Ted's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 16 Mar 2025 20:12:00 -0700 60 Ted's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Great Jones Street 407
Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling force he is trying to escape.

DeLillo’s third novel is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture’s obsession with the lives of the few.]]> 272 Don DeLillo 0140179178 Ted 5 3.50 1973 Great Jones Street
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
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Similar in some respects to the film Performance in general idea, Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Streets is a story of what happens of what happens to the fan base and the larger culture when a revered rock star goes into seclusion. The musician /prophet/poet/stand-in savior is Bucky Wunderlick, a prematurely sainted scribe whose music and lyrics have been scrutinized by fans, critics, philosophers for hints of what the future holds for the world who, evidently, wanted a respite from being the millennial hero. Doubtlessly inspired by the speculative weirdness that ensued after Dylan's famed motorcycle accident and subsequent retreat from public view, DeLillo gets across the idea through satire, parody, monologues, sample song lyrics, odd-ball projections that a media created savior' absence creates another kind of presence, a mystical state of collective speculation which vaguely yet insistently maintains that the personality that gives purpose to millions of lives is not gone but still here, doing their work, to return with something greater, grander, better than what we already have. It's a wildly funny novel, and DeLillo's prose manages the hard job of being dead pan and yet rhythmically lyric.
]]> The New Sentence 404571 214 Ron Silliman 0937804207 Ted 5 4.24 1987 The New Sentence
author: Ron Silliman
name: Ted
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> The Executioner's Song 12468 Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize

]]> 1056 Norman Mailer 0375700811 Ted 5 4.06 1979 The Executioner's Song
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History]]> 12474
Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer’s seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America’s two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties� tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.]]> 304 Norman Mailer 0452272793 Ted 5 3.64 1968 The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/22
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Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book "The Armies of the Night". Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the persona, the third person referenced "Mailer", to engage the the collision of forces that made up the political sensibility of the 60s ; the counter culture, anti-war activist, avowed Marxist revolutionaries, feminists, black nationalists , yippees, hippies, crazies of all sorts converged on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam and what was seen by many alternative life stylers as the fatally erring trajectory America had taken; all the sins of capitalism, white racism, imperialism, and the like were now returning to the soil from which they came, demanding the bill be paid and the interest collected in full. Mailer, someone who had announced early in his career, in his introduction to "Advertisements for Myself", that he was obsessed with radically transforming the way his country came to see itself in the strange and terrifying world that was emerging in the post-war period, comes off as the smartest guy in the room, someone conducting a running commentary on the tensions and contradictions that were coming from the estranged forces that composed the American Left. Much of the fun, though, certainly has to be the adventures of the swaggering, blustery, drinking and drunk Mailer as he wades through the issues and the worries that accompany movements that want to seize the future. There is an apt awareness of his own absurdity and celebrity, there is a realization that even his imagination cannot single-handedly stop an congery of policy evils already in place and being executed. What he could do, though, maintained his sublime sense of irony and report, comment, opine and theorize with the quick-witted verve that only the best stylists maintain. This is a worthy read, an important document from a period of American which to this day refuses to be understood in retrospect.
]]> <![CDATA[Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.]]> 206318561 178 Eve Babitz 0394409841 Ted 5
Active as a writer in the 70s and 80s, Babitz was a feature writer for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Vogue and Esquire, with a good portion of her journalism and essay writing covering Los Angeles in its most chaotic , boundary pushing years. Slow Days, Fast Company is a collection of magazine pieces, reissued a few years ago by NYRB Books , the terrain being California, the place where it seemed everyone had come from everyone else to make a last stand to be something bigger than normal before resigning themselves to their fate.

These are wonderful pieces , with Batitz maintaining a beautifully modulated tone in her first person narration of non fiction events: she is skeptical while being sympathetic, bracingly honest but hardly heartless, full of wit but seldom cruel. What comes across through the scattered subjects here is how well she presents her lack of experience or her presumptions about locations and relationships she's about to enter and credibly reveal how much she'd learn. Her piece on the city Bakersfield is a revelation of serene sympathy for a people and the community they live in, and a stand-out article is a recollection of the heroine death epidemic that seemed to be everywhere in the bad old days; Babitz recollects on her relationship with Janis Joplin , who, Babitz writes, seemed to have everything after much struggle as a woman and an artist, but resorting to heroin to fill a void her material success couldn't heal. More moving is the memory of an actress friend named Terry , a delicate creature who flitted about the edges of acting success in Hollywood, who couldn't refrain from a drug that was killing her by the noticeable inch. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for more brilliant writing about the middle part of the 20th century. With Didion, Wolf, Mailer, Babitz, I think, is essential reading for the curious.]]> 4.07 1977 Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.
author: Eve Babitz
name: Ted
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
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review:
Any reader who has finished the outstanding set of novels, essays, and journalism left to us by the late and truly great Joan Didion who have need to read another smart woman writer blessed with quick wit, a fast and telling eye for detail, and who can use what they put across as the frailties of their personality as a brilliant means to get a handle on the cultural chaos that surrounds them in the SoCal sunlight, I would recommend...the late and truly great Eve Babitz.

Active as a writer in the 70s and 80s, Babitz was a feature writer for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Vogue and Esquire, with a good portion of her journalism and essay writing covering Los Angeles in its most chaotic , boundary pushing years. Slow Days, Fast Company is a collection of magazine pieces, reissued a few years ago by NYRB Books , the terrain being California, the place where it seemed everyone had come from everyone else to make a last stand to be something bigger than normal before resigning themselves to their fate.

These are wonderful pieces , with Batitz maintaining a beautifully modulated tone in her first person narration of non fiction events: she is skeptical while being sympathetic, bracingly honest but hardly heartless, full of wit but seldom cruel. What comes across through the scattered subjects here is how well she presents her lack of experience or her presumptions about locations and relationships she's about to enter and credibly reveal how much she'd learn. Her piece on the city Bakersfield is a revelation of serene sympathy for a people and the community they live in, and a stand-out article is a recollection of the heroine death epidemic that seemed to be everywhere in the bad old days; Babitz recollects on her relationship with Janis Joplin , who, Babitz writes, seemed to have everything after much struggle as a woman and an artist, but resorting to heroin to fill a void her material success couldn't heal. More moving is the memory of an actress friend named Terry , a delicate creature who flitted about the edges of acting success in Hollywood, who couldn't refrain from a drug that was killing her by the noticeable inch. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for more brilliant writing about the middle part of the 20th century. With Didion, Wolf, Mailer, Babitz, I think, is essential reading for the curious.
]]> The Hatred of Poetry 26114416
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.]]> 86 Ben Lerner 0865478201 Ted 0 3.82 2016 The Hatred of Poetry
author: Ben Lerner
name: Ted
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
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review:

]]> A Frolic of His Own 400201 594 William Gaddis 0140237348 Ted 5 The Recognitions. Brilliant dialogue, which drives the novel, sans character attribution. The lawyer trade should duck under the table if they see a judge with this book poking from his robe.Gaddis was the American heir to Joyce's attempts to exhaust literature's capacity to achieve a real life complexity; through his comedies he renews the tongue we share. Gaddis , in fact, exceeds Joyce's genius, which was more rumor than substance. The difficulty of his greatest work, Ulysses is over stated by a generation or two of critics who needed to make their career moves convincing to would be employers. ]]> 4.11 1994 A Frolic of His Own
author: William Gaddis
name: Ted
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves:
review:
I love the fact that the late Gaddis simplified his style not a wit since the 1958 publication of his first novel, The Recognitions. Brilliant dialogue, which drives the novel, sans character attribution. The lawyer trade should duck under the table if they see a judge with this book poking from his robe.Gaddis was the American heir to Joyce's attempts to exhaust literature's capacity to achieve a real life complexity; through his comedies he renews the tongue we share. Gaddis , in fact, exceeds Joyce's genius, which was more rumor than substance. The difficulty of his greatest work, Ulysses is over stated by a generation or two of critics who needed to make their career moves convincing to would be employers.
]]> The Locusts Have No King 92290 Alternate-cover edition for ISBN ISBN 1883642426 / 9781883642426 is located here: The Locusts Have No King

No one has satirized New York society quite like Dawn Powell, and in this classic novel she turns her sharp eye and stinging wit on the literary world, and "identifies every sort of publishing type with the patience of a pathologist removing organs for inspection." Frederick Olliver, an obscure historian and writer, is having an affair with the restively married, beautiful, and hugely successful playwright, Lyle Gaynor. Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.]]> 286 Dawn Powell 1883642426 Ted 0 ]]> 3.96 1948 The Locusts Have No King
author: Dawn Powell
name: Ted
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/18
date added: 2023/11/18
shelves:
review:
A New York comedy of manners set in the Forties, it concerns a married couple comprised of a famous playwright and her husband, an academic who labors at his specialty in obscurity. The husband, while successful in this discipline, works away in his obscure scholarly endeavors, known by virtually no one save for a handful of peers while the wife is the toast of Broadway, blessed with hit after hit, loads of favorable reviews and admiring tidbits in all the newspapers. Fate , or some other cruel force that loves to upset the expectations of the smug and the arrogant, works so that the husband gains great notoriety for the research he's been pouring over for years, even breaking through to what was then the mainstream media, while the wife must deal with a box office bomb and negative reviews, items that have her reputation sliding quickly down the social ladder. Powell is one of the better comic writers we've had --a spikier Edith Wharton, shall we say, a funnier Thomas Hardy (think of Mayor of Casterbridge)--who provides momentum, atmosphere and rich, crackling dialogue in this many -charactered satire. This would be the sort of novel Tom Wolfe has been trying to write for years. More about Wolfe-as-novelist, he lacks the precision of detail, character quirks, and reveals himself to be rather drifting plotter. The arcs of his novels lack the efficient forward movement of Powell, who has the sense along with the afore mentioned Hardy that fate , triggered by seemingly insignificant gestures, remarks or stray, condemning thoughts, results in a reversals of fortunes, either comic or tragic. We are fortunate Powell opts for the comic. Wolfe piles it on , sentence after sentence, clause after clause, until he suffocates the good ideas he might have hard. Powell keeps us intrigued as to how much deeper the characters in question can deepen the hole they're in.We have here a situation where the fortunes of famous wife and unknown husband are suddenly and realistically reversed, a turn that reveals the shallow relations and loyalties, tied as they are to one's fortunes. Or lack of them.

]]> The Philosophy of Modern Song 60538185 The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.

In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.]]> 339 Bob Dylan 1451648707 Ted 4
As the songwriter’s lyrics became darker, more mystical, expressively abstract, the deeper the appreciation of the baffling brilliance of his work became—and soon enough the serious vanguard of modern American poetry—Ginsberg, McClure et al., counted the man from Hibbing as one of their own, a sage who could see beyond the flat appearance of the material world and provide glimpses of what’s behind the veil. Dylan née Zimmerman had a run of genius, the length of which depended on how dedicated one is to the continuity of the songwriter’s brilliance. My interest is more about his earlier career, 1962 (Bob Dylan) through 1969 (Nashville Skyline). In my quizzical estimation, his work has been inconsistent since that time, occasionally animated with outbreaks of energy and verbal intensity (Blood on the Tracks). But Dylan zealots are a bright and well-read part of the listening population, and those who found worth, insight, and inspiration from albums from Street Legal or Empire Burlesque (two random selections from the years I call “the Great In-Between�) defend the later work with energy, solid thinking, and proficient writing. That’s the Dylan whose work and reputation provokes an alarming amount of cogitation.

An endless variety of books have been published about Dylan and his songwriting in the six decades since the release of his first album, some purely for pop music fans, others gossipy, and many that are a kind of interpretative analysis that approach the inscrutability of the maestro’s best stanzas. But Dylan, again, is a songwriter, not a writer of books in the main. His catalog of songs abounds with much of the most original, penetrating, and innovative lyrics of the 20th century, and many achieve the status of High Art, genuine and compelling poetry. “Visions of Johanna,� “Desolation Row,� “Highway 61 Revisited,� “Memphis Blues Again.� “Spanish Harlem Incident,� and the full version of “Mr. Tambourine Man� reveal a man in love with the varieties of idioms available to him; he loved language enough to ignore the formalities in front of him and merge the styles he loved in the simple melodies he often borrowed from others. He could rhyme and his couplets were adroit and left you saying “oh, wow� as he finished each verse. This virtuosity didn’t carry over to books, as the pair he’s written up to now wind-up head scratchers at best.


Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up� technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. It remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock, although there are some striking and evocative tributes to a woman named Aretha, most likely Aretha Franklin. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic inventions and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.


Dylan’s next book Chronicles Volume One, published in 2004, is said to have started as the author’s attempts to write liner notes for his then-forthcoming reissues of Bob Dylan, New Morning, and Oh Mercy. The project grew larger and became what is described as part one of a three-part memoir. While fascinating to read the usually opaque lyricist convene in readable prose, his recollections are limited to some worthy remarks about the making of his first album and then protracted memories of the relatively obscure New Morning and Oh Mercy. Chronicles spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was well reviewed, though there was disappointment in the matters he chose to talk about and not discuss. Worse, there were rumblings that Dylan had fabricated much of what he did bother to disclose. Clinton Heylin, a thorough Dylan biographer, who has published eight books on the singer in the last 30 years, has been quoted as saying that while he enjoyed reading Dylan’s book as a work of imaginative literature but that “� almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction…�

So, we arrive at Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. It’s a handsome, oversized tome that has Dylan bringing us a stream of brief essays that discuss an odd, seemingly random set of 66 songs that were popular through American history. As expected, the songs are a confounding selection of tunes, as he opts not to opine or analyze the landmark music of the last century or so but instead goes for a good many tunes that are painfully obscure and not necessarily worth dwelling on at length. From 2006 to 2009, the singer had Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly, one hour satellite podcast where each program’s playlist centered around a theme instead of a specific genre. The song choices were unusual in large part—the odd, the quirky, the gorgeous, and the amazingly bucolic varieties of American music played to whatever the mood of the week the week was, the music on each program peppered with Dylan’s off hand remarks, jokes, anecdotes, historical trivia, and brief biographies of the musicians. The Philosophy of Modern Music appears to take the same strategy and avoids a traceable thesis through the essays where Dylan chats about the songs he’s chosen for elucidation. A fascinating assortment, including three songs by the Eagles (“Life in the Fast Lane,� ”New Kid in Town,� “Pretty Maids All in a Row�), Rosemary Clooney (“Come on a My House�), Johnny Taylor (“Cheaper to Keep Her�), Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti�), Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves�), and other songs of far-reaching style, attitude, and subject matter that are, truthfully, perfectly fine, and often brilliant classics but that have little obvious connection other than the Nobel Prize winner selected for a book.

The book is hailed in promotion materials as a masterclass in songwriting and refers to the essays, while being nominally about music, as being “meditations and reflections on the human condition.� “Essays� is too generous a term to describe what Dylan has written for these songs, as their lengths and depth of thought don’t particularly rise above an average blog post. What’s revealed is that Dylan is not really the philosophical sort to take apart concepts and deal with them critically in archly specialized language, and that he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature based on his prose. Anyone desiring weighty and eloquent clarity on the purpose of existence will find the book wanting, but those who consider Dylan to be a gifted artist with interesting things to say about some musical landmarks that got and kept his attention, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an intriguing, frequently surprising set of remarks and musings from one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic figures. The individual pieces are remarkably poetic and literate on their own terms. What connects this wide swath of tunes is Dylan’s skill at putting himself in the narrative at hand rather than analyze the melody and lyrics for subtler inclinations and nuance or hypothesize how a hymn offers a critique of a social relations; Dylan imagines cinematic scenarios, sees archetypes of modern myth negotiating their respective terrains, and finds the souls of errant knight of endless variation questing for a greater glory with what gifts or curses that mark their lives.

The lyricist hasn’t the prose polish of John Updike or James Baldwin, but his language is vivid, colorful, and skillfully emphatic as he delineates the dilemmas and joys each song undertakes to describe in a short expression. A theme does emerge as he runs through a host of the music, the notion of perseverance and persistence even in the face of hardship, heartbreak, and the cold inescapability of a certain fate. A random selection of essays brings this. Marty Robbins� “El Paso� has a strong feeling of a classic movie western as Dylan writes of the narrator—a lone cowboy at a border town to meet up a challenge he cannot forestall, puts emphasis on the weight loneliness of the gunslinger, an existence where every joy is fleeting, and the shadow of death lurks in every unlit corner. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves� was a 1971 hit for Cher, a torrid bit of fanciful exploitation that was a cardboard pathos at best, but Dylan thought deeper on the matter and found resonance. It stretches credulity, but his insistence on this song makes for reading you can’t draw away from. He uses the pronoun “you� in writing about the title’s tawdry trio, the intended effect being to imagine yourself as a member of this wandering community, the only home being the wagon that carries you at the outskirts of every town. He lays it own a little too thick by essay’s end, with his penchant for stringing three or more adjectives together when one would have been just as effective, but he does what he sets out to do to give you a strong impression of what life at the edge of society would be like. To that end, it reminded me of my time as a carnival worker, going from town to town up the coast, selling chances to win dusty stuffed animals to townies who obviously held the orange shirted show folk in contempt. It was a rush of memories, a chill in the bones, and an adventure I consider myself lucky to eventually walk away from.

These are songs of perseverance and persistence are again short testimonials that crop up on the radio, in movie soundtracks and music videos of individuals of many origins, backgrounds, and varying degrees of stress, who are determined to stand their ground lest the final remains of what is truly theirs vanishes in self-loathing rituals of compromise and surrender. That seems what has found in 66 songs, wildly disparate in era, style, and sentiment; it’s the one tangible thread I’ve found. He is at his best when he gives vent to the full range of ironies contained in the Who’s 1965 proto punk rock anthem “My Generation,� with its famous line “I hope I die before I get old…�

The fact that the singer and songwriter who brought us the line, Roger Daltry and Peter Townsend are neither dead and are, in fact, old reflects on the arrogance of youth. The stuttering youth of the song is barely articulate and has no idea of what he wants to do, has no idea about why he’s angry and impatient, and is happy to simply be that way. It’s a grand and immature f**k you of self assertion, a declaration that shocked and inspired a generation of kids to think that things will get better when they take over after the last wicked adult dies. But Dylan writes that you’re in a wheelchair being pushed around to the places you need to get to—doctor’s offices, the bathroom, the community meal hall; your mind is alert, but the body fails in subtle and significant ways every day. You’re eerily close to whatever dying day will award you, and you hear noise and brash men having their own good clamorous time in the thrall of their youth. You’re annoyed, you’re sleepy, you fall asleep. Dylan’s writing is particularly effective in this essay that should have aged well. At 81, I suppose Bob Dylan hear what the lyrics declaim and vividly recalls being the speedy, in-your-face Dada King, who rarely missed a chance to confound and confront the Old Squares who didn’t get it, a character in full sympathy with the romantic tragedy of a genius poet’s early demise. But his musing takes him to the next thought, which is that he’s far older than he might have expected, his memories are fuller, richer, more far reaching than he thinks he has any right to, and the songs he’s paid attention to aren’t merely audio postcards of long-ago places but rather a means to remain connected; he intends to live fully and well and on his own terms, in his own words. Meandering and bizarre and syntactically awkward as it is at times, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wonderful glimpse into how this perennial mystery man thinks.]]> 3.77 2022 The Philosophy of Modern Song
author: Bob Dylan
name: Ted
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/02/08
shelves:
review:
Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, an ironic designation if only because Dylan wasn’t a man of books, but rather a songwriter. The gist of the argument for the musician being awarded the prize was that his lyrics, in a brief span of time, evolved from clever imitations of the folk and blues artists he admired and imitated to become a rich libretto for his age. Surrealist nightmares, black humor, rhapsodic tone poems, acute observations of ingrained varieties of bad faith revealed in personal lives and in the political sphere, songs like “Like a Rolling Stone,� “I Want You,� and “Positively 4th Street� brought a new, serious poetry to the jukebox, leading the way for a generation of other songwriters. It was a common sight in nearly any graduate student’s apartment that Dylan discs like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde cozily nestled next to the typically dog-eared paperbacks of Pound’s Cantos, One Dimensional Man or a coffee table book about Max Ernst or Diane Arbus.

As the songwriter’s lyrics became darker, more mystical, expressively abstract, the deeper the appreciation of the baffling brilliance of his work became—and soon enough the serious vanguard of modern American poetry—Ginsberg, McClure et al., counted the man from Hibbing as one of their own, a sage who could see beyond the flat appearance of the material world and provide glimpses of what’s behind the veil. Dylan née Zimmerman had a run of genius, the length of which depended on how dedicated one is to the continuity of the songwriter’s brilliance. My interest is more about his earlier career, 1962 (Bob Dylan) through 1969 (Nashville Skyline). In my quizzical estimation, his work has been inconsistent since that time, occasionally animated with outbreaks of energy and verbal intensity (Blood on the Tracks). But Dylan zealots are a bright and well-read part of the listening population, and those who found worth, insight, and inspiration from albums from Street Legal or Empire Burlesque (two random selections from the years I call “the Great In-Between�) defend the later work with energy, solid thinking, and proficient writing. That’s the Dylan whose work and reputation provokes an alarming amount of cogitation.

An endless variety of books have been published about Dylan and his songwriting in the six decades since the release of his first album, some purely for pop music fans, others gossipy, and many that are a kind of interpretative analysis that approach the inscrutability of the maestro’s best stanzas. But Dylan, again, is a songwriter, not a writer of books in the main. His catalog of songs abounds with much of the most original, penetrating, and innovative lyrics of the 20th century, and many achieve the status of High Art, genuine and compelling poetry. “Visions of Johanna,� “Desolation Row,� “Highway 61 Revisited,� “Memphis Blues Again.� “Spanish Harlem Incident,� and the full version of “Mr. Tambourine Man� reveal a man in love with the varieties of idioms available to him; he loved language enough to ignore the formalities in front of him and merge the styles he loved in the simple melodies he often borrowed from others. He could rhyme and his couplets were adroit and left you saying “oh, wow� as he finished each verse. This virtuosity didn’t carry over to books, as the pair he’s written up to now wind-up head scratchers at best.


Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up� technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. It remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock, although there are some striking and evocative tributes to a woman named Aretha, most likely Aretha Franklin. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic inventions and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.


Dylan’s next book Chronicles Volume One, published in 2004, is said to have started as the author’s attempts to write liner notes for his then-forthcoming reissues of Bob Dylan, New Morning, and Oh Mercy. The project grew larger and became what is described as part one of a three-part memoir. While fascinating to read the usually opaque lyricist convene in readable prose, his recollections are limited to some worthy remarks about the making of his first album and then protracted memories of the relatively obscure New Morning and Oh Mercy. Chronicles spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was well reviewed, though there was disappointment in the matters he chose to talk about and not discuss. Worse, there were rumblings that Dylan had fabricated much of what he did bother to disclose. Clinton Heylin, a thorough Dylan biographer, who has published eight books on the singer in the last 30 years, has been quoted as saying that while he enjoyed reading Dylan’s book as a work of imaginative literature but that “� almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction…�

So, we arrive at Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. It’s a handsome, oversized tome that has Dylan bringing us a stream of brief essays that discuss an odd, seemingly random set of 66 songs that were popular through American history. As expected, the songs are a confounding selection of tunes, as he opts not to opine or analyze the landmark music of the last century or so but instead goes for a good many tunes that are painfully obscure and not necessarily worth dwelling on at length. From 2006 to 2009, the singer had Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly, one hour satellite podcast where each program’s playlist centered around a theme instead of a specific genre. The song choices were unusual in large part—the odd, the quirky, the gorgeous, and the amazingly bucolic varieties of American music played to whatever the mood of the week the week was, the music on each program peppered with Dylan’s off hand remarks, jokes, anecdotes, historical trivia, and brief biographies of the musicians. The Philosophy of Modern Music appears to take the same strategy and avoids a traceable thesis through the essays where Dylan chats about the songs he’s chosen for elucidation. A fascinating assortment, including three songs by the Eagles (“Life in the Fast Lane,� ”New Kid in Town,� “Pretty Maids All in a Row�), Rosemary Clooney (“Come on a My House�), Johnny Taylor (“Cheaper to Keep Her�), Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti�), Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves�), and other songs of far-reaching style, attitude, and subject matter that are, truthfully, perfectly fine, and often brilliant classics but that have little obvious connection other than the Nobel Prize winner selected for a book.

The book is hailed in promotion materials as a masterclass in songwriting and refers to the essays, while being nominally about music, as being “meditations and reflections on the human condition.� “Essays� is too generous a term to describe what Dylan has written for these songs, as their lengths and depth of thought don’t particularly rise above an average blog post. What’s revealed is that Dylan is not really the philosophical sort to take apart concepts and deal with them critically in archly specialized language, and that he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature based on his prose. Anyone desiring weighty and eloquent clarity on the purpose of existence will find the book wanting, but those who consider Dylan to be a gifted artist with interesting things to say about some musical landmarks that got and kept his attention, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an intriguing, frequently surprising set of remarks and musings from one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic figures. The individual pieces are remarkably poetic and literate on their own terms. What connects this wide swath of tunes is Dylan’s skill at putting himself in the narrative at hand rather than analyze the melody and lyrics for subtler inclinations and nuance or hypothesize how a hymn offers a critique of a social relations; Dylan imagines cinematic scenarios, sees archetypes of modern myth negotiating their respective terrains, and finds the souls of errant knight of endless variation questing for a greater glory with what gifts or curses that mark their lives.

The lyricist hasn’t the prose polish of John Updike or James Baldwin, but his language is vivid, colorful, and skillfully emphatic as he delineates the dilemmas and joys each song undertakes to describe in a short expression. A theme does emerge as he runs through a host of the music, the notion of perseverance and persistence even in the face of hardship, heartbreak, and the cold inescapability of a certain fate. A random selection of essays brings this. Marty Robbins� “El Paso� has a strong feeling of a classic movie western as Dylan writes of the narrator—a lone cowboy at a border town to meet up a challenge he cannot forestall, puts emphasis on the weight loneliness of the gunslinger, an existence where every joy is fleeting, and the shadow of death lurks in every unlit corner. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves� was a 1971 hit for Cher, a torrid bit of fanciful exploitation that was a cardboard pathos at best, but Dylan thought deeper on the matter and found resonance. It stretches credulity, but his insistence on this song makes for reading you can’t draw away from. He uses the pronoun “you� in writing about the title’s tawdry trio, the intended effect being to imagine yourself as a member of this wandering community, the only home being the wagon that carries you at the outskirts of every town. He lays it own a little too thick by essay’s end, with his penchant for stringing three or more adjectives together when one would have been just as effective, but he does what he sets out to do to give you a strong impression of what life at the edge of society would be like. To that end, it reminded me of my time as a carnival worker, going from town to town up the coast, selling chances to win dusty stuffed animals to townies who obviously held the orange shirted show folk in contempt. It was a rush of memories, a chill in the bones, and an adventure I consider myself lucky to eventually walk away from.

These are songs of perseverance and persistence are again short testimonials that crop up on the radio, in movie soundtracks and music videos of individuals of many origins, backgrounds, and varying degrees of stress, who are determined to stand their ground lest the final remains of what is truly theirs vanishes in self-loathing rituals of compromise and surrender. That seems what has found in 66 songs, wildly disparate in era, style, and sentiment; it’s the one tangible thread I’ve found. He is at his best when he gives vent to the full range of ironies contained in the Who’s 1965 proto punk rock anthem “My Generation,� with its famous line “I hope I die before I get old…�

The fact that the singer and songwriter who brought us the line, Roger Daltry and Peter Townsend are neither dead and are, in fact, old reflects on the arrogance of youth. The stuttering youth of the song is barely articulate and has no idea of what he wants to do, has no idea about why he’s angry and impatient, and is happy to simply be that way. It’s a grand and immature f**k you of self assertion, a declaration that shocked and inspired a generation of kids to think that things will get better when they take over after the last wicked adult dies. But Dylan writes that you’re in a wheelchair being pushed around to the places you need to get to—doctor’s offices, the bathroom, the community meal hall; your mind is alert, but the body fails in subtle and significant ways every day. You’re eerily close to whatever dying day will award you, and you hear noise and brash men having their own good clamorous time in the thrall of their youth. You’re annoyed, you’re sleepy, you fall asleep. Dylan’s writing is particularly effective in this essay that should have aged well. At 81, I suppose Bob Dylan hear what the lyrics declaim and vividly recalls being the speedy, in-your-face Dada King, who rarely missed a chance to confound and confront the Old Squares who didn’t get it, a character in full sympathy with the romantic tragedy of a genius poet’s early demise. But his musing takes him to the next thought, which is that he’s far older than he might have expected, his memories are fuller, richer, more far reaching than he thinks he has any right to, and the songs he’s paid attention to aren’t merely audio postcards of long-ago places but rather a means to remain connected; he intends to live fully and well and on his own terms, in his own words. Meandering and bizarre and syntactically awkward as it is at times, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wonderful glimpse into how this perennial mystery man thinks.
]]> <![CDATA[The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock]]> 32191669 The Show That Never Ends is the definitive story of the extraordinary rise and fall of progressive (“prog�) rock. Epitomized by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake Palmer, along with such successors as Rush, Marillion, Asia, Styx, and Porcupine Tree, prog sold hundreds of millions of records. It brought into the mainstream concept albums, spaced-out cover art, crazy time signatures, multitrack recording, and stagecraft so bombastic it was spoofed in the classic movie This Is Spinal Tap.


With a vast knowledge of what Rolling Stone has called “the deliciously decadent genre that the punks failed to kill,� access to key people who made the music, and the passion of a true enthusiast, Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story of prog in all its pomp, creativity, and excess.


Weigel explains exactly what was “progressive� about prog rock and how its complexity and experimentalism arose from such precursors as the Beach Boys� Pet Sounds and the Beatles� Sgt. Pepper. He traces prog’s popularity from the massive success of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale� and the Moody Blues� “Nights in White Satin� in 1967. He reveals how prog’s best-selling, epochal albums were made, including The Dark Side of the Moon, Thick as a Brick, and Tubular Bells. And he explores the rise of new instruments into the prog mix, such as the synthesizer, flute, mellotron, and—famously—the double-neck guitar.


The Show That Never Ends is filled with the candid reminiscences of prog’s celebrated musicians. It also features memorable portraits of the vital contributions of producers, empresarios, and technicians such as Richard Branson, Brian Eno, Ahmet Ertegun, and Bob Moog.


Ultimately, Weigel defends prog from the enormous derision it has received for a generation, and he reveals the new critical respect and popularity it has achieved in its contemporary resurgence.]]> 346 David Weigel 0393242250 Ted 5 3.42 The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
author: David Weigel
name: Ted
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves:
review:
I was not entirely a progressive rock fan during the 70s, when the genre was at its peak and the music of the bands in this volume was at its...busiest. I loathed the singers for the most part, thinking that while the frontman had decent enough voices, suitably trained to negotiate the usually overheated song structures, I could stand them rarely a whit. Save for Peter Gabriel of Genesis (and later as a solo artist), the lot of them sounded over earnest, wide-eyed with wonder, strangulated high notes offering that would be wisdom of righteously and insanely stupid lyrics. I always bet on anyone who knew Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery well enough or Shakespeare to feel compelled to harm themselves as a means to relieve the disgust that overwhelms them. On the other side of this genre, though, was generally good musician and an honest desire to extend rock's instrumental bearings toward more complexity. The snap and zip of odd time signatures, odd keys and ensemble stretches consisting of many moving parts were all used by ELP, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Genesis. Much of the stuff is good, cranky fun, and it was delirious. David Weigel, a politics writer by reputation, is also a considerable fan of progressive rock. Here he expands on a series of fascinating articles he did for Slate some years ago on the history of this odd and painfully dated brand of music making. He interviews many of the musicians, investigates the places from which they rose, and comes to consider how it was that a good many British musicians, seemingly at the same time, came to employ classical music complexity in the service of a classical music. His conclusion, though not explicitly stated, is that it seems a case of the young musicians “getting back to their musical roots�, of rediscovering the European classical heritage and making it their own. The book is especially fun and fascinating for the music fan who's been wanting more to be published about this under considered music. Weigel does not rate the bands--re realizes that he is a reporter, not a critic--and does his subject justice by sticking with the absorbing story laid out before him.
]]> Tarantula 132025
Music legend Bob Dylan's only work of fiction—a combination of stream of consciousness prose, lyrics, and poetry that gives fans insight into one of the most influential singer-songwriters of our time.

Written in 1966, Tarantula is a collection of poems and prose that evokes the turbulence of the times in which it was written, and gives a unique insight into Dylan's creative evolution. It captures Bob Dylan's preoccupations at a crucial juncture in his artistic development, showcasing the imagination of a folk poet laureate who was able to combine the humanity and compassion of his country roots with the playful surrealism of modern art. Angry, funny, and strange, the poems and prose in this collection reflect the concerns found in Dylan's most seminal a sense of protest, a verbal playfulness and spontaneity, and a belief in the artistic legitimacy of chronicling everyday life and eccentricity on the street.]]> 144 Bob Dylan 0743230418 Ted 5
Even Dylan's wildest lyrics, from Desolation Row to his more recent brilliance noteworthy Rough and Rowdy Ways: surreal or nonsensical as the stanzas may be, the line limits and the need to rhyme imposed restrictions on Dylan's musings. Hey needed to wrap up his investigations into his more obscure imaginings. He gave you something to talk about. Tarantula was written on the road, in hotel rooms, on tour, rattled off in high doses of speed, and maybe other drugs too inane to bother talking about, and it indeed reads like it, snub-nosed Burroughs, Kerouac without the jivey swing. Some parts make you laugh, some good lines abound. Yet, it suffers in that readers wanted their hero, the poet of their generation, to write a genuinely good of poetry or some such thing, with true believers tying themselves in self-revealing knots to defend the book that is interesting as an artifact to the historical fact of Dylan's fame and influence and not much else. There is a part I like, effective as poetry, a bit of self-awareness that shows that Dylan realizes that his persona is false, a conspiracy between himself and the major media, and that he might have to account for the construction somewhere in the future of the whole matter.
Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up� technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. Although there are some striking and evocative tributes to Aretha Franklin, it remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.]]> 3.29 1971 Tarantula
author: Bob Dylan
name: Ted
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/01/02
shelves:
review:
Dylan is a word slinger to be, maybe a genuine poet during some parts of his oeuvre. Still, he is not a writer, not as we know the word, a craftsman, an artist, a professional who makes sentences that start somewhere and set the tone for the sentence that follows. That is, writers, write things that make sense in some respect, as in you understand clearly the thing being described, or that you understand it more abstractly and realize that the writer is undertaking a task that tries to deal with several things--philosophical notions, contradictory arguments, overlapping historical data --and bringing a coherent framework to understand complex matters, or at least come away with a sense of what the writer is getting at.

Even Dylan's wildest lyrics, from Desolation Row to his more recent brilliance noteworthy Rough and Rowdy Ways: surreal or nonsensical as the stanzas may be, the line limits and the need to rhyme imposed restrictions on Dylan's musings. Hey needed to wrap up his investigations into his more obscure imaginings. He gave you something to talk about. Tarantula was written on the road, in hotel rooms, on tour, rattled off in high doses of speed, and maybe other drugs too inane to bother talking about, and it indeed reads like it, snub-nosed Burroughs, Kerouac without the jivey swing. Some parts make you laugh, some good lines abound. Yet, it suffers in that readers wanted their hero, the poet of their generation, to write a genuinely good of poetry or some such thing, with true believers tying themselves in self-revealing knots to defend the book that is interesting as an artifact to the historical fact of Dylan's fame and influence and not much else. There is a part I like, effective as poetry, a bit of self-awareness that shows that Dylan realizes that his persona is false, a conspiracy between himself and the major media, and that he might have to account for the construction somewhere in the future of the whole matter.
Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up� technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. Although there are some striking and evocative tributes to Aretha Franklin, it remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.
]]> Call Us What We Carry 56805404 The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry. Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,� the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.

The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.]]> 228 Amanda Gorman 0593465067 Ted 1 ]]> 4.27 2021 Call Us What We Carry
author: Amanda Gorman
name: Ted
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves:
review:
Amanda Gormanda is a medicore poet,and the reason has nothing to do with her race or gender. Her book of poems has been published and it reveals all the defiencies of the inaugural poem, being full of superficial gestures that appear in the work of established poets—free verse, eccentric line breaks, a mixing of formal and idiomatic voices, typographical oddness, gender ambiguity, a fractured narrative line that has stanzas of individual poems not actually relating to the previous set of ideas but rather jumpstarting a new tangent. The appearances of a seasoned bard are there, but these seem used more to hide the rather ordinary set of exhortations for the readership and the nation to collectively move forward as one nation. Very little of this rings true as anything actually felt: the set of techniques she’s attempting to use read like nothing so much as attempts to write with depth and feeling in the cadences of greater, more seasoned poets. The problem with Amanda Gorman is her age in large part. Nothing about her work reads as genuine, natural. Her lines are stiff, without rhythm.

]]> Gunslinger 22554 224 Ed Dorn 0822309327 Ted 4
So I go back to Ed Dorn, introduced to me by poet Paul Dresman back
in the late Seventies, particularly his epic poem "Gunslinger". Equal parts myth making,satire, phenomenological investigation and an expansion on the Charles Olson projectivist project that twined style and diction , personality with the physicality and accumulated history of region, some of what Dorn was up to now reads psychedelic and out of sync, of it's time, the Sixties, but there remains beyond the dated lingo the verve of a writer that understands the absurdity of all manner of defining rhetoric and which finds purpose in exposing what's under the cornerstones of dogma.

The warning sounds again and again in Gunslinger against someone finding themselves described at all; set in a West of the imagination, where one can start over and start again potentially as many times as the imagination permits, being described imprisons one in another person's frameworks; you become what they think you are.The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.

____
More on Dorn: Giddy stuff, this, but Dorn is brilliant at the stretch. He gets it done. One finds solace too in is shorter poems. Some are plain-spoken knockouts:

IN MY YOUTH I WAS A TIRELESS DANCER

But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me--
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway.

Oh perish the thought
I was thinking in that moment
Newman Illinois
the Saturday night dance--
what a life? Would I like it again?
No. Once I returned late summer
from California thin from journeying
and the girls were not the same.
You'll say that's natural
they had been dancing all the time.


Tom Robbins' wrote a blurb for one of Dorn's books (Hello LaJolla), "Ed Dorn is a can opener in the supermarket of life." He was one of the great masters of the Western Voice in the 20th century, a voice maintaining rural accents and wanderlust that has been subdivided with Eastern conceits and European irony; his epic poem Gunslinger is something of a post-modern masterpiece after the pomp of Whitman and Charles Olson have worn away; the student has an expansive persona as well, but it is zany, frantic, engaged in constant conversation with the variant dictions he contains within himself. Moving on to the next thing, as you say, is what is always required in this personality; there's always something else to learn, emotions to feel anew, a new dance step to absorb, a new direction to take over all. I like this because Dorn has a way of interrupting himself and getting to what it was he really wanted to say without the initial lines being a waste; one appreciates the mastery of the bold strokes, the odd alignments. One appreciates, as well, his relative brevity. Ed Dorn could take you a journey in a poem and leave you at the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere, wondering what just happened. I mean that as a compliment.


]]> 4.09 1975 Gunslinger
author: Ed Dorn
name: Ted
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/07/26
shelves:
review:
There comes the occasional need to clear the poetry that becomes a wax sediment in one's ear by returning to an old standby, a dependable set of poems that fired an imagination decades ago that can still inspire one to think imaginative writing is indeed the method with which one can "break on through". This isn't a slight against anyone I've been reading, though there are hills and dales in the perpetual reading list I keep; it's just that I want the gravity and grit of sentences that distinguished themselves from the common expression.

So I go back to Ed Dorn, introduced to me by poet Paul Dresman back
in the late Seventies, particularly his epic poem "Gunslinger". Equal parts myth making,satire, phenomenological investigation and an expansion on the Charles Olson projectivist project that twined style and diction , personality with the physicality and accumulated history of region, some of what Dorn was up to now reads psychedelic and out of sync, of it's time, the Sixties, but there remains beyond the dated lingo the verve of a writer that understands the absurdity of all manner of defining rhetoric and which finds purpose in exposing what's under the cornerstones of dogma.

The warning sounds again and again in Gunslinger against someone finding themselves described at all; set in a West of the imagination, where one can start over and start again potentially as many times as the imagination permits, being described imprisons one in another person's frameworks; you become what they think you are.The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.

____
More on Dorn: Giddy stuff, this, but Dorn is brilliant at the stretch. He gets it done. One finds solace too in is shorter poems. Some are plain-spoken knockouts:

IN MY YOUTH I WAS A TIRELESS DANCER

But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me--
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway.

Oh perish the thought
I was thinking in that moment
Newman Illinois
the Saturday night dance--
what a life? Would I like it again?
No. Once I returned late summer
from California thin from journeying
and the girls were not the same.
You'll say that's natural
they had been dancing all the time.


Tom Robbins' wrote a blurb for one of Dorn's books (Hello LaJolla), "Ed Dorn is a can opener in the supermarket of life." He was one of the great masters of the Western Voice in the 20th century, a voice maintaining rural accents and wanderlust that has been subdivided with Eastern conceits and European irony; his epic poem Gunslinger is something of a post-modern masterpiece after the pomp of Whitman and Charles Olson have worn away; the student has an expansive persona as well, but it is zany, frantic, engaged in constant conversation with the variant dictions he contains within himself. Moving on to the next thing, as you say, is what is always required in this personality; there's always something else to learn, emotions to feel anew, a new dance step to absorb, a new direction to take over all. I like this because Dorn has a way of interrupting himself and getting to what it was he really wanted to say without the initial lines being a waste; one appreciates the mastery of the bold strokes, the odd alignments. One appreciates, as well, his relative brevity. Ed Dorn could take you a journey in a poem and leave you at the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere, wondering what just happened. I mean that as a compliment.



]]> The Ayn Rand Reader 17334916 Ayn Rand Ted 1
I thought I would power my way through the pages, but I couldn't even read ten of the sixty pages Rand's publisher selected for us to read. As has been said by critics more willing to speak at length about her inadequacies as a stylist, Rand's style of writing is wooden for great lengths, less rhythmic or musical as, say, the typical photo caption; making matters worse is when the late writer/pundit would try to lift her writing up a bit and applying similes that read more like afterthoughts rather than spontaneous insights, and metaphors that performed the rather mechanical function of boosting her storyline--which is, of course, one dualistic straw-man argument--to a philosophical level. Mechanical is the operative word here, as the attempt on Rand's part to frame her ideas about unrestrained power for brilliant capitalists in fictional disguise leaves us with a choppy, big footed shaggy dog of a novel that is in the tradition of unreadable novels-as-polemic. I closed the book and finished my ride to work looking at the neighborhoods I have passed through a thousand times before. This was more exciting, yes, more illuminating than a thousand pages of Ayn Rand's crabby, delusional exhortations to live free.
]]> 3.40 1999 The Ayn Rand Reader
author: Ayn Rand
name: Ted
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1999
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2022/07/26
shelves:
review:
The Ayn Rand Sampler is a promotional give away that has been sitting my house for years. Never a fan of the writer, I ignored it, confident that I knew from reading of The Fountainhead and selections from her political philosophy, just what a rank, turgid crypto-fascist Ayn Rand was. I hadn't, though, read what seems her central effort, Atlas Shrugged, which her followers consider being the highest synthesis of her work as both artist and a philosopher; what the hell, I thought, I needed something to read on the bus, so I decided to take the book along and read the sixty page excerpt from the novel. I was prepared to be surprised--one would think that a writer as famous as Rand, no matter how awful a writer or pretentious a thinker, had to have written at least one book that transcends everything she has going against her.

I thought I would power my way through the pages, but I couldn't even read ten of the sixty pages Rand's publisher selected for us to read. As has been said by critics more willing to speak at length about her inadequacies as a stylist, Rand's style of writing is wooden for great lengths, less rhythmic or musical as, say, the typical photo caption; making matters worse is when the late writer/pundit would try to lift her writing up a bit and applying similes that read more like afterthoughts rather than spontaneous insights, and metaphors that performed the rather mechanical function of boosting her storyline--which is, of course, one dualistic straw-man argument--to a philosophical level. Mechanical is the operative word here, as the attempt on Rand's part to frame her ideas about unrestrained power for brilliant capitalists in fictional disguise leaves us with a choppy, big footed shaggy dog of a novel that is in the tradition of unreadable novels-as-polemic. I closed the book and finished my ride to work looking at the neighborhoods I have passed through a thousand times before. This was more exciting, yes, more illuminating than a thousand pages of Ayn Rand's crabby, delusional exhortations to live free.

]]> <![CDATA[Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72]]> 7748 Hilarious, terrifying, insightful, and compulsively readable, these are the articles that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone magazine while covering the 1972 election campaign of President Richard M. Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George S. McGovern. Hunter focuses largely on the Democratic Party's primaries and the breakdown of the national party as it splits between the different candidates.

With drug-addled alacrity and incisive wit, Thompson turned his jaundiced eye and gonzo heart to the repellent and seductive race for president, deconstructed the campaigns, and ended up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic

]]> 481 Hunter S. Thompson 0446698229 Ted 4
Mere appearence, though, sufficed too often for Thompson, as his conceit, dove-tailing tellingly with his appetite for high powered stimulants, was that he could walk into the room full of characters and size the situation quickly. His concern was pacing over all, the attempt to simulate the down hill careen of a waiter carrying too many hot dishes from the kitchen. For all the energy and paranoid genius Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and his Campaign Trail book contained, it amounted to the best expression of the limited set of riffs Thompson.

He was not especially engrossing as a political thinker--we read him for his vitriol. His attraction for invective , I imagine, was because it was easy and that it was a convenient means to get to the bottom of one typewritten page after another; the rhythm of the constructed persona of being the most wasted man alive bravely inveighing against the stupidities and inequities and the utter mendacity of the world in which he finds himself would go into hyperdrive.

For some this suggested automatic writing, the idea that HST was channeling some Truth hidden behind the barriers of bullshit and pretense, a voice greater than his own. Perhaps, but for me it was the writing of someone who was working what became a tired set of rhetorical ploys. Thompson plainly never had the chance to transcend his moment of transcendent genius, as had, say, Norman Mailer, himself an egotist with a certainity that only he could get to the disguised truth of things. Mailer settled in for the long haul, abandoned much of his writerly eccentricity and produced a series of brilliant books of fiction and nonfiction in his late career; there are other things to discuss about Mailer than his antics.

There are many who would like to consider Thompson our generations H.L.Mencken, but I would say the departed Hunter comes up short: even a writer as caustic as Mencken would , often enough, vary his tone and write about matters that didn't need to be vilified, crucified or witlessly mocked. Thompson never had the chance to try anything truly different.
]]> 4.13 1973 Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
author: Hunter S. Thompson
name: Ted
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/07/25
shelves:
review:
In celebration of the 40th Anniversary edition of Hunter Thompson's gonzo masterpiece of political writing "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail", Slate writer Matt Taibbi writes an extensive essay on why HST still matters in our current climate of dread and drudgery.It is a nice commemoration, but I'm not persuaded that we could have learned anything more than we already have from the late writer; what newer readers would learn is what we did, after time, that HST could be wildly entertaining and then dependably repetitive in his subjects, his insults, his tone. Truthfully, Thompson's reputation as a writer is based on a very small body of quality work. I am willing to cede that Hunter Thompson succeeded , momentarily, at being a Great Writer for a couple of books, but the bitter truth was that while he was long on rage , he was short on other elements that keep a writer interesting over a career. Those qualities are insight, nuance, a curiosity about people and their circumstances beyond what mere appearances.

Mere appearence, though, sufficed too often for Thompson, as his conceit, dove-tailing tellingly with his appetite for high powered stimulants, was that he could walk into the room full of characters and size the situation quickly. His concern was pacing over all, the attempt to simulate the down hill careen of a waiter carrying too many hot dishes from the kitchen. For all the energy and paranoid genius Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and his Campaign Trail book contained, it amounted to the best expression of the limited set of riffs Thompson.

He was not especially engrossing as a political thinker--we read him for his vitriol. His attraction for invective , I imagine, was because it was easy and that it was a convenient means to get to the bottom of one typewritten page after another; the rhythm of the constructed persona of being the most wasted man alive bravely inveighing against the stupidities and inequities and the utter mendacity of the world in which he finds himself would go into hyperdrive.

For some this suggested automatic writing, the idea that HST was channeling some Truth hidden behind the barriers of bullshit and pretense, a voice greater than his own. Perhaps, but for me it was the writing of someone who was working what became a tired set of rhetorical ploys. Thompson plainly never had the chance to transcend his moment of transcendent genius, as had, say, Norman Mailer, himself an egotist with a certainity that only he could get to the disguised truth of things. Mailer settled in for the long haul, abandoned much of his writerly eccentricity and produced a series of brilliant books of fiction and nonfiction in his late career; there are other things to discuss about Mailer than his antics.

There are many who would like to consider Thompson our generations H.L.Mencken, but I would say the departed Hunter comes up short: even a writer as caustic as Mencken would , often enough, vary his tone and write about matters that didn't need to be vilified, crucified or witlessly mocked. Thompson never had the chance to try anything truly different.

]]> Of Women and Their Elegance 1028034 288 Norman Mailer 067124020X Ted 4 3.55 1980 Of Women and Their Elegance
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/06/20
shelves:
review:
An under appreciated Mailer work, one which, to my mind, debunks the general charge that Mailer couldn't write complex or compelling women characters. The controversies involving Mailer and his feminist critics is likely to remain current for the foreseeable future, but his fictionalized account of Monroe presents the troubled actress--part naif, part fighter, smarter than likely men and women film goers and critics preferred to think--as someone caught between different personalties that make up the Hollywood snakepit. Mailer allows her a first person narration and creates a voice and personality that attempts to be a serious artist and to do good work and also please bosses, boyfriends, husbands, friends real and doubtful. The accusation might be put forth that this merely more male fantasy stuff that Mailer was give to composing when he sought to discuss the dynamics of difficulties of men and women relating to each other in a consumer culture --his previous "Marilyn biography, a marvelous and occasionally beautiful tribute to the actress did, at times, veer off into the most purple of prose stretches this side of Cornell Woolrich--but I think here the author allows the actress to address her own narrative, in a clearly plain-spoken and sympathetic tone. It's a product of Mailer's imagination, I admit, but it is an intriguing read, a very mine short novel.
]]> The Wapshot Chronicle 11890 The Wapshot Chronicle is a stirring family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James]]> 352 John Cheever 0060528877 Ted 5 3.77 1957 The Wapshot Chronicle
author: John Cheever
name: Ted
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975]]> 54110594 � The Wall Street Journal

An intimate look at the earlyĚýyears of one of the world’sĚýmost significant and influentialĚýguitarists and songwriters.

In this moving and immersive memoir,ĚýRichard Thompson, international and longtimeĚýbeloved music legend, recreates the spirit of theĚý1960s, where he found, and then lost, and thenĚýfound his way again.

Known for his brilliant songwriting, his extraordinaryĚýguitar playing, and his hauntingĚývoice, Thompson is considered one of the topĚýtwenty guitarists of all time, in the songwritingĚýpantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, andĚýRandy Newman. Now, in his long-awaited memoir,Ěýthe British folk musician takes us back toĚýthe late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity—both for him and for the world at large.

Thompson packed more than a lifetime ofĚýexperiences into his late teens and twenties.ĚýDuring the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, justĚýas he was discovering his passion for music, heĚýformed the band Fairport Convention withĚýsome schoolmates and helped establish theĚýgenre of British folk rock. That led to a headyĚýperiod of songwriting and massive tours, whereĚýThompson was on the road both in the UK andĚýthe US, and where he crossed paths with theĚýlikes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and JimiĚýHendrix. But those eight years were also markedĚýby change, upheaval, and tragedy. Then, at theĚýheight of the band’s popularity, Thompson leftĚýto form a duo act with his wife Linda. And asĚýhe writes revealingly here, his discoveryĚýand ultimate embrace of Sufism dramaticallyĚýreshaped his approach to music—and of courseĚýeverything else.

An honest, moving, and compelling memoir,Ěý Beeswing vividly captures the life of a remarkableĚýartist during a period of creative intensity in aĚýworld on the cusp of change.]]> 304 Richard Thompson 1616208953 Ted 2
Thompson doesn’t belabor song meanings or origins, nor does he deep dive into the tricks and techniques of his laudable guitar skills, preferring to limn lightly through the scuffling days of the years 1967 through 1975. Again, there isn’t much in the way of sordid detail, strong opinion, or linguistic scene-chewing, but the book does provide a breezy, montage-like feel of Fairport Convention and the bands they knew that gig in the same towns at the same clubs, pubs, and meeting halls. The elements of low-paying gigs, the band’s eventual adapting an abandoned, unheated pub as band living quarters and rehearsal space, creative tensions in the band, and having a singer in Sandy Denny who was as strong-willed and undisciplined as she was brilliant and alluring are the ingredients of a rich tale that here seems told only by a third. Beeswing has concise and breezy pacing; the book gives off the feeling of being a treatment for a motion picture music biopic. The chronology of events has the air of a “greatest hits� list with the details scantily fleshed out to satisfy the requirements of a screen screenwriter who can squeeze everything into an entertaining and pat 120 feature. After reading, you’re left wanting to know more and can’t but feel a bit cheated.

What might deeper feelings there have been within Thompson when he had to fire Denny from the band? He makes a note of the difficulty in weighing Denny’s great talent against her insecurity and hard-drinking. At this point in a much-detailed story, we witness a conflicted choice to make sure that the band he co-founded remains a stable entity for the sake of his free expression and reason to exist. It’s apparent that as much as he loved Denny and cherished her talent, he felt it better that he and the rest of Fairport move ahead without her. Thompson writes of this deftly but is sketchy on the emotional details. Beeswing is full of matters that cry for a fuller accounting, episodes such as Thompson’s eventual conversion to Sufism, meeting his eventual wife and songwriting-performing partner, encounters, and music with John Lee Hooker, Van Dyke Parks, and Linda Ronstadt. Incidents get mentioned, briefly described, sometimes with significant poetic effect, but too often are a glance at meaningful encounters and musical landmarks. In the end, the style and amount of details are suitable for a making-of-the-band movie or an outline for a limited series for a streaming service. As a book, though, it’s a slight effort often poetically expressed. Thompson has a reputation as a potent lyricist who condenses emotional states and situations to brief, evocative epiphanies. It may be the case that his habit of compositional mind influenced his decision to avoid revealing too much of his inner life. The subtitle of Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967�75, tells us that the book covers only eight years of the author’s career, hinting that there’s another part of the story to be related, another volume forthcoming. With one book done, it would be a sweet deal if Thompson warms up to the idea that he’s now a writer and composes the next volume fearlessly, with verve, detail, and nuance. Thompson is a magnificent talent, and the world needs him to tell his tale of a critical and endlessly enthralling time in popular music history with the vividness it deserves.]]> 3.91 2021 Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975
author: Richard Thompson
name: Ted
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
review:
Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967�75, a relatively new book by acclaimed Richard Thompson—guitar hero, songwriter, singer, and co-founder of the influential British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. Thompson is appealing and moderate but overly cautious when revealing the facts of his life. Not without sin, sizzle, disaster, or tragedies that need to be overcome as eventual success comes to the music and the music maker. His style is reflective and meditative to a degree, choosing his words and descriptions carefully. There’s also a tangible air of hesitancy while he recounts his story, a seeming concern to avoid the dramatic and the sensational. Too much caution, however, as there are moments where eloquent rumination on incidents would have given Beeswing greater philosophical heft. To this day, it’s one of my low expectations that old guard rock stars have something resembling a pearl of elegant and lengthy wisdom that’s been formed over their years of music-making on an international scale. Thompson is the soft-spoken sort, it seems, and the soft-written as well. Elegant in his brief and occasionally minimalist prose, he trades not in a scandal, gossip, or revenge snark but instead goes forth like Joe Friday in Dragnet: just the facts as best he remembers them, told as well as he can manage. The album sold meagerly, but it was a fruitful starting point for the legendary band as they progressed. A woman blessed with an ethereal and silver-toned voice, Sandy Denny replaced original co-lead singer Judy Dyble, Thompson’s girlfriend. The addition of Denny to share lead vocals with singer, guitarist, and songwriter Ian Matthews coincided with Fairport’s burgeoning desire to grow conspicuous American influence but instead explored and made use of their own rich of British and Celtic music folk styles. The following three records—What We Did on Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, Liege, and Lief—marked a band that had invented a new kind of folk-rock, based on a fascinating combination of blues, jazz, and rock filtered through the gossamer textures of British and Celtic melodic construction and overtone. Fired by the unique sensibilities of Thompson’s guitar work, the songwriting collective in this band gave the world that singular thing in pop music history: a distinct body of work.

Thompson doesn’t belabor song meanings or origins, nor does he deep dive into the tricks and techniques of his laudable guitar skills, preferring to limn lightly through the scuffling days of the years 1967 through 1975. Again, there isn’t much in the way of sordid detail, strong opinion, or linguistic scene-chewing, but the book does provide a breezy, montage-like feel of Fairport Convention and the bands they knew that gig in the same towns at the same clubs, pubs, and meeting halls. The elements of low-paying gigs, the band’s eventual adapting an abandoned, unheated pub as band living quarters and rehearsal space, creative tensions in the band, and having a singer in Sandy Denny who was as strong-willed and undisciplined as she was brilliant and alluring are the ingredients of a rich tale that here seems told only by a third. Beeswing has concise and breezy pacing; the book gives off the feeling of being a treatment for a motion picture music biopic. The chronology of events has the air of a “greatest hits� list with the details scantily fleshed out to satisfy the requirements of a screen screenwriter who can squeeze everything into an entertaining and pat 120 feature. After reading, you’re left wanting to know more and can’t but feel a bit cheated.

What might deeper feelings there have been within Thompson when he had to fire Denny from the band? He makes a note of the difficulty in weighing Denny’s great talent against her insecurity and hard-drinking. At this point in a much-detailed story, we witness a conflicted choice to make sure that the band he co-founded remains a stable entity for the sake of his free expression and reason to exist. It’s apparent that as much as he loved Denny and cherished her talent, he felt it better that he and the rest of Fairport move ahead without her. Thompson writes of this deftly but is sketchy on the emotional details. Beeswing is full of matters that cry for a fuller accounting, episodes such as Thompson’s eventual conversion to Sufism, meeting his eventual wife and songwriting-performing partner, encounters, and music with John Lee Hooker, Van Dyke Parks, and Linda Ronstadt. Incidents get mentioned, briefly described, sometimes with significant poetic effect, but too often are a glance at meaningful encounters and musical landmarks. In the end, the style and amount of details are suitable for a making-of-the-band movie or an outline for a limited series for a streaming service. As a book, though, it’s a slight effort often poetically expressed. Thompson has a reputation as a potent lyricist who condenses emotional states and situations to brief, evocative epiphanies. It may be the case that his habit of compositional mind influenced his decision to avoid revealing too much of his inner life. The subtitle of Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967�75, tells us that the book covers only eight years of the author’s career, hinting that there’s another part of the story to be related, another volume forthcoming. With one book done, it would be a sweet deal if Thompson warms up to the idea that he’s now a writer and composes the next volume fearlessly, with verve, detail, and nuance. Thompson is a magnificent talent, and the world needs him to tell his tale of a critical and endlessly enthralling time in popular music history with the vividness it deserves.
]]> The Hills We've Carried 60025668
CMM calls this book, "BRILLIANT."

The Book Review Board of Non-Existent Locales says, "You don't want to miss out on this historically significant work."

The Meow York Times says, "AMAZING!"]]> 44 Amanda Goreman Ted 1 4.14 The Hills We've Carried
author: Amanda Goreman
name: Ted
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2022/04/09
shelves:
review:
Amanda Gormanda is a medicore poet,and the reason has nothing to do with her race or gender. Her book of poems has been published and it reveals all the defiencies of the inaugural poem, being full of superficial gestures that appear in the work of established poets—free verse, eccentric line breaks, a mixing of formal and idiomatic voices, typographical oddness, gender ambiguity, a fractured narrative line that has stanzas of individual poems not actually relating to the previous set of ideas but rather jumpstarting a new tangent. The appearances of a seasoned bard are there, but these seem used more to hide the rather ordinary set of exhortations for the readership and the nation to collectively move forward as one nation. Very little of this rings true as anything actually felt: the set of techniques she’s attempting to use read like nothing so much as attempts to write with depth and feeling in the cadences of greater, more seasoned poets. The problem with Amanda Gorman is her age in large part. Nothing about her work reads as genuine, natural. Her lines are stiff, without rhythm.
]]> <![CDATA[Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero]]> 29363075
This is the definitive biography of the legendary guitarist whom eminent figures like Muddy Waters and B. B. King held in high esteem, and who created the prototype for Clapton, Hendrix, Page, and everyone who followed.

Bloomfield was one of the first popular music superstars of the 1960s to earn his reputation almost entirely on his instrumental prowess. He was a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which inspired a generation of white blues players; he played with Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s, when his guitar was a central component of Dylan’s new rock sound on “Like a Rolling Stoneâ€� and at his earthshaking 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance. He then founded the Electric Flag, recordedĚý Super Session Ěýwith Al Kooper, backed Janis Joplin, and released at least twenty other albums, despite debilitating substance abuse. He died of a mysterious drug overdose in 1981.

A very limited edition of a book of this title was first published in 1983, but it has here been so thoroughly revised and expanded that it is essentially a brand-new publication. Based on extensive interviews with Bloomfield himself and with those who knew him best, and including an extensive discography and Bloomfield’s memorable 1968 Rolling Stone Ěýinterview, Michael Bloomfield is an intimate portrait of one of the pioneers of rock guitar.]]> 224 Ed Ward 1613733283 Ted 4 While Eric Clapton has won the praise and glory for his chops when he first appeared on American record stands in 1966 as the featured player on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album, Bloomfield was already turning heads with this spiky fretwork on Dylan’s 1965 effort Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan had abandoned folk for rock and Bloomfield was instrumental in creating a new kind of music; it was nothing anyone had heard before. Later that same year, he was highlighted on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band record, an integrated band out of Chicago that brought black blues back into the spotlight.

Combined with Butterfield’s serpentine harmonica work, it was an unbeatable combination, as Bloomfield’s fluid, biting style dominated the disc; audiences and reviewers raved and wrote about the guitarist, not the band leader .Bloomfield was the marvel, the toast among fans and critics, a white Jewish kid from Chicago suburbs who’d learned his trade from the Masters. It’s an old story; somewhat stale as you approach it in order to create a narrative, but it has the benefit of being true in large measure. Bloomfield was that good a musician; he was that important an innovator, his blend of blues-raga-jazz-and traditional was that far ahead of its time. It was as fast rise to the top, a sequence of memorable albums and live dates and then a long slide into a comparable obscurity. Ward makes the case that Mike Bloomfield is an artist whose influence is still very much felt today although his name is not often mentioned.

Ward accomplishes setting up a story of the young Bloomfield, a young man in the Chicago suburbs and the son of a successful business man, discovering the blues and seeking out the musicians who played it, Muddy Waters, Hubert Sumlin, and B.B.King. Always restless and impatient with his own progress, Bloomfield jumped between many styles, from Chuck Berry rock and roll to Chicago Blues, country blues and jazz, learning the riffs, the phrases and the subtle embellishments of each style. Particularly fascinating are the variety of circumstances with which he became acquainted with other white musicians obsessed with black blues music, in the persons of Paul Butterfield, Nick Gravesites, Charlie Musselwhite.

In quick succession the guitarist was in the spotlight for his work with Dylan and the acclaimed he drew for his blistering fretwork on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album. With the release of that band’s second album, East/West, the consensus seemed to be that Bloomfield was the finest guitarist on the planet, with the band in large measure leaving the traditional blues styles they’d been interpreting behind and extending themselves in long improvisations. Key to this was a swinging workout on Nat Alderfly’s “The Work Song� that was elevated by Bloomfield’s fluid single note lines. But what closed the deal on Bloomfield’s reputation was the title track, a 13 minute raga/drone improvisation influenced by John Coltrane’s integration of Indian classical music techniques into his register-jumping flights. The center of the piece was Bloomfield, extemporizing in a manner that was a curious but entrancing mixture of both his jazz and raga influences; this was the guitar solo that raised the bar perilously high for other players.

Ward goes through the highlights and low points of Bloomfield’s career, using a series of effectively placed quotes from those who knew and worked with him to provide context to the problematic musician’s life. He was a manic personality, perpetually ill at ease, starting projects and abandoning projects in quick order, blazing through stints with Butterfield, The Electric Flag, Muddy Waters, Al Kooper, KGB, John Hammond Jr. and Dr.John. There were so many promising starts, so many abrupt departures. Audiences took him for granted; critics started awarding him negative reviews. By his own admission, Bloomfield’s heroin use eroded his skills as a guitarist to the extent that he ceased playing altogether for a period. Ward details the effects of drugs on his work, and admirably resists the urge to sermonize, lecture or otherwise wring his hands over the murky circumstances about Bloomfield’s death from a drug overdose in 1981. The tragedy, the loss of a gifted musician too early in his life, is effectively conveyed through the way Ward has laid out the progress of Bloomfield’s life of music making, from a naïve but engaged kid from the suburbs seeking out his heroes in the bars of Southside Chicago to an artist making his way through the mad eddies and inviting distractions of the Sixties counter culture. Detailed, perceptive, free of babble and cant, Ward represents this master musician wonderfully and respectfully. He comes not sensationalize this life but to celebrate the music Michael Bloomfield played a blues that all these decades later that still moves the soul and warms the heart.]]> 3.70 1983 Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero
author: Ed Ward
name: Ted
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/09/23
shelves:
review:
Those hungering for a history of rock and roll’s glory days, ala the Sixties, should latch onto a copy of Ed Ward’s book Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar World. Ward, a long time music historian and journalist was one of the original record reviewers in the early days of Rolling Stone is direct, succinct, accurate in detail and brimming with insights of breathtaking for their clarity. Ward’s no-fuss, no frills style serves his subject well, as Michael Bloomfield, arguably the first guitar hero, is nearly forgotten man in the discussion of how rock guitar evolved.
While Eric Clapton has won the praise and glory for his chops when he first appeared on American record stands in 1966 as the featured player on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album, Bloomfield was already turning heads with this spiky fretwork on Dylan’s 1965 effort Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan had abandoned folk for rock and Bloomfield was instrumental in creating a new kind of music; it was nothing anyone had heard before. Later that same year, he was highlighted on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band record, an integrated band out of Chicago that brought black blues back into the spotlight.

Combined with Butterfield’s serpentine harmonica work, it was an unbeatable combination, as Bloomfield’s fluid, biting style dominated the disc; audiences and reviewers raved and wrote about the guitarist, not the band leader .Bloomfield was the marvel, the toast among fans and critics, a white Jewish kid from Chicago suburbs who’d learned his trade from the Masters. It’s an old story; somewhat stale as you approach it in order to create a narrative, but it has the benefit of being true in large measure. Bloomfield was that good a musician; he was that important an innovator, his blend of blues-raga-jazz-and traditional was that far ahead of its time. It was as fast rise to the top, a sequence of memorable albums and live dates and then a long slide into a comparable obscurity. Ward makes the case that Mike Bloomfield is an artist whose influence is still very much felt today although his name is not often mentioned.

Ward accomplishes setting up a story of the young Bloomfield, a young man in the Chicago suburbs and the son of a successful business man, discovering the blues and seeking out the musicians who played it, Muddy Waters, Hubert Sumlin, and B.B.King. Always restless and impatient with his own progress, Bloomfield jumped between many styles, from Chuck Berry rock and roll to Chicago Blues, country blues and jazz, learning the riffs, the phrases and the subtle embellishments of each style. Particularly fascinating are the variety of circumstances with which he became acquainted with other white musicians obsessed with black blues music, in the persons of Paul Butterfield, Nick Gravesites, Charlie Musselwhite.

In quick succession the guitarist was in the spotlight for his work with Dylan and the acclaimed he drew for his blistering fretwork on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album. With the release of that band’s second album, East/West, the consensus seemed to be that Bloomfield was the finest guitarist on the planet, with the band in large measure leaving the traditional blues styles they’d been interpreting behind and extending themselves in long improvisations. Key to this was a swinging workout on Nat Alderfly’s “The Work Song� that was elevated by Bloomfield’s fluid single note lines. But what closed the deal on Bloomfield’s reputation was the title track, a 13 minute raga/drone improvisation influenced by John Coltrane’s integration of Indian classical music techniques into his register-jumping flights. The center of the piece was Bloomfield, extemporizing in a manner that was a curious but entrancing mixture of both his jazz and raga influences; this was the guitar solo that raised the bar perilously high for other players.

Ward goes through the highlights and low points of Bloomfield’s career, using a series of effectively placed quotes from those who knew and worked with him to provide context to the problematic musician’s life. He was a manic personality, perpetually ill at ease, starting projects and abandoning projects in quick order, blazing through stints with Butterfield, The Electric Flag, Muddy Waters, Al Kooper, KGB, John Hammond Jr. and Dr.John. There were so many promising starts, so many abrupt departures. Audiences took him for granted; critics started awarding him negative reviews. By his own admission, Bloomfield’s heroin use eroded his skills as a guitarist to the extent that he ceased playing altogether for a period. Ward details the effects of drugs on his work, and admirably resists the urge to sermonize, lecture or otherwise wring his hands over the murky circumstances about Bloomfield’s death from a drug overdose in 1981. The tragedy, the loss of a gifted musician too early in his life, is effectively conveyed through the way Ward has laid out the progress of Bloomfield’s life of music making, from a naïve but engaged kid from the suburbs seeking out his heroes in the bars of Southside Chicago to an artist making his way through the mad eddies and inviting distractions of the Sixties counter culture. Detailed, perceptive, free of babble and cant, Ward represents this master musician wonderfully and respectfully. He comes not sensationalize this life but to celebrate the music Michael Bloomfield played a blues that all these decades later that still moves the soul and warms the heart.
]]> Bartleby and Benito Cereno 24694 "Bartleby" (also known as "Bartleby the Scrivener") is an intriguing moral allegory set in the business world of mid-19th-century New York. A strange, enigmatic man employed as a clerk in a legal office, Bartleby forces his employer to come to grips with the most basic questions of human responsibility, and haunts the latter's conscience, even after Bartleby's dismissal.
"Benito Cereno," considered one of Melville's best short stories, deals with a bloody slave revolt on a Spanish vessel. A splendid parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil, the carefully developed and mysteriously guarded plot builds to a dramatic climax while revealing the horror and depravity of which man is capable.
Reprinted here from standard texts in a finely made, yet inexpensive new edition, these stories offer the general reader and students of Melville and American literature sterling examples of a literary giant at his story-telling best.
--back cover]]> 104 Herman Melville 0486264734 Ted 4 3.78 Bartleby and Benito Cereno
author: Herman Melville
name: Ted
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/08/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Existential Errands 896931 316 Norman Mailer 0451054229 Ted 4 3.23 1972 Existential Errands
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.23
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/04/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism]]> 204011 438 Fredric Jameson 0822310902 Ted 3
Jameson is a Marxist literary critic and it seems he has another goal in addition to discussing the why and the why-not? of a fluid philosophy that seems to undermine any sense of "fixed" areas of knowledge that might otherwise give a culture a sense of itself, an identity, ethos and larger purpose that makes the past acceptable, the future brimming with a promise yet to be fulfilled, an entrenched optimism that makes the present tolerable or, at least, a condition where apathy is the preferred stance; he is intent of maintaining the authority of Marxist methods of discerning the economic superstructure of capitalism and, as well, holding on to the progressive notion that properly executed critiques and political actions based on them will further us along to Marx 's and Engle's prophecy that after the revolution, after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established and operating for an unspecified amount of time, the State will eventually, naturally wither away , as men and women have, it's assumed, been restored to their natural state before the foul distortion of capital fouled every thing up; that is, we will have become , to paraphrase a famous promise, fishers and farmers in the morning, poets, musicians and artists in the afternoons, scholars and philosophers at night.

That is to say, we will no longer have occupations, our labor, informing us who we are and destroying our potential of being much more.
The post modern inclination undermines the metaphorical structure and linguistic devices philosophies use to make their systems persuasive; Derrida and Baudrillard were smart men with much influence over the Left who had their own discourses that argued that every argument contains the seeds of it's own counter assertion. Jameson doesn't seem to want any of that and proceeds to write as densely as the thinkers he seeks to critique, often times stalling before coming to a major point he seemed to be traveling toward in order to indulge himself with clarifications about terms being used, ideas and artifacts that have been used as examples of opaque references . There is much the notion of the word-drunk in this volume, the idea that Jameson is thinking out loud and that the writing is a species of verbal stream of conscious wherein there is the assumption, an act of faith actually, that the longer the associative chain ,the more inclusive the argument the analysis becomes and that in this process there will come the connecting conceit that unifies what might have been mere intellectual drift into a bravura performance.

I can't shake the idea that Jameson is stalling here and is, honestly, out of his depth in his discussions that are not directly involved in parsing the creation and use of narrative forms as political tools in a problematic culture. There is value here, though, and I would suggest reading the opening essay, "Culture", where one gets the choicest ideas and insights has in this volume. For the rest, it is a reminder of just how bad a writer Fredric Jameson is.]]> 4.00 1991 Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
author: Fredric Jameson
name: Ted
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/02/28
shelves:
review:
This is a key book for those struggling to comprehend the verbal murk that constituted post modernist theory , which is a shame, because Fredrick Jameson cannot help but add his own murk to this occasionally useful overview of a directionless philosophical inclination. He certainly brings a lot of reading into his digressive discussions and reveals how much the idea of post modern strategy--Lyotard's notion that the Grand Narrative that unified all accounts of our history, purpose and collective sense of inevitable autonomy over the earth and those outside our culture has been shattered, eroded or made unpersuasive in a century that has known the horrors of 2 world wars and the overwhelming emergence of new technologies and the efforts of populations outside the margins of acceptable culture to claim their rights as humans , first and foremost--has usurped preceding and established ideas in areas of literature, architecture, movies, the arts, philosophy itself.

Jameson is a Marxist literary critic and it seems he has another goal in addition to discussing the why and the why-not? of a fluid philosophy that seems to undermine any sense of "fixed" areas of knowledge that might otherwise give a culture a sense of itself, an identity, ethos and larger purpose that makes the past acceptable, the future brimming with a promise yet to be fulfilled, an entrenched optimism that makes the present tolerable or, at least, a condition where apathy is the preferred stance; he is intent of maintaining the authority of Marxist methods of discerning the economic superstructure of capitalism and, as well, holding on to the progressive notion that properly executed critiques and political actions based on them will further us along to Marx 's and Engle's prophecy that after the revolution, after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established and operating for an unspecified amount of time, the State will eventually, naturally wither away , as men and women have, it's assumed, been restored to their natural state before the foul distortion of capital fouled every thing up; that is, we will have become , to paraphrase a famous promise, fishers and farmers in the morning, poets, musicians and artists in the afternoons, scholars and philosophers at night.

That is to say, we will no longer have occupations, our labor, informing us who we are and destroying our potential of being much more.
The post modern inclination undermines the metaphorical structure and linguistic devices philosophies use to make their systems persuasive; Derrida and Baudrillard were smart men with much influence over the Left who had their own discourses that argued that every argument contains the seeds of it's own counter assertion. Jameson doesn't seem to want any of that and proceeds to write as densely as the thinkers he seeks to critique, often times stalling before coming to a major point he seemed to be traveling toward in order to indulge himself with clarifications about terms being used, ideas and artifacts that have been used as examples of opaque references . There is much the notion of the word-drunk in this volume, the idea that Jameson is thinking out loud and that the writing is a species of verbal stream of conscious wherein there is the assumption, an act of faith actually, that the longer the associative chain ,the more inclusive the argument the analysis becomes and that in this process there will come the connecting conceit that unifies what might have been mere intellectual drift into a bravura performance.

I can't shake the idea that Jameson is stalling here and is, honestly, out of his depth in his discussions that are not directly involved in parsing the creation and use of narrative forms as political tools in a problematic culture. There is value here, though, and I would suggest reading the opening essay, "Culture", where one gets the choicest ideas and insights has in this volume. For the rest, it is a reminder of just how bad a writer Fredric Jameson is.
]]> <![CDATA[Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties]]> 23316493 A lively chronicle of the 1960s through the surprisingly close and incredibly contentious friendship of its two most colorful characters.

William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Mailer were the two towering intellectual figures of the 1960s, and they lived remarkably parallel lives. Both became best-selling authors in their twenties (with God and Man at Yale and The Naked and the Dead); both started hugely influential papers (National Review and the Village Voice); both ran for mayor of New York City; both were noted for their exceptional wit and venom; and both became the figurehead of their respective social movements (Buckley on the right, Mailer on the left). Indeed, Buckley and Mailer argued vociferously and publicly about every major issue of their time: civil rights, feminism, the counterculture, Vietnam, the Cold War. But behind the scenes, the two were close friends and trusted confidantes. In Buckley and Mailer, historian Kevin M. Schultz delves into their personal archives to tell the rich story of their friendship, their arguments, and the tumultuous decade they did so much to shape.

Here is the entertaining and deeply American story of what Mailer himself called a "difficult friendship": from their debate before the Floyd Patterson–Sonny Liston heavyweight fight in 1962 to their failed mayoral campaigns, to their confrontation at Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Ball, to their starring roles in the central events of the �60s, including the giant antiwar rally in Berkeley, the March on the Pentagon, and the national political conventions in Miami and Chicago. Through it all, Schultz charts their friendship, whether sailing together off the coast of Connecticut, celebrating rave reviews and grousing about lousy ones, and defending each other's decisions privately even as they attack each other’s positions publicly.

Brimming with Buckley and Mailer's own thoughts from their personal diaries and letters, Buckley and Mailer also features cameos by other leading figures of the time, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Barry Goldwater, Robert F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gloria Steinem, and Gore Vidal. Schultz delivers a fresh chronicle of the '60s and its long aftermath as well as an enormously engaging work of narrative history that explores these extraordinary figures' contrasting visions of what America was and what it could be.]]> 400 Kevin M. Schultz 0393088715 Ted 2 3.75 2015 Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties
author: Kevin M. Schultz
name: Ted
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/02/09
shelves:
review:

]]> The Silence 53879204
Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.]]> 117 Don DeLillo 1982164557 Ted 4 2.66 2020 The Silence
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 2.66
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/10/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Kingdom of Speech 28118522
Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.

From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.]]> 304 Tom Wolfe 0316269964 Ted 1
Wolfe's tirades have become the overheated blather he lampooned. I've not yet read his new book "The Kingdom of Speech", wherein he takes on Darwin and his theories on Evolution and the work and ideas of Noam Chomsky. Assuredly, there is no Wolfe book fails to reward with solid phrase, a brilliant metaphor, even a pertinent question that needed to be asked in the arena of ideas. But when Wolfe, who has a doctorate in American Studies from Yale, decides to get theoretical and trades realm of ideas rather than be the mere journalist or novelist, his reasoning gets skewed, confused, and seems little else than perpetual wallow in sarcasm and an unnamed source of bitterness. The open sequence is distressing for reasons that make you think less of James Joyce, who seems an obvious model ,than it does of a man who lost his glasses, rummaging through drawers and desktops , making a mess until he finds the crucial lenses. So that you know, Wolfe is attempting to broach the subject of Rice University.A sample of the slew:

“I surfed and Safaried and finally moused upon the only academic I could find who disagreed with the eight failures, a chemist at Rice University � Rice � Rice used to have a big-time football team � the Rice Owls � wonder how they’re doing now? I moused around on the Rice site some more, and uh-oh � not so great last season, the Owls � football � and I surfed to football concussions � exactly as I thought!�

Some will find genius , as Wolfe diehards customarily do, but these are variations of a theme being played on an untuned piano. Figuratively speaking, of course/Digression is my middle name with regards to stylish prose concentrating on little more than what interests the author at the moment, but this seems more a stumble or a stall. All told, I will read this book and pray that there is a bit of lucidity lurking under the encrusted sarcasm that has become Wolfe's world view.

It's notable that Kingdom of Speech has received quite a few bad reviews from the mainstream "liberal press" and it's been suggested in different places that his apparent "take down" of Darwin and those in the field of linguistics upset a progressive establishment who were collectively irritated to have a canonical figure debunked. Debunked? Remarks and wisecracks are not persuasive critiques of scientific theories , even if the jibes happen to be funny. Wolfe has a doctorate in American Studies , meaning that he's a smart man within his field, but there are times in his late career as a public intellectual where he thinks he's knows more than he actually does. This is one of those times.Perhaps more along the lines that those who gave the book one star are defenders of scientific protocols for verification of proof. Remember that scientific theories are coherent statements of verified, measured and replicated facts that are related in an effort to find out how things work. No where in any credible theory of scientific endeavor does it say that the interpretation of the facts is final. Protocol requires if new evidence emerges that credibly challenges established conclusions, scientists reexamine the issue at hand and alter theories as required to accommodate new data. This applies across the board , in all areas of research endeavor, whether biology, astrophysics, or linguistics. Chomsky would be the first to insist that his frameworks need to under go the same rigorous challenges as theories in other disciplines do. Scientific investigation leaves itself room to be modified in deal with new input as a matter of course. That is how they do things in the disciplines that are interested in facts that can be measured. Wolfe , of course, is a former journalist, a novelist who overrates his worth, and a clever ironist who can catch the flaws and contradictions in the statements of other creative writers. His world , though, is literary, not scientific, not one predicated on hard facts, which means that its one thing to eviscerate a Mailer, an Updike or a John Irving on the basis of having a quicker, snarkier tongue and quite another to put on the gloves and climb into the ring to take on science. Poor Wolfe simply cannot dissect what he thinks he understands]]> 3.44 2016 The Kingdom of Speech
author: Tom Wolfe
name: Ted
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2016
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2020/09/24
shelves:
review:
Wolfe,84, has continued his manner of composition, ratcheted up his disgust with cultural habits of the moment and has become, in fact, a crank old cuss who is no longer the refreshing breath of fresh air blowing into a room full of overheated bloviating.

Wolfe's tirades have become the overheated blather he lampooned. I've not yet read his new book "The Kingdom of Speech", wherein he takes on Darwin and his theories on Evolution and the work and ideas of Noam Chomsky. Assuredly, there is no Wolfe book fails to reward with solid phrase, a brilliant metaphor, even a pertinent question that needed to be asked in the arena of ideas. But when Wolfe, who has a doctorate in American Studies from Yale, decides to get theoretical and trades realm of ideas rather than be the mere journalist or novelist, his reasoning gets skewed, confused, and seems little else than perpetual wallow in sarcasm and an unnamed source of bitterness. The open sequence is distressing for reasons that make you think less of James Joyce, who seems an obvious model ,than it does of a man who lost his glasses, rummaging through drawers and desktops , making a mess until he finds the crucial lenses. So that you know, Wolfe is attempting to broach the subject of Rice University.A sample of the slew:

“I surfed and Safaried and finally moused upon the only academic I could find who disagreed with the eight failures, a chemist at Rice University � Rice � Rice used to have a big-time football team � the Rice Owls � wonder how they’re doing now? I moused around on the Rice site some more, and uh-oh � not so great last season, the Owls � football � and I surfed to football concussions � exactly as I thought!�

Some will find genius , as Wolfe diehards customarily do, but these are variations of a theme being played on an untuned piano. Figuratively speaking, of course/Digression is my middle name with regards to stylish prose concentrating on little more than what interests the author at the moment, but this seems more a stumble or a stall. All told, I will read this book and pray that there is a bit of lucidity lurking under the encrusted sarcasm that has become Wolfe's world view.

It's notable that Kingdom of Speech has received quite a few bad reviews from the mainstream "liberal press" and it's been suggested in different places that his apparent "take down" of Darwin and those in the field of linguistics upset a progressive establishment who were collectively irritated to have a canonical figure debunked. Debunked? Remarks and wisecracks are not persuasive critiques of scientific theories , even if the jibes happen to be funny. Wolfe has a doctorate in American Studies , meaning that he's a smart man within his field, but there are times in his late career as a public intellectual where he thinks he's knows more than he actually does. This is one of those times.Perhaps more along the lines that those who gave the book one star are defenders of scientific protocols for verification of proof. Remember that scientific theories are coherent statements of verified, measured and replicated facts that are related in an effort to find out how things work. No where in any credible theory of scientific endeavor does it say that the interpretation of the facts is final. Protocol requires if new evidence emerges that credibly challenges established conclusions, scientists reexamine the issue at hand and alter theories as required to accommodate new data. This applies across the board , in all areas of research endeavor, whether biology, astrophysics, or linguistics. Chomsky would be the first to insist that his frameworks need to under go the same rigorous challenges as theories in other disciplines do. Scientific investigation leaves itself room to be modified in deal with new input as a matter of course. That is how they do things in the disciplines that are interested in facts that can be measured. Wolfe , of course, is a former journalist, a novelist who overrates his worth, and a clever ironist who can catch the flaws and contradictions in the statements of other creative writers. His world , though, is literary, not scientific, not one predicated on hard facts, which means that its one thing to eviscerate a Mailer, an Updike or a John Irving on the basis of having a quicker, snarkier tongue and quite another to put on the gloves and climb into the ring to take on science. Poor Wolfe simply cannot dissect what he thinks he understands
]]> Hip: The History 54753 Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -- and continues to influence -- America's view of itself, and provides an incisive account of hip's quest for authenticity.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.]]> 405 John Leland 0060528184 Ted 5
Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the expected doses of cultural anthropology, literature and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. Most importantly he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their respective needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from a slavery as free people in a racist environment, hip was an an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium.

For the younger white hipsters, in love black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class. Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that the framework of what we consider hip is a way in which both races eye other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own good style from their black influences, the white hipsters is never far from black face minstrelsy.

For all the appropriation,experimentation, and varied perversions of black art that has emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes, people who, themselves, were the few among the many. ]]> 3.76 2004 Hip: The History
author: John Leland
name: Ted
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/09/17
shelves:
review:
John Leland's Hip:The History is the sort of book I like to read on the bus, the portentous social study of an indefinite essence that makes the reader of the book appear, well, hip. This is the perfect book for the pop culture obsessive who wonders, indeed worries and frets over the issue as to whether white musicians can become real blues musicians or whether Caucasian jazz musicians have added anything of value to the the jazz canon besides gimmick.

Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the expected doses of cultural anthropology, literature and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. Most importantly he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their respective needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from a slavery as free people in a racist environment, hip was an an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium.

For the younger white hipsters, in love black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class. Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that the framework of what we consider hip is a way in which both races eye other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own good style from their black influences, the white hipsters is never far from black face minstrelsy.

For all the appropriation,experimentation, and varied perversions of black art that has emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes, people who, themselves, were the few among the many.
]]> <![CDATA[Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man]]> 707141 416 Norman Mailer 0446672661 Ted 4 3.84 1995 Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/08/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Big If 385389 Wry, muscular Vi Asplund is the daughter of an atheist insurance adjuster who took the young Vi and her brother, Jens, to the grisly accident scenes he covered. This tolerance for the macabre follows Vi into her career as an agent, and into Jens's development as the software designer for a gorey video game. Chief-of-detail Gretchen Williams fights to keep the team in order, while Agent Tashmo, a veteran presidential guard, reflects on the glory days of the Reagan administration.
As the primary approaches, these intense men and women balance their own lives with that of the vice president. An astounding novel of survival and absurdity, Big If casts a sharp eye on America today.]]> 360 Mark Costello 0156027798 Ted 5 In many ways, this is one of the best novels to investigate what is one might do in the absence of God, or even a convenient social construction of The Public Good. All points of reference in Big If are minimized and negotiated from relevance. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, mostly invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book , is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If on line game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costello's' prose is quick with the telling detail,the flashing insight, the cutting remark.

The problem, of course, is that no one can define what "good" is. Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, and the other is with the rich detailing of the other secret service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rational, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field. Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details , his comic touches, A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks.

The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things , the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness. On view in "Big If" are different models on which characters try to contain , control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with it's fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle", but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic.]]> 3.10 2002 Big If
author: Mark Costello
name: Ted
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2002/01/01
date added: 2020/08/03
shelves:
review:
Mark Costello's novel Big If is a superb and unforgiving comedy of American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who must get reacquainted with her estranged computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid turns and twists of her nerve-rattling job. This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives, or at least have their lives take on a fleeting semblance of normality.The quests, individual and collective, aren't what anyone would expect--this novel takes a hard left turn from the Anne Tyler/Paulo Coelho fictions that insert everyday mysticism into the complications of city life--, and the results are habits, tics, behaviors and alienation from self that comes close to home, in the heart of the nest: the bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen, the places one lives the most and gains small satisfactions or walls themselves to unreachable Siberias of the psyche.
In many ways, this is one of the best novels to investigate what is one might do in the absence of God, or even a convenient social construction of The Public Good. All points of reference in Big If are minimized and negotiated from relevance. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, mostly invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book , is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If on line game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costello's' prose is quick with the telling detail,the flashing insight, the cutting remark.

The problem, of course, is that no one can define what "good" is. Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, and the other is with the rich detailing of the other secret service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rational, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field. Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details , his comic touches, A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks.

The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things , the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness. On view in "Big If" are different models on which characters try to contain , control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with it's fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle", but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic.
]]> Why Are We in Vietnam? 131790 Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after The Naked and the Dead, the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality.

Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful.]]> 215 Norman Mailer 0312265069 Ted 5
I suspect he felt to write his next novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam", as an attempt to suggest reasons for the propensity of American males to irrational violence--it's a funny story about an Alaskan bear hunt, a reworking of "The Bear" by Faulkner, and through the characters he presents a thick layering of issues that are not resolved and which, being un-diagnosed and not dealt with in any authentic way, mingle and merge and produce a tension that can only be released through violence or art. Mother issues, latent homosexuality, technology removing culture and the people in it from authentic, tactile experience with their world, a political agenda that knows only to expand and conquer with religion and natural law as bogus rationales--this is a lumpy stew of issues that make us , as a whole and individually, functionally insane and capable of nearly anything as the right provocation presents itself. "The products of America go insane" is what William Carlos Williams said, and the title of the novel, asking us why we are in Vietnam, has a simple answer: because we had to be, by our nature. This is not to let anyone off the the hook by blaming Mailer's act on environment and other extraneous details.

Mailer's violence against Adele Morales was , at the heart of the matter, a conscious act. He was aware of the difference between right and wrong and he chose to do a wrong thing. Mailer, I think, is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and was deserving of the praise he has received , but he also deserves the damnation . He has written several masterpieces and over all I think his literary reputation will grow . But we need to remember all the things he did and understand, as well, that there is something unjust about a man, no matter how you admire his work, who thrives professionally after the fact.
]]> 3.30 1967 Why Are We in Vietnam?
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/06/19
shelves:
review:
Mailer did try to understand the nature of evil imaginatively in a series of essays, novels, and journalism, most notably in his novels "An American Dream", a fictional piece where a Maileresque hero (the celebrity Mailer) willfully gives himself over to a violent impulse and seeks to rid himself of what he considers is killing him psychically : he murders his wife, steals a Mafia Don's mistress, beats up a character intended to represent to be Miles Davis, and defies the New York City Police Department, the CIA and other sinister , secret forces. It should be mentioned that the novel's hero is constantly drunk through this escapade. It is a brilliantly written book, containing many passages of astonishing poetry and insight into mores and social relations, and I regard it as an obscene male fantasy he needed to write , an act of speculation about what would happen if the Mailer hero were unleashed onto the world. Mailer, a big older and wizened to a degree, was likely not all that pleased with the mess this existentialist in the course of the story.

I suspect he felt to write his next novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam", as an attempt to suggest reasons for the propensity of American males to irrational violence--it's a funny story about an Alaskan bear hunt, a reworking of "The Bear" by Faulkner, and through the characters he presents a thick layering of issues that are not resolved and which, being un-diagnosed and not dealt with in any authentic way, mingle and merge and produce a tension that can only be released through violence or art. Mother issues, latent homosexuality, technology removing culture and the people in it from authentic, tactile experience with their world, a political agenda that knows only to expand and conquer with religion and natural law as bogus rationales--this is a lumpy stew of issues that make us , as a whole and individually, functionally insane and capable of nearly anything as the right provocation presents itself. "The products of America go insane" is what William Carlos Williams said, and the title of the novel, asking us why we are in Vietnam, has a simple answer: because we had to be, by our nature. This is not to let anyone off the the hook by blaming Mailer's act on environment and other extraneous details.

Mailer's violence against Adele Morales was , at the heart of the matter, a conscious act. He was aware of the difference between right and wrong and he chose to do a wrong thing. Mailer, I think, is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and was deserving of the praise he has received , but he also deserves the damnation . He has written several masterpieces and over all I think his literary reputation will grow . But we need to remember all the things he did and understand, as well, that there is something unjust about a man, no matter how you admire his work, who thrives professionally after the fact.

]]> Toward the End of Time 205054
Toward the End of Time "is the journal of a 66-year-old man, Ben Turnbull . . . [which] reveals not only the world but the wanderings of his wits. . . . So what if he jumps from a United States in the next century, disintegrating after a war with China, to ancient Egypt, or to virtual reality? So what if characters appear and disappear like phantoms in a dream? . . . Turnbull's journal is like Walden gone haywire. . . . If Ben's ruthlessness is evenhanded, so is his alarming intelligence; it falls on every scene, person, object, and thought in the book, giving it an eerie ambiance."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A BOOK AIMED NOT TO RESOLVE BUT TO AROUSE A READER'S WONDER . . . Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen."
--The Miami Herald

"WONDERFUL RUSHES OF NEAR-MELVILLEAN PROSE . . . Toward the End of Time has a force that gets under your skin."
--New York Review of Books

A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 0 John Updike 0517370301 Ted 4
Toward the End of Time was one of his occasional flings with science fiction and it was dull beyond repair. Licks of Love was rather a quaint and grandiloquent selection of lately composed stories that don't add much to his reputation. The Rabbit quartet, though, is masterful, a genuine American Saga of a man who is the quintessential rudderless citizen who goes through an entire lifetime in which none of his experiences gives any clue to purposes beyond his own disappointments and satisfactions. Updike is brilliant in this sequence, and for this alone I'd guess his reputation as a major writer is safe for generations to come. He's had his share of duds, but an unusually high proportion of his work is masterful, even brilliant. The Rabbit quartet, The Coup, Witches of Eastwick, Brazil, Beck: A Book, The Centaur, Roger's Version. I could go on. It's interesting as well to note the high incidence of experimentation with narrative form and subject matter. Rabbit placed him with this image of being someone comically dwelling on the lapsed virtues of middle aged East Coasters, ala John Cheever, (another writer I prize), but he has been all over the map so far as what he's written about and how he wrote about it. Even though I've cooled on Updike lately--I've been reading him for thirty years--I can't dismiss him nor diminish his accomplishment. He is one of the untouchables. Besides, neurosis is character, and it's hardly a monochromatic shade. It's a trait that comes across in infinitely varied expressions, and we need someone who can artfully exploit their potential.]]> 3.28 1997 Toward the End of Time
author: John Updike
name: Ted
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/04/20
shelves:
review:
It's been said that John Updike is able to write extremely well about nothing what so ever, less to do with the sort of hyper-realism of Robbe-Grillet or the purposeful taxonomies of David Foster Wallace than the plain old conceit of being in love your own voice. There is no theoretical edge to Updike's unceasing albeit elegant wordiness. It's a habit formed from deadlines, I guess, having to write a long and coherently in short spurts. He has published a minimum of one book a year since his first book The Poorhouse Fair was published in 1958, and like any artists who is as prolific over a long period--Wood Allen and JC Oates fans take note--there will be the inevitable productions that are ambitious but under constructed, dull, repetitive of past success, what have you.

Toward the End of Time was one of his occasional flings with science fiction and it was dull beyond repair. Licks of Love was rather a quaint and grandiloquent selection of lately composed stories that don't add much to his reputation. The Rabbit quartet, though, is masterful, a genuine American Saga of a man who is the quintessential rudderless citizen who goes through an entire lifetime in which none of his experiences gives any clue to purposes beyond his own disappointments and satisfactions. Updike is brilliant in this sequence, and for this alone I'd guess his reputation as a major writer is safe for generations to come. He's had his share of duds, but an unusually high proportion of his work is masterful, even brilliant. The Rabbit quartet, The Coup, Witches of Eastwick, Brazil, Beck: A Book, The Centaur, Roger's Version. I could go on. It's interesting as well to note the high incidence of experimentation with narrative form and subject matter. Rabbit placed him with this image of being someone comically dwelling on the lapsed virtues of middle aged East Coasters, ala John Cheever, (another writer I prize), but he has been all over the map so far as what he's written about and how he wrote about it. Even though I've cooled on Updike lately--I've been reading him for thirty years--I can't dismiss him nor diminish his accomplishment. He is one of the untouchables. Besides, neurosis is character, and it's hardly a monochromatic shade. It's a trait that comes across in infinitely varied expressions, and we need someone who can artfully exploit their potential.
]]> The Falls 15967
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is a stunning achievement from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation).]]> 512 Joyce Carol Oates 0060722290 Ted 4
Or a finished Oates novel, for that matter. She does get it right sometimes, as she did with "Black Water" and "Tattoo Girl"; with the right configuration, her usual wit's end prose style and fascination with fragile psyches and marginally psychotic psychologies get as intense as fiction is ever likely to get. Zombie is a rather potent little psychodrama, and it's the kind of writing Oates excels at. She gets to the heart of the fringe personality better than anyone I can think of. The Tattooed Girl, from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and The Falls. My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving.

She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil, as in the case with Jonathan Franzen.]]> 3.59 2004 The Falls
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Ted
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/04/20
shelves:
review:
Joyce Carol Oates is not my favorite writer, but for all the repetition of her themes of fragile women being imperiled by evil masculine forces they masochistically desire, she does occasionally publish something both compelling and well written. I detested "Beasts" and "The Falls" since she exercises her familiar dreads in contrasting lengths, the first book a slender novella, the latter a literal brick, both books sounding rushed, fevered, and breathless, as first drafts of novels usually do.

Or a finished Oates novel, for that matter. She does get it right sometimes, as she did with "Black Water" and "Tattoo Girl"; with the right configuration, her usual wit's end prose style and fascination with fragile psyches and marginally psychotic psychologies get as intense as fiction is ever likely to get. Zombie is a rather potent little psychodrama, and it's the kind of writing Oates excels at. She gets to the heart of the fringe personality better than anyone I can think of. The Tattooed Girl, from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and The Falls. My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving.

She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil, as in the case with Jonathan Franzen.
]]> <![CDATA[Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man]]> 22535453 384 Robert Christgau 0062238795 Ted 3
I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. "Any Old Way You Choose It", his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of my all-time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At The Movies", for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA! “Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock, disco, reggae, folk, jazz, and pop was like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art. His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self-indulgent as it may have seen, it was fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music is an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice-weekly campus newspaper and was required, in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theater, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was a lot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau, an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style.

The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop a writing style, ideas, and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed an argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do. Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal shorthand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old-fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that. Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before the deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories.

His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain. Christgau certainly tried to be confessional, tell all essayist, a horrible habit from the sixties that still infests popular nonfiction these days, as when he reprinted a long piece in "Any Old Way" about a trip across country with his girlfriend Ellen Willis and, in what was ostensibly an essay dealing with ideas, chronicled the events precipitating their break up. It was a rather aimless accounting, neither interesting as personality gossip nor compelling as an intellectual argument. It was just...awkward, not unlike someone who feels they have to talk about something that is a change in their life but cannot find the words that make you empathize. I rather enjoyed his prejudices, snobbery and the like, and I liked the fact the reserved the right to change his mind about an artist, even if only for one album. He as a critic, a dilettante, someone's who's a propensity toward prolix was intriguing, attractive, worth the bother to pour over when he was engaging the popular culture he thrived on.
]]> 3.29 2014 Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man
author: Robert Christgau
name: Ted
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2020/04/14
shelves:
review:
I made it halfway through Robert Christgau's memoir Going Into the City: Portrait Of a Critic as a Young Man before I had to put it down. Memoirs are a literary excuse for interesting people to talk about themselves due to an inherent belief that merely being themselves, sans abstraction or objectively intriguing art--novels, movies, poems, paintings--is enough to fill a book. it's likely that my lapse was due to the format Christgau chose; too much him, not enough of the world that formed him as a thinker about Pop Music and related concerns.I'm tempted to pick it up again, but I hesitate, I stall, I make excuses to do something else, considering that Christgau's obsessiveness, perfect for a critic, can be hard to take for long in a book that is supremely autobiographical in nature. I have been wishing that someone would take his best essays from his website and collect them into a volume or two; on rock and pop and some other matters of culture is always an intriguing point of view and it would be great to have those views between covers.

I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. "Any Old Way You Choose It", his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of my all-time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At The Movies", for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA! “Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock, disco, reggae, folk, jazz, and pop was like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art. His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self-indulgent as it may have seen, it was fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music is an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice-weekly campus newspaper and was required, in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theater, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was a lot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau, an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style.

The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop a writing style, ideas, and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed an argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do. Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal shorthand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old-fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that. Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before the deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories.

His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain. Christgau certainly tried to be confessional, tell all essayist, a horrible habit from the sixties that still infests popular nonfiction these days, as when he reprinted a long piece in "Any Old Way" about a trip across country with his girlfriend Ellen Willis and, in what was ostensibly an essay dealing with ideas, chronicled the events precipitating their break up. It was a rather aimless accounting, neither interesting as personality gossip nor compelling as an intellectual argument. It was just...awkward, not unlike someone who feels they have to talk about something that is a change in their life but cannot find the words that make you empathize. I rather enjoyed his prejudices, snobbery and the like, and I liked the fact the reserved the right to change his mind about an artist, even if only for one album. He as a critic, a dilettante, someone's who's a propensity toward prolix was intriguing, attractive, worth the bother to pour over when he was engaging the popular culture he thrived on.

]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Vintage International)]]> 18847694
- "Harmonium"
- "Ideas of Order"
- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"
- "Parts of the World"
- "Transport Summer"
- "The Auroras of Autumn"
- "The Rock"]]> 602 Wallace Stevens Ted 5 4.15 1954 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Vintage International)
author: Wallace Stevens
name: Ted
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/04/14
shelves:
review:
Wallace Stevens was the quintessential American Modernist, a man whose muse allowed him to consider the perfection of forms and the imperfections they garner as the human mind considers them and attempts to transform them. This is metaphysics with a memory , deconstruction with euphoric recall. There is a subdued music under the lithe lyricism of Steven's tuneful imagery, with varying degrees of joy, melancholy, desire, loss. The world he writes of is here because he was in the world. Heidegger likely would have admired Steven's reconsideration of Ideal and Idyll formations.
]]> The Leftovers 10762469
Kevin Garvey, Mapleton's new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin's own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence; his son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne. Only Kevin's teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she's definitely not the sweet "A" student she used to be. Kevin wants to help her, but he's distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start.

With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta has written a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss.]]> 355 Tom Perrotta 0312358342 Ted 5 3.41 2011 The Leftovers
author: Tom Perrotta
name: Ted
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/04/14
shelves:
review:
I am inclined to agree that the HBO production was one of the best TV series in recent memory, but the novel by Tom Perrotta is no less brilliant, perplexing, comic and able to undermine a reader's sense of metaphysical sure-footedness. Perrotta is a cross between Don DeLillo and John Cheever, someone who brings weirdness into the suburbs and small towns and has us observe how oddly things come unglued. The plot here centers around a small, Cheeveresque suburb, but the difference is that these townsfolk, like the rest of the world, is trying to deal with the unthinkable fact that a quarter of the world's population has vanished, gone, literally into thin air, rapture-like. This is about how the folks try to reconstruct their daily routines both in personal lives in social structures and how different groups come to interpret that event which is, by its nature, sealed off from interpretation.
]]> Amira of Nowhood 53050462 166 Robert Kerstetter 1733225110 Ted 4 4.00 Amira of Nowhood
author: Robert Kerstetter
name: Ted
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/04/08
shelves:
review:
A parable for those who wonder what it might be like in a post-perfect world when there are no more problems to solve, no arguments to have, no disease, no heartbreak, no soul. It is a world that offers no challenge and no motivation, amiable or threatening, to use the imagination as a means of feeling a part of something greater than the smooth operation of one's isolated metabolism. Our titular character learns that we have a need to feel , evolve, take new shapes and adapt as our subsumed nature demands. Nature will not be denied, and Amira begins a path at once frightening and wondrous. This rich, poetic language regarding an existence that comes undone and is transformed into something greater than itself.
]]> Infinite Jest 6759
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1088 David Foster Wallace Ted 3 Infinite Jest is perhaps the most exasperating novel I've ever read, along with being the most chronically overrated in contemporary fiction. It may be argued that he novel is about the digressions he favors, and that such digressions place him in line as being the latest "systems novelist", taking up where Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth (John) have led the way, to which I'd say fine, and what of it? The AA and recovery material is potential good fun, and the aspect of powerlessness over a movie ought to be enough for a writer to mold a sure satire, but Wallace seems far too eager to surpass "Gravity's Rainbow" and" The Recognitions" in his long, rhythm less sentences. The aforementioned editor I proposed would have handed the manuscript back with the observation that this set of multi-channeled satires has already been done by the previously mentioned authors whose works are not likely to be matched. Said editor would then advise that over-writing isn't the sure means to break with your influences, but that developing one's own style is.

There is a well argued rationale for the lack of editing in Infinite Jest, that David Foster Wallace was in the tradition of testing the limits of a what a sentence, a paragraph, a page can contain before the onset of the concluding period, the test being that a sentence can drift, digress, take long turns and circuitous routes to the finish a series of ideas,but even digressions have to be pared down to the ones that will have an effect, even a diffuse one that. Wallace really isn't in control of his digressions. Every so-called postmodern writer has to decide , and finally know what effect and point, or drift, they are getting at.

Even in an style whose hall marks are pastiche, parody and high-minded satire, craft still counts for something, and a sense of the form a book is taking, it's architecture, has to come under control, or else the eventual point of the writing, to study, in an imaginative terrain, some aspects of the human experience, lost entirely. Any working novelist, whether a genre-hack , a royalist, avant-gardes of most any hue, ought to be in control of their materials, where Wallace, with IJ, clearly isn't.

That control is more instinctual than mechanical, and the ability to know when to stop and allow the fictional incidents resonate in all their overlapping parts. Wallace doesn't trust his instincts, or his readers powers to interpret his material, I guess. There is always one more paragraph, one more digression, one more bit of undigested research for him to add. It's like watching a guy empty his pockets into a plastic tray at an airport metal detector.

White Noise is written, of course, in a spare and professorial style that some might find maybe too much so. I didn't have that problem, and thought the style perfect for the comedy he wrote. It's a college satire, and was a remarkable choice on his part to convey the distorted elements of the story line, from the lush descriptions of the sun sets , et al.

It's a prose style that is brilliant and alive to idea and incident: DeLillo has the rare genius to combine the abstract elements of a philosophical debate with imagery - rich writing that manages several narrative movements at once. His digressions meet and merge with his descriptions, and the result is a true and brooding fiction that aligns the comic with the horrific in a series of novels where the pure chase for meaning within systems of absolute certainty are chipped away at, eroded with many layers of a dead metaphor , slamming up against an unknowable reality that these systems , including literature itself, have claimed entree into. Heady, compulsively readable, vibrantly poetic.Mao ll, Underworld are among the best American novels written in the 20th century. ]]> 4.26 1996 Infinite Jest
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Ted
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2020/03/09
shelves:
review:
Infinite Jest is perhaps the most exasperating novel I've ever read, along with being the most chronically overrated in contemporary fiction. It may be argued that he novel is about the digressions he favors, and that such digressions place him in line as being the latest "systems novelist", taking up where Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth (John) have led the way, to which I'd say fine, and what of it? The AA and recovery material is potential good fun, and the aspect of powerlessness over a movie ought to be enough for a writer to mold a sure satire, but Wallace seems far too eager to surpass "Gravity's Rainbow" and" The Recognitions" in his long, rhythm less sentences. The aforementioned editor I proposed would have handed the manuscript back with the observation that this set of multi-channeled satires has already been done by the previously mentioned authors whose works are not likely to be matched. Said editor would then advise that over-writing isn't the sure means to break with your influences, but that developing one's own style is.

There is a well argued rationale for the lack of editing in Infinite Jest, that David Foster Wallace was in the tradition of testing the limits of a what a sentence, a paragraph, a page can contain before the onset of the concluding period, the test being that a sentence can drift, digress, take long turns and circuitous routes to the finish a series of ideas,but even digressions have to be pared down to the ones that will have an effect, even a diffuse one that. Wallace really isn't in control of his digressions. Every so-called postmodern writer has to decide , and finally know what effect and point, or drift, they are getting at.

Even in an style whose hall marks are pastiche, parody and high-minded satire, craft still counts for something, and a sense of the form a book is taking, it's architecture, has to come under control, or else the eventual point of the writing, to study, in an imaginative terrain, some aspects of the human experience, lost entirely. Any working novelist, whether a genre-hack , a royalist, avant-gardes of most any hue, ought to be in control of their materials, where Wallace, with IJ, clearly isn't.

That control is more instinctual than mechanical, and the ability to know when to stop and allow the fictional incidents resonate in all their overlapping parts. Wallace doesn't trust his instincts, or his readers powers to interpret his material, I guess. There is always one more paragraph, one more digression, one more bit of undigested research for him to add. It's like watching a guy empty his pockets into a plastic tray at an airport metal detector.

White Noise is written, of course, in a spare and professorial style that some might find maybe too much so. I didn't have that problem, and thought the style perfect for the comedy he wrote. It's a college satire, and was a remarkable choice on his part to convey the distorted elements of the story line, from the lush descriptions of the sun sets , et al.

It's a prose style that is brilliant and alive to idea and incident: DeLillo has the rare genius to combine the abstract elements of a philosophical debate with imagery - rich writing that manages several narrative movements at once. His digressions meet and merge with his descriptions, and the result is a true and brooding fiction that aligns the comic with the horrific in a series of novels where the pure chase for meaning within systems of absolute certainty are chipped away at, eroded with many layers of a dead metaphor , slamming up against an unknowable reality that these systems , including literature itself, have claimed entree into. Heady, compulsively readable, vibrantly poetic.Mao ll, Underworld are among the best American novels written in the 20th century.
]]> Beasts 762727 154 Joyce Carol Oates 0786711035 Ted 2 Beasts, yet another new one from Joyce Carole Oates, is short novella about an impressionable young poetess surrendering to a catastrophic seduction by her amoral, decadence-spouting writing professor. Oates doing what she does best, inhabiting a mind on the verge of a breakdown, giving us a personality that translates experience who’s every instance portends disaster. She is not my favorite writer, but this one is convincingly creepy.]]> 3.65 2001 Beasts
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Ted
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2020/03/02
shelves:
review:
Beasts, yet another new one from Joyce Carole Oates, is short novella about an impressionable young poetess surrendering to a catastrophic seduction by her amoral, decadence-spouting writing professor. Oates doing what she does best, inhabiting a mind on the verge of a breakdown, giving us a personality that translates experience who’s every instance portends disaster. She is not my favorite writer, but this one is convincingly creepy.
]]> The Body Artist 11767 The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, Don DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to.

As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating exposé of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion.]]> 128 Don DeLillo 0743203968 Ted 5 The Body Artist has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. I meant to convey was that the meaning she was seeking, the connection between what she's examining outside herself , the precise moment where existence seemed purposeful, is a mystery. The answer is not revealed, if there was an answer at all. What is obvious to the reader is that we are witnessing rituals of some very private sort--the obsessed cleansing of the body, the concentrated on selected external facts, the momentary wanderings of mind that consider what sort of consequence the continued ritual of trying to bridge the gap between the subjective mind and a world external actually has. Evidence of consciousness, a soul, the essence of what makes us human? Or merely the expected habit for sort of creature we are, mere animal behavior, something directed by biology and an environment that shapes our responses to it? A mystery. My own experience with this book was that it reminded of those times , alone, or in a crowd, when my thinking got the best of me, due to some sort of trauma or illness or some such thing, when the nature of existence became a dominant topic of all my thinking. Concentrated, felt existentialism, when all of what seems to be is questioned and nothing seems to fit this world right. It is the nagging sensation that all is mere perception,nothing else.DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud. A short, haunted masterwork.]]> 3.30 2001 The Body Artist
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2002/01/01
date added: 2020/03/01
shelves:
review:
DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork Underworld made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age.
The Body Artist has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. I meant to convey was that the meaning she was seeking, the connection between what she's examining outside herself , the precise moment where existence seemed purposeful, is a mystery. The answer is not revealed, if there was an answer at all. What is obvious to the reader is that we are witnessing rituals of some very private sort--the obsessed cleansing of the body, the concentrated on selected external facts, the momentary wanderings of mind that consider what sort of consequence the continued ritual of trying to bridge the gap between the subjective mind and a world external actually has. Evidence of consciousness, a soul, the essence of what makes us human? Or merely the expected habit for sort of creature we are, mere animal behavior, something directed by biology and an environment that shapes our responses to it? A mystery. My own experience with this book was that it reminded of those times , alone, or in a crowd, when my thinking got the best of me, due to some sort of trauma or illness or some such thing, when the nature of existence became a dominant topic of all my thinking. Concentrated, felt existentialism, when all of what seems to be is questioned and nothing seems to fit this world right. It is the nagging sensation that all is mere perception,nothing else.DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud. A short, haunted masterwork.
]]> Tough Guys Don't Dance 12469 Tough Guys Don’t Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers.
Ěý
Praise for Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Ěý
“Spectacular . . . [Norman Mailer] makes every word count, like a master knife thrower zinging stilettos in a circle around your head.��People
Ěý
“As brash, brooding and ultimately mesmerizing as the author himself . . . [Mailer strikes a] dazzling balance between humor and horror.�—New York Daily News
Ěý
“A first-rate page-turner of a murder mystery . . . full of great characters, littered with dead bodies and replete with plausible suspects.��Chicago Tribune
Ěý
“[Tough Guys Don’t Dance] has that charming Mailer bravado.��The New York Times
Ěý
Praise for Norman Mailer
Ěý
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.��The New York Times
Ěý
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.��The New Yorker
Ěý
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.��The Washington Post
Ěý
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.��Life
Ěý
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.��The New York Review of Books
Ěý
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.��Chicago Tribune
Ěý
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.��The Cincinnati Post


From the Paperback edition.]]> 240 Norman Mailer 0375508740 Ted 4 3.48 1984 Tough Guys Don't Dance
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/02/17
shelves:
review:
The late Norman Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the 20th century who, despite what misgivings you may have about his vanity, arrogance, and odd sense of the masculine imperative, wrote some masterpieces. His novel, "Tough Guys Don't Dance", wasn't one of his master works, but it was a first-rate entertainment, a noirish murder mystery that combined Mailer's career long themes--the nature of courage, the search for knowledge through sexual encounters and violent challenges--with a wonderfully presented atmosphere and a cast of skewed, tortured, characters. The tale of an alcoholic , would be writer who tries to recover from a black out exactly how a woman's head showed up in his marijuana plant stash is an intoxicating read. a tale of improbable events and impossible characters made plausible by the poetry of Mailer's writing. As a film director , however, Mailer is quite awful, being someone with notions of how a film ought to look and how it should achieve its effects but with no idea how to get anywhere near the mark he set for himself. The dialogue, acceptable in the context of the dark and brooding world of Mailer's novel, is preposterous here, revealing a tin ear for the rhythms of how people actually sound. Good actors seem stiff and embalmed, and bad actors come off as automatons. In a more forgiving light, one might say that his is an art film , an avant gard production that just happened to have some money behind it,but that would be wishful thinking. The movie is just odd and awful.It's a great bit of noir-toned quirkiness, a wild tale from a strange world of macho imagination. Mailer had his faults, of course, but all his strengths as a writer come together here. Beautifully written , this is a mystery, a ghost story, a Lawrence - like experiment in ideas of sexuality that were at once spiritual and sexist. I've read twice, and from time to time pick up to savor the poetic tone of Mailer's prose as he lays out the world and dilemmas of Tim Madden, a failed writer, a failed husband, an alcoholic and pothead who finds the severed head of his gone-missing wife in his marijuana stash. What follows is a beautifully brooding novel always at the edge of paranoia with characters who've been too long imbibing from the vices of the cutting edge of the period--sex, drugs, politics, copious amounts of self indulgence--who are now shells of the former potential, used up, ossified, cursed with experience without the benefit of wisdom. No mistake, though, this is a hard boiled page turner, a gripping yarn, a world of deception, bad faith, dirty little secrets that come exposed as the investigation into the dead woman gets underway. I would been very pleased if Mailer had decided to give us a series of mystery novels featuring the hapless hero Tim Madden much as Chandler offered the world books with Philip Marlowe.
]]> <![CDATA[The Big Note: A Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa]]> 36875364 754 Charles Ulrich 1554201462 Ted 5 4.82 The Big Note: A Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa
author: Charles Ulrich
name: Ted
average rating: 4.82
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/01/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery]]> 96119 Ěý
Praise for Oswald’s Tale
Ěý
“America’s largest mystery has found its greatest interpreter.��The Washington Post Book World
Ěý
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection.�—Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books
Ěý
“A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form.�—Christopher Hitchens, Financial Times
Ěý
“The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.�—Martin Amis, The Sunday Times (London)
Ěý
Praise for Norman Mailer
Ěý
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.��The New York Times
Ěý
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.��The New Yorker
Ěý
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.��The Washington Post
Ěý
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.��Life
Ěý
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.��The New York Review of Books
Ěý
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.��Chicago Tribune
Ěý
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.��The Cincinnati Post]]> 864 Norman Mailer 0345404378 Ted 4 3.92 1995 Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/01/20
shelves:
review:

]]> White Noise 28251250
White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition]]> 320 Don DeLillo 0143129554 Ted 5 3.88 1985 White Noise
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Falling Man 28700
Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.

These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.]]> 246 Don DeLillo 1416546022 Ted 3 here were great expectations for a Don DeLillo novel that confronted the epic tragedy of 9/11, but it seems reasonable that "Falling Man" is less ambitious than many of us wanted it to be. It is beautifully written and definitely furnishes the mood of severe dislocation when a symbol of our abstracted sense of self, the Word Trade Center towers, were attacked and destroyed. There is a poetically conveyed sense of distance between the characters and the unimaginable tragedy that unfolded. In keeping with DeLillo's themes of staring down institutions that influence behavior, policy, choices and assigns significance to products and habits that are meant to supplant our inner life, the novel his the ongoing concern with trying to understand people who vaguely adhered to images, propaganda, manufactured consensus and consumerism that at least told us, theoretically, what America and Americans stood for--a herd in many ethnic and cultural subsets acting "as if" their life had fixed certainty and purpose--who confront the terror not just of terrorism, mass murder and increased violations of their rights, but the terror of realizing that faith in The System and its statements of purpose are a fiction intended to keep our eyes off the prize and instead glued to the television tube and computer monitor.

The novel,though, reads at times like a parody of DeLillo's best work. Despite the customary excellence of the writing, the author strains for effect sometimes, drifts into digressions that are page fillers. There is a sense of obligation one detects in the otherwise superb craft; given tht he is the genius who wrote "White Noise" and "Underground", two of the best novels every written that found the empty chamber that passes as the American heart, we have a great writer competing with a recent history that is so incredible and ground shaking that it so fars defies literary imagination to successfully diagnosis and turn into superb irony. It is worth a read for DeLillo completest, but this is not the book to begin with if you've been thinking of reading one or more of his books. I would suggest "White Noise " or "Great Jones Street" for that.]]> 3.27 2007 Falling Man
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2020/01/11
shelves:
review:

here were great expectations for a Don DeLillo novel that confronted the epic tragedy of 9/11, but it seems reasonable that "Falling Man" is less ambitious than many of us wanted it to be. It is beautifully written and definitely furnishes the mood of severe dislocation when a symbol of our abstracted sense of self, the Word Trade Center towers, were attacked and destroyed. There is a poetically conveyed sense of distance between the characters and the unimaginable tragedy that unfolded. In keeping with DeLillo's themes of staring down institutions that influence behavior, policy, choices and assigns significance to products and habits that are meant to supplant our inner life, the novel his the ongoing concern with trying to understand people who vaguely adhered to images, propaganda, manufactured consensus and consumerism that at least told us, theoretically, what America and Americans stood for--a herd in many ethnic and cultural subsets acting "as if" their life had fixed certainty and purpose--who confront the terror not just of terrorism, mass murder and increased violations of their rights, but the terror of realizing that faith in The System and its statements of purpose are a fiction intended to keep our eyes off the prize and instead glued to the television tube and computer monitor.

The novel,though, reads at times like a parody of DeLillo's best work. Despite the customary excellence of the writing, the author strains for effect sometimes, drifts into digressions that are page fillers. There is a sense of obligation one detects in the otherwise superb craft; given tht he is the genius who wrote "White Noise" and "Underground", two of the best novels every written that found the empty chamber that passes as the American heart, we have a great writer competing with a recent history that is so incredible and ground shaking that it so fars defies literary imagination to successfully diagnosis and turn into superb irony. It is worth a read for DeLillo completest, but this is not the book to begin with if you've been thinking of reading one or more of his books. I would suggest "White Noise " or "Great Jones Street" for that.
]]> Cosmopolis 28703 209 Don DeLillo 0330412744 Ted 4 DeLillo's mastery of language lets him convey the psychic activity that constantly tries to reacquaint the world with meaning and purpose after the constructions are laid bare; Eric, here in this world of commodity trading, which he regards as natural force that he's mastered and control, attempts to reintroduce mystery into the world he is trapped in. He is bored beyond the grave with the results of his luck. His efforts to live dangerously , spontaneously and thus get a perception he hadn't had and perhaps secure a hint of a metaphysical infrastructure that eludes, all turn badly, but for DeLillo's art it's not what is found , discovered, or resolved through the extensions of language, but rather the journey itself, the constant connecting of things with other things in the world; this is the poetry of the human need to make sense of things in the great , invisible state beyond the senses, a negotiation with death.His imagistic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the hyperactive commotion of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself. DeLillo might be the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork "Underworld" made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age.

"The Body Artist" has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnishes meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized, obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloesque cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband.

The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption, slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, and precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously makes the cottage on the cold, lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud.
]]> 3.26 2003 Cosmopolis
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/01/11
shelves:
review:
Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers on the events of an eventful day in Manhattan. Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the constant, ghostly electronic feed of news of pending financial disaster, a young billionaire asset manager limousines uptown to get a haircut in order to embrace his sense of inevitable, personal apocalypse. DeLillo's writing is outstanding, funny with a cool lyricism, poetic when you least expect it. The brilliance here, as with "White Noise" and especially "Mao ll" is the way characters seek to reconfigure their metaphors, their assuring base of references , once their world view is rattled and made less authoritative by unexplained events and human quirks. This is semiotics at its best, an erotic activity where DeLillo probes and glides over the surfaces of ideas, notions, theories and their artifacts, things intellectual and material emptied of meaning, purpose.
DeLillo's mastery of language lets him convey the psychic activity that constantly tries to reacquaint the world with meaning and purpose after the constructions are laid bare; Eric, here in this world of commodity trading, which he regards as natural force that he's mastered and control, attempts to reintroduce mystery into the world he is trapped in. He is bored beyond the grave with the results of his luck. His efforts to live dangerously , spontaneously and thus get a perception he hadn't had and perhaps secure a hint of a metaphysical infrastructure that eludes, all turn badly, but for DeLillo's art it's not what is found , discovered, or resolved through the extensions of language, but rather the journey itself, the constant connecting of things with other things in the world; this is the poetry of the human need to make sense of things in the great , invisible state beyond the senses, a negotiation with death.His imagistic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the hyperactive commotion of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself. DeLillo might be the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork "Underworld" made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age.

"The Body Artist" has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnishes meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized, obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloesque cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband.

The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption, slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, and precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously makes the cottage on the cold, lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud.

]]> Mao II 402 The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover—and Bill's.]]> 241 Don DeLillo 0140152741 Ted 5
The novel's fabled author, sensing that he is nearing the end of his creative potency, agrees to come is seclusion to participate in a large public reading to support an obscure poet who has been abducted by terrorists ; he emerges from the world of the secluded artist who has control of his creativity and the consequences of his choices and reenters the world he withdrew from, the world he nominal takes his inspiration from, and is subject again to the ebb and flow of events he assumed he finally understood through a career of fictionalizing it. DeLillo here does some of the best writing I've come across about the practice of writing, or rather, the rituals of writing; the novelist is working on an eagerly anticipated novel that will place his long career in perspective, but the reader witnesses isn't a conclusion being achieved, but rather stalling.

There are revisions, a retyping of notes, editorial changes, alterations of format, more research to do, more cross-indexing to be done before the manuscript can be submitted to the publisher and the judgment of history. Death, of course, is easily detected presence here, hanging over the composing and collating procedures like some cloud threatening to rain, but DeLillo defers reference to the inevitability and concentrates instead on the intensity of the busy work the novelist and his assistant engage in during their work sessions; there is a focus on the details of narrative and the word choices that serve as background noise, a loud music of a kind that keeps the lurking notion that there are no more words to come after this book is completed and out of his hands. Getting started again, becoming interested in a new idea to the degree that one is willing to subject themselves to another span of time of research, writing, and revision. Mailer had commented while he was writing his final novel The Castle in the Forest that he was "...going to finish this novel, or it's going to finish me," summarizing perfectly the process of writing as an activity that requires every resource one has to commit to a book they think needs to be written.

One does feel used up and empty after the last correction is made and the manuscript is shipped out; the prospect of starting over again for the next book is daunting, and the idea of starting a new work late in life, admitting the possibility that one might die before the work is done is a frightening prospect. One does not want to be found in the midst of their unfinished business, whatever it might be. The stalling tactics of DeLillo's fictional novelist become understandable: delay the completion of the book, extend the length of one's life. The question, though, is whether the quality of life, on those conditions, rises above being a kind of stasis-defined Limbo. Is a life predicated on the non-engagement of one's creative instinct worth sticking around for?]]> 3.69 1991 Mao II
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/01/11
shelves:
review:
Don DeLillo's novel Mao ll shows the writer at the height of his powers, a novel that highlights an individuals experience of seeing the coherence of his belief system erode and chip apart as forces, historical and economic, invade that area of life that had seemed safe for so long. Potent writing, one of those characters is a reclusive Pynchon (or DeLillo) stand -in whose absence of new work or public appearance has created a presence larger than literary reputation alone could manage: if we talk about the speed at which disparate events suddenly seem to converge and become linked through the slimmest of resemblances, this is the novel to start with. This DeLillo at his championship best--he is superb at amassing the telling details his characters surround themselves in a secure themselves with. Likewise, he effectively conveys how intervening events readily dismantle a homemade cosmology.

The novel's fabled author, sensing that he is nearing the end of his creative potency, agrees to come is seclusion to participate in a large public reading to support an obscure poet who has been abducted by terrorists ; he emerges from the world of the secluded artist who has control of his creativity and the consequences of his choices and reenters the world he withdrew from, the world he nominal takes his inspiration from, and is subject again to the ebb and flow of events he assumed he finally understood through a career of fictionalizing it. DeLillo here does some of the best writing I've come across about the practice of writing, or rather, the rituals of writing; the novelist is working on an eagerly anticipated novel that will place his long career in perspective, but the reader witnesses isn't a conclusion being achieved, but rather stalling.

There are revisions, a retyping of notes, editorial changes, alterations of format, more research to do, more cross-indexing to be done before the manuscript can be submitted to the publisher and the judgment of history. Death, of course, is easily detected presence here, hanging over the composing and collating procedures like some cloud threatening to rain, but DeLillo defers reference to the inevitability and concentrates instead on the intensity of the busy work the novelist and his assistant engage in during their work sessions; there is a focus on the details of narrative and the word choices that serve as background noise, a loud music of a kind that keeps the lurking notion that there are no more words to come after this book is completed and out of his hands. Getting started again, becoming interested in a new idea to the degree that one is willing to subject themselves to another span of time of research, writing, and revision. Mailer had commented while he was writing his final novel The Castle in the Forest that he was "...going to finish this novel, or it's going to finish me," summarizing perfectly the process of writing as an activity that requires every resource one has to commit to a book they think needs to be written.

One does feel used up and empty after the last correction is made and the manuscript is shipped out; the prospect of starting over again for the next book is daunting, and the idea of starting a new work late in life, admitting the possibility that one might die before the work is done is a frightening prospect. One does not want to be found in the midst of their unfinished business, whatever it might be. The stalling tactics of DeLillo's fictional novelist become understandable: delay the completion of the book, extend the length of one's life. The question, though, is whether the quality of life, on those conditions, rises above being a kind of stasis-defined Limbo. Is a life predicated on the non-engagement of one's creative instinct worth sticking around for?
]]> <![CDATA[Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege]]> 210062
Drinking the Sea at Gaza maps the zones of ordinary Palestinian life. From her friends, Hass learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early euphoria over the peace process and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous.

Full of testimonies and stories, facts and impressions, Drinking the Sea at Gaza makes an urgent claim on our humanity. Beautiful, haunting, and profound, it will stand with the great works of wartime reportage.]]> 400 Amira Hass 0805057404 Ted 0 4.11 1999 Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege
author: Amira Hass
name: Ted
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The Deer Park 131791 "The Deer Park" is the story of two interlacing love affairs. Sergius O'Shaugnessy is a young ex-Air Force pilot whose good looks and air of indifference launch him into the orbit of the radiant actress Lulu Meyers. Charles Eitel is a brilliant director wounded by accusations of communism--and whose liaison with the volatile Elena Esposito may supply the coup de grace to his career. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire.]]> 398 Norman Mailer 0349109974 Ted 1
Mailer failed with the ambition, of course, but we have to love him for trying to swing the bat so that it crack the loudest and result in the the ball not just leaving the park, but the planet as well. Many great books were written him, most of them a brilliant species of journalistic novels, non fictions written in a narrative style that showed that history could be faithfully and heroically recounted like a good yarn. His novels are another matter, fantastic and questing and experimental in form and content, novels long and very long and short, even brief, none of them perfect,many of them brilliant and commanding all the same.

Yes, this man should have won the Nobel Prize for literature based solely on the originality and brilliance of his work; Mailer, though, was not the politically acceptable sort to be given the award by a governing body that prized only the most pristine of authors who had political views that didn't rock the rafters. Mailer rocked the rafters, he questioned,he probed,he outraged, he said things that Blacks, gays, women and an army of others have understandable problems with.He was the necessary man to have around at the time when the counter culture and the left had this soft headed notion that bad things and armies and guns and bad wars and poverty would just fade away; Mailer, an existentialist of his own devising and a religious mystic of at least an impressive amateur standing (Mailer's writings gave even his most naive or outrageous utterances a poetic urgency that forced you to admire the power of their expression) was not convinced we were advancing to a higher evolution, a higher consciousness where the state and its contradictions would wither away. We were merely headed for something darker, starker, less reliant on imagination and passion and self-determination and more so on technology, corporate need, and the erosion of people's attention spans. As I said, Mailer was seeking a new style of prose and approach when The Deer Park appeared. It is a good yarn, not a great one. I would not recommend this book. I say that with some reservation, as Mailer has been my favorite novelist for decades. But his real genius still lay before him.]]> 3.26 1955 The Deer Park
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.26
book published: 1955
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2019/11/05
shelves:
review:
Mailer's third novel, The Deer Park, finds the author searching for a style suitable to his ambitions of being the literary genius who finally sets the world straight on matters of love, destiny, masculinity, sex, betrayal, all that good stuff.

Mailer failed with the ambition, of course, but we have to love him for trying to swing the bat so that it crack the loudest and result in the the ball not just leaving the park, but the planet as well. Many great books were written him, most of them a brilliant species of journalistic novels, non fictions written in a narrative style that showed that history could be faithfully and heroically recounted like a good yarn. His novels are another matter, fantastic and questing and experimental in form and content, novels long and very long and short, even brief, none of them perfect,many of them brilliant and commanding all the same.

Yes, this man should have won the Nobel Prize for literature based solely on the originality and brilliance of his work; Mailer, though, was not the politically acceptable sort to be given the award by a governing body that prized only the most pristine of authors who had political views that didn't rock the rafters. Mailer rocked the rafters, he questioned,he probed,he outraged, he said things that Blacks, gays, women and an army of others have understandable problems with.He was the necessary man to have around at the time when the counter culture and the left had this soft headed notion that bad things and armies and guns and bad wars and poverty would just fade away; Mailer, an existentialist of his own devising and a religious mystic of at least an impressive amateur standing (Mailer's writings gave even his most naive or outrageous utterances a poetic urgency that forced you to admire the power of their expression) was not convinced we were advancing to a higher evolution, a higher consciousness where the state and its contradictions would wither away. We were merely headed for something darker, starker, less reliant on imagination and passion and self-determination and more so on technology, corporate need, and the erosion of people's attention spans. As I said, Mailer was seeking a new style of prose and approach when The Deer Park appeared. It is a good yarn, not a great one. I would not recommend this book. I say that with some reservation, as Mailer has been my favorite novelist for decades. But his real genius still lay before him.
]]> Music: A Subversive History 43886050 A preeminent music historian and critic presents a global history of music from the bottom up


Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, historian Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs.


Gioia tells a four-thousand-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how social outcasts have repeatedly become trailblazers of musical expression: slaves and their descendants, for instance, have repeatedly reinvented music, from ancient times all the way to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day.



Music: A Subversive History is essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning of music, from Sappho to the Sex Pistols to Spotify.]]> 528 Ted Gioia 1541644360 Ted 3 3.98 2019 Music: A Subversive History
author: Ted Gioia
name: Ted
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/11/05
shelves:
review:
Fascinating read, Goia does us the favor of skipping the technical comparatives and assorted arcana that interest tech heads and deep nerds and instead discusses, in plain language, the evolution of music in social, philosophical and spiritual context, revealing the need to make music as a means to give direct and immediate expression of human experience . He covers a lot of material here, does a fine job displaying the various arguments over the use and misuse of music has been, and is very cogent and persuasive as to how various music forms, especially song, developed over time , changing condition, and need to adapt . Some of his conclusions seem a little pat--I am suspect these days of sweeping pronouncements about unbelievable large things such as the history of music--but Goia does make you appreciate the miracle of being able to make music .
]]> Of a Fire on the Moon 238970 480 Norman Mailer 0394620194 Ted 5 3.67 1970 Of a Fire on the Moon
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Other Side of the Mountain]]> 2266967 116 Michel Bernanos 0877973520 Ted 4 4.13 1967 The Other Side of the Mountain
author: Michel Bernanos
name: Ted
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/07/23
shelves:
review:
Easily one of the strangest and most spellbinding novels I've read in a lifetime of reading same said books, this short novella begins as a sea adventure, a young man who signs on to a ship's crew as a cabin boy. Things ago awry before long once the trip starts, and the tale soon turns into a horror story, depraved to the least of all hope. The ship sinks, and the boy and the ship's cook wind up marooned on an uncharted island where nothing is where it seems. It turns into a horror fantasy the island being a malevolent intelligence, a throbbing, menacing organism. The story becomes about humanity can persevere and have its virtues surmount the evil in its presence known and metaphysical. This book continues to make me ponder its moral perplexity.
]]> <![CDATA[The Other Side of the Mountain]]> 2500044 128 Michel Bernanos 0722116098 Ted 4 4.06 1967 The Other Side of the Mountain
author: Michel Bernanos
name: Ted
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/07/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Love in the Ruins 60403 416 Walker Percy 0312243111 Ted 4 3.84 1971 Love in the Ruins
author: Walker Percy
name: Ted
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years]]> 11793195 210 Greil Marcus 1586489453 Ted 3 Morrison would have yet another counter-cultural tragedy left for dead and forgotten, rock and roll made him at least briefly pull his resources together and give the world something memorable beyond his pretentiousness.]]> 3.18 2011 The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
author: Greil Marcus
name: Ted
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/03/13
shelves:
review:
Marcus is one of the remaining first-generation Rolling Stone rock critics who, in his old age, has evolved into something of a Methuselahian sage for the artist and band's populating the Rock and Roll Canon. He is a fine writer, beautifully evocative at times, a widely read gent who brings his far-flung references of history, aesthetics, politics, and mythology into his generalized ruminations on the movement of human history and how it was reflected and/or caused by the emergence of pop, rock and soul music. His idea, if he has any thesis at all, is that these were not merely forms of entertainment and distraction, they were cultural forces that changed the way we live. Marcus, as fine a prose stylist as he can be, and as momentarily persuasive as he can seem in his richer passages, actually puts forth little in the way of criticism; he rarely in his late writings spends the time to convincingly let you how songs, lyrics work internally. Craft is not on his agenda. With the Doors, though, he does a good job of explaining what I've always felt for some time, that Jim Morrison was pompous, , vacuous to major extent, a mediocre poet, a pretentious intellect who happened to have some things going for him: good looks and sex appeal, an appealing baritone voice could bellow or fashion a slumbering croon, and that he was in a band of good musicians that compelled him, in the songwriting process, to peel away the mostly dreadful riffing in his poems and boil it all down to the genuinely strange, exotic and provocative. The result of that combination of Morrison's affectations and the talents of the other band members made for a number of first-rate original songs. Save for the near perfection of their first two albums, it also made for some mostly uneven records where Morrison's drunk insistence on being a drunk put his worst tendencies on full display. Marcus is smart and remarkably succinct here, rendering shrewd judgments, the key one being that while saying up front than in any other life
Morrison would have yet another counter-cultural tragedy left for dead and forgotten, rock and roll made him at least briefly pull his resources together and give the world something memorable beyond his pretentiousness.
]]> <![CDATA[Been So Long: My Life and Music]]> 36900363
“Jorma Kaukonen is a force in American music, equally adept at fingerpicked acoustic folk and blues as he is at wailing on an electric.� � Acoustic Guitar

“Jorma Kaukonen lit a fuse and transformed his electric guitar into a firework.� � Live For Live Music

Includes a CD of live music as a companion to the book!

From the man who made a name for himself as a founding member and lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane comes a memoir that offers a rare glimpse into the heart and soul of a musical genius―and a vivid journey through the psychedelic era in America.

“Music is the reward for being alive,� writes Jorma Kaukonen in this candid and emotional account of his life and work. “It stirs memory in a singular way that is unmatched.� In a career that has already spanned a half century―one that has earned him induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, among other honors―Jorma is best known for his legendary bands Jefferson Airplane and the still-touring Hot Tuna. But before he won worldwide recognition he was just a young man with a passion and a dream.

Been So Long is the story of how Jorma found his place in the world of music and beyond. The grandson of Finnish and Russian-Jewish immigrants whose formative years were spent abroad with his American-born diplomat father, Jorma channeled his life experiences―from his coming-of-age in Pakistan and the Philippines to his early gigs with Jack Casady in D.C. to his jam sessions in San Francisco with Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and other contemporaries―into his art in unique and revelatory ways. Been So Long charts not only Jorma’s association with the bands that made him famous but goes into never-before-told details about his addiction and recovery, his troubled first marriage and still-thriving second, and more. Interspersed with diary entries, personal correspondence, and song lyrics, this memoir is as unforgettable and inspiring as Jorma’s music itself.]]> 368 Jorma Kaukonen 1250125480 Ted 3
However reticent Kaukonen was to speak with the press at the peak of his fame with the Airplane (and later with Hot Tuna, his long-term folk and electric blues project with JA bassist Jack Casady), the author’s memory seems to serve him well in these pages. A second generation American of Finnish descent born in Washington DC in 1940, young Kaukonen had already seen much of the world, particularly Philippines and Pakistan courtesy of his father’s diplomatic corps assignments. His early years seemed a case of accidental wanderlust, his family from moving city to city, country to country, with Kaukonen, easily making friends in each new home though, it seems, shared interests in music, cars (“gearheads� as they called themselves) and, to be sure, girls. While in Washington he acquired a guitar and began learning traditional folk songs, learned the advantages of keeping his guitar tuned, and made a lifelong friendship with future JA bassist Jack Casady. What Kaukonen realized was that playing music was pretty much what he wanted to do, and muses that music seemed the elixir that made brought a dimension to his life than just merely existing and putting with boring jobs and mean people. Laconically and tersely, he concludes “Music seemed to me to be the reward for being alive.�

The first half of the book is full of reminisces about his family, his two sets of grandparents from Europe in the quest for the opportunities migrations to America promised, and he speaks fondly, lovingly of his parents, aunts and uncles and shares what he recalls of their expectations of a new life in the promised land. Most tellingly, though, was Kaukonen’s seemingly slow but eventual emersion into music. We see in negotiation with his father for a guitar, his playing DC clubs with Casady, with fake IDs, when Casady was playing lead guitar and Kaukonen played rhythm. And we see his growing interest in folk music styles that would become the defining essence of what would become his electric guitar style with Jefferson Airplane. Developing into a fine finger picker and with an affinity for the simple and elegantly articulated patterns of folk-blues, Kaukonen incorporated these techniques into his eventual electric work for the Airplane, giving them a rattling guitar sound unique in an era where every other guitarist fashioned Clapton impersonations. Kaukonen’s style slid and slithered, his leads full of peculiar tunings, odd emphasis on blues bends, and a jarring vibrato that made teeth chatter and nerve endings fire up. It was a style that informed the Airplane’s best songs� “Lather�, “White Rabbit�, “Greasy Heart”—and which was a sound that was an essential part of the complex and wonderful weave that characterized this band’s best albums, from Jefferson Airplane Takes Off through Volunteers.

At a point, Jefferson Airplane was among the top bands of the era, one of the top bands in the world, originating in the countercultural environs of San Francisco and adventuring beyond those city blocks to perform historical rock gigs such as the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. It was something of a charmed life, Kaukonen was earning a good amount of money. He was, he admits, willing to start spending it, buying homes, new cars, new equipment. The band was at the top of their game, and on a Dick Cavett, Show following the last night of the Woodstock Art and Music Festival, a myriad of performers—David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, the Airplane, Steve Stills among them—sat around a rather casual set for the program and bantered breathlessly about the monumental experience they’d all just been through. In the afterglow, at that moment, it seemed as though Ralph Gleason’s mid-Sixties prediction in Rolling Stone that the Sixties Youth, spearheaded by the music, musicians, troubadours, and poets of the time, would change America profoundly, enact a revolution without bloodshed or bombs. The music would set you free. Believe me, I was there, watching the Cavett show at least in my parent’s basement TV, as well as reading the newspaper and 6pm news reports on the massive concert. For a few minutes, just a few, it all seemed possible, especially when watching the beautiful and brilliant Grace Slick and the Teutonically authoritative Paul Kanter lay it out what many took to be a forecast of the American future. Kaukonen was on the set as well, in the background, sitting with his guitar. He was happy to let Slick and Kanter do the talking; as reiterates through the narrative that he was happy to play his guitar and let others be the prophets.


There is much ground Kaukonen tries to cover in Been So Long, but there is a lack of urgency on the author’s part to offer detail, specifics, characteristics or insights connected to the material progression of his story. He is an able writer that conveys a personality that’s sufficiently humble after the long, strange trip he’s been on. He has gratitude for the gift that has been bestowed upon him and humble in the face of the hard times and deviltries he’s survived. But there is a kind of cracker-barrel philosophy in tone, a succession of incidents, occasions, fetes, celebrations and disappointments in his life, told in sketchy detail summarized with a cornball summation, a reworked cliché, a platitude passing as hindsight. He mentions family, wives, children, famous musicians in a continual flow of circumstances, but does not actually say much beyond the convenient sentiment when you expect him to give a hard-won perspective of his adventures before and after the Rock and Roll Life. Despite having a life’s story that might otherwise seem impossible to tell in a dull manner, Kaukonen is intent on doing just that.

He does not tell tales out of school, he doesn’t reveal the quirks of his friends. what he might consider the essence of their genius; structurally the book reads as if it were compiled from notecards and handwritten journals, arranged in order (more or less), assembled for a rapid walk- through rather a revelation of what drew an artistic temperament to this kind of life at all. Kaukonen’s reticence to write more deeply prevents a fascinating and unique tale on the face of it from being more compelling. It’s as if he’s talking about things he would rather not disclose; the half-measured commitment shows up when he mentions his increasing reliance upon an addiction to alcohol through the book’s chapters. Using phrases from the principal writings of Alcoholics Anonymous as well and peppering his text with 12 step mottos, it’s apparent from those in recovery where the musician got help for this alcoholism. A large part of the A.A. program is for members to find a God of their understanding, a power greater than oneself which can help them with their problem. For those who have a “God Problem�, the fellowship also refers generically to “a power greater than oneself�. A god of one’s own understanding? Fair enough, but Kaukonen here takes to writing God as “G-d� for reasons that remain explained. It’s one thing to not demand that others have the have the same theology as yourself, but it’s another to routinely omit an offending “O� when the world God comes into expressive play. Being more forthcoming on this quirk, offering a reason for the eccentric use, would have offered more light on the outline Kaukonen offers. It is a small mystery, an annoying one, a recurring bump in the road that stops the reader; what is Kaukonen not telling us?

Perhaps an as-told-to memoir like Keith Richard’s memoir Life would have eased more nuance and insight and crucial detail from the hesitant Kaukonen. Richards, speaking at length and on-the-record with collaborator James Fox, the Rolling Stones guitarist speaks frankly and at length about the highlights and low spots of his life in music; free to speak as he pleased to Fox’s probing questions and not having to worry about censoring himself while at the typewriter or with pen-in-hand, Life is a witty, harrowing, bristling account of one remarkable musician’s life. On the surface, Kaukonen’s tale is as full and intriguing as a rock and roll biography requires� worldly as a young man, ROTC, a lover of music and cars, a founding member of one of the most significant bands of the Sixties in the midst of a major cultural revolution, drugs, money, fame, glory, flaming out, regrouping—the outline is here, yet Kaukonen does little to flesh it out or reveal the sex, sizzle, and drama under the facts and their note-card descriptions. Richard’s work with a collaborator allowed his mouth to run as long as it needed to tell the best story he had, his own, the final payoff is an engrossing read blessed with Richard’s hard-won and refreshingly offhand wisdom. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist is not so garrulous, is reflectively taciturn and terse, in fact. One needs to respect his right to tell his story as he sees appropriate; the shame is that what is likely a great story doesn’t so much get told as mentioned in passing.

Been So Long remains a fascinating read and is an interesting addition of first-hand accounts of the psychedelic revolution in the 60s from a key player. The irony here is that Kaukonen does indeed remember the decade—he just doesn’t see the need to get into the weeds, dig in the dirt and relate something fuller, an account of a life fully lived.]]> 3.70 Been So Long: My Life and Music
author: Jorma Kaukonen
name: Ted
average rating: 3.70
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2019/02/02
shelves:
review:
There's an old joke that goes "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there." Those 60 and over go ha-ha, ho-ho, I get it, too many flashbacks, too many bong hits, far too many uppers to balance all those downers, and, too many long drum solos. The conceit was that there was too much experience crammed into too-few years; many of us who thrived and jived on the wide, permissive mores of the Sixties ought to still be overwhelmed, asking ourselves what happened. Who among us might recollect that glorious experiment in living? Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of and lead guitarist for the definitive 60s/San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, remembers and brings his recollections together in a new memoir Been So Long: My Life and Music. It's worth noting up front that the musician, a stalwart figure who preferred to remain in the background, quiet though attentive while fellow JA members Grace Slick and Paul Kanter did the many media interviews admits early on that the book is composed of his recollections of how he remembers events transpired, but that some of what he's recounting might be vague or incomplete in the telling. He offers a disclaimer in the introduction mentioning his imperfect recollection: "...this is my story as I remember it as seen through the prism of my mind's eye. I can do no better than that."

However reticent Kaukonen was to speak with the press at the peak of his fame with the Airplane (and later with Hot Tuna, his long-term folk and electric blues project with JA bassist Jack Casady), the author’s memory seems to serve him well in these pages. A second generation American of Finnish descent born in Washington DC in 1940, young Kaukonen had already seen much of the world, particularly Philippines and Pakistan courtesy of his father’s diplomatic corps assignments. His early years seemed a case of accidental wanderlust, his family from moving city to city, country to country, with Kaukonen, easily making friends in each new home though, it seems, shared interests in music, cars (“gearheads� as they called themselves) and, to be sure, girls. While in Washington he acquired a guitar and began learning traditional folk songs, learned the advantages of keeping his guitar tuned, and made a lifelong friendship with future JA bassist Jack Casady. What Kaukonen realized was that playing music was pretty much what he wanted to do, and muses that music seemed the elixir that made brought a dimension to his life than just merely existing and putting with boring jobs and mean people. Laconically and tersely, he concludes “Music seemed to me to be the reward for being alive.�

The first half of the book is full of reminisces about his family, his two sets of grandparents from Europe in the quest for the opportunities migrations to America promised, and he speaks fondly, lovingly of his parents, aunts and uncles and shares what he recalls of their expectations of a new life in the promised land. Most tellingly, though, was Kaukonen’s seemingly slow but eventual emersion into music. We see in negotiation with his father for a guitar, his playing DC clubs with Casady, with fake IDs, when Casady was playing lead guitar and Kaukonen played rhythm. And we see his growing interest in folk music styles that would become the defining essence of what would become his electric guitar style with Jefferson Airplane. Developing into a fine finger picker and with an affinity for the simple and elegantly articulated patterns of folk-blues, Kaukonen incorporated these techniques into his eventual electric work for the Airplane, giving them a rattling guitar sound unique in an era where every other guitarist fashioned Clapton impersonations. Kaukonen’s style slid and slithered, his leads full of peculiar tunings, odd emphasis on blues bends, and a jarring vibrato that made teeth chatter and nerve endings fire up. It was a style that informed the Airplane’s best songs� “Lather�, “White Rabbit�, “Greasy Heart”—and which was a sound that was an essential part of the complex and wonderful weave that characterized this band’s best albums, from Jefferson Airplane Takes Off through Volunteers.

At a point, Jefferson Airplane was among the top bands of the era, one of the top bands in the world, originating in the countercultural environs of San Francisco and adventuring beyond those city blocks to perform historical rock gigs such as the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. It was something of a charmed life, Kaukonen was earning a good amount of money. He was, he admits, willing to start spending it, buying homes, new cars, new equipment. The band was at the top of their game, and on a Dick Cavett, Show following the last night of the Woodstock Art and Music Festival, a myriad of performers—David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, the Airplane, Steve Stills among them—sat around a rather casual set for the program and bantered breathlessly about the monumental experience they’d all just been through. In the afterglow, at that moment, it seemed as though Ralph Gleason’s mid-Sixties prediction in Rolling Stone that the Sixties Youth, spearheaded by the music, musicians, troubadours, and poets of the time, would change America profoundly, enact a revolution without bloodshed or bombs. The music would set you free. Believe me, I was there, watching the Cavett show at least in my parent’s basement TV, as well as reading the newspaper and 6pm news reports on the massive concert. For a few minutes, just a few, it all seemed possible, especially when watching the beautiful and brilliant Grace Slick and the Teutonically authoritative Paul Kanter lay it out what many took to be a forecast of the American future. Kaukonen was on the set as well, in the background, sitting with his guitar. He was happy to let Slick and Kanter do the talking; as reiterates through the narrative that he was happy to play his guitar and let others be the prophets.


There is much ground Kaukonen tries to cover in Been So Long, but there is a lack of urgency on the author’s part to offer detail, specifics, characteristics or insights connected to the material progression of his story. He is an able writer that conveys a personality that’s sufficiently humble after the long, strange trip he’s been on. He has gratitude for the gift that has been bestowed upon him and humble in the face of the hard times and deviltries he’s survived. But there is a kind of cracker-barrel philosophy in tone, a succession of incidents, occasions, fetes, celebrations and disappointments in his life, told in sketchy detail summarized with a cornball summation, a reworked cliché, a platitude passing as hindsight. He mentions family, wives, children, famous musicians in a continual flow of circumstances, but does not actually say much beyond the convenient sentiment when you expect him to give a hard-won perspective of his adventures before and after the Rock and Roll Life. Despite having a life’s story that might otherwise seem impossible to tell in a dull manner, Kaukonen is intent on doing just that.

He does not tell tales out of school, he doesn’t reveal the quirks of his friends. what he might consider the essence of their genius; structurally the book reads as if it were compiled from notecards and handwritten journals, arranged in order (more or less), assembled for a rapid walk- through rather a revelation of what drew an artistic temperament to this kind of life at all. Kaukonen’s reticence to write more deeply prevents a fascinating and unique tale on the face of it from being more compelling. It’s as if he’s talking about things he would rather not disclose; the half-measured commitment shows up when he mentions his increasing reliance upon an addiction to alcohol through the book’s chapters. Using phrases from the principal writings of Alcoholics Anonymous as well and peppering his text with 12 step mottos, it’s apparent from those in recovery where the musician got help for this alcoholism. A large part of the A.A. program is for members to find a God of their understanding, a power greater than oneself which can help them with their problem. For those who have a “God Problem�, the fellowship also refers generically to “a power greater than oneself�. A god of one’s own understanding? Fair enough, but Kaukonen here takes to writing God as “G-d� for reasons that remain explained. It’s one thing to not demand that others have the have the same theology as yourself, but it’s another to routinely omit an offending “O� when the world God comes into expressive play. Being more forthcoming on this quirk, offering a reason for the eccentric use, would have offered more light on the outline Kaukonen offers. It is a small mystery, an annoying one, a recurring bump in the road that stops the reader; what is Kaukonen not telling us?

Perhaps an as-told-to memoir like Keith Richard’s memoir Life would have eased more nuance and insight and crucial detail from the hesitant Kaukonen. Richards, speaking at length and on-the-record with collaborator James Fox, the Rolling Stones guitarist speaks frankly and at length about the highlights and low spots of his life in music; free to speak as he pleased to Fox’s probing questions and not having to worry about censoring himself while at the typewriter or with pen-in-hand, Life is a witty, harrowing, bristling account of one remarkable musician’s life. On the surface, Kaukonen’s tale is as full and intriguing as a rock and roll biography requires� worldly as a young man, ROTC, a lover of music and cars, a founding member of one of the most significant bands of the Sixties in the midst of a major cultural revolution, drugs, money, fame, glory, flaming out, regrouping—the outline is here, yet Kaukonen does little to flesh it out or reveal the sex, sizzle, and drama under the facts and their note-card descriptions. Richard’s work with a collaborator allowed his mouth to run as long as it needed to tell the best story he had, his own, the final payoff is an engrossing read blessed with Richard’s hard-won and refreshingly offhand wisdom. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist is not so garrulous, is reflectively taciturn and terse, in fact. One needs to respect his right to tell his story as he sees appropriate; the shame is that what is likely a great story doesn’t so much get told as mentioned in passing.

Been So Long remains a fascinating read and is an interesting addition of first-hand accounts of the psychedelic revolution in the 60s from a key player. The irony here is that Kaukonen does indeed remember the decade—he just doesn’t see the need to get into the weeds, dig in the dirt and relate something fuller, an account of a life fully lived.
]]> A Multitude of Sins 26934
With remarkable insight and honesty, Richard Ford examines liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared from their life together. And on a spring evening, a young wife tells her husband of her affair with the host of the dinner party they’re about to join. The rigorous intensity Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date–confirming the judgment of the New York Times Book Review that “nobody now writing looks more like an American classic.”]]> 304 Richard Ford 037572656X Ted 3
For the more poetic language of simile and metaphor, The Cheever influence is clear; the imagery to describe the detail make those details resonate profoundly, as in the last story "Abyss", without killing the tale with a language that's too rich for the good of the writing. His writing is quite good, although the shadow of Hemingway dims the light of his own personality. Ford seems as if he’s made peace with the gloomy and morose code of honor and betrayed idealism that is said to the heterosexual male’s stock and trade. But maybe not just peace; it’s as if he’s cut a deal with the emotional sagging age brings upon his brow, and he cherishes each sour taste and resonating resentment to give his brooding prose the feeling of being more than cleverly disguised metaphors simulating the moral dissolution of a grown man’s sense of situated-nests. ]]> 3.74 2001 A Multitude of Sins
author: Richard Ford
name: Ted
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2018/11/02
shelves:
review:
"A Multitude of Sins", a collection of short stories by Richard Ford. He has the strained relations between men and women falling in and out of love with one another nailed, better than anyone since John Cheever, with a prose that is flawlessly crafted and deeply felt in its economy . Richard Ford is an extraordinarily gifted prose writer whose control of his style is rare in this time of flashy virtuosos , ala Franken and DF Wallace or Rick Moody, whose good excesses run neck-and-neck with their considerable assets. Ford, in his The Sports Writer, Independence Day, and certainly in this collection of Multitude of Sins, understands his strengths in language and advances , seemingly, only those virtues in his work. He obviously understands the lessons of Hemingway , and wisely chooses not imitate: rather, the words are well chosen.

For the more poetic language of simile and metaphor, The Cheever influence is clear; the imagery to describe the detail make those details resonate profoundly, as in the last story "Abyss", without killing the tale with a language that's too rich for the good of the writing. His writing is quite good, although the shadow of Hemingway dims the light of his own personality. Ford seems as if he’s made peace with the gloomy and morose code of honor and betrayed idealism that is said to the heterosexual male’s stock and trade. But maybe not just peace; it’s as if he’s cut a deal with the emotional sagging age brings upon his brow, and he cherishes each sour taste and resonating resentment to give his brooding prose the feeling of being more than cleverly disguised metaphors simulating the moral dissolution of a grown man’s sense of situated-nests.
]]> <![CDATA[Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century]]> 37004369 Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: it is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise.

"Playing changes," in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser's resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes--ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical--that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.

Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters--from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding--who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.]]> 288 Nate Chinen 1101870346 Ted 4 4.13 2018 Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century
author: Nate Chinen
name: Ted
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2018/11/02
shelves:
review:
A book I'm currently reading, "Playing Changes" by Nate Chinen, is a fascinating argument that we are currently in an age of amazing new jazz artists and an equal amount of amazing innovation and new ways for jazz composers and soloists to further this resilient art of musical improvisation. The premise is not one I'd bicker with--ours is a time when the "jazz is dead" club needs to just be silent for a very long time and listen to the creativity that abounds. But, as the review points out, author Chinen, a critic with a forward-thinking preference for new and temperamentally sounds, writes in a such a way that he makes you think of the guy who must have been the least interesting student in a seminar on post-modernism. He does not, as the reviewer suggests, at times sound like Derrida; rather, he seems more like a person who thinks he sounds like Derrida. Which is a shame, because although Chinen writes about important artists and at times makes crucial distinctions in what is happening in the ever-evolving jazz timeline, it seems that the premise of the book is that the music exists only to be co-opted and made to dance between inscrutable phrases and descriptions that don't really intrigue a reader to actually go out and purchase some of this fine new music. Tellingly, Nate Chinen chides the older critical establishment, those who would have jazz become a formalized canon, set in place, with boundaries and inflexible boundaries, yet he seems to be working to construct his own fiefdom of critical imperative. Meet the new boss... In any case, all this begs the question to be asked, which is why can't there be a working idea of jazz that doesn't require anyone going to war against other schools of thoughts on the music, or specific ways of playing. A jazz fan can enjoy both and not be betraying whatever "true spirit" of jazz the critical camps think. Seriously, one occasionally feels that some critics, whether Leonard Feather , Amiri Baraka or Nate Chinen, despite his protest to the contrary, wish they could be in the studio, instructing the musicians in what their note selections and points of creating tension and release should be.
]]> The Plot Against America 703
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.]]> 391 Philip Roth 1400079497 Ted 5
The power of Roth's novel lies not only in the impressive historical research he brings to the novel, but especially in how creeping Totalitarian persecution effects the lives of characters who are complex, sympathetic, argumentative.

This is not a dry recital of dates, events, names from fading ledgers and indexes, because the novel is a family saga among its several formations, and what Roth has done is highlight a family's struggle between each other and their inner lives while the nation prepares to give in to its worse fears and lay the land for fascism. Several instances -- the family listening to the radio during the convention, a hapless father become less powerful in the children's eyes as political forces move against American Jews, the subtly advanced symbolism of the fictional Philip Roth's stamp collection-- gives a reader an vivid accounting of the things that disrupted, destroyed, lost by systematized evil.

The Plot Against America is a masterpiece of quirky remembering and imaginative flight, qualities that place him, unexpectedly, in the same league with Sinclair Lewis. This is art as a form of truth-telling, of an acute paranoia made comprehensible through a focus of literary skill that gives voice to the unspeakable. TPAA is something of a warning, a novel addressing a collective fear that never abates; although matters in one's life and in one's community, from appearances, seem orderly and fair in practice and deed, there's the dread that history's lessons haven't been won and a complacent country can become gullible enough to cede its responsibility to conduct a civil democracy over to a dictator, a despot, a demagogue gathering power through fear, suspicion, lies, a willingness to trample on rights.

Roth was obliviously raised to revere democracy, and this work, tempered by experience and the history of humankind to go wrong and become complicit in evil, sounds off a warning for the reader that is hardly an original thought but meaningful resounds even still: the price of freedom is constant vigilance because the enemies of our rights as citizens are snakes sleeping with one eye open.]]> 3.79 2004 The Plot Against America
author: Philip Roth
name: Ted
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2018/07/29
shelves:
review:
Novelist Philip Roth, always a spiky and unpredictable storyteller, creates an alternative history for America, a fascinating and troubling fantasy of "what if": Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero and Nazi-sympathetic isolationist, is nominated by the Republican Party in the 1940 presidential election, and handily defeats FDR. Using his own family as the center of this fable, Roth has written a novel with the impact of a memoir of hard and terrible times, speaking to how easily a homegrown fascism could take root and grow.

The power of Roth's novel lies not only in the impressive historical research he brings to the novel, but especially in how creeping Totalitarian persecution effects the lives of characters who are complex, sympathetic, argumentative.

This is not a dry recital of dates, events, names from fading ledgers and indexes, because the novel is a family saga among its several formations, and what Roth has done is highlight a family's struggle between each other and their inner lives while the nation prepares to give in to its worse fears and lay the land for fascism. Several instances -- the family listening to the radio during the convention, a hapless father become less powerful in the children's eyes as political forces move against American Jews, the subtly advanced symbolism of the fictional Philip Roth's stamp collection-- gives a reader an vivid accounting of the things that disrupted, destroyed, lost by systematized evil.

The Plot Against America is a masterpiece of quirky remembering and imaginative flight, qualities that place him, unexpectedly, in the same league with Sinclair Lewis. This is art as a form of truth-telling, of an acute paranoia made comprehensible through a focus of literary skill that gives voice to the unspeakable. TPAA is something of a warning, a novel addressing a collective fear that never abates; although matters in one's life and in one's community, from appearances, seem orderly and fair in practice and deed, there's the dread that history's lessons haven't been won and a complacent country can become gullible enough to cede its responsibility to conduct a civil democracy over to a dictator, a despot, a demagogue gathering power through fear, suspicion, lies, a willingness to trample on rights.

Roth was obliviously raised to revere democracy, and this work, tempered by experience and the history of humankind to go wrong and become complicit in evil, sounds off a warning for the reader that is hardly an original thought but meaningful resounds even still: the price of freedom is constant vigilance because the enemies of our rights as citizens are snakes sleeping with one eye open.
]]> The Angel on the Roof 26918 528 Russell Banks 0060931256 Ted 2
]]> 3.89 1999 The Angel on the Roof
author: Russell Banks
name: Ted
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2017/11/18
shelves:
review:
If there was a sense of humor, or even hope in Russell Banks' life, it must have been beaten out of him a long time ago, if these tales are any indication. There is a perverse yearning glamor to be found in these stories about the hard, bitter truths the characters find, or don't, almost as if the hopelessness is something to be envied. Cheever, it can be said, is often times dour and melancholic, but at least lightens the load with transcendent prose , and a dark wit. In the art of using finely wrote sentences and skillfully rendered imagery to depict narratives where a sad ending is inevitable, Cheever is a master; the tragic, the forlorn, the ache and condition of the character's lives are made more emphatic by the elegant framing Cheever places around the particulars. The lesson, intended or not, is that art needn't be limited to helping us appreciate the pretty, peaceful and serene matters of life; only to make us feel the conditions of existence deeper. Additionally , Cheever knew when to quit; craft and art are ever present in his stories,Banks lacks even that, and this succession of dark skies, long winters, and teeth-grinding pain bearing just wears out: the writing, dare we say, even veers towards the cliche. A better written and more incisively written set of stories are needed in place of this.


]]> <![CDATA[The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories]]> 35221 288 Stephen-Crane 0143039350 Ted 5 3.33 1895 The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
author: Stephen-Crane
name: Ted
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1895
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Tattooed Girl 15964
Alma Busch, a sensuous, physically attractive young woman with bizarre tattoos covering much of her body, stirs in Seigl a complex of emotions: pity? desire? responsibility? guilt? Unaware of her painful past and her troubled personality, Seigl hires her as his assistant. As the novel alternates between Seigl's and Alma's points of view, the naĂŻve altruism of the one and the virulent anti-Semitism of the other clash in a tragedy of thwarted erotic desire.

With her masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the contemporary tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges our accepted limits of desire. The Tattooed Girl may be her most controversial novel.]]> 320 Joyce Carol Oates 0007170785 Ted 4
"The Tattooed Girl", from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and "The Falls". My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving. I agree with the assessment on Oates. She writes so much that she's almost as undercooked and sometimes awful as she is brilliant. Producing novels at such an assembly line clip seems a compulsion. We Were Mulvaneys read like it was meant to capture some of the weepy women's market and I put it down, and Beasts was a novella of abuse that was better left in the manila envelope, as it was a flat litany of sexual assaults that she's done better before. But just as you think Oates is all used up, she surprises you.

"The Tattooed Girl" was an amazing book, as was "The Falls", with their portents of violence, domination, skewed rationalization of unworthy deeds. She has made an art of the dystopian personality, and it is here that she gets greatness. She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. Editors hold much less sway in the preparation of a book, it seems. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil, as in the case with Jonathan Franzen.

]]> 3.30 2003 The Tattooed Girl
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Ted
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2017/05/03
date added: 2017/05/03
shelves:
review:
Joyce Carol Oates is not my favorite writer, but for all the repetition of her themes of fragile women being imperiled by evil masculine forces they masochistically desire, she does occasionally publish something both compelling and well written. I detested "Beasts" and "The Falls" since she exercises her familiar dreads in contrasting lengths, the first book a slender novella, the latter a literal brick, both books sounding rushed, fevered, and breathless, as first drafts of novels usually do. Or a finished Oates novel, for that matter. She does get it right sometimes, as she did with "Black Water" and " The Tattoo Girl"; with the right configuration, her usual wit's end prose style and fascination with fragile psyches and marginally psychotic psychologies get as intense as fiction is ever likely to get." Zombie" is a rather potent little psychodrama, and it's the kind of writing Oates excels at. She gets to the heart of the fringe personality better than anyone I can think of.

"The Tattooed Girl", from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and "The Falls". My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving. I agree with the assessment on Oates. She writes so much that she's almost as undercooked and sometimes awful as she is brilliant. Producing novels at such an assembly line clip seems a compulsion. We Were Mulvaneys read like it was meant to capture some of the weepy women's market and I put it down, and Beasts was a novella of abuse that was better left in the manila envelope, as it was a flat litany of sexual assaults that she's done better before. But just as you think Oates is all used up, she surprises you.

"The Tattooed Girl" was an amazing book, as was "The Falls", with their portents of violence, domination, skewed rationalization of unworthy deeds. She has made an art of the dystopian personality, and it is here that she gets greatness. She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. Editors hold much less sway in the preparation of a book, it seems. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil, as in the case with Jonathan Franzen.


]]> <![CDATA[Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan]]> 16983562 256 Ted Berrigan 1283277433 Ted 4 4.25 2011 Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan
author: Ted Berrigan
name: Ted
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2017/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Busker's Holiday 27157422
Busker's Holiday is the story of McKay Chernoff, a Columbia University grad student with a harmonica in his pocket and a blues band in his background. Desolate and despairing after a disastrous romantic breakup, McKay decides to fly off to Paris and reinvent himself as a street performer.

What follows is an epic summer voyage into the busking life, propelled by the mad exploits of Billy Lee Grant, a fearless young guitar shredder whose Memphis-to-Mississippi pedigree and Dylanesque surrealism make him, when he explodes into view, precisely the partner McKay has been yearning for.

Burning like a latter-day Dean Moriarty, Bill goads McKay into a sun-drenched, all-night bender, stoked by wine, women, mushrooms, and trains, that careens down out of Avignon and across the French Riviera. What happens next--in Florence, Solingen, Amsterdam, Paris--is a story of purgatory, redemption, and love regained. Hope, in a word, as a modern troubadour returns from his wanderings, reborn.]]> 228 Adam Gussow 0996712402 Ted 4 Adam Gussow, a professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, is among the best younger scholars of blues culture one is likely to come across. He is no less, a superb, stylish, and gritty blues harmonica player who has, in his time, traveled and plied his trade as street musician and busker, most notably as part of the duo Satan and Adam, with guitarist/vocalist Sterling McGee. Gussow is the author of several fine books related to Southern and blues culture in America, and wrote a fine memoir of his relationship with McGee, “Mister Satan's Apprentice". This is mentioned just to establish that Gussow isn't a mere dilettante on the blues, mastering a few tricks and signature moves and then resting on laurels and a reputation made long ago; Gussow continues to gig, with McGee , as a solo performer, and in collaboration with a number of other musicians, often times in public, on the street, the hat out for loose change and scattered change, keeping himself honest with what he plays and maintaining a connection his vibe with the world of experience that is the energy the blues channels. He is a scholar who continues to seek the source, to find that invisible "it" behind the mere description and appearance of things as they present themselves.

His first novel, "Busker's Holiday", is, I imagine, a fictionalized accounting of his own quest, a young man at particular moment of his life when what he's been doing in terms of study, romance and location no longer fits the skin he wears and gets an itch to try something else, to what happens. Set in the 80s, the novel regards the plight of McKay, a doctoral candidate in literature whose life has hit a rough patch. Reeling from problems in his relationship with his girl friend, McKay jumps at the chance to go on a five week trip to Europe with his friend Paul. A blues fan, McKay gathers up his harmonicas and his amp, eager to perform before crowds on the Continent.

There is something akin to novelist Henry James here, the 19th and early 20th Century American novelist who had as a major theme the confrontation of the New World (America) and the Old World (Europe). But where James' novels--"The American", "Wings of a Dove"--were long, measured, slow paced and geared to consider the interior lives, the changes of psyche, occurring over long stretches of time, Gussow instead goes for the Beat-influenced insistence on sensation, speed, the influx of sound, smell, and blurred vision. There is the velocity and mania of Jack Kerouac here, that point where the novel opens up with its landings in Paris and beyond, but author Gussow has a better command of the technique. He keep the tone and pacing right; Kerouac and the Beats are an obvious and working influence on the style of this tale, but what we have here is something better and, I think, more honest to the experience. Kerouac is problematic for many of us, and for me the issue was his willingness, his chronic need to make his already made pace even more intense with infusions of hip-argot, haphazardly placed modifiers.
To paraphrase Gore Vidal, Kerouac used adjectives, verbs, similes, metaphors “the way truck drivers uses ketchup at a diner.� Again, Gussow has a better command of the style, the instrument, which that he gets closer to the Charlie Parker concern of “making it all fit�, the Spontaneous Bop Prosody that Kerouac’s principle aim with his prolix excursions.

Adam Gussow's writing is vivid, alive, the mellifluous sentences flow when he goes at length and the shorter sentences have something of the Hemingway craft of resonating terseness. It is a recollection that resonates. McKay is delivered very well; an engaging, seeking, impatient, naive, curious man in search for knowledge and new means to express a growing feeling of a rich inner life. The writing is swift but disciplined, loose but always aware of where the rhythm truly is, is a match for the harmonica playing and instrumentation you’ve described. It is a wonderful and engaging accounting of being within the experience of performance, of when the chops fail and where they come together.
]]> 3.42 2015 Busker's Holiday
author: Adam Gussow
name: Ted
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2017/02/06
shelves:
review:

Adam Gussow, a professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, is among the best younger scholars of blues culture one is likely to come across. He is no less, a superb, stylish, and gritty blues harmonica player who has, in his time, traveled and plied his trade as street musician and busker, most notably as part of the duo Satan and Adam, with guitarist/vocalist Sterling McGee. Gussow is the author of several fine books related to Southern and blues culture in America, and wrote a fine memoir of his relationship with McGee, “Mister Satan's Apprentice". This is mentioned just to establish that Gussow isn't a mere dilettante on the blues, mastering a few tricks and signature moves and then resting on laurels and a reputation made long ago; Gussow continues to gig, with McGee , as a solo performer, and in collaboration with a number of other musicians, often times in public, on the street, the hat out for loose change and scattered change, keeping himself honest with what he plays and maintaining a connection his vibe with the world of experience that is the energy the blues channels. He is a scholar who continues to seek the source, to find that invisible "it" behind the mere description and appearance of things as they present themselves.

His first novel, "Busker's Holiday", is, I imagine, a fictionalized accounting of his own quest, a young man at particular moment of his life when what he's been doing in terms of study, romance and location no longer fits the skin he wears and gets an itch to try something else, to what happens. Set in the 80s, the novel regards the plight of McKay, a doctoral candidate in literature whose life has hit a rough patch. Reeling from problems in his relationship with his girl friend, McKay jumps at the chance to go on a five week trip to Europe with his friend Paul. A blues fan, McKay gathers up his harmonicas and his amp, eager to perform before crowds on the Continent.

There is something akin to novelist Henry James here, the 19th and early 20th Century American novelist who had as a major theme the confrontation of the New World (America) and the Old World (Europe). But where James' novels--"The American", "Wings of a Dove"--were long, measured, slow paced and geared to consider the interior lives, the changes of psyche, occurring over long stretches of time, Gussow instead goes for the Beat-influenced insistence on sensation, speed, the influx of sound, smell, and blurred vision. There is the velocity and mania of Jack Kerouac here, that point where the novel opens up with its landings in Paris and beyond, but author Gussow has a better command of the technique. He keep the tone and pacing right; Kerouac and the Beats are an obvious and working influence on the style of this tale, but what we have here is something better and, I think, more honest to the experience. Kerouac is problematic for many of us, and for me the issue was his willingness, his chronic need to make his already made pace even more intense with infusions of hip-argot, haphazardly placed modifiers.
To paraphrase Gore Vidal, Kerouac used adjectives, verbs, similes, metaphors “the way truck drivers uses ketchup at a diner.� Again, Gussow has a better command of the style, the instrument, which that he gets closer to the Charlie Parker concern of “making it all fit�, the Spontaneous Bop Prosody that Kerouac’s principle aim with his prolix excursions.

Adam Gussow's writing is vivid, alive, the mellifluous sentences flow when he goes at length and the shorter sentences have something of the Hemingway craft of resonating terseness. It is a recollection that resonates. McKay is delivered very well; an engaging, seeking, impatient, naive, curious man in search for knowledge and new means to express a growing feeling of a rich inner life. The writing is swift but disciplined, loose but always aware of where the rhythm truly is, is a match for the harmonica playing and instrumentation you’ve described. It is a wonderful and engaging accounting of being within the experience of performance, of when the chops fail and where they come together.

]]> <![CDATA[Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties]]> 26530380 416 Kevin M. Schultz 0393353028 Ted 4 Buckley and Mailer,/i> is an informative, if terse, recounting of the doings of two of its most interesting white men.]]> 3.82 2015 Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties
author: Kevin M. Schultz
name: Ted
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2017/02/04
shelves:
review:
Both men in the title were large presences in the worlds they inhabited, and likewise enjoyed the continued company of other men of equally over sized personality. Schultz gives an accurate , vivid and swift accounting of the relationship between Mailer and Buckley, summing up their world views , their similarities and differences handsomely, but there is not much here in the way of literary criticism or speculation. His treatment of both writers is, I think, much too worshipful . This is precisely the kind of subject that makes you wish the late John Leonard were still with us in order to take apart , inspect and comment upon the public utterances and behaviors of Bill and Norm and render a judgement as to how both men, as thinkers, will be effected by the eventual and brutal judgement of history. But for those fascinated by the culture, art and politics of the 50s and 60s, certainly a combustible era for America, Buckley and Mailer,/i> is an informative, if terse, recounting of the doings of two of its most interesting white men.
]]> <![CDATA[Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs]]> 28818559
With an intricate storyline that unites engaging characters and themes and reads like a novel, Bop Apocalypse details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new and revolutionary segment of the American social fabric.

Drawing upon his rich decades of writing experience, master storyteller Martin Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow, Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Reefer Madness , Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the coming of heroin to Harlem. Aficionados of jazz, the Beats, counterculture, and drug history will all find much to enjoy here, with a cast of characters that includes vivid and memorable depictions of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Borroughs, Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, Terry Southern, and countless others.

Bop Apocalypse is also a living history that teaches us much about the conflicts and questions surrounding drugs today, casting many contemporary issues in a new light by connecting them back to the events of this transformative era. At a time when marijuana legalization is rapidly becoming a reality, it takes us back to the advent of marijuana prohibition, when the templates of modern drug law, policy, and culture were first established, along with the concomitant racial stereotypes. As a new opioid epidemic sweeps through white working- and middle-class communities, it brings us back to when heroin first arrived on the streets of Harlem in the 1940s. And as we debate and grapple with the gross racial disparities of mass incarceration, it puts into sharp and provocative focus the racism at the very roots of our drug war.

Having spent a lifetime at the nexus of drugs and music, Torgoff reveals material never before disclosed and offers new insights, crafting and contextualizing Bop Apocalypse into a truly novel contribution to our understanding of jazz, race, literature, drug culture, and American social and cultural history.]]> 448 Martin Torgoff 0306824752 Ted 3 Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs is a rather large subject, but author Martin Torgoff soft pedals his main thesis — that drugs were an essential ingredient in the creation of bold new music and literature by black musicians and white writers — with a light touch. Instead of weighing his subject with burdensome cliches, Bop Apocalypse at its best provides is an anecdotal history. It’s a narrative that jumps through time, cutting between jazz musicians and beat writers, in a series of essays and recollections that seek the precise moment when the artists were introduced to drugs and, more emphatically, it attempts to explain how drugs motivated musicians and poets alike to challenge themselves to create new, nerve rattling work. Those expecting a continuous timeline will find this book a bit exasperating, as Torgoff prefers to present his history and his argument in something of a cinematic style, with jump cuts, flashbacks, and fast-forwards. There is the sense that he is attempting an impressionistic approach to how particular events are linked to creating the mythos that has brought about hip culture. It’s a fractured, frustrating but fascinating narrative. Early in the book Torgoff covers the details about the federal criminalization of marijuana, a action initiated by Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Needing a visible symbol of the threat to convince the country of the menace drugs posed, they portrayed African-American jazz musicians as deviants, criminals, and moral reprobates due their drug use. These were the perverts aiming to sully American innocence and lure youth into lives of moral degradation. Later, emerging white writers of the Post War Era discovered the same chemicals, many of whom indulged in them as a means of coping with the crushing conformity of the Eisenhower 1950s. Drugs, whether marijuana, heroin, or various forms of amphetamine, were seen as a means of self discovery that freed poets and painters and playwrights from their inhibitions, allowing them to capsize the old rules and create bold new work in their stead. Anslinger is revealed as the unwitting creator of the modern idea of hip, the aesthetic, the pose, the manner of being that artists have assumed for decades — the idea of artist as outsider, as outlaw, as iconoclast. The American avant garde now had a hook to hang its bulky coat on.

Readers familiar with Beat aesthetics — their emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, a Zen mindfulness free of distortion and subterfuge — will be relieved as Turnoff goes lightly on the usual apologies made on the Beats behalf. Bop Apocalypse works best when the stories are told of central personalities in the period at crucial moments in their lives. The joy of the book is in the wealth of telling detail, such as those of writer Terry Southern (Candy, Blue Movie, Red Dirt Marijuana) when he discovered pot as a kid, which grew wild on his cousin’s Texas farm, or how saxophonist Charlie Parker was introduced to heroin, or Kerouac blitzing himself in clouds of marijuana while he rattled off On the Road in a spurt of super human productivity.

Miles Davis, Hubert Huncke, John Coltrane, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holliday, William Burroughs, Lester Young, and others have their tales told, some details well-known and others likely apocryphal, the scenes from their lives revealing a similar scenario, their respective introduction to pot, heroin, and amphetamines as a means of coping with their marginalized existence and of forcing their wits and instincts to the edge. What is obvious through the book is Torgoff’s premise of drugs being critical to the creation of art at the end of the chapter on Jack Kerouac, making the claim that the greatness many have given to Kerouac’s body of work would have remained unwritten had he not taken up the tea habit. As Kerouac remarks, “I need Miss Green to write; can’t whip up interest in anything otherwise.�

For myself, I’ve always found Kerouac’s fiction and poetry problematic at best, a writer who often mistook breathlessness for beauty, Torgoff’s association of being stoned with quality sounds more than a little day dreamy, likening the author’s body of work as that which would be considered to be “…likened to Proust’s, Melville’s and Shakespeare’s.”This brings to mind something I’d read years ago in a Downbeat magazine interview with jazz guitar virtuoso Joe Pass, talking about his drug addiction and eventually getting clean. The interviewer asked if he thought he was actually better and more imaginative when he was high. Pass offered a cautious answer all the same — that while he couldn’t say he definitely played better, he certainly thought he was playing brilliantly while he was high. I kept this in mind while reading this otherwise engaging and well-researched book and remain convinced that the gift to create music or to write poetry are aspects of a personality that exist separately from drug use.

That someone can produce chorus after chorus of hard bop jazz a la Parker or compose a monumental poetic masterwork, such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, has more to do with the talent that’s already in place, not because the drugs aided these artists to their particular style of genius. Torgoff does us the favor, though, of presenting the polemic evenhandedly, although there are times when hyperbole gets the best of him. Raising Kerouac’s literary value to Shakespeare and Proust is an example, as is an incident related in a section about Charlie Parker. An intriguing chapter overall, with the sort of telling details of clubs, cities, characters of interest on the risks they took to pursue an art form on the outskirts of what was considered the American mainstream, Torgoff relates the tale of jazz producer and promoter Norman Granz and his organization of a series of concerts billed as “Jazz at the Philharmonic� in Los Angeles, in 1946. At this period in his brief life, Parker’s behavior was erratic due to the complications of his heroin habit. Parker had barely managed to make it to the West Coast from New York. He quickly disappeared — looking to score drugs in a city where he had no connections — and arrived late for the concert, which had already started. Torgoff writes:

“…having found what he was looking for, he showed up 28 choruses into â€Sweet Georgia Brownâ€� and stepped on the stage to play a chorus that brought the music to a whole new level and the audience to its feet, then he stayed on to play alongside Lester Young on â€Oh Lady Be Good’Ěý…Bird’s choruses astounded musicians and jazz fans everywhere. Everything he played that night would become part of the basic syntax of jazz…â€�

This is the kind of over praise even the most ardent admirer winces at, as curious readers are given soft-shouldered platitudes and proclamations instead of colorful, clear, and precise explanations of what the artist is up to, an idea of the tradition that a musician is breaking away from and how he’s creating new music based on the traditions he’s learned from. This is a gift jazz critic Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddens, vividly highlighting artistry and contribution over sensationalism, a subtler approach that Turnoff does not take on. Worse for Bop Apocalypse is the not-so-subtle idea that the artists who matter — the artists who break tradition, create new forms, innovators whose avant garde experiments command respect and influences generations many decades after they’re deceased — have to be chemically deranged in order to have that latent genius become activated and find its fullest and fatal expression. It should be noted that not everyone covered died tragically or fell prey to the foul clutches of permanent addiction — as the biographies of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Ginsberg, and Burroughs attest — but Bop Apocalypse provides a constant suggestion that it’s not enough for committed artists to engage their craft to the best of their ability, but that in doing so one must knowingly risk their lives to achieve a genius level of expression the merely sober amongst us cannot. Torgoff’s underlying premise crystallizes much of what is afoul with the contemporary notion of romanticism, that the kind of lethal idealization of the drug-related deaths of writers and musicians creates an allure that is seductive and wrongheaded. It is, on the face of it, irrational to consider an early and preventable death of an inspired creator as confirmation of their genius.

Torgoff, though, brings a wealth of research to the subject and, despite the periodic wallowing in cliché and unexamined proclamations, creates an entertaining mosaic through an electric period of American history. What the book lacks in supportable thesis or in establishing how these artists actually influence each other’s work is made up for by Targoff’s storytelling skills. Imagine this as a film by Robert Altman at his best, a diffuse but alluring tour of the rich details of an aspect of our legacy we must continue to engage. One does wish, though, that the author avoided the unintended irony of writing about artists who changed the way we think about the world with old ideas that merely reinforce our worst habits of mind.

Martin Torgoff’s generous gifts as a storyteller are superb when he remains with the tale; he is nearly cinematic in his ability to set up a scene and follow the action through. It’s unfortunate that his stories, one after the other, are too often hobbled by his pet theory, an idea that cannot be made compelling regardless of how many times it gets repeated.]]> 4.02 Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs
author: Martin Torgoff
name: Ted
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2017/02/01
shelves:
review:
Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs is a rather large subject, but author Martin Torgoff soft pedals his main thesis — that drugs were an essential ingredient in the creation of bold new music and literature by black musicians and white writers — with a light touch. Instead of weighing his subject with burdensome cliches, Bop Apocalypse at its best provides is an anecdotal history. It’s a narrative that jumps through time, cutting between jazz musicians and beat writers, in a series of essays and recollections that seek the precise moment when the artists were introduced to drugs and, more emphatically, it attempts to explain how drugs motivated musicians and poets alike to challenge themselves to create new, nerve rattling work. Those expecting a continuous timeline will find this book a bit exasperating, as Torgoff prefers to present his history and his argument in something of a cinematic style, with jump cuts, flashbacks, and fast-forwards. There is the sense that he is attempting an impressionistic approach to how particular events are linked to creating the mythos that has brought about hip culture. It’s a fractured, frustrating but fascinating narrative. Early in the book Torgoff covers the details about the federal criminalization of marijuana, a action initiated by Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Needing a visible symbol of the threat to convince the country of the menace drugs posed, they portrayed African-American jazz musicians as deviants, criminals, and moral reprobates due their drug use. These were the perverts aiming to sully American innocence and lure youth into lives of moral degradation. Later, emerging white writers of the Post War Era discovered the same chemicals, many of whom indulged in them as a means of coping with the crushing conformity of the Eisenhower 1950s. Drugs, whether marijuana, heroin, or various forms of amphetamine, were seen as a means of self discovery that freed poets and painters and playwrights from their inhibitions, allowing them to capsize the old rules and create bold new work in their stead. Anslinger is revealed as the unwitting creator of the modern idea of hip, the aesthetic, the pose, the manner of being that artists have assumed for decades — the idea of artist as outsider, as outlaw, as iconoclast. The American avant garde now had a hook to hang its bulky coat on.

Readers familiar with Beat aesthetics — their emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, a Zen mindfulness free of distortion and subterfuge — will be relieved as Turnoff goes lightly on the usual apologies made on the Beats behalf. Bop Apocalypse works best when the stories are told of central personalities in the period at crucial moments in their lives. The joy of the book is in the wealth of telling detail, such as those of writer Terry Southern (Candy, Blue Movie, Red Dirt Marijuana) when he discovered pot as a kid, which grew wild on his cousin’s Texas farm, or how saxophonist Charlie Parker was introduced to heroin, or Kerouac blitzing himself in clouds of marijuana while he rattled off On the Road in a spurt of super human productivity.

Miles Davis, Hubert Huncke, John Coltrane, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holliday, William Burroughs, Lester Young, and others have their tales told, some details well-known and others likely apocryphal, the scenes from their lives revealing a similar scenario, their respective introduction to pot, heroin, and amphetamines as a means of coping with their marginalized existence and of forcing their wits and instincts to the edge. What is obvious through the book is Torgoff’s premise of drugs being critical to the creation of art at the end of the chapter on Jack Kerouac, making the claim that the greatness many have given to Kerouac’s body of work would have remained unwritten had he not taken up the tea habit. As Kerouac remarks, “I need Miss Green to write; can’t whip up interest in anything otherwise.�

For myself, I’ve always found Kerouac’s fiction and poetry problematic at best, a writer who often mistook breathlessness for beauty, Torgoff’s association of being stoned with quality sounds more than a little day dreamy, likening the author’s body of work as that which would be considered to be “…likened to Proust’s, Melville’s and Shakespeare’s.”This brings to mind something I’d read years ago in a Downbeat magazine interview with jazz guitar virtuoso Joe Pass, talking about his drug addiction and eventually getting clean. The interviewer asked if he thought he was actually better and more imaginative when he was high. Pass offered a cautious answer all the same — that while he couldn’t say he definitely played better, he certainly thought he was playing brilliantly while he was high. I kept this in mind while reading this otherwise engaging and well-researched book and remain convinced that the gift to create music or to write poetry are aspects of a personality that exist separately from drug use.

That someone can produce chorus after chorus of hard bop jazz a la Parker or compose a monumental poetic masterwork, such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, has more to do with the talent that’s already in place, not because the drugs aided these artists to their particular style of genius. Torgoff does us the favor, though, of presenting the polemic evenhandedly, although there are times when hyperbole gets the best of him. Raising Kerouac’s literary value to Shakespeare and Proust is an example, as is an incident related in a section about Charlie Parker. An intriguing chapter overall, with the sort of telling details of clubs, cities, characters of interest on the risks they took to pursue an art form on the outskirts of what was considered the American mainstream, Torgoff relates the tale of jazz producer and promoter Norman Granz and his organization of a series of concerts billed as “Jazz at the Philharmonic� in Los Angeles, in 1946. At this period in his brief life, Parker’s behavior was erratic due to the complications of his heroin habit. Parker had barely managed to make it to the West Coast from New York. He quickly disappeared — looking to score drugs in a city where he had no connections — and arrived late for the concert, which had already started. Torgoff writes:

“…having found what he was looking for, he showed up 28 choruses into â€Sweet Georgia Brownâ€� and stepped on the stage to play a chorus that brought the music to a whole new level and the audience to its feet, then he stayed on to play alongside Lester Young on â€Oh Lady Be Good’Ěý…Bird’s choruses astounded musicians and jazz fans everywhere. Everything he played that night would become part of the basic syntax of jazz…â€�

This is the kind of over praise even the most ardent admirer winces at, as curious readers are given soft-shouldered platitudes and proclamations instead of colorful, clear, and precise explanations of what the artist is up to, an idea of the tradition that a musician is breaking away from and how he’s creating new music based on the traditions he’s learned from. This is a gift jazz critic Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddens, vividly highlighting artistry and contribution over sensationalism, a subtler approach that Turnoff does not take on. Worse for Bop Apocalypse is the not-so-subtle idea that the artists who matter — the artists who break tradition, create new forms, innovators whose avant garde experiments command respect and influences generations many decades after they’re deceased — have to be chemically deranged in order to have that latent genius become activated and find its fullest and fatal expression. It should be noted that not everyone covered died tragically or fell prey to the foul clutches of permanent addiction — as the biographies of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Ginsberg, and Burroughs attest — but Bop Apocalypse provides a constant suggestion that it’s not enough for committed artists to engage their craft to the best of their ability, but that in doing so one must knowingly risk their lives to achieve a genius level of expression the merely sober amongst us cannot. Torgoff’s underlying premise crystallizes much of what is afoul with the contemporary notion of romanticism, that the kind of lethal idealization of the drug-related deaths of writers and musicians creates an allure that is seductive and wrongheaded. It is, on the face of it, irrational to consider an early and preventable death of an inspired creator as confirmation of their genius.

Torgoff, though, brings a wealth of research to the subject and, despite the periodic wallowing in cliché and unexamined proclamations, creates an entertaining mosaic through an electric period of American history. What the book lacks in supportable thesis or in establishing how these artists actually influence each other’s work is made up for by Targoff’s storytelling skills. Imagine this as a film by Robert Altman at his best, a diffuse but alluring tour of the rich details of an aspect of our legacy we must continue to engage. One does wish, though, that the author avoided the unintended irony of writing about artists who changed the way we think about the world with old ideas that merely reinforce our worst habits of mind.

Martin Torgoff’s generous gifts as a storyteller are superb when he remains with the tale; he is nearly cinematic in his ability to set up a scene and follow the action through. It’s unfortunate that his stories, one after the other, are too often hobbled by his pet theory, an idea that cannot be made compelling regardless of how many times it gets repeated.
]]> <![CDATA[The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes]]> 78281 Previously published as Invisible Republic and already considered a classic of modern American cultural criticism, The Old, Weird America is Greil Marcus's widely acclaimed book on the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967--a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was more than thirty years ago.

As Mark Sinker observed in The Wire: "Marcus's contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse, and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock, are where that community as a whole gets to speak." But the country mapped out in this book, as Bruce Shapiro wrote in The Nation, "is not Woody Guthrie's land for made for you and me . . . It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America.'" This odd terrain, this strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history--which Luc Sante (in New York magazine) termed the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"--is the territory that Marcus has discovered in Dylan's most mysterious music. And his analysis of that territory "reads like a thriller" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly) and exhibits "a mad, sparkling brilliance" (David Remnick, The New Yorker) throughout. This new edition of The Old, Weird America includes an updated discography.
]]> 304 Greil Marcus 0312420439 Ted 2 3.85 1997 The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes
author: Greil Marcus
name: Ted
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2016/07/26
shelves:
review:
I read Greil Marcus because I love the way he writes and admit that his prose has been an influence in the way I take finger tips to keyboard. This is a problematic love of the man's love that has existed for five decades.Lately, though, it's been more prolix than persuasion, as his ongoing effort to make Bob Dylan the central factor of the 20th century hasn't struck a believable insightful note in decades. This collection, an extended reflection on the songs that appeared on Dylan's famous 'Basement Tapes" , strives to provide the secret history behind the songs . In matters of the cross pollination of cultures, racial justice, the mashing together of folk authenticity, rock and roll and symbolist poetry, Marcus essentially argues that all roads lead to Dylan and lead through him as well. As criticism , it is more an act of imagination than a weighing of elements; Well read and as well listened as he is across a great spectrum of literature and music types, what is lacking here are the dual duties of establishing how the songs and artists within the folk tradition influenced Dylan and how Dylan assimilated the music who's expressive brilliance he could never equal and yet was motivated by to create his own means, and create a new criteria by which to discuss the success or failure of the work. Dylan is less the artist to Marcus than a saint or something greater, and, even though there is pleasure to ride the waves, cadences and well crafted metaphors and similes of the writer's prose, The Old Weird America is a shaggy dog story at heart. Marcus began this habit of epic digression with Lipstick Traces, a tome not without its pleasures--his connection there of the efforts of Caberet Voltaire, the Dadaists, Punk Rock and the Situationist provocations of Guy DuBord was especially tightly argued-- but now it seems little else than a practiced spiel that's trotted out and exclaimed, regardless of the topic, not unlike an old timer's AA share that is memorized not just by him or her but by the entire meeting that has heard him or her deliver for decades. What I am saying is that Marcus is writing the same book with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Those familiar with how the author thinks on the page will note, also, the lack of real verve in the writing, skilled and flowing as it maybe.
]]> Little Children 37426 355 Tom Perrotta 0312315732 Ted 5 3.63 2004 Little Children
author: Tom Perrotta
name: Ted
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Quick Question: New Poems 13624696 128 John Ashbery 0062225952 Ted 3 3.68 2012 Quick Question: New Poems
author: John Ashbery
name: Ted
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/06/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]]> 18545 126 Tom Stoppard 0802132758 Ted 5 4.05 1967 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
author: Tom Stoppard
name: Ted
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/02/21
shelves:
review:
The neat trick with Stoppard's play is how he places the most subsidiary characters in Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" in the foreground and relegating the famous narrative--the Prince of Denmark taking his cue from a ghost and investigating the death of his father and, in time, plotting to expose the killer and take revenge in ways too clever to be wholly successfully in the world as it's constituted-- into mere background noise. There has been sufficient commentary over the decades, perhaps the centuries , as to what the actual relationship of Rosencrantz and Guilderstern was to the the troubled Prince Hamlet, a question worth pondering and certainly one that provides endless gristle for the industry that produces Shakespeare criticism. Tellingly, Shakespeare was mum on the subject , since in his day there was little in the way of poets and playwrights furnishing their own comments and critical apparatus to consider the work. I suspect he hadn't given it much thought and considered them strawmen who's purpose , who's function was to basically emerge, say their lines and then recede, their dialogue, such as it was, functioning to move the action along. To a certain degree, the theorizing over Rosencrantz and Guilderstern has been a learned indulgence, a species of balderdash. Fun, but the speculation is poetry of a sort, a wandering in intangibles, intriguing but finally inconclusive. Tom Stoppard , though, decides not to theorize but to use his imagination instead, investigating the quality of existence R and G have when they are not in the presence and command of Hamlet, Polonious or Gertrude. With the famed play reduced to background bustle that emerges to the forefront only occasionally, R & G are basically amnesiacs barely aware of who they are and where they are and what they are doing. Clever with words, free associating as a means of constructing their own narrative line, this pair are conspicuously modeled after the tramps Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". In the Beckett, the two hobos find themselves on a road they cannot name in a life they cannot remember, trying to recollect their names, where they were, where they are going , prating on as they await the arrival of someone named Godot , who would make everything clear and provide a direction for the indigents. Godot , though, does not come, and Vladimir and Estragon remain as the play closes, defined, if that's the word, by their rudimentary role, to wait for someone or something to clear up the confusion, to reveal something large. Smart folks have long guessed that Godot represents God or Jesus or something other religious construction; Beckett, though, refrained from debating the existence or non-existence of a deity and instead gave us a grim metaphor of modern existence, civilizations reduced to rote practice, routines, conventional thinking, a horror of unacceptable repetition that we are forced to reenact however much our backs , feet and souls ache, with the promise of deliverance deferred and filed away with a legacy of other cliches and tropes that no longer sparkle. It's an existential hell; all we know of the world's condition is the perpetual waiting. Stoppard takes it a little further, with the two aimless, talkative, amnesiac Rosencrantz and Guilderstern given momentary purpose in world that suddenly has a place for them when the original "Hamlet"play intervenes in the pair's procrastinating dither. As Hamlet and others take the foreground, the dialogue switches to Shakespeare's original dialogue; queried and instructed by their superiors, R and G respond as the Bard originally had them, and then are left alone , again, to their own devices, slumping shoulders again, back to pondering and wondering without end who they are and how they got there and what it is they are supposed to be doing. A life guided by the enlivening elements of philosophical certainty or religious fervor exists for others, a privileged crown in the background operating in narratives of their own invention , scheming . plotting and lusting to reasoning that is entirely self-serving. What one can do with this is fascinating, endlessly so, and one needn't think too hard before coming up with an analog for which Stoppard's absurdist plot is a keen metaphor: think of millions of Americans obsessed with the fictionalized , extra-curricular skulduggery witnessed on professional wrestling programs. Witness the arguments of a very few mostly white politicians about principles that are essentially bankrupt virtues but which still excite an agitated electorate that knows only frustration and and the return of conveniently hazy "good old days". The theme is waiting for someone or something to arrive that will clean up the obscuring mess we've made of our associated cosmologies. The uniform experience is the waiting,the waiting, the waiting. "Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead" leaves you with this feeling, that bit of uncertainty that makes you question even the ham sandwich you might be raising to your mouth. It provokes, it agitates, it haunts you in large and small ways. What are we doing , who are we, how did we come to not remember where we came from? Stoppard asks the question and convincing responses are not fast in coming.
]]> A Coney Island of the Mind 99713 "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind—a kind of circus of the soul.]]> 93 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 0811200418 Ted 5 4.16 1958 A Coney Island of the Mind
author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
name: Ted
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/02/11
shelves:
review:
Ferlinghetti is in that tradition of the public poet, no less than Vachel Lindsay or the absurdly expansive Whitman; less a man to complain about how the world doesn't fit comfortably around the skin he was born in, or muse long and serially on fragments of memory and half recalled cliches that never crystallize satisfyingly as a perception worth of the claim unique than he his something of a force of personality that refuses introspection and opts instead to verbalize, extol, berate, rant and rave in a lyric vein at once lyric , cranky, ecstatic, lustful and very much in love with the senses that bring him the full force of the beauty and ugliness that is life. There is little in the way of introspection, and that, I think, is the secret of his endearing popularity, and why his poems remain readable decades after the Beat craze has passed on into history . These are poems that like a good friend, a very good friend, who talks to you at the bar and pokes you in the shoulder, the man who would not let you get away with lying to yourself, the second opinion you constantly get , like it or not, that is a crude but freshly phrased thing we can call the truth , of a sort. It is , I think, a voice attached to an imagination that realizes that there are not enough years in any lifespan to not live fully , senses engaged with the raw stuff of existence. These poems are jazzy, a crafted idiom that rings with the swinging chain of associations that cut through reams of rhetoric and regulation and get to the pulsing heart of the matter; birth, sex, death, joy, sorrow, glee, calamity. It all hurts, it all brings sensations we don't want, but this is a man who rolls with the punches, knows when to duck, is in love with the facts that is still drawing a breath and walking still without a crutch or cane, that he has a voice to speak words of yet new seductions to come or already underway.
]]> The Dying Animal 29776 'No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex'
With these words America's most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous, humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.]]> 156 Philip Roth Ted 3 The Dying Animal, that we can understand why he stopped: had played the last note he could stand on that instrument of style he possessed. Bearing in mind that Roth's genius has been for writing about angry men who are perpetually ill at ease, raging against their imperfections in a world they don't fit in. Roth's works are equals self-loathing, arrogance, misogyny , mother issues, sexual dysfunctional, bitter agnosticism, deeply felt emotional upheaval and revelation, cruel wit and puckish humor, an endless series of ironies that, through out a brilliantly realized career , had Roth as the outstanding straight, white , male Jewish male the rapidly shifting terms of existence seemingly used a punching bag. "The Dying Animal", coming late in is career, deals with a typical Roth protagonist , a male , late in his life, who finds that he no longer love and leave the ladies as he had always done; age, infirmity, impotene, the stuff of raging speeches given in rain storms while the vestments of position and power are stripped from you, reduce him to a supplicant. More irony follows, the poor man gets his just deserts, and anger and bitterness and the sense that nothing stops the torment except death; anyone familiar with Roth's works can more or less forecast how this tale with end, or rather, fade out. Nicely done,we can see, but it lacks the snap, the verbal snarl , the grating detail that highlights the increasingly sour moods and downcast fatalism of the author. It lacks, alas, the energy to get angry again. My suggestion would to pick up a book published only slightly earlier, "The Plot Against America"; irony, punch, a sense of playfulness, a story of innocence of youth become threatened by what-if elements that cloud the sense of the future of American democracy. That is the Philip Roth worth seeking out.]]> 3.62 2001 The Dying Animal
author: Philip Roth
name: Ted
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/01/08
shelves:
review:
Roth announced his retirement from being a novel writer a couple of years ago , and it's in the slight variations of his late career novel, 2001 's The Dying Animal, that we can understand why he stopped: had played the last note he could stand on that instrument of style he possessed. Bearing in mind that Roth's genius has been for writing about angry men who are perpetually ill at ease, raging against their imperfections in a world they don't fit in. Roth's works are equals self-loathing, arrogance, misogyny , mother issues, sexual dysfunctional, bitter agnosticism, deeply felt emotional upheaval and revelation, cruel wit and puckish humor, an endless series of ironies that, through out a brilliantly realized career , had Roth as the outstanding straight, white , male Jewish male the rapidly shifting terms of existence seemingly used a punching bag. "The Dying Animal", coming late in is career, deals with a typical Roth protagonist , a male , late in his life, who finds that he no longer love and leave the ladies as he had always done; age, infirmity, impotene, the stuff of raging speeches given in rain storms while the vestments of position and power are stripped from you, reduce him to a supplicant. More irony follows, the poor man gets his just deserts, and anger and bitterness and the sense that nothing stops the torment except death; anyone familiar with Roth's works can more or less forecast how this tale with end, or rather, fade out. Nicely done,we can see, but it lacks the snap, the verbal snarl , the grating detail that highlights the increasingly sour moods and downcast fatalism of the author. It lacks, alas, the energy to get angry again. My suggestion would to pick up a book published only slightly earlier, "The Plot Against America"; irony, punch, a sense of playfulness, a story of innocence of youth become threatened by what-if elements that cloud the sense of the future of American democracy. That is the Philip Roth worth seeking out.
]]> Why are We at War? 12472 Why Are We at War?

Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about George W. Bush and his quest for empire. Norman Mailer, one of the greatest authors of our time, lays bare the White House’s position on why war in Iraq is necessary and justified. By scrutinizing the administration’s words and actions leading up to the current crisis, Mailer carefully builds his case that Bush is pursuing war not in the name of security or anti-terrorism or human rights but in an undeclared yet fully realized ambition of global empire.

Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor on an administration he believes is recklessly endangering our very notion of freedom and democracy. For more than fifty years, in classic works of both fiction and nonfiction, Mailer has persistently exposed the folly of the powerful and the mighty. Beginning with his debut masterpiece, The Naked and the Dead, Mailer has repeatedly told the truth about war and why men fight. Why Are We at War? returns Mailer to the subject he knows better than any other writer in America today: the gravity of the battlefield and the grand hubris of the politicians who send soldiers there to die.]]> 126 Norman Mailer 0812971116 Ted 2 3.45 1968 Why are We at War?
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1968
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2015/10/30
shelves:
review:
Worth the read to gain access to Mailer's always trenchant remarks on the psyches of men with power who are seduced by the promise of war as a positive agent of change. Sadly, though, the prose is stiff and at times awkward. Mailer, a master in creating sentences that ring and resound, is not on his game here.
]]> The Prisoner of Sex 226022
Unlike some of those who have excoriated him for his views, Mailer writes with with wit and compassion, clearly a man who loves women, and who is dedicated to the proporsition of vive la difference. On one level, this work is a spirited defense of the differeences between the sexes, a vigorus condemnation of those forces in society which strike at the heart of individuality, but as Pete Hamill emphasizes in his introduction, it is also a fascinating glimpse at the "processes of Mailer's thinking." Hamill compares Mailer's rhetorical counterpunching to a bravura jazz performance: "Again and again, he enters his piece with a light-hearted prologue, then states the melody or theme. From there he races off on an improvisation whose brilliance and complexity are up to him on any given evening, free of the constraints of conventional form, able to call on as much of what he knows (about the world, the self) as he cares to reveal." And reveal he does, lighting up the sexual stage with verbal pyrotechnics, forcing us by clever twists and turns into a new understanding of ourselves.]]> 240 Norman Mailer 0297993550 Ted 4
There are times when Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating argument,where his romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatics hallucinations, but his defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments of Millet's original critique in "Sexual Politics" is literary criticism at its most emphatic. In college I had, in fact, used Mailer's extended remarks on Lawrence as a means of illustrating that author's particular genius at exploring the sensual and thorny attraction men and women have toward one another. The fundamental issue was that men and women change each other psychically in the course of making love , genuine love, and that it is those changes during the exchange that require courage of the rarest sort to face a world afterwards that now has new terms of use. I did well in the course, although the professor was, understandable, not a Mailer's ideas in general.

"Prisoner of Sex" is, I'm afraid, incoherent at times, but there are long passages of rich knock-out prose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of the premiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense of D.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself. ]]> 2.94 1971 The Prisoner of Sex
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 2.94
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/10/27
shelves:
review:
There is much to argue with in "The Prisoner of Sex", and though I'm in sympathy with the aims of the women's movement, I cheer Mailers' defense of the artists right to use their sexuality and sense of the sensual world as proper fodder for poetic expression.

There are times when Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating argument,where his romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatics hallucinations, but his defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments of Millet's original critique in "Sexual Politics" is literary criticism at its most emphatic. In college I had, in fact, used Mailer's extended remarks on Lawrence as a means of illustrating that author's particular genius at exploring the sensual and thorny attraction men and women have toward one another. The fundamental issue was that men and women change each other psychically in the course of making love , genuine love, and that it is those changes during the exchange that require courage of the rarest sort to face a world afterwards that now has new terms of use. I did well in the course, although the professor was, understandable, not a Mailer's ideas in general.

"Prisoner of Sex" is, I'm afraid, incoherent at times, but there are long passages of rich knock-out prose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of the premiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense of D.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself.
]]> The Cradle Place: Poems 451262
Thomas Lux is humorous, edgy, and ever surprising in The Cradle Place, his tenth collection of verse. These fifty-two poems question language and intention and the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. Lux has long been an outspoken advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture, and his voice is urgent and unrelentingly evocative. As Sven Birkerts has noted, “Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends.�

“A book full of arresting images . . . The natural world, as it appears here, is at first lovely . . . but turns out dangerously vanquished . . . Not since Plath has hysteria looked this kissable." � San Francisco Chronicle

“Lux has a gift for the swiftly turned expression . . . Such immediacy and quirkiness will hold a reader." � Poetry

"Readers will be mesmerized." � Poetry Book of the Year, Library Journal

THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.]]> 80 Thomas Lux 0618619445 Ted 5
RENDER, REND
Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now’s the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for “clearing�), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, that
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!
This is a poet who witnesses human experience and of life itself as process that goes on regardless of the fine personal and community philosophies we've written for ourselves to abide by. Life is a raw force that will continue to pulse, change, destroy and create anew regardless of how well can describe it. We can describe life's circumstances, we cannot control them. But there is heart in Lux's work, a sympathy, that sense of the struggle of humanity trying to create meaning in a world that defies logic and yet remains a species that continues to dress the world in a wonderful cosmology of expectations. There is wit, dark humor, tenderness, a wonderfully terse lyricism in Lux's finest writing. None are better .]]> 4.11 2004 The Cradle Place: Poems
author: Thomas Lux
name: Ted
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/19
shelves:
review:
Lux fairly much defies description, combining the plain speak of dilligent journalism and the eloquence of an other wise taciturn poet who will use an word or a phrase that takes a contrary turn other than where you expect it to go. He is the Poet of Unintended Results, a story teller very much in the John Cheever mode where the omniscient narrator begins yarns of folks with ambitions, intentions, desires for all manner of things making their way through their routines, only to have them interrupted and , as a consequence, find themselves to the larger world ,with what were once nuances and pesky inconviences of fact now looming over them in a crazy state of I-Told-You-So.

RENDER, REND
Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now’s the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for “clearing�), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, that
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!
This is a poet who witnesses human experience and of life itself as process that goes on regardless of the fine personal and community philosophies we've written for ourselves to abide by. Life is a raw force that will continue to pulse, change, destroy and create anew regardless of how well can describe it. We can describe life's circumstances, we cannot control them. But there is heart in Lux's work, a sympathy, that sense of the struggle of humanity trying to create meaning in a world that defies logic and yet remains a species that continues to dress the world in a wonderful cosmology of expectations. There is wit, dark humor, tenderness, a wonderfully terse lyricism in Lux's finest writing. None are better .
]]> Einstein's Dreams 1965790 179 Alan Lightman 1558008373 Ted 3 4.11 1993 Einstein's Dreams
author: Alan Lightman
name: Ted
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:
This is a fucked up novel by a good science journalist; sadly, someone told him he could write fiction. Sadly, some of us read it. Tragically, some of us thought it was good.
]]> The Darling 26920 The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.]]> 391 Russell Banks 0060957352 Ted 1
I've read some of his novels--Affliction, The Relation of My Imprisonment, The Angel on the Roof, Trailer Park--and I have to say that while I find his prose often times gorgeous and genuinely moving, his fiction is so persistently dire, dour and depressed that it's hard to say that I enjoyed the books I finished and put on the shelf. The misfortunes visited upon his characters are constant to the point that they become nearly comic in their overwrought attempt to create a saddened tone; the works are quite simply emotional melodramatic.

The Darling, concerning a rich young daughter who joins the Weather Underground during America's revolutionary mid-century who becomes involved in terrorist bombing that winds up killing people, we follow this poor soul as she flees the USA and winds up in Africa, in Liberia, where she gets a government post carrying for chimpanzees in a State Run field station. She winds up falling in love with a government minister who has taken pity on her and helps her, marries him and has sons. She becomes friends with Charles Taylor , the ruthlessly cruel President of the country and , strangely, she narrates at considerable length how she she seems to be communicating silently with the apes who are in her care. Disaster , revolution, race hatred, genocide follow , she flees back to the States and returns to her estranged parents and reconnects with friends from the political days. It was at this point where I closed this book and did not open it again, even though I was but 75 pages away from finishing. The improbable circumstances piled atop each other too quickly, too bluntly; Bank's prose stopped being graceful and tragically lyric at that point,moving in emotional impact and became labored.

Clearly, he had too much going on and rather than cut sequences, scenarios and conceits that were't working to begin with--the kinship with the caged chimps creates incredulity, not empathy--he is reduced to hurrying through the story, to connect his plot points. In truth, there is nothing told here that could not have been done in 200 pages; we would have had a more powerful novel that might have actually detroyed you in the spot you were holding the book. But we get blather instead, many long paragraphs of what reads like a twenty volume suicide note.You could here the strain and sense the tedium of a plot take its toll. This reads like a novelization of the most pathetic button-pushing mini series imaginable, circa 1973. The novel is a gargantuan bore.]]> 3.81 2004 The Darling
author: Russell Banks
name: Ted
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2004
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:
Russell Banks is one of those novelists who gets considerable mileage out of his character's capacity to make themselves miserable, to attract misery without necessarily seeking it out, or being born into a miserable world that makes the bringing of each and every sunrise a cue to begin again for someone to arise and then debate whether to make coffee or slit their wrists.

I've read some of his novels--Affliction, The Relation of My Imprisonment, The Angel on the Roof, Trailer Park--and I have to say that while I find his prose often times gorgeous and genuinely moving, his fiction is so persistently dire, dour and depressed that it's hard to say that I enjoyed the books I finished and put on the shelf. The misfortunes visited upon his characters are constant to the point that they become nearly comic in their overwrought attempt to create a saddened tone; the works are quite simply emotional melodramatic.

The Darling, concerning a rich young daughter who joins the Weather Underground during America's revolutionary mid-century who becomes involved in terrorist bombing that winds up killing people, we follow this poor soul as she flees the USA and winds up in Africa, in Liberia, where she gets a government post carrying for chimpanzees in a State Run field station. She winds up falling in love with a government minister who has taken pity on her and helps her, marries him and has sons. She becomes friends with Charles Taylor , the ruthlessly cruel President of the country and , strangely, she narrates at considerable length how she she seems to be communicating silently with the apes who are in her care. Disaster , revolution, race hatred, genocide follow , she flees back to the States and returns to her estranged parents and reconnects with friends from the political days. It was at this point where I closed this book and did not open it again, even though I was but 75 pages away from finishing. The improbable circumstances piled atop each other too quickly, too bluntly; Bank's prose stopped being graceful and tragically lyric at that point,moving in emotional impact and became labored.

Clearly, he had too much going on and rather than cut sequences, scenarios and conceits that were't working to begin with--the kinship with the caged chimps creates incredulity, not empathy--he is reduced to hurrying through the story, to connect his plot points. In truth, there is nothing told here that could not have been done in 200 pages; we would have had a more powerful novel that might have actually detroyed you in the spot you were holding the book. But we get blather instead, many long paragraphs of what reads like a twenty volume suicide note.You could here the strain and sense the tedium of a plot take its toll. This reads like a novelization of the most pathetic button-pushing mini series imaginable, circa 1973. The novel is a gargantuan bore.
]]> Fight Club 375782 Fight Club is now recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels published in this decade, Chuck Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel tells the story of a god-forsaken young man who discovers that his rage at living in a world filled with failure and lies cannot be pacified by an empty consumer culture. Relief for him and his disenfranchised peers comes in the form of secret after-hours boxing matches held in the basements of bars. Fight Club is the brain child of Tyler Durden, who thinks he has found a way for himself and his friends to live beyond their confining and stultifying lives. But in Tyler's world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes.]]> 208 Chuck Palahniuk 0805062971 Ted 5 4.11 1996 Fight Club
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Ted
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo]]> 756503 268 Tony Tanner 0521783747 Ted 5 4.14 2000 The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo
author: Tony Tanner
name: Ted
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Murphy Stories (Illinois Short Fiction)]]> 383882 ..... 120 Mark Costello 0252003098 Ted 5 4.28 1973 The Murphy Stories (Illinois Short Fiction)
author: Mark Costello
name: Ted
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Kick Out the Jams 698108 128 Don McLeese 0826416608 Ted 3 3.82 2005 Kick Out the Jams
author: Don McLeese
name: Ted
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker]]> 721685 448 James Gavin 156649284X Ted 3 4.01 2002 Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker
author: James Gavin
name: Ted
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth]]> 57784 282 Joseph Roth 039332379X Ted 2 4.25 2001 The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth
author: Joseph Roth
name: Ted
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> The Ax 176811
Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company when the cost-cutting ax falls, and he is laid off. Eighteen months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search -- with agonizing care, Devore finds the seven men in the surrounding area who could take the job that rightfully should be his, and systematically kills them. Transforming himself from mild-mannered middle manager to ruthless murderer, he discovers skills ne never knew ne had -- and that come to him far too easily.]]> 352 Donald E. Westlake 0446606081 Ted 5 3.92 1997 The Ax
author: Donald E. Westlake
name: Ted
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Pafko at the Wall 162497 "There's a long drive.

It's gonna be.

I believe.

The Giants win the pennant.

The Giants win the pennant.

The Giants win the pennant.

The Giants win the pennant."

-- Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951

On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American sportswriting.

]]> 96 Don DeLillo 0743230000 Ted 5 4.13 2001 Pafko at the Wall
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Introducing Don DeLillo 28702 Diversity is the key to this striking assemblage of cultural criticism edited by Frank Lentricchia. Special features include an expanded version of the Rolling Stone interview with the author (“An Outsider in this Society�) and the extraordinary tenth chapter of DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star. Accessibly written and entertaining, the collection will be of great interest to both students and scholars of contemporary American literature as well as to general readers interested in DeLillo’s work. Contributors. Frank Lentricchia, Anthony Decurtis, Daniel Aaron, Hal Crowther, John A. McClure, Eugene Goodheart, Charles Molesworth, Dennis A. Foster, and John Frow]]> 232 Frank Lentricchia 0822311445 Ted 5 3.58 1991 Introducing Don DeLillo
author: Frank Lentricchia
name: Ted
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Players 28704 212 Don DeLillo 0099928507 Ted 5 3.29 1977 Players
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> The Names 408 The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.

"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, an original world of its own is created."--Chicago Sun-Times

"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement

"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world, to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times]]> 339 Don DeLillo 0679722955 Ted 4 3.64 1982 The Names
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Libra 400
In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.]]> 480 Don DeLillo 0140156046 Ted 4 4.05 1988 Libra
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ted
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, #8)]]> 303525 in accordance with Corso's individual (therefore universal) desire." - Allen Ginsberg]]> 105 Gregory Corso 0872860884 Ted 4 4.00 1955 Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, #8)
author: Gregory Corso
name: Ted
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/05/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Harlot's Ghost 381365 Harlot’s Ghost is a panoramic achievement in the tradition of Tolstoy, Melville, and Balzac, a triumph of Mailer’s literary prowess.
Ěý
Praise for Harlot’s Ghost
Ěý
“[Norman Mailer is] the right man to exalt the history of the CIA into something better than history.�—Anthony Burgess, The Washington Post Book World
Ěý
“Elegantly written and filled with almost electric tension . . . When I returned from the world of Harlot’s Ghost to the present I wished to be enveloped again by Mailer’s imagination.�—Robert Wilson, USA Today
Ěý
“Immense, fascinating, and in large part brilliant.�—Salman Rushdie, The Independent on Sunday
Ěý
“A towering creation . . . a fiction as real and as possible as actual history.��The New York Times
Ěý
Praise for Norman Mailer
Ěý
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.��The New York Times
Ěý
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.��The New Yorker
Ěý
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.��The Washington Post
Ěý
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.��Life
Ěý
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.��The New York Review of Books
Ěý
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.��Chicago Tribune
Ěý
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.��The Cincinnati Post]]> 1191 Norman Mailer 0345379659 Ted 5 become evil themselves, which is to say that the agents in play, visiting various bits of expensive and furtive skulluggery against enemies present and invisible, have to pay a solomn lip service to the virtues of American freedoms and the governing institutions that direct them, but who must be able to betray every moral principle they've sworn to uphold as a means of defending against the godless, the unbathed, the fearfully "other". Rather than have agents who are compartmentalized to the extent that they lie, cheat, steal and dispatch bad guys by day and watch TV and crosswords at night, we have instead characters who are at war with the lies they tell themselves.Within this is a paranoia that is made into a layered, convoluted, brooding world. Not a perfect novel, but a genuine work of literature none the less. I would venture that this is Mailer's best novel.]]> 3.88 1991 Harlot's Ghost
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/05/10
shelves:
review:
This is a generational saga more than anything else, the story of Harry Hubbard and his relationship with his CIA mentor, the titular Harlot. It is, I think, a brilliant mess of a novel, not unlike the projects the Central Intelligence Agency has taken on covertly, unheard of and unspoken, in order to preserve the good graces and virtue of the United States. The main message, I think, is that one cannot fight evil unless they understand exactly what evil is and are willing to be evil , unprincipled, lacking in romanticized notions of goodness and fairness in order to combat any and all threats that approach our shores. It is messy work, in other words, and there is a liturgy here, something approaching a theological world view that places the agency and its agents in a context that represents an over specialized class of professional attempting to rationalize the vileness of their work by allusively equating their violence, lies and disruptions as serving the greater good.What especially intrigues about this novel is the foul premise that one cannot effectively fight evil unless they are able to become evil themselves, which is to say that the agents in play, visiting various bits of expensive and furtive skulluggery against enemies present and invisible, have to pay a solomn lip service to the virtues of American freedoms and the governing institutions that direct them, but who must be able to betray every moral principle they've sworn to uphold as a means of defending against the godless, the unbathed, the fearfully "other". Rather than have agents who are compartmentalized to the extent that they lie, cheat, steal and dispatch bad guys by day and watch TV and crosswords at night, we have instead characters who are at war with the lies they tell themselves.Within this is a paranoia that is made into a layered, convoluted, brooding world. Not a perfect novel, but a genuine work of literature none the less. I would venture that this is Mailer's best novel.
]]> She Didn't Mean to Do It 425491 80 Daisy Fried 0822957388 Ted 1 4.00 2000 She Didn't Mean to Do It
author: Daisy Fried
name: Ted
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2000
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2015/01/20
shelves:
review:
Daisy Fried is actually quite a good vernacular poet--she can whip up a storm of conflated chatter and have it all echo with a Greek chorus effectiveness of announcing an irony undetected or casting a skewering glance at a future that remains doubtful to other eyes. Of course , I contradict myself from the previous paragraph, but I did say that this was "payback", an activity that isn't, by default, honest, rational, or fair in any sense other than shoring the boundries of one's permeable ego. The truth is that while Fried has room for improvement in her performances as a cultural journalist, she is , all the same, a poet worthy of her publications. A tart and witty tongue lives in the that head of hers.
]]> <![CDATA[If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler]]> 374233 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration�"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.

The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches—stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."]]> 260 Italo Calvino Ted 2 they are writing in before one drops the book and fixes themself a strong drink. Self-reflective art in excessive doses and abusive combinations with other dislocating devices of retired experiments makes you complacent about the value of literary writing itself; what Calvino has going for him is an elegant style that engages you even as he performs the old tricks of revealing what's behind the curtain. For my taste, one should investigate the more recent novels of Paul Auster, especially his New York Trilogy. He essentially manages to have us step back from the linguistic artifice of fiction just enough to makes us aware of just how arbitrary the beginnings, middles and ends of plot outlines are when they are confronted by the irritable unpredictability of reall events; and yet even with this conceit going for him, he does not lose connection with his stories. These are characters who suffer, laugh, revenge, connive in all their circumstances, quirky and believeable, like we the readers, trying to make sense of situations that defy every template we can attempt to tame them with. ]]> 4.05 1979 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
author: Italo Calvino
name: Ted
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 2
read at: 2014/12/22
date added: 2014/12/22
shelves:
review:
Calvino can be an intriguing fabulist, but there is a limit to how often one can keep r interrogating the very medium
they are writing in before one drops the book and fixes themself a strong drink. Self-reflective art in excessive doses and abusive combinations with other dislocating devices of retired experiments makes you complacent about the value of literary writing itself; what Calvino has going for him is an elegant style that engages you even as he performs the old tricks of revealing what's behind the curtain. For my taste, one should investigate the more recent novels of Paul Auster, especially his New York Trilogy. He essentially manages to have us step back from the linguistic artifice of fiction just enough to makes us aware of just how arbitrary the beginnings, middles and ends of plot outlines are when they are confronted by the irritable unpredictability of reall events; and yet even with this conceit going for him, he does not lose connection with his stories. These are characters who suffer, laugh, revenge, connive in all their circumstances, quirky and believeable, like we the readers, trying to make sense of situations that defy every template we can attempt to tame them with.
]]> <![CDATA[Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920]]> 6486968 In this lively narrative A. David Moody weaves a story of Pound's early life and loves, his education in America, and his years in London, where he trained himself to become a great poet-learning from W. B.Yeats, Ford Madox Hueffer, and others-and exhorting his contemporaries to abandon Victorian sentimentality and "make it new." Pound was at the center of everything, forming his own Imagiste group, joining with Wyndham Lewis in his Vorticism, championing the work of James Joyce, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot, and constantly on the lookout for new talent as International Editor for Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine. Moody traces Pound's evolution as a poet from the derivative idealism and aestheticism of his precocious youth to his Cathay," based on the transliterations of the Sineologist Ernest Fenollosa, to the stunningly original Homage to SextusPropertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. By 1920 Pound was established as a force for revolution in poetry and in his critical writing as a brilliant iconoclast who argued against stifling conventions and the economic injustice of the capitalist system.
Ezra Pound: Poet gives us illuminating readings of the major early works and a unforgettable portrait of Pound himself-by turns brilliant, combative, selfless, ambitious-and always fascinating.]]> 544 Anthony David Moody 0199571465 Ted 4 3.91 2007 Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920
author: Anthony David Moody
name: Ted
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/10/20
shelves:
review:
Pound the poet, the propagandist, the editor, the talent scout, all dutifully reported and examined by A.David Moody, a literature professor and literary biographer. William Carlos Williams had opined that the self-created Pound was certainly a genius but added that he was, as well, “an ass�. I was grateful to read this in this slow moving biography , if only to know that it wasn’t just me that thought him as someone who it was more work than it was worth to know.Moody's thesis seems to confirm my suspicions that the greater part of Pound's genius, as it were, lay in his massive appreciation in the genius of others. He was, in my view, a first rate talent scout and an enthusiastic supporter of new and revolutionary work. I will admit that there are those few poems written by his hand that I've actually liked, but as the review suggests, his most radical writing wasn't just dense difficult by a daunting learnedness, but because the writing was a melange of styles , emulations, parodies and voices that collectively couldn't pierce the veil of self-imposed obscurity. The difficulty seems a self-fulfilling prophecy; purposefully abstruse verse with little aid to the curious, and a built in rationale for further lacerating the rubes for their failure to "get" what he was getting at. Like Ayn Rand, Pound's central belief was in genius that was dictatorial and not obliged to make the new ideas comprehensible . One got with the program or be trampled by the revolution to follow. Pound is one of the most fascinating men in American literature, and he'll no doubt continue to vex generations of bright poets to come. But that is something we who think literature should , by default, have "progressive" leanings will have to grin and bear. Like or not, Pound revolutionized Poetry coming into the 20th century just as D.W.Griffith created the modern film narrative style with his epic and naively racist Birth of a Nation. Much of the time great work doesn't come from morally unambiguous personalities.
]]> The Fight 773971 Ěý
Praise for The Fight
Ěý
“Exquisitely refined and attenuated . . . [a] sensitive portrait of an extraordinary athlete and man, and a pugilistic drama fully as exciting as the reality on which it is based.� � The New York Times
Ěý
“One of the defining texts of sports journalism. Not only does Mailer recall the violent combat with a scholar’s eye . . . he also makes the whole act of reporting seem as exciting as what’s occurring in the ring.� � GQ
Ěý
“Stylistically, Mailer was the greatest boxing writer of all time.� —Chuck Klosterman, Esquire
Ěý
“One of Mailer’s finest books.� —Louis Menand, The New Yorker
Ěý
Praise for Norman Mailer
Ěý
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.� � The New York Times
Ěý
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.� � The New Yorker
Ěý
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.� � The Washington Post
Ěý
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.� � Life
Ěý
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.� � The New York Review of Books
Ěý
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.� � Chicago Tribune
Ěý
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.� � The Cincinnati Post]]> 234 Norman Mailer 0375700382 Ted 4 4.05 1975 The Fight
author: Norman Mailer
name: Ted
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/09/07
shelves:
review:
Mailer and Ali, what more could a reader wanting to investigate the egos and aspirations of manly men want? Mailer worshipped the will of those who were willing to endure pain and humiliation as they cultivated some strange aspect of their personality to an aesthetic reality; make no mistake , Mailer considered Ali to be an artist no less than his other heros, Hemingway, Picasso, Marylin. There is lots of poetically conveyed romanticism going on here, made palatable and even intellectually attractive by Mailer's fine prose; there is the strong suggestion that Mailer knew how absurd he was with respect to his assumptions and the way he wrote bout his adventures in the third person. Still, this brillant stylist brings it off, and does justice to the skill, grace , and yes, art of another brillant stylist, Muhammad Ali.
]]> <![CDATA[A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]]> 4953 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read for decades to come.]]> 530 Dave Eggers 0375725784 Ted 3 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , a memoir of his assuming the parenting role for his younger brother Toph after the back-to-back deaths of their parents, is a bit of masterpiece of the hurried voice; a stammering and rushing narrative of someone having to shed the remains of teenage slackertude and learn adult behavior in a hurry, Eggers' style was appropriate to the subject. Given circumstances that made his reality seem to collapse upon itself, Eggers could do nothing else except move forward, as if running up the hall from a burning house, instinctively moving toward the daylight coming from a door at the end. AHWOSG , breathless, impatient, agitated and at times staggering, as it were, in it's balancing act of grace and wit and awkward locutions and shotgunned transitions, remains a real document of a writer having to leave his cozy assumptions of living the bohemian life and take on the weight as family head.

The desperation was real, and was interesting for the way the author didn't assume the disguise of narrative know-it-all. Beguiling as that was, one would have thought he would have changed his style, suitable to idea and subject, but he has not. It's about the hurry, the haste, the speed of writing coming as quickly as the speed of perception. It is the speed of the Internet generation, and the result is broad banded mediocrity. Every book he's done up until now has been a set of gasping, agitated sentences that are all jabber and no communication. Incredibly, his writing seems to mimic the way many characterize of his generation actually talk, rapidly, long streams of sentences, filled with undiscerning details, asides and anecdotes, all uttered at a pace and high-strung pitch that attempts to make you think that something incredible is about to happen.
]]> 3.70 2000 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
author: Dave Eggers
name: Ted
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/07/30
shelves:
review:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , a memoir of his assuming the parenting role for his younger brother Toph after the back-to-back deaths of their parents, is a bit of masterpiece of the hurried voice; a stammering and rushing narrative of someone having to shed the remains of teenage slackertude and learn adult behavior in a hurry, Eggers' style was appropriate to the subject. Given circumstances that made his reality seem to collapse upon itself, Eggers could do nothing else except move forward, as if running up the hall from a burning house, instinctively moving toward the daylight coming from a door at the end. AHWOSG , breathless, impatient, agitated and at times staggering, as it were, in it's balancing act of grace and wit and awkward locutions and shotgunned transitions, remains a real document of a writer having to leave his cozy assumptions of living the bohemian life and take on the weight as family head.

The desperation was real, and was interesting for the way the author didn't assume the disguise of narrative know-it-all. Beguiling as that was, one would have thought he would have changed his style, suitable to idea and subject, but he has not. It's about the hurry, the haste, the speed of writing coming as quickly as the speed of perception. It is the speed of the Internet generation, and the result is broad banded mediocrity. Every book he's done up until now has been a set of gasping, agitated sentences that are all jabber and no communication. Incredibly, his writing seems to mimic the way many characterize of his generation actually talk, rapidly, long streams of sentences, filled with undiscerning details, asides and anecdotes, all uttered at a pace and high-strung pitch that attempts to make you think that something incredible is about to happen.

]]> <![CDATA[It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006]]> 2177388 257 Leslie Scalapino 0520254627 Ted 4 Laying out a poem like it were a trail of bread crumbs a reader would to the bigger feast of The Point Being Made is not how writer Leslie Scalapino writes. As we find ourselves in a time when the popular idea of the poet and their work they compose seems slanted toward the lightly likable Billy Collins and others witing poems that can be grasped, shared, written out in a fine hand on perfumed paper and preserved between the leaves of a dictionary of quotations. Scalapino requires not the casual gaze but the harder view, the more inquisitive eye. Scalapino brings a refreshing complexity to her work, a sanguine yet inquisitive intelligence that is restless and dissatisfied with the seemingly authorized narrative styles poets are expected to frame their ideas with. The framing, so to speak, is as much the subject in her poems and prose, and the attending effort to interrogate the methods one codifies perception to the exclusion of other details that don't fit a convenient structure, Leslie Scalapino has produced a body of work of rare and admirable discipline; the writing is a test of the limits of our generic representations, and an earnest inquiry in how we might exist without them.

In as series of over nineteen books over published since the seventies, she has been one of the most interesting poets working , an earnest inquisitor of consciousness and form blurring and distorting the boundaries that keep poetry, prose, fiction and auto biography apart.It's Go in Horizontal is a cogent selection from three decades of writing. The distinction blurring is not a project originating with her, but there is in Scalapino's work the sense of a single voice rather than expected "car radio effect", the audio equivalent of Burrough's cut up method that would make a piece resemble an AM dial being moved up and down a distorted, static-laden frequency. Leslie Scalapino's writing is one voice at different pitches responding to an intelligence aware of how it codes and decodes an object of perception. Her writing are fascinating , intoxicating interrogation of an intelligence that wrestles with an image that is received and with the act of witnessing itself.

In the best sense of the comparison , her writing has traces of Gertrude Stein at her most concentrated, when she had considered the Cubism of Braque, Picasso and Leger and sought an equivalent in writing of the effects they achieved in their painting and sculpture; a disassembling of the usual way that orders visual experience the effect of which reveals each perspective at the same time. This simultaneity of witness presents problems at first--head scratching isn't an unusual response to first timers even these days--but the beauty of the project is that the abstraction it produces in the work of the Cubists and with sympathetic experimental writers like Stein is that it allows for things that are normally hidden or ignored in favor of more flattering, svelte detail to be brought to the forefront. The world is less smooth and elegant as the former restraints are removed, and it becomes a huge space filled with objects of infinite shape.

Stein, though, was principally intrigued with the visual,and Scalapino's writing concerns itself with an investigation of one's own perception. There is a fracturing of narrative flow, a rephrasing of what was formally said, a studied trek through a temporal sequence of events full of incidental images, smells and sounds, any of which trigger associations linking the speaker, the witness to phenomenon, to a personal history and future one speculates about in limitless wondering. Scalapino's writing is a study of the mind conducting it's habit as a device that forces order on an infinitely complex rush of details that would other wise overwhelm the senses.
Hers is a poetry examining the canvas on which one draws their conceptualization of the world, a worried presence on the margins of conventionally consolidated personality that is aware of the filters one applies over phenomenon that occur without warning, and considers the concrete again and yet again as the variations and tones of the details are exposed.

I haven't excerpted any of Scalapino's work here because the formatting of this blog wouldn't do justice to the arrangements of her lines on the page; the spatial arrangements are crucial in many of her poems for each sliver and shaving of nuance to fully work. But there are are some choice links here you can follow to some of her works on line, presented, I assume, as the author intended them to appear.

]]> 4.26 2008 It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006
author: Leslie Scalapino
name: Ted
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2008/04/01
date added: 2014/05/19
shelves:
review:

Laying out a poem like it were a trail of bread crumbs a reader would to the bigger feast of The Point Being Made is not how writer Leslie Scalapino writes. As we find ourselves in a time when the popular idea of the poet and their work they compose seems slanted toward the lightly likable Billy Collins and others witing poems that can be grasped, shared, written out in a fine hand on perfumed paper and preserved between the leaves of a dictionary of quotations. Scalapino requires not the casual gaze but the harder view, the more inquisitive eye. Scalapino brings a refreshing complexity to her work, a sanguine yet inquisitive intelligence that is restless and dissatisfied with the seemingly authorized narrative styles poets are expected to frame their ideas with. The framing, so to speak, is as much the subject in her poems and prose, and the attending effort to interrogate the methods one codifies perception to the exclusion of other details that don't fit a convenient structure, Leslie Scalapino has produced a body of work of rare and admirable discipline; the writing is a test of the limits of our generic representations, and an earnest inquiry in how we might exist without them.

In as series of over nineteen books over published since the seventies, she has been one of the most interesting poets working , an earnest inquisitor of consciousness and form blurring and distorting the boundaries that keep poetry, prose, fiction and auto biography apart.It's Go in Horizontal is a cogent selection from three decades of writing. The distinction blurring is not a project originating with her, but there is in Scalapino's work the sense of a single voice rather than expected "car radio effect", the audio equivalent of Burrough's cut up method that would make a piece resemble an AM dial being moved up and down a distorted, static-laden frequency. Leslie Scalapino's writing is one voice at different pitches responding to an intelligence aware of how it codes and decodes an object of perception. Her writing are fascinating , intoxicating interrogation of an intelligence that wrestles with an image that is received and with the act of witnessing itself.

In the best sense of the comparison , her writing has traces of Gertrude Stein at her most concentrated, when she had considered the Cubism of Braque, Picasso and Leger and sought an equivalent in writing of the effects they achieved in their painting and sculpture; a disassembling of the usual way that orders visual experience the effect of which reveals each perspective at the same time. This simultaneity of witness presents problems at first--head scratching isn't an unusual response to first timers even these days--but the beauty of the project is that the abstraction it produces in the work of the Cubists and with sympathetic experimental writers like Stein is that it allows for things that are normally hidden or ignored in favor of more flattering, svelte detail to be brought to the forefront. The world is less smooth and elegant as the former restraints are removed, and it becomes a huge space filled with objects of infinite shape.

Stein, though, was principally intrigued with the visual,and Scalapino's writing concerns itself with an investigation of one's own perception. There is a fracturing of narrative flow, a rephrasing of what was formally said, a studied trek through a temporal sequence of events full of incidental images, smells and sounds, any of which trigger associations linking the speaker, the witness to phenomenon, to a personal history and future one speculates about in limitless wondering. Scalapino's writing is a study of the mind conducting it's habit as a device that forces order on an infinitely complex rush of details that would other wise overwhelm the senses.
Hers is a poetry examining the canvas on which one draws their conceptualization of the world, a worried presence on the margins of conventionally consolidated personality that is aware of the filters one applies over phenomenon that occur without warning, and considers the concrete again and yet again as the variations and tones of the details are exposed.

I haven't excerpted any of Scalapino's work here because the formatting of this blog wouldn't do justice to the arrangements of her lines on the page; the spatial arrangements are crucial in many of her poems for each sliver and shaving of nuance to fully work. But there are are some choice links here you can follow to some of her works on line, presented, I assume, as the author intended them to appear.


]]> Detroit: An American Autopsy 15811520
In another life, Charlie LeDuff won the Pulitzer Prize reporting for The New York Times. But all that is behind him now, after returning to find his hometown in total freefall. Detroit is where his mother’s flower shop was firebombed; where his sister lost herself to drugs; where his brother works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as “Made in America.�

With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark—and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses—LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its neighborhood against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption. He investigates state senators and career police officials, following the money to discover who benefits from Detroit’s decline. He befriends union organizers, homeless do-gooders, embattled businessmen, and struggling homeowners, all ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination.

Americans have hoped for decades that Detroit was an exception, an outlier. What LeDuff reveals is that Detroit is, once and for all, America’s city: It led us on the way up, and now it is leading us on the way down. Detroit can no longer be ignored because what happened there is happening out here.

Redemption is thin on the ground in this ghost of a city, but Detroit: An American Autopsy is no hopeless parable. Instead, LeDuff shares a deeply human drama of colossal greed, ignorance, endurance, and courage. Detroit is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer—and a black comic tale of the absurdity of American life in the twenty-first century.
]]> 304 Charlie LeDuff 1594205345 Ted 4
This reads like a novel, more or less, a writer's journey through a city that once thrived and was respected and now, due to basic and fatal human flaws of greed, racism, and generations of indescribably awful economic and political decisions, has diminished in all respects. Will Detroit recover? LeDuff leaves that question alone; what he does is provide vivid portraits of some of its citizens who share an remarkable resilience to their collective hardship. The question "Detroit: An American Autopsy" is whether politicians, city, state and federal, can look this cit in the eye and muster the political will to do something about it. This a gruff, bracing read, powerfully presented.
]]> 3.93 2013 Detroit: An American Autopsy
author: Charlie LeDuff
name: Ted
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/03/10
shelves:
review:
I read this a year ago, and as a Detroit native I have to say that LeDuff's Hemingway-inspired , virtually verbless prose style suits the ongoing heartache that is the Motor City. It's a relief that the author refrains from being the amateur urban planner or statistic-infected wonk in order to project dismal futures or to propose expensive , long term solutions predicated on someone's willingness to raise taxes. That is another conversation and debate that would distract from LeDuff's strong points as a writer,which are an attention to detail, unspoken nuance, the voice of the people he talks to and the grinding despair of a seemingly doomed city.

This reads like a novel, more or less, a writer's journey through a city that once thrived and was respected and now, due to basic and fatal human flaws of greed, racism, and generations of indescribably awful economic and political decisions, has diminished in all respects. Will Detroit recover? LeDuff leaves that question alone; what he does is provide vivid portraits of some of its citizens who share an remarkable resilience to their collective hardship. The question "Detroit: An American Autopsy" is whether politicians, city, state and federal, can look this cit in the eye and muster the political will to do something about it. This a gruff, bracing read, powerfully presented.

]]> American Death Songs 17162036
From the California high desert to a Texas prison yard, from Ozarks dive bars to the shadows of Hollywood, these stories burst with gutter grandeur and criminal mythology. Harper burns through prison-tatted flesh to expose his characters� hardened, scarred but still beating hearts. And he does it with a virtuoso prose style that brews pulp panache and literary flare into pure nitroglycerin.

“A harrowing, hallowing ode to those whose options boil down to a bullet, a bank or a strange stretch of highway. American Letters has found in Harper an agent worthy to take the crime fiction tradition into the 21st century.� � Hardboiled Wonderland]]> 165 Jordan Harper 0988721600 Ted 5 4.41 2012 American Death Songs
author: Jordan Harper
name: Ted
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited]]> 5479 Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future--of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.

The non-fiction work Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including the threats to humanity, such as over-population, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.]]> 340 Aldous Huxley 0060776099 Ted 4 4.17 1958 Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Ted
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> How to Read Literature 16073298 232 Terry Eagleton 0300190964 Ted 3 ]]> 3.70 2013 How to Read Literature
author: Terry Eagleton
name: Ted
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/01/05
shelves:
review:
I've been a long time reader of Eagleton for the plain reason that he has a wonderful prose style and that , as a Marxist in the mode of Raymond Williams, he remains skeptical of using art as a springboard for philosophical speculation and insists that we have to appreciate how authors use their imaginations and techniques to elicit the subtle effects on their readership. He does not dodge the political in art, but he does insist that readers remember that literature is about the human experience and that the role of the artist is to present us with provocative narratives that place the reader in a flow of experience outside their own references. Eagelton, though, does go slack in making an argument about why attentive reading and an eye and ear for how a narrative succeeds or fails on the terms it establishes for itself; he is, perhaps, too much of a crank more interested in bellowing at today's kids rather than re-establishing his own reasons for bothering with a career in literary discussion. He makes an attempt to tell us why it's important to have the skills to read with a subtler mind through extensive explorations of emotional conflicts and situational tension, but he is not entirely convincing. There was a point in the end pages of his book "Literary Theory" where Eagleton seemed to go into a both a lament an rant about how theorizing about literature, the general examination of books as "texts" and the demonstration of how they cannot mean anything adequate to lived experience, over the finer art of criticism, genuine appreciation, when he postulated that after years of slugging it out with competing academics one--meaning himself, I believe--had to struggle what it was that made one desire to teach and dicuss literature as a career. Perhaps the author has reached that point even as he tries to reignite the passion for the studies of stories as entities in themselves, not extensions of political assumptions. I do like Harold Bloom's assertion that literature's principle benefit to the is that it helps us think about ourselves. That works for me.

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