This man and music

When I was young, my father dutifully paid the family bills in a small enclosed porch opening off the bedroom he shared with my mother in our house in Lexington, Massachusetts. There was just enough room for a secretary, a chair, a narrow bookcase, and two filing cabinets. On the shelves behind the glass doors of the secretary he kept memorabilia: a 1961 Ford Thunderbird he’d made from a plastic model kit and painted cherry-red when my brother and I were toddlers (anticipating, he once told me, the father-son model making to come); a home run baseball he’d got his hands on from inside the scrum when it rolled under the bleacher seats in an Orioles game in the 1950s; a kaleidoscope; a prism; a beautiful old ivory Keuffel & Esser sliderule from his graduate school days; The Bluejacket’s Manual. On the outside of one of the doors, tucked between the glass and a fake mullion, was a photograph taken of him while he was in the U.S. Navy:

Sun-damaged old photograph of Louis Alton Hall in Navy seaman's uniform on a Chicago street in 1946, counting change in his palm

I regret the damage, which is all my fault. I’ve loved that photograph ever since I was a small child, and after my father died and I inherited his secretary, I made sure to slip the picture into its old place, by way of a memorial. But I neglected to consider that the room in which I keep the secretary, unlike my father’s old cubby-hole, gets a lot of direct sunlight.

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Pegasus

My mother never liked television, preferring to read mystery novels in her spare time. When, at the age of 77, she began to suffer dementia, she kept track of a book’s characters by writing their names on sticky tabs and affixing them to the pages on which they appeared. Her paperbacks bristled with scores of these brave little yellow flags. Then she surrendered, and started watching TV.

When I drove to Massachusetts on weekends to pay her bills, scout out needed repairs, and consult with her day-time aides, I would spend part of every day sitting on the couch with her in front of the tube. She still couldn’t stand broadcast or cable, she wanted to see only a handful of movies and series that she owned on DVD: Miracle of the White Stallions, National Velvet, a boxed set of three TV movies based on Dick Francis mysteries, The New Adventures of Black Beauty, The Saddle Club, and several equestrian documentaries. I saw all of these movies, episodes, and specials many times. Now and then, hoping for a little variety, I would suggest Babe, which I had bought for her, but she rarely agreed—the part of the horse in that movie was too small.

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The Curious Man podcast

Last week I had a phone conversation with the engaging and omni-curious Matt Crawford, whose podcast is appropriately titled The Curious Man’s Podcast.  We talked about the personal sources of my new novel, family dysfunction, loneliness, fiction vs. nonfiction, E. M. Forster, Rodney King, teenage readers, video game voice acting, Mass Effect‘s awesome Jennifer Hale, the Beethoven late string quartets, astronomy, and a bunch of other stuff.  Toward the end, even FDR and Churchill get in there, somehow.  Matt posted the podcast today, and you can listen to it here.

Lit Hub piece on science and art in The Stone Loves the World

I’ve written a piece for Literary Hub about what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” scientific knowledge vs. the literary arts—how my family turned them into a quiet but sustained battle, how I straddled them in my life and in my new novel, The Stone Loves the World. You can check it out here.