The Amazon of the Mind (Guest Blogger: Arthur Phillips)
Monday morning and I arrive here at the Amazon.com complex. The Omnivoracious outbuildings, where I now take residency for the week, are extraordinary. The blog occupies eighteen architecturally unique buildings, each designed by one of the world’s great architects. I’ve just finished unpacking in the Bezos Crystal Chamber, a massive geodesic dome where I will be sleeping and working until Friday. It’s opaque from the outside but transparent from the inside, with a view of Seattle, or at a whispered command, the night sky, displaying the twinkling hemisphere of your choice. Tom, my invisible editor, communicates to me from one of the larger Omnivoracious buildings--that chrome-wrapped place shaped vaguely like a book. Gehry, I assume.
I demanded music here in my temporary digs, and the finest of Seattle technology was deployed to please me. The sound system is discreetly hidden in pillows and planters, and it is entirely voice-activated. It takes a few tries until it adjusts to my voice: for the first several attempts, I yell out “The Police” and am forced to listen to a polka. I call out, “Dexter Young,” but hear only Buster Poindexter. (I am reminded of an Amazon custom-recommendation from the store’s early days: “Readers who liked Chicken Soup for the Soul might also like Soul on Ice”). But the system’s kinks are quickly worked out. As I am a sucker for English pop from the 90s (especially Manchester stuff), I just shouted out “Happy Mondays,” and now “Step On” fills the cavernous space.
For those at home, crank it up. Now, if you turn off all the lights and spatter your ceiling with luminescent paint, you’ll get a sense of what it’s like for me in here. I find it odd that I won’t be allowed outside, nor am I permitted any contact of any sort with other people, except your comments to the blog, until I’m released on Friday evening, but if I’ve learned anything after ten years writing, it’s this: you just do what Amazon says. You just do it.
The video projection is impressive, a little derivative of IMAX, but when viewed from this king-size memory-foam mattress, sampling this excellent fruit plate [Tom--I’m allergic to kiwis--I thought I mentioned that on the intake forms], it’s really not that bad. Here’s an embed for you home viewers. That’s Harriet Wheeler and her band The Sundays, back in 1990, when I was 21. Catchy tune, that voice, nice English girl charm: I have carried a torch for her for almost twenty years now, despite both of our marriages and whatnot, her kids, my kids.
That’s a fairly long time for a torch to blaze, considering that I never met her. And I have no idea what she looks (or sounds) like now, but she (especially her first album) filled a specific role in my life, back in those early 20s, and that experience has been much on my mind the last few years. The role of music in my life, especially the music I fell in love with back then, when the brain is somehow most susceptible to music’s permanent imprinting power, has been the focus of my fiction writing for the past two and some years.
Tomorrow I’m publishing my fourth novel, a story about a middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with a singer, a woman half his age he sees in a Brooklyn bar. I promise that it is only autobiographical in that he and I share the same taste in music, and that he and I are both headphone junkies. My feelings for my iPod are profound, and part of the fun in writing the book was thinking about all the power that beautiful little machine (and its clunkier ancestors) have had over me for the past two decades.
I am a music lover, and I intend this week to be a music-lover’s book-blog: thoughts about music, bands I love, books about music, music about books, etc. I hope you’ll chime in on the matter as the week proceeds. Especially as you will be my only human contact here.
{By the way, if music-nostalgia-midlife-obsession isn’t up your alley, you are free to go now, of course, but as a consolation, here’s a short story of mine running one chapter a day this week, and it has nothing to do with music. Visit my friend Dave over at Five Chapters.}
C. Taylor Brown on April 06, 2009 at 10:25 PM
If your book is as interesting as your blog, I'd read it! Congratulations on your book. I like your prose style.
C. Taylor Brown
English Experiment
http://chriswasbrown.blogspot.com
MLMCL on April 07, 2009 at 08:54 AM
Interesting topic for the week, it made my brain start to churn. What bubbles to the top are two favorites:
Body & Soul by Frank Conroy - the music part is about a genius pianist boy and his life and growth with music. Made me want to go practice my scales. Conroy was the head of the Iowa Writers Workshop for years, as well as being a jazz pianist with a Grammy! It's a wonderful book.
Books and rock 'n roll are right up there in my top 5 favorite things, so my other rec has to be High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. Quirky and rock and roll all in one package.
arthur on April 07, 2009 at 11:04 AM
Saw the HiFi movie, of course, as I have a generational weak spot for Cusack. THe Conroy book sounds like a good rec - thank you, mlmcl
and thanks for the kind words, chris brown, scientist without degree.
Brian on April 07, 2009 at 12:31 PM
Your book sounds very interesting. I've always wondered if it was the music I have listened to, through-out my life, that has influenced who I have been at that time... or was it my life influencing the type of music I listened to? During the 80's when hair bands were big, which I couldn't stand, I seemed adrift and unsure of who I was or what I was doing in my life. Of course, being a teen-ager living in a children's home in rural Kentucky during that time may have had something to do with that, as well. In the late 80's and early 90's, I found punk and the local punk scene in Louisville, KY and that influenced a lot of who I was at that time, the people I associated with, and what I did for fun. After joining the Air Force, like you, I discovered the Sundays and the whole Manchester sound. I, actually, got to see Ride play with the Pale Saints at the 930 Club in DC. And later this month, I'm hoping to get to go see My Bloody Valentine play here in Denver.
As time has passed, my life has gone through drastic changes and those changes are usually reflected in song. Did my cynicism on the human race develop from getting into Nine Inch Nails and other industrial bands or did my growing cynicism make me enjoy that type of music more? The same can be said of movies I have seen and books I have read. I can see where a different outlook on life has resulted from movies I have seen and books I have read because I related to the characters. Their responses may have served as some degree of a template for my responses to things that happened to me after seeing/reading a story. Of course, being 40, now, these things seem to have less influence on me than they did when I was still trying to figure out who Brian was and who I wanted him to be.
I look forward to reading your book!
arthur on April 08, 2009 at 08:02 AM
Brian,
I think you're hitting on a very profound part of art - how much we bring to it, how much of ourselves it draws out and how much it actually creates in us. I completely relate to your experience, even if the details are entirely different than my own (except for the Sundays, god bless them).
Arthur
Mari Malcolm on April 09, 2009 at 04:18 PM
Hi Arthur,
Sorry to arrive a little late to the show, but I want to tell you that I just listened to that Sundays song five times in a row, and with every listen I became more 16 again, sitting on my bedroom floor angsting over something stupid I just said or did that probably ruined everything with a boy (and yes, I remember exactly which one). That song is, in itself, a little souvenir of a terrible year, but I still love it. Thanks for the memories.
Mari