This is terrible, unlistenable, for real man, I can’t stand it, I tell Travis, whose exultation of the virtues of the band now playing amounts to the imperative to read the liner notes, as though whatever context given might excuse the off-tempo, slipshod, unharmonious, dare-I-even-call-it music from having to fulfill even the instrumental proficiency, let alone mastery, that one expects of an act whose album actually made it into the world, and managed, astoundingly, to accrue some modicum of success in the form of an ever-burgeoning, in-the-know legion of underground initiates. They’re called The Shaggs, and they suck. So what if their music has garnered praise from Lester Bangs and Frank Zappa. So what if Susan Orlean penned a feature on them for The New Yorker. Without the story of how a tyrannical father—influenced by his mother’s palm-read prediction that he’d sire a successful musical group—forced his own daughters into a seemingly-torturous regiment of homeschooled musical calisthenics, which lead to performances at the local nursing home and town hall, The Shaggs are nothing but a bad band. A very bad band. I don’t care about the liner notes, I tell Travis. Please—turn it off!

*

When opening a new CD, the first thing I do is throw away its jewel case, along with any accompanying artwork, lyric sheets, foldout posters, or tiny booklets tucked into it. I just want the CD, the round little disc’s music; not the story; not the critical appraisal; not any PR team’s sense of what might keep me hooked enough to buy their next release; not the biography; not a list of the band’s friends; no photographs, none of their faces, their instruments slung artfully low; no long exposures where the stage lights create thick, swirling lines around them: I want nothing ancillary. Context be dammed! But books? The first thing I do is dive enthusiastically into any extant scaffolding.

*

I read the jacket copy, blurbs, the acknowledgment page, author’s bio, dedication, afterward, introduction, epigraphs, colophon; nothing escapes my scrutiny. I scan everywhere, squinting to make out the most microscopic text, turning the book on its side, breaking the spine if need be. Sometimes these are the only things I read, satisfied that I can absorb the work, somehow commune with its core through all the filigree and adornment around the text. When I was in grade school, there was a poster in the library of Garfield, the cartoon cat, with books roped to his body, books tied to his feet, his belly, arms, and tail. As a clever way to send students to the dictionary, the poster read, “I’m learning by osmosis.” I looked it up, which was, of course, the point. But what stuck with me was the possibility that such a process might indeed work. To this day, I surround myself with books, many of which I’ve never read but am wholly attuned to, in touch with, convinced that I know as well as any of the CDs I’ve listened to hundreds of times. I’m not alone in this. Although, upon his death, the pages of Mallarmé’s copy of the works of Hegel were, according to Rosemary Lloyd, in her study Mallarme: The Poet and His Circle, discovered uncut, the poet was known to employ a distantly Hegelian vocabulary in some of his letters. Maybe he was learning by osmosis.

*

Here, I wanted to quote something Calvino said about the aura of a book, about the burden and difficulty one has to surmount when initially approaching the work of a major figure. Calvino said that, right? I was pretty sure it was in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which I’ve owned for over a decade, but, pulling the thing off the self, I see that my bookmark is planted firmly between pages 14 and 15. I’m a Calvino fan. I own all of his books. I’ve read Invisible Cities at least a dozen times, sped through if on a winter’s night a traveler, devoured the first twenty pages of Cosmicomics, have a vague memory of reading some of The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and must have gotten to at least page 14 of Six Memos. The rest of them sit on my shelf, familiar, unopened, totally absorbed. Like I said, I’m a fan.

*

I’m fresh out of college, and work for a year at a dollar store where I often hide in the backroom, reading. My co-workers and I have a system. We trade off; one of us goes back there, where we keep our stock of supplies, while the other plays lookout, ready to knock on the wall if the boss arrives. This way, one might gingerly emerge from the room with a handful of new trinkets to line the shelves, demonstrating what is most certainly work, industrious, autonomous work. I want to be a poet, and know that such a desire calls for an understanding of the scene, of what’s current, what came before; so I read, my real work—getting in touch with literature. You look like the singer of Smash Mouth, a girl who couldn’t be a day over twelve tells me, her friend beside her, giggling; both of them, decked out in dozens of jelly bracelets, which they continually adjust. I don’t know who that is, I say, vaguely annoyed, not at the comment, but simply at the fact that it’s still my co-worker’s turn in the back room, and I have to be here, by the register, dealing with a couple of kids who are more or less teasing me. You don’t know who Smash Mouth is, the other girl exclaims, clearly baffled. Again, both of them giggle. A few minutes later, they’re standing under the archway of the store’s entrance, and in what must have been a pre-planned assault, they cry in unison before running off: You’re outta touch!

*

It takes eight hours to drive from Denver, CO to Lincoln, NE. We leave at first light, and because it’s mid-winter, arrive in darkness. We’re here for The Clean Part Reading Series, invited by Mathias Svalina, who graciously puts us up for the weekend. It’s cold, bitterly cold, so cold that the pipes in Mathias’s apartment will freeze tonight, and while Josh is showering tomorrow morning, burst, spreading bucketsful of water across our host’s kitchen floor. But tonight we’re cozy, warmed by the camaraderie of whiskey-fueled gossip. I feel an instant kinship with Mathias; we’re the same age, have the same cultural touchstones, experienced the same shift from the hardcore punk scene to that of experimental poetry. The small apartment is so cluttered that each room seems partitioned off by stacks of books and records rather than walls, stacks dangerously close to simply collapsing, burying us in the detritus of our host’s vigilant attempt to keep up with the divergent worlds of innovative music and experimental literature. We dub the place Indy Rock Central. At some point, I admit that I haven’t paid much attention to new music as of late, tell the story about the two girls calling me out of touch, and take up Mathias on his offer to ameliorate my musical shortcomings via a set of burned CDs.

*

I’m in New York City for the weekend, at a used bookstore in Brooklyn, scouring the shelves, squinting to read each title. Wait a sec, there’s a Calvino book I don’t have: Why Read the Classics? I pull it out, flip though, realize this is the book I meant—the book where he writes about the aura surrounding a major figure. I have no memory of actually reading this book, but somehow, amazingly, am familiar with its arguments. It’s only six dollars, but maintaining the mystery of how I’ve accrued this familiarity is far more valuable to me, so I shelve the book, and make a solemn yet private pledge never, not ever, to open a copy of it again.

*

There’s an email in my inbox from Mathias: You’ll need this in about three days, it reads. This, it turns out, is the attached Word Doc listing the artists and song titles for a set of three CDs. The majority of these bands are wholly alien to me (Boris, Smoke or Fire, Band of Horses, Man Man), but I have heard of some of them (The Decemberists, Clap Your Hands & Say Yeah, The Faint), maybe I’ve even heard them, their music, although without this list I’d be unable to say who sounds like what; my inculcation into musical currency depends on it entirely. There is one exception: Joanna Newsom, the elfin singer and harpist whose distinctly singular voice is instantly recognizable. That I was first introduced to her work via a segment on NPR no doubt proves the steadfast persistence of my unremitting out-of-touchness.

*

When, a few days later, the CDs do indeed arrive, I’m somehow disappointed by the lack of attendant ritualistic discarding I’ve come to associate with the accrual of new music; there’s nothing to shed, nothing to self-satisfyingly toss in the recycling bin; the CDs are blank, bare save for their markered titles: Getting Noah Back in Touch (volumes 1 to 3). Because it’s familiar enough, covering genre-territory already well-trodden by my own particular affinities (death metal, pop-punk, neo-folk), I immediately take to the music, letting each of the CDs stay for days at a time on repeat play in my stereo. I’ve even, more or less, jettisoned the music’s accompanying pedagogical imperative, not having opened the Word Doc of track and artist listings since the arrival of the CDs. Isn’t just having the music enough?

*

Finally, reluctantly, and so enchanted by a few of these songs that I want to hunt down whatever album they’ve been unmoored from, I do print out the listings, faithfully attempt to amend to whatever songs I’m enamored by an actual band name, and realize rather quickly that it’s an impossible task. Joanna Newsom, my North Star, the one artist here whose work I recognize, proves the unnavigable mess of these listings. That’s certainly her voice cutting through the air of my apartment, but it doesn’t match up with the track number. According to Mathias, this high-pitched, squeaky-voiced harpist is actually Pelican, an instrumental post-metal quartet, who, after searching for their music online, I can assure you are about as close to Newsom as Mozart is to Motown. Talk about your unreliable narrator.

*

In his essay, “In Praise of the Fake Memoir,” Robin Hemley argues for the creation of a new sub-genre of literature, a term to amend to works that are not quite novels, not quite nonfiction, works that are, at their core, acts of conceptual framing, works where the shape of the I is suspect. For Hemley, admission into this genre is granted based on aesthetic rather than moral grounds; essentially, only those who display in their work some semblance of literary merit are allowed entry; thus, he rejects J.T. LeRoy, Nasdiij, James Frey, etc; although they too have written fake memoirs, their writing doesn’t hold up. Evidently, once the framework and scaffolding dissolve, once the liner notes disappear, once the arguments about what, exactly, constitutes truth have vanished, it’s about the pure artfulness of the author’s prose.

*

If we were talking about music, I’d wholeheartedly agree. Those CDs Mathias burned for me remain among my favorite, although I’ve got no idea who, for the most part, it is that I’m listening to at any given time. However, with books, I think one has to grant a certain import to the author’s framing technique; it might not be a literary enterprise, but it is an action, regardless of the author’s intention, infused with a kind of artfulness, one that is as apt to challenge assumptions about truth, commerce, and authenticity, as it is to elicit groans, vitriolic backlash, and a torch-carrying mob at the castle gates. I think this is a good thing. After all, genre, too is performative.

*

And such a performance is carried out, led, orchestrated by the slim, cylindrical pronoun of the self, the “I”—our one letter, when presented without serifs, that resembles nothing so much as the conductor’s baton, active, authoritative, kinetic, at once controlling and yet disappearing into the very music over which it dominates. To watch a conductor translate the raw physicality of the body—indeed, the shape of the I—into the symphonic complexity of music is tantamount to unlocking some remote, clandestine secret of alchemy; rarely is one given so thorough a glimpse behind the curtain, into the control room, under the hood. In fact, to enact my own argument, I’ll admit that this essay that I’m now writing, which everywhere presents itself as a nonfiction, anecdotal, and otherwise “true” account is not immune from the aforementioned allegiance to performance. Each time I type “I” I am invariably acting. Sometimes the performance is subtle, understated, barely noticeable; sometimes, as now—right now, when I’ve gone to lengths to announce it—it’s unavoidable. In his essay “The Philosophy of Raymond Queneua,” Calvino attempts to come to terms with the perception of the French writer’s public persona: “[E]very piece of bio-bibliographical information which can be added to it only makes it even more complicated,” notes Calvino. Does the fact that I’ve just pulled this quote from Calvino’s collection of essays Why Read the Classics? render my I suspect? After all, this is the very same book that I mentioned earlier as having made a pledge never to open. What if I told you that I did buy this book in Brooklyn, that it was here, on my desk while I was working on this essay? What if I told you that I’m now, right now, listening to the same group whose music I lambasted in the first paragraph above, the Shagg’s amazing record Philosophy of the World? What if I told you that this is a lie, yet I mean it with all the conviction my I can allow? What if I told you that I is beside myself?

A version of this essay originally appeared in English Language Notes.