Now reading...

[spinlps]

Cool, LET IT BE is one of the titles I received. The Smiths MEAT IS MURDER is written by Joe Pernice. He doesn't write about the album as much as he details his teen years when that album was released. Great approach... and is there nothing that guy can't do?

The 33 1/3 series is pretty interesting. I've read only a couple of them, but want to read more... Colin Meloy of the Decemberists wrote the one about the Replacements' LET IT BE.

Re: Eggers, that's my feeling about much of the McSweeney's school. I like The Believer periodical quite a bit, but the McS kids seem a bit cloying to me a lot of the time.

[jazzbo]

Now reading the A. J. Albany memoir "Low Down."

Scary. Dark. Excelent writing as others have pointed out.

[B. Goren.]

[brownie]

Been re-reading Isaac Babel's 'Red Cavalry'.

Had read this several years ago. Still a fascinating experience!

[ejp626]

Am now about 1/2 through At Lady Molly's, which is the 4th novel in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. I think this is where the series really picks up some momentum. That's not to say it is a chore reading the earlier books. I started to appreciate them about 25 pages into book 1. There is a detached wit in the observations of characters. What is interesting, and clearly part of the construction of the series, that friends fall away and return with the ebb and flow of time. This seems particularly true of this class of English (educated at Oxbridge) and living in London, so they do still run into each other from time to time. The interweaving of people through marriage and other alliances/dalliances seems almost suffocating at times.

I wonder a few things. Are there contemporary settings that have the same layeredness, either in the US or UK? The places that strike me the most likely are still London or New York, since people who have made it some scene in either place are extremely reluctant to leave. Also, academic communities have considerable continuity (among the professors at any rate) that one doesn't seem to find in other settings. Some of the old tropes of fiction (long-standing grudges in particular) just don't seem as relevant in contemporary US where there is still such mobility. I suppose I am a bit of an exception, but I've made 4 or 5 moves of over 500 miles, depending on how you count them, and make smaller moves almost every year. Almost none of my old friends are living where I originally met them. And yet virtually all sitcoms depend on the same crowd showing up and dealing with the same things, year in year out. Would it be possible to create a tv program that really reflected this unrootedness or would that just be emotionally unsatisfying? In some small way, Seinfeld approaches this, with George's many jobs and the transitory nature of all relationships outside the core four plus familiy (and Newmann). I suppose most of the non-sitcom shows have shake-ups among the staff. I suppose it comes down to television comedy requiring familiarity not required by comic or semi-comic novels. But maybe I am simply expecting an unreasonable amount of uprootedness -- most sitcoms that go past five years have some personnel changes (for spinoffs if nothing else) -- MASH, Taxi, All in the Family, LA Law, Barney Miller -- and that may be a much more representative example of how frequently most people move than expecting changes every few episodes.

Anyway, to get back to the book, there are a few really amusing characters, particularly this titled character who has adopted radical politics but still can't go the last step and turn his estate over to the masses. I'm still feeling that this is closest to a modernized version of Trollope's The Pallisers.

[jazzbo]

Fascinating! Great!

[birdanddizzy]

[BruceH]

Is this any good?

[frank m]

Just finished Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury" . Now into Ackroyd's brief bio of Chaucer. (My wofe tidied it up and now neither one of us have been able to find it, so I can finish it. Just started Freeman Dyson's "Infinite in All Directions" which has much merit. He's an interesting guy, or was.

[birdanddizzy]

Is this any good?

This is one to read.

This book is the base of the movie "'Round midnight" of Betrand Tavernier with Dexter Gordon.

'Round Midnight is a brilliant movie ! And, if you haven't already seen it, read Paudras' Dance of the Infidels first. It makes the movie that much better.

Francis Paudras makes the case that Bud was a co-inventor of what we call bebop. Paudras was close to Bud for several years and played a key part in his stay in France during the early 1960s, so this book is a kind of "work of love".

[7/4]

...guitar porn and great stories.

[ghost of miles]

Getting ready to start Thomas Merton's THE SIGN OF JONAS, and dipping into both Will Friedwald's JAZZ SINGING and Alec Wilder's AMERICAN POPULAR SONG.

[Alexander Hawkins]

Just finished Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote. Quite simply the most beautiful book I've ever read.

Been re-reading bits of this lately (something in itself - I'm definitely not one for re-reading things in general) - and I stick by what I said earlier. It's amazing stuff

[BruceH]

Is this any good?

This is one to read.

This book is the base of the movie "'Round midnight" of Betrand Tavernier with Dexter Gordon.

'Round Midnight is a brilliant movie ! And, if you haven't already seen it, read Paudras' Dance of the Infidels first. It makes the movie that much better.

Francis Paudras makes the case that Bud was a co-inventor of what we call bebop. Paudras was close to Bud for several years and played a key part in his stay in France during the early 1960s, so this book is a kind of "work of love".

I saw 'Round Midnight when it came out, but without having read any bio of Powell first. Dexter Gordon was very good in it, though it struck me at the time that there was quite a bit of Lester Young in his character.

[Kalo]

Just finished Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote. Quite simply the most beautiful book I've ever read.

Been re-reading bits of this lately (something in itself - I'm definitely not one for re-reading things in general) - and I stick by what I said earlier. It's amazing stuff

Maybe I need to try this translation. I ploughed through the Putnam version last year for my reading group, but bogged down halfway through Volume II.

Recent books read: Richard Stern's Other Men's Daughters(written in 1973). Set in Boston/Cambridge in the late 1960s early 1970s, it was sort of a time capsule for this Bostonian. Very well written and sensitively observed. One critic wrote that it was reminiscent of Lolita as re-imagined by Chekhov.

Tom Perrotta's Little Children, is also very good, though is set in the here and now and more of a standard comic novel than the above. I've read all of his books and this one was very good. He's a funny, observent writer who is exactly my age, so that might be part of why I respond to him. His best book is Election (also made into an excellent movie, by far Alexander "Sideways" Payne's best), and my second favorite is his short story collection Bad Haircut, but this one runs a close third. Give Joe College a skip, though.

I also just reread Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman. It's about Sylvia Plath and Richard Hughes, but it's really more about the ethical and philosophical problems of biography in general. I'm a big fan of Malcolm's writing, whatever the subject. In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer are her most amazing books, but they're all so provocatively good that you could start anywhere.

Edited February 12, 2006 by Kalo

[BruceH]

I just re-read some Peanuts strips.

[ghost of miles]

beware - bad book full of mistakes of both fact and emphasis -

Yes, I'm treating it as a somewhat novelistic treatment of LB's life. I'll keep an eye out for THE ESSENTIAL LENNY BRUCE--I'm really eager to find something reasonably well-written about him. Been listening to that Shout! Factory compilation, though the set I picked up had no booklet--and also used an LB track for this week's Night Lights--hence my renewed interest in him right now.

So, is Annie Ross supposed to be the LB love interest that Goldman refers to as "the member of a highly successful vocalese trio?"

Currently reading J.G. Farrell's THE SINGAPORE GRIP.

Edited February 19, 2006 by ghost of miles

[frank m]

Farrell------His best work was the "Siege of Krishnapur" IMHO. How he could make such humor out of all that blood is forever beyond me. Let us know how the newer Farrell is. Haven't yet read it.

Do you know how Farrel died. Strange that!

[jazzbo]

Finished reading he bio of Abraham, which I really found interesting.

Then reread Chandler's "THe Hight Window." Not one of his best, but I love to read Chandler.

[ghost of miles]

Farrell------His best work was the "Siege of Krishnapur" IMHO. How he could make such humor out of all that blood is forever beyond me. Let us know how the newer Farrell is. Haven't yet read it.

Do you know how Farrel died. Strange that!

I'm hoping to eventually read SIEGE. He died fishing, didn't he? Pulled out to sea and drowned?

[ghost of miles]

Then reread Chandler's "THe Hight Window." Not one of his best, but I love to read Chandler.

Me too. The ones I find myself returning to are FAREWELL, MY LOVELY and THE LADY IN THE LAKE.

[Jazzmoose]

Finally picked up The Hamlet when I was in the mood for Faulkner (which happens a lot lately, after my move!) rather than The Sound and the Fury for the umpteenth time...

[birdanddizzy]

Just finshed :

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now reading :

[ghost of miles]

Currently reading Antony Beevor's PARIS AFTER THE LIBERATION. This is the same author who wrote THE FALL OF BERLIN 1945 and STALINGRAD... good, accessible historian. (Entertaining, too... he has a great quote from somebody saying, "There's no doubt that De Gaulle loves France... he just doesn't like Frenchmen.") I'd like to read his book on the Spanish Civil War as well.

Edited March 6, 2006 by ghost of miles

[Ron S]

I was going to wait for the briefest history to come out, but figured this will have to do in the meantime.