I have a tendency to read multiple books at once. Right now I am in the process of reading five books. Two are collections of short stories, two are non-fiction and one is a giant of a Russian love story.
I think just as I have music in my blood I have words too. I come from a long line of word loving people. It’s impossible to me to not be reading something all the time. Since moving to New York I’ve gained a reading place that I’d never had before. The subway.
My subway book right now is called River Teeth. It is a collection of stories and writings by one of my favorite authors, David James Duncan. He is the author of The River Why, an epic and heartwarming tale about fly-fishing in the northwest.
On Friday during my morning commute I opened River Teeth to the next story in line and found myself at “My One Conversation with Colin Walcott”. It is a tale of a night of magical music making and impossible bonds formed with little conversation and the help of the mystical beauty of the Oregon coast.
The story is knowingly self-conscious and awe filled and as Duncan states it is about something inexplicable as most things that are worth explaining are. It is a story about music and how it can bring people together, create communities out of crowds of strangers and cause magical things to happen.
“Music is the food whose peculiarity it is to enter us through the ears.
Music is an inexpressible from outside us touching an inexpressible
within, causing the frenetic persona that normally wedges itself between
outside and inside, creating twoness, to vanish.”
For a man of words he does a beautiful job of describing his inability to actually convey the beauty of what he experienced. His story is lyrical and musical and worth the small amount you’d pay for the book to share the experience with the author.
It was the first written piece that ever made me want to sing. Now that is beautiful prose, soundless but full of vibrations.
David James Duncan - http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=David+James+Duncan&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational&hl=en
