2013: Towards Los Angeles

 2013: Towards Los Angeles

   2013 started with me going to New York, post break up.  As 2013 went on, I moved through the break up and thought about what to do next.  I was doing fine in San Diego post-break up in terms of money and career, but socially speaking most of my friends were through my ex, who was a native.  My eyes immediately turned to Los Angeles and I even had my eventual new partner in mind, having met her at a wedding- of someone I met through this blog- while my ex and I were still together.  Specifically, the Ariel Pink show in June in Los Angeles was the first occasion to hang out, though it wasn't a date and we were part of a group.

   Also, 2013 was the last year of the "Dirty Beaches/Zoo Music" era- Alex's amazing double record, Drifters/Love is the Devil represented a high point with the record getting Best New Music on Pitchfork- during an era where that still meant something, mind you.  The record was a big financial success, though it quickly became clear that even with the benefit of the Best New Music designation, true financial success was several orders of magnitude away- but both Alex and the label were making money in this period- not life changing money but money.

Roentgens Desk

Published 1/16/13
Thank God Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens Exhibit Is Still At The Met

  Phew- I was worried that Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens Exhibit was going to close before I made to New York City- but- relief- I will be there while the exhibit is still open (closes January 27th, 2013.)  I don't think there's an exhibit about 19th century furniture I've been THIS excited about since I last visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a decade ago.

  Unfortunately I won't be in town for the Exhibition Tour- A Conservator's Perspective on Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens Exhibit.  I can't believe they got Mecthild Baumeister to do a walk n talk.

  This exhibit promises to be THE definitive statement on the rise of the father/son funiture design and manufacture duo Abraham and David Roentgens from their begins in Germany in the mid 18th century to their closure in the early 19th century.

  People are like, "Why go to New York in January- sounds terrible." And I'm like, "BECAUSE I LIKE TO GO TO MUSEUMS."

  I promise a full review upon my return!

Rubin Museum Interior

Published 1/24/13
The Rubin Museum of Art (of the Himalayas)
New York City
150 17th st. New York, NY.

   I am a big, big fan of museums.  Everything about museums.  And although I would say New York City is only the third best city for Museum-going in the world (Paris, London)- New York City has still got an amazing number of museums.

  Staying in Greenwich Village I decided to choose my museum visits by proximity.   The Rubin Museum is located between NYU and Chelsea.  Housed in an ex Bloomingdale's ladies store, The Rubin Museum specializes in the art of the Himalayan region.  A more accurate description would probably be "Tibetan Art Etc." but I'll stick with their preferred nomenclature.

  Unbelievably the permanent collection was closed for my visit- the museum-goers equivalent to flying to NYC for a Broadway show and finding out that the understudy is playing the lead instead of the Hollywood star you came to see.  However, I'm just going to assume, based on the quality of what I did see that the permanent collection is amazing- because everything else was.

Collection of Nyingjei Lam (HAR 68323).

 I don't fancy myself an expert in the area of Tibetan art, but I've been to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a good half dozen times and could do ten minutes of party material on the wonders of Tibetan art- namely tons of scary looking demons derived from the Tantric Buddhist tradition and elaborate, detailed wall paintings of Buddhist themes and personages.

  My visit to the Rubin Museum of Art expanded that thin familiarity with two excellent exhibits:  Casting The Divine- a collection of 104 miniature sculptures Nyingjei Lam Collection.  The sculptures were quite a revelation- demonstrating a level of sophistication and quality that equalled any comparable European work from the same time period.  The subject matter is repetitive- Buddha/High Level Monk/Wandering Holy Man- though there were some interesting subjects- like a real-life famous wandering Ascetic who was depicted with dense curly hair that reflected his south Indian upbringing.

  Certainly these exquisite sculptures were something I had never seen before and I was impressed.

  The other interesting exhibit was The Place of Provenance- about regional variation of Tibetan painting.  Again- the subject matter was repetitive- you can tell the difference in regions by the way they paint the clouds- but the workmanship was really high quality.

   And while the Rubin Museum didn't alert me to the existence of high level Tibetan Art Products, it did expand my knowledge of the kinds and varieties of artifacts and their high level of quality.  It's worth a stop if you are in the area- though fyi it costs ten bucks to get in.  The Permanent Collection re-opens the first week of February 2013.
  

The New Museum on the Lower East Side New York NY

Published 1/25/13
The New Museum
L.E.S. New York, New York

Viewed
Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos (closed)

Prime Age, photograph by Rosemarie Trockel

  I'm not sure there is much value in reviewing a now closed museum exhibit, but the same could be said for this entire blog so.  First thing about the New Museum: No permanent collection so it's a very WYSIWYG kind of scenario.  The exhibit on display while I was visiting was Rosemarie Trockel, a German Artist who is notable for her refusal to stay in a single media or discipline.  The exhibit contained everything from punk style Zines, to knitted "paintings", to sculptural assemblages with a sprinkling of non-Rosemarie Trockel outsider Art/non-art "pieces" selected by the Artist.

Rosemarie Trockel

  Trockel's refusal to "settle down" and pick a studio art discipline is a primary reason that her collected output deserves a career retrospective at an NYC museum.  It also places the question of "what is art?" into a sharp focus- both by the width and breadth of "things" that Trockel has transformed into art through her vision, but also by the "non-art" objects that Trockel selected to stand along aside her artwork.  One "non-art" object is an amazing botanical illustration made by a woman in the 17th century- the woman was long overlooked because it was thought that a woman "couldn't" make such an accurate drawing of a living thing.

Rosemarie Trockel portrait

  There was an unexpected overlap between the Trockel retrospective and recent conversations I've had about the business of music, where people have emphasized the transformative aspect of digital reproduction in freeing specific Artists from formerly difficult to cross artistic boundaries.  For example, a Musician publishes a book instead of a record.  Such cross-marketing has always been an integral part of the upper layer of the Art-Industrial Complex, but digital distribution extends this layer downward to the very floor.

  What's lacking in that realm is the existence of Artists who are sufficiently keen enough to grasp this new freedom AND make Art products that people want to buy/put in museums to look at.

Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos exhibition lay-out

  I'm sure that Trockel has had people asking her for her entire career, "But what kind of Artist are you?"  Are you a painter? A sculptor?" etc.   Young Artists would be smart to a take a cue from the diversity of Trockel's output- and imitate her- not the specific artworks obviously, but the practice.

Published 1/27/13

Extravagant Inventions: 

The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens (closed)

Metropolitan Museum of Art 

   Another review of a closed Museum Exhibit in New York City! You are Welcome, readers!

   This was interesting to me because you don't see a whole lot of high-end 18th century European furniture on this side of the Atlantic.  Sure, if you want to hit Paris or Amsterdam the Louvre and Rijksmuseum got suites filled with the stuff, but not so much the United States.  

   Roentgen was a father/son furniture workshop from Germany/Netherlands that sold to a bunch I like to call, "The crowned heads of Europe."  Basically, he would finacle a face-to-face meeting with various royalty and then pitch them on buying furniture which he has either already made or would make on demand.  We are talking, King of France, Catherine the Great of Russia Etc. 

  As one might have every reason to expect, the furniture is amazing because they just haven't made furniture that ornate and detailed since the 18th century- the 19th century kind of killed demand for ornate writing desk's among the Kings and Queens of Europe:  pesky social revolutions!

  But as I sit here today- that time period- the early Modern period where skilled craftsmen made material possessions for royalty using modern techniques of crafte and manufacture- they made some ill shit.   Whether it be jewelry or furniture- the work stands up.  Particularly the techniques used by craftsmen to manufacture articles like furniture and jewelry.  I won't say it's a lost part, but people don't appreciate it like they used to, and there certainly aren't a ton of Kings and Queens sitting around going, "BRING ME YOUR FINEST MARQUETRY."

  People still appreciate furniture, but the appreciation is more likely to take the form of appreciation for the sturdy workmanship of Colonial America or the sleek lines of Modernism.  America wasn't even independent when most of the pieces in Extravagant Inventions was manufactured.  Pretty incredible that these pieces still exist.

Thomas Jefferson

Published 2/10/13
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
by Jon Meacham
p. 2012
Random House


  Here is the funniest thing about Thomas Jefferson and his legacy.  Historians spent close to two centuries denying that Thomas Jefferson banged the enslaved half-sister of his wife and fathered a half dozen children by her.  "Oh no- that's impossible- it was his nephew....no, no no, he would NEVER EVER do such a thing."  Across the board- historians denied it coming up with dozens of excuses.  Then- in the 1990s they finally got some quality DNA tests done AND GUESS WHAT YEAH HE DID.    Jefferson not only fathered a half dozen children by Sally Hemings, he kept the children AS SLAVES.

  So now of course, historians are like, "Oh you have to judge him by the standards of his times."  Oh rly, historians?  Is that why y'all spent two centuries bending over backwards to deny the truth?  What a crock of shit.  There were plenty of founding fathers who didn't enslave their own children- like- oh, I don't know- all of them.

  Meacham, to his credit, I guess, acknowledges the factual truth of this relationship and tries to place it into the context of Jefferson's life and times but man- the more I think about it the more it grosses me out.  Which is not to say that Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power is a gross book- quite the opposite.  Meacham's one volume biography of Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize last year.

  It clocks in at 500 pages with an additional 200 pages of footnotes.  It's pretty hard to write a one volume of Jefferson's live- and to do it you need to assume that the reader is already familiar with the historical events in the Revolutionary/Early Republic era.   With 43 chapters Meacham keeps the narrative moving along- 10 pages on this, 10 pages on that- the pace more resembles a well researched feature film then a scholarly biography.  Perhaps for that reason Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power seems destined to maintain a position as a primary source for people looking to canvass the various stories of the founding fathers.

SIR SLY band

Published 2/13/13
SIR SLY
Miner
@ The Casbah

    There is no part of the music industry that isn't an absolute shit show in 2013 (except maybe publishing) but as someone who primarily interfaces with that industry as a record label partner, I am particularly fascinated by the world of music management.  Historically, succesful managers moved became record label owners- two primary examples being David Geffen and Irving Azoff.  Here is a quote from Frederic Dannen's national best seller, Hit Men- which is about the music industry during the halcyon days of glory (i.e. the 1980s):

   "Though artist management had made them rich, it was only a matter of time before Geffedn and Azoff leaped the bargaining table to become label presidents.  Almost all top managers and lawyers in the record business secretly hanker to run a label.  However powerful the artist representatives may be, the label bosses are the ones who hold the check book."
  "Lawyers and managers never forget, meanwhile, that their power is tenuous.  Artists may fire them or, even more likely, fall from the charts.  The average career of a rock artist is cruelly brief- five years is an achievement, and twenty years is a miracle." (pg. 141-142.)

   These days, the traffic is 100% in the other direction, particularly since record labels don't hire anyone ever these days.  On the other hand, there are plenty of ex-A&R types working as managers. The difficulty of being a manager is that you don't get paid unless the Artist gets paid, and the Artist isn't going to get paid unless they are very, very successful and even then...if you get them after they hook up with an indie label- poof- there goes a huge pot of money.  So I'm never surprised when a manager comes between a label I work with and a band they are releasing- that is the natural order of things.  It's like being mad at Nature for the weather- your time is better spent trying to understand it then being angry at it for what it does to you.


   I'm bringing all this up because the only reason I went to last night's show is because I was curious about "what it takes" to get picked up by Monotone Management- and Sir Sly is the most recent act to be picked up by Monotone Management. I'm always curious to see what people who are actually successful in the music industry are interested in, and what they decide to spend time and energy on.  Monotone Management of course, is the home of Jack White, Vampire Weekend, The Shins and Foster The People.

Kate Miner

  First up at last night's free show was Los Angeles indie-folk act Miner.  Miner essentially treads the same sonic space as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.  Now, they aren't original, but man- think about the potential upside- FM radio and actual record sales for one.  It's not too hard to draw comparisons to Grammy Album Of The Year Winner Lumineers or Mumford & Sons.  It's not music I listen to, but I literally saw dollar signs on top of the heads of the gently swaying crowd.

Miner band

  As I've said before, originality in music is highly, highly, highly overrated- what you want is a twist on something with an established sales track record, and when you are using Edward Sharpe, The Lumineeers & Mumford and Sons as your benchmarks the upside is unlimited. Maybe they make it, maybe they don't but it's hard to imagine that one could lose money putting out an LP on Miner.  Actually, it's impossible to imagine losing money on such an LP.

 They should consider changing their name to something like the Miner Family Singers though- so it's more obvious to casual music listeners what they are about.  Miner sounds like a band on Dischord.

  Headliners SIR SLY lost about half the crowd that was there to see Miner (score a point for Miner.)  They are a five piece- singer/guitarist, lead guitarist, bassist, drummer and key/synths guy- all dudes. To say that they are they are polished is a mild understatement- they are slick like a California freeway after the first rain of the year.  The focus of SIR SLY is clearly the singer/guitarist who fronts the band-   and the sound has obviously been crafted for maximum impact on alt rock FM radio.  Paul Lester of the London Guardian called them a "Chillwave Coldplay" but you could also just call them a super pro synth pop act and leave Coldplay out of it.  Maroon 5- also a comparison made by the London Guardian and also apt, although the singer will have to ditch the guitar and pop off his shirt to really merit a comparison to Adam Levine.

 All told it was pretty darn easy to see why Monotone Management is fucking with  SIR SLY- they sound exactly like the kind of band that gets signed to a major label in 2013.  I'm sure both bands have a viable future ahead of them due to their combination of professional grade sound and performance chops. I say, "Good luck on your journey gentlemen, and may the odds be ever in your favor."

  Oh last thought- having a live drummer play drum pads instead of actual drums seems like a solid move in 2013- like the drum break in Phil Collins In The Air Tonight:

  You can't go wrong with that sound.

Love this Dirty Beaches poster from a Hong Kong Show in 2013

Published 2/22/13
Dirty Beaches announced some 2013 UK Tour Dates:

May
18 4 St. Petersburg, Russia - Модный клуб Грибоедов(FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
19 4 Moscow, Russia - P.P.C.M. (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
21 4 Kursk, Russia - Somewhere great (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)

5 5 - Newcastle, UK- The Cluny (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
6 5 - Dundee, UK - DCA (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
7 5 - Glasgow, UK - Nice 'n Sleazy  (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
8 5 - Dublin, IE - The Workman's Club  (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
9 5 - Liverpool, UK - The Shipping Forecast (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
10 5 - Chester,  UK - The Compass (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
11 5 - Manchester, UK - Soup Kitchen (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
12 5 - Leeds,UK - Brudnell Social Club (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
14 5 - Brussels, BE - AB Cafe (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
16 5 - Amsterdam NED  - OT 301(FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
17 5 - Groningen NED  - Vera (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
18 5 - Utrecht, NED - Le Guess Who Festival(FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
21 5 - Drifters/Love Is The Devil Album Release (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
22 5 - Winterhur, SZE - Salzhaus (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
24 5 - Limoges, FR - ccm John Lennon (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
25 5 - Paris, FR - Saint-Ouen (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
26 5 - Lyon, FR - Le Sonic (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
27 5 - Turin, IT - Hotel Astoria (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
28 5 - Ravena, IT - Hana Bi (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
29 5 - Rome, IT - Circlo degli Artisti (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)

30 5 - Milan, IT - Video Sound Art Fetival (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
31 5 - Berlin, GER - Festsaal Kreuzberg (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
5 6 - Hamburg, GER - Hafenlang (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
6 6 - Koln, GER - Reineke Fuchs (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
7 6 - Munich, GER -Gallery Kullkcu (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)
8 7 -  Frankfurt, GER - Zoom Club (FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE)

  I don't know which date looks more interesting- Chester? or Dundee? (LINE OF BEST FIT POST)(FACT MAGAZINE)

Jeremy Irvine playing Pip in the 2012 adaptation of Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Published 3/8/13
The Dickens World
by Humphry House
Oxford Paperbacks No. 9
p. 1941


    Even though Charles Dickens was a huge popular success as soon as his books came out and in many ways the first  truly international literary celebrity (Sir Walter Scott didn't do a reading tour of the United States and Charles Dickens did); critical acclaim lagged by nearly a century.  During the early 20th century critical taste was with the sophisticated proto modernism of Henry James and the pure modernism of James Joyce- Dickens was considered to be merely a popular author.

 This began to change in the mid 20th century and The Dickens World by Humphry House- originally published by Oxford University Press in 1941- was one of the first works of criticism to take Dickens seriously without claiming that he was unduly sentimental/sappy/not worth serious thought.

Gillian Anderson playing Ms. Havisham in BBC 2012 adaptation of Charles Dickens Great Expectations

  This leads to the question of how one rehabilitates or establishes the critical reputation of a popular artist a century after the author died.  House's The Dickens World is largely a project of establishing a context for obtaining a deeper understanding of the complexity of "The Dickens World."   Charles Dickens was writing classic hits for a couple decades and he was writing during a time of great change.

  Before critics started taking Dickens seriously it was held that he had a simplistic, sentimental view of the world and that this point of view made his characters and plots simplistic.  Certainly Dickens reflected the taste of the audience during the time he was writing, but the assertion of thematic simplicity is shown by House to be false.

  As the title implies, The Dickens World take the reader through the different aspects of existence in the early mid 19th century and how that influence Dickens writing.  Notable are chapters on "Religion" and two whole chapters on "Economy: Domestica and Political."   Chief among the observations that House makes is that Dickens started writing before money craziness took hold of society in the 1840s, and then he witnessed this change- and this made it's way into his fiction even though his characters APPEARED to identify with an older era.

  House also highlights how the morality of Dickens was a welcome contrast to the conventional morality of the period, and how Dickens competed successfully with the religious literature that dominated the literary marketplace prior to the emergence of the novel as a popular art form.



Published 3/25/13
Dickens & His Readers:
 of Novel Criticism Since 1836
 by George H. Ford
p. 1965
The Norton Library edition

   This books appears to be utterly forgotten in light of the deserted Amazon Product Page.  That is a pity because I happen this book is pretty relevant for the big data era we currently happen.  Specifically, it is relevant for obtaining a proper understanding of Charles Dickens and his relationship to his readers and his critics.

   I agree with M.H. Abrams and his schematic regarding critical theories of art, pictured above.   The thing about that scheme is that almost 100% of art criticism focuses on the relationship between one aspect to another aspect, but rarely is the Audience considered, whether they be critics or fans, or both.

  But this book is unique as far as I can tell because of the detailed consideration of the RECEPTION of Charles Dickens by his different Audiences, popular and critical.   Writing in the 1950s,  Ford is perched on the precipice of an explosion in esteem for Charles Dickens.   According to Ford, Dickens reached a critical nadir in the 1920s and 1930s when he was derided by critics (who often asserted that a popular audience no longer read Dickens, i.e. that he was unpopular.)

Scrooge McDuck

   Charles Dickens was, above all, a popular phenomenon.  He was an Artist critics came to embrace only after his popularity with the general reading Audience was perfectly clear.   The popular success of the early Charles Dickens novels made everyone sit up and take notice.  Dickens success was such that he helped elevate the Novel as an Art Form from something that literary critics treated with derision to the rising Art form that came to dominate the both the market for literature as well as the market for literary criticism.

Charles Dickens Little Nell

  After the initial acceptance,  Charles Dickens had one notable popular failure- Martin Chuzzlewit.   Chuzzlewit was published after his most popular, least enduring work, The Old Curiosity Shop.  The Old Curiosity Shop had the archetypical example of "bad" Charles Dickens- Little Nell.  Little Nell would become a symbol of the saccharine sentimentality that plagued much of his early work.

  Ford argues in Dickens & His Readers that the failure of Martin Chuzzlewit was based on it being such a digression in subject matter and tone from his prior success.  In other words, Dickens failed to meet the expectations of his popular Audience.   But again- critics mirrored rather then shaped the reception of the popular Audience.  Today, of course, Martin Chuzzlewit is considered a top five Charles Dickens title and The Old Curiosity Shop is not popular.

  An interesting chapter in Dickens & His Readers handles the way the English literary critical establishment handled the emergence of the Russian trio of Dovstoyevsky, Turgenev & Tolstoy, the French naturalism of Zola & Flaubert and the homegrown sophistication of George Eliot.  All three of these forces were in play by the 1880s, which was also the beginning of a generation long decline in esteem for Charles Dickens by critics, if not the reading the public.

  All three of these trends shared a more adult, sophisticated take on the Novel.  Out were the broad comedy and emotion of Charles Dickens, in was the delicate contemplation of inner existence and human motive.  Critics were anxious to argue that the Novel had "grown up" and this view required Charles Dickens as a foil.

Oliver Twist

   One fact that becomes clear with the ebb and flow of the relationship between Charles Dickens and his critics:  Critics liked to make the claim that the popular Audience had stopped reading Dickens at various points in time but the continued sales strength of all of his works would tend to rebut that claim.  In fact, despite the rise and fall of critical esteem, the "collected works" of Charles Dickens was a household staple in countries from England, to the United States, to France, to Germany.  Like, Dickens would be the only Author that people would ever read.  Like, people would re-read all of his books every couple of years- these were behaviors that have persisted among his Audience for over a century and a half.

  In light of Dickens' proven Audience pleasing talents, I'm inclined to favor him over the serious minded Naturalism/Realism of the late 19th/early 20th century.  I'm talking, Thomas Hardy, Henry James- the really, really, boring novels that crop up during the transition from the late Victorian to the early Modern period of literature. To these people, Dickens was a kind of a clown.  But you know what: People don't give a fuck about Henry James today, and Charles Dickens is an international literary saint of the highest order.  I'm with Charles Dickens.   Fuck Henry James.

Published 4/15/13

Watch Waterpark by Evan Prosofsky w/ Dirty Beaches OST

Shorts on Sundays: Waterpark on Nowness.com.

  Here is something else that happened totally independent of anything I do or tell people to do- you can watch the Evan Prosofsky directed Waterpark- which is a documentary about a water park in Canada- with an OST by Dirty Beaches.  I've encourage Alex in this area. Who wants to be touring night clubs for the rest of their life? Movies seem like a cushier, not to mention unionized, gig. (GORILLAVSBEAR)

Published 4/23/13

Relevant Search: Internet Art/Net Art


INTERNET ART/NET ART WIKIPEDIA
RACHEL GREENE INTERNET ART AMAZON PRODUCT PAGE

Relevant information.

Published 5/20/13

Dirty Beaches - Casino Lisboa (Official Video)

 So proud to be a part of this!  Dirty Beaches Drifters/Love Is The Devil is in stores today in the EU/UK, tomorrow in the US.  US tour this fall.

The First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles

Published 6/22/13

First Unitarian Church (f/ Ariel Pink)

DO LA party
Sponsored by Goose Island Beer

  I love a new venue and if the invite includes free beer (courtesy the lovely people at Goose Island Beer, Chicago's Craft Beer) and industry networking, SO MUCH THE BETTER.  Also, I happen to love driving between San Diego and Los Angeles- call me crazy.

Court Yard at First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles

  The First Unitarian Church is located west of Downtown Los Angeles, near the intersection of W 9th and Vermont Ave.  There are three separate spaces:  a gymnasium type social space, a church/venue and a lovely open air court yard that really made the night.  The venue is seated and it gets hot inside but it was a nice place for a mixed all ages/21+ show.

  On street parking is scarce but valet was provided.  I wanted to write about the Goose Island Matilda that I had.  The Matilda is a Belgian Style Pale Ale and uh... it was pretty solid.  I could have had a half dozen but driving so I couldn't.  Goose Island has a wide selection of fine beers and ales.. and last night people were saying positive things about Honker's Ale.  I would order Goose Island products in a bar scenario: it was crafty but not TOO crafty.

  Ariel Pink was ok.  He acts like he is on drugs and doesn't like to shower- more power to him as far as I'm concerned, I'm just saying.  I would def go back to First Unitarian Church for another summertime show.  In winter it might be too cold, but hey in LA- probably not?  Last night it was beautiful night that made me glad to be alive.

Published 8/28/13

List of Important Japanese Films 1950-1973


     I think movie reviews of Japanese films are the least popular subject I cover on my blog.  So far I've watched six films via the Criterion Collection: Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Kwaidan, Samurai I & II & Good Morning.   Then I've got three scheduled in September: High and Low, Rashomon & The Seven Samurai.  Then I've got three scheduled in October: Double Suicide, The Hidden Fortress & Samurai III.  Yeah.  I spread them out because they are so very, very unpopular.  The Ozu review (Good Morning) got 17 page views.  17.  That is embarrassing.  The most popular review is Yojimbo, published in June, with 84 views.

  I figure... maybe it is because I'm not doing Japanese cinema justice, that I am ignorant.  The same goes for many of the discrete areas of world cinema: Italian neo-realism would be another example.  I don't see any value to watching these movies other then them being great art.  It truly seems like not a soul I know in the world could give two shits about Japanese film, but does that mean I ignore it?

  Last time I was in Los Angeles I went to a few used books stores to look for a cheap, college-level text that provided summaries of the different genres of World Cinema.  I found A History of Film by Jack C. Ellis, published by Prentice-Hall, which I believe is an educational house.  Each chapter ends with a list of the important films, and I think it is quite a useful resource for what I'm doing.

  Another interesting aspect of Japanese films on Criterion Collection/Hulu Plus is that they are 100% streaming.  There are some countries where it is almost 100% the other way- films from the U.K.- for example- very few of those titles are available streaming.

  Ultiimately though I think one of the things you do if you are actually into Art vs. just being a poser who likes to hang out with cool people, is you take it on yourself to learn about new kinds of art with which were previously unfamiliar.  And Japanese cinema fits that bill.  So the fact that it is unpopular to readers of this blog is irrelevant.

 Here is the list for Japanese films between 1950-1973 (Date of review)

1950
Rashomon (Kurosawa) (September 11th, 2013)

1952
Ikiru (Kurosawa) Criterion Collection #221 !
The Life of O'Haru (Mizoguchi) Criterion Collection #664 !

1953
Gate of Hell (Kinugasa)Criterion Collection #653 !
Tokyo Story (Ozu) Criterion Collection #217 !
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi) Criterion Collection #309 !

1954
Chickamatsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
The Bailiff (Mizoguchi) Criterion Collection #386 !
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)(September 18th, 2013)

1956
The Harp of Burma (Ichikawa) Criterion Collection #379 !

1957
The Lower Depths (Kurosawa) Criterion Collection #239 !
The Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) Criterion Collection #190 !

1958
Conflagration (Ickikawa)

1959
Fires on the Plain (Ichikawa) Criterion Collection #378 !

1961
An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu) Criterion Collection #446 !
The Human Condition (Kobayashi) Criterion Collection #480 !
Onibaba (Shindo) Criterion Collection #226 !
Woman of the Dunes (Teshighara) Criterion Collection #394 !

1965
Red Beard (Kurosawa) Criterion Collection #159 !

1968
Death by Hanging (Oshima)
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Oshima)

1969
Boy (Oshima)
Double Suicide (Shinoda) (October 7th, 2013)

1970
Dodeska-den (Kurosawa) Criterion Collection #465 !

1971
The Ceremony (Oshima)

1975
Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa)
Kaeski (Kobayashi)
Realm of the Senses (Oshima) Criterion Collection #446 !

! = Available on Hulu Plus


Published 9/13/13
The Story of Film - An Odyssey
Available on Netflix Streaming
Released 2012
The Story of Film - An Odyssey New York Times Review January 2012
The Story of Film - An Odyssey - IMDB
The Story of Film - An Odyssey - Rotten Tomatoes

  I DVR'ed episode 2 of this sprawling 900 minute plus television documentary by critic/narrator Mark Cousins about the history of film.  I was so impressed by the DVR episode that I searched "The Story of Film - An Odyssey streaming" on Google, and quickly discovered that it was on Netflix streaming. I watched the first two episodes a little bit each night this week and I found this documentary really enthralling on a number of levels, but mostly because Cousins actually seems to be in touch with the last 50 years of film criticism and non-Hollywood film, so he's giving what is essentially the Criterion Collection history of film.

  Cousins posits fairly early on that this is a revisionist or alternative history of Cinema, assuming that the main Hollywood driven narrative is the recognizable narrative for most viewers.  However, for me it is the history of Cinema, not a competing story.  Hollywood still plays the central role in a history of film that includes non Hollywood film, if only because the Audience for non-Hollywood films  within the United States was negligible until after World War II.

 The two most interesting themes from the first two episodes of this monster documentary are the movement of film from being a "popular amusement" to an art form between 1900 and the 1920s.  The second is the analysis of the mainstream 1920s Hollywood aesthetic as being "Romantic" and not "Classical."    Although he doesn't really delve into the terminology, it is clear that he is using Romantic and Classical with the meanings established in 19th and 20th century art criticism.  So by Romantic he means Romantic like M.H. Abrams meant Romantic in his book, The Mirror & The Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition.

  Using Abrams Mirror/Lamp metaphor, Classicism sees art as a mirror and Romanticism sees art as a lamp.  Thus, for Cousins the Hollywood spectacle film of the 1920s, with it's soft lighting of starlets, emotive subject matter and over wrought set design, is the definition of Romantic and is about as "Classic" as a Wordsworth poem.  This whole analysis seems to play off of an understanding of the silent film era as being equivalent to "Classic" Hollywood.  I'm not sure that is a term that is really embraced by American audiences.  Being Northern Irish/British, Cousins comes from a different perspective on that question.

 The other interesting theme is the process by which film started as an amusement, something less then art, and evolved into a recognized art form by the teens/twenties of the twentieth century. Again, as a television type documentary, Cousins doesn't get into the mechanics of it, but he does show some early theaters- built before the movie "palaces" of the teens and 20s, and they look like the equivalent of video arcades.  Early theaters were often referred to as Nickelodeons, which is a compound word combining Nickel (price) and Odeon, which is what they called a theater in ancient Greece.

  The Story of Film is a must for anyone looking to dive into the Criterion Collection- because it shares a similar perspective on world cinema and many of the non-American works discussed are represented in the Criterion Collection.

Emma Watson does her Vanessa Hudgens in the Bling Ring, d. Sofia Coppola (2013)

Published 10/10/13

The Bling Ring (2013)
d. Sofia Coppola
Theatrical release June 21st, 2013


   Wow so people really didn't dig The Bling Ring did they?  What the fuck were they expecting from a Sofia Coppola joint about this subject?  Citizen Kane or something?  People be hating on Sofia Coppola but she knows how to portray contemporary mores in more or less the same fashion as a 19th century English novelist like The Bronte sisters or Jane Austen.  Her women are young, vulnerable but with huge social influence.  They have been the subject of Art since they came into existence at the beginning of time.  Each of Coppola's films details some woman at the cross roads of irrelevance and power.


  The Bling Ring is her most explicit foray into the relationship of young women to power.  Here, the setting is modern day Los Angeles, specifically the subset of Los Angeles residents who are there to "make it."  The girls/women of The Bling Ring exist outside of a framework of morality, they are "home schooled" by a Mom who follows the "spiritual" tenets of The Secret.  They are modern day Maenads, young female followers of Dionysus ready for a frenzy or down for whatever.

  Like Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring is best viewed without reference to Christian morality.  Whatever you want to say about the movie, "Thou Shall Not Steal" does not come up in conversation at all, for the entire movie.  The gleeful amorality of contemporary youth culture is in no way a novel subject for film, but Coppola deserves unacknowledged credit for opening a window on this most recent iteration of a theme that requires regular updating.

  The non mise en scene aspects of Coppola's work always fascinate- her soundtracks have been influential since Air scored a huge break-out in the aftermath of the Virgin Suicides.  Coppola outpaces other potential filmic/musical influencers by virtue of impeccable taste and an apparently excellent licensing department.  I would even argue that The Bling Ring is the superior soundtrack vs. Spring Breakers.  Spring Breakers and Bling Ring both have M.I.A.'s Bad Girls, which is obviously the theme song for this genre of film.  Only The Bling Ring opens with Sleigh Bells Crown on the Ground over the credits.

 I'm inclined to think that cinema at it's best is a kind of fun-house mirror, reflecting and distorting truth/reality and showing it back to people (for 10 USD plus a pop) so I think some of the negative reaction to The Bling Ring is from people who are like that and didn't like what they saw.  A bold strategy for Coppola as a director, and I think The Bling Ring is a film that will be appreciated more in the future as more people get a chance to actually like it.

 I also think that Coppola is right on in depicting the young upper middle class women of Southern California as a group of beautiful gangsters.  Gleeful amorality doesn't even begin to describe it. And the sound track, wow, evocative of the milieu.

Published 10/12/13

New San Diego Main Library/Central Library

330 Park Blvd.

  The new San Diego Main Library/Central Library replaces the decrepit prior Central Library, a claustrophobia inducing Public Works Administration holdover favored by members of our Vagrant-American population.  It is no way an exaggeration or slur to simply state the fact that the old Central Library smelt strongly of stale human urine.  Truth be told, I haven't been into a non-legal library since I graduated from law school in San Francisco more then a decade ago (and oof.)



  There is something charming about opening a new library in 2013, just as books and reading seem to be on the verge of extinction.  The new location is excellent, across the street from Petco Park and located near trolley and bus lines.  The interior has an indoor/outdoor design appropriate to the weather in San Diego.  The first three stories have a spacious open-air atrium that invites the casual user inside.

  Plenty of computers as one expects, but also all their books on display.  I wouldn't say that I was impressed with the collection, but fuck man, it's a brand new library.  I've been reading public domain novels on my Kindle for like three years so it really opens up some new opportunities in literary criticism and history books.

  If you are a downtown/Golden Hill/South Park/Barrio Logan this is a great opportunity to renew your love affair with the library.

Published 10/30/13

The Relationship of Astrology to Babylonian Star Worship

   Star worship is a fairly common spiritual/religious theme.  In Western culture, it most often take the form of "astrology," which in terms of esteem is held somewhere between legitimate "new age"  spiritual belief and parlor trick depending on who you talk to.  However the Astrology column in the local daily that focuses on Birthday horoscopes does not represent the great history and, frankly, majesty of the larger category of "star worship."

 To understand the depth of star worship, it's best to start at the beginning with the practices of Babylonian Star Worship.  Babylonians are a key world-historical culture because they are the first civilization with writing who spoke a language from a contemporary language family, Semitic. Semitic is the family of Hebrew and Arabic, and Akkadian is the earliest known example. Akkadian is now extinct, but it was "succeeded" by a different Semitic language, Aramaic, which was the language of the Assyrian Empire.  The Assyrians conquered much of the Middle East and held it from roughly 1300 BC to 1000 BC.  By the end of this period, the language of the Assyrian conquerors had become the lingua franca of the entire Middle East, much in the same way Latin was during the Roman Empire and the way English is in the west.  Akkadian itself was the prior Lingua Franca but it was surpassed by Aramaic in the west, and in the east it fell victim to the Persian invasion.  The Persians, of course, spoke a language of Indo-European extraction and thus were outside the Semitic linguistic sphere.

 Babylonian astronomy/star worship both precedes and runs concurrently with the Assyrians but Babylonians and Assyrians were separate related peoples/languages like Spanish/French.  The Assyrians would have essentially received Babylonian/Akkadian texts intact and there would have been interaction and overlap between two religions, with Babylonian's "leading" and Assyrians "following." (1)


NOTES

(1)  From the Wikipedia Page:

Old Babylonian astronomy refers to the astronomy that was practiced during and after the First Babylonian Dynasty (ca. 1830 BC) and before the Neo-Babylonian Empire (ca. 626 BC).
The Babylonians were the first to recognize that astronomical phenomena are periodic and apply mathematics to their predictions. Tablets dating back to the Old Babylonian period document the application of mathematics to the variation in the length of daylight over a solar year.

Centuries of Babylonian observations of celestial phenomena are recorded in the series of cuneiform tablets known as theEnûma Anu Enlil—the oldest significant astronomical text that we possess is Tablet 63 of the Enûma Anu Enlil, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, which lists the first and last visible risings of Venus over a period of about 21 years. It is the earliest evidence that planetary phenomena were recognized as periodic.

The MUL.APIN contains catalogues of stars and constellations as well as schemes for predicting heliacal risings and settings of the planets, and lengths of daylight as measured by a water clock, gnomon, shadows, and intercalations. The Babylonian GU text arranges stars in 'strings' that lie along declination circles and thus measure right-ascensions or time intervals, and also employs the stars of the zenith, which are also separated by given right-ascensional differences.[5] There are dozens of cuneiform Mesopotamian texts with real observations of eclipses, mainly from Babylonia.

   This section establishes Babylonian astronomy/astrology as dates to 1830 BC- almost five hundred years before the Assyrian empire arose. 

1970's Literature: 1977-1979

 

1970's Literature: 1977-1979

    I think I'm getting some more ideas about what a synthesis of this blog might look like- alternating chapters of criticism and autofiction, each chapter short, only a few pages if that.  I think...if you make a work and a response you elicit is "I wish it was longer."  That is about as good as you can do.  "Always leave them wanting more." is a quote that is often attributed to P.T. Barnum but it seems apocryphal to me.  Above all, it seems to me, a work needs to be created with a specific audience in mind vs. the romantic conception that art comes within and artists are driven by some kind of compulsion to create.  That is the PROBLEM with art these days- there is too much of it to consider, and much of it lacks an audience. 

   One of the original ideas is that I would go through time and tie together different works: books, movies, music and then relate that to my own personal timeline- which begins in 1976.  Obviously, I didn't read much for that first five years (though I was an accomplished reader by the time I was 10), and I think my first personal relationship to a work of art would be seeing Fantasia and the first Star Wars in revival showings when I was five or six.  Musically, the first memories would either be songs I heard driving around with my mom in her car- though I was probably at least 10 before those began to make an impression on me.  I had a Fisher Price record player- I can still remember listening to a vinyl copy of the Disney Song of the South soundtrack- a film which has essentially been banned by Disney for being racist. 

   Some of these authors I can remember being on the shelf in my parent's house growing up. I can remember they had a copy of the Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. In terms of the 1001 Books list- the late 70's were big for German literature and women writers- mostly from the UK and commonwealth countries, are making a push towards more equal representation in the canon by this point.    Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer were both active in this period. 

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage in the 1950's.  

Published 11/5/16
The Public Burning (1977)
by Robert Coover

  Robert Coover is one of those author's who managed to secure a life on the strength of his writing.   He hasn't managed to secure one of the first tier literary awards and none of his titles have the kind of immortal hit status that seems likely to stand the test of time.  But, he's still alive and still writing books, so any kind of final judgment about his status as a canonical author will have to wait.

  The Public Burning is Coover's third novel and it's the now familiar combination of historical meta fiction, magical realism and fabulism.  In 2016, that combination of elements seemingly describes almost every major prize winning book of the last decade.  In 1975 it was still a novel combination.  The plot of The Public Burning is Coover's reworking of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.  The narrator is none other than Vice-President Richard Nixon.   Readers expecting the monstrous boogey man of the liberal imagination will be disappointed.  Coover's Nixon is a sensitive fellow trapped in a grown man's game.

   Checking in at 500 pages plus, The Public Burning is neither a light nor a fun read.  It is, however, comprehensible.  There is nothing remotely experimental about the form of the novel, with the exception of several "intermezzo's," interstitial chapters which feature various characters from the novel singing their lines in opera form.  It's almost better as a quirky Richard Nixon biography.  The Rosenbergs, seen also here in slightly disguised form in E.L. Doctorow's, The Book of Daniel are no longer the potent culture symbols they were in the mid 1970's.

  Reading it, I questioned whether The Public Burning was really worthy of the 1001 Books list, between the length, the diminished importance of the characters involved and the general dominance of the historical metafiction/magical realism/fabulist mode of story telling in the novel over the last several decades.   So I wasn't surprised to see that it was dropped from the revised edition of 1001 Books.  This leave the short story collection by Coover, Pricksongs and Descants as his sole title on the list.

Published 11/9/16
Petals of Blood (1977)
 by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

  I actively look forward to African authors when they appear on the 1001 Books list.   So far that list consists of a handful of white people from Southern Africa, Chinua Achebe (west Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o (east Africa).    Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o  famously dropped English as his preferred language, instead choosing to develop the literature of his native Gikuyu.  Petals of Blood was written before that shift, and it is a novel that is steeped in the Western literary tradition, with elements of Balzac and American detective fiction entwined with the themes of colonialism and economic development.

  It is a classic mix of inspirations, transported to East Africa.  Nominally a who-dunnit about a detective trying to solve the deaths of three local big wigs in the home of a powerful local madam, Petals of Blood is really a broad statement about the impact of independence on the Kenyan people. Spoiler alert: The rich get richer.  

Published 11/9/16
Dispatches (1977)
by Michael Herr

  It turns out that Dispatches is the book from which every single Vietnam era cliche is derived.   Considering the extent to which the Vietnam experience has been depicted in popular film over the last several decades, it's surprising that such a rich source of material would have escaped any mention, but the fact that this copy of Dispatches is an Everyman's Library edition demonstrates that Dispatches is, in fact, a classic.

  Dispatches is most unusual in that it is one of the only non-fiction title on the list.  Most of the titles that appear on the list as "non fiction" are war memoirs, and perhaps that can be chalked up to the importance of the battle field experience in the western imagination, and the difficulty about describing the experience without first hand knowledge.

  You can't call Dispatches cliche because I'm sure that when Herr was writing none of the cliches about Vietnam had crystallized.  Still, you can't beat Dispatches for really nailing down the Vietnam War experience in 250 pages of crisp, clean, professional prose (Herr was a journalist.)

Published 11/12/16
Delta of Venus (1977)
by  Anaïs Nin

  This book of erotic short stories was published posthumously in 1977.  As the foreword by Nin recounts, she forced be economic circumstances to write erotica for a wealthy collector during the 1940's.   She remembers that he told her to be "more mechanical, with less emotion."  If you could accurately describe the difference between mere pornography and literature, that would be the formula.  Her main reference points (besides her imagination and the experiences of her various bohemian friends) are the 1000 Nights and a Night  and D.H. Lawrence.  The Arabian Nights influence is more in terms of the linking of stories within stories and the lack of main narrative focus.  D.H. Lawrence permeates the manuscript.  Also, one would imagine, Henry Miller, with whom Nin is forever associated.

  And it's also clear that Nin was familiar with 18th century writers like the Marquis de Sade and 19th century writers like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.   Delta of Venus somewhat systematically explores a catalog of perversions including every sort of intercourse, different brands of sexuality, fetishes and a deep emphasis on female character who want to be penetrated to the depths of their womb.

Published 11/13/16
The Hour of the Star (1977)
 by Clarice Lispector

   Clarice Lispector is the only female Latin American representative on the 1001 Books list up to this point.   The fact that she was Brazilian and Jewish tells you all you need to know about the state of women writers in Latin American countries.  Lispector is firmly within the tradition of 20th century experimental fiction.  She was famously difficult to read in her native Portugese, and the translator includes an afterword to explain that the weirdness in Lispector's English translation accurately reflects original weirdness in her prose.

  The Hour of the Star was Lispector's last book published during her life.  It is also on the more traditional side of her narrative range, about a woman from rural Brazil trying to make her way in the big city, told by a semi-omniscient narrator who sometimes seems to become the author (Lispector) mid-paragraph.  The depiction of an uneducated woman as a central narrative focus is itself unusual.  Even the characters written by other non-white non-male authors tend to be male, educated or both.

  Like many of the other titles from the mid to late 20th century, The Hour of the Star is hardly even a novella- 69 pages in the New Directions paperback.  With a list price of 12.95 USD!    Thirteen dollars for a seventy page book.   That's just nuts.

Published 11/13/16
Song of Solomon (1977)
by Toni Morrison

  One of the pleasures of a Toni Morrison is that she writes in the grand tradition of the 19th century novel.  Which is not to call her technique unsophisticated.  Morrison is a technician as well as a visionary, and this really comes into focus during Song of Solomon, the first Morrison novel in the 1001 Books list to be written largely about male, rather than female characters.   Here, the protagonist is Macon "Milkman" Dead, the scion of an upwardly mobile African American family in small-town Pennsylvania.  Like all of her novels, the characters are extraordinary in terms of their depths.  Unlike her earlier works on the 1001 Books list, Morrison has Macon Dead take a straight journey through time.  The story is a more-or-less conventional coming-of-age saga, albeit one adopted to the delayed adulthoods that many Americans experienced in the 20th century.

  Song of Solomon was Morrison's commercial and critical breakthrough.   It's hard not to think that some of this was due to her consciously "dumbing down" her style and writing a book with a man as a lead character.   But like all of Morrison's books, petty criticisms are drowned by the overwhelming power of her work.  

Published 11/21/16
The Shining (1977)
by Stephen King

  You could argue that Stephen King was the most successful writer of fiction in the 20th century, and sixteen years into the 21st century, he is still a formidable figure both in genre fiction and popular film.  He also figures prominently in almost any serious discussion of the boundaries between "high" literature and "low" fiction.  Certainly, in the mid 1970's the idea of a genre author transcending genre and ascending into "literature" was not entirely foreign.  What is amazing about the extent of Stephen King's popular audience is not simply that he has sold over 350 million copies of his books, but also that more than 30 feature films have been made, and several of those have achieved classic status.  I'm thinking of The Green Mile, Stand By Me, and of course, The Shining.

    Any discussion of The Shining (novel) needs to start with a discussion of The Shining (movie).  I would say that like all Stanley Kubrick films based on literary sources, the movie is better than the book, but only because the movie is world class, and the underlying source material is, at best, above average. The Shining (novel) makes it onto the 1001 Books list as King's only representative.   The Editors probably figure that like The Odyssey and The Bible, enough people are familiar with his work to omit all of his books but for The Shining.  

  Kubrick clearly came to King's source material with his own agenda, and the eye of a film maker, vs. the concerns of a genre novelist, albeit a transcendent genre novelist.   Of course, literally any human being reading The Shining in 2016 will have seen the movie and therefore know the broad outlines and even the details of the book.   People riding the wave of recent interest in the meaning of the Kubrick film can find much to debate in the book.  Specifically, I think the only valid interpretation of the book is that the area on which the hotel is built is occupied by a malevolent spirit, which compelled the initial builder to build the hotel in the first place, and this spirit has maintained the existence of the hotel by manipulating the behavior of the owners and occupants of the hotel.

   This malevolent spirit maintains the souls of it's past victims, and it is interested in new victims.  Kubrick, of course, was interested in expanding on what is essentially a ghost story, and it is he who added the spatial manipulation that fans of the film seem to focus on.   There isn't much.., style... in King's fiction.  It's amazing stuff, but clunky and awkward, with dozens of pages that seem included specifically to manipulate the emotions of the reader, but that is probably why he is so successful. 

Austian writer Thomas Bernhard

Published 11/22/16
Yes (1978)
 by Thomas Bernhard

  Austrian author Thomas Bernhard is up there in your top 5 post Word War II German-language novelist/writer discussions.  He's not Gunter Grass or Krista Wolf famous, but his deeply weird and obsessive novels continue to resonate with aficionado's of post modern literature.   Like Correction, the other Bernhard penned book I've read thus far, Yes features an obsessive protagonist and is centered around suicide.

  Bernhard's prose resembles the experimental prose of writers in other languages, the constant rephrasing of mid career Beckett and the works of French writers from the Oulipo movement like Raymond Queneau and George Perec.  His narrators have a habit of repetition and rephrasing that is annoying, on purpose, I imagine.  It seems in terms of his themes and styles that Bernhard wants to challenge the reader, that he would be fine with an unhappy reader, because unhappiness is the natural state of the universe.

Published 12/3/16
The Virgin in the Garden (1978)
by A.S. Byatt

    Possession: A Romance, was published in 1990 and won the Booker Prize the following year.  This win instantly catapulted Byatt to the first tier of world fiction writers, and so it is only natural to go back and look at her earlier books (she published her first novel in 1964) to look for inklings of the combination of elements that proved such a roaring success in Possession.    I'm not sure if anyone took much notice of The Virgin in the Garden upon it's initial publication.  The copy I checked out from the library is a paperback edition published in the aftermath of the Possession win, from which I can infer that it was out of print when she won the Booker Prize.

   Byatt's reputation is as a master of the post-modern historical novel, one of the early practitioners of this form, one which almost dominates the intersection of "serious" and "popular" fiction.   From the perspective of the mastery demonstrated by Byatt in Possession, The Virgin in the Garden is early days.   What The Virgin in the Garden most resembles is an updated take by a woman author of the world of D.H. Lawrence circa the publication of Women in Love.   Set in the aftermath of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, in a small English town so familiar to any serious reader of fiction, The Virgin in the Garden is about two sisters and a brother, the children of an eccentric, anti-clerical scholar who teaches at the local school.  The Potter family consist of the eccentric father, Bill, Stephanie, the oldest sister, back from Cambridge and teaching elementary school children, Frederica, clearly the focus of the novel and indeed three others, which are known as the Frederica quartet and chart most of her adult life.  Finally there is Marcus, the youngest, a pale, sickly boy with nary a friend in the world.

  The plot mechanics involve Marcus finding a friend, Stephanie finding a husband, and Frederica losing her virginity.  To tell more would spoil the delights of the book, but I would mention that The Virgin in the Garden is not only 420 plus pages, it is also stuffed full of classical allusions that will either force you to your phone (or not I suppose.)   It did lead to me searching, and finding, different records referenced by the text, including a 1944 recording of Ezra Pound reading his poems that I found on Spotify.

Published 12/5/16
The Cement Garden (1978)
 by Ian McEwan

  The Cement Garden is another example of a classic that was only retrospectively awarded that status after the author obtained a critical and commercial audience with the success of a later work.  In this case, that later work is Amsterdam, which won the Booker in 1998.  He had another hit with Atonement, the movie version of which won an Oscar.   He continues to publish new titles, and his hits are airport book store mainstays.  His q rating among people who have actually purchased a book in the last twelve months is probably close to 100%.

  Which is all to say that The Cement Garden, a dry, sparse, horrific tale about three siblings who suffer the natural deaths of both parents within the space of a few months.  They are alone, without family, friends or even neighbors, since they occupy the single standing home in a development of abandoned, decaying, lots.   There is also an explicit incest theme which ends up playing a critical role in the denouement.   It's no wonder that The Cement Garden was not the hit that MacEwan needed, but it was his first novel, and so here we are.

Published 12/5/16
The Singapore Grip (1978)
by J.G. Farrell

  J.G. Farrell, along with Salman Rushdie are the most Booker-y of the Booker Prize wining authors.  Rushdie has TWICE won the "Booker of Bookers" for best of all the Booker Prize winners, both times for the 1981 novel Midnight's Children.   Farrell, on the other hand, first won for the Siege of Krishanpur, and was retroactively awarded the 'lost" Booker, awarded because a change in the qualifying dates for the yearly award, several years back.   Unlike Rushdie, Farrell did not become an international celebrity, but that may have been more due to his untimely death than any other reason.

  The Singapore Grip is the third book in his Empire Trilogy, and the only one that didn't win the Booker Prize.  The Singapore Grip, while powerful, is a bit ponderous compared to the other two titles in the trilogy.  Specifically, Farrell dives deep into the economics of commodity protection on the Malayan peninsula in the early part of the 20th century in such detail that for large portions The Singapore Grip reads like a work of non-fiction, and a boring work of non-fiction at that.

    Which is not to say that The Singapore Grip doesn't have it's moments.  Starting with the title, which is a slang term for a kind of sex where the man lays flat on his back and the woman uses her interior vaginal muscles to induce orgasm.  The meaning of the title is not revealed until late in the book, which leads me to believe that the title is meant to be a metaphor for the experience of the British Empire in Singapore on the eve of the successful Japanese invasion of the colony.  

  This parallel is drawn out by the extensive description of the Japanese invasion, and the comparative impotence of the British Command, assisted by the equally impotent Australian Command, who are depicted lacking adequate troops, materiel or any kind of strategic understanding that would have allowed them to defeat the Japanese.  This being a book published in 1978,  Farrell also has a Japanese army private as a character, to show the invasion from the perspective of a common Japanese soldier.

 

Published 12/7/16
The Safety Net (1979)
by Heinrich Boll

    Man, I am KNEE DEEP into Henrich Boll oeuvre and I still don't have a firm grasp on him.  For example, I picked up this three hundred page book, and noticed that it had a two page long "cast of characters" in the front, before the novel starts, and I thought, "Hmm, that's certainly odd for a 300 page novel written in late 1970's.  But, as it turns out, The Safety Net is written from a variety of perspectives, not just within chapters, but between chapters.

  Although typically described in American reviews as a novel about surveillance and the state, the foreword by Salman Rushdie takes pain to note the comparisons to the real life events surrounding the Baader Meinhof Gang.   I happen to have read a recently written factual account of the Baader Meinhof Gang, and I noticed the similarities between those events and some of the events discussed by the characters in this book.   As I write this, I'm still unclear what the "Association," whom the main character is the recently elected Chairman of, actually did.  I guess it's supposed to be some sort of capitalist Illuminati conspiracy but that element was muted, with an emphasis on the day-to-day emotions of the Chairman and his extended family, and the impact that constant protective surveillance has on their lives.

The Safety Net is also the only one of four Boll titles to be removed at the first revision.  I get that, I literally didn't understand what was happening until I remembered the cast of characters, then I had to leaf back and forth to make sense of the variety of constantly shifting narrators.   I'm always up for a meta-fictional challenge, but the narrative pay-off didn't seem to equal the amount of time invested for such a short book.  Still, there's no denying the formal sophistication of Boll's method, and the relevance of the themes to this day.  The Safety Net actually might be more relevant today then it was in 1979.

Published 12/10/16
If on a winter's night a traveler (1979)
by Italo Calvino

  If on a winter's night a traveler is a fully post-modern novel in  every sense of that phrase.  Calvino using a framing narrative, switches between second and third person narrators within the same chapter,  uses the "reader" as a central character and assorted other tricks which are central to post-modern literature.   On top of that, the plot is a twisting, turning snake involving the attempt of the reader to read a novel which has been mis-translated, lost in the mail and may not actually exist.  Near the end, he introduces the idea of a Japanese company constructing fake novels of an Irish author.  There are also multiple instances of Calvino inventing languages, lands and peoples.

  Obviously, If on a winter's night a traveler is confusing, but unlike other experimental fiction from this time period, at least it's fun.  For me that, is the main difference between successful and unsuccessful post modern literature, the successful stuff is fun.  After all, if reading a novel requires the level of concentration one typically uses for work, the text itself better not be dull.

Published 12/12/16
A Bend in the River (1979)
by V. S. Naipaul

  V.S. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971, and forty years later he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.   That is the modern world double in literature and with it comes assured status as a statesperson of world literature, not just English language literature.  His work sits at the intersection of broad trends in literature past and present, an heir to Conrad and an avatar for the globalization of English language literature at the very same time.   A Bend in the River did not win the Booker Prize, but when the committee awarded Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature and singled him out as an heir to Conrad, A Bend in the River seemed to be the book they were talking about.  At least, the publisher of this copy of A Bend in the River would have you believe that, since they splash that quote from the Award Ceremony on the back cover.

  A Bend in the River is set in a thinly veiled Eastern Congolese city during the era of Mobutu.  The narrator is Salim, the son of a moderately well to-do Muslim Indian trading family living on the coast in what is today southern Kenya or northern Tanzania.  African independence hits their community hard, and Salim takes up an offer to run a trading depot in a moribund central African township, recently despoiled by the paroxysm accompanying independence.   The cast of characters include his "slave," who has made the decision to accompany him up river for lack of anything better to do, Ferdinand, the child of a trader from an up river village, and Yvette, the white, European wife of exiled Presidential advisor Raymond.

  The events of A Bend in the River in a manner familiar to students of the history of Zaire/the Congo, initial progress under the dictator is reversed  over time, and eventually all are left worse than they were before.  It's no wonder that this book received criticism from the left for being an apology for neo-colonialism, but since Naipaul seems to be right about everything he said in A Bend in the River, as things turned out,  it appears that it would be the Nobel Prize Committee who had the last word.

  As a fan of Conrad and Conradian fiction, it is easy to see the comparison, and makes sense to call Naipaul a worthy heir to Conrad's achievements.  After all, Conrad famously wrote in his third language (English) and his anglicized name disguised but did not erase his Polish heritage.  Conrad was a global author before such a thing existed.

The cover of Shikasta tells you all you need to know about the comments: Tedious!

Published 12/14/16
Shikasta (1979)
by Doris Lessing

  Shikasta is book one of Doris Lessings' Sufi influenced science fiction quintology.  It bears the extremely awkward full title of:  

Canopus in Argos:
Archives
Re: Colonised Planet 5
Shikasta
Professional, Psychological, Hisotrical Documents Relating to Visit by
JOHOR
(George Sherban)
Emissary (Grade 9)
87th of the Period of the Last Days

    All of that appears on the cover of Shikasta, and it actually provides a good indicator of what the reader is in for with this book.  Shikasta is only very loosely a novel, rather it is a compilation of reports and observations by JOHOR, ending with a two hundred page novella written about George Sherban, a human incarnation of JOHOR.   Before the novella comes a series of obeservational reports written by JOHOR and other alien observers about their time on Shikasta (It's Earth, ok?) during the lengthy project of alien colonization.

  Lessings' narrative: Multiple alien species active secretly on Earth in an attempt to create a galactic colony in harmony with the rest of the universe, will sound familiar to many fans of science fiction.  Canopus, the main player in this galactic empire of harmony, works in conjunction with partner empire Sirius and against the rogue empire Puttiora and it's aggressive representative planet, Shanmat.  JOHOR is designated as an emissary to Shikasta/Earth and he is on the scene as the initial colony set up by Canopus collapses as a result of Shanmat's interference, to be replaced by the rise of the contemporary human race.

  The modern period with the incarnation of JOHOR as George Sherban, takes place on the eve of World War III, when China with the help of various youth armies has taken control of the globe, and Europe stands on the brink of extinction, in order to pay penance for the crimes of "the white race."  Lessing, in addition to her new Sufi influences, evident in the eschatology of the alien race of Canopus, joins her previously noted Socialist/Communist leanings in Shikasta.

  During Shikasta I had the distinct feeling that I was reading a dramatic wrong turn in the career of a first rate world writer (Nobel Prize for Literature 2001).  The fact that Lessing remained committed enough to the idea over five novels presumably tells you all you need to know about "late Lessing," and the fact that the 1001 Books project dropped Shikasta in the first revision tells me all I need to know about whether this book is actually a classic.

Published 12/15/16
Smiley's People (1979)
 by John Le Carré

  Smiley's People is the final installment of his trilogy of novels about English intelligence officer George Smiley.   This trilogy is commonly considered a high point of a rich and varied (and continuing) career writing high-class spy fiction.   Over the course of the trilogy, Smiley is locked in a career long struggle with the nameless head of the KGB KARLA unit, devoted to recruiting western double agents.

 The single most memorable scene in spy fiction (outside of the various James Bond one liners popularized by the films) is the confrontation between Smiley and the future head of Karla in a Bombay prison, described during Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  In that meeting, Karla famously refuses to defect, instead choosing to face a likely death sentence back home in Russia during one of the post World War II purges.  Confusingly, the  1001 Books series didn't include the middle book in the Smiley trilogy, The Honorable School Boy and they also include an earlier novel where Smiley appears as a minor character, but is not part of the Smiley trilogy (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold).

  I think you could make the argument that Le Carre is underrepresented at this point.  His career extends far beyond George Smiley, and his works are being adapted as frequently as ever.  His lengthy, rich plots seem ideally suited for the requirements of "peak tv."   Movie versions have been received warmly.   If you read the newspaper, the KGB and Russian spies are are as relevant right now as they were in the late 1970's.  Vladimir Putin wouldn't be out of place in a Le Carre novel.

Published 12/16/16
City Primeval (1979)
by Elmore Leonard

   Elmore Leonard is probably the top American crime fiction of the past few decades.  He got his start writing westerns- as early as 1953, but he segued into crime fiction and City Primeval is a good example of a police procedural: detective fiction written from the perspective of a cop, rather than a private investigator.  Here, the crime is the senseless murder of a controversial African-American judge and his (white) girl friend, the location is Detroit, and the cast of characters includes a psychotic red headed killer, a Mexican police Detective and a white, female defense lawyer.  

   Long known as a compelling writer of "gritty" crime fiction,  City Primeval is all that and a bowl of chips, a compelling example of Leonard coming into his own as a top author of genre fiction.

Published 12/18/16
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
by Milan Kundera

  I remember, in junior high, furtively thumbing through a copy of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1988, after the movie version came out, because the movie was rated R for sexual content.   I was 12 at the time, not even close to my first date, kiss or relationship, let alone sexual activity with  anyone.  I remember being confused by The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and unable to make sense of any of it, let alone find erotic content.   That memory returned to me while I was reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a novel of seven interrelated narratives (or variations on a theme as the author/narrator himself explains during the book) that share the theme of memory/forgetting.  Very little laughter occurs, and what attention is paid to laughter is not flattering.  No, this is mostly The Book of Forgetting.

  I will forever associate Kundera with the pan-European film trilogy Three Colors, by Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski.   Those films weren't released until the mid 1990's, but I feel like they are a good summary of the impact of several decades of philosophical existentialism on the feature film experience.   After all, I sincerely doubt that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting would have made the 1001 Books project had The Unbearable Lightness of Being been such a hit with Western audiences in the mid 1980's.    And, you know, now that I'm two books into Kundera's bibliography, I feel like it is his frank, sympathetic depiction of adults having sex that is the key to his success, much in the same way 12 year old me picked up the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (at a time when I was reading science fiction out of the young adult section in the local public library in Northern California.

  Sex sells in popular entertainment, be it book, music or film.  Kundera writes about sex in such a way that it is almost entirely deprived of erotic charge.  His characters grope, fumble and stifle laughter during furtive sexual encounters staged during the Russian occupation of the Czech Republic.   In a broad sense, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting belongs to the genre of novels that depict life in Communist occupied Eastern Europe, but it is the sex that sets him apart, like it or not.  Personally, I feel like every artistic word ever uttered about sex or sexual relationships has been rendered entirely irrelevant by the explosion of pornography on the internet.  I'm not talking about love, but the depiction of sexual acts in art and literature.   Nothing an author could possibly write about the sexual act could rival a five minute search of literally any term at a site like Pornhub.

  

Published 1/1/17
The Sea, The Sea (1978)
 by Iris Murdoch

   The Sea, The Sea was the 1978 Booker Prize winner and perhaps it was a bit of a make up for the fact that the Booker Prize hadn't even started until Murdoch was 15 novels deep into her career.  It is also her sixth novel to make the first version of1 the 1001 Books list and the last, chronologically speaking.   My take on Murdoch is that she is the last of the line of 20th century English authors that begins, more or less, with D.H. Lawrence- writers who managed to animate the relationship between the sexes, both physically and mentally, while simultaneously maintaining their direct connection to English authors of the 19th century.  

   Thus, with Murdoch, you often get a combination of familiar "English novel" elements:  Childless, upper middle class English men and women experiencing a spiritual crisis of one sort of another, falling in and out of love, drinking and screwing.  In The Sea, The Sea, the narrator/protagonist is Charles Arrowby, a distinguished figure in the world of London theater, recently retired and moved to an isolated English sea-side village, where he rents an eccentric home perched at the top of a cliff, overlooking the sea.

  His contemplative mood is interrupted when he discovers, quite by chance, that his first love, the "one who got away" is living nearby, with her husband.  He rapidly becomes obsessed with renewing their relationship, despite all evidence that a renewal of the prior relationship is impossible.  Other characters pop in and out as Arrowby's increasingly desperate machinations result in an actual kidnapping of his beloved and worse.

  In a career of vividly drawn characters, Charles Arrowby, with his egomania and theatrical background, stands out, as does his "Old India Hand" cousin, James, whose experiences with Eastern mysticism during his time in the British army play an increasingly important role as events take the course.  He also introduces the touch of science fiction/fantasy, that Murdoch has played with in prior books, elevating The Sea, The Sea out of a strictly realist perspective.

Published 1/4/17
Burger's Daughter (1979)
by Nadime Gordimer

   South African author Nadime Gordimer is another Booker/Nobel Prize for Literature winning double.   Bit of a scandal that she only placed two books on the 1001 Books list. Her 1974 Booker Winner, The Conservationist, didn't even make the cut.   Her relative dearth of novels (especially when compared to fellow South African Nobel/Booker winner J.M. Coeteze (10 titles!) maybe relates to the decline in interest in the struggle surrounding the Apartheid/White Supremacist government in South Africa by the African National Congress and their allies.

  Like several other books that deal with the subject of the plight of leftist activist/terrorist types after World War II, Burger's Daughter is written about the child of a pair of white South African Communists who both die in prison after being convicted of crimes against the South African government during the apartheid era. The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow, about the children of  the Rosenberg spies, published in 1977, is one book that comes to mind.  The Safety Net, by Heinrich Boll, is another.

 Burger's daughter, named Rosa, after Rosa Luxembourg is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a South African doctor of Dutch decent, who turns his back on his people in order to assist in the struggle of Africans against the white minority government.   A critical scene in the novel is Rosa's memory of taking her Father supplies while he was imprisoned awaiting trial.  After losing the trial, he is sentenced to life in prison, and dies a couple years into his sentence.

 The rest of Burger's Daughter is Rosa struggling both with the legacy of her father and the role she wants to play in the ongoing struggle for freedom in South Africa.   Gordimer's style is elliptical, abstract and the overwhelming mood is a sense of detachment in the aftermath of physical and mental trauma.  Burger's Daughter is transparently an important novel about a vitally important subject.  You get the sense that the character is based on someone Gordimer knew, which is apparently the case.

  Burger's Daughter is also a good reminder of just how fucked up apartheid era South Africa was, and how complicated, lest we forget.

Published 1/8/17
Broken April (1978)
by Ismail Kadare

  Ismail Kadare is number one Albanian novelist, winner of the first International Booker Prize, international best seller in French translation, perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature and emissary of Albanian culture in the West.  He had two books on the first edition of the 1001 Books list and then added and lost an additional title since then.   Broken April is a refreshing change of pace from other "European" novels from this time period, most of which fall in the category of Existentialist inspired philosophical novel.  Broken April, on the other hand, is about the Albanian highlands, set in the early 20th century, but it could be set in the middle ages for all the modern world intrudes on the setting.

  The main facet of this Albanian highlands culture is the vibrant tradition of honor killings, which are known to span a dozen generations and result in dozens of deaths on each side, each death prescribed by rules from the kanun, a quasi legal code that governs this region in place of any kind of central government authority.  This kanun lays down the laws for the ritualized honor killings that are a central institution of this place (Albanian highlands) and Kadare tells his story in a way that blends objective reportage with the characters and motives of a traditional novel.   The interlocking narratives switch between a young man who has just committed an honor killing and a young couple from the capital, Tirana,  travelling through the highlands in the style of young people from the city travelling through the sticks anywhere.

Published 1/5/17
Life A User's Manual (1978)
 by Georges Perec

  Life A User's Manual was French author Georges Perec's last novel, and it is also considered his best.    Checking in at 500 pages, with an additional 100 pages of appendices, Perec manages to embrace both his life long obsession with writing under a system of constraints (a characteristic of the Oulipo movement, of which Perec was a life-long affiliate.)  Unlike some of his other novels, the scheme does not eclipse the narrative, making Life A User's Manual enjoyable to read.

  The idea behind Life A User's Manual is to completely describe the lives (and things) of an entire apartment building of Parisians.  It is the novelistic equivalent of removing the front of a children's dollhouse and making up a story for each of the inhabitants and then describing all of the things inside the dollhouse.  According to Wikipedia, this approach was something of a life long obsession with Perec.   All of the rooms of each of the apartments is described in turn at a single point in time, moments after the death of the owner of the building, Bartlebooth.

  Bartlebooth is a wealthy Englishman who has spent his entire life in a single project.  First, he spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors.  Then he travels the world, painting one watercolor almost every week and then sending them back to Paris, where they are turned into 750 piece jigsaw puzzles by Gaspard Winckler (another resident of the described apartment building.)  Bartlebooth returns from his travels and then spends the rest of his life reassembling the puzzles, after which he returns the finished puzzle to the place where it was painted and has it chemically washed, the idea being that his entire life's work will be obliterated.

   Interspersed between episodes of this main narrative, necessarily (because of the restrictions of the approach) told as flashbacks, are dozens of interlinking tales about the lives of the people who have lived in the apartment building at various times.   These tales are voluminous and as entertaining as the central narrative concerning Bartlebooth.  Perec helpfully provides an index of these tales in the back of the book, with the numbers referring to chapter.

  It is tempting to describe Life A User's Manual as an early post-modernist masterpiece, but Perec is more like a modernist taking realist principles of description to an extreme and then cloaking it in his system of restraints.  Perec's fondest for lists of physical things is nowhere abated in Life A User's Manual.   What is different is the introduction of compelling narrative- both the central story about Bartlebooth and his puzzle paintings and dozens of the surrounding tales, which show an understanding of the appeal of genre fiction and genuine humor- rare in a European novel published between the end of World War II and today.

Published 1/22/17
The World According to Garp (1978)
 by John Irving

   The World According to Garp was a very much a book that was on the shelf at my parent's home.  I tried reading it when I was young, maybe 11 or 12, and I didn't get very far.  Frankly, I expected, with a title like The World According to Garp, something along the lines of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, science fiction, humor.    There is some humor in The World According to Garp, but no science fiction.   Irving was a student of Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a fact which I became aware of halfway through Garp, when I thought to myself, "This books reads like a Kurt Vonnegut novel" and searched the names of both authors on the internet.

  There are also elements of Tom Robbins and Ken Kesey as well as the additional element of post-modernism.  The plot of Garp is both loosely autobiographical AND about the ways in which literature contains and does not the biography of the author.  The protagonist (but not narrator) T.S. Garp is the son of a nurse who decides she wants a baby but not a man.  Working as a nurse in a New England towards the end of World War II, she inseminates herself with the help of a soldier in a vegetative state, and then repairs to her ancestral home of New Hampshire, where she works at a prep school and raises her son, little T.S. Garp.

  After graduation, Mother and son repair to Vienna, where Mom writes an auto-biography that becomes a touchstone of feminism.  Son writes a novella which is well-reviewed but doesn't sell. Garp and Mother return to the States, where Garp claims his bride with the help of his novella (proving he's a "real" writer to his bride, a the daughter of his prep school wrestling coach)  and things move on from there.

  "There" involves A LOT of events.  The major themes are lust, death and human relationships, in the same way that those are the central themes of every Kurt Vonnegut novel.   The World According to Garp has the first explicit discussion of the feminist "movement" of the 60's and 70's, that I have read so far in the 1001 Books project.  This portion very much reminds me of a similar theme in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, published in 1978 by Tom Robbins.  In 2016 it is cringe inducing to realize that a major literary investigation into the feminist movement was authored by the cissest of cis white males.

  The cringe inducing discussions of feminism, which also explicitly treats the issue of transsexualism in a way that was ahead of it's time, are balanced out by some astute observations about the nature of "popular" and "literary" fiction.  Unfortunately, I can't really discuss this portion of The World According to Garp without spoiling the third act,  but I found that part of the book highly satisfying, simply speaking as someone who has given ample time and thought to the issues surrounding art, artists and audiences.

Published 2/25/19
Suttree (1979)
by Cormac McCarthy

  Cormac McCarthy is another author I've selected via the process of this blog for a completest approach.  By completest(completist?) I mean revisiting all the works of an author, not just the canonical books.  McCarthy merits this treatment for a variety of reasons: interest which preexists this blog, personal enjoyment of his books, his status as a canonical novelists both within the United States and outside the United States and his refusal to participate in the entertainment industrial complex a la J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon.

  Whatever it's merits or failures, there is no denying that Suttree is the starting point for a serious reader of Cormac McCarthy.  It is often called his masterpiece and I think it is fair to say that calling Suttree McCarthy's Ulysses is not specious.   Casual readers are most likely to be familiar with McCarthy's later works- The Road, in particular, which is the last novel McCarthy published (in 2006), and his later western books starting with Blood Meridian in 1985.

  Suttree marks an end to an earlier, less familiar period of McCarthy's career, which can be called his Faulknerian/Southern Gothic/Tennessee period.  Suttree is all those things in spades, set in 1950's Knoxville, where McCarthy was raised by his father, a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley River Authority.  The character of Cornelius Suttree, who has renounced a life of educated privilege in favor of living the life of a drunken derelict, making a (poor) living as a fisherman on the river and generally acting like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas: a man bent on self destruction.

   Suttree represents the culmination of this earlier period- let's call it his Southern Gothic period- which is more transparently a product of the Southern Gothic tradition.  McCarthy's fifties Knoxville is populated with a host of character that echo those from Flannery O'Connor's short stories.  McCarthy is faithful to the period- although the milieu of the down and out in Knoxville is racially integrated, the white characters have no hesitation about dropping the N-bomb on every fifth page.  It's not a deal breaker, exactly, but he isn't writing in or about the distance past, so the dedication to verisimilitude left me uneasy.

   McCarthy shies away neither from forbidden words nor bodily functions- the extent to which Suttree is filled with vile bodily fluids is remarkable, and there is a general miasma of rot and decay that hovers over every page of the book.  I didn't regret my choice to listen to the Audiobook version, which is a work of art in and of itself.  Suttree is so filled with colorful characters and regional argot and vocabulary that it almost seems a shame to NOT listen to the Audiobook.   I think I'm moving towards a future where I do both: listen to the Audiobook and read the book itself for the same title.  If a book is really good, it's worth it, by definition almost, just as you would see the movie version. 

Published 3/3/19
The Ghost Writer (1979)
by Philip Roth

   The interesting fact about the Audiobook edition of The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth- a book published in 1979, mind- is that it was published only in 2016.   That means Roth's publisher went back to these earlier books and decided to put out Audiobook editions.  In the context of Roth and his publishing career, a 2016 Audiobook edition of the first Nathan Zuckerman novel qualifies as a new release.

  Roth published an astonishing nine books in the Nathan Zuckerman series, starting in 1979 with The Ghost Wrtier and including such later career standouts as The Human Stain, American Pastoral and I Married A Communist, all of which could be considered as canonical Roth books.   Roth was prolific not just within the nine book Zuckerman series but outside it as well, with other multi-volumes series including the Roth series (with Roth as the narrator), the Nemeses series, with four volumes, and a half dozen novels not tied to any series.   It strikes me that Roth may be suffering simply because of the difficulty and amount of time it takes to read even a fair portion of his bibliography.

 For example, I am nine books in, and I still wouldn't be able to tell you much outside of some plot descriptions and the observation that many of his books deal with very personal issues relating to family and sex, but that he also has a facility with the big novel of ideas, and even high concept works with genre roots.   In other words, Roth is hard to pin down.  At the same time, he is undeniably an unfashionably straight white male, American-Jewishness aside, and the sheer number of books means that he will face a diminished level of interest from newer readers.

   The Ghost Writer isn't long- the Audiobook was just over four hours, practically making it a novella.   In it, the young Zuckerman grapples with the impact of his nascent literary career on his family (they are upset at his portrayal of his Jewish family) while he seeks mentor-ship from from E.I. Lonoff, who is said to be based on either Henry Roth or Bernard Malamud.  While ensconced in upstate New York seclusion with Roth and his melodramatic wife, he becomes enamored of a young woman, who may or may not be the real Anne Frank. 

  At the time, The Ghost Writer was a big hit- it almost won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  And it's only 180 pages long!  Highly recommend the Audiobook, which is readily available via the Libby library app. 

Jennifer Connolly Heroin chiced it up in the Darren Arnofsky directed movie version of Requiem for a Dream.

Book Review
Requiem for a Dream (1978)
by Herbert Selby Jr.

Replaces: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson


   Requiem for a Dream is a clear example of a book gaining belated entry to the canon via a succesful movie version.   Here, Darren Arnofsky made the movie version, in 2000, presumably leading to the inclusion of the book version in the second edition of 1001 Books.    Before the movie came out, Selby already had achieved what you might call "cult status" which in the USA is generally good for an adjunct faculty job at a major university teaching writing to undergraduates (see Luccia Berlin, as well.)

  I remember watching the movie when it came out- in the theater- later that same year I dressed in a film inspired costume alongside my partner, who wore Ellen Bustyn's famous red dress- also a focal point of the book.   Requiem for a Dream details the travails of the Goldfarb family.  Mother Sara is widowed, living alone in her Brooklyn apartment, suffering from periodic visits from her son,  Harry- a confirmed heroin addict, who steals her television every few weeks when he needs money for heroin.

  Harry has a partner- Tyrone Love- and a girlfriend, Marion, his part novel is a straightforward rags to riches to southern prison sentence story about heroin addicts in 70's New York.  Marion descends into prostitution, Harry and Tyrone end up in said southern prison- Harry loses an arm to a monstrous abscess caused by his heroin addiction.  I was surprised to see that the editors of the 1001 Books project gave Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit- a very pathbreaking LGBT bildungsroman from a non-London based English writer, and I'm just generally surprised that Requiem for a Dream made the cut over Last Exit to Brooklyn, which is the more compelling tale in my mind, and was also written almost fifteen years before Requiem for a Dream was published.

Marlon Brando played sympathetic lawyer McKenzie in the 1989 movie version of A Dry White Season.

Published 3/12/19
A Dry White Season (1979)
by Andre Brink

Replaces:  The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

  Andre Brink was the biggest name in South African fiction in the 1970's, getting two Booker Shortlist nominations in a row for his second and third novels, An Instant in the Wind and Rumours of Rain (1975, 1978).   He then followed up with A Dry White Season in 1979, which became a genuine international hit, even spawning a well received film version in 1989 (with Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando(!) above.   Although he has consistently published since then (15 novels since then, most recently in 2012 he was almost totally eclipsed by the emergence of fellow South African J.M. Coetzee, who actually won the Booker in 1989, and in 1989 and then, of course, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.   The first 1001 Books list is filled with Coetzee- I think he is the most represented author in the first book, but Brink was excluded, so it makes sense that they would add him in for the first revision.

   By the standards of apartheid era South Africa, A Dry White Season, about a wealthy white Afrikaner who intervenes on behalf of a black father and son who are judicially murdered by the police, was racy stuff- banned in South Africa of course- but the entire plot is highly vulnerable to the "White Savior" critique of this sort of book.  Ultimately, South Africa collapsed, not because of the activity of individual Afrikaners but from a combination of international pressure and effective political organization by the black majority population.   In this way, Brink is an evolutionary dead end, representing the extremely limited liberal Afrikaner population who failed to effectuate the needed change. 

Published 4/12/19
Offshore (1979)
by Penelope Fitzgerald

  I'd never heard of Booker Prize winning English author Penelope Fitzgerald until I heard the afterword to The Transcription, the new novel by Kate Atkinson.  The Transcription is a World War II era spy novel, and the main character works at the BBC.  In the afterword written by the Author, she recognizes the work of Fitzgerald as being the "last word" about fictional depictions of the BBC.  I'd never heard of Fitzgerald, and then I found her 1979 novel Offshore, about the life of a single mother living with her two daughters on a houseboat moored in the Thames river, on the list of Booker Prize winners.

  Even more incredibly, I found an Audiobook version, recently published (2016) that was available from the library.   GO FIGURE!  Like many Booker Prize winners, Offshore is off-beat- not what you would expect, except it seems like very Booker Prize winner is a weird.   The center of Offshore is Nenna James, a woman recently separated from her husband, raising two pre-teen girls on her houseboat.  Edward, her husband, refuses to live on a boat, and has decamped to the apartment of his friend's mom in North London.

  Her boating companions are a group of almost entirely male eccentrics, led by Sam Willis, a semi-retired painter of maritime scenes, who lives on the decrepit Dreadnaught, the sinking of which is a major event during the course of Offshore.

   Other than that you've got Nenna flibbing and flubbing about getting back with her husband, and possibly removing herself to Canada under the patronage of her wealthy older sister.  There is also a German visitor, and James' two daughters get their own sub plot, which is blessedly PG.   

Published 11/4/19
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
 by Barbara Pym

Replaces: Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

  Quartet in Autumn was part of an unlikely second act for the English novelist Barbara Pym, whose first act lasted through the 1950's and early 1960s.  The first part of her literary career was characterized by commercial and critical success until about 1961, at which point she was told by her publisher that was too "old fashioned" and that she was no longer publishable.  She then went on hiatus between 1963 and 1977, when she reemerged with Quartet in Autumn, a novel about a coterie of four office drones on the verge of retirement.  Quartet in Autumn was a surprise hit, and earned her a Booker Prize nomination, leading to a revival of interest in her and her writing before her death in 1980.

  She ranks as a major omission from the first edition of 1001 Books, the second edition included two works, this one and Excellent Women- from her first period (1953).  Her omission must have been an oversight based on over-familiarity, since I imagine the editors of the 1001 Books project being the type of people who would not have given Quartet in Autumn the time of day in 1977.  She generally fits into the category of "domestic fiction" about the quiet lives of ordinary men and women, mostly written by women. 

  Quartet of Autumn is also interesting because it tackles old age, and the lives of older people, a set of problems which are typically excluded from the youth and child rearing obsessions of writers of literary fiction.   It replaces Old Masters by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard- one of my favorite discoveries from the first edition of 1001 Books, and a rare second edition subtraction for German language of literature.   German language literature is a huge winner in the second edition of 1001 Books, but Bernhard is well represented in the first edition, with six(!) titles, so some reduction in representation should be expected.  

Published 11/11/19
The Wars (1977)
 by Thomas Findley

Replaces: Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

   Another Canadian writer who was overlooked in the original 1001 Books edition, Thomas Findley got added in 2008 with The Wars, his 1977 work of "historical metafiction" about the experience of a Canadian man who enlists in the British army during World War I.  Findley combines disparate narrators and adopts first, second and third person viewpoints during the 277 pages of The Wars.

  Robert Ross is a Canadian teen who enlists at the beginning of the war, eventually making his way to the front lines for some of the worst of the fighting.   The description of the battle scenes are harrowing, but any reader well acquainted with the voluminous (and still being written) library of literature on the First World War is unlikely to find anything new.   Predictably, he cracks up and is institutionalized before returning to the front, and a surprising ending mad less surprising by the prologue, which sets the scene for that surprise without giving any context.

  The Wars replaces Old Masters by Austrian Thomas Bernhard- another loss for the German literature category of the 1001 Books list, and another win for Canada, whose writers seem to be the major English language winners in the first revised edition.

Author Mariama Ba

Published 11/13/19
So Long a Letter (1979)
 by Mariama Ba

Replaces: Marya by Joyce Carol Oates

  Huge canon diversity win here, replacing a second-tier Joyce Carol Oates title with a book written by a female, Francophone, West African (Senegalese) writer.  Francophone West Africa is entirely absent from the 1001 Books with the exception of this title.  Slim, at 96 pages, is a novella written in the form of a letter from the wealthy first wife of a deceased government minister, about her experience being abandoned by her husband for a younger woman, but surviving the experience, and also reflecting on the Senegalese liberation movement, of which her husband plays an important part as a teacher and Union organizer.

  It is a privileged view point of the post-independence African experience, no terrible civil war here, but it is also entirely African in perspective, also the characters (and Ba) are Muslim, which is as underrepresented as Francophone Africa.

Published 12/2/19
The Beggar Maid (1978)
by Alice Munro

   Replaces: A Maggot by John Fowles


  Canadian short-story specialist Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, five years after the first revision of the 1001 Books list, where she was included (2 books) for the first time.  Her omission from the original edition is a minor embarrassment- especially when you look at the over representation of other recent Nobel winners like J.M. Coetzee.    Munro was awarded her Nobel for being a "contemporary master of the short story," but The Beggar Maid is as close as she gets to a Novel.  Indeed, a reader could be forgiven for thinking (as I did while listening to the Audiobook) that The Beggar Maid is a novel, since every story is about the same woman- Rose, and the episodes proceed in largely chronological order over the course of her lifetime.

  Like many of Munro's protagonists, Rose is a woman from a disadvantaged socio-economic background in rural Canada who transcends her origins but faces difficult choices along the way.  The Beggar Maid replaces A Maggot by John Fowles- a post-modernist metahistorical fiction  that confuses as much as it entertains, and Fowles himself is a marginally canonical figure if you look at 21st literary trends.  He scores a fat zero for diversity purposes, and his literary reputation is less secure then his (strong) sales record and continued presence in international book stores.

Japanese author Yuko Tsushima

Published 1/30/20
Territory of Light (1979)
 by Yuko Tsushima

  Territory of Light, a pioneering work of "auto-fiction" (see Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgard and Marcel Proust) was published in Japanese in 1979 but didn't get an English translation until 2018, with a publication date in February of last year.   It's been a breakthrough for Tsushima, who only has two books currently in print in English and available via Amazon.    Tsushima died in 2016, so it seems fair to acknowledge the type of critical re-appraisal (or first-time appraisal) that results in books like Territory of Light getting translated in 2018.

  Narrated by the author using "I" and "me" to describe events, Tsushima's version of herself: A recently semi-abandoned single mother working in a private library,  is full of dark secrets, bluntly revealed.  Tsushima the character and the the writer are both fearless in a way that is not something that I associate with Japanese fiction.  What must contemporaries made of it at the time?  Tsushima seems to have been decades ahead of her time as far as appreciation in the west, but with two translations in the past two years, surely there is hope for more books in the future. 

Published 6/11/20

Players (1977)

 by Don DeLillo

     Don DeLillo is one of those authors who is likely to see fewer readers over time.  He is a straight, white, male post-modernist writing novels at the end of a period where those concerns have dominated literary fiction.  These days, folks are looking for diversity and baby, Don DeLillo ain't it.  DeLillo, 83, is still publishing- he has a book- The Silence that is supposed to come out this year.    As far as his canonical representation, he's got one dead bang winner: White Noise (1985) which is still in print and is read widely at the undergraduate label in intro to American Lit survey courses.  Underworld (1997), is a close second, and maybe his best book- a sprawling best-seller that won the National Book Award and almost won the Pulitzer Prize- it gave him the kind of pop-cultural staying power that solidified his status in American Literature for a generation- but that was close to 25 years ago at this point.

   Since Underworld he's published five more novels, and none of them have achieved close to the same kind of ubiquity as Underworld or White Noise.   There's also the fact that he published seven novels before White Noise- none of which would be in print if it weren't for Underworld and White Noise.   Players is from that early period- I was surprised to find an Audiobook version- published two years ago, on the Libby app.   Players shows DeLillo as a writer of experimental fiction.  I can hardly describe the plot:  Someone gets shot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and then there is some kind of terrorist plot involving the CIA or something.   I guess there are concurrent story lines involving a couple- Lyle- a Wall Street floor trader and Pammy, who works at the World Trade Center.  Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia, I suppose I can sense of what I heard in the Audiobook, but not while I was listening to it.  It's easy to see why Players was not a hit.

Published 7/22/20

Missing Persons (1978) 

by Patrick Modiano

  Originally published in 1978, Missing Persons won the Prix Goncourt(the French Pulitzer) and established himself as a major literary talent inside France (he was five novels in to his career).  It is also- surprise surprise- the most accessible of the four books of his I've read.   Missing Persons actually takes the detective story by way of European existentialist format common to all of Modiano's novels and takes it somewhere- giving the reader a narrator who is investigating his own identity- having been found without memory as a young man in the aftermath of World War II.  Missing Persons is the Modiano to read first!

Criterion Collection Cover of Stalker d. Andrei Tarkovsky

Published 2/1/21

Stalker (1979)

d. Andrei Tarkovsky

Criterion Collection #888

   Stalker is a huge movie for people who call movies "films."   In my mind it is one of the central movies of the entire Criterion Collection and it represents "World Cinema" in its purest form.  Stalker is unwieldy, difficult to understand, comes with an "only in Russia" production story and bears little to no resemblance to its source material, a science fiction novel, but it has still managed to influence a generation of writers and filmmakers- most notably in the movie version of the Jeff Vandermeer novel Annihilation, which is basically a remake/homage/rip off of Stalker. 

   Clocking in at a full 161 minutes (it feels even longer!) Stalker is "about" the central character- more of a guide than an actual Stalker, who is hired to tour the "writer" and the "professor" around a mysterious era known as "the zone."  The zone is a constantly changing, rearranging area that is never the same place twice, walled off from a sepia-tinged Russia that looks like it has just emerged from a World War.   If, like me, you are expecting some kind of action or excitement from such a set up, you are due to be disappointed since the bulk of Stalker is shots held for minutes at a time and the characters engaging in dialogue whose closest Western equivalent would be a Samuel Beckett play.

  It strikes me that Stalker is one of those movies where, once you make it through, you feel compelled to call it magnificent, but mostly I found it hard to pay attention.  Sad!

Dust was a 1985 Spanish/French movie version of In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee.  It starred Jane Birkin as unreliable narrator Magda.

Published 12/19/16
In the Heart of the Country (1979)
 by J.M Coetzee

   Coetzee is closer to the center of the first edition of the 1001 Books list than any other author from the 20th century.  He placed an astonishing 10 titles in the first edition of the book, and keeping with the rule of thumb between volumes, lost five of them in the 2008 revision.   In the Heart of the Country was his second novel, published three years after his first, Dusklands.  International fame would not be far behind.  He won his first Booker prize in 1983 for The Life and Times of Michael K.  His second Booker prize came in 1999, and then he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, the second South African to win (Nadine Gordimer.)   His catalog is a mainstay of book stores everywhere.  Decades later, it is still easy to find in print versions of his most obscure titles.


   In the Heart of the Country is described as "one of his more experimental novels,"  but I don't think that is entirely accurate.  Instead, I believe that Coetzee, like many young authors in the 20th century, begin with experimentation and then become "more traditional" as their books become more successful.  After all, once you have won a Booker Prize, no one is going to call into question your prose technique.  Dusklands,his first novel, was barely even that, it was more like two separate novella's that were shoe horned together to make them more viable commercially.

  Thus, I think it's fair to say that In the Heart of the Country is Coetzee's first "real" novel, even though it is still only 130 pages longs and consists of a series of numbered paragraphs, documenting the increasing madness of Magda, the 20 something daughter of a Boer widower living in an isolated part of South Africa.   Magda is your classic unreliable narrator.  Her fantasies of graphic violence against her father and an imagined replacement bride are manifested in graphic fashion, as is her repeated rape at the hands of their African servant after her violent outburst against her father.

   The back cover compares In the Heart of the Country to Faulkner in it's "feverishness" but also in the ties between sex, family and violence- three intertwined themes at the heart of many of Faulkner's stories.

Published 12/2/19
The Beggar Maid (1978)
by Alice Munro

   Replaces: A Maggot by John Fowles

  Canadian short-story specialist Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, five years after the first revision of the 1001 Books list, where she was included (2 books) for the first time.  Her omission from the original edition is a minor embarrassment- especially when you look at the over representation of other recent Nobel winners like J.M. Coetzee.    Munro was awarded her Nobel for being a "contemporary master of the short story," but The Beggar Maid is as close as she gets to a Novel.  Indeed, a reader could be forgiven for thinking (as I did while listening to the Audiobook) that The Beggar Maid is a novel, since every story is about the same woman- Rose, and the episodes proceed in largely chronological order over the course of her lifetime.

  Like many of Munro's protagonists, Rose is a woman from a disadvantaged socio-economic background in rural Canada who transcends her origins but faces difficult choices along the way.  The Beggar Maid replaces A Maggot by John Fowles- a post-modernist metahistorical fiction  that confuses as much as it entertains, and Fowles himself is a marginally canonical figure if you look at 21st literary trends.  He scores a fat zero for diversity purposes, and his literary reputation is less secure then his (strong) sales record and continued presence in international book stores.

Author Mariama Ba

Published 11/13/19
So Long a Letter (1979)
 by Mariama Ba

Replaces: Marya by Joyce Carol Oates

  Huge canon diversity win here, replacing a second-tier Joyce Carol Oates title with a book written by a female, Francophone, West African (Senegalese) writer.  Francophone West Africa is entirely absent from the 1001 Books with the exception of this title.  Slim, at 96 pages, is a novella written in the form of a letter from the wealthy first wife of a deceased government minister, about her experience being abandoned by her husband for a younger woman, but surviving the experience, and also reflecting on the Senegalese liberation movement, of which her husband plays an important part as a teacher and Union organizer.

  It is a privileged view point of the post-independence African experience, no terrible civil war here, but it is also entirely African in perspective, also the characters (and Ba) are Muslim, which is as underrepresented as Francophone Africa.

Published 6/11/20

Players (1977)

 by Don DeLillo

     Don DeLillo is one of those authors who is likely to see fewer readers over time.  He is a straight, white, male post-modernist writing novels at the end of a period where those concerns have dominated literary fiction.  These days, folks are looking for diversity and baby, Don DeLillo ain't it.  DeLillo, 83, is still publishing- he has a book- The Silence that is supposed to come out this year.    As far as his canonical representation, he's got one dead bang winner: White Noise (1985) which is still in print and is read widely at the undergraduate label in intro to American Lit survey courses.  Underworld (1997), is a close second, and maybe his best book- a sprawling best-seller that won the National Book Award and almost won the Pultizer Prize- it gave him the kind of pop-cultural staying power that solidified his status in American Literature for a generation- but that was close to 25 years ago at this point.

   Since Underworld he's published five more novels, and none of them have achieved close to the same kind of ubiquity as Underworld or White Noise.   There's also the fact that he published seven novels before White Noise- none of which would be in print if it weren't for Underworld and White Noise.   Players is from that early period- I was surprised to find an Audiobook version- published two years ago, on the Libby app.   Players shows DeLillo as a writer of experimental fiction.  I can hardly describe the plot:  Someone gets shot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and then there is some kind of terrorist plot involving the CIA or something.   I guess there are concurrent story lines involving a couple- Lyle- a Wall Street floor trader and Pammy, who works at the World Trade Center.  Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia, I suppose I can sense of what I heard in the Audiobook, but not while I was listening to it.  It's easy to see why Players was not a hit.