Now reading...

[jazzbo]

GOM, was that "Confessions of Zeno"? If so, one of my favorite novels, one I can read ever decade and get something else out of it because of my life experience. One of the great works of literature that has a little bit of everything in it and is stone cold funny while being deep.

I'm currently reading Caetano Velloso's "Tropical Truth," after finishing "Jazz on the Barbary Coast" and "The Hours."

[ghost of miles]

GOM, was that "Confessions of Zeno"? If so, one of my favorite novels, one I can read ever decade and get something else out of it because of my life experience. One of the great works of literature that has a little bit of everything in it and is stone cold funny while being deep.

Yep, one & the same (the new Everyman translation changes the title). I still haven't started it--read MISS LONELYHEARTS first and then got sidetracked with Horace McCoy's KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE--but it's now about to step up to bat in my literary reading game. I can definitely empathize with any book about a guy who continuously vows to quit smoking and then fails; it took me a long, long time to succeed. You know the old Mark Twain joke--"It's easy to quit smoking--I've done it hundreds of times."

[jazzbo]

Yes, that is a great vehicle he uses in the book. I love this book, it really resonates with me somehow about life, and I find it so amazing how he uses humor to illuminate truths of human life in this book. I'm sure you are going to enjoy it a lot.

It's going to be a lot different than the Horace McCoy I bet (I haven't read that one.)

[ghost of miles]

I found the McCoy a bit disappointing, actually. I really enjoyed his earlier book, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY, but found KISS sketchily implausible at times. I'm prepared to accept that to some degree in mid-20th-century pulp noir work (otherwise I wouldn't read David Goodis), but crazy breaks just happened too much to the protagonist in KISS for my taste.

[jazzbo]

Well thanks for that information. I'd probably read it given the chance, just for the writing, the tone that McCoy brings to the page. He and Woolrich were sort of poets in that way: even if the plot and characterization were implausible or thin, their writing and the mood and tone it conveyed fascinates me! (Goodis too.)

And for my money Jim Thompson is in a whole 'nother league!

Edited April 18, 2003 by jazzbo

[ghost of miles]

Ronald Morris' WAIT UNTIL DARK: JAZZ AND THE UNDERWORLD 1880-1940. Morris, so far, seems to be positing that gangsterism was actually a positive force in the development of early jazz. Interesting thesis! I'll probably start a thread on that topic after I finish the book.

[Chuck Nessa]

I am trying to read "the Blessing" by Gregory Orr. Orr is a well known poet, but this is a memoir about accidently killing his younger brother in a hunting accident when he was 12.

I heard Orr interviewed on NPR when the book came out, and put it on my Christmas list last year. My daughter bought it for me and I started to read.

I can't get past page 11, 'cause I know the "kill" is coming, and I just can't do it.

The book has been left untouched for a couple of months.

[alankin]

Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay" - an epic novel of the 1930's & 40s and the birth of the comic book industry. I'm about 100 pages into it. I like the part where the cousin helps smuggle the Golem out of Prague...

[ghost of miles]

Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay" - an epic novel of the 1930's & 40s and the birth of the comic book industry. I'm about 100 pages into it. I like the part where the cousin helps smuggle the Golem out of Prague...

I loved that book, Alan, and I think you'll enjoy the rest of it as well. Chabon did a marvelous job in recreating NYC of the 30's/40's/50's; IMO he's one of the most entertaining literary-mainstream writers around these days.

[jazzbo]

Finished Caetano Veloso's "Tropical Truth" and Hampton Hawes' "Raise up off Me" and have started to re-read "The Zap Gun" by Philip K. Dick. (For like the fifth time.) There really is no timelier book in several ways; it's a great companion to the time we have now in America with our myth-making dogs at the helm. I'D LOVE TO SEE SOMEONE MAKE A MOVIE OF THIS!

[ghost of miles]

James Naremore, MORE THAN NIGHT: FILM NOIR IN ITS CONTEXTS. Naremore's a professor of English and film studies here at IU, and a jazz buff as well; I'm going to have him on as a guest for my jazz in post-WWII French cinema radio program.

[Jazzmoose]

I'm currently reading Blinded by the Right by David Brock. But don't tell weizy!!

[ghost of miles]

I'm currently reading Blinded by the Right by David Brock. But don't tell weizy!!

Ahhhhh, you know he's got a copy, buried in a closet somewhere... waits till the wife & kids are asleep and then sneaks a few pages every night.

[pryan]

Just finished Douglas Henry Daniels' book on Lester Young. Daniels spent a very long time interviewing and researching for this book and the results are superlative. Much interesting reading as far as jazz and Africain-American history goes. I gained a lot of insight into Pres' early years when he was travelling with his father's band, etc. An excellent portrayal of Young as well as the struggles faced by Blacks in the late-Nineteenth/first half of the Twentieth century.

Now it's on to the Bunny Berigan bio.

[ghost of miles]

Just started Graham Greene's CONFIDENTIAL AGENT, a 1939 "entertainment" that Greene later disowned, but which a friend and Greene fan endorsed with much enthusiasm.

[Guest Mnytime]

Last couple months I have been re-reading some of my favorite Russian Lit by Authors not named Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The Master & Margarita-Mikhail Bulgakov

Dead Souls-Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

Diary of a Madman-Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

Father's & Sons-Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Home of the Gentry-Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

A Hero of Our Times-Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov

Oblomov-Ivan Goncharov

Cancer Ward-Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk- Kikolai Leskov

At the moment reading:

The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin-Vladimir Voinovich

Anyone interested in Pre-Ordering Chris Albertson's update on Bessie Smith

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books

Edited May 21, 2003 by Mnytime

[ghost of miles]

Alan Wald's WRITING FROM THE LEFT: NEW ESSAYS ON RADICAL CULTURE AND POLITICS. Wald is writing a three-volume history of 20th-century American leftists and authors (only published volume so far is EXILES FROM A FUTURE TIME). Fascinating to read how many radical writers went underground into the pulp industry after WWII; anybody who's interested in leftist culture, history, and art should check out his work.

[jazzbo]

I'm reading "Blue Note Records: the Biography." It's fun to read about Blue Note, and the fact that the author has strong opinions and doesn't adore all the recordings is no problem to me. BUT there are some really sloppy elements here, factual-wise, and they really breeze through the first fifteen years or so and the book is heavily lopsided towards the modern recordings which is unfortunate. It's understandable, and I may be among the only ones not really happy about it, but it just doesn't seem balanced to me.

Anyway, for most residents this would be an interesting read.

[ghost of miles]

Checking in from Douglas, Michigan (just 60 miles south of Chuck Nessa's swell jazz joint) where I'm on the next-to-last day of my vacation, perusing the following:

Robert Dupuis, BUNNY BERIGAN: ELUSIVE LEGEND OF JAZZ

William L. Van Deburg, NEW DAY IN BABYLON: THE BLACK POWER MOVEMENT AND AMERICAN CULTURE, 1965-1975

Chester Himes, LONELY CRUSADE

Arthur Conan Doyle, THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Henry James, THE ART OF FICTION AND OTHER ESSAYS

However, I have no CD player with me and am suffering a serious jazz jones... particularly with the CDs I bought from Chuck smokin' a hole in my suitcase.

[Late]

Good gracious, Ghost! I just read through this thread ... you are on the voracious side of reading! Kudos. I read so slowly, and wish I didn't. And ... most of my reading, to be honest, is student essays.

I am, however, into some good books of poetry:

• Killarney Clary: Potential Stranger (Univ. Chicago Press) I think Clary, while perhaps not a household name in poetry circles, is the pre-eminent prose poet in America today. Tight, condensed, amazing stuff. It's strange, but after reading some of her poems, I went straight to the player and put on Webern. His shorter work almost seems a sonic representation of Clary's use of language.

• Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon, Choi Young-mi: Three Poets of Modern Korea (Sarabande) I'm reading this mostly for Dong-seon's work, which is very fine. James Kimbrell's introduction also opened my eyes to some conditions I have little knowledge of — namely, virtually no North Korean poetry exists in translation for foreign readers.

• Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Hours (Northwestern) Going back to this one; haven't started yet. It's nice to have the German right there, in this edition. My German's pretty poor, but with the translation right next to it, I can follow it much better.

[ghost of miles]

I just finished a couple of poetry books myself--JELLY ROLL, a collection of blues poems by Kevin Young (who teaches here at IU) and DISCOGRAPHY, a book of poems with jazz motifs by a former IU student and friend of mine, Sean Singer (he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for it). Right now I'm absorbed by Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN (anybody see the movie they made of this? Not the 50's one, which I hear is atrocious, but the recent one) and Eric Porter's WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED JAZZ?, which I think would be enjoyed by anybody who liked Scott Deveaux's approach in THE BIRTH OF BEBOP.

[pryan]

I just started the newly revised bio of Bessie Smith, entitled Bessie, penned by "our own" Chris Albertson. I've only read the author's note and the first chapter, but I'm really digging it so far.

[pryan]

I just started the newly revised bio of Bessie Smith, entitled Bessie, penned by "our own" Chris Albertson. I've only read the author's note and the first chapter, but I'm really digging it so far.

[Brad]

I'm trying to finish Geoffrey Haydon's book about the Massey Hall Concert and I'm sort of perusing part of Allyns Shipton's A New History of Jazz.

I'm also re-reading All Quiet on the Western Front (haven't looked at it since high school; my son just read it).

Also, my son and I are reading together the newest Harry Potter book.

[Late]

Deja vu!

Brad, I've been thinking about All Quiet on the Western Front off and on for the last couple of days. It's been 20 (!) years since I read that book, and I need to revisit it. Unfortunately, some of my reminiscings about this book involve John Boy from the Waltons, as he was in the made-for-television movie based on this novel(la).

Ghost, I'll have to look for that book by Singer. Oxford University Press is (purportedly) compiling an anthology on the literature of jazz, and I wonder if your friend has been contacted. What with winning the Yale Younger Poets award, I'd assume he has (or should be). The anthology has been in the works for some time now, and I think it might currently be on hold indefinitely. The way it was described to me was that it could be used as a textbook, say, for college literature courses. Should be interesting when it eventually sees publication light.

What Melville do you all like? (Outside of Moby Dick, that is.) I'll profess to having read not-enough (read: very little) of his work, but am hungry for more. I always feel, though, that in order to fully engage myself with his writing that I need to be stranded somewhere, without contact with the world at large.

Additionally ... any fans of Williams' Paterson?

Edited June 24, 2003 by Late