Djelloul Marbrook

Noah Eli Gordon in an end paper in the Spring issue of Rain Taxi says he recently began to read page twenty-six of every book he owns. The more I thought about this quixotic adventure the more it enchanted me. As I compared it to the evening news, it seemed to me infinitely more intellectually adventurous.

News organizations are like fastball hitters; they fear curve balls and knuckle balls, exactly the kind of pitches Noah Gordon is likely finding on all those twenty-sixth pages. For the average news anchor there’s ping and then there’s pong. There’s ho and then there’s hum. But lord knows what glories, temptations and recognitions are in those books.

I experimented in my own library. First I laid hands on A. Alvarez,
Autumn to Autumn (Macmillan London Ltd., 1978). On page 26 there was the poem Operation. Two lines in the last eight-line stanza nabbed my attention:

My blood stings like a river
lurching over the falls.

I closed my eyes and reached for another book in the poetry section:
Ann Lauterbach’s The Night Sky, Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Penguin, 2005). I searched page 26 and found a passage that resonated eerily with my own childhood experience of Manhattan’s east side:

There was the stench of chaos. Outside, the city contributed its harmonic: sirens, the Third Avenue el rasping along black tracks, cats, a distant foghorn, bells dividing the hours, planes ovefrhead. The boundary between outside and inside was porous, leaky.

I still remember all the snapshots of human drama I saw in the third and fourth floors of tenements as I rode that el.

I like Gordon’s fey and oblique eccentricity. It’s rather like ambling around a room peopled with fabulous beauties and slowly getting the notion that you’re the only one who notices they’re all cockeyed. —DM
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