Brother from Another Mother

Villa Borghese is a Montreal-based '80s-influenced indie-pop band.
Give 'em a chance; their number one friend on MySpace is Henry Miller. (Yes, that Henry Miller. I didn't know he was on MySpace, either.) Plus, they write the kind of spry, hooky pop that makes you think on the second listen that you've known their stuff for years. It's a little Ben Gibbard-meets-Joe Jackson-meets-Cheap Trick, but there have surely been more horrible unions.

Molly and I are heading up to Montreal this spring so perhaps we'll see them while we're there.

Books I Have Loved (But Never Finished)

I'm not going to lie: I haven't read Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. I have read enough, and am happy enough about my inclinations and biases, that I rarely find myself simply inventing a familiarity with an author or a book. I'm not embarrassed by my complete ignorance of Austen, Eliot, or Hardy--though perhaps I should be--so it never pains me to admit it even to extremely literary friends.

What does sometimes hurt is recommending a book to a friend when I haven't finished it. I don't mean a book that I haven't finished yet; I mean a book that, after repeated serious attempts, I have never finished and may never finish. Perhaps this discomfort is telling me something, but I find that I simply can't help it; I'm an inveterate recommender. Plus, I have read far enough into these books, and enjoyed them enough to that point, that I have no real qualms about suggesting them to other people.

Here are a few:

Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller (yes, that Henry Miller)
Dalva, Jim Harrison
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

If I've recommended these books to you with an evangelist's zeal, well, keep in mind that most evangelists haven't finished the Bible, either. It's pretty tough going in the middle.

Welcome

I can't summon the spirit of ironic vitriol or apocalyptic zeal that animated Henry Miller when he welcomed reader-guests to his Villa Borghese in the first, short, blistering paragraph of The Tropic of Cancer:

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Indeed, my life in Providence, Rhode Island is antithetical to Miller's in Paris. His was itinerant, frustrated, periodically exultant, and lice-infested; mine is domestic, predictable, and, except for the occasional cat-related (and possibly imagined) flea problem, hygienically sound. I invoke Miller, then, not as a kindred spirit but as a model--of urgency, voracity, and authenticity.

Miller finishes his long introduction to Tropic, an introduction that has indulged in the most bitter (or juvenile?) despair ("There is no escape."), with a strident affirmation:

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

The Tropic of Cancer is about various "conquering worms"--time, war, illness, ennui, resignation--but it is, and is also about, the wild song we sing to sustain and inspire us as we go.

I hope that my virtual Villa Borghese will provide the right acoustics for whatever song it is I'm singing.

Thanks for visiting.