Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

the *ending* seems too carefully, obtrusively contrived. Would rather she just *threw* her cards up in the air...

Older and younger people using and used by, sometimes maybe even for the better, while they all keep getting older, of course: yeah, that part's relatable, as the kids say.

using and used by *each other* ffs

I forgot that July has a novel out. I'll have to remember to check that out. I quite enjoyed No One Belongs Here More Than You. Some might find her a little cutesy, but several of her improbable deadpan twists had me laughing out loud.

Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism From a Living Female Rock Critic
Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism From a Living Female Rock Critic
Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

thomas Bernhard: My Prizes -- hilariously bad-tempered

That's his thing, no?

Definitely, but this is a collection of recollections of various prizes he was given (plus some of the acceptance speeches) and how for the most part he hated winning them, or the prizegiving went wrong, or the thing he bought with the money got trashed. Rather touchingly, he seems to go everywhere with his aunt.

just started reading "a late dinner - the food and culture of spain" by paul richardson. very interesting. also been flicking through the irish journal, stinging fly, the london issue. bought that new granta anthology yesterday and my in-tray also has the new musil collection and portnoy's complaint.

Ishiguro, THE BURIED GIANT

Chandler, THE BIG SLEEP

then I started on Kafka, AMERIKA

Tony Fletcher All Hopped Up But Got No Place to Go
History of 50 years of music from the streets in NYC. So far I've got as far as Chan Pozo getting murdered over his reaction to a bad weed deal on returning to NYC from a tour where his congas had been stolen. It's good so far. & has me wanting to get hold of some material by Machito who has already been talked about.
I think what negative criticism I've read of the book has been over omissions he has actually consciously made to fit his self designed rubrick which is about that music from the streets thing, so he drops things when they get commercial recognition. it means he looks at Latin music about a decade before Fania nut none of the Nu Yorica era stuff. He also drops hip hop just as its beginning to get really interesting. He cuts off in 1977, so I think he has the birth of that but none of the latter developments which he might dismiss the street level of because of major label involvement, which doesn't sound quite like the reality of the situation but does seem to be his approach.
Anyway looking forward to reading the rest of this and hopefully having the soundtrack as I go. Writing ids pretty good anyway.

Or alternatively actual title is All Hopped Up and Ready To Go. As in the Ramones line,

readin TEH TRACTATUS in german so lese LOGISCH-PHILOSOPHISCHE ABHANDLUNG, it's nifty

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. In German it rhymes, do u see?

hör

hör auf!

:O

"music from the streets in NYC"

can one really play music in the street?

maybe as a one-man-band or busker or something

but music more often made in a studio or concert venue or similar

interesting

Time was a child could play a kick-drum in the street.

Read some in Cassius Dio's History last night, but I think I will move over to reading Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

I last read Roumeli in 1980 and have fond memories of it. I was a bit of a Grecophile back then, which tendency has abated somewhat in the intervening decades, but I would still jump at a chance to return to Greece and spend a few weeks in one of the less-touristy backwater towns, preferably near the sea (and most of Greece qualifies on that head), drinking retsina, eating whatever the taverna served and palavering with the locals.

I think Fletcher's idea is that the music is organically directed rather than shaped by commerce. As in it comes directly from the artist and he gives up on whatever the music scene is when its established enough that labels are directing the music. Anyway its an interesting read. I've just got through doo wop.

Kurt Tucholsky: Berlin! Berlin! -- collection of Weimar Germany-era journalism/poems/satires
Randolph Stow: The Visitants -- Papua New Guinea, Australian ex-pats, madness, colonialism, suicide, aliens?

Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Abandoned. One of the great books - with the caveat that you'll get more out of it if you know enough about the Russian poets and literature in general of the 20s and 30s (and then a dollop of Soviet history on top) but its by turns critical, gossipy, chatty, funny, and she never feels sorry for herself. At least in print, she remarkably keeps her cool at what life throws at her. And the Soviet regime of the 30s had thrown a lot at her!

the preceding volume of that i remember being pretty great

i am reading gene wolfe, oyy, and working through the library of america james baldwin

Yeah - have a 'classic' 70s penguin paperbk of both.

reading this. 2nd book in a trilogy. 3rd book hasn't come out yet. i like it. about a weird fussy race of space conquerors. they really love tea, so you know they are evil.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/vxkfj6hqbqknpmwt7ur9.jpg

The Tailor of Panama and Edmund White's States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.

in the 80's i remember chickening out and not buying states of desire when i saw it in a bookstore after totally loving a boy's own story and the beautiful room is empty. i would read it now!

I've been reading Chris Kraus's Torpor, which is just brutal, the last book in Kraus's "failing marriage to Sylvere Lotringer" trilogy, not as manic and colorful as "I Love Dick" but impressive in its ability to balance the playful flexibility of the narrative voice with the crushing sadness of the subject matter. Also going slowly through Brandon Stosuy's anthology of New York Downtown writing in the seventies and eighties, Up is Up But So is Down, and starting Cynthia Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly.

in the 80's i remember chickening out and not buying states of desire when i saw it in a bookstore after totally loving a boy's own story and the beautiful room is empty. i would read it now!

― scott seward

As a unknowing time capsule of an era decimated in a couple of years, it's poignant.

yeah, that's one of the reasons i'd be interested in reading it now. forgotten worlds appeal to me.

It's also (iirc) p hot, and I'm p much straight, so that's kinda cool. Reading Daphne du Maurier's The Parasites and up to The Auroras of Autumn in Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems.

finished Kafka, AMERIKA - less sinister and dark than the other novels but can still be distressing the way the innocent hero is abused by others.

odd how it finishes with such a separate chapter which introduces a brand new character (Fanny) we're supposed to have met before but whose previous appearance must not have made the cut at least in the version I have.

then finished another PKD novel.

Also going slowly through Brandon Stosuy's anthology of New York Downtown writing in the seventies and eighties, Up is Up But So is Down

I just spent some time w/this too, researching my own memoir-ish project. Ended up skimming, frankly. Didn't get Kathy Acker then, don't now. Miguel Pinero's poem "scatter my ashes on the lower east side" >>>>> everything else in the book put together, in my not so humble. Cynthia Carr's David Wojnarowicz bio was fascinating if a little overlong and ultimately shattering, tragic. Gives a sharp, detailed inside view of the 80s EV art scene.

Pinero's thing is called A Lower East Side Poem.

That sounds good! I would like to read that poem.

I am going to read Franco Moretti a bit.

A Lower East Side Poem by Miguel Pinero

Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a
tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till
I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

So let me sing my song tonight
let me feel out of sight
and let all eyes be dry
when they scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

From Houston to 14th Street
from Second Avenue to the mighty D
here the hustlers & suckers meet
the faggots & freaks will all get
high
on the ashes that have been scattered
thru the Lower East Side.

There's no other place for me to be
there's no other place that I can see
there's no other town around that
brings you up or keeps you down
no food little heat sweeps by
fancy cars & pimps' bars & juke saloons
& greasy spoons make my spirits fly
with my ashes scattered thru the
Lower East Side . . .

A thief, a junkie I've been
committed every known sin
Jews and Gentiles . . . Bums & Men
of style . . . run away child
police shooting wild . . .
mother's futile wails . . . pushers
making sales . . . dope wheelers
& cocaine dealers . . . smoking pot
streets are hot & feed off those who bleed to death . . .

all that's true
all that's true
all that is true
but this ain't no lie
when I ask that my ashes be scattered thru
the Lower East Side.

So here I am, look at me
I stand proud as you can see
pleased to be from the Lower East
a street fighting man
a problem of this land
I am the Philosopher of the Criminal Mind
a dweller of prison time
a cancer of Rockefeller's ghettocide
this concrete tomb is my home
to belong to survive you gotta be strong
you can't be shy less without request
someone will scatter your ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

I don't wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don't wanna rest in Long Island Cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting & unnatural dying
& new birth crying
so please when I die . . .
don't take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side . . .

Although it doesn't remotely fit I can't help but read that to the tune of The Magnetic Fields 'I'm The Luckiest Guy on The Lower East Side'.

"A thief, a junkie I've been
committed every known sin
Jews and Gentiles . . . Bums & Men
of style . . . run away child
police shooting wild . . .
mother's futile wails . . . pushers
making sales . . . dope wheelers
& cocaine dealers . . . smoking pot
streets are hot & feed off those who bleed to death . . ."

would have loved for Sinatra to tackle this...

Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim

Imagery and cadence reminds me of at least one Dave Van Ronk song--which comes from a different perspective, and I prefer its original performance on No Dirty Names (available on spotify and iTunes), but still the voice of experience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

Good old Flash--if this doesn't show, it's "Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again," on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

Sorry! The latest Firefox---no, it's my fault.

Speaking of books about lost worlds, I've always loved Geoffrey Stokes' Star Making Machinery, about a time, when emerging mass bohemia x discretionary income, in the wake of Janis Joplin's farewell vision of "Me and Bobby McGhee"---discreetly changed from "Bobbie"; all things were not yet possible---but still a time when conservatives and hippies could come together and make superstars of Commmander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, with a little help from their friends in the studio, the press-publicity meld, their warped label, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers---o it got heavy, but Stokes' humane, lucid, unsentimental sense of justice and absurdity never slips into Behind The Music soap opera.
And the press junkets! For sub-Grub Streeters, making maybe 10 bucks for 1000 words, in some cases (and 10 bucks for 1000 words was still 10 bucks for 1000 words, even way back then, lemmetellya). From Flushing to Frisco, even. "And hey, doesn't your sister live out there? If you wanna stay a few days into next week, that'd be cool too."

(Spoiler: making superstars of Cody's crew seemed possible, to some...)

Wuthering Heights

(first time)