Bedside Manner: Black Holes, Fake Legs, and the Shaggs

First things first: I've been sleeping with Neil deGrasse Tyson for about a year now. As you can see, my handsome astrophysicist's Death by Black Hole is on top. It's been my go-to for bouts of insomnia, not because his descriptions of dying stars and molecular orgies are boring, but it's an appropriately dense book.

Rather, I feel like he's lying there next to me, wearing a three-piece suit and telling a story in that sonorous voice. “How about getting fried by waves of high energy electromagnetic radiation and particles, spewed across space by an exploding star?” Whatever you want, Neil. Fill my Sagan void with your cosmic plasma. Downside: reading about “spaghettification” by black hole before falling asleep contributes to bizarre dreams. Upside: Same.

But Neil's just one of my late-night lovers. This pile used to be Jenga-tall, before it started making me feel like an after-hours floozy. I've become a flipper: I'll read a few pages of one book, put it down, switch to another. I don't know what that says about my attention span, but I do miss the days when I had nothing more to do than lay about and read an entire book.

Most recently I decided to revisit Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. A few months ago, I'd had a dream in which I had a fake leg that I kept misplacing, like my keys. After re-reading “Good Country People,” I realized I'm just about the same age as Joy Hopewell, the story's main character. I don't know what it all means, but I'd definitely lose a fake leg without the help of a shady Bible salesman.

Lydia Davis' short story collection is also holding steady at about a year now, only because it's about 700 pages and is best read in large chunks. It was my summer book, then I skipped fall, and now I'm back in winter. That's sort of the extreme nature of her work: Hot and cold. Her way with a sentence is sometimes dazzling, sometimes frustrating. Her stories seem conversational at first, then slowly back you into a corner. For instance, this passage from “Examples of Confusion”:

“I am filled that day with vile or evil feelings — ill will toward one I think I should love, ill will toward myself, and discouragement over the work I think I should be doing. I look out the window of my borrowed house, out the narrow window of the smallest room. Suddenly there it is, my own spirit: an old white dog with bowed legs and swaying head staring around the corner of the porch with one mad, cataract-filled eye.”

Over the last week I've also been slowly inhaling the Oxford American's latest Southern music issue. They're celebrating Alabama this go-round, and its accompanying CD of Alabamian artists is a real treat, lovingly compiled and rife with regional oddities like the Rev. Fred Lane's big band meltdown, “Rubber Room." It's a nice compliment to Jack Pendarvis' wonderful essay, “Weird Sincerity,” about why music is better than writing. He makes a convincing case, and any man who cites both George Saunders and the Shaggs is OK with me.