Listen to “Make Space 37” on Spotify
And tell a friend!
In high school, my friends and I were obsessed with the number 37. We were convinced that if you looked at the clock during class, it would be 37 minutes past the hour. If you paused a movie, it would land on the 37th second. Our buddy M named his band Groove & 37th.
Once, also in high school, my friend J yelled to her parents, “I’m going to pick up Ross!”
“Rocks?" her mom replied.
“Yes. Exactly, Mom. I’m going to pick up rocks.”
“Well, you have to admit, that is something you would do.”
She wasn’t wrong.
From then on, J’s parents called me Rocks.
In his poem, “Journey to Iceland,” Auden initially wrote, “and the poets have names for the sea.” In the galley copy, the printer set it as “and the ports have names for the sea.” Auden thought it an improvement.
In early drafts of The Conversation, Gene Hackman’s character was written as Harry Caller. Coppola thought the name’s symbolic weight was too heavy, so he changed it to Harry Call. A typist later made an error, writing it as Caul, a word denoting the membrane surrounding a fetus. Coppola ran with it. After all, it’s a film about—among other things—a man coming to terms with his inability to insulate himself from the world. For much of the movie, Hackman wears a thin, translucent rain jacket.
In Rachel Cusk’s 2016 novel, Transit, she writes, “A friend of mine, depressed in the wake of his divorce, had recently admitted that he often felt moved to tears by the concern for his health and well-being expressed in the phraseology of adverts and food packaging, and by the automated voices on trains and busses, apparently anxious that he might miss his stop; he actually felt something akin to love, he said, for the female voice that guided him while he was driving his car. There had been a great harvest, he said, of language and information from life.”
Yesterday I drove by an elderly couple out for a stroll. The woman lurched suddenly— urgently—toward a nearby fence, gripping the railing with both hands, the universal language of someone who’s about to be sick. Her companion rubbed her back, the universal language of grace. Something akin to love. A great harvest.
At the end of June, I turned 38.
Groove & 38th.
On my birthday, Will Power’s “Adventures in Success” popped up on a playlist while I was out biking around. I hadn’t heard it in probably 10 years. I made a note in my phone, but it autocorrected to “Dentures in Success.”
The song’s tongue-in-cheek motivational lyrics used to irk me—I preferred the dub mix—but I guess I’m becoming a less cynical listener. That’s cool. Like language, time and meaning and memory can be slippery, too.
Thanks for listening.
Your bud,
Rocks
Art @ Joseph Grigely
The writing in this article is so wonderful. It's a little work of art. Thank you! Gonna listen to the music now
Love it all. Every little bit.