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Freak | Oct 24 2001

Walking to the train this evening, I sang Edelweiss in the voice of Johnny Rotten. So fucking funny.

Edelweiss, Edelweiss
You look so happy to me

A middle-aged Hasidic man at the corner of Hewes and South Fifth made a face as I passed. I hadn’t seen him in time and was singing quite loudly.

It occurred me that he had no idea who Johnny Rotten was.

*

On the train I read the same book I always read: The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. This is the only book I ever manage to read in its entirely, despite the fact that I read it in only one place: the subway.

The trick is, I read it nearly every time I take the subway, provided I’m alone and can get a seat. I read about five to eight pages per ride, depending how far I’m going. When I finish I return to the beginning and start again, around and around.

The book is musical, its effect on me is like music, like the effect music has. I never tire of it.

It has little or no plot. It is simply a person’s thoughts about his two closest friends, his only two friends, both of whom are now dead, one having recently committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree a hundred yards from the home of his sister, who abandoned him, as he saw it, in order to marry the owner of a chemical plant in Switzerland, in Zizer bei Chur, a godawful place name, as his often told his friend, “where the archbishop says Good Morning! each morning.”

Years ago I enjoyed reading books—novels!—but over time I’ve taken to avoiding them. Most seem so “written”; I begin reading and all I can think is how “written” they seem. Descriptions, in particular, I find intolerable.

The Loser contains no descriptions, or nearly none, which is partly why I love it.

A confession: I dog-ear the pages. I didn’t used to do this; I used to use a bookmark of some kind, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, bookmarks are unnatural. It feels unnatural to use this extraneous thing that must be stored somewhere while one reads. Perhaps if I found a suitable place to store the bookmark, it wouldn’t seem so unnatural, but I’ve never found such a place and so I’ve adopted the habit of dog-earring the pages, despite my reluctance to “ruin a perfectly good book.”

I’ve been reading The Loser (that is, this particular copy of The Loser) for several years now, and so nearly half the pages have little diagonal dog-ear creases. Oddly, this pleases me. It pleases me to dog-ear a previously dog-eared page, I don’t know why; I suppose it has something to do with loving something to the point of destroying it a little.