In the year 02026 CE I find myself in two book clubs.
First, there's the one with Alex's aunt Di and cousin Beth, which is now in its fifth year and has introduced me to some of my favorite books of all time: "North Woods" by Daniel Mason, "This is Happiness" by Niall Williams, "There's Always This Year" by Hanif Abdurraqib, "Mecca" by Susan Straight. Right now we're reading "The Emperor of Gladness" by Ocean Vuong, which contains a cast of secondary characters that takes me right back to the scrappy days of working the stock room at LuValle Commons. If you're looking for something to read, I've been tracking our selections on The StoryGraph; maybe you'll find one you're interested in?
And then there's the unexpected Mountain Goats Book People Book Club that has emerged among the comments section of 15-year-old YouTube videos...specifically, videos for the songs featured in John Darnielle's recently-released book, "This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days".
morning ritual: drink tea, read about a song
(I think, if you've read my blog, you probably know a little bit about John Darnielle and his 3.5-decades-long musical output that is the Mountain Goats, but if not, the short context is that he is one of my favorite lyricists and storytellers of all time, whose works span lo-fi cassette recordings to novels about text-based RPGs to, most recently, a musical about two people washed ashore from a storm at sea.)
Like a lot of people, I've been reading "This Year" one day at a time so I can savor the book across the whole year, each day flavored in part by whatever song and personal reflection JD chose for that particular date.
Here's one of my recent favorites, from January 16:
Fresh Cherries in Trinidad
When I woke up on Saturday and you came in / And you brought the sunlight in / I felt sleep slipping away from me / I feel things occasionally / Like this / Fresh cherries / Hanging from your fingers
When the water on the window lit the sunlight through / And I got a good look at you / Standing above me bright and tall / There are no words for it, there are no words at all / I saw / Fresh cherries / Hanging from your fingers
Water, windows, fruit: the inviolate early Mountain Goats troika! The second person, in medias res, and a specific point in time (Saturday): the troika of secondary necessity! But it's the note of longing in a song like this that, for me, made the song a keeper instead of one among many other songs featuring water, windows, and fruit that never got released. The details are there only to get to the longing: to frame it in a way that makes it feel real. And it is real; I wrote this song after Joel, now mentioned for at least the fourth time, either wrote or called to tell me his partner, Kim, had brought him fresh cherries. They lived in Trinidad at the time. Trinidad, California. It's up near Humboldt, but I was under no obligation to tell you that.
This is one of many early Mountain Goats songs¹ that I'd never heard before, so after reading the lovely annotation with my morning tea, I hopped over to YouTube to listen to the song and delighted in its unexpectedly boppy Casio beat. Even though most of the cassette-era songs aren't uploaded to the band's official account, locating them is never an issue; the Mountain Goats fandom is unabashedly obsessive² and I've found that there will always be a ~10-year-old video uploaded by a fan somewhere, which is where we all convene for a day to check in with each other:
The asynchronous book club started happening within the first few days...everyone seemed to have the same realization that we were dusting the cobwebs off these barely-viewed YouTube videos, discovering and rediscovering the Mountain Goats together.
For a fandom that is largely Gen X and Millennial, finding community in the comments section of a website that used to be for funny little DIY projects (before being "content creators" was a thing) feels appropriate. Our book club conversation happens piecemeal, unrehearsed: part musical commentary, part personal diary, part therapy.³
I'm sure there are plenty of people like me (dozens of us?) who don't comment but read the thread all the same, maybe slinging the occasional upvote for comments that make us smile. We're all here, a strange little book club of nerds, listening to this song today and then going out and doing our own thing until we reconvene tomorrow.
footnotes
¹ "Billy the Kid's Dream of the Magic Shoes" - Another recent discovery among the early tMG catalog, perhaps my favorite so far.
² "Going to Fennario" - This latest Mountain Goats song was released in honor of Bobby Weir, and the Bandcamp page includes a nice tribute from JD. I was born too late to be a part of the Grateful Dead fandom at the peak of the touring years, but being a Mountain Goats fan feels similar: there is a deep camaraderie and lore around the music, a shared understanding that the recordings are really just "physical evidence that something happened, something spectral and momentary" (p. 29) in the form of a rock concert.
³ The song after which the book is named, which doubles as an anthem to sing when you're going through it.