Text (c) Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015
Images from the Internet
This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began: Essays
By Joe Bonomo
Orphan Press (Cordova, TN), 2013
249 pages; USD $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-615-75545-8
It can be ordered HERE
Joe Bonomo is a name that is definitely becoming better known in
the music historian field. He’s had, in part, books published about the likes
of Jerry Lee Lewis, AC/DC (for the prestigious 33-1/3
series), and the definitive biography (okay, the only one) of the
Fleshtones. I’ve read and reviewed just about everything he’s written (just
search this blog), and Joe’s the real deal.
This book, however, takes a autobiographical
non-fiction (yes that is a genre, though I prefer the term creative non-fiction) look at his life,
in a semi-chronological approach. Rather than a series of anecdotes or a deep
analysis of what things mean, this is an artistic look at what makes him tick;
not about music, but his formation into what it is he has become.
Over the years, Bonomo has been published in numerous creative
writing journals, such as the prestigious The
Fiddleback, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and New Ohio Review. These
pieces have been collected (and updated; i.e., re-edited) into this anthology
of his work; he is certainly not a One Topic Pony, even within the
autobiographical framework.
From discovering girls as a youth in a strict Catholic school through
becoming an academic at Northern Illinois University, Bonomo bars no topic of internal
conversation, but rather with fluidly and prose language examines key moments,
often unsentimentally but rather as facts, as they are true to his memory, and
the formation of himself.
While topics such as lost friendships, substances (e.g. booze)
and first crushes are clearly and sharply displayed, as he gets older and
previous events start to build, that’s when you start to connect the dots and
see seminal events in his life, both small and writ large. Not all of it, of
course, is fresh and pretty. For example, a discussion on male gaze –
especially his own – is strongly evident as he attended strip clubs as a young
man:
But as the clothes come off a different
cloak is draped. Witness the growing bulge of the strippers G-string – nothing
less than her money belt – as she pockets more and more control flowing from
these men’s wallets. The sign remains the same for strippers of either gender,
the body’s topography cunningly similar to value: for a male stripper, a bulge
signifies power, masculinity, control, domination; for a female stripper, a
bulge signifies power control, domination – and so, masculinity. … (pp.
91-92).
It isn’t until near the end that specific music show up at all, such
as a mention of the use of Gary Glitter and the Ramones at ball games, though
in “Student Killed by Freight Train,” he talks right up my Media Theory mindset:
“I wonder if before
the invention of movies we heard sentimental orchestral strings in our minds
when we read sad passages in novels, or a wave of triumphant music when, say,
little Sylvia perched atop a fir tree first spotted the prized heron’s nest. In
1793 while a dying man gazed far ahead or far back in his imagination, did the
edges of his perception grow poignantly fuzzy in a cinematic dreamscape?” (p. 183).
We are taken through parts of his life in New York, Maryland, Washington,
DC and finally Illinois, where he is currently a professor. In fact, Bonomo
almost uses places as a substitute for music as the axes of his life. He will
talk about a topic, and pin it to the map by mentioning not only the location,
but the building, e.g., such and such a store on this particular street. It’s
more than a memory; it gives a stranger a foundation, and someone familiar with
the local a mental pinpoint equivalent to a smell that brings back a memory.
Location, by fixing it so precisely, presents a form of the
cycle of eternity, showing how some things change, but others become both fixed
in time and only in memory, so even if they are no longer there, on some level
they linger in mind, so they exist yet. He addresses this head-on in “Colonizing
the Past”:
In autobiographical
nonfiction, place is elastic, no firmer than smoke. Nostalgia carries with it
the desire to return and memory its own mindfulness, less the urge to go back
than the desire to stay put and try to understand… Google Maps allows me now to
fly over my hometown, to revisit in three dimensions an atlas precision the
places I’ve rebuilt (or halted the growth of) in my heady imagination. We don’t
yet know the effects of this on the culture value of memory: the dream-engine
that hovers over the past now competes with digital bits of verifiable information,
cartographic certainties, calendar truths.” (pp.
134-135)
One of the focal points is Bonomo’s Roman Catholic upbringing,
and what one could argue are the sins that normalize into nearly everyone’s
life. In the case of Bonomo, including as I mentioned, there is girls and then
women (lust), neighbors (envy in some cases, perhaps), self (pride), drink (could
be gluttony), and prayer (I might argue as sloth, as in asking for another –
God – to do for you rather than
earning).
Covering both small moments that change one’s perspective and
larger events, Bonomo meditates on not just the what, but the wonder of
it. For example, in one of my favorite moments, in a piece called “Into the
Fable,” he contemplates on a moment in his life where an acquaintance does a questionable,
yet not normally memorable thing as a child, but Bonomo ponders why that moment
has stuck with him for his whole life, and “why I can’t shake it. John has
entered the fable. He’s become a literary figure. He’s become fabled. Does that
mean that I invented him? He’s now fabulous. He’s now somewhere, not thinking
of me” (p. 234). If I may be so presumptuous, we’ve all had moments like that,
where certain events become like a television rerun playing inside our heads,
for reasons that shake the internal head of reason. He does kind of answer that
earlier in “There Was the Occasional Disruption,” where he states, “What begins
as rumor can never circle back to fact, instead moves inevitably toward myth.”
(p. 175)
Not just because we both worked at a Baskin-Robbins at one point
in our lives, I feel a kinship of some kind. Bonomo has lived a very different existence
than mine, but there are so many moments that were aha flashes of understanding and on occasional level clear
identification. For example, he mentions that “…entering a church, I always
felt as if I were entering a movie in the middle. It was a story I felt left
out of many times.” (208) This is often how I felt going to synagogue as a
youth, and something just didn’t jibe to me; I especially feel it now when I regularly
take a relative to a Lutheran church. And don’t get me started on “Spying on
the Petries,” a treatise on one of my favorite shows growing up (in repeat
form), The Dick Van Dyke Show.
While being a non-poetic form of prose, Bonomo tells stories and
thoughts without getting overly philosophical, rather staying within the realm
of thought and more often than not, the marvel about his life and the events
that brought him to the present. The book is an enjoyable read that is
exceedingly accessibly without talking down to its reader; both fun and
thought-provoking. In short, it’s a good read.
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