In photos, one room in the apartment looks like an archival storage area with stacks of unprocessed materials, but these piles are the result of a default position: a failure to clean, sort or discard. A photograph of this storage room shows a Grammy used as a paperweight that is half falling off the pile it anchors. His yellow legal pads, strewn throughout the apartment and found after he died, reflect Gould’s sense of interior order. Most of the pads’ contents are obsessive lists. He tracked various functions, maintaining lists related to the stock market, the food he ate, physical symptoms and future plans.
Glenn Gould’s apartment, Toronto, Canada (photography by The Glenn Gould Estate)
Text: Variations on Solitude: Glenn Gould (by Suzanne Snider, published in Kinfolk)
