Connie Converse, Mongol user

[Howard Fishman, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse (New York: Dutton, 2023). The photographer is unidentified. Click for a larger view.]

Howard Fishman’s biography is an extraordinary effort to document the life and times of Elizabeth Eaton “Connie” Converse (1924–disappeared 1974), whose music survives in home recordings from the 1950s. Converse was a singer-songwriter before there was such a category in American music. Like Molly Drake, she has found a public audience in the twenty-first century.

A similar photograph in Fishman’s biography makes me think that this cover photograph is another from a series taken on August 22, 1959, at 46 West 88th Street, Manhattan, Converse’s last address in the city before she moved to Ann Arbor.

Click for a larger view, look closely, and see what you recognize. I see C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite and White Collar and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. Lesser-known books: Ernest Nagel’s Sovereign Reason and Other Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Donald Tovey’s The Forms of Music, and what I think is Quentin Reynolds’s Courtroom: The Story of Samuel S. Leibowitz. There’s also a book titled Trees.

In the glass on the bookshelf, what might be a Parker Vacumatic fountain pen and what is, beyond any doubt, a Mongol pencil.

[Click for a larger view.]

There’s another Mongol next to the clipboard on the sofa.

Related materials
Connie Converse’s recordings (Bandcamp) : We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary (YouTube) : A line from a song : “A long winter” (from Converse’s prose)

[Fishman’s biography is admittedly obsessive in its search for the details of Converse’s life. In the book’s index, the first item under “Converse, Elizabeth Eaton ‘Connie’” is “author’s obsession with.”]