David and Julia on the Carolinian 80. Photo by Ivan Weiss.
In his prose poem “Rounding Off to the Nearest Zero,” Albert Mobilio writes that “Driving, or at least driving alone, is, I’ve always found, conducive to thinking. The sense of forward motion, the calf’s calibrated flexing, the purposeful grip of the wheel combine, it seems, to concentrate the mind.” Trains have this effect, too: their linear haste through the landscape makes thoughts unspool. The final three chapters of “Big, Bent Ears”—including the latest, Chapter 10—follow the trajectory of the Carolinian 80 as it wends from Durham to New York, and its motion drew Ivan Weiss into a web of associations between the sounds and processes of Tyondai Braxton and of Oren Ambarchi as well as those with whom they collaborate. This new chapter revels in sensory confusion—rhythms that are seen, memories that are sonic, tables that make music—and in the comfort that can be found in music:
I’d walk into a room and be invisible, and music was always the thing that calmed the noise. It was where I found solace. I would go to sleep with the radio next to me and wake up with the radio next to me. Before my eyes would open, my hands would flick the on switch.
The chapter opens with David and Julia, pictured above—strangers who meet on the Carolinian 80 and whose conversation is loosed by the lull of travel. Their exchange, like the rest of the installment, recalls Joseph Mitchell’s lines from our first chapter:
The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.
Read the latest chapter here, and catch up on the rest of the series:
Nicole Rudick is managing editor of The Paris Review.
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