TOBI'S DESK

Pete Unseth, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons . I don’t usually write to music. I’m too susceptible; I find it can give what I’m writing a false, unearned resonance, like slipping a poem into Garamond to make it “better.” But there are two songs that are rhythmic enough, each in their own way, that I sometimes put on a loop when I’m revising. There’s something about the cadence and the breath in them that works for me, that creates a kind of chamber that keeps the outside world at bay. And though I’ve heard “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (a quote so apt, it’s attributed to no less than a dozen people), here goes: “Spiegel im Spiegel,” 1978—Arvo Pärt  The piece—in English, “Mirror in the Mirror”—begins with a simple ascending arpeggio, little triads that subtly alter, reflected back and forth like light on water, a mirror looking into a mirror. The melody stretches over and through the scales, extending like a long breath. The left hand on the pi...

I have always liked categorical statements that are obviously wrong. When someone says to me “This is the way the world works,” I get very excited, even though of course nobody knows how the world works. Or, even better: “There are only two types of people in the world.” This statement is usually followed by two binary qualities that could be used to define and divide all of humanity. Such a proposition is clearly ridiculous and, to me, deeply appealing. This is perhaps why my favorite game is called Dichotomies, The game originated because my friends and I are always talking about our other friends. One night my friend Nick and I began idly categorizing people we knew, somewhat arbitrarily, as either thunder or lightning. We knew immediately who was which: Nick and I are both lightning. Our friend Ben: thunder. Alex: lightning. Graham: thunder. Lily: thunder, though maybe she has a bit of lightning too? We discussed and debated. This dichotomy is a good one in part because of its ...

President Harding with pet dog Laddie being photographed in front of the White House. National Photo Co., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I might not have read a single truly funny novel that year if my friend hadn’t stopped by my Los Angeles porch one afternoon carrying an out-of-print copy of Robert Plunket’s comic masterpiece, My Search for Warren Harding . We were in the worst of days—the depths of the pre-vaccine pandemic—and our world was on fire, both literally and figuratively. The copy of the novel that my friend, the writer Victoria Patterson, handed over to me looked the way we all felt in those days: yellowing, battered, dusty from too long in storage. Tory bellowed through the muffling fabric of her N95 mask that it was one of her favorite novels—and really fucking funny. I needed funny. I opened the book a few weeks later—and despite my allergic reaction to the mold in the edition, kept reading for the next 256 pages. When I was done, I sat in a kind of silent,...

Michael Raedecker, solo 2021. Courtesy of the artist. In a novel that she had been trying to read the night before, she’d read the description of a late spring day as a glittery day, and she thought of that as she was walking with her daughters, and the dog, up through the boulevards. It was turning from a warm into a hot day, even though it was still morning, and not yet summer. The dog was panting, and they took a break, to drink their bottles of water thrown underneath the stroller. There was something filmy to the skin of her daughters, she had dressed them that day in their lightest clothes, and later, she had promised, they could put on their swimwear at the local splash pad. Before leaving she had quickly pulled their hair off their faces, and now they kept on taking off their hats and handing them to her, and she would throw them in the bottom of the stroller. They needed to get their hair washed tonight, she observed, as she looked at them, their curls greasy with sunscreen...

Map by Donna Brown for Library of America, with input from Paul Devlin. Based on a map drawn by Albert Murray in the 1950s or 1960s. Circa 1969, the writer Albert Murray paid a visit to his hometown on the Alabama Gulf Coast, to report a story for Harper’s . Murray hadn’t lived there since 1935, the year he left for college. During his childhood, elements of heavy industry—sawmills, paper mills, an oil refinery—had always coexisted with wilderness, in the kind of eerily beautiful landscapes that are found only in bayou country. But as an adult, Murray was aghast to see how much industry had encroached. The “fabulous old sawmill-whistle territory, the boy-blue adventure country” of his childhood, he wrote, had been overtaken by a massive paper factory: a “storybook dragon disguised as a wide-sprawling, foul-smelling, smoke-chugging factory.” He imagined that the people who had died during his years away had been “victims of dragon claws.” When Murray made this visit, he was in his ...

Russell Patterson, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . I’d never heard of Ursula Parrott when McNally Editions in­troduced me to Ex-Wife , the author’s 1929 novel about a young woman who suddenly finds herself suspended in the caliginous space between matrimony and divorce. The first thing I won­dered was where it had been all my life. Ex-Wife rattles with ghosts and loss and lonely New York apartments, with men who change their minds and change them again, with people and places that assert their permanence by the very fact that they’re gone and they’re never coming back. Originally published anonymously, Ex-Wife stirred immediate controversy for Parrott’s frank depiction of her heroine, Patricia, a woman whose allure does not spare her from desertion after an open marriage proves to be an asymmetrical failure. Embarking on a marathon of alcoholic oblivion and a series of mostly joyless dips into the waters of sexual liberation, Patricia spe...

Bird lore, 1906. National Committee of Audobon Societies of America. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I knew a birder once. I liked him—it’s pointless to deny it and in any case I don’t think I can write about him without it being abundantly clear—though we redirected early enough that friendship seemed possible. For him it always was a friendship, anyway. Still, the birding excursion was definitely a date. Perhaps he was curious about whether he’d discover feelings for me among the pines—whether what psychologists call the misattribution of desire might be prompted by seeing a rare bird in my presence. We only saw regular birds, though: grackles, goldfinches, a great blue heron. He was a birder but he was mostly a musician. I would have found it satisfying to discover that these were two sides of the same coin for him: it’s nice, after all, when people cohere, when you can discern a uniform purpose or a set of underlying values across their various pursuits. But the truth, really, ...