche. It has to go. I suppose you could turn it into idiomatic English as “Hey, y’all, listen up,” but that would be a crime in a different direction.

If I were to translate this bit, I would just leave off the unnecessary parts and rewrite it as: “It calls to us in the dark. It is deep midnight and the hour speaks:” This sets up a light/dark dichotomy that pays off later in the piece.

Too many translations, especially of classic Greek or Latin literature are written in this fusty, worn out poeticized and conventional twaddle. It’s amazing anyone waded through the Iliad in the 19th century. Homer’s actual style was immediate and direct.

Imagine if Robert Frost had written: “Two paths in twain divided were; traverse we may but one.” Who would now bother with it? It is Circe turning men into pigs.

In other words, I have no issue with completely recasting the originals to make modern, idiomatic sense in a language that I hope remains poetic but without the equipage of outworn convention.

A stunning example of this approach is Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid, beautiful translations of several bits from The Metamorphoses. In Hughes’ style the stories move quickly and smartly and you turn the pages as in a best-seller. One only wishes Hughes had completed the whole thing, instead of mere sniglets.

In this way, I have translated (or rewritten, if you hesitate) a good bit of German lieder. So much of it is hyperventilated Romantic sludge, which speaks to the early 19th Century of a generation that was weaned on Young Werther, and undoubtedly expressed the genuine feelings of those who lived through it, but now seem unrealistic and kitschy.

Yet, there are real things being said and expressed in the poetry of Müller, Hölderlein or Eichendorff. It comes through like a buzz saw in the music of Schubert or Schumann, where the music has an authenticity that the verse sometimes lacks.

I have tackled whole swaths of lieder verse, including a translation of all of the Winterreise. I found I could be a bit more faithful near the beginning of the cycle, but the deeper in, the more I had to rethink the verse.

Take the first song, Gute Nacht. The text takes care of itself. A simple translation of the first stanza would be:

But, 24 songs later, the text of Der Leiermann, about a hurdy-gurdy man, is too bland without the devastating music Schubert provides (one of the most desolate and despairing bits of music ever penned), and so I’ve written my variation on it, to stand without the music:

Just this week, I started another project, translating four of the texts that Gustav Mahler set. I have arranged them into a set that belongs together, in four “movements,” rather like a symphony, meant to be taken as a single whole.

I am offering them here as my apology for the type of translation I most appreciate — at least when others my better do it.

The main benefit of doing such work (since I have no plans or hope ever to publish my translations — they are simply for the pleasure and knowledge I get from them — is that they force me to pay attention to the poetry and to the words.

We can read through poetry much as we may distractedly hum a favorite tune. But good poetry offers much more, and forcing yourself to go through it word by word, can help you uncover much more. Translating forces concentration.

And so, I read the German for its sound, parse individual words for their various meanings (for no word in any language has but one simple meaning), read various translations to compare how others have understood the words, reassemble them in my own English and then revise, over and over, until I get something that sounds good to me and — more importantly — makes sense.

I have to admit that I generally like my own translations better than the ones packaged with the CD as the libretti or lyrics. But that is likely because they match my own particular esthetic — they are tailor made for my ear. Your ear may resonate to a different frequency.

And so, the first “movement” of my Mahler word-symphony comes from the second of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, words originally written by the composer himself. The main melody of the song became the first theme of his Symphony No. 1.

The second movement is Mahler’s own crib of Zarathustra’s Rundgesang, or “Zarathustra’s Midnight Song,” as the composer has it. All four of the texts I have translated focus on the twin but opposite facts that life is suffering but also it is joy.

Third, there is heartbreaking and rueful song by Friedrich Rückert, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, set by Mahler first for voice and piano, but later orchestrated and part of his Sieben Lieder aus letzter Zeit (“Seven songs of Latter Days”). It is surely one of his greatest songs, and can hardly be heard or sung without feeling it was written directly with you in mind.

Finally, there is Der Abschied (“The Farewell”), the final movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (“Songs of the Earth”). In it, Mahler has pieced together two Chinese poems of dubious provenance (themselves translated or rewritten, or perhaps invented in French and German) purportedly by Tang Dynasty poets Meng Haoran and Wang Wei, with three lines added at the end, written by Mahler himself. Der Abschied is Mahler’s summa, and at 30 minutes, is as long as the previous five movements combined. And it ends with the quiet reiteration, over and over, in dying voice, “Ewig… ewig…” (“forever… forever…”) finally so in performance you can never quite tell when it ends, the final “Ewig” as quiet as the silence that follows.

In the end, I recommend to everyone that they attempt to translate a poem from a different language. Take a Baudelaire, for instance, or a Neruda (avoid Rilke like the plague, unless you wish to end in an asylum), and parse it through, word by word. Read it out loud in the original language to hear the music of it (yes, your French may not be as liquid as the original) and read various translations to see how differently the words are construed. Then arrange a version of your own.

In the end, you will have internalized the poetry and it will never again be a stranger to you.

A life list

July 1, 2022

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It’s completely meaningless to rate art. Is Picasso greater than Rembrandt? Beethoven than Mozart? Is Beethoven’s Fifth better than Beethoven’s Eroica? Pointless.

But there is a different question: faves. It’s possible to have favorites without making claims to supremacy. We all have them. Yes, they shift over the years: The older me appreciates different art and appreciates it in different ways than the young me did. But even day-to-day the favorites may change. Often my favorite symphony is the one I’m listening to at the moment.

Still, Top Ten lists will be made. Or Top Five, or Top 100. There’s no hope for it. It’s instinctive, built into our DNA. And so, I’ve put together my list of my Top Dozen favorite works of art — a baker’s dozen. Your mileage may vary. (For the ultimate list of lists, link here).

And so, here are my favorites, listed by genre. I’ve tried to narrow my choices to art I have experienced in person — paintings I have actually seen, dances I have attended, books I have read. Book reproductions or sound recordings don’t count. I have a lifetime of art-going and concert-attending, and so I may have access to more than the average bear. But I am well aware that there’s a whole lot more that I haven’t seen.

And by favorite, I don’t just mean something I like, but rather, something that has wormed into my very being and become a part of who I am, so that encountering it can explain to others a bit of who I am. It has been grafted into my personality.

This list is entirely personal, flexible and apologetically incomplete. Ask me again tomorrow and this could be a very different list.

Painting: None of these choices changes more often than painting. today’s favorite fades with tomorrow’s. I’ve simply come to love too many paintings to have a single choice. But today, I will go with Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. It was a painting I had wanted to see for years, and then got my chance when the Museum of Modern Art held a Pollock retrospective in 1998 and the elusive work was borrowed back from Australia, where it had sat for decades, out of the reach of us Northern Hemisphere shut-ins. Its appeal came from its elusiveness, for sure, but also for its unique place in Pollock’s catalog — more than just paint squiggles, it had the structure of the bars across its surface. I loved it in reproduction, but it bowled me over in person.

Alternate takes: Picasso’s Guernica; John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark

Sculpture: I grew up visiting the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as often as I could. I loved the place — and I mean loved. And deep in its bowels resided the giant Olmec head, chiseled from basalt (actually, the one in New York is a plaster copy, but I didn’t know that when I was 10 years old and rapt in wonder). In the darkened hall of the museum, the head seemed immense and the original weighs 20 tons. It impressed me no end and to this day, it is my favorite sculpture. No doubt there is other, more important sculpture elsewhere, but I have not been to Rome or Egypt to see them. I have spent considerable time in the Louvre in Paris and have several faves there, such as the Three Graces or the Winged Victory, but none has stuck in my psyche with quite the force of the Olmec head.

Alternate takes: Rodin’s Burghers of Calais; Louvre’s Three Graces

Architecture: As architecture critic for The Arizona Republic, I got to visit a lot of buildings, including most of the Frank Lloyd Wright sites in the U.S. (Wright was a longtime resident of Scottsdale, Ariz.) I was blown away by Taliesin in Wisconsin and his studio in Oak Park, Ill. But the building that struck me as most beautiful was Falling Water in Pennsylvania. Everything you have ever heard about it is true — about its siting in the woods over the waterfall; about how its interior is micromanaged by Wright’s designs; and (I’m one of the few who have been given access to this) the pathetic orphan of a bathroom hidden in the basement. Wright really didn’t like having to deal with kitchens or bathrooms.

Alternate takes: Chartres cathedral; George Washington Bridge

Orchestral music: this is the hardest category for me because I have so much music bottled up in the ol’ storage batteries, and faves change not only day to day, but hour to hour. But I studied Mozart’s Symphony in G-minor, K. 550, score in hand, for most of an entire semester in college and it is drilled into my memory so that I can hear the whole thing in my head, from beginning to end, even without the score. If ever a piece of music felt like home to me, it is Mozart’s 40th Symphony. Dissecting it has given me an approach to all other classical music.

Alternate takes: Mahler’s Symphony No. 3; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

Choral music: I’m not a religious man, and neither was Johannes Brahms, so his German Requiem can console my most grief-stricken moments in a way more devout music cannot. More than any other music, I go to the Deutsches Requiem for consolation and peace. Each year, on the anniversary of the death of my wife, I drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway, find a quiet forest road and park and listen to my Brahms and weep for my loss and for the loss all humankind must suffer.

Alternate takes: Haydn’s Creation; Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil

Chamber music: I want so much to claim Schubert’s C-major String Quintet, for it is the deepest, most emotionally moving piece of chamber music in the repertoire. Yet, I cannot, as long as there is Schubert’s competing “Trout” Quintet, which must be the most ebullient, life-affirming piece of music ever written. One cannot come away from it not feeling — despite all the sorrows of the world — that life is pure joy. It is no end of astonishment for me that Schubert wrote both.

Alternate takes: Brahms Clarinet Quintet; Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2

Opera: Mozart’s most subversive opera wasn’t The Marriage of Figaro, which was often banned for making fun of the aristocracy, but rather Don Giovanni, with its lusty chorus of “Viva la libertad” and its turning topsy-turvy the villain-hero model. The Don is the life force embodied, for good and bad, and when he is threatened with hell, he laughs and refuses to recant, choosing damnation over hypocrisy. Its first act is the most completely flawless in all of opera history and despite the phony ending usually tacked-on to the second act, a model of moral complexity.

Alternate takes: Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier

Dance: Of all the artforms, dance moves me the most. And I was extremely lucky, because when I became dance critic, Ballet Arizona was taken over by Ib Andersen, former star dancer for George Balanchine and brilliant choreographer himself. He staged many Balanchine ballets and I was hooked. I have now seen Balanchine’s Apollo four times, once by the New York City Ballet in Paris, and I cannot watch it now without welling up with emotion. I love dance and Apollo stands in for all of it.

Alternate takes: Ib Andersen’s choreography for Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet; Frances Smith Cohen’s choreography for Center Dance Ensemble’s Rite of Spring

Theater: Bad theater, or worse, mediocre theater can give the impression that live drama is hopelessly, well, theatrical. You know: dinner theater. But when it is done well, there is nothing that can match it, a lesson I learned by seeing the original Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. I’ve now seen it — both parts together — four times and it destroys me every time. In great theater, you soon forget all the artifice and everything becomes immediate and real. Movies are great, but they can’t match the breathing now-ness of live theater.

Alternate takes: Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus

Film: There are films that are exciting, films that are visually beautiful, that are clever, that are cultural barometers, and there are films that are wise. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu has informed my own life more than any other film I’ve seen. How can you beat Octave’s observation: “The terrible thing about life is that everybody has their reasons.” I will watch Rules of the Game over and over for the rest of my life. It is cinematic comfort food.

Alternative takes: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev; Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal

Novel: Most books, you read once. If it’s a mystery, you have the killer caught; if it’s a Victorian saga, you get the heroine married. But some books you can read over and over and get intense pleasure from the language used and the perspective offered. For me, that book is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I don’t always read the whole thing from beginning to end, but I bet I’ve read the first chapter, at least, a hundred times. Melville’s language has seeped into my own writing more than any other (for good or ill).

Alternative takes: James Joyce’s Ulysses; Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

Poetry: I read a lot of poetry, mostly modern and contemporary, but the poem I go back to over and over, read out loud for the sound the words make in my mouth, proselytize to others and keep in my heart is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Trouthe. The antique language isn’t so hard, once you get used to it — sort of like listening to a working class Mancunian accent, or a Yorkshireman gabble — and once you’ve caught the knack of it, it’s like any other English. God, I love that poem. “The wrastling for the worlde axeth a fal.”

Alternative takes: Eliot’s Four Quartets; Pablo Neruda’s Odas Elementales

And the Number One, hors compétition and sans genre, is:

The north rose window, Chartres cathedral. As I have written many times, the north rose window is the single most beautiful human-made object I have ever seen. I am in awe of it. Reproduction cannot give you a sense of its glowing color and implied motion — it virtually spins (and I mean virtually literally). I can sit in its presence for an hour at a time.

Again, I am not making the claim that these are all the greatest works, although they may be, but that they, more than their compeers, have buried their way into my innermost being, where they reside as a permanent part of my unconscious. They are who I am.