The Haunted Library

by Jean Roberta

Sitting in the room my spouse & I call “the library,” where our computer is surrounded by bookshelves, I see a hodge-podge of books, loosely organized into different categories so we can find them. (This doesn’t always work – read on.)

In what I think of as the spooky/spiritual section on the highest shelf to my left, I see a very thick paperback. The title on the spine is Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond by Hans Holzer. This book is packed with stories and photos from the files of one of the world’s foremost ghosthunters, and it threatens to suck me in again. The last time I read it, I had to stop before reaching the end so I could keep up with my day job.

Next to this is The Complete Prophesies of Nostradamus, several books on modern witchcraft, including three by Starhawk (one bought directly from her when she came to my town on tour), The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a gift from one of my stepsons), a hardcover Bible (originally bought for my six-year-old daughter, in which she drew a picture of a smiling man with a beard, named “God”) and a small, hardcover English translation of The Koran. Strangely enough, this last book is the only one in this section that I inherited from my parents after their deaths in 2009. They were agnostics who never showed a great interest in religion in any form. However, they probably thought (as I do) that as academics, they needed to have some knowledge of the holy books of the world’s major religions.

This library is very eclectic because many of the books were given to me, inherited, or they belonged to my spouse before we joined households. In some sense, it is full of ghosts that constantly threaten to pull me away from more pressing concerns.

After my parents passed away, I let my two sisters take the bulk of their books, since I already had enough of my own. Several of our mother’s books of literary criticism are now neatly arranged on the shelves in my office at the university. A few of our father’s books on political theory are still in the home library, including two by John Raulston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization. I think my father enjoyed Saul’s skeptical look at the long-term political effects of Enlightenment idealism.

I can still hear a conversation I had with my dad when he was still an Economics professor and I was still reeling from four hard months as a student English teacher in a local high school. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked him, “that the idea of universal education is a well-intended 18th-century plan that has never worked as it was intended to?”

“Exactly!” he replied with delight.

“But before you propose to tear down the public school system,” I said, “I’d like to know what you would put in its place.” He just laughed.

One of the books I inherited from my father is one that Spouse and I gave to him for Christmas in 2000. It’s An Illustrated History of the Royal Navy by John Winton, in association with the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England. It’s a big coffee-table book full of full-colour paintings, engravings and photos of ships of the British Empire and the men who sailed them. I knew my dad would like this. Ever since he joined the U.S. Navy as a young man in the Second World War, he loved boats of all kinds.

In the fiction section, I have a well-preserved hardcover copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1942 with detailed maps of battle zones and a foreword by eminent critic Clifton Fadiman, who points out the parallels between the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century and the “current European conflict.” I inherited this book from a woman I never knew: a locally-famous hairdresser who had recently passed away, and whose family invited people she knew (including a male hairdresser friend of mine) to browse her shelves and take whatever they wanted. A grown son of the deceased woman assured me that I was welcome to take whatever was left, since the family had already made their choices.

Among Spouse’s books are several about John Lennon and Che Guevara, the two heroes of her youth, and a biography of Lenin. Her oldest books are in Spanish, and these include material on leftist political theory and alternative Christianity (for lack of a clearer term), e.g. a history of the Rosicrucians and Dan Brown-esque investigations of the history of the Catholic Church. The Spanish-language section has its own shelf.

At one time, I had a collection of books by J.R. Tolkien, including The Hobbit and all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, including one unauthorized book that was sold openly in a bookstore in small-town Idaho. (No one seems to remember any more that in the 1960s, an American publisher brought out a pirated edition, and Tolkien sued.) When I looked for The Hobbit to skim through it before going to the second-installment movie (The Desolation of Smaug), I couldn’t find it. This isn’t surprising. It could have left my house with my grown daughter or either of my grown stepsons. If so, I won’t demand it back. I’ll just have to buy a replacement copy before the third-installment movie comes out.

Of course, there is an erotic section in my library. It’s on two bottom shelves which can be camouflaged by other objects if necessary. That section deserves a post unto itself, but I'm coming to the end of this one.

A lot of memories are in this room.

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Rock and Roll Never Forgets

By Lisabet Sarai

'Cause it seems like you've gotta give up

Such a piece of your soul

When you give up the chase

Feeling it hot and cold

You're in Rock'n'Roll

It's the nature of the race

It's the unknown child

So sweet and wild

It's youth

It's too good to waste

- Joni Mitchell, "The Blonde in the Bleachers"

I was a senior in high school. He was my classmate, the lead singer in a Doors tribute band. He didn't really look much like Jim Morrison but he had that wiry rock 'n roll build, verging on emaciation, like he never ate a square meal - like he survived on pure music. He had narrow hips like Jim's, fingers splayed and battered by his guitar strings, a wild cloud of coal-black hair. With the arrogance of youth, he dubbed himself the Lizard King.

I only kissed him once, at a party the night before graduation, but during the previous year I had watched him play many times. I was seduced by the mystery of rock and roll. Not by the glamor - there wasn't much glamor about a pimply high school kid - but by the sense that rock musicians, my schoolmate included, were some sort of fey creatures, half-angel, half-devil. Creatures with power. They could make you sweat and yearn. They could make you dance even when you swore you wouldn't. Rock and roll had a kind of irresistible, dark magic. Its danger was enticing. It could sweep you away.

I was swept away that night, standing on the dam by the reservoir, tasting his lips for the first and last time, feeling his hands. How many kisses do you remember forty years after the fact? I do remember, remarkably clearly: the mild June night, the wind tangling our hair together, the sense of transgression and of inevitability. Just a few kisses, nothing more, but it's one of my most erotic recollections.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. I don't know about the drugs part, but nobody has to tell you that rock and roll is about sex. Morrison sings, "Come on baby, light my fire." Lennon belts out, "Why don't we do it in the road?" Jagger complains, "I can't get no satisfaction." We all knew what they were talking about, even when we were clueless teenage virgins. Bare chests and gyrating pelvises reinforced the message, but even without the visual reminders, the lyrics and the music make it clear. We're not talkin' about Platonic love, baby.

Sexual energy isn't the only draw of rock and roll, of course. There's the beat that takes you over, dives into your belly and loosens your limbs. I'm convinced that the drums wake some sort of ancestral memory, readying us for tribal ritual. Of course, that ritual might have been tied up with sex as well.

I'm currently reading Keith Richard's biography, Life. I didn't plan this when I scheduled this topic months ago - just one of those weird coincidences. I'm finding the book both entertaining and enlightening. There's a surprisingly candid account of Richard's heroin addiction. (The Stones definitely celebrated the "drugs" part of the unholy trinity.) The stories that amaze me, though, are the accounts of how fabulous songs seemingly came out of nowhere, how classic recordings were caught in one take. Spontaneous genius. Revelation. Like I said, half-angels.

The flip side is that Richards spent his whole life immersed in music. He started playing guitar when he was in elementary school (right after World War II, before rock and roll really existed). He sang in a choir before his voice broke. He quit school and dedicated his life to studying and dissecting the blues. The Rolling Stones were originally a blues band. Who knew?

(Of course, rock and roll has its roots in the blues. But I'm not qualified to talk about that - I didn't really become aware of the blues until the middle of my life. Maybe someone else's post this week will explore this connection.)

So, the flashes of sudden brilliance seem sudden and miraculous, but the foundations had been laid a long time before. When you live and breathe music, your conscious and unconscious seething with melody, rhythm, and rhyme, it's not completely surprising that insights and inspiration bubble to the surface.

It's not all that different from spending your entire life immersed in books and one day vomiting up a novel.

I've never written a story about rock and roll. To be honest, I'm afraid I couldn't capture the magic. I'm not a musician myself. I can imagine what it must be like, up on the stage, energy flowing in an endless circuit from one member of the band to the next, flying higher than any drug can take you. But I really don't know if I can make it real, convincing - if I can seduce my readers the way I've been seduced.

Plus I've read too many tales in the last few years about vampire rock and roll idols (sigh). I think I'm jaded.

And I'm an old fart now, with so many aches and pains that dancing requires an anesthetic. Joni sings, "It's youth; it's too good to waste." I'm grateful that I didn't waste mine, but as the Starship wrote in "Love Rusts", "Youth is something you can't hold on to long".

The music still gets to me, though. We'll be in a bar, having a quiet drink, when the DJ will put on "Under My Thumb", or "Hurts So Good" (John Mellencamp), or "Life in the Fast Lane". And I can't sit still. I'll toss my purse in my husband's lap and jump up into the aisle. I'll pay for it later, physically, but I can't say no to rock and roll.

You know what Bob Seger sings: "You can come back, baby. Rock and roll never forgets." Of course that song also includes "Now sweet sixteen turns thirty one". Thirty one is way back in my past! Still, I haven't become immune to thrill, the buzz, the spectacular way that great rock can turn you on.

I hope that I never do.