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21 March, 1996 9:57:10 PM i have a weakness for phonebooks, encyclopedia, dictionaries and search-engines. there's really nothing to it. i could sit here at this desk for the rest of my life just reading people's names and addresses, looking at their phone numbers and wondering what it would be like to call them. and i've learned a great many useful things by simply picking up the dictionary and opening to a page. i learned about Janizary music one day after picking up the Harvard Dictionary of Music and opening to a page. any page. when i go to a library i routinely check the card catalogue for works by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, the obtuse and eternally obscure British composer whose name i've used as my login id for several years. Sorabji wrote piano pieces that were several hours long, and virtually impossible for any pianist to perform. he also wrote some normal piano music, some of which i've performed. our names are not even remotely similar. getting bored with looking up Sorabji at every public library i visited is how i learned of the music of Ferdenando Sor. i also check for anything by the French composer Charles Alkan, and for any recording by the great Vladimir Horowitz. in college i would search the Edgar database for my name. i would search for the names of everyone in my family, just to see what other people with the same names were up to, and with the not-so-vague wish that i might discover something. maybe my father (whose name is the same as that of a Jazz Age socialist and political rabble-rouser) had written an obscure but critical dissertation on man's relation to currency.
once i picked up a New York Times and was alarmed to read that "Mark Thomas' house of hate is a bastion of Nazi rage." i had that issue of the Times on my piano. it was there for months, but i seem to have misplaced it. for weeks i couldn't quit thinking "Mark Thomas' House of Hate." that issue of the Times was mailed to me by a former friend who i never met, but who was nice enough at one point to have made the effort to find that issue and mail it to me.
Mark A. Thomas
announced in
December that
he would run for
sheriff in Winston-
Salem, N. C., this
year. Thomas said
he would be more
effective at fighting
crime than the
incumbent because
he is "criminally
minded": He was
convicted of theft
in 1983 and of
embezzlement a few
years earlier.
[Winston-Salem Journal, 12-3-93]
there is someone at my place of work who has the exact same name as i. it was a source of confusion and aggravation when first i started working there. it was worse for him, i think, because his life insurance and family's finances were all elaborately intertwined within the company. he was getting my expense checks, and i was getting his insurance renewal notices and magazines.
i can't describe, nor can i explain why i found it so unsettling to know that someone was receiving my calls and opening my mail before realizing it was not his. knowing that someone was handling messages personally addressed to me, or inadvertantly misleading others into thinking one way or another about whether or not i do the simple things like return phone calls or answer mail feels like an inner demon over which i have no control. and the grandiose manner with which some people addressed me over the phone, and then the dismal disappointment in their voices when they realized they were talking to The Other Mark Thomas is one of the strangest feelings i've ever known. like answering a ringing payphone and trying to keep up a conversation with whoever called.
most of the time, when the caller realizes that i am not the mark thomas they were looking for, the line goes dead. they hang up.
the tone of our conversations is sometimes strident.
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