As suggested, I actually do sneak a book into the Guns n’ Roses concert two weeks ago, against the possibility that Axl may start the show super-late or something and keep us all sitting around for hours with nothing to do. I select Laura’s beat-up, used, pocket-sized paperback of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. (I haven’t read it, though I have had lengthy portions of it read aloud to me years ago by a highly amused university roommate, in between his spasmodic fits of mirth.) I slip it into my jacket’s ripped inside pocket until the book is 100% concealed within the jacket’s lining. However, at the show, although there is a bit of down-time between acts — the Suicide Girls’ burlesque striptease, Sebastian Bach & Friends, and GNR — they all start pretty much on time. The book stays inside my jacket for the whole show.

Postscript: I discover afterward that Vonnegut’s illustrations on pages 24, 184, 71, and 49 (shown above) do a pretty good job of representing the concert bill.

Forget forgetting a book. What if you’ve read a book and remember it fine but just don’t understand it? Is that the same as never having read it? I remember a lot of books I read in college that I wouldn’t say I really read. Out of college too.

Today: I open Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books to this:

19. I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

which makes me think of 1) this bit from Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross that I recall and mull over (and attempt to recite) last Thursday evening, on a full stomach, while washing dishes with my brother after Thanksgiving dinner at our parents’ place:

A great meal fades in reflection. Everything else gains. You know why? ‘Cause it’s only food. This shit we eat, it keeps us going. But it’s only food.

and 2) this thing Tom Stoppard says in the recent NY Times Magazine’s profile of him:

One of the questions that haunts me — it’s a question for philosophers and brain science — is, if you’ve forgotten a book, is that the same as never having read it?

A raincloud of tantruming toddlers and aggressively colicky carry-on infants now seems to follow me around no matter what airport I’m in or what airplane I’m on. Horrid little brat-shaped air-raid sirens shrieking their germs into the bored faces of their parents, who are lucky enough to be able to tune the sound out. Something about contemporary aviation must be extra upsetting to the 21st-century young — perhaps the TSA’s ramped-up X-rays are agitating their Nerfy fontanelles. (Nice baby.) Last week’s quotations involving DFW’s and Z. Smith’s comments on M. Amis remind me of what Smith told Lorrie Moore regarding DFW: I want to meet him so much it’s giving me a hernia. Raincloud notwithstanding, on Black Friday I make respectable if not overly substantial progress through Amis’s Money and Elizabeth Crane’s All This Heavenly Glory while in the airports and on the planes, en route back home to the proper cold and proper dismal. In Money I hit the line “Selina and I get on like a house on fire” only shortly after noting that Thisbe Nissen’s blurb on the back cover of Heavenly Glory begins: “Elizabeth Crane writes like a house on fire!” (Which is true.)

Zadie Smith, on meeting Martin Amis at Ian McEwan’s wedding party while she was at university:

I was so delighted to be there and yet so rigid with fear I could barely enjoy it. It was a party full of people from my bookshelves come to life. I can recall being introduced to Martin Amis (whom I was busy plagiarizing at the time) and being shown his new baby. Meeting Martin Amis for me, at nineteen, was like meeting God. I said: “Nice baby.” This line, like all conversation, could not be rewritten. I remember feeling, like Joseph K., that the shame of it would outlive me.

The tennis scene near the beginning of Amis’s Money reminds me of this classic exchange from a 1999 Time Out New York interview with David Foster Wallace (and yes, I posted this quote a few years ago, but I think it warrants an encore):

TONY: We know from your essays that you played a fair amount of tennis in high school. The other literary guy who writes about tennis a lot is Martin Amis. What about a fantasy matchup — you and Amis? Any thoughts?

DFW: Now, this is going to sound really arrogant, but I happen to know that Martin Amis smokes, like, two or three packs of unfiltereds a day, which means I’d be shocked if I couldn’t beat him — only because I know that when I smoked two or three packs of cigarettes a day, I couldn’t even fuckin’ finish a set. So unless Martin Amis is some kind of pulmonary mutant, I’m pretty sure I could beat Martin Amis.

Today I am in Florida, where it is cold and gray and dismal outside — I feel right at home. Though it lacks Hamilton’s urban patina of decay and trashy, sooty gloom. Plus of course the cold here is a great many degrees less cold than the cold there. An apropos bit of weather-writing from Martin Amis’s Money that I managed to read on my flight yesterday despite the surrounding choir of howling infants:

With a flinch I looked up: still no weather. Sometimes, when the sky is as grey as this — impeccably grey, a denial, really, of the very concept of colour — and the stooped millions lift their heads, it’s hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more than the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.

The Guns n’ Roses show is relentlessly, athletically entertaining, a violent ear-splitting spectacle of arena-rock histrionics, and an endurance test for band, audience, and staff, lasting as it does from 11:30pm until 2 in the morning. (Plus opening acts beginning at 8pm.) The 2006 incarnation of W. Axl Rose is a horrifyingly waxen Botoxed cornrowed middle-aged upholstered gargoyle who must be part cyborg to be in such great physical shape. And he is machinelike in more ways than one. This is the first GNR show I’ve been to, but Axl’s vocal performance — down to the timing and inflections and movements and lyrical embellishments — looks and sounds identical to every audio and video recording I’ve ever heard of GNR’s past shows. There are onstage teleprompters scrolling up each song’s lyrics, something he’s been using since the 90s. The internet informs me that their setlist on this tour varies only minimally. The one bit of spontaneity Axl exhibits is to insult the crowd — “Don’t play too loud,” he cautions guitarist Ron (“Bumblefoot”) Thal before leaving the stage for Thal’s guitar solo, “these people on the sides are trying to take a nap.”

The remark is prima-donna assholishness as usual for Axl, but he’s right: most of the people up in the seats on either side of the stage are sitting down through like the whole show. With the exception of the roof-raising acclamation the crowd gives the Trailer Park Boys, this Toronto crowd is without a doubt the deadest audience I’ve ever seen at a rock show. I am up in the seats myself, and it’s just me and a scattered assortment of other people who remain standing the whole time. We stand and do our best to cheer and scream and sing and do the rock-show thing while surrounded by these motionless, silent sitters. Is everyone too tired? Is everyone too old? Is everyone so wealthy that they’re fine with coughing up $100 for a rock show ticket and then resting on their asses the whole time? Is it because the venue stops selling beer before the opening acts are over, and so these poor sad souls have to suffer through their precision rock n’ roll entertainment in a totally sober state?

Whatever the case, the crowd’s deadness is contagious. Not even the band’s maniacal energy, the light show, the pyrotechnic effects, the nostalgic sing-alongs, the mere fact of seeing a legendary lunatic in person, etc. — none of it can prevent the show from feeling strangely boring to me. Maybe this 2006 version of GNR really is boring. Or maybe it’s my fault for not buying a fucking floor ticket.

This week I have been reflecting on the fact that I’ve now been living in Canada for a year, as of last Saturday. For the most part I keep thinking no big deal, it pretty much feels the same as the other places I’ve lived, neither better nor worse, ho hum, etc.

However: Last night I get a profound reminder that I am but a visitor here. I am at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, for the Guns n’ Roses show. The arena is not quite sold out, but very nearly so: something like eighteen- or nineteen-thousand of us cock-rock losers. Onstage is opening act Sebastian Bach, former lead singer of Skid Row, and a Toronto area native, as he reminds the crowd about a thousand times. (“Toronto, you’re responsible for Sebastian Bach!” he roars. “It’s all your fault!”) He is putting on a decent show but the crowd is kind of lukewarm, standing still or sitting down. Then, in the middle of a song, the band stops and Bach says it’s time to introduce some special guests: the Trailer Park Boys. To my surprise and brain-addling bewilderment, as these three yokelish dudes walk out onto the stage, the entire goddamned arena around me leaps to their feet and goes absolutely berserk.

If you do not live in Canada, chances are you have never heard of the Trailer Park Boys. What this is is a recent Canadian television show that, I’m reliably informed, is now one of the most unbelievably popular things in Canada ever. I know next to nothing about it and have never seen the show, and the only reason I know about it now is that I saw a preview for the then-forthcoming Trailer Park Boys movie a few months ago and had no earthly idea what the hell I was looking at. I had to ask Laura, and then I had to ask the internet. (The Wikipedia entry will enlighten you.)

(I’m also informed that few things enrage Canadians more than being reminded that Americans are pretty much ignorant of, and could usually care less about, Canadian pop culture. To all Canadians reading this who I do not live with, I apologize.)

So the Trailer Park Boys are down there on the stage, calmly basking in this mighty Torontonian ovation. The myopic retarded-looking one then starts strumming a guitar and singing some song that I assume is from the show, since everyone except me ebulliently joins in with it. I am dumbstruck and freaked out. If it is not the goddamnedest thing I ever saw, it is way up there among the goddamnedests. All I can do is stare at this arena of crazed Canadians and the unknown-to-me celebrities they’re cheering and say repeatedly to myself: I am definitely in a foreign land.

So much great writing and great music I only manage to stumble across by accident. Whereas I’m not very good at actively unearthing such stuff. Casting a wide net and so forth. Can one learn to be accident-prone? Can one take steps to stumble more? Can one cultivate serendipity, harness happenstance? How to seek out more of what is best discovered unlooked-for? Perhaps always be looking for the wrong thing.

My border-crossing Amazon.com order of five weeks ago evidently gets lost in the mail and so they kindly send me a replacement order, expedited shipping, at no extra charge. (Actually they end up over-refunding me five dollars.) Among the books I’ve ordered is The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. From Paul Auster’s introduction:

Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years … a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying.

The book opens with this notebook entry of Joubert’s, tentatively dated 1783:

The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your door unlocked, and never to know where you will be sleeping at night.

“Democrats Seize Control of House, Garden, Carport, Backyard Gazebo.”

Election schmelection; I don’t even live in that country anymore. I look forward to a whole new shower of columnists and pundits trotting out the old standby from Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”

Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to note a successful (and inadvertent) Google Bomb, while it lasts: My Penguin Modern Classics obsession has hit Google’s top ten results for “Penguin Modern Classics”. Bloggers, my hat is off to you.

Then again, an author such as Gide, who published over fifty books in his lifetime — novels, essays, plays, poetry, memoirs, journals, etc. — should perhaps not be taken as too much of an authority on the utility of unprolificness.