![]() It’s a cute trick.īut yes, it’s a very strong statement. We take two very different people, Artie and Paul, who have very different natures and found a fusion. What can I say? It didn’t capture … I think the main thing about us is that we’re good. There’s a bunch of books about Simon and Garfunkel. I knew it was different from other things. I fell into these scraps of paper and I was told, “You may have a book here.” I started shaping it up. Well, you’re starting from the starting point as if a person begins with a desk and a clean piece of paper. And then it wraps itself around you and then an interviewer asks you, “When did you start this endeavor?”ĭid you ever think about writing a traditional memoir without the poetry and lists and everything? Something you do takes hold of you and then you do a lot of it. I don’t put myself into the category of “rock star writing his biography.” That’s because we live our lives by falling into experiences. Well, there’s the famous Keith Richards book and the Clapton one. ![]() Give me your perfect A, B, C, D … and we will digitize that and we will have the ability to manipulate ”ĭid you read books by other musicians while preparing for this one? And then Vicky Wilson, my great editor at Knopf, said to me, “Here’s what I want you to do. But I hate to disappoint you, though I did write the whole book top to bottom with my left hand. When I was 11, Paul Simon, my fast friend, would say to people, “Look at my friend Artie, he’s the human typewriter.” It was sweet. Did you write the whole book out by hand? I’ve always been fascinated by your perfect handwriting. Well, I lost one of the walls in the fire. It’s Darwin, Origin of the Species, the good stuff. I have 1,165 of them spread around the walls. I like to be up there to make my phone calls and do my writing. It’s been two years, but very shortly I get to move back in. My wife took over and I stepped back, so I’ve been living here. I read about the fire at your apartment a couple years back. (“After the evacuation behind the bathroom door, I mention the clickety sound of colonics, so she tap dances on the hardwood floor.”) There are also numerous poems, including one about getting a colonic by a woman from Queens. ![]() There are segments about the formation and ultimate bitter dissolution of Simon and Garfunkel, along with other passages about his long life, but they are mixed in with lists of books he’s read and songs on his iPod, quotes from the likes of Shakespeare and Marvin Gaye, and set lists from his concerts. The end result is What Is It All But Luminous: Notes From an Underground Man, which is unlike any book ever released by a rock star. “I then shaped them chronologically and said, ‘It’s my life.'” ![]() “He said, ‘You have a book here,'” recalls Garfunkel. He never gave much thought to publishing them until he showed them to literary agent Dan Strone a few years back. There must have been a thousand of them.” Those bits included poems, lists, scattered thoughts and pointed anecdotes from his long career. “And when inspiration struck me, I’d write little bits. “I’d stay at two-star inns during the night,” he says. The whole time, he had a small notepad and pen in his back pocket. The journey was conducted across 40 installments (always picking up exactly where the last one ended) and took him 14 years to complete. In the spring of 1983, Art Garfunkel stepped out of his New York apartment building and began a walk across North America. ![]()
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