I recall seeing the Blues Brothers when it came out ALMOST FIFTY YEARS AGO (augh!?!) and saw this audible original was available, so listened to it. II recall seeing the Blues Brothers when it came out ALMOST FIFTY YEARS AGO (augh!?!) and saw this audible original was available, so listened to it. I know there has been a lot written about that movie, the franchise, with films, albums, tours, sequels, and so on. So roughly two hours seemed fine, as this was a fine fun flick for me, especially for me as a midwesterner, but I didn't recall it as one of the best movie ever.
But it was surprisingly good in that Elwood Blues (aka Dan Aykroyd) narrates this short history of the BB phenomenon, from an SNL sketch with John Belushi, which improbably led these white dudes to work with and celebrate the music of blues legends Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Ray Charles. Various people are interviewed, including Jim Belushi, Paul Shaffer, Curtis Salgado, John Landis, Steve Jordan, and more. The main storyteller is Aykroyd, but one treat is a lot from the late Judy Belushi Pisano, and a previously unheard interview with John Belushi himself. And quite a bit from Landis.
And band members who defend the project as both comedic genius AND a serious tribute to the great blues artists, many of whose careers were revived (as with the Coen Brothers comedy that takes bluegrass music seriously, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) as a result. No complaints of cultural appropriation here, as blues clubs suddenly were packed, and for several years.
To stretch it out a bit we get into John's bro Jim getting into the mix, a second The Blues Brothers movie, the founding of House of Blues, the Blues Brothers 2000 sequel. Most importantly, I made a list of some songs I had not listened to in a long time, and made a commitment to 1) see the movie again with the fam, and 2) get back one more time to a classic Chicago blues club, preferably like one that I heard is being revived on the south side that I used to go to in the seventies (hearing Buddy and Phil Guy there, among many others). On a mission from God!...more
I did not want to listen to this book because I knew I would be outraged and sad but it made a list of great books of the year and then, Letters from I did not want to listen to this book because I knew I would be outraged and sad but it made a list of great books of the year and then, Letters from Guantanamo is an Audible Original. But I have a file of outrageous and shameful Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo articles, one shame of American history about which probably nothing is taught in enough American history classes (banned or excised from the public record) (or reframed: "Hitler did a lot of good things, you know--DT; and "slavery did a lot for the slaves, they learned a lot of skills there"), and have read a few memoirs that have thankfully been published. So, yes, we still have a free press willing to tell the truth, ugly and disgusting as it may be. So I listened to it and over all thought it was pretty powerful.
I had never read Don't Forget About Me by the same author, Manoor Adayfi, of which I imagine this is to be a kind of adaptation.
I didn't initially like the lively jokey tone of this memoir/drama: "I'm going to take you into the infamous Guantanamo Prison, but I promise you will not be waterboarded, I'll protect you." Heh. I know waterboarding unfortunately became a kind of cultural joke, but I winced to hear a Yemeni guy who had spent 14 years in this prison, 18-32 years old, beaten, tortured, in isolation, force-fed on hunger strikes, try to lighten the mood for us. Not funny, I thought.
But then this kid, known as Smiley, is smart, articulate, savvy, and manages to outlast his captors, has a way of not giving in to humiliation and fear--he jokes at the most surprising times!--who came as many of his fellow prisoners, as a teen, sold as a hostage to the US military, with no background in politics and certainly not in terrorism. He had never seen a skyscraper let alone bomb one. No, he had no idea who Osama bin Laden was. How do we know this? They were never charged, and some of his captors here write letters of apology, in shame at the end of the book. The story, set up as a three-act play, is comprised of a series of sometimes ludicrous letters Adayfi wrote to aliens, Men's Health, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, his family, and so on, none of them allowed to be sent. He is eventually freed, even gets to college post-prison, expressing no bitterness, though still seeking justice.
It's well-written, graphic, painful to hear, and important. It makes clear what we even knew then: If you torture people, they will tell you whatever you want to hear. And almost none of the prisoners there were ever accused of any crimes after many years. Shameful period in American history. His story reveals he is an admirable person with keen insights; even if you are skeptical, if you think you wouldn't quite trust him post 9/11 because he is a Yemeni Muslim, or whatever, your skepticism will be worn down, and besides, many accounts support his testimony. He restores the faith in humanity you might lose as you read of the horrors there....more
I bought a signed copy of this AT the Bookshop at the End of the World, sold to me by Lance, the enthusiastic and loving husband of the author, who asI bought a signed copy of this AT the Bookshop at the End of the World, sold to me by Lance, the enthusiastic and loving husband of the author, who assured me this would be one of the best books I will ever read. I loved my time talking to Lance! The bookshop is locate in the small villageManapouri, New Zealand (!!) on the edge of Fiordland. Since I was there and ytalked to him I of course had to buy it and read it, and I am glad I did!
The book alternates between stories of Ruth's life, her memoir prior to the bookstores called Two Wee (the national bird is the Tui! ha!) and stories of many people who she has met in the bookstores over the years. My initial impression was that it was going to be a (merely?) sentimental book by an older lady bookseller (review written by an older man, check), which would have be fine, but man, she lived quite the dramatic life. I won't tell much about it, but she survived some brutal things.
Early on she met Lance, too, and they were engaged to be married. Her parents wanted a Catholic wedding and Lance, who was not Catholic, agreed, but the priest said they had to raise any children Catholic. Lance resisted, saying kids need to make their own choices, and . . the deal was off, and Lance took off, and so did Ruth, on the High Seas, sailing on the Pacific (meeting headhunters in a port in New Guinea, robbed by pirates, gambling), until decades and many relationships later, they meet again. . . a love story!
It's a wild and endearing story, well-told and engaging, harsh and sweet and funny, so to just think of Ruth and Lance as two old folks in a wee bookstore. . . well they are, but you have NO idea what lives they lived!...more
A sweet Audible Original Art+Music performance by Patti Smith that includes her son and daughter playing in the band with her as she reflects (brieflyA sweet Audible Original Art+Music performance by Patti Smith that includes her son and daughter playing in the band with her as she reflects (briefly, less than ninety minutes) on a few key events, focusing especially on the two most important men in her life, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fred "Sonic" Smith. They alternate stripped-down versions of her best-known songs with her brief account of her life, drawing on already published anecdotes (and actual prose) from her published writing, principally M Train.
That probably sounds like faint praise, but as she gets older, I have grown fonder and fonder of the artist, writer, and person Patti Smith, who liberally quotes other writers (and they play a song with a Rilke poem as lyrics) in all her works, urging me to reread them. So, as a memory trip, given it tells me little new, it maybe merits a three-star rating, but as an experience it bumps up for me to four stars. I liked it a lot....more
Something That Cannot Die by Paula McClain is an Audible Original story of about 90-minute length, a first-person historical fiction biography, that rSomething That Cannot Die by Paula McClain is an Audible Original story of about 90-minute length, a first-person historical fiction biography, that relates one turning point in the artist Georgia O’Keefe’s life. Cynthia Nixon is the reader and does an okay job, though I hadn’t imagined O’Keefe’s voice sounded anything like the light sort of vanilla girlish tone we hear. The condensed story is maybe a familiar one of a woman, married to a much older, iconically famous and expectedly controlling (male) artist, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. I thought it was okay, imagining an important moment in her life, but I'll say, if you know little about her, read whole biographies, get volumes of her art.
O’Keefe meets and marries the much older Stieglitz in her early twenties, enamored by his fame, flattered by his mentoring encouragement, but she is expected to be at home near him as he ages, and is ailing, and in spite of the fact that he is constantly unfaithful to her. She needs a new beginning with her artistic life and resisting his discouragement, moves west for a time to get a fresh start, but the jerk will not even visit her there in the desert. He didn’t want her to have children, though she did. And yes, she traverses the country between NYC and the desert so she can remain in some fashion with him.
O’Keefe in the desert meets Maria Chabot, who helps her to artistic and personal independence. The story is more about a woman’s need for space to accomplish her personal goals than her painting, really, which is fine except it feels more like light feminist allegory to me than a story of O'Keefe per se. . I thought this short story to be solid but unremarkable, given the complexity of O’Keefe’s work, I was curious about McClain’s sources, and I initially found nothing until I saw that Goodreads reviewer Kathleen McCormick actually had written to McLain to ask about what she had drawn in to create her work. Here's what McClain said:
"In addition to steeping myself in a handful of the usual biographies, the real find was stumbling on the correspondence between O'Keeffe and Maria Chabot, 1941-1949, published by University of New Mexico Press, 2003."
At that moment I appreciated the book a bit as coming from more substance than I had imagined. It kinda made me want to read those letters, which the author would of course encourage. But I would have liked more about the actual art of a great artist. ...more
I just read yet another JFK murder theory book, but saw that Hoopla was featuring this, too, so I listened to it this weekend. What's seductive about I just read yet another JFK murder theory book, but saw that Hoopla was featuring this, too, so I listened to it this weekend. What's seductive about it is that Paul Landis is the last surviving witness of the JFK assassination. A secret service agent still in his twenties, he was initially assigned to protect Eisenhower's grandchildren, then JFK's kids, then Jackie, with his partner, Cliff, which means he was within feet of the actual murder.
Much of this book I'll admit I listened to at an accelerated speed, as it focuses on Landis's life leading up to the assassination, but unless you are a budding secret agent, you don't really care about his getting into a frat or taking trips out west with his buddies. In his defense, the first half establishes that he's Everyman, just like us, grew up middle class, from the midwest, a patriot who would come to love working with the Kennedy family, especially the elegant Jackie. But the majority of readers (including me) just wanted him to get the main event.
There are some troubling revelations from Landis, including one potentially important piece of information, but most of them are actually troubling about him. I mean, I believe he is telling the truth here, but given he never told the cops of the FBI what he knew sixty years ago, he becomes an unreliable witness to the authorities.
So, riding in the car behind the Kennedys, he thought he heard three shots, thought they had come from behind him, later determining they had probably come from the Book Depository. But he knew JFK was dead before he left the car. He had undeniable proof, not to get too specific. Landis was traumatized by the killing and within a year, unable to sleep well, probably suffering from what we know now to be ptsd, he quit the secret service and never looked back. And by that I mean he actually never read the Warren Report or ANY other book about the killing! His buddy Cliff testified to the Warren Commission, but Landis was never asked to (in spite of the fact he was so close). He turned down interview opportunities from the press, and says he refused to think about it for more than fifty years!
Then, in his eighties, he was given a copy of Six Seconds in Dallas, and he read it and found flaws in it. He doesn't say, disappointingly, what other accounts he read and found flawed, but he says his book began when he started taking notes on that book. Key problem for him is that he says he found a bullet on the seat behind Jackie, didn't want to leave it there, slipped it in his pocket, later put it on JFK's gurney, and never told anyone about it til now. He doesn't discuss what he thinks that means, but leaves it to us to determine its significance. Well, he does say the Warren Report says a bullet was found on Governor Connolly's gurney, which he knows to be wrong. But he doesn't even speculate on what actually happened. He just leaves it to us to make what we will out of his revelation!
Many historians are going to find his report problematic, in that he hid this information for decades, never said anything about what amounts to a late life (he's 89 this year, 2023) confession, of sorts. His buddy Cliff wrote two books on his experiences (that I heard are much better), but Landis never wrote anything, nor reflects on having read Landis's accounts, which is disappointing.
His actual accounting--from the inside--of the assassination and aftermath is interesting and of course sad, but I am not sure what this account ultimately adds to the larger picture. He doesn't take stands on conspiracy theories or any of that. I'm glad to have read some of it, but I can't say I would recommend your reading it unless you are more hardcore assassination guy than me....more
Written in Annie Ernaux's diary sixty years ago: ‘I will write to avenge my people, j’écrirai pour venger ma race’. It echoed Rimbaud’s cry: ‘I am of Written in Annie Ernaux's diary sixty years ago: ‘I will write to avenge my people, j’écrirai pour venger ma race’. It echoed Rimbaud’s cry: ‘I am of an inferior race for all eternity.’ I was twenty-two, studying literature in a provincial faculty with the daughters and sons of the local bourgeoisie, for the most part. I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.”
Ernaux writes in spare, unadorned prose. Dull? No, but when i first read her i was less than impressed. Where were the lyrical quotes? But in her fourth book, about her father, Ernaux suddenly realized, she’ll betray her family and her working-class roots if her prose is flowery. She wants to speak for her people, largely left behind by the academy and the literary establishment.
“I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me.” (the rift between her working class roots and her middle class academic aspirations).
“I adopted a neutral, objective kind of writing, ‘flat’ in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion."
She was initially educated to be a teacher, but she left that work to study literature at university: “By choosing literary studies I elected to remain inside literature, which had become the thing of greatest value, even a way of life that led me to project myself into the novels of Flaubert or Virginia Woolf and literally live them out. Literature was a sort of continent which I unconsciously set in opposition to my social environment. And I conceived of writing as nothing less than the possibility of transfiguring reality.”
“. . .what subdued my desire and my pride. . . was life situations in which the weight of difference between a woman’s existence and that of a man was keenly felt in a society where roles were defined by gender, where contraception was prohibited and termination of pregnancy a crime.”
Writing became “a matter of delving into the unspeakable in repressed memory, and bringing light to bear on how my people lived.”
“And I wanted to describe everything that had happened to my girl’s body; the discovery of pleasure, periods.”
“When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.”
The feminist and social activist said she wanted to dedicate her Nobel “to those who, in one way or another, hope for greater freedom, equality and dignity for all humans, regardless of their sex or gender, the colour of their skin, and their culture; and with those who think of future generations, of safeguarding an Earth where a profit-hungry few make life increasingly unliveable for all populations.”...more
“Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and“Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I avoid the math when I can and put a layperson’s spin on these things. ‘Plasma is blood,’ I told him. ‘Exactly,’ he said.”
“The Fourth State of Matter," is an essay by Jo Ann Beard, published in The New Yorker in 1996. I bet it was for years a staple of writing courses all over the country. I have no recollection why someone suggested I read it, or how it is I was otherwise nudged to open and read it, but it had been opened on my computer for weeks, and I finally just read it, not knowing what it was about.
“What it is about,” is complicated. Beard’s life is almost tragic-comically falling apart. She’s the assistant editor of a Physics journal housed at the University of Iowa. One of her dogs is dying, peeing all over the place, requiring Beard to get up three times a night to clean up the mess.
And then it is not about her alone, ultimately, but I won’t tell you what happens, though you may have already guessed if you were around during 1991 and have picked up clues from me about when and where this incident takes place, but to say the least it makes a week that was already impossible to process downright unbearable. And not just for her, but for many many people. And someone very close to me was admitted to be a Physics major that fall at Iowa and had met all the Physics professors and staff, that summer, so it is not about her, of course, but it did give me an extra shudder because of that. Ripples of plasma. The waves of effects, almost never-ending.
And this is for many of us like what happens in some weeks, and not just to us, but to the world. But that dog she refuses to put down is that small, good thing that keeps her afloat:
“When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently with my dog arm. She rises slowly, faltering, and stands over me in the darkness. My peer, my colleague. In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.”
Wow, just wow, so sad and so beautifully rendered.
I just read Suze Rotolo’s memoir about the early sixties with Dylan in Greenwich Village, so it made sense to read this book, which in part focuses onI just read Suze Rotolo’s memoir about the early sixties with Dylan in Greenwich Village, so it made sense to read this book, which in part focuses on Dylan and the woman that “replaced” Rotolo, Joan Baez. Rotolo is not much mentioned in this book except as Dylan’s first real girlfriend and as-a child of American Communists--and as with Baez, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger--a major influence on his early political song-writing.
This is a really good book by a Columbia University Journalism Professor, David Hajdu, who can really write, as opposed to a lot of hack writers on music and musicians. And he has no axe to grind. In general he writes about four young, creative, ambitious people whose lives intersected for a time and had an impact on a generation.
I have read biographies of Dylan, so it is interesting to read Hajdu’s take on his early years and three close friends for a time who were also key to the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early sixties, also "blowing up" (we wouldn't have used that phrase in the anti-nuke sixties) to national prominence: Joan Baez, who was for a time the Queen of Folk, with her formal, somewhat reserved, classical style and that clear-as-a-bell voice, who became a political activist; Dylan, the scruffy poet with the unconventionally scruffy voice who emerged as the most brilliant musician and writer of the four (though not the best person) and of his generation; Mimi (Baez) Farina, Joan's younger sister, a fine singer in her own right, and good guitar player who at seventeen married Richard Farina, a writer and sometime folkie.
So young, creative, competitive, jealous; Bob really liked Mimi, Richard really liked Joan. . . Bob was jealous of Richard's writing and so wrote Tarantula; Dick was jealous of Dylan's musical success, so picked up a dulcimer and worked up music with young wife Mimi.
Fun facts: *Farina's novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, was published April 28, 1966, the 21st birthday of his wife Mimi and also the day he died in a motorcycle accident.
*Like Dylan, Richard Farina was seen as a “fabulist,” as distinct from a liar, which implies ill-intent, maybe. Farina and Dylan made up all sorts of stories about themselves. The four of them were raised in comfortable middle-class homes, in suburbia, but Dylan and Farina pretended to be be Beat, hoboes. They were wild to hang with, but could be mean.
*Joan Baez and her sister Mimi (who eventually took the last name of Richard Farina, were both musicians, Mimi younger, less famous but still well known in the scene. They all dabble in politics and literature without reading all that deeply; they’re young! It was the sixties! And did so many drugs it is hard to believe anything got done at all.
*Richard's best man in his marriage was Thomas Pynchon! He was Farina’s Cornell University friend, who also wrote the introduction to Farina’s novel.
*Joan is not seen as particularly generous with others; more competitive. Her first Vanguard album sort of exploded, a best seller, a first in the folk scene. She was a sort of traditional folk singer of English ballads at first, not a singer songwriter such as Joni Mitchell. Well, all of them were competitive with each other and others; the boys especially wanted fame and fortune, and Dylan and Baez certainly got it.
*The portrait of Dylan here is not very warm. Early on he broke into the folk scene and then became an anti-war and civil rights singers, until he shape-shifted, as he has done his whole career, Dylan said, "I don't have to B.S. anybody like those guys up on Broadway that're always writin' about 'I'm hot for you and you're hot for me--ooka dooka dicka dee.' There's other things in the world besides love and sex that're important, too. People shouldn't turn their backs on 'em just because they ain't pretty to look at. How is the world ever gonna get any better if we're afraid to look at these things.”
But then he decided not to look at those things quite as much, perhaps overwhelmed and resentful as a young man by all the pressure he felt to be a social justice icon, to be the protest singer spokesman for a generation, so he turned to poetry and electric as Joan got more politically active. And according to Hadju, he got for a time out of control with fame, and got mean and crazy. He was asked why he worked his way into folk and social justice music, and he said, "Because I had to start somewhere, and because it sold." Ouch. His main model was Woody Guthrie, whose hobo style and even biography he copied, to some extent early on.
Dylan left Joan for Sara Lownds, who became his wife, 1965-77. After a 1966 motorcycle accident (6 months after Farina’s fatal crash, though it is disputed to ever have happened, as he never was hospitalized) when his baby Jesse was 5 months old, Dylan “got out of the rat race” for eight years in Woodstock with his new family, four children in roughly five years and adopting Sara’s first child.
*Dylan was especially mean to Baez in the break-up, but he never lost touch with her, or maybe it is she that never quite gave up on him, seeing him as troubled but brilliant. In Reynaldo & Clara, a film Dylan made, Sara played Clara, and Baez played “a woman in white.” Early on she heard “Masters of War, and said, "I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad.” Dylan was to live with Baez again for several weeks after his breakup with Sara, and toured with him again in the late seventies Rolling Thunder tour, and again in the eighties . The lyrics to Dylan’s angry song, “Positively Fourth Street, assumed to be his diatribe against the Greenwich Village folk crowd whom he felt had criticized his shift to electric and his abandonment of political commitments:
A good soci0-cultural history of a period of joy and turmoil, I liked it a lot. It basically ends with that crazy day of Farina's death, one kind of ending punctuation to a time, like the Stones at Altamont. ...more
I listened to Rental Person Who Does Nothing (2023), a memoir by Shoji Morimoto, knowing little about it, but I was looking for a laugh. And I was amuI listened to Rental Person Who Does Nothing (2023), a memoir by Shoji Morimoto, knowing little about it, but I was looking for a laugh. And I was amused, but I was happily surprised that it was also very thought-provoking and interesting.
Morimoto saw online a post by a guy who offered to be a guest to anyone for a fee, and Morimoto, a graduate in physics, working odd jobs, tried out his own version of it for himself. By the end of a week he had 100 followers, and by the end of the year he had more than 100,00!
His goal in being Rental Person Who Does Nothing is to be open to doing things--not just being a guest--for people, in exchange for food and transportation only. NO fee. Now he is so famous that some people just want him to show up at places. But he turns most invitations down. They have to be interesting to him. And he admits he likes the exchanges he has with people on twitter as he reports out on his experiences. But he insists on doing “NOTHING,” though this is not actually true as he says some few things or does a few things. But not much!
He raises issues about the “value” of a person, or of work as central in people’s lives. Or money. I thought of those people in China who are deliberately working less. Or people in the sixties that tuned in, turned on, and dropped out of “the rat race.” People living “off the grid.”
Other thoughts:
*Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl (she’s a sex worker; she's a lesbian who rents out her body to both women and men). Does he get sexual offers? Yes, of course. But he (and his wife) discourage this. Maybe of course. ...more
I only listened to this 90-minute Audible Original “condensation” of Gabriel Byrne’s memoir Walking with Ghosts because I had viewed his series QuirkeI only listened to this 90-minute Audible Original “condensation” of Gabriel Byrne’s memoir Walking with Ghosts because I had viewed his series Quirke based on Benjamin Black’s mystery series, though at a glance I can see that many of my Goodreads friends loved this book. I’ll say that many people think that actors are really articulate, but in fact there is no guarantee of that, in that they are on stage or screen speaking the words of others. But Bryne is actually a terrific writer, and having him perform his own words makes this a special treat, and it has convinced me to read the book in its original form.
Byrne is lyrical, self-deprecating, sometimes melancholy, often hilarious, as he tells a version of his life story mainly centered in Dublin, usually loving family and friend and school stories, but there’s a few tough stories, one involving childhood sexual abuse, one of his dear sister’s mental illness, and the story of his long struggle with drinking and depression.
"My depression, it seems, was often linked to my drinking."
When drinking, “I was a me that I liked. . . But that was before it betrayed me. . . had become that drunkard on the street."
He talks about different jobs he did before coming to acting (plumber, dishwasher, toilet attendant), which he came to in spite of the fact that he was always shy and self-conscious. And working with Richard Burton, whom he met and immediately got drunk with, both of them denying they were drunkards (he plays the alcoholic pathologist, Quirke, in the tv series).
Note to self: I am reading all these books on ghosts but did not read this deliberately because of the word “ghost” in the title. I just always assume a memoir with the word ghosts in it refers to one looking back on memories, that we are always inhabited by the “ghosts” of the past.
“I begin to apply my makeup. My mask. Our tragedy, O'Neill said, is that we are haunted not just by the masks others wear but by the masks we wear ourselves. We all act all the time. Life makes us necessary deceivers. Except maybe when we are alone.” ...more
I was skeptical that Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink), a man with no musical background, could pull this off, but I eventually settled in tI was skeptical that Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink), a man with no musical background, could pull this off, but I eventually settled in to enjoy it. I am old enough to have experienced all his music basically as it came out, and have been a fan of his work and his duo work with Art Garfunkel, so I liked it when Simon took a close, passionate and technical look back at the construction of some of his music across the years.
Audible has a number of short memoir/musical events from a range of musicians, and I like there how the musicians tell their own stories, playing music as they talk. Intimate, personal. Gladwell is a fan of Simon, and essentially does what he does in his books; he develops a theory and supports it with the help of Simon's own testimony, which is not exactly like Simon telling it in his way, but over time I came to appreciate Gladwell's analysis. And he's not a critic, he thinks Simon is a genius--see the title Miracle and Wonder--and never takes him to task for anything he has ever done, even Capetown, his disastrous Broadway musical (give him credit for bravery, for not repeating himself, and so on).
Gladwell sees Simon essentially as an experimental songwriter, who likes to try new things--South African music, Western African music, Jazz, Jamaican music, spirituals. He thinks a lot of the music is in conversation with Simon's father, who was himself a musician. Gladwell doesn't claim this is a biography, but he does take us through his whole career in roughly five hours, so we are not taking a deep dive, except when Simon himself lovingly recalls sources of his songs. I liked best Simon talking and playing, of course. I would have liked more Simon and less Gladwell, for sure. He doesn't know anything about music, so can't truly engage with him on the subject at hand, though he has a fan's enthusiasm for the project; we can relate, as fans.
We get one whole song to end it, "American Tune," which was originally done by Simon when he was a young man, a kind of reflection on the late sixties, Vietnam, Nixon, but he sings it now with renewed relevance (and in great voice!) to the current American scene. I like Simon's taking us through how songs such as "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" came about. One of the great songwriters ever. And I had not heard some of his later work, which I am encouraged to check out.
Here's the lyrics and a link to the whole songs from The Seven Psalms, not pop music, but a kind o meditation on life and death and The Present Moment. Intimate and poetic:
I listened on Audible to Jeff Tweedy read/talk us through one version of his life story, in about 90 minutes. No pretense, just a regular guy, a musicI listened on Audible to Jeff Tweedy read/talk us through one version of his life story, in about 90 minutes. No pretense, just a regular guy, a musician I maybe connected to more since he is from my town, Chicago. And I know he is written more about his life than this, but I honestly hadn't known lots of details. In this story he shares without apology his struggles with family, mental health and addiction, giving most of the credit for his survival to both music itself and his wife. He's very likable, very down to earth, honest.
In these Audible Original Words+Music productions the musician talks and sings stripped down versions of some of the songs he sees as important in his life and career. These versions from Tweedy feel very intimate, like he is in his living room, which is where he and his family shared music throughout the pandemic. If you like Wilco or Tweedy's earlier band, Uncle Tupelo, this is a must for you. ...more
The Young Man is the latest short memoir--64 pages--in the lifelong effort Annie Ernaux has made to document her life while reflecting on time, class,The Young Man is the latest short memoir--64 pages--in the lifelong effort Annie Ernaux has made to document her life while reflecting on time, class, gender, family and writing. Sometimes the books take a wider angle, situating her life in the socio-political-historical context of the time, and sometimes she takes a close look at a particular person or event in her life. This is one of those latter books, focusing on an affair she had when she was in her early fifties with a young man more than thirty years younger than her.
The Young Man was partly written in 1988-90, after the affair ended, and revised in 2022 when it was published in French, (and also English, among others). Around this time she began drafting the story of her “back street abortion,” titled Happening, in English. She wrote other short works on her experience doing what a young wife would have done at the time (as most women do now), managing a household while negotiating a career (A Frozen Woman) and having an affair with a married man, A Simple Passion.
"If I don't write them down, things didn't come to an end, they were only lived."
Ernaux admits she knew she would write about the affair, where she was led to recall her relationship with a boy not much younger than the man she was having an affair with, the boy who had impregnated her and then was out of her life. She hears a song with the guy she was having an affair with that she knew well in the early sixties when she had the abortion. She has coffee with the man in a cafe across the hospital where she had the abortion.
The young man wants to have a baby with her, but Ernaux is 54, and though this intrigues her, she had known at 28 when she had her second son that she would not want more children. She writes about the continuing double-standard of being an older woman (shame! scandal!) having a relationship with a very much younger man.
The book is very short so it is not much more than a series of reflections about the experience. If this were the first book you picked up from Ernaux you might be severely disappointed by its brevity, its plain, flat prose, it’s matter-of-fact tone, but if you are like me, one who has read most of her work, you are grateful for a little more reflection about this affair that had been mentioned in previous works. And grateful for another look at her style, her approach to life and writing.
I listened to it this morning but also bought a copy, so look forward to reading it again....more
"I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person."
I have this feeling I might have liked this curmudgeon of a book moreThe Misanthrope
"I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person."
I have this feeling I might have liked this curmudgeon of a book more had I read 2-3 more of his other novels first. Yes, this is my first Thomas Bernhard book (I think!). It's a kind of rant against many things he hates, and a kind of homage to his friend, Paul Wittgenstein's nephew. That was the hook for me, as I love Wittgenstein as philosopher (especially the zen-koan-like Philosophical Investigations) and I am intrigued by his personal life--the wealth, the mental health issues, the brilliance, the madness. But I thought it was less about Paul than Thomas.
The book is called a novel, but it is widely described as autobiography/memoir or some combination of the two. The opening is a focus on Thomas, in a sanitarium for tumors (he died at 58 at a life time of lung illnesses), and Paul, in a psychiatric wing nearby (though they rarely see each other, as Thomas does not want to see his friend in decline, it's too depressing for him). I am somewhat influenced by having read an article about a book by Bernhard's brother, who referred to him as a lifelong "demon" in his life. Thomas said the center of their friendship was great talks about music, and castigating everything from psychiatry, the literary life, literary awards, the German press, to "ignorant" Viennese people, and so on. They hate walking, nature, the country.
I'm told Bernhard was at his best energetic and entertaining and at his worst nasty, but in this book there are only reported conversations, zero dialogue at all. I am interested in the meditations Bernhard writes about the world of health vs. the sick, something that both he and Paul suffered with their whole lives. Both were mad and ill, in different ways. Both were sort of capricious snobs with very low views of human nature. I did like the award story where the presenter knew nothing about him; that was funny. In spite of what I say here I read it straight through--100 pages, all without paragraphing. I sometimes like to read about misanthropes, as in Moliere, or Celine, but he abandoned his friend near the end because he had become "grotesque," an ironic description to make for a man who was himself ravaged from disease all his life, also in and out of hospitals.
So, Ilse and other Bernhard fans, what's your favorite Bernhard?...more
“Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together”--Deborah Levy
The Cost of Living “Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together”--Deborah Levy
The Cost of Living is part two of the Living Autobiography Deborah Levy is constructing in pieces, a kind of feminist response to George Orwell’s Why I Write. Short works, reminding me of the short autobiographical works by Annie Ernaux. So many men’s autobiographies and memoirs, and far fewer from women, over the years. What is it to be a woman--and writer--in a particular place in time? Both Ernaux and Levy are strong, independent women, among the best writers of their generations, both wives and mothers and daughters trying to commit to the writing life, and they answer these questions in their own ways, critiquing patriarchal systems that have always been limiting in ways for women writers.
“When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us.”
I liked this volume even more than the first, Things I Don't Want to Know, as it dealt with her dealing with the powerful impacts of two major events--1) the end of her marriage, at nearly age fifty, and 2) the death of her mother, even as she saw her daughters less and less. She was alone! She was free! But as she says, freedom is never free; it comes at a cost. Trauma, grief.
Levy names no men in this volume, choosing to call her former husband “the father of my daughters,” and very few are even mentioned. She writes of and cites other women writers such as de Beauvoir and Duras, but only mentions a couple male writers, Camus and James Baldwin. In this process she manages to build a room of her own--a shed, actually. A powerful story of a woman who has learned after years of self-sacrifice how to be strong.
You know, I own 2-3 novels by Levy that I have never read, Hot Milk, Swimming Home. I might appreciate her story even more if I read at least one of these books. I suppose it’s kind of odd to begin with her memoirs, but it made sense since I had just read a lot of the Ernaux. ...more
Women Holding Things by the--dare I say quirky--Maira Kalman is yet another book I have loved from her, and is a piece with Girls Standing on Lawns, tWomen Holding Things by the--dare I say quirky--Maira Kalman is yet another book I have loved from her, and is a piece with Girls Standing on Lawns, though that last one was a combination of drawings and photographs of. . . . you guessed it! Girls standing on lawns! So let’s see if you can build on this expertise and predict what Women Holding Things is about?
Yes, correct, but the verb holding gets multiple definitions here, so yes, it’s about the act of actual holding stuff but also things such as “holding on to past regrets,” and holding hands, holding your breath, holding opinions, and so on.
Maira Kalman lovingly shows you some of Women Holding Things, a kind of love letter to women who hold so many things:
Gertrude Stein holding true to herself writing things very few people liked or even read. Woman holding a book. Woman in my dreams walking through almond blossoms holding a giant boulder. Holding a granddaughter. Hortense Cezanne holding her own. Woman holding and consoling a child. Woman holding a man. Women holding grudges.
You can’t hold time.
Maira lost a lot of family to the Holocaust. She paints some of them from photographs, one of many women holding things before many of them died in Auschwitz.
There are also girls and men holding things in the book. And digressions, hurray; as in, Let me tell you about my father, and so on.
The book emerged, she said, out of a smaller project she did during the pandemic, and then it just grew.
Proust is mentioned in this first of six volumes by Karl Ove Knausgard and so of course he is signaling that this is what I take to be "Dad is dead."
Proust is mentioned in this first of six volumes by Karl Ove Knausgard and so of course he is signaling that this is what I take to be his contribution to the oeuvre, the modernist reflection on time and memory, the recording of one ordinary life. Manny's review is a model of one way to respond to it; you list all the details of any given moment, yawn. As in James Joyce's Ulysses; an 800 page book about the waking hours of one man over one days, which I do appreciate, as I do Proust. And I do like memoir. But what does this particular contribution to the genre really add up to?
Min Kamp (which I take it is not to be a commentary of Adolf Hitler's autobiography) or, My Struggle, is focused on a son's coming-of-age, with emphasis on his relationship with his father, though it is mainly about his feelings after the death of his father. The early parts are about school, girls, and his love of alcohol, and his becoming a writer. We don't learn that much about the nature of his passionate commitment to writing--where it comes from, what his predilections are-- and we don't know much about his relationships with girls, or anyone, really, as all of this falls away when he comes to his grandmother's house to see the place his father and grandmother basically destroyed as his father drank himself to death.
Edgy? Well, there must be at least 200 pages about Karl Ove and his brother throwing out literally hundreds of empty bottles and rotting food and cleaning up bodily fluids as his eighty-year-old grandmother, unraveling, watches, in a daze, at the beginning of dementia. The most memorable scene in the whole book is where Karl Ove, his brother, and grandmother, in the process of cleaning, in the aftermath of alcoholic self-destruction, get drunk together. This death is tough for him, as it has been for all of us, the death of our fathers, but what is the nature of his insight?
“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
Karl Ove cries all of the time in grief, as I did, as we all did or will, regardless of our relationship with our fathers. But we don't learn very much about Dad, or anyone other than Karl Ove, who ruminates, reflects, feels. What we learn is that Karl Ove is sensitive; he notices everything and writes it all down, And he is a loner, a lone wolf, no one really can reach him, emotionally. So he's a brooding hipster, an artiste, a (white) guy telling the story of his emotional state while growing up and experiencing his first and maybe most important encounter with Death:
“I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.”
I have only read the first of the Proust version of this autobiographical experiment, and will read more as I enter my eighth decade--I'm gonna read a lot of Big Books, I recently decided. But unless you tell me Knausgard attains some greater insight about something in the later books, I won't read on. I just didn't find this remarkable. I found Annie Ernaux's more minimalist explorations of her life much more interesting than this work. Oh, I could relate to it in that he talks of the seventies and rock music, and sure, he writes well, but I just don't see the genius that most of my (at least many of my fellow older white male) Goodreads friends see in it.
For all of you Patti Smith completists, this is a collection of photographs accompanied by brief explanatory writing that Smith published one recent yFor all of you Patti Smith completists, this is a collection of photographs accompanied by brief explanatory writing that Smith published one recent year on Instagram. I have looked through many of her collected photographs, so this was no surprise, but I like all the literary/artistic/musical love notes to famous friends, alive or gone.
This says preview, but it may be the whole thing (which you could also see on Instagram:
As an Ernaux completist, I saw this 2001 book was available in English translation in late 2022, so I began reading it. Ernaux has one short book abouAs an Ernaux completist, I saw this 2001 book was available in English translation in late 2022, so I began reading it. Ernaux has one short book about her passion and despair at twenty, having an affair with a married man, just paralyzed by it. A Simple Passion (1989), 80 pages. Not a feminist text, necessarily, but sort of a source text for feminist study, I'd say, about women and desire.
And thirteen years later, Ernaux, a literary sensation in France who might have begun to “control the message” and make herself more likable to her growing audience, well-published and well-known, publishes her original journal about his affair, unedited: The sex that swallows her whole, the waiting for him to call, the doubt, the self-loathing, the despair. A companion piece to A Simple Passion, maybe especially for writers. How do you take the raw materials of an experience and "capture" the "essence" of it? You keep a daily diary and you have to be honest, brutally honest.
In the process, Ernaux quotes and is guided by the Master Memoirist, Proust, and she also reads Anna Karenina in the process of the affair, realizing she is the tragic Anna, and her lover, S., a married Russian diplomat, is Vronsky.
Early on I glanced at the low overall rating of this book, and imagined short reviews: Idiot! But I think this is a kind of treatise on the joys and pitfalls of sex/desire. Sometimes I think of it as an almost Calvinist warning about sex, as all-consuming as it is for her in the throes of passion. But it’s everything, the joy of sex and the depths of despair.
What is it like to be in an affair at 48 with a (married) man of 35, a Russian diplomat? A Simple Passion is auto-fiction about this affair (though with some of the central details changed). It’s evocative, elusive, it’s everything--desire, lots of sex, waiting, anguish. And in her actual journal of that time--if we’re interested--we can see the broader context for the novel, not fiction (though let’s acknowledge that all memoir is in part fiction, selective). More descriptions of sex, and darker, filled with the madness and delusions of desire (unless she is actually in the throes of sex, when she has no doubts about his attraction for her).
“I perceived there was a ‘truth’ in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion—something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation. I thought that this, too, should be brought to life.”
But the journal and the novel reveal a kind of insular passion: “The outside world is almost totally absent from these pages.”
Ernaux also writes a lot about the relationship of writing to experience: “ . . . words set down on paper to capture the thoughts and sensations of a given moment are as irreversible as time—are time itself.”
“It [writing in the journal] was a way of enduring the wait until we saw each other again, of heightening the pleasure by recording the words and acts of passion. Most of all, it was a way to save life, save from nothingness the thing that most resembles it”.
“This journal will have been a cry of passion and pain from start to finish.”
She rereads it and introduces it to us: “This is a notebook full of sorrow, with few glimmers of wild delight.”
S. is in our eyes not necessarily a “catch.” He’s a Russian diplomat that defends Stalin, is shallow, interested in a show of material wealth in clothes, and so on. He’s not physically remarkable. It’s about desire, which may not always bear a close relationship to reason, she makes clear. After months she sees a dimple on his chin she had never noticed, and when she is with him they are naked almost constantly.
S. is married, and we learn his wife is short, not thin, which somehow she admits makes her feel better, superior. They meet at a few social occasions, even attending some events together. Is the fact that Ernaux is the unapologetic “other woman” part of why some people rate this so low? Not sure, but there’s not much forgiveness for women such as Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or Annie Ernaux as “homewreckers,” (though that does not actually happen). But the point is not an apology from Ernaux; it is to reveal with brutal honesty what this was like for her (with the possibility that it may be useful to others--maybe particularly women). No shame. Literature.
“I understand Tristan and Isolde, the passion that consumes and cannot be extinguished, despite--because of--the obstacles.”
“Admit it--I’ve never wanted anything but love. And literature. I only wrote to fill the void. . . everything that was a story of flesh and love.”
“. . . raising life to the level of a literary novel.”
“What I’ve experienced with S. is as beautiful as a Russian novel.” In other words, even the despair she pays for passion is worth the investment: “It’s still a beautiful story.”
Michel Foucault: “The highest good is to make one’s life a work of art.”
Then later Ernaux says: “It’s not much of a story, just a layer of egocentric suffering.”
And: “Everything I wished for on January 1, 1989, more or less came true, except I didn’t know the price I’d have to pay.”
Except she did, as she had done things like this before, and she knew S. was married and would never leave his wife, not ever an issue.
She is brutal about her loss of self in love: “. . . the ‘male,’ the man, he whom I recognize as a god, for a while, before disillusionment, oblivion.”
And she admits it is the act, not a “relationship”: “I don’t know anything about him.”
But she wouldn’t have it any other way: “Passion filled to bursting,” even if it leads to despair. “What matters is having and giving pleasure.” “I am a voracious woman.” “Writing as desire.”
And she can’t call him, he is married, so she is waiting for him to call and show up when he can, so her imagination runs wild, with jealousy, and other emotions. But mainly desire.
Sometimes she thinks sex is the only thing that matters, the only time when she is truly present, but other times she is aware that it can be an erasure of self, too. At one point she says that sex at 48 is like reviving her 22-year-old self, when she felt exactly the same, consumed and obliterated.
Ernaux, the Nobel Prize in Literature awardee of 2022, can surely write....more
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