Books I'm Reading: Gardens and Music

In the middle of Michael Pollan's Second Nature (1991, Grove Press). So far, interesting. On gardens and man's relationship to them in contrast with natural landscapes. More a collection of essays than an extended argument of any kind. A bit lacking in cultural breadth (exclusively the Western point of view here), but a good read nevertheless. More when I've finished it.

Just finished This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin (Plume, 2006). Although the author's conclusions are never startling, they are always interesting. He has a lot to say about why the music of our youth stays with us the way it does--a subject much on my mind in the past year. The power certain songs have to immediately bring back a moment in time, a specific place, or a specific person, can be astonishing.

To this day, hearing Petula Clark's Downtown transports me to a small apartment in Brooklyn, New York. I'm in the kitchen/utility area. The song is on the radio--a portable, blue, marine band model in a leather case that my father bought because we had a small sailboat at the time. There is a fold-up clothes drying rack in the room. The horizontal metal rods are sheathed in bright yellow plastic with longitudinal ridges. Atop the yellow rack sits a tiny calico kitten--we called her Marimekko because of her coloring--batting at my fingers. I would have been about four at the time, the cat about four weeks. The year, 1964.

Joni Mitchell's Rainy Night House, from the live Miles of Aisles album is as powerful, transporting me equally vividly to another place (Ohio), another time (1975 or so), another cast of characters. Certain lines resonate especially strongly. "You sat up all night and watched me/Just to see, who in the world I might be" is one. The high notes Mitchell hits after the line "I sing in the upstairs choir" literally give me goose bumps every time I hear them. I remember the day I first heard it, upstairs in my room in my mother's house in Dayton, a house that had been her mother's. The music had arrived in a letter from a friend, on a Memorex cassette tape. Coincidentally, it's raining in Santa Rosa tonight and this book mentions Joni Mitchell in a number of places.