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

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)

i read wuthering heights for the first time over a three-month period as part of my english lit a level and still have not recovered

It's been a good summer for getting grounded in the Archaean and Proterozoic:

Robert M. Hazen - The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (2014)
Paul G. Falkowski - Life’s Engines: How Microbes made Earth Habitable (2015)
Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (2015)

The Hazen is the most readable, I've learned most from the first 4 chapters of the Lane. Up next is: Gerard Russell - Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (2014). I feel I haven't paid proper reverence to Ahura Mazda and Abatur of late.

I finished Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God. It takes up an interesting problem, but it seems a bit unsure about what level to pitch itself at. It seems perhaps like someone trying to write for a more generalist audience than they're used to, and not sure how to be less technical without dumbing things down. Also I didn't always feel comfortable with the way Lilla paraphrased the arguments & ideas of the authors he wrote about. I could understand how they fit into the story he was trying to tell, but I wasn't sure that I understood what they would have understood themselves to be saying. Also, I think I just see the interplay of theology and politics a bit differently than he does. His sweeping talk about the "Great Separation" annoyed me as much as it annoyed some people on the Immanent Frame blog. I'm tempted to say the discussion of the book there is better than the book itself.

reading eileen gunn's first collection. she is a hoot. i need her 2014 collection. might have to buy that online.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41y13CJKkML._SX303_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

some of the 2nd collection is readable online:

http://questionablepractices.net/stories/

her steampunk parodies are fun: http://www.tor.com/2010/11/01/the-perdido-street-project/

I'm most of the way through Roumeli now. The book's biggest fault is his overreaching prose, which seems to equate an exceptional style with an excellent style, but the substance of the book is well worth it. The events, places and people he describes are pretty awesome to read about.

noted this on facebook: in eileen gunn's 1991 story Fellow Americans, about an alternate history Richard Nixon, she totally uses the word "futurama".

Futurama was a ride at the 1939 World's Fair.

AHA! in this story there is a 1990 world's fair. that governor of new york bobby kennedy visits...

huh I remember reading that Gunn book when it came out - it's okay, I think I got rid of it...?

i like it. her.

reading Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona and enjoying it a lot. her first book and it's considered a children's book, but i can't imagine any child reading it here. i did have Rufus read the first chapter aloud this morning though. just to hear how it sounded coming from a child.

now i want to find some more of her books. she wrote 25 books after this one! she was in her 40's when she wrote Verona. let's hear it for the late bloomers. (lots of story collections too. i definitely want to find those. probably not that easy. don't think she has really made a name for herself here.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Gardam

"Gardam gave up work to raise three children—Tim, Kitty, and Tom—in what she has called a “monster of a beat-up house” in the London suburb of Wimbledon. She channelled her creativity into becoming the ideal mother. “I gave myself to my children,” she said, pouring white wine. “It happens to some women.” She invited the neighborhood busybodies to tea. She fed the hordes. “I did all the right things, because I wanted my children to have friends,” she said. The day that Tom went to school, she marched upstairs, sat down at her desk, and began to write. “I ought to tell you at the beginning,” the opening line of her first novel reads, “that I am not quite normal.”

pieces on her in the NYT and the New Yorker last year, so, maybe her time will come in the states. at the age of 85.

I'm finishing Up is Up But So is Down, which I mentioned upthread. For the most part, it's been filling in my sense of the downtown scene (through its breadth of contributors, but also through Stosuy's inclusion of downtown fliers and zine art, which give a vivid idea of the connections between the writing scene and the artworld) rather than radically revising it: I was probably most struck by the texts by Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, and David Wojnarowicz, but I already loved their work. The main discoveries of the anthology for me were probably Tim Dlugos's long AIDS elegy "G-9" and, to a lesser extent, Patrick McGrath's Wilde/Huysmans riff "The Angel", and the anthology reminds me to look more closely at Cookie Mueller and Penny Arcade's writing in particular. I also got the sense that I probably don't need to engage much further with Joe Maynard (who seems to have fallen off the map, anyway), Nick Zedd, or Richard Prince, at least as prose writers, since they don't have much more to offer here than ~edgy~ misogyny and a kind of abstract stab at transgression. I also have to say that the anthology makes the downtown writing scene, aside from the Nuyorican Poets' contributions, seem pretty white-centered: I'm curious to know to what extent that reflects the historical dynamics of the scene and to what extent that impression arises from the anthology's editorial choices.

All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though

Ursula K Le Guin: The Wind's Twelve Quarters -- early story collection. not everything in here is doing it for me, but the ones that do are amazing (esp. the one about Winter, later setting of Left Hand of Darkness)

Started The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, put it down 60 pages in - didn't get appeal of superhero don juan main character, not sure what parts of the plot are not terribly cliche, prose seemed p old school too, didn't enjoy random poetry references (actually I rarely enjoy main characters who think about literature all the time, it gets a bit meta icky for me - like, it's not very believable that all these main characters care so much for lit, writer is just projecting stuff)

Now reading The edge of Europe by Pentti Saarikoski which is a g r e a t read so far, strong poetic energy, lots of non sequituring stream of consciousness thoughts from cats to Stalin, I dunno what to say, unlike most stuff I've ever come across - reading a Danish translation

xxxpost

I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.

It's been a while,mbut i remember keith haring's autobiography being good in that vein. Never liked his art at all, but he lived in an interesting time and place and mileu

"All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though"

i naturally thought of you as the person here who had probably read her stuff. maybe the recent u.s. press will get some sort of stateside reissue series going.