« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
April 7, 2022
Jeff Deutsch's Playlist for His Book "In Praise of Good Bookstores"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Jeff Deutsch's In Praise of Good Bookstores is an eloquent and powerful ode to the necessity of community bookstores.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Deutsch, director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, reflects on the importance of bookselling in his moving debut. . . . A resonant elegy to a changing business, this will hit the spot for literature lovers."
In his own words, here is Jeff Deutsch's Book Notes music playlist for his book In Praise of Good Bookstores:
In Praise of Good Bookstores, my celebration of the bookstore in the 21st century and the undervalued profession of bookselling, is comprised of meditations on five primary themes: space, abundance, value, community, and time. When I first conceived of the book, there was a sixth ultimately abandoned theme – reverence. While writing the book, however, it became clear that reverence couldn’t be separated from the rest. What would it mean to write about space without speaking of altars or sanctuaries? What would it mean to speak of community and not celebrate the divine presence the rabbis tell us descends upon a meeting when bookish teachings are shared? Or to speak of time and not mark the transition from common to sacred time, or the hours of remembering and the hours of forgetting, or eternal and ephemeral moments?
I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community and left it at 14, when I began finding meaning elsewhere: in Bob Dylan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Marlboro Reds. While there was much I valued about the Jewish way of life, I found dogma and devotion to be incompatible. I have spent my entire career in bookselling – in part, because I have had my share of orthodoxy; bookstores are havens of heterodoxy. And so, the sixth chapter proved unnecessary.
I occasionally listen to music when I’m reading, but I often listen to music when I’m writing. Perhaps it was the music that infused the rest of the book with reverence usually reserved for the divine. I listened to quite a bit of gospel and folk, and a considerable portion of my music collection is inspired by the divine. Here are a few songs on various reverent themes:
“Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody” The Abyssinian Baptist Choir
The work of bookselling consists of filtration, selection, assemblage, and enthusiasm. It is this last skill – enthusiasm – that finds near-perfect expression in the ecstatic choir-sung, “I can’t keep it to myself!” We booksellers know what it is to be bursting with good news!
“Six Days on the Road” Taj Mahal
Chicago winters can be difficult in good times, but, as the first winter months of the pandemic approached toward the end of 2020, the weeks seemed unbearable. My wife, May, always filled with good ideas, thought we might find our way to spring by thinking differently about time. And so, from January through April, we rounded out the weeks by keeping a sort of sabbath: we avoid ephemera and screens from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
I love so many versions of the song “Six Days on the Road.” I listened to so many, including versions by Steve Earle, George Jones, Charley Pride, Mudcrutch, Eric Church, and David Allan Coe. While the Gram Parsons version is a firm runner-up, my favorite remains Taj Mahal’s, which was also the first version I ever heard.
It was only after listening to it a couple of hundred times, and, of course, upon keeping it again myself, that I understood the refrain, “six days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight,” was a reference to that rest that awaits us after six days of work – in other words, sabbath.
“Down by the Riverside” Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
While I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, my mother was an unapologetic atheist, with a great love for folk and gospel music (and Baldwin novels, which I reference in the book). She remains my greatest influence and I have very fond memories of listening to records with her.
The African American spiritual “Down by the Riverside” appeared on so many albums in my mother’s collection. Versions by Big Bill Broonzy (one of her favorites), Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, and Memphis Minnie loom large in my musical memory. But the one by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee is the one that I’ve listened to the most.
It is a song of peace.
While I was raised in an insular world, I was able to step outside of it here and there. And my mother’s sensibility was my model of what seemed important about the non-Orthodox world. The bookstore was my ideal space. Like the riverside, it seemed a place where I might lay down my burden – my proverbial sword and shield – and meet all that was great about my loving mother, whose enthusiasm for secular literature and godly music, was a balm and a comfort.
“Rolling Hills” Van Morrison
“Rolling Hills,” another song of peace, is from Morrison’s underrated 1979 album Into the Music. Its protagonist will “do no man no ill,” as he’s reading his bible still, among the rolling hills.
The novelist and pacifist Nicholson Baker once called the Seminary Co-op Bookstore a “peaceable kingdom of books.”
“V’yitnu L’cha” Shlomo Carlebach
This one is here because of the joyful buoyancy of the arrangement. It’s a bounding and beautiful song that was adapted from the High Holiday liturgy. And it is a perfect musical expression of the giddiness I feel upon discovering a heretofore unknown good bookstore.
“One of Us” Prince
“Presence of the Lord” Blind Faith
There is something purely transcendent when Prince releases a string of “yeahs” after singing, “Yeah, yeah, god is great. Yeah, yeah, god is good.” And nothing makes me feel god’s goodness more than wandering the stacks of a good bookstore with nothing to do, nowhere to be. It is there I feel I “finally found a place to live, in the presence of the Lord.”
“No Bad News” Patty Griffin
In addition to a reference that echoes Seneca’s notion that we’re dying every day, from his letter to Lucilius, that opens the fifth chapter (“can’t have my fear, I’m not getting out of here alive any way”), there is a lovely stanza in “No Bad News” that could have fit nicely in the chapter on community:
And we won't be afraid, we won't be afraid, and though the darkness may come our way
We won't be afraid to be alive anymore
And we'll grow kindness in our hearts for all the strangers among us
Till there are no strangers anymore
“Every Grain of Sand” Bob Dylan
This hymn, from the last of Dylan’s trilogy of Christian-themed albums, is one of his most gentle melodies.
Booksellers see many types of browsers, and I describe some of them in the book. One such type is the sandpiper. Named after the Elizabeth Bishop poem in which she describes an obsessed bird whose beak is focussed, “looking for something, something, something,” the browsing sandpiper feverishly searches, in the blur of the stacks, for the one book that will reveal the ultimate truth.
Blake saw the world in a grain of sand and Dylan, like Bishop’s sandpiper, is a student of Blake’s.
To borrow from Dylan’s sublime lyrics, in the hour of our deepest need, we browsers might “ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay,” listening to the “ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea,” and beholding the divine hand in every leaf – recto and verso – that trembles, and in every grain of sand.
Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. He lives in Chicago.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
