Reading Art
In a column on Popmatters.com, Mikita Brottman takes a close look at The Garfunkel Library, “a chronological listing of every book [singer Art Garfunkel] has read over the last 38 years – almost a thousand of them – including the month and year of reading, the date of first publication, and the number of pages they contain.”
As if the very existence of such a listing weren’t odd enough, Brottman discovers some further oddities:
Most revealing, however, aren’t the books that are listed, but those that aren’t. According to the site’s author, “We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art has read over the last 30 years.” That’s right, every book, do you hear? This means that, although he’s a poet himself, Garfunkel has only ever read four or five volumes of poetry—one of which, read in October 1989, was his own (Still Water—Prose Poems by Art Garfunkel). It means that when his wife, Kim, was pregnant in 1990, he read nothing in preparation; no What to Expect when You’re Expecting, no Official Lamaze Guide.It means that, when he walked across America in 1984, and later on across Europe, he did so without the aid of travel books. It means he read nothing he could share with his son, born in 1991 (unless you count Louise Ames’s Your Five-Year Old in 1996.) It means he read no books about healing and forgiveness in the build-up to his much-vaunted re-union with Paul Simon (unless that explains Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, in August 1996). Most recently, in January 2006, Art and his wife had a second son, born to a surrogate mother. You’d think he could have found something more pertinent to read in preparation for this emotion-laden event than Henri Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.
Though the list appears to be legit – it appears on Garfunkel’s own website, for one thing – we still can’t seem to get the phrase “elaborate prank” out of our heads.
