4-23-10
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman 7.6 Stans
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A precise and nearly deranged internal meditation on desire, as well as a damning portrayal of the sort of personality that analyzes every thought and gesture in each interaction as if there were nothing not imbued with meaning. Fascinating and exhausting at the same time. A real accomplisment by the author. The end in particular ceases to be so clinical and the passages about the two main character's time in Rome are particularly nuanced and well-rendered. |
4-18-10
After The Workshop by John McNally 7.5 Stans
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I enjoyed this slight satire about the publishing world and MFA workshops. Set in Iowa City, at the writing program the author himself attended, this is an insider skewering of authorial pretention and the ultimate meaninglessness of climbing (or descending) the literary ladder. Mcnally smartly writes in an extremely clean and open manner, a true rebuke to most authorship, and there's not a single ornamented line in the book. It's refreshing. It might be the first 300 page work I read pretty much in two sittings. Funny and mostly empathetic, the story rings true. I wonder, though, what those who haven't attended these sorts of classes or have a toe in this world would think. So many of his barbs were familiar and satisfying to me, but probably aren't to most readers. The hoary cliches that was the S.S. Pitzer character, as well as the narrator's ineveitable unfinished manuscript weren't easy to overcome. |
4-10-10
Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil 8.8 Stans
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An oral history of pre-punk that is beyond entertaining. Truly hilarious. From the Velvet Underground through New York Dolls, Dead Boys, Stooges, MC5, Ramones, Patti Smith, etc. All the early acts before punk really existed or had a name. Truly makes you appreciate the willingness to do something subversive and unexpected, as well as the true stupidity and egomania of many of your heroes. An absolutely damning and brutally awesome read. Ultimately, it's all names. It's all rock and roll, just people reacting to whatever was last popular. Punk happened because people were like "Kansas and ELO are crap, and so are 14 minute solos." So is an art that is entirely reactive the same as being genuinely creative? Or is all art reactive and without true originality? And why do almost all musical movements come from either the gay or junky communities? Every song ever written comes from Anger, Pain, or Cash. Pick your favorite, and there's your genre of choice. |
3-30-10
Every Thing Here Is The Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor 6.4 Stans
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There's a few really good stories in this collection and a couple that read like toss offs from the MFA circuit. There's also a few consistant themes, mainly an early 20's world-angst, small town boozing, bisexuality, and a vaguely anarcho/punk character subset that feels like fictionalized authorial life excerpts. A bunch of nice lines interspersed. I thought "What Was Once All Yours" was by far the best story, and in fact it was pretty great and entirely successful except for the few minor occasions when it slipped into a sort of "Aw, Shucks" voice. |
3-24-10
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson 7.0 Stans
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Exceedingly Hamsun-esque, which seems a cheap comment or at least an unenlightened one, as if all Norwegian literature were the same. But, yeah, it reminded me of Growth Of The Soil a lot. Just the notion of what the idea of living in solitude really means and how it affects perception. |
3-11-10
The Quick and The Dead by Joy Williamson 8.2 Stans
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This is a pretty great book. Funny, demented, wrong on many levels, relatively fearless, a little scary. It's one of those books that you couldn't possibly try to write, it would just have to bleed out of you in an almost pre-conscious way. I'd never heard of Joy Williamson before stumbling upon this, but I will most certainly check her out now. Not for everyone. Which may be the greatest recommendation there is. |
2-27-10
Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann 0.0 Stans
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This is a beautifully written novel that attempts, with a great deal of success, to juxtepose Philippe Petit's walking on a wire between the World Trade Center towers in 1971 and 9-11 by getting into the heads of a revolving group of characters witnessing the event then and considering how applicable their musings are to our situation now. McCann is a graceful and intuitive writer who fully inhabits his characters, to the point that they feel either over-researched or the product of a genius-level imagination. From reading the backmatter, it seems he began work on this book before the release of the terrific Petit documetary Man On Wire. Anyone seeing the documentary before reading the book, as I did, may have to grapple with the question of how much of the mental background and subtely was provided by the film before wading into the text. |
2-22-10
Funnymen by Ted Heller 6.0 Stans
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This is a great idea: a fake oral history of two Borscht Belt comics more or less based on Martin and Lewis, but really inhabiting traits and stories of most of the big names of the pre-television era. And for about 100 pages it's great. Unfortunately, no one seems to have edited the book. VERY long passages begin to pretty much repeat themselves. Repeatedly. Again and again. Over and over. Gags, behaviors, and anecdotes become indistinguishable and tiresome. The affectations of the two main characters never change, over the course of their lives, which we are shown almost all of. They're the same people at twenty as they were are at sixty. And then there's still 200+pages to go. There is some very funny and clever stuff in here. With a judicious pruning, it could really have been enjoyable. There's just too much dead weight to slog through. |
2-11-10
Just Kids by Patty Smith 6.0 Stans
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The Seventies NY art scene will always hold a fascinating allure. Not just the obvious Velvets/Warhol axis, but the fantasy of a place where you could be a working artist, have a crap job, be surrounded by creative people, hang out every night with Jim Carroll and Candy Darling and Jackson Pollack and still be able to afford a hovel in parts of town that might as well be Zurich at this point. Patty Smith was right in the middle of everything, knew everyone, bedded every poet and was at every iconic show. And this memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorp and emergence as a public figure/alterna-icon is interesting in parts. I found a lot of it to be without any real examination of events though. Too many throw away lines and obvious conclusions. Sorta ho hum. |
2-7-10
Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription by William F. Buckly Jr. 6.0 Stans
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Outtakes from the "Notes and Asides" section of the National Review over the years, this is a collection of Buckley letters and rants. Has all the usual gimlet-eyed Buckley wit and constipated erudition and plenty of new vocabulary for any reader. If this is the funniest stuff they published over 50 years, it's not too impressive. Still, I laughed out loud a few times. Enjoyable on the whole, conservative in the extreme, and frequently sounding like the man had just smoked a big fat joint. How do these things co-exist? Got me. Turns out Buckley was pretty immature and deeply silly. You can practically hear him giggling and turning up the Zeppelin in the background. It almost makes you forget about his loathesome politcal stances on so many issues. But, in comparison with today's voices on the right, Buckley seems fairly loveable. Or, at least willing to consider the occasional opposing view. |
