Sweet Nonsense: A Love Story About The Chiffons

Note: I actually wrote this some time ago, as the first of a planned series of girl-group essays. That never materialized (turns out nobody wants an essay series about a fairly niche, long past, deliberately non-boundary-pushing musical moment), so I thought I might as well give this one a home.

In 2000 or 2001, a boy lay on a bed in a room in his grandmother's house. I put him there. He was serious, beautiful, and had an obscurely tragic but also beautiful end awaiting him later in the story (train tracks, autumn, dusk). But first, he turned on his grandmother's beat-up old radio, tuned permanently to the oldies station, and heard a song.

He's so fine, oh yeah

Gotta be mine, oh yeah

Sooner or later, oh yeah

I hope it's not later, oh yeah

Like anyone with ears, the serious boy could not escape the perfection of the song's four-part harmonies—and that low, simple lead line free of melisma or flourish, the voice confident not from any sense of bravado but because its beauty was self-evident and the singer had never learned to doubt it. But he found them as empty as the nonsense sounds that kicked the whole thing off, doo lang doo lang doo lang; they seemed to be taking place in another world entirely, cotton-candy-light and devoid of engagement with the serious truths. Some kind of teenage thing, and although he was a teenage boy if you wanted to be annoyingly literal about the whole thing, he was definitely not that kind of teenage boy (despite being in physical description quite a lot like the soft-spoken, wavy-haired object of the Chiffons' affections, come to think of it; we teen girls being predictable, after all). But the 117 seconds of the song granted him a moment of hazy weightlessness that was the closest he would come to levity; it could not save him from the train tracks, the autumn, the dusk.

I wrote this insubstantial tragic dreamboat into existence around age 15. My grandmother too listened to the doo-woppier oldies station when she listened to music at all; she could not brook even jazz, finding it hard to understand why anyone would want to listen to "a bunch of people playing different songs at once." (My protagonist would have certainly liked jazz, and ideally been better schooled in it than I, with my collection in the genre consisting of Bird at the Apollo and a best-of Thelonious Monk disc.) But I did not discover the song in my grandmother's house, though I certainly lay back on my bed at home getting lost in those warm female voices as my protagonist did, especially in moments of soul-flattening misery. And I must have been less successfully armored with seriousness than he, because the voices did not just drift pleasantly by but reached into my chest, and had I needed them to, I was soft enough that they could probably have saved me.

At that time my musical diet consisted mainly of punk (preferably political) and riot grrrl and those two jazz CDs, with a little lesbian folk around the edges. I hadn't heard "He's So Fine" until my better-rounded best friend and bandmate put it on one of her enviably eclectic mix tapes. I hadn't heard anything like it at all before. In the middle of The Clash and the Germs and Parliament Funkadelic and probably a few joke songs from Sifl and Olly, there opened up this impossibly brief window of consuming sweetness.

I barely understood what it was—I may not have even known the name of the group, or when it was made, at first—but I copied it onto every mix tape I made for several years. It didn't occur to me that there would be more where that came from. The internet was not yet an obvious source of music; one didn't necessarily expect that even current bands would have websites, much less one from 1962. It wasn't until I got to college that I began to accumulate some context for that luminous single. Eventually I used some Christmas money to order the remarkable One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost & Found Rhino box set. When it arrived I sat down in my dorm room and popped the first CD in, and was promptly overwhelmed to the point of welling eyes and helpless gaping grin. I hadn't been aware that there had once been all these people dedicated to what seemed the pure pursuit of the most perfect sonic beauty, weaving the richest-sounding pop arrangements I'd ever heard (strings, chimes, Latin horns!) around the variously warm, shy, bratty, bracing voices of very young women.

There is a sense in which I seem to have aged in reverse between the ages of, say, 14 and 21. Around the time I heard my first Chiffons song I was beginning to make a project of not wanting everything I couldn't have. The emotionally elegant silhouettes who drifted through my early fictions were a little better at it than I was; they shook off love and family and camaraderie quite lightly, just the opposite of these singing girls with their two or three ever-present friends in harmony, their advice-giving parents, their successes in love or their heartbreaks so gladly shared. Even if I'd had more than the one song, I wouldn't have been quite ready for their unembarrassed youth.

Instead I formed an all-girl punk band whose lyrical content comprised half sociopolitical ranting and half Dadaist goofiness—absolutely no room for love songs or other girly stuff. We were already not taken seriously as things stood. Not that we should have been, possessing as little sense of songcraft and basic musicianship as we did, but it wasn't just that; it was the ostensibly progressive dudes who let slip that they felt weird about booking more than one female-fronted act on a bill, it was an older female friend saying that she just didn't like the way women's voices sounded. And so on.

Girl groups around that time called to mind Destiny's Child, or the Spice Girls, whom I'd loved along with everyone in sixth grade.

"They're not really musicians," my mother's boyfriend explained to me one day. I'd just gotten a cassingle of "2 Become 1" from a friend for my birthday—my least favorite of their hits, what with all the uncomfortable sexiness, but I clutched it proudly as a token of admission to a cultural realm where even the popular girls hung out. "They don't play any instruments. All they do is dance around and sing." I think I just nodded. His guitars filled a corner of our living room and his classic-rock cover band sometimes practiced in our basement at volumes so eardrum-battering that I escaped to the roof of the garage. I hated him and would have given up my entire tape collection for him to teach me how to shred and use what he called the wang bar. Instead he bought a guitar for my uninterested little sister, which I appropriated the moment she abandoned it.

This sense of rock-dude authenticity was just in the air if you saw yourself as someone who cared about music. So I, too, expressed disdain for women who did nothing but stand there and sing; at least I wrote songs, and clawed at a few chords between shouted lyrics. I wasn't good, but I could be real, sort of, and sing about things that mattered.

I suppose you could see it as a subconscious counter-rebellion, a few years later, when I sat rocked open by the voices of an idealized, pastel-toned mainstream girl culture four decades gone. I was certainly delighted when I learned that authentic rock-guy George Harrison had unknowingly absorbed "He's So Fine" and rewritten it as "My Sweet Lord"—and been successfully sued for plagiarism. (Not that I have anything against George Harrison; the pleasure was in the principle of the thing.) But in fact the girl-group sound was perhaps the first body of music I loved that didn't come packaged with an argument for its worth. It would not help me better engage with my peers; it would not help me understand the ineffable musical truths of a Bach or a Beethoven; it was not saying anything of political importance; it would not connect me to a venerable American tradition. Its beauty was superfluous in a way that, had it occurred in nature, would have seemed evidence for the loving generosity of divine creation; you could see why Phil Spector's phrase "little symphonies for the kids" needn't have been exactly dismissive. Yes, the songs were there to make money—as the rough and careless treatment of the Chiffons and so many other girl groups by their labels would attest—but they were much better than they had to be for commercial purposes, if never five seconds longer.

For instance, take Judy Craig's voice shifting from playful to plaintive in the space of two bars, the backup girls so blocking out the session players' on-the-clock plunking that it takes me a few listens in a row to even register that they're doing something back there. How to put it into words, what these inconsequential sounds do to me? Doo lang, doo lang, doo lang.

Borderlands: In the Far North Air

A storm's been lazily roaming the sky all evening, dropping rain any which way as it becomes too heavy. Just now, though, came a crack as loud as any I've heard in my life, the kind that sends sound rolling away a long time down the curved edges of the earth. Now rain drives up to the building to stay. Neighbors' voices click on around the courtyard.

Earlier I took my dinner at the Ethiopian coffee shop across the street, and when I came out a man was standing in the bus shelter, playing jazz trumpet out into that moment's downpour. It was a too-perfect opening credit sequence to some film noir, and the strip snapped shortly as the player began to righteously rail against some enemy, real or imagined. (There may, after all, have been some heckler out there in the shadows, obscured from me by the rain.) Still, he started up again.

In Rogers Park we often get a little music with our weather. Some confluence of factors turns these blocks into a sort of magic-realist realm—the old hippies, the new students, the park and lake. A few weeks ago Heather and the dog and I went out into the water on a still hot night. The moon was a piece of gleaming alien currency casting a pink path across the deep; I followed drifting over sandbar after sandbar as in a dream one dips between lesser and higher states of consciousness and control.

In my childhood I invented precisely one ghost story. It was simple in its outlines, was exquisitely sad, and allowed me to show off my singing voice quite well, I thought. A girl whose name I recall as Marigold lived in a house on the shore. She woke up early one morning to the sounds of beautiful singing that, had she been a real girl, she would have found annoyingly derivative of the music in The Little Mermaid. The house was large and weathered and white; the girl rose from her bed, closed the screen door softly behind her, and went across the sand seeking its source. She reached the ocean's lapping edge, but the song was still out there somewhere ahead. With eyes alert and placid brow, she began to wade in as the song kept sounding. And she followed and followed, never to be seen again.

I was not interested at the time in Marigold's salvation, but two decades later as I resurfaced as far from shore as I could walk (I don't swim well), I found that a suitable hero had appeared on the scene. He had climbed the lifeguard's white wooden watchtower and was playing a ukelele. He didn't seem to be attached to any of the few small groups on the sand; he was simply there for our safety, luring us back to the human shore with scrappy bits of song.

Another night a young man with an acoustic guitar strapped to his chest stomped and sang through the park all alone; the dog crouched and tucked her tail as if fear had jumped onto her back directly from a dark branch. And just after our move here, in daylight, a group of people in African dress sang and drummed in a wide semicircle, apparently just practicing in the bright air. More regularly, there are the Hare Krishnas, parading and chanting and shaking things; almost despite myself I like the sound, and return the smiles of the soft-eyed young women who often lead them. (They had a large festival a month or two ago and as we walked through the park an occasional emissary would come up and ask whether we'd like to join in some chanting, as if they were offering us a newspaper or a sample of a new kind of gum.) And the coffee shop on the corner holds an open mic night every week. The music is sometimes exciting, even if I suspect I'd roll my eyes at the words; I sometimes think of attending out of nostalgia, for I myself, oddly, hosted an open mic on the patio of an Ethiopian restaurant as a teenager.

If you are inclined to look on your life cinematically, this is a landscape that all but demands regular epiphanies. Yet this summer I've felt quieted and slowed, oppressed by a sort of humidity that only sometimes coincides with the weather. Largely the effect of uninteresting life complications and a heavy workload, I suppose. But maybe the vibrations of all these odd moments are finally synching up and, with the gusty early dark we're getting now, are starting to shake things loose. 

I felt that way, certainly, on Thursday night, pushing toward home from the southwest where I'd met Peter and struck up a plan to put our band back together after a dormant summer. Some minutes into my ride the clouds broke and cold rain flooded the streets, drawing astonished laughter out of me and then drowning it in the deluge. 

Eventually I turned onto Bryn Mawr and saw another cyclist ahead of me; he must, however, have actively decided to go out in the storm, because he was clad in one of those cheap, clear plastic ponchos. We were the only ones out in that quiet northwest corner of the city, and as I trailed him through the dark he was transformed every fifty feet or so by streetlights. As they caught his poncho, he he was turned briefly into a wild bag of lightning, billowing down the road. The plastic crackled in the wind as the rain began to fade. As long as our respective routes allowed I modulated my pace to follow him, a beacon of obscure but hopeful import.

Hard Listening: Patti Smith, "Horses"

When I summon some of my most intense teenage memories, a primary sensation is of school bus seats. Are they the same everywhere? The color a sort of horseshit green. The texture a zombie version of leather, a third-generation imitation that isn't even vaguely trying for authenticity. Holes in some places letting the white cloth backing and then the yellow foam show through. And always cool and clammy to the touch, no matter how many kids were packed inside. Your cheek lay resting on the back — if you were motion-sick or queasily nursing an impossible crush or just very, very tired — and the side of your forehead made a little live circle on the frosty window glass, which rattled and buzzed in its frame. Inhaling, you smelled old foam and dust, infinitely stale. I was on buses a lot in middle school and high school, not just to and from school but often across the state to theater competitions. It cannot always have been dark on these trips, but the essential atmosphere is always the darkness of evenings in winter or early spring.

Claire and I are sitting toward the back. We hold a clunky Discman delicately to avoid skips, and we share a pair of headphones — earbuds not yet being ubiquitous, we simply turn the volume high and lean into the speakers, plugging our outside ears with our hands (and even then, the sounds of the bus and the theater kids around us make it a little hard to hear. We are working from memory; both of us have spun this record countless times).

Singing is a classic ritual of the drama bus ride home. It's a group thing, even if the social butterflies with the big musical-theater voices lead the way. The songs I like don't lend themselves to this campfire approach, but I love singing in a car anyway. In Kelly's minivan late at night on the way home from a show or a party in the middle of nowhere, my friends and I belt out our songs. Sleater-Kinney, the Clash, dozens of punk and ska bands on the mix tapes that circulate endlessly between us and whose sequence of songs we have memorized as well as any actual album, the next track keyed up in the back of our throats in the static pause before it begins. I'm too self-conscious to join the theater-kid sing-alongs. I don't have the talent to sing nicely without a lot of apparent effort or the self-assurance to belt it out without caring how I sound. At Girl Scout camp one year I overheard a girl complaining that I was "showing off my voice" when I sang along with everyone else -- showing off the voice that had frequently been judged not-good-enough in other contexts. It's hard to know how to use an in-between voice like that, especially when you're 16.

So Claire and I sit and strain to hear this album. There is a lot of silence in it anyway, a lot of space. A sense of an actual room. The opening chords come softly, a low church-bell cadence on piano. We just barely pick them up. I'm not sure when we start singing, but by the time we reach the chorus we are wild and audible, breathless with the excitement of football fans cheering on their underdog team.

"That's not how the song goes," notes one of our friends, a straight-laced theater boy a row back. He thinks we are listening to and fucking up Van Morrison's "Gloria." It takes us a minute to even understand what he means. For us, this is the primary text. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine -- what use could the world even have anymore for a version that did not begin this way?

As Claire and I sang along with this album, we'd sometimes stop and look at each other and crack up with delighted disbelief at just how crazy she was being. There are words we've never managed to figure out. And the name of the band is . . . Twistelette? Twist-to-the-left? Take me up, up, to the belly of the ship, she stretches out over about a dozen bars, and later ends the song: We . . . like . . . bird . . . land. This almost Sesame Street thing. But there's a looseness to the album that makes the hippie weirdness work; it sounds like it all could be ecstatically spontaneous, and doesn't land with the thud of solemn calculation. And it doesn't interfere with the moments of aching poetry.

Or of forthright sex appeal. I knew even then that Patti Smith was not actually gay, I think (having almost certainly researched this online as soon as I brought the record home), but the female-directed sense of sex in the record felt convincing — probably because rooted in the power of the singer rather than in the object of desire. That strut a consummation in itself. Eileen Myles has written a little about being a young woman wanting to be a boy — not to be male, but to occupy the same cultural space that a boy does. To be independent and have adventures and make mischief selfishly and forgivably. To be, automatically, a protagonist. And there's a similar, wholly untortured sense of boyishness to Patti Smith, not engaging femininity in battle but just ignoring its expectations outright. In fact it took me a while to identify as a feminist when I was young, not because I disagreed with any feminist principles but because I had a hard time feeling that being female was all that essential to my character; I was reluctant to play up that accident of my birth too much.

So this skinny figure with a ratty halo of hair, an Oxford shirt, and a jacket jauntily slung over her shoulder staring out of the white album cover with utter self-possession -- androgynous but not sexless -- resonated with me. Horses (and Smith's book Just Kids, which I've just read) has plenty of affection for women, but it's mostly full of boys. She's watching them, drifting in and out of their stories as she tells them, merging with them in places. In "Land," there is a boy, on a beach or on a bed or in the hallway of a school, dying or being violently transformed; she arrives finally on the scene and touches his throat, his hands, his brain itself before all boundaries are erased, stuttering out with him: I, I, that's how I, that's how I, I died.

Few songs provide so clear a template for transformation through rock and roll. There's this scene of high-school violence and hysteria, of self-destruction undertaken not as an act of enmity toward the self but as the defiant answer to the angel who looks down at him and says, Oh pretty boy, can't you show me nothin' but surrender? (As she shouts sublimely on the CD's bonus track, a cover of "My Generation:" I don't need their fuckin' shit! Hope I die because of it!) Then this moment of perfect stillness -- he felt himself disintegrating, there was nothing happening at all / and go inside the black tube -- before a little window opens in the blackness onto a street scene, and there's the "sweet young thing" we met in "Gloria." Finally, in the last seconds:

In the sheets

there was a man

dancing

around

to the simple

rock and roll

song

I like and listen to "Elegie," which follows, but this has always felt like the end of the album for me. When I wasn't listening to it on a bus, I'd listen by putting on my headphones and lying down on my bed in the dark, letting myself be cleansed by this ocean of a record. At the end of "Land," Patti converges with her beautiful doomed boy and then there I am too, on my own sheets, twitching a foot to the rhythm, having drowned whatever ugly adolescent commotion had made me retreat to my room and now ready to make something, to take on that rock and roll strut for myself. Less alone in my wedge of Venn-diagram overlap between poetry and punk rock, the Watusi and Rimbaud.

Because it so demands my concentration and involvement, I don't listen to Horses much anymore, but when I do I often think I may be able to hear it anew after a gap of however many months. It always turns out that it is too deeply embedded in me to come at fresh; it's like trying to frighten yourself by shouting "Boo!" In a silent room I can reproduce every intonation, every stab of guitar in my head. I don't think I've ever put a song from Horses on a mix tape -- maybe "Gloria" or "My Generation." They're less songs than weird spastic meditation exercises, existing beyond the purposes of appreciation and built for total catharsis. It's almost not necessary for me to listen to the album anymore. The squeak in her voice, when she tosses it up and catches it midair — I've stolen that for my own use for years, and "Gloria" thunders through my head whenever I need to feel okay about going onstage. In smaller moments, too, the album is with me. Riding in a car at night, looking out over fields: It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars, 'cause when he looked up they started to slip. That cold starlight made warm has always gotten me. This is a record that shapes and purifies the darkness, using wild noise to engineer a peaceful vehicle through the night.

First Strangers

People, when they meet me, do not typically suspect that I am a performer. Which is all for the best, really — what a pretentious and demanding thing to be, a performer.

You feel that way, at least, before you have become famous. If you are famous it will probably be accepted that you are giving a gift to or at least making a fair exchange with the audience by performing—performing for them. Before you are famous, you may feel continually that you are performing at them, taking advantage of their hospitality. Stop showing off, sing the ghosts of the schoolyard if you are prodigiously talented; sit down and shut up, if you are anything less.

This is the smalltime music-scene space I currently inhabit, and maybe always will. And maybe this space is not so small, and its boundaries will keep stretching even if I should ever approach them: the current omnipresence of the Kickstarter model for arts funding means that it is expanding, this band-as-charity, consumer-as-philanthropist feeling.

But at first we are all performing for each other. There is this economy of showing up. Joseph was talking about a pair of friends outside of the music scene who have attended a number of our shows. "It's too bad," he said. "I wish they had something I could go support." According to this system of values, attending someone's show both is a virtuous thing to do and may get you another body in the audience when you perform again. Pleasure may or may not factor into your decision to attend.

When I get onstage, I am trying to convince myself that it does (even if, the moment I step offstage, I feel that I have probably wasted everyone's time and goodwill and ought to quit). "People pay to see others believe in themselves," said Kim Gordon, writing in Artforum in 1983. As a concertgoer, I know this is certainly true. So I try to do that (though, to be a little more precise, it's really only about believing in myself as an acceptable vehicle for the music we are making. Somebody has to do the job. Here I am).

People are sometimes surprised to learn that I am a performer because I am not at all outgoing. Given the instructions to work a room I would get about as far as the nearest emergency exit. My specialties are the silent nod, the demurely appreciative laugh, the gaze inadvertently darting past my interlocutor's shoulders to find an escape route. This is with people I like reasonably well; I have caught my panicked brain automatically generating excuses to get out of a chance conversation with someone whom I'd positively hoped to get to know, musing on the matter in my solitude. And it is not just that, say, I love music so deeply as to overcome my shyness, because I was an actress in high school; I competed in poetry slams; I volunteered for every class and camp skit; I still make the occasional no-budget video with friends and post it online. It is an actual drive.

I won't claim I'm immune to the desire for praise and attention, but I think being shy has itself fueled my taste for performing. If a social butterfly wants to spend time with a bunch of people and feel the fact of her existence connect with theirs, she can go to a bar or a party and do just fine. Performing is a way to be in a room full of people without the burden of social interaction. There is a script—if not literally, then a set list at least, or a clear task at hand. There is no need to justify your presence in the room. The art you perform may make that argument or fail to, but it does not tax your interpersonal skills. (I used to try to develop a bit of stage banter before going on, but more and more I feel that it is not what I'm up there to do, and leave it to chance or cut it out entirely. For the same reason, I wouldn't stand up there and tap dance.) Likewise, I can't really handle elevator conversation at work but have no problem leading a meeting or speaking up in brainstorming sessions. The role assigned to me then is clear, and any anxiety I may have upon getting into costume is simple stage fright, nothing more serious or existential.

This month marks our third anniversary as a performing band, and it's only now, this past season, that everything is beginning to consistently feel right. It still takes me a few songs to find my sea legs. (At the gig of my dreams, we'd be playing for about fifteen minutes before they'd open the doors to let everyone in.) But after that it's possible to relax a little, almost have fun. I don't mean that it feels natural yet, or easy, but I can trust that the music will be there for my voice and my fingers to fall into. I'm one of many parts moving in a machine, not frantically and shakily building the machine in midair as I play. (None of us is an improviser at heart, I need hardly say.)

We've also started to notice a (small) number of people who listen to our music not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because, astonishingly enough, they like it. I am embarrassed to say what a triumph this seems. But we have made a long investment in something entirely untested, and though we've enjoyed the process enough not to count it as a loss no matter what, these strangers we've reached feel like the first true returns.

When celebrities gush about how they're "grateful to their fans," the instinct is to roll one's eyes, but for all I know it could be sincerely uttered every time. The kindness of strangers upon which we depend consists in their ability to make us believe that they are not doing us a kindness at all; our occasional doubts are accompanied by a rush of gratitude. Every person who turns to your art for pleasure advances the process of your redemption for having dared to perform, your transformation from someone who demands and demands into someone with something to give.

Transformative Junk

Mediocre things can change our lives.  When I think about the cultural products that have shaped me I can pick out a handful of The Great Works that have been truly formative, but a lot of what impressed itself upon my impressionable youth is stuff that I now find a little embarrassing, or ought to if I've got as much good taste as I tend to assume.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I remember being 16 and sitting at the coffee shop with a friend of mine who always seemed to have some terrible older boyfriend and the newest of her terrible older boyfriends. The conversation turned to books. The terrible boyfriend must have read a few, I suppose, but apparently not as many as he'd absolved himself from reading by declaring their very existence pretentious. In the latter category was Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"I dunno, I see what you mean," I said. I knew already that I didn't like or respect this guy, but I found it almost physiologically necessary to defend every nicety of my vision of the world in those days. (Today I'd more likely roll my eyes and find a way to leave the table, tired coward.) "But on the other hand, I have to admit that there's a sense in which it changed my life."

I started to go on, but then something shifted in me or in the air or just in the snake-faced dude's expression, and made it clear that no further unpacking of this statement would be possible. One could nearly see the shiver of superiority traveling from over-gelled hair to belted jeans. He may still be drawing energy from it today.

So here is what I meant by that. I was not making a claim of value; I was simply stating a fact about the course of my existence.

I don't really know how I began to find adult literature to read. When I was probably 11 or 12 I began sidling from the YA section of the library over to the tall, dense adult stacks, not without a guilty glance to see whether my mom was following. (I was always scared to betray any change in myself as a child, perhaps supposing that my family had only just learned to love me and would have to start the whole process over again if they knew who I'd become. My heart raced when I had to tell my mom I wanted to start shaving my legs, or had gotten my period, or had decided to stop eating animal products; I never confessed to dating anyone until I was well into college. Even now when I am out in the world I feel compelled to retain my state of motion as long as anyone can see me, will keep running until my thighs burn rather than draw attention to myself by stopping.) So I know roughly when this happened, but I don't know on what principle I began making my selections and started building the chain of references and associations that would propel me through my phantom syllabus. My family mostly did not read books, and my friends who read were in thrall to fantasy and sci-fi, so however I chose, I did it on my own. And somehow, the year I was 14, I got to On the Road.

Before that, reading for me was mainly—to borrow a phrase from Michael Chabon, an author from whom I can remember no other sentences—"a kind of pyromania." I made my library selections in bulk. Words were a commodity I took entirely for granted, to be consumed as thoughtlessly as water from a drinking fountain in the hallway at school. You pass by and you partake; you are always at least a little bit thirsty, after all. Reading was the default state, and still is, as I cannot sit down to eat alone, relax on a park bench, or ride a bus without my nicotine-strong craving for something to read beginning to twitch. Or to use another metaphor it was a sort of steady job, one I loved but without the ambition and intentionality to make it a career.

I read On the Road and the idea that there were such things as literary style and literary culture began to take shape. In place of lucid and reasonable prose there was this torrent of impassioned chatter among people for whom writing and the living that fed it were holy duties. The rush of it all pulled me under within pages. When I had to return it to the library I put it on my Christmas list—which must have been on the assumption that my dad and stepmother would never bother cracking open a book that wasn't, say, obviously obscene, because just flipping through it again now I recall that there are whores and sex parties and drugs on every other page.

I think I had not yet found many models for interesting adult lives. I was reminiscing yesterday to Heather about the time when, at age five, I dismayed my mother by musing that the job I'd most like to have when I grew up was rounding up the shopping carts from the enormous parking lot at Meijer. My ideas about my future had all been in areas where you could essentially keep being a lone child hobbyist—Olympic figure skating, or painting, maybe. This book made me yearn for a sense of community, of collaboration, to become one of "the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing" and recruit others to my cause. (This made me even more obnoxious, definitely, obviously, but it also made me renounce the habit of boredom, which I've kept off my trail for the most part ever since.) It was my first brush with any kind of counterculture, and I wanted some.

It turned out that no one wanted to start the next Beat Generation with me (and I think that this is, pathetically, how I actually formulated the problem to myself), but I did other things. I began to see value in the very act of taking intense interest, in cultivating the power of enchanted attention to the world. So I took up languages and banged my head against complex physics and mathematics. I burned my way through Beat lit and let it lead me to other poems, other novels, bodies of cultural criticism, philosophers. Eventually I found other flesh-and-blood writers, in the poetry slam scene and in an arts-center writers' group that turned out to be one of the most important institutions of my teenage years. Possible paths through the adult world began to light up.

Probably all of my cultural pursuits have had similarly inauspicious beginnings. The first time I really noticed the electric guitar was some session player's corny solo on a Natalie Merchant tape; though I've just completed a country guitar class in which we made our way through Buck and Hank and Merle and Johnny, my first country music loves were Garth and Shania. The first mosh pits I dove into were at terrible third-wave ska concerts. All junk of various grades, created and loved in absolute earnest.

I think some people have been better at rolling along with the popular culture of their times, so that they're pushed out of the music and books and movies they enjoyed very naturally as the culture moves on. Then, when they're a little older it is easy to laugh affectionately at those vintage selves. It's okay to keep them around, framed in warm irony and nostalgia, and compare them without much embarrassment to the collections of other people of your generation (though a little embarrassment usually must be feigned for decorum's sake).

There was something more deliberate and therefore more culpable about the way I hacked my path through culture. I really chose these things. Which is maybe why I felt compelled, at even a couple of years' distance from her, to put up a bit of a defense of the absurd kid dreaming of roaring across the country taking Benzedrine and shouting about angels. She is to me as an eccentric and overbearing aunt from whom I have received a vast inheritance. She is no longer with us, but I must not be an ingrate even so, nor despise the lowbrow means by which she made her fortune.