I might stare at the bookshelves all day. Or, too lazy to get up, I might just dip into the nearest book within arm’s reach, which happens to be a John Ashbery volume. Leisure. Or I can stare at those books on the shelf with the hope of summoning thoughts useful, revealing, confessional.

The visible books on the shelves are mostly from college, early 1990s, and even high school vintage. “Gray’s Anatomy,” portions of which I had memorized in 1990 and 1991, sits slightly askew in the middle of the shelf. I don’t have all the Latin terms ready to wield like a whipsaw but I remember the os magnum, the carpal trapezium, the metacarpals and capitatum, the semilunar and the unciform — this just a random memorydump of words, issued in no meaningful sequence but to demonstrate how I once had memorized the names of every bone of the human hand.

My interest in the complexities of human hands led me to purchase “Gray’s Anatomy,” a weighty tome through which I wandered other bony realms of feet, skull, ass, and shoulders.

I pursued these interests partly as curious diversion but also in an attempt to understand “the mechanism,” as we called it at the conservatory. The “mechanism” is the complex of gear-like chunks of bone and cartilaginous innards united by physics and artistry to create sound at a piano and on other instruments. The professor with whom I studied used the term “mechanism”. He massaged his right arm any time he said the word. One time he groused about atrophy, and he squeezed his right forearm saying “Sometimes the mechanism isn’t feeling like it used to.” Chopin used the same term in summarizing the characteristics of each finger and the art of fingering. I don’t know if Chopin had much knowledge of anatomy. Was Chopin fluent in the locations and functions of the metacarpals and the unciform? I brandish those terms now with foggy memories of their relationship and their appropriate sequence. I might simply enjoy the sound of the words, a superficial spark which helped draw me in to a fascination with the workings of the human hand.

I became similarly interested in architecture not because I cared for buildings (though I do) but because I was 16 years old when a girl I liked just out of nowhere started blurting out words like “squinch”, “stalactite”, “stucco”, and “Muqarnas”. She also lit up my word-o-sphere with a bunch of terms regarding joints and lathing. “Stucco” was the only of her words I knew, for Stucco was a material commonly used for walls and ceilings in Florida houses. As with squinch and stalactite and other words, “Stucco” could have meant birdshit and I still would have thought it was an awesome word just on account of its sound.

The next book on my shelf is “The White House Transcripts,” purchased for $1.33 on October 9, 1990, at a Tampa book shop. These details (which I assume to be accurate) are known to me because I just stood up to get that book and I found the purchase receipt stuck between pages 142 and 143. Hah, I shall add that relic to my collection of receipts. I never got too far with this book, remembering it mostly for the [expletive deleted] and the [unintelligible] leitmotifs. Watergate became a morbid interest of mine in college on account of my interest in obtaining a copy of a piece of music Richard Nixon wrote for the Orthagonians, a club at Whittier College (why do I still remember this?).

On the same shelf as this book of transcripts is “Music At the White House,” a volume summarizing musical performances at the White House and the musical endeavors of presidents who had such talents themselves. I bought that volume for its reference to Nixon’s piano-playing and for its quote of him saying he composed the aforementioned Orthagonians song. As far as I know Nixon is the only POTUS to have written a piece of music, though I imagine Thomas Jefferson might have tried his hand at composition.

The volume of transcripts from Nixon’s tape recorders seemed monumental in its significance, though I could hardly explain why. A few years earlier, as Iran-Contra unfolded, my grandmother (who talked to me very little) described how dispiriting the Watergate affair had been, and how it slowly uprooted her trust in government and even in America. For her Watergate was painful, and Iran-Contra seemed to her like more of the same.

Elsewhere on that shelf (which I chose to study simply because it is at eye-level): “The Stairway to Heaven”, by Zecharia Sitchin, a volume I found at the same time as Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” and which captivated me in ways which should embarrass me today. A volume which shall remain nameless, but to which I contributed mightily, sits exactly on top of “The 12th Planet,” another in the aforementioned Zecharia Sitchin series of books which attempt to prove that human beings derived from space aliens, and that no other explanation may exist for earthly phenomena like the sudden and inexplicable appearance of agriculture, the abrupt acceleration of human evolution, and the presence (in artistic representations) of what appear to be oxygen tanks on the backs of gods.

A couple of Scrabble books.

The 9/11 Commission Report.

Miss Lonelyhearts.

The Liar’s Club.

The Well, by Katie Hafner.

Why New Orleans Matters.

Rather than stand up again to explore any of these mostly half-read titles I shall return (as I so often do) to John Ashbery, whose poetry always seems to be within arms reach.