BOOKS BOUGHT:

• The British Museum Is Falling Down—David Lodge
• Angel—Elizabeth Taylor
• My American—Stella Gibbons

BOOKS READ:

• Eminent Hipsters—Donald Fagen
• The British Museum Is Falling Down—David Lodge
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—John le Carré
• Thunderstruck and Other Stories—Elizabeth McCracken

I have been thinking a lot about the past these last few weeks, for reasons both professional and personal—but then who hasn’t? Don’t we all think about the past, all the time, when we’re not thinking about the future (a.k.a. what we’re going to eat for lunch)? Maybe it’s because I’m old, and there’s more past than future now, or maybe it’s because I spend too much time on my own, but each day I wake up to a head full of childhood holidays, ten-year-old football results, school friends, ex-girlfriends, half-remembered and maybe half-read books, good times, bad times, former homes, jobs, teachers. I’m like that kid in The Sixth Sense, except that rather than dead people I see department stores that don’t exist anymore. Everything is the past, it turns out. Life, after all, consists of things that have already happened.

Eminent Hipsters, Donald Fagen’s lovely book of essays, is mostly about the past, and when it isn’t about the past it’s about growing old: “With the Dukes of September,” the last piece in the collection, is a tour diary that describes, with a winning mordancy, what it feels like to go out on the road with other old geezers (Boz Scaggs, Michael McDonald) and play night after night to similarly aging and occasionally indifferent audiences who want to hear only ’70s hits. The rest of the book is mostly about the musicians, broadcasters, and writers whose work nourished the Fagen soul just as its owner was preparing for his accomplished and enthralling career in jazz-rock. (You already knew that Donald Fagen was one half of Steely Dan, didn’t you? Good. Phew. Otherwise I wouldn’t know how to continue.) Essays about influence needn’t necessarily produce a book about the past, of course, unless one is talking in the most banal sense. Fagen could have been formed by—or could have chosen to write about—Miles Davis, Rembrandt, Aristotle, or Mark Twain. And those guys are still around, in the air that we breathe, creating new artists as we speak, so the past doesn’t come into it. But Fagen’s eponymous hipsters are a bunch of people who, I suspect, won’t speak to the young ever again. The Boswell Sisters—favorites of Fagen’s mother—Henry Mancini, Jean Shepherd, the Science Fiction Book Club, the all-night jazz DJ Mort Fega… You can hear Fagen’s great solo...