The other night I watched a documentary called “Desperate Man Blues” about a man who is an avid collector of old bluegrass and blues records. By old, I mean 78s from the 20s and 30s. He had a room called the record room where these records lined the walls–25 thousand records. Most of them he got  by combing the back roads in his area of the country, driving to farms to ask people if they had any old records to sell. The man he had a great time collecting in the fifties, because every house was getting a television and they were dumping  records out with the trash. One record he found–I wish I could think of the title–had been stored for decades under an old mattress, covered with dust in a box filled with otherwise worthless records. This one though, he believes to be the only existing copy of the recording. He played it on his record player, and boy did it sound great, a voice calling to you out of time like that.

The record room, with its wood paneling and floor-to-ceiling shelves of records–indistinguishable in their smoke-stained sleeves–reminded me of Jim Whitehead’s study, where I spent many a Fayetteville afternoon attempting to redeem poems I had written. 

It also made me think of the obscure copies of lit mages that I have piled up in my office both at home and and work–most of the copies are freebies, or contributor copies. I love thinking that one day down the line somebody could read a poem of mine in a print journal, which I fear will become a thing of the past, years and years after I’m gone–maybe read it alound to themselves and being my voice back like the voices on those records.  And as much as I love the work of making poems, it’s hard to think the poems that took so much of my energy rotting in a basement somewhere, just like I won’t let myself dwell too much on the inevitable DEEP sleep. I’m young, but, on my family tree, I just passed the halfway part. And the second half always moves faster than the first.

From Llewellyn Hinkes and The Morning News, an exploration of books and other physical media as fetish objects.

Not a groundbreaking idea, but a timely one given the emphasis on collecting in the Goldbarth interview I posted earlier. (Not to mention the recent release of the larger, more expensive Kindle).

The trouble is that maintaining a physical collection is expensive and bulky. There’s just too much out there in the world. Even after pruning the treasury down to only those records and books of great personal importance, you can still be saddled with mountainous stacks to maintain. The convenience of digital deep storage is hard to deny. Fewer people are willing to make the sacrifice of cost and convenience for the impracticality of flipping sides, changing needles, and hauling thousands of pounds of paper and plastic when they move in exchange for better sound quality, musty paper, and gatefold album art. But what if you don’t care about actually owning your fetish? That is, what if true fetishism had little to do with possession, but instead was more of a compulsion to ensure that those things you find precious and holy are preserved and treated with dignity?

Two years old at this point, but still a rare and fascinating look at one of my favorite poets: Richard Siken interviews Albert Goldbarth. The interview focuses on Goldbarth’s collection of vintage toys, but from there it leads into the connections between collecting and writing.

I must say first, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the line of agreement or even the line of distinction between my writing and this collection. They’re both deep pleasures for me—the writing even more so, of course. I’m sure there must be overlap, but I’ve never been one who sits around and very consciously becomes an archaeologist or a psychologist or a deconstructor of his own aesthetic life. I don’t sit around and try to self-articulate the details: the where, the why, and the how. It seems to me that there’s probably more likeness between some of the spirit behind the writing and some of the spirit behind the collecting than there is difference. If I wanted to, I could think of many of my poems or essays as display cases of objects, also ideas, also human needs and human pleasures and human perils, that have been arranged for a specific aesthetic effect.

The photos are great as well. Goldbarth has transformed his entire dining room into a museum.