If you go
› What: “An Evening with Art Garfunkel”› When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 19› Where: Walker Theatre inside Memorial Auditorium, 399 McCallie Ave.› Admission: $99.50, $74.50, $54.50› For more information: 423-757-5580› Online: tivolifoundation.com
Autobiographies by their very nature take a lifetime to complete and some can take almost that long to actually write, some will tell you. Art Garfunkel says he has been writing his for the last 30 years in journal form, collecting short poems, single lines of ideas, musing and thoughts in general.
The collection, like the man, is the sum of many parts, with plenty of contradictions, deep insights and silly bits. When it came time to form the pieces into one collection for a book, he wanted to stick to the process, and determined the weirder the better.
"I have the danger of being very goofy," he says.
"My idea is the more personal you are and the weirder you are, the more universal you are. We are all weird. It's the artist's job to be brave and go inside and tell the damn truth.
"'You are contradictory,' you say to yourself. You are messy. You are strange. You are hard to figure out, and in the telling of the truth you touch the universals. I think you touch the human race when you go into your own admissions."
In "What Is It All But Luminous (Notes from An Underground Man)," Garfunkel writes about his early life before he became known as the quiet member of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, as well as what that period of his life was like and his life after.
Did you know?
Art Garfunkel is an avid reader and has chronicled every book he has read since June 1968 on his website. www.artgarfunkel.com. So far: 1,281. Books marked with asterisks are his favorites.
Always much more than whatever perception people drew from his partnership with Paul Simon, the 78-year-old Garfunkel is a poet, actor, solo artist, math teacher, husband and father. He says after seeing the completed book, he was a little surprised to discover just how important his wife, Kim, whom he married in 1988, and their children are to him.
"I didn't realize that my Kim, Kathryn, my wife, would be such a strong pulse throughout my life. She is my heatbeat. So, there is a beauty there. And I'm more of a family man than I realized."
Garfunkel and Simon met in sixth grade in New York and split up, but not before recording "Bridge Over Troubled Water." It is a soundtrack song for many people's lives and Garfunkel says he feels lucky to have been the messenger.
"It's thrilling. It puts a wonderful sense of meaning in my life. I made that offering that day in 1970 or '69 in the studio with heart and soul and all that sincerity and God-given talent and it struck a chord. Through technology and corporate distribution, it really got around. It struck its mark into people's hearts and souls, and I'm the lucky guy who is riding amidst that phenomenon."
The audience at Saturday's "An Evening with Art Garfunkle" in Walker Theatre will hear that song and others, as well as a few stories from his life.
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.