"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden."

I like to soundtrack my novels. I pick an album and listen to it and only it each time I open the book. It sort of cauterizes the experience in my mind—not just the narrative or the music, but the sensation of absorption, layered in sound and story. Then, whenever I return either to the music or the novel, I can feel the other like a ghost limb, like something now gone that was once a very real part of me. Synesthesia moonshine, home brewed.

This week:

Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice + Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa. (Done despite the fact that Mann’s Aschenbach was in part based on Mahler.)