Unread Books, Unheard Music

I've been having one of my periodic book-weeds, and came across a book I'd forgotten about and never got around to reading (what, just the one? Sadly, no). It was The Morning Rides Behind Us, by Tariq Goddard. I think I bought it because it seemed to be about the experience of demobbed soldiers from WW2 trying and failing to adjust to the post-War world, a subject that (way back in antiquity and for forgotten reasons) had interested me for a while, then fell off the agenda, the way things do around here: I don't have the tenacious scholarly cast of mind that can sustain an interest over decades.

His name struck me as an unusual combination, so I looked him up just out of curiosity, and he turned out to be somewhat more interesting than merely the author of some book I had bought but never read (a distinguished list, admittedly, that includes the likes of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens). As well as being a writer, for example, I discovered that he had co-founded two publishing houses of left-ish and left-field books (Repeater and Zero Books), and was involved with characters from the academic-political fringe like the ill-fated Mark Fisher. There's an interesting interview with him here in which it appears he may have gone on to write the sort of book I'd always intended to write, but now probably never will. [1]

Anyway, that led me to yet another of those corners of the Web where things are going on I had no idea were going on; in this case an online music magazine, The Quietus. Now, for some years I have more or less abandoned music as an area of active interest, despite having once been as invested in certain musical fields as it is possible for a non-professional to be. I was rarely happier than when chasing musical curiosities down rabbit holes, or simply listening to whatever music had lately caught my attention. As I say, I don't have the scholarly cast of mind, so would for a while be intensely curious about a contemporary jazz pianist like Keith Jarrett or Esbjörn Svensson, but then move on to the grandeur of Handelian opera and a side-fascination with the counter-tenor voice, then return to the work of familiar singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, or even to the pure pop of Motown and Atlantic Records. Yes, I'm one of those infuriating people who, when asked what kind of music they like, reply "good music". But tinnitus and partial loss of hearing in late middle age took away a good deal of the pleasure of listening to music, and without pleasure what is the point of music?

As a consequence, I haven't been keeping up for a long time. So it was no real surprise that I hadn't heard of most of the musical performers or even whole genres covered by an on-trend, self-consciously ahead-of-the-pack journal like The Quietus. I mean, just to pick an example at random that caught my eye, here is the description of duo Moni Jitchell (no, really):

Consisting of lead vocalist and drummer Grant Donaldson and twelve-string guitar and bass player David Scott, between the two of them Moni Jitchell are an unstoppable duo who fully submerge you into a disturbed world of feral math rock riffs and doom-inducing screamo.

"Math rock"? "Screamo"? I can only speculate. Let's not even get into the puerile disrespect of their ridiculous name (or the certainty of tinnitus and partial hearing loss that lies in their future and that of their fans). But then I came across the Guardian's recent list of "The Best Albums of 2023 So Far", expecting a modicum of familiarity, but found I had a similar experience: Who? (Bar Italia?) What? ("slacker indie"? "sexy shoegaze"?). Of course, having been an avid reader of music weekly NME in its 1970s heyday, I'm well aware of how bumptiously pretentious and cliquey most writing about rock and pop can be; as it is obliged to be, really, its primary task being to flatter its readers as street-wise members of an exclusive in-crowd. Never heard of "shoegaze", grandad? Don't try to dig what we all s-s-s-say...

But the real takeaway for me was this: how many thousands upon thousands of people must there be out there on the fringes of the known musical world hoping to make a career for themselves, all competing hopelessly for our limited span of attention? It's an impression that is only multiplied by a visit to online platforms like bandcamp and SoundCloud, where unknowns and wannabes can cast their latest sonic message-in-a-bottle upon the waters of the Web. It's overwhelming, there is just too much of it, with too little time to take it all in, unless of course you're young and – for those few Golden Years – part of a scene with its own clear, narrow, and well-defined identity-filter; "slacker indie" crossed with "sexy shoegaze", perhaps... Call it Shibboleth Rock.

The same applies to all expressive media, of course. Here am I, for example, one among millions, half-heartedly trying to pique interest in my own late-life photographic and digital work on a blog read by a few hundred people at most, almost none of whom have ever shown the slightest interest in buying or promoting or even commenting on what I produce. And why should they? Here it is, laid out free of charge, just one of the millions of clinking, unopened bottles bobbing around as far as the eye can see. There are exclusive "scenes" out there for visual art too, of course, and your main hope of getting noticed is probably to belong to one, and to enable fans and followers to feel they can belong to it, too. In the end, most people are not so much interested in the aesthetic qualities of an artist's work as the strength, comfort, and fit of the identity reinforcement it can offer. Plus whether it matches the sofa, obviously.

Even at the most stellar level, and in the areas of cultural activity of most importance to you, it's impossible to keep across everything. I love visual art and photography, but every week it seems I discover someone I'd never even heard of before who is indisputably important, written about, and whose work is collected in museums and galleries. I recall the embarrassment of a typical never 'eard of 'im, mate moment, when I was on a committee discussing the selection of paintings from the university's collection on display in our library with the director of the on-campus gallery, Stephen Foster. The fate of a particularly dull, greyish green, oddly L-shaped work on canvas that was hanging in a stairwell came up. It was, Stephen informed us, despite our obvious indifference, an important and quite valuable work by Ellsworth Kelly, a notable American painter. The blank looks on the faces of the rest of us – all well-informed, highly-educated people, it should be said – clearly betrayed a dismaying ignorance of even A-list American painters. Well, who knew? Not us. And yet somehow that new knowledge didn't stop it from being just a dull, greyish green, and oddly L-shaped painting. Sometimes you just have to embrace your inner philistine.

Then there are all the books. Hundreds of thousands of books are published every year but very few get promoted or reviewed in any given week, and of them hardly any are bought by anyone, and many of those will go unread, or at most dipped into and abandoned. Despite a pressing need to free up shelf space, I still find it hard to dispose of those books I have bought but not read, even when I can barely remember why I decided to buy them in the first place. The unread book has a curious kind of power, doesn't it? Rather like those books whose titles so eloquently convey their contents that actually to have read them can seem superfluous (Small Is Beautiful, for example), a well-chosen but unread book radiates its immaculate potential, so much so that it can seem irresponsible to discard it, like binning perfectly edible food.

In our consumption-led society, we are encouraged to believe that the intersections of the purchasing choices we make are the most valid determinants of the person we feel we are or should be. "Consumption" does not necessarily imply that a purchase has actually been consumed, of course. I am, for example, precisely the sort of person who might serially buy copies of Persuasion – because it is based in Lyme Regis and people whose opinions I value claim it is the one Jane Austen novel I really might enjoy – but who will nonetheless never actually get around to reading it.

Something stirs in my vestigial scholarly memory about Derrida, deferral, and différance, but only vaguely. After all, you don't need a sophisticated theory to appreciate the nature of procrastination, or the pleasures of indefinitely deferred gratification. If I did feel the need for a more radical contemporary political perspective on such matters I suppose I could start reading again the sort of books that, like music, I seem to have given up; perhaps even something like Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism, published by the aforementioned Tariq Goddard at Zero Books. But life is short, the book's title is almost self-explanatory given a moment's thought or a quick dip into Wikipedia, and I'd probably only buy it, put it on a shelf for a few years, and then pass it on unread to Oxfam.

The danger, of course, is that an unread book, given time, can gradually become part of your identity. I'm sitting here looking at my copy of Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street, bought as a brand-new hardback in 1979. It has a bold blue and orange spine, uniform in design with its companion NLB publications, books that I had read with the closest attention as a student just a few years before. It would be impossible to cast this book out now, just because I've never actually got around to reading it. By continuing to radiate its as yet untapped potential – or perhaps by reassuring me that my own potential is not yet tapped out – it has settled into its rightful place and gathered the dust of the decades, an inviolable "white elephant" gift from my younger self.

That younger self had all the time in the world for reading books and listening to music, and had no way of knowing how much time would shrink and yet opportunities for curiosity expand so overwhelmingly in the coming years. Who could have? Possibly Walter Benjamin? It wouldn't surprise me. But, somehow, lacking that scholarly cast of mind, I no longer feel any urgent need or obligation to find out; the book remains unopened, and I'm happy to let it sit there. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter... [2]

1.  But OTOH contrast that with this! Huh?

2. John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn".