Brown girl, Brownstones (1959) by Paule Marshall

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

by Paule Marshall

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 8/28

New York: 81/105

  Brown Girl, Brownstones was a pioneering bildungsroman about the experience of growing up black and female in an immigrant family.  Like other pioneering books from the POV canon, Marshall takes her place on the basis of being the first, or one of the first, to express this particular point of view- I can only imagine what her conversations with publisher were like before someone agreed to publish her book.  Told from the point of view of a young woman in a Barbadian immigrant family. Brown Girl, Brownstones that would, in the future, come to embody the pov bildungsroman, but must have been very fresh indeed at the time of publication.  In her New York Times obituary they wrote that this book is, “the novel that most black feminist critics consider to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writings.”

  That is pretty impressive, because contemporary African-American women writers exploded into the consciousness of the reading public about a decade later.   Selina Boyce, the protagonist, is 10 when the book starts, a witness to on-going disputes between her mom, a no-nonsense type, and her husband, a gauzy dreamer.  

 By the end of the book, Selina is a college student who is dreaming of an artistic, bohemian life while she carries on with a young veteran who lives in her Brooklyn neighborhood.  It's a memorable journey, and never seems dated in its prose or themes.

  I checked the census website and as of 2021 almost 17% of adult Americans did not have children. That would make them the most dramatically underrepresented demographic group in the entire 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, I think.  I guess you could add in the books where the protagonists are young adults who just haven't had kids yet.

Revisiting: Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009)by David Suisman

 Revisiting: Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009)by David Suisman

   I look back on a post like this one and I chuckle because... who is going to read this post on a blog? If you are going to write something this detailed, a blog is not the right place for it, even if it is your own blog.  Still, I was at my best here, really trying to write a post that had some substance and context. I was a couple years away from learning my lesson, that this type of writing wasn't interesting to anyone- the level of detail and complexity- just not the right tone for a blog, but when I look back on it it's like, "Wow- I wrote that?"

Published 7/22/10
Selling Sounds:
The Commercial Revolution in American Music
by David Suisman
p. 2009
Boston: Harvard University Press

   The strangest fact about this book is that there is another book called The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (2007) that covers much the same thematic territory.  I was also immediately reminded of That Moaning Saxophone: The Six Brown Brothers and the Dawning of a Musical Craze (2004).  All three books are an example of a renaissance in academic Interdisciplinary Studies.  The back covers of those three books provides an additional ten titles which all proceed from the same cross-disciplinary viewpoint.  I don't think ANY of the books or the books listed on the back cover would be considered a "hit" within the publishing world except for Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. (2003)  All of these titles represent a break down between departments in American Universities as well as a move away from trends in cultural theory during the 1990s.  The happy result is the production of relevant knowledge in readable language.

      Like the other books listed, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, selects different strands of music culture in the period between the end of the Civil War and the start of the First World War.  Really, the relevant time periods here (time periods are important) are 1880-1917 and 1918-1929 (Great Depression)  Like all of the books listed, Selling Sounds focuses wholly on the United States market.  Suisman's analysis is strong as far as it goes.  He uses the term 'culture industry' with comfort and his opening chapter on Tin Pan Alley is a tour-de-force.

    I think... the limits of this book are best expressed in the failure to introduce similar analysis of different groups of ideas that were "out there" at the same time during the course of the time periods here.  There was certainly a heavy exchange between Germany, France, The United Kingdom and the United States.  Specifically, one of the intellectual ideas that pre-dates the time period covered here is the "Folk Music" movement in EUROPE in the mid 19th century.

       I think the influence is especially salient when one considers the role of white European immigrants in the founding of record labels that specialized in African American folk music and jazz influenced popular music. This leads me to the other main omission in Selling Sounds, which is, by the way, an amazing book.  The second omission is any treatment of hillbilly music, the analogue to Suisman's focus on "Race Records" in this book.  There is hardly any overlap in the time periods covered in this book (1880s-1929ish) and the time period covered in Selling Sounds: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (1920-1970s.)  By the way- the overlap is "the invention of broadcast radio."

      As Selling Sounds eases into chapters on the recording career of Enrico Caruso and the lost history of the player piano, we move into familiar culture studies territories.  However, Suisman writes with a light hand and doesn't engage in debates of interest only to specialists.   A strong late chapter is his set piece on The Black Swan, the earliest substantial African American owned record label.  It's actually seemed to me that the book emerged out of that chapter, which has a somewhat clunkier theoretical apparatus then the rest of the book.  Also is the chunky conclusion, with a 'pointing out paradoxes' hook that left me yawning.

     I don't think you can talk about modern music culture without adding in the underlying folk culture.  Certainly, it might surprise a trans-Atlantic Professor of History that one would seek to write an account of a specific aspect of American Culture without discussing the impact of ideas generated wholly within Europe or the United Kingdom. Additionally, this is an example of what David Hackett Fischer calls the fallacy of presentism in his book Historians Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. Fischer defines the fallacy of presentism as

"a complex anachronism, in which the antecedent in a narrative series is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent.  Sometimes called the fallacy of nunc pro tunc, it is the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world." (FISCHER: 135.)

   This fallacy is demonstrated in the omissions I just pointed out.  African American influenced music dominates the contemporary landscape.  Meanwhile, the intellectual discussion over folk music as practiced in Germany and the United Kingdom in the mid 1850s is a footnote to a footnote to a footnote, studied perhaps only in the John Hopkins Department of Comparative Literature.

  I don't think you can explain the commercialization of American music in the 20th century without reference to, first, the folk music culture of regular people living outside major cities as it existed before the Civil War, and second, the impact of ideas about Folk Music on the development of ideas about Popular Music in the 20th century.  That's a pretty big subject though, so I'm going to give Suisman a pass and instead congratulate him on what is an excellent book, inside or outside the University knowledge production system.

Fire Exit (2024) by Morgan Talty

 Book Review

Fire Exit (2024)

by Morgan Talty

   Morgan Talty's debut collection of short stories came out in 2022.  I read it when it was released, but didn't write a post about it till last year when it popped up in the Maine chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where I had it at #3 for Maine, #5 for Northern New England and #12 for all of New England.  I liked The Night of the Living Rez but didn't love it, probably because it was a collection of short stories and not a novel.  Here, then, is the novel that the public demanded.  It covers much of the same physical and mental territory:  The Penobscot nation of Maine, it's people and landscapes and the intergenerational trauma and social disfunction that links his narrative to those of other Native American writers and writers from other disadvantaged socio-economic groups. 

   Anyone who read The Night of the Living Rez:  Drinking, smoking, getting on the wagon, falling off the wagon, snowy landscapes, sleepless nights, etc.  Charles Lamosway, the narrator, is a white guy who was the stepson of a Penobscot nation member whose death got him kicked off the reservation.  He fathered a child with a Native woman but she chose to disguise this fact and has raised her with a Native partner who has assumed her patrimony. Charles' Mom is suffering from Alzheimer's or Dementia or both and doesn't recognize him, even though he spends most of his time in this book taking care of her.  Charles is himself a recovered alcoholic who spends his free time hanging out with an active alcoholic who has no other friends.

   Lamosway has become determined to tell his daughter "the truth," that he is her biological father for reasons that remain somewhat unclear.  Eventually, he articulates the idea that he needs to tell her "his stories" so that she understands her history, but I am frankly unclear, and this after reading the book, what he possibly had of value to tell her.  

  

  What I did find very interesting is that Talty is an author who wrote a first novel that IS NOT a thinly veiled take on his own experience.  Talty is actually a member of the Penobscot nation, so Charles, a white guy raised on the res,  can only be a creation of his.  This marks him out as being more advanced then the great majority of first-time authors who are either writing a thinly veiled book about their own experience growing up, or their own experience as a young adult or their own family history. 

  Like Tommy Orange did in There There I yearn to see Talty move back in time- to retell the Native/European encounter from the perspective of the Native side.  It's a POV that has been sorely neglected by the American publishing industry and we could do with a shelf full of historical fiction from the Native perspective, authored by Native writers. 

   It was just happenstance that I listened to the Audiobook instead of reading the e-Book (though I might buy a copy if I see it on sale inside Maine)- the Audiobook makes sense because it is a first-person narrator, single voice novel.  On the other hand, the subject matter is depressing and I would have personally preferred to grapple with this work on the printed (or e-printed) page.  I would recommend actually getting a copy of the physical book.

Desperate Characters (1970) by Paula Fox

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Desperate Characters (1970)

by Paula Fox

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 7/28
New York: 80/105

   Originally published in 1970, Desperate Characters was out of print by 1990 until it was rediscovered by Johnathan Franzen, who wrote a nice essay about it.  A publisher read his essay and the result was that Desperate Characters was re-published to a whole new audience in 1991.  When Paula Fox died in 2017, many of articles focused on this revival and helped elevate it into a quasi-canonical status, where it remains today (the 1991 edition was updated as recently as 2015).  It's a short, sharp novel about a childless white couple living in Brooklyn in the late 1960's.  I would fully agree that this novel was decades ahead of its time- it often seemed to be that, but for the absence of smart phones and the impact of computers, the characters could be in Brooklyn right now, behaving essentially the same way.

  The plot, or plot-lessness, feels very contemporary as well: Basically the wife of this couple- a stay at home type (the husband is a lawyer), gets bit by a cat.  She goes out to lunch a couple of times and talks to a couple friends, then they travel up to their vacation house and find it has been vandalized in their absence.  I'm serious, that's the whole book.  I can certainly understand why it was such a revelation to Franzen back in 1990- finding a novel about contemporary life that holds up for decades afterwards is a rare experience. 

  This is also the first book I can remember out of the 200 or so books from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list that I've read where the main characters were a childless, professional couple.  I've noticed that almost every book in the entire project revolves around the relationship between a parent and their child, typically from the perspective of the child, sometimes from that of the parent.  Usually adults who don't have children in the books on this list are either dramatically dysfunctional or the whole book is about the fact that someone lost a child.

Revisiting: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

 Revisiting: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

I actually possess a copy of a zine I put together in high school- early in high school, and when I was looking at it a while back I noticed that I still have a similar authorial voice- that nothing much has changed over 30 years of amateur cultural criticism.  As I continue the process of editing this blog down to a manageable, exportable size, I notice that I said much of what I had to say about "big topics" way back at the beginning, between 2008 and 2011.  I haven't ever followed up or expanded on anything because this is an amateur affair, but as revise and edit, it increasingly looks like the earlier posts were more significant than anything I've written in the past decade or so- post divorce, let's say (2014).

3/2/10
John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

Aesthetics (wiki entry) ("Modern Aesthetics interior section")
John Ruskin (wiki entry)  Section 2.1 Art and Design Criticism
Thomas Carlyle (wiki entry) (Sign of the Times essay)

    I was reading the Los Angeles Times free weekly the other day and I saw an alternative headline for the "Queens of Lo Fi" article.  The alternative headline, used for the cover of the free weekly, but not the newspaper articles was "Lo Fi is DIY"- and then it was the same article inside.  That is an equivalence I subscribe too, personally.  The essence of whatever you want to call lo fi is homemade, bedroom pop by individuals in non-professional surroundings.  As I said before, it is the mode of production, rather then any particular sound that results, which describes "lo fi" and therefore lo fi is simply an update of the familiar diy music phenomenon.

    In an attempt to describe a particular SOUND or LOOK or FEEL people will sometimes discuss the "Aesthetics" of a certain category of art.  "The aesthetics of diy" for example, though it could be "the aesthetics of heavy metal" or something not involving music at all.  Aesthetics has a visual and thematic aspect that recalls it's role in history as the "science of beauty."  Beauty takes many forms.  Aesthetics is the study and description of beauty.

       The first important point to make is that the discussion of aesthetics was not confined to debate over what popular musician is better then another popular musician or the merits of the latest Rodarthe rtw  line.  In England, in particular, writers like Thomas Carlyle and most importantly, John Ruskin created a comprehensive critique of 19th century industrial age English society by focusing on the ugliness of the environment.  These guys were super hoity toity intellectuals, criticizing  directly from where they considered themselves "above" i.e., they were into medieval architecture, understood the importance of craftsmanship in production, thought the middle class was stupid, etc.

      But when you talk about an aesthetic of diy, you are essentially talking about John Ruskin.  His ideas in turn inspired William Morris, who inspired the "Craftsman" movement of the United States in the early 20th century.  Perhaps the major difference between the aesthetics of John Ruskin and William Morris vs. the DIY ethic of today is that DIY today is slap dash and amateurish.  People aren't even trying for beauty, it is more important to experiment, express raw emotion or simply to exist.

     However, the larger audience has been taught by culture to seek beauty from art (see above) so these attempts, however satisfying they may be to the artist, are doomed unless they comport with contemporary ideas of beauty.  You might ask yourself, if you are going to make something that people will not consider beautiful, "Why bother?"  The value of art absent an audience is dubious.  The idea of art or beauty without an audience to perceive it is something that would have been foreign to the ancient Greeks (who invented the science.)  On the other hand, it is well in line with the aesthetic theory of the romantics (i.e. wildness, individualism, disregard of the group, etc.)

     Ruskin and Carlyle are more in line with the Ancient Greeks- that's something that separates their thought from the larger romantic movement in the UK and Europe.  Their whole goal is to persuade society of the rightness of their position, they actually involve out of the passion of romanticism.  Romanticism came first, then came the aesthetics of John Ruskin.

    Modern DIY is different from all this because the beauty is in the background.  It needs to be in the foreground.  An Aesthetic that isn't consciously concerned with the description of a particular kind of beauty, is not, in fact, an aesthetic at all, and so to the extent that DIY is not concerned with beauty, it is not an aesthetic at all, but simply a description of a particular form of mass production within consumer capitalist society.

Bright Lights, Big City (1984) by Jay McInerney

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Bright, Lights, Big City (1984)

by Jay McInerney

Manhattan: 30/33

New York: 79/105

  I can't believe that American Psycho didn't make it into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. How on earth can you create a literary map of Manhattan without the office and restaurant scenes in American Psycho.  My sense is that editor Susan Straight is determined to keep things PG unless it involves sex abuse suffered by the protagonist of a POV novel when she is a young girl- there are plenty of those scenes.  Instead she has picked Bright Lights, Big City as her stand-in for the coked-out excesses of 1980's New York City.

  My impression is that Bright Lights, Big City was part of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list- but in preparing this post I realized it wasn't on that list, and that I'd never posted about Bright Lights, Big City.  Certainly I've read it.  I still remember of the cover of the Vintage paperback edition I read...it must have been in college or law school.  Maybe high school, actually. I know I read Less Than Zero before high school so it makes sense I would have read Bright Lights, Big City as well.

  Decades on I can still remember the feverish tone and the difficulties of being a New Yorker fact checker at day and a partying coke-fiend at night.  I remember being amused by the idea that in the early 1980's you could work as a fact checker and afford to be a degenerate coke addict at the very same time, which never seemed plausible to me, even as a high school/college student with no practical experience in the work place. 

Native Speaker (1995) by Chang rae Lee

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Native Speaker (1995)

by Chang-Rae Lee

Manhattan: 29/33

New York 78/105

    Chang-Rae Lee is yet another author who I would have missed but for the 1,001 Novels project- shame on me- Lee is a Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University and he's written several interesting novels, including a dystopian-climate change type book that I immediately checked out after listening to the Audiobook of Native Speaker, his novel about a Korean-American corporate spy struggling with his current assignment, rooting out the secrets of a Korean-American New York City councilman from Queens while balancing the difficulties of his marriage in the aftermath of the death of his son during a freak birthday party accident.  

   Whenever a novel features a child recently deceased, I am reminded of the advice Checkov frequently dispensed to young playwrights, ""If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."   The corollary of a world where every writer of fiction, plays or otherwise,  knows that proverb is that when a plot element is introduced, you know it is important.  No one throws a dead child into the mix of a novel and then doesn't make it a central issue  in whatever text follows.  Contrast the treatment of dead children to that of parents, who are frequently and flagrantly killed off in the distant past without so much as a full paragraph of explanation and no further role to play in the plot. 

  And I am certainly not singling out Native Speaker as a particularly egregious example.  His dead kid baggage colors the plot with his semi-estranged wife, but it's just one of a number of events (including recently dead parents as well) that emphasize the overall theme of the alienation of modern life as experienced by a non-traditional professional Korean-American.  In fact, the most notable element of an otherwise familiar immigrant/family novel is his work, as a corporate spy for a shadowy (is there any other kind) outfit that specializes in non-white operatives. 

 His target is New York City councilman Henry Park, an implausibly popular Korean-American representing Queens.  The plot reminded me of something Paul Auster would write, although in between Lee is heavy with the very culturally specific context of growing up as the son of a Korean immigrant made good father.  Native Speaker is ultimately a book about the relationship between a man and his dead Dad, and coming to terms with that relationship, and the rest seemed like window dressing to get people interested in picking it up.

Drafted Posts

         I read all these books but didn't write blog posts about them.   Most of these titles are books I read about in either the Guardian, New York Times or the Publishers weekly feed I follow in Feedly.  A common thread is that these were all books where I read or listened to the book and then didn't get to thinking about doing a blog post for a week or more, and then finding that I just didn't have anything interesting to say about the book based on what I remembered about it.

Jealousy (1957) by Alain Robbe Gillet 1/17/16

Runaway Horses by  Yukio Mishima 9/1/16

The narrow road to the deep north 8/9/17

The immortalists by chloe benjamin 6/27/18

The dark forest 9/23/18

How to Stop Time (2018) by Matt Haig 9/25/18

West by Cary Davies 10/27/18

A matter of time by shashi despande 11/20/18

Audiobook Review: Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett 1/2/19

Woes of the true policeman by Roberto bolano 1/12/19

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Evans 3/23/19   

Occidentalism by ian buruma and avishai margault 5/4/19

Mouthful of Birds by Samatha Schwabin 6/18/19  

Underground Airlines by Ben Winters 6/27/19

The Storm by Anwar Arif 7/20/19

Recursion (2019) by Blake Crouch 8/17/19

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott 10/8/19

Salt Slow by Julia Armfeld 10/25/19

Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi 11/3/19

Marly by John Clinch 11/5/19

Silver, Sword & Stone by Marie Arana 12/1/19

The Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage  12/3/19

The Need by Helen Philips 12/16/19

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orleans 1/24/20

Damnation Island by Stacy Horn 1/25/20

Fashionopolis (2019) by Dana Thomas 2/13/20

The History of Sexuality volume 1 (1976) by Michel Foucault 3/4/20

A Savage Empire by Alex Axelrod 3/18/20

Babel by Gaston Dorren 4/3/20

The Address Book by Deidre Mask 5/9/20

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by p dijeli clark 5/14/20

Neuromancer by William Gibson 5/25/20

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake 7/19/20

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi 10/11/20

Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson 2/12/21

A Passage North (2021) by Anuk Arudpragasm 8/12/21

Appleseed (2021) by Matt Bell 9/28/21

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler 10/1/22

How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil 10/1/22

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 10/1/22

Oh! William by Elizabeth Strout 10/1/22

Nineteen Reservoirs by Lucy Sante 10/1/22

Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga 12/17/23

Normal Rules Dont Apply (2023) by Kathryn Atkinson 1/18/24

Astoria by Peter Stark 4/17/24

Piglet by Lottie Hazell 4/15/24