A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness, Pt. 8: Dogma vs. Delight (#1 of 2)

A Top 10 List of My Father's Lists

Presenting the eighth installment in my ongoing series of posts about my relationship with my late father, Jerry Hirshberg, and our shared and separate relationships to art we loved and/or made. Each essay responds to a selection from my dad’s homemade card catalog, which documents his lifelong music collecting habit. I want each of these pieces to stand on its own, but suspect their effect will be cumulative. If you’re new to the series, you might want to start with Pt. 1.

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Top Ten List of My Father’s Top 10 Lists (Part 1)

My parents’ marriage was well into its fifth decade before my mom figured out how to make my dad stop whining about dinner parties: she told him to come up with a list challenge. Different challenge every time. Usually based around movies: best opening scene, say, (no more than eight minutes); best single instance of use of a single piece of soundtrack music. Then, before or after dinner, everyone could gather to watch and discuss.

Not whole movies, mind you. Too much risk of someone bringing something my dad didn’t want to see, and him having to sit through it.

Except on New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve, I think, they watched whole movies. That he picked.

I wasn’t there at the moment of dinner party concept inception. But I picture it so vividly, I may as well have been. My mom having her lightbulb moment. Heading for the living room to pitch the idea to my dad. Then pitching it again, because he’s busy listening to music with his Misters (see Pt. 6), doesn’t hear her, and has instead insisted she come listen beside him.

Then my dad’s face, as understanding dawns. As the task—with its limitless possible variations, its delicious and dizzying opportunities for precisely the sorts of conversations he loved most—unfurls before him.

My dad leaping from the couch, bounding downstairs to the movie collection like a dog after a ball. (Although not their dog. Way too much work, the fetch-training. Way too much fun just to lift the dog onto the couch and let it lie its head on his lap while he cooed at it. While listening to music.)

From that point on, I think my dad actually did enjoy couples’ nights. But not as much as he enjoyed preparing for them. Calling to talk to and get input from me, my brother, and other friends. Consulting his reference materials. Making lists.

So many lists, just for this. Scenes to share, categorized by theme. Also by specific couples with which to share them, because he absolutely obeyed the Nick Hornby High Fidelity dictum, and tailored his menu choices to please the specific friends to whom he offered them. This may seem surprising. But other people’s delight was always an essential element in his list-making. And his collection building. And all the listening and viewing he ever did, even though he did the great majority of that alone. See Dinner Guest Music List, sub-entry B, below.

Lists channel all through my father’s notecard catalog. In fact, they overflow it. My wife was recently down helping my mom finish packing the house my parents lived in for almost thirty years. She found lists all over his desk. Tucked into and behind books. In old wallets. In nightstand drawers.

The lists are, in fact, the ground cover from which all his other cards spring. Or maybe that’s wrong. More than wrong, inverted. They’re the reservoirs into which all those thousands of individual entries and notations pour. They may be the reason for his card catalog in the first place. Reading them now, I hear his voice more clearly than I have at any point during this project. He’s right under my window, just behind those trees. Calling for me to come out.

Just another echo, I know. But this one has so much of him in it.

Therefore. In tribute. And because it’s not only right, but the only appropriate way to do this. Here is my Top 10 list of my father’s lists, in ascending order of significance.

Wait, significance to what, you ask?

Yes, says I.

But Glen, what’s your criteria?

Fuck that, says I. It’s a rule of listing, as essential to proper performance of the exercise as the number ten. List first, criteriate later.

Umm, Glen? There seem to be thirteen entries in your Top 10 List...

Yeah, and I’m afraid I have troubling news for you: By the time I hit Publish on Part Two next week, there could be more. I might even add more later. As in, after I publish.

What are you, a purist? List-making Puritan, elevating dogma above delight?

Not a mistake my father would have made.

Right. Here goes. The (current, as of 9/10/23) list of Jerry Hirshberg’s lists:

13. The Ultimate Sonic/Audiophile Demo Lists

I’m less taken with any specific entries on these particular cards than their JLA (that’s Jerry Language Association) Style Guide variations.

Look at the picture above. Note, for starters, that “&cds” is outside the box at the top of the “AUDIOPHILE DEMO LPs” list. That could be because that card is old, and he started it before there were CDs. But I don’t think so. It’s an expression of grudging acquiescence to reality (ok, cds have their place). And also a ranking. Expression of preference.

I also note the variety in exclamation points. The traditional dagger-sticks punctuating certain entries. Usually just one. But sometimes two!

Meaning he was particularly excited about or in love with those recordings? Or really wanted to listen to them again?

Then there are those inverted-triangle exclamation points. A rating system, do you think?

Could be. Not a coherent or consistent one, though. Delight over dogma, remember?

But, Dad. I’m afraid I have looked closely enough to spot the fact that that glorious first Blue Nile album I introduced you to appears twice on this card. And that Dave Brubeck’s Take Five gets not only an exclamation point but also a cloud squiggle.

You may never have gotten yourself art-snob free enough to award your (many) popular music loves individual cards. But you couldn’t keep them off your lists.

And I know the lists mattered more to you.

I win.

12. The I Don’t Know What it Is List! With More Exclamation Points!

That’s my name for these cards, obviously. There are lots of them. Some are probably page two of some other list, but with no obvious means of identifying which. Some have an F at the top. Which could mean Fanfare, the magazine? Something? Others bear the heading “Browsing Notes”, but there are never notes on those cards, and I have no idea whether “browsing” means in his own collection or elsewhere. Or even who should be browsing.

I sometimes imagine trying to reverse reconstruct his thinking by listening my way down these lists, trying to (re)discover the connection. Assuming there was one, beyond the day and the mood he was in at the moment of committing them to card.

But I’ll never know what these lists are. It’s more than possible, if he were here and saw them now, that he wouldn’t, either.

And yet. Somehow. In that spiderweb of connections he was always observing. Or making. Expressing excitement about with all those exclamation points, singular or multiple, with or without block triangles or cloud squiggles.

So many squiggles. So many connections. So much joy.

Hi, Dad.

11. The Opera List

Nature? Nurture?

All I know is that for someone with as restless and expansive a musical palate as you had, that’s a pretty piddly—and canonical—list of operas worth listing. It’s also the only opera list I have found amid your notecards, anywhere.

Which elicits my thousandth rueful smile of this project. Yet another companions-in-so-many-things shrug. The you-and-me-both nod.

It’s not you, opera. It’s us.

10. The Best of (Whichever) Year Lists

As in, mostly, their absence. In the entirety of my father’s card catalog, I’ve found two year’s best anything cards.

This surprises you? Then you don’t understand, yet. About the arbitrariness of years. Their irrelevance. The insignificance of any sort of keeping up or keeping current as compared to the elation of finding, whenever that happens.

Here’s yet another thing my dad loved: theoretical physics. Even more, he loved theoretical physicists. Kept their biographies on his nightstand. Took literally years to read them.

How much and how precisely did he understand the concepts? Well, I never underestimate my father.

But I’m pretty sure that what he loved and understood best was leaping brains. The one tiny idea or shift in movement or perspective that triggers a million other tiny shifts that lead to revelatory eruptions of thought. In his book, The Creative Priority, he talks about “crossing the streams”, gathering input from a thousand different disciplines and activities as a way of upending staid practices and galvanizing invention (and if you don’t think he was aware of and delighted by the double entendre about fun activities to try at urinals, you haven’t been reading this series carefully enough).

Who cares, therefore, what year something was released, as compared to when you found it, and what else it suddenly reminded you of or led you to?

9. The Dinner Guest Music Lists

Again, noteworthy primarily by their absence, and their incompleteness. There are maybe three of these cards. None of them are complete.

Why? Three reasons.

A. Way too ill-defined and boring a task to hold his attention. “Dinner music” meaning background? Meaning generally and generically pleasant sounds to talk over? Why not just flick on some fans and be done with it?

B.  No specific target recipients. So, no other discrete minds to thrill, challenge, engage. Cross streams with.

C. “Wait, dinner guests? Do I have to come?”

8. Lists for Specific Other People

On the other hand, there are dozens of these. For his friend Len. For his brothers-in-law, children, barber (I kid you not. They must have got talking). Someone named Arthur, probably my lovely cousin Susie’s partner, but I don’t know that for sure.

Maybe my favorite thing about these cards is the way they’re broken down by category. Arthur, for example, gets several separate lists. One is labeled “Divinities”, and includes things like Beethoven’s “Appassionata”, and so could be music in some way about religious experience or God. But I suspect that word is just another Jerry classification system, because halfway down the “Divinities” list is another sub-list: “Demi-Gods”. Meaning, I’m pretty sure, music Arthur would find almost divine.

7. Lists on the Back of Other Lists

Like this one. Found by chance, when I accidentally dropped the “Ultimate Sonic List” card above as I was replacing it in the file box.

Did he run out of notecards? Seems unlikely that he ever would allow that to happen.

Maybe he accidentally laid the Ultimate Sonic list facedown, didn’t realize he’d already written on that card? Or, wait, why am I assuming which side is the back?

As noted elsewhere in these essays, my father cherished libraries. And library collections. But he wasn’t a librarian. I don’t know why it has taken me this long—all summer—to figure this out. Yes, these cards are a record. Yes, they’re a locating device. Mostly, though, they’re diving boards. A thousand different platforms from which to dive, yet again, into to some other hidden reservoir in his collection.

All of them conceived and constructed by him. But totally usable by me. Or anyone.

Meant for me. And everyone.

Thanks, Pop. Again. Always.

But also...what the hell is “Lost Art of Letter Writing”?! And how is it that you never made me this disc, because you couldn’t have, because if I’d heard that piece—even if it didn’t live up to that title, and honestly, how could it—surely I’d remember?

Matter of fact, I think I better go hear it now. It’s what you would have wanted.

Even more, it’s what you would have done.

Be right back...

(to be continued…)