Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.
John McPhee, Omission: Choosing what to leave out, The New Yorker (September 7, 2015)
“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”
Andrew Weathers is a voyager, traveling the country in search of inspiration from the land and the sky. His music transcends genre and style, incorporating stylistic signifiers both rural and urban, earthly and cosmic. In his recent review of the reissued Andrew Weathers Ensemble album Fuck Everybody, You Can Do Anything, Bryon Hayes suggested that he and his band “produced broad, sweeping soundscapes that incorporated elements of drone, minimalism, chamber music and americana.” The written word is a huge influence on Weathers, and he draws influence from a variety of sources for his lyrics. In this edition of Listed, the artist, composer, and producer elaborates on how words and music are intertwined for him.
Music is essentially my entire life, the thing that frames everything that I do. Living is a constant expansion, reading helps. Folding the world outside of music into my practice is an important pursuit; here are ten books that aren’t about music that shaped how I think about music. Many of these books were given to me by good friends and collaborators — thank you Seth, Marianna, Will, Emmerich, Siena, Eric.
William Least Heat-Moon — PrairyErth
This is the book that has shaped me more than any other; Heat-Moon looks at a single county in rural Kansas and finds a whole world. Nowhere is nowhere. William, please email me.
Roxana Robinson — Georgia O’Keeffe
I’ll be honest, I’ve found Georgia O’Keeffe’s work to be entirely cornball. Something shifted in my perception after I visited her former home in Abiquiu, NM. This biography is extensive and detailed; a life fought for and deeply rooted in place. I found something admirable there.
Gretel Ehrlich — Islands, The Universe, Home
“Some days I think this one place isn’t enough. That’s when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and have the know-how and guts to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destination. Only then do I see, at least momentarily, that most everything is here.”
John McPhee — Oranges
One of the best writers on geology places the Orange as a fulcrum for the unfolding of manifest destiny. Unassuming, deeply powerful, also delicious.
James Nisbet — Second Site
Second Site takes on time and place, an attempt at tracing a barely perceptible shift. A long lineage of precedent for what I do — a new context to sit in.
Georges Perec — An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
This is what I do in sound in the form of a novel. A sentence about a green bus passing by brought me to tears. There’s everything in the mundane.
Orhan Pamuk — The Museum of Innocence
Not just a novel, but an actual museum in Beyoğlu, Istanbul. I saw the museum first and then the book pulled it into focus. Everything touches; media are always fluid.
Dan Flores — Coyote America
If we have talked at any length, I’ve probably mentioned this book. Coyote is the Unhuulda, the fence-sitter between wilderness and civilization. I feel a kinship to the way that the coyote navigates this world, constantly slipping between the cracks.
Francesco Careri — Walkscapes
One of the rare books that I regularly come back to, this helped me codify practices and habits I’ve had since I was a teenager. It exists for me in a similar space to Second Site, though possibly more intimate.
Went back through my Goodreads account, which I've had since 2008, to see what I'd rated 4-5 stars. I don't own some of these books anymore, so it's pleasing to see them laid out together in screenshots. A selection:
All a conservationist group can do is to defer something. There’s no such thing as a permanent victory. After we win a battle, the wilderness is still there, and still vulnerable. When a conservation group loses a battle, the wilderness is dead.
David Brower, quoted by John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid
A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening - as five of us did - it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold.
(The best openning paragraph - from John McPhee: Encounters with the Archdruid)
