藏書超萬冊 Michael Jackson是個書癡

"I love to read.

I wish I could advise more people to read.

There’s a whole other world in books.

If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading.

You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading."

~ Michael Jackson, 1984

  

來源：新京報   2009年7月6日

邁克爾·傑克遜深夜逛書店 最近，與邁克爾·傑克遜同處洛杉磯，有著近水樓臺便利的《洛杉磯時報》竟然挖掘出傑克遜 還是一位標準“書癡”的秘密。 今年年初，傑克遜回到洛杉磯的時候，就有一些當地人竟然在聖莫妮卡的書店裏隱約看到他的影子。 邁迷們對這個消息驚訝得不得了，他們可能更認為傑克遜會在某個豪華夜店裏享樂。但對於書店老闆來說，這實在算不上什麼新聞，而這篇文章的作者卡洛琳·克羅格（Carolyn Kellogg）略加進行了調查，竟然發現書店老闆們對天王的印象都不錯。 一位藝術與建築書店的老闆透露，邁克爾是他們店的常客，當傑克遜去世的消息傳來，他說，“我們會想念他的。” 著名的獨立書店布蘭特伍德書店（Dutton’s Books）的老闆道格·都頓（Doug Dutton）說自己在上世紀80年代時初第一次見到傑克遜，他當時“戴著很大的太陽鏡”，“身邊都是警衛，但自己卻安安靜靜地一個人呆著。”道格說，天王的身上沒有任何寫著“傑克遜”標示的符號，也沒說什麼讓人印象深刻的話，不過每次來一般都要捧回四五本書。 而到了上世紀80年代初90年代末傑克遜最紅的時候，他要去書店，則必須搞個大排場。道格的兄弟戴夫當時接到一個電話，問能不能把店關了，因為傑克遜要來。他們後來的確把店關了，專心接待天王，後者坐著一輛大篷車緩緩駕到，從神色緊張的警衛部隊中走進書店，表情挺親切。 而在90年代初，書店老闆們這時見到的傑克遜戴著整容手術後的面具。那家藝術建築書店的老闆曾將他的現場錄影了下來，裏面的傑克遜一邊看書，一邊由助手打著一把黑傘蓋過他的臉。 這位“流行之王”喜歡看什麼書呢？戴夫說，他喜歡在詩歌書櫃前徘徊，他認為超驗主義詩人，美國思想家愛默生是傑克遜的最愛。“我覺得他歌詞裏有很多超驗主義，無所不包的哲學理念。”作者也詢問了一些傑克遜身邊的人，結果，“書癡”的形象越來越鮮明。傑克遜自學長大，一直以來都很喜歡讀書。他的律師鮑勃·桑格（Bob Sanger）說，他經常和傑克遜討論榮格、佛洛德等心理學，霍桑等文學，還有社會學，黑人歷史以及和種族問題有關的社會學。 據《洛杉磯週刊》的報導，傑克遜的藏書超過萬本，看來，傑克遜除了擁有“夢幻莊園”，遊樂場、人工湖、無數豪華玩具，無數天價收藏之外，他可能還有著一個私藏多年的小小寶 貝：圖書館。 Thursday, July 02, 2009 http://www.bookpatrol.net/2009/07/michael-jackson-extremely-well-read-had.html   Michael Jackson “Extremely Well-Read,” Had 10,000 Books The King of Pop a dweeby book lovin’ geek? Apparently so, and hooray. He was an avid reader who had an appropriately majestic library at Neverland that held 10,000 volumes on its shelves, according to two recent Los Angeles newspaper articles. In the midst of a lengthy interview in the L.A. Weekly, Jackson attorney Bob Sanger revealed the following as his last of three golden attributes that defined the Gloved One. “Michael was extremely well-read…I knew Michael, but I got to know him a lot better at the trial. The judge was doing jury selection, and it was time for break. Judge Melville said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know that jury service is very, Tvery important.' He's trying to convince people not to have stupid excuses to get out of jury service. All judges do this. He says, 'The jury system is a very time-honored system. It's been around for 200 years. We're going to take a break and come back in 15 minutes.’ “We stand up and the judge leaves, and Michael turns to me and says, ‘Bob, the jury system is much older than 200 years, isn't it?’ I said, 'Well, yeah, it goes back to the Greeks.' He says, 'Oh yeah, Socrates had a jury trial, didn't he?' I said, 'Yeah, well, you know how it turned out for him.' Michael says, 'Yeah, he had to drink the hemlock.' That's just one little tidbit. We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne , sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues. But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature. “He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house. And I know that because - and I hate to keep referring to the case, because I don't want the case - the case should not define him. But one of the things that we learned - the DA went through his entire library and found, for instance, a German art book from 1930-something. And it turned out that the guy who was the artist behind the book had been prosecuted by the Nazis. Nobody knew that, but then the cops get up there and say, 'We found this book with pictures of nude people in it.' But it was art, with a lot of text. It was art. And they found some other things, a briefcase that didn't belong to him that had some Playboys in it or something. But they went through the guy's entire house, 10,000 books. And it caused us to do the same thing, and look at it.” “And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there.” I’ll Be There As reported in the L.A. Times. Doug Dutton, proprietor of the legendary and now, alas, defunct, Dutton's Books in Brentwood, was at a dinner with people from Book Soup, Skylight and other L.A. bookstores. "Someone mentioned that Michael Jackson had been in their store," Dutton recalled. “Everybody said he'd shopped in their store too." Doug first met Jackson in the early 1980s when the icon came in his shop wearing "very large sunglasses" and a suit of bodyguards. MJ was solitary and quiet. "There was no display of 'I'm Michael Jackson,'” he recalled. "I don't remember him actually saying anything." Jackson bought four-five books during visits. Doug’s brother, Dave, remembers getting a call in the late '80s - early '90s from an MJ minion, who requested that the shop be closed early so Jackson could privately shop. "We did close early," Dave said. Then, "about a quarter to nine he showed up in a big van. Once you got over the initial caution because of those burly guys with him, he was very nice. He loved the poetry section," Dave’s son Dirk asserts that Ralph Waldo Emersonwas Jackson 's favorite author. "I think you would find a great deal of the transcendental, all-accepting philosophy in his lyrics." I would have bet the farm that, considering his obsession, Michael Jackson would have been a compulsive collector of all things Peter Pan, the collecting completist’s completist, acquiring every single edition of the book, every scrap of paper associated with it, and everything from the story’s subsequent incarnations. "He was a longtime and valued customer," a spokesperson for Hennessey + Ingalls, the renowned art and architecture bookstore in Santa Monica , said in the L.A. Times piece. It turns out that Michael Jackson was a sort of Johnny Appleseed of reading, spreading books to all children. Former Los Angeles resident Cynde Moya remembers that "back when I worked at the Bookstar in Culver City, his people would have us keep the store open after hours, and he'd come in with a vanload of kids, who could buy whatever books they wanted." As MJ’s life got stranger over time, so did his book buying habits. He would wear a surgical mask during his book shop visits, and in a video of him from New Year's Eve 2008, he’s at Hennessey + Ingalls browsing for books, a black umbrella, held by an assistant, shielding him from the unflattering glare of florescent lighting. Or, maybe to prevent his love for books from being exposed. This is a problem that will never threaten the unread, book-hating and proud singing star Kanye West. It is a fact that intellect and pop entertainment values do not mix well in American culture: A pop star could never mysteriously disappear for a few days, drive family, friends, and the nation crazy with anxiety, then resurface with the rambling confession that he was incognito in Buenos Aires visiting the sultry, irresistible National Library of Argentina, full of hot-blooded Latin-American tomes, because he needed a change of scenery. Completely unbelievable. There must have been something else, something seamy, going on, perhaps with La Biblioteca Nacional de la Republica Argentina ’s head of special collections, right? I mean, really, is nothing sacred?