Coffee on the Keyboard

Norman Mailer died today.

It doesn’t matter much to me. I didn’t know him. I’d never read any of his books. I rarely read any of his articles or columns, and then only when we crossed paths on the internet.

Norman Mailer

But I have not been reading lately, and the death of such a well-known author did give me cause to think about literature and reading in general. Soon, if the next month goes well, I will suddenly find myself with more free time than I have had in the last 42 months: I will be a college graduate with a 9-5 job and a few friends still in class.

In those 42 months, I have developed a nasty habit of spending my free time idly at my computer; scouring the vast emptiness of the internet for interesting things to read or to see and occasionally talking to real-live humans. I want to break myself of this habit and nurture a new dependency on reading that other great invention: the book.

To that end, I’m starting a list of books I want to read, which is something I should have done years ago. Below I am reproducing this list as an open call for additions and suggestions. This is in no particular order and is based only on what I’ve read recently.

• The Name of the Rose* Umberto Eco.
• The 42nd Parallel John Dos Passos.
• 1919 John Dos Passos.
• The Big Money John Dos Passos.
• The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer.
• Armies of the Night Norman Mailer.
• The Executioner Norman Mailer.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey.
• The Odyssey tr. Stanley Lombardon.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being* Milan Kundera.
• Carrie Stephen King.
• William Marshall* Georges Duby.
• Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell.
• Moby Dick* Herman Melville.
• L’Étranger (in French) Albert Camus.
• The Plague Albert Camus.
• Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov.
• Camera Obscura Vladimir Nabokov.

An * means I’ve already started the book.

So I did end up going to Urban Outfitters. I was about to blow almost $100 on a jacket and hoodie, but then the jacket rang up for 90% off. That’s right. 90%. I don’t think she typed in enough 9s, because it was sure supposed to be $50 and came out to $5.

I think people have appreciated the fact that I wore a <gasp /> different shirt.

I love Sushi. Even more than that, I love being the type of person who eats sushi.

One of the few local restaurants around here, completely independent, is a sushi place down the street called Q Sushi. It’s run by a family, I think they’re Korean but I’m not positive, and they really roll some quality fish.

It’s not as “nice” as some of the other places around here, but it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it tastes good. And it’s the closest. What more could you want?

On an unrelated note… Only having one hoodie (and one or two long-sleeve t-shirts) is starting to bore me, so tomorrow I think I’m wandering down to the vintage store and/or Urban Outfitters.

To me! It’s my 21st birthday, and rather than be at a bar at midnight, I strapped on my boots and walked out to the fields behind my house. That’s right, the first thing I did on my birthday was kick a soccer ball.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the “orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us…” But what did he mean by that; how can the future recede before us? In the book, Gatsby is driven by his desire to rekindle the past; to create a future that is no longer possible.

It is said that when we are born, for roughly the first year of our lives, humans have the ability to hear and distinguish all possible sounds, but at some point, those sounds become more limited to what we hear regularly. Hence, constantly expose a newborn to music, they will retain a better “ear” for it than others; expose a child to several languages, they will be more able to learn and understand them, simply because they can hear all the tones–like African “click”
languages or Chinese’s four intonation. We are all born with the ability to learn any language, but we lose if it we do not use it: the ability to learn new sounds “year by year recedes before us.”

I would give anything to talk to myself at five–as I’m sure we all would.

I am a shallow person: I want to be great at something–successful–in a way that people remember me and I compete at the top level. More than that, I just want to be good at something. Really good. I want to excel at one thing. Not to be the best in the world, but among the best.

That future is rapidly receding before me. At 21, if I were going to be really exceptional, I would be already. If I were going to be a professional musician, I would be in a conservatory practicing and writing. If I were going to play football professionally–even semi-professionally–I would either be on a team or a starter on my college’s varsity team. These are the only two things that have really managed to hold my interest.

Teaching is a consolation prize. It’s a way I can hope to help a few people, hope to coach some high school football, hope to be remembered by an old student or two. There is still time to be an exceptional mathematician, but I think I would have already shown some signs, and I am too glad to be done with math at the end of the day/week/semester.

So today I am 21, 5 months and 8 days older than Wayne Rooney, and watching my orgiastic future recede just a little farther as I “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”