In "On the Lower Frequencies, a Secret History of The City" Erick Lyle sings the untold and unsung

In Erick Lyle's "On the Lower Frequencies", which Mike Davis calls a "ghetto-blaster of a book" we are in fact, "blasted" by the audacity of the author and his approach to living and writing. Out-takes from the criminal how-to zine, Scam, the polemic street newspaper and gossip rag, Turd Filled Donut, interviews, letters and other writing are combined to tell a multi-layered, socio-economic history of "The City". In spite of the blasting, the tone and scope of this book are often lushly cinematic and tersely hilarious in their portrayal of the punks, squatters, activists, criminals, homeless and working class residents of the city...as they struggle, protest, create, rage, party, cry and just try to survive. The setting is San Francisco as the Dot Com era turns to the Dot Bomb era and then explodes and roils in the years of the current Afghanistan and Iraq wars. However, This is not a strident, romanticized voice of the victimized. In full acknowledgment of the criticism leveled by haters of cultures of resistance and punk rock, that they offer only critiques but not solutions and certainly not road maps for sustainable change, this book offers chapter after chapter of true examples of "being the change that you want to see". Because as Erick repeats mantra like: "What you're for is what you'll get!".
Erick tells his and a whole spectrum of others' stories about surviving the tumults of history of 11 or so epic years with it's familiar hopes, struggles, wars, losses and somehow...expectant, impossible hope emerges again from the disaster, tragedy and common greed known to all eras of a city. Erick frames his story in that continuum of history while remaining in the specific perspective of "Now"...lending his immediate, yet human, journalistic style of writing a vivid newsreel quality. The cast is Erick and legions of San Franciscans that enact a world, with a raw strategic approach, that seems like it should be as effective as the Salt Marches in bringing down an empire...as the city awakens to another tomorrow...

Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound, by Paul Drummond

Texas genre-defining psychedelic garage rockers the 13th Floor Elevators have a wild and tragic back story most fans are familiar with. It's a story of drugs, mental institutions, and some of the most crazed rock'n'roll sounds to come from the crazed druggy rock'n'roll of the 1960's. In his book, Paul Drummond searches further inside the history of this group than any previous writings, and comes up with one of the most engaging and even-handed, yet full of the excitement of a true fan, rock biographies around. The moment I finished it, I went back to page one and started again!

The history of the band goes as deep as the sounds they produced with their songs. It's a psychologically deep history. The musical roots of the main instrumentalists and vocalist come from a shared love of early rock'n'roll and the ensuing British Invasion sounds, with a little Texas hillbilly thrown in the mix giving them a touch of regional flair. The music, however, was only half of what made this band so special. The other half was their lyrical and spiritual searching for the keys to existence. We learn in the book that each of these elements was not only artistically, but also physically half the band; main lyricist/electric jug player Tommy Hall, and vocalist/guitarist Roky Erickson were dedicated to the spiritual quest of the band. The rhythm section, which consisted of a couple different drummers, though for most of the band's existence was John Ike Walton, and a small handful of bassists, was generally far more dedicated to their musical craft than the spiritual quest the band was supposed to be about; some even felt it detracted from the music. Although common legend has it that the whole band performed every show while on LSD, Walton took the drug only twice; the second time was at an early band rehearsal, where he had a hellish trip, and never touched it again. Quite possibly this was a good thing for the musical power of the band, as his performance at that rehearsal was noted to be very off-time. Finally, guitarist Stacy Sutherland, a man torn in two by his own emotional conflicts and demons, spent the entire history of the band vacillating between the two differing schools of thought within it.

This is the kind of tension that is infinitely important to the creative output of many of the greatest bands. There are certainly exceptions, but the groups who don't get along fabulously seem more likely to create art with greater emotional and psychological depth than a group of great comrades. With the Elevators, this tension, including a fair amount of resentment against Tommy Hall for his attempt to be the leader of the band yet hardly being a musician, along with the psychoactive drugs at the core of their disagreements, gave the world a candle that burned viciously bright for a brief time before slowly flickering down from both inner and outer pressure. The outer pressure came in the form of constant police surveillance and busts. Roky's grasp on reality loosing itself more and more was the real nail in the coffin for the Elevators.

The book handles this last subject very deftly, voicing the author's own opinion on the matter, pieced together from the interviews he prints within the book. Which brings me to the thing I most appreciate about his writing. He writes from the standpoint of both a huge fan of the 13th Floor Elevators' wild garage rock sounds, and a true appreciator of the importance to the band of their spiritual quest. This book could have easily been written by someone who would dismiss the latter in favor of the blinding amazingness of the former; or by a crazed acidhead who doesn't quite get the power and fervor of their music. Drummond handles all points of the band's history with an even hand, yet still with the excitement of a genuine fan. He shows clearly how the depth of the Elevators' acid-informed lyrics were head and shoulders beyond the merely presentational psychedelic lyrics of their contemporaries. Through his exhaustive interviews with every available person in the band - Sutherland died in 1978, but is well represented by an in-depth 1973 interview - and dozens of their close friends, fans, and family, Drummond's style of using unaltered quotes from these interviews, interspersed with his own piecing together of the story, pushes the tale along at a perfect pace. All the details you could ever be curious about are in here, including the secret to Tommy's electric jug, and the jazz influence he was trying to bring to the band through it. Their three month stay in San Francisco in late 1966 left me dazzled at how much they accomplished and changed as a band in such an amazingly short time.

Even if the whole book were about that stay in San Francisco, you'd have a well-encapsulated history of the band, written in a balanced yet engaging hand. But the book covers every corner of the Elevators' existence, from their earliest, locally well-respected cover bands through interesting where-are-they-nows and personal reunions. When I learn a great deal more about an artist or group than I had previously known, I often feel that too much mystery has been taken away, and no longer have as much interest in them. With this dense of subject matter, Eye Mind does not reveal enough to take away the mystery of the 13th Floor Elevators. This is no slight on the book. It illustrates how vastly deserving this group is of the in-depth look Drummond has given us.

Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (translated by Joanne Turnball) is a collection of surreal short fiction written in the 1920's but published posthumously. I don't know too much about this guy, but his writing is absolutely incredible. I have faith that pretty much anyone who reads this blog would not find spending the short amount of time it takes to read one of these stories to be a waste and that many of you, ok at least some, would find this to be as good as the best fiction you have read. I am taking it slow, savoring each story, because I don't want it to end.

Here's what the New York Times has to say:

Newcomers to this author will appreciate the guidance Turnbull provides in her introduction, which serves “to exgistolate the gist” of the stories, as the author might say. In “Quadraturin,” a man who lives in a communal apartment building “loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room,” which has been magically enlarged by the application of a “proliferspansion” ointment. “The Bookmark” features an Eiffel Tower that “runs amok.” In “The Branch Line,” a commuter ends up in a place where “nightmares are the reality,” while in “Red Snow,” a dejected man “comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it.” A “sociable corpse misses his own funeral” in “The Thirteenth Category of Reason.” And in the title story, the man with the time machine “gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant Communist future.”

Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are more like dream diaries than fiction. Quite intentionally, he blurs the line between sleep and waking, real and unreal, life and death. While his translators admirably convey the whirligigging quality of his narratives, Krzhizhanovsky’s peregrinations demand unstinting focus and frequent compass checks. His characters often seem half, or wholly, asleep. Sometimes, as in “The Thirteenth Category of Reason,” they are dead — which doesn’t stop them from boarding city trams and chatting with commuters. “Alive or dead, they didn’t care.” Their only concern is whether such conduct is “decrimiligaturitized” — that is, legal. “In “Quadraturin,” the man with the proliferspansion ointment never exits a state of benumbed grogginess. Lying on his bed, “unable to part eyelids stitched together with exhaustion,” he tries to sleep through the night, “mechanically, meekly, lifelessly.” When inspectors from the Remeasuring Commission drop by to make sure he hasn’t exceeded his allotted 86 square feet of space, he hovers, terror-stricken, at the door, hoping they won’t spot his infraction. It’s an archetypal nightmare, reminiscent of Kafka.

Valencia by Michelle Tea

I forgot I had asked for Michelle Tea books for Christmas when I got Valencia on my birthday this year, but it was a welcome surprise. I had checked out Rose of No Man's Land from the library after seeing her read from it at Homo A-Go-Go (or was it Ladyfest) and loved it but had never owned a copy of that or any of her other books. I feel like I've given them away as presents myself...so after I had a big party to celebrate my 40th, my boyfriend and I drove around Hood's Canal and went camping...for the next few days I read on the beach until dark and then continued to read by the fire and then in the tent with the flashlight. There's a funny picture of me reading this one by the fire with the headlamp on, which is why I even remember all this.
Also it's relevant because it's a funny book to read on your 40th birthday on a camping trip with your boyfriend in the woods. I guess I wished I had read it when I was 20, because I totally would have loved it then. I still thought it was pretty great. The kinetic energy of her writing, the speed of her thoughts, her stream of consciousness sentence structures, the rambling nature of her days, the way she is searching and experimenting and discovering so much about herself and the world and needing with urgency to leave a record of it...all this reminds me of youth and of living like a young person. I guess some people never get to the point where they experience that degree of being alive and open to whatever you feel compelled to do regardless of the consequence--to live on desire alone, from one sexual encounter to the next, falling in and out of love without the kind of hesitation you develop as you get older...or should I say should develop. I guess I won't turn it into a judgement....just that when I was reading this I was glad to be reminded of what it's like to be young but also glad not to be young anymore, sitting there in the borrowed camping chairs, sleeping in a tent, cooking on the camp stove, hanging out with my grown up boyfriend. It felt alright. It was nice. I was happy to be alive, I was happy to be under the stars...I was happy to be in a serious committed long term monogamous relationship with someone I can communicate with and not back in the late 80's/early 90's all confused and at war with the world. I was happy to be me and not any of the characters in the book...this is not to say they aren't likable--I did like them. My younger self would have been thrilled to have found this book. It would have meant everything to me in 1989. But I think reading it made me even happier to be 40, if that makes sense.
So yeah...it's a good book, highly recommend it! She's a great storyteller, really good at description and has interesting observations about the world, but what I think she really really excels at is creating an energetic, expressive text that can't be easily digested or contained. She simply must be read. Most of you have probably already read all of her books but I had somehow missed this one. I guess it's a memoir/novel hybrid, right? Not sure.

Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music by Greg Prata

This is another one I got for my birthday and read on my camping trip. I was going to review it at the time and I realized that I had been asked to be interviewed for it but never got around to answering the questions. So then I wrote to the author to ask if it was ok to post my answers here and he said he'd rather I not do that, since I hadn't bothered to turn in my interview. Fair enough, but then I never finished the book...but here's what I remember:
Old school Olympia/Tacoma scenester/punk photographer Tracy Marander is interviewed in the book, which is cool because she was a big part of the early "grunge" scene in the late 80's/early 90's. Donna Dresch wasn't interviewed, but Kathleen Hanna and Allison Wolfe were, which seemed a little weird...since Donna's music fits more into the "grunge" category than Kathleen or Allison's does...but really it's cool to hear some female voices in there.
There's a lot of stuff by bands I don't care about at all, like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam...I liked reading about Malfunkshun, who I really thought was a great band and Mother Love Bone, who I never saw. I also enjoyed learning about Soundgarden who I did see often but never liked and know very little about. The author is not from Seattle, but the book is done in the Please Kill Me style so it doesn't really matter. It has some cool interviews with the guys from Mudhoney in it and it's always interesting to read a version of history that you were a part of.
I guess the major criticism I have, is that I am only really interested in the Seattle rock scene insofar as it is a small part of the whole history of NW music, which would include writing on Olympia, Tacoma and Portland ...as well as Vancouver....that book LOSER does that a little better, but there are so many factual errors in that book....at one point I wrote down a page worth and those are just the facts I knew were wrong.
It's not really that exciting, but neither was that particular scene/era of music if you ask me...not a lot of conceptual ideas and nothing that great really happened...some people got famous, a few of the bands were good, one of them was great and they got more famous then everyone else, that impacted the local economy/music scenes and then things got weird/bad. But even that amount of context is missing from this book, which fails to really capture the larger setting all these events happened in. They do talk about fame, drug addiction and that kind of thing...but really what is there to be said about any of that that hasn't already been said?
I guess I kind of missed out on a lot of the exciting time period because I didn't turn 21 until halfway through 1990 and I moved away in 1988...so I was around in '87 (or was it earlier) when Nirvana first starting playing shows and then I was back in 89, but I still couldn't get into bars and there were all ages shows happening locally and in Tacoma so I'd see these bands if they played an all ages show, but that really didn't happen that often. In 1991 I moved away again and by the time I moved back at the end of 92, things had gotten pretty weird...anyhow, yeah.

Check it out from the library if you are a local music obsessive like me.

Cat Power: A Good Woman by Elizabeth Goodman

This is another book I didn't go out of my way to seek out...it was on the new book shelf at the library. I love Cat Power, especially the records she has made in the past ten years. I saw her play a few times in the late 90's/early 00's and it was...bizarre. I mean, seriously strange performance style. I was told that it was not an act, that she was having some problems. I also don't know very much about Chan Marshall, so I decided I would read the book. I met her at a Matador festival in London one night when everyone was very drunk. Members of Comet Gain, Unwound, Emily's Sassy Lime, Sleater-Kinney, Huggy Bear and whoever else was around got talked into going to this "Indie" night at a disco. The flyer listed several of our bands on it as records the DJ was going to play, so the logic was that if we could just get everyone to this club, which was across town, then we could just explain that they need to let us in free. I don't remember if Chan came with us or not, but I have a bunch of pictures of her boots and there are some very strange pictures of both of us, where our faces seem to be made of silly putty. We were, silly putty drunk. I remember a bunch of boys peeing into mail slots and the cops coming and then running to the train station and crawling on hands and knees to bunk fare (this is english slang for not paying to go on the subway) and then having to pay to go to the club and members of certain bands hailing expensive cabs and then ....well...some things are better left as memories. Anyhow, this kind of zaniness is what I associate with Cat Power and if the book is at all to be believed this would be a typical kind of situation for her. She probably just went back to her hotel room actually, but she seemed just as crazed as everyone else, which is kind of intense for someone on tour.
I should say, the book is UNAUTHORIZED and therefore it's probably unethical for me to write about it or for you to read it. Well if you are interested you will probably read it anyways. I think she's a great songwriter/performer who makes good records and someday we'll get the real story about her life. This author is shitty and I actually think she hates women. She pretty much says as much at one point. She also comes across as a disrespectful, sycophantic parasite. I wouldn't put it past her to have made this whole story up. So whatever. It's a story, she's a public figure....but that really doesn't mean ethics go out the window, right? Someday I'll stop reading this kind of thing.

Woman's Inhumanity to Woman & I'm So Happy For You

How do women perpetuate sexism? Are there ways in which some of us benefit from patriarchy? I know some people are still fond of that old riot grrl saying, "there's no such thing as reverse sexism". I understand this as a strategic position aimed at redirecting the discussion to a more constructive (in theory) examination of power; the imbalance is societal and there is a difference between discrimination and institutionalized oppression. But is it really true that women can't be sexist? If we really want to dismantle oppression, don't we need to take responsibility for how we, as women, also participate in this crap? For example, how do straight women put pressure on men to live up to a patriarchal ideal of masculinity? That is something I have witnessed my whole life and I think it's really damaging to men and women.

But these are hard conversations to have with men who have power over you on some level. It's often too exhausting and unproductive to sustain this kind of dialogue. Plus it might require giving up something that makes you feel powerful or even gives you real power, especially economic power. For example, if a man is "the breadwinner" in the family, the bills are more likely to get paid. If a woman tries to be the breadwinner, on average, she will make less money than a man. Statistically, if she has children she will make even less money. For reasons like this, some women tend to be more open to talking about "internalized sexism" or sexism between women. For some of us it's easier to confront. For many of us it's less risky in really concrete, material ways. This is not to say that this lets us off the hook.

I still think both of these things ("there's no such thing as reverse sexism"/ saying "internatlized sexism" instead of sexism) at least slightly fall into the "victim feminism" category, meaning this way of thinking assumes we are victims and not responsible for our own actions. I mean, even though ideology exists, power exists, institutionalized oppression exists--we do have free will, we do have agency--at least to some extent. I'd like to believe that anyway. So if we are going to be feminists and hold others accountable, we also need to be accountable for how we choose to live our lives.

Thinking about how women are sexist towards each other, I picked up a book at the library called Woman's Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chesler. Woah. It certainly made me think re-evaluate some of my own behaviors. For example, why is it sometimes easier to deal with guys "being jerks" than it is to deal with women who are being mean, controlling or dramatic? I think I tend expect less from men, so really I don't let it bother me so much when they fuck up. But by being harder on women than I am on men, I may also be perpetuating sexism towards women. I know this is something that people talk about a lot, but to see it in your own relationships with people is intense.

The book itself is not great. It suffers from that kind of second-wave feminist tendency towards universalizing. It draws examples of "woman's inhumanity to woman" across cultures without situating them adequately. Additionally, the book seems to be driven by personal vendetta. Chesler is angry about several incidents that happened to her in the woman's movement and by writing this book she seems to be trying to call people out on their shit without naming names. I realize the personal IS political, but at times it feels like reading someone's chap book from middle school where they write what they really think about you--the ostensible logic being that only you will know they are talking about you--the reality being EVERYONE you both know will know EXACTLY who the shit talk is directed towards. Ironically, as a result, the book itself feels like a catty act of revenge. Sure maybe there are some legitimate grievances here. But if you are gonna call someone out, call them out! What good is served by talking around the issue? For me it got confusing and tedious and I didn't finish reading it. This is not to say that feminists shouldn't talk about this stuff, but if we are going to talk about it, let's talk about it clearly and directly so that it makes sense and is constructive. I realize this is hard to do and I think this attempt is better than nothing.

Around the time I picked it up I ran across a "not-your-ordinary chick-lit" novel by Lucinda Rosenfeld called I'm So Happy For You. It might not be typical of the genre, but compared to the male-dominated George Pelacanos novels I've been reading lately, it is pretty female-centered. Unfortunately it's also pretty mediocre and there are some really...dare I say "sexist" undercurrents? The plot revolves around two best friends from college who are at different points in their lives and become "frenemies". Everything is fine, from the protagonist's point of view, until her friend starts getting her shit together and living her own life. As soon as the friend is no longer a complete fuck up, things gets weird in their relationship. So while this is an interesting theme to explore--how friendships between women can get competitive and bad when one is perceived as having more power than the other--the book was pretty depressing and ultimately disappointing. Although the book seems to be about cattiness it also uses cattiness for entertainment value and does not explore what it means that women are catty to each other--it just shows us how awful it can be and kind of normalizes it.

On one level, I enjoyed reading it. I think I read it in one evening from start to finish. It is a page turner. But there was this annoying hipster-turned-yuppy who lives in Brooklyn type "identity" or maybe "niche market" that was trying to be sold to me that was ultimately conservative. The main character works for an ineffective leftist magazine but spends her days reading entertainment news on the web. While this was funny at times and maybe also realistic, it seemed to endorse a kind of post-everything why-bother version of reality. There is an acknowledgment that we are at war with Iraq, but the characters feels disconnected from world events. Is the reader supposed to then feel absolved from her own complacency? Why even mention politics if you aren't going to say something interesting? It's more than a little annoying. It reminded me of that terrible film Away We Go and I kept hoping no one makes a film of the book. Maybe it was meant to convey "realism"? Not sure.

I'm also not sure if the book has anything revealing to say about female friendships. It depicts them realistically on some level--you will recognize the cattiness and weird games straight women often play with each other--but it also makes this kind of thing feel somewhat inevitable. I guess the author is absolved because she has a "touching" ending where a mother and daughter who didn't like each other discover a deeper connection? I don't know. Anyhow don't be surprised by this book being kind of crappy if you do decide to read it. It's the kind of thing that would be good to read on the plane. I really felt the author dumbed down her characters because she wants to market the book to Hollywood or something. I mean really, they come across as cliches, and the story centers around the demographic that has the most money to spend on stuff like books and DVDs. So maybe that's cynical of me but I felt there was a market driven motive for the book that was noticeable and distracting. Is cattiness marketable? Yes. Sexism sells.

So how would someone write about this stuff without perpetuating it?

Awhile back I did some research on the 70's "woman's novel", a genre I vaguely remember from high school. This was possibly my first introduction to feminism. I tried re-reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and Woman On The Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and didn't get very far, though I still really liked The Golden Notebook. I had better luck with The Woman's Room by Marilyn French, which I had never read before. I liked it but it was limited in scope. This is something I will continue to explore....maybe someone can recommend a book similar to Shelf Discovery about 70s/80s feminist novels? I know there's a lot of Sci Fi, which I'd love to read about more than re-read...

Here is something a former colleague of mine forwarded me when we were discussing this stuff via email. It's called "Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood". It probably deserves it's own post. It was written by Joreen for Ms. Magazine in 1976.

It's Raining: Shelf Discovery

Dear Readers,

Well the rain is here, which makes me happy. Not only will I no longer feel guilty for just wanting to stay home and read, but I am finally motivated to sit down and type out a log of what I've been reading these past few months. A recent library hold came in last week for Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Jezebel.com blogger Lizzie Skurnick. There are some other writers listed as well and it says A Reading Memoir underneath the title. I didn't realize this initially, but the book appears to be a collection of reviews that first appeared as a regular blog feature on Jezebel. You can read more about it on the author's own website here.

I am more than thrilled about this book because I read so many wonderful young adult novels in the 70's/80's and I have forgotten most of them. I remember some of them well, such as From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg --who could forgot Claudia Kincaid's scheme to run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art! But I don't remember whole, wonderful sentences that are quoted here, like this one:

She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes.

When I read that sentence, I was back in 5th grade again. I remembered the visual I had of this book. I read it several times and thought it was totally great.



One I had totally forgotten but was pretty into, is called Happy Endings Are All Alike. The plot centers around two teenage lesbians who are in a relationship. The mom is a feminist and there is a realistic rape scene. Of course an adolescent girl would be intrigued by this book. I had forgotten it even existed.

What I did not realize, even at the time, is that this book was written by the same author who wrote Suzuki Beane, my favorite childhood picture book. Suzuki Beane haunted me for years. One day I was a kid who didn't read picture books anymore and I went to look for it and it was gone. I tried to ask my parents where it went but they didn't remember. I would search for it but after awhile I forgot what it was called and I don't think I ever knew the author's name, Sandra Scoppettone.




What's also really cool is that lately I've been reading a lot of hard-boiled detective novels and enjoying them a lot except for their sexism. I was wondering if there was any feminist noir...well it turns out Scoppettone writes detective novels that just might fit that description! How exciting and weird, right?

A few other books I remember reading and am enjoying revisiting through this book:

A Wrinkle in Time -totally my favorite series of young adult novels
Harriet the Spy -more on this later, a HUGE influence on me in every way, also this author, Louise Fitzhugh, illustrated Suzuki Beane. another weird connection I hadn't realized!
Farmer Boy -the Little House book about the little boy Laura marries in the end
Danny the Champion of the World -by the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author, Roald Dahl
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself -my favorite Judy Blume novel



I really recommend this if you read this stuff as a kid--or if you have kids yourself. Each book has a synopsis and an analysis and the criticism is pretty cool so far.

"summer recap"

I've been trying to read books that are kind of like classics, not like actual classics but the ones that are assigned at school so most everyone has read them. I've read to kill a mockingbird and one flew over the cuckoos nest. I really liked to kill a mockingbird and read it really quickly. It took a while for me to get into one flew over the cuckoos nest. I got through the last chunk pretty fast, the ending was depressing. While I read one flew over... I reminisced on high school reading. I kept wondering if this was one of the books that mainly the boys like. Like I remember in school that most of the girls hated beowolf and most of the boys loved it.

I've been reading almost entirely fiction for the past few months which is highly unusual for me. I read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Ok, I already love dystopian fiction but I looooooved this. One of the elements that I intially hated but then I loved was the refrences to durrent technology, like blogging and texted and social networking sites, fast food and such... The internet plays a pretty big part in the storyline. Most of the dystopian fictions I read are kind of old, so to read a story that has teenagers texting in it... it made it feel more current therefore actually possible, interesting because Atwood has stated that she doesn't write science fiction but speculative fiction. I also read a Handmaids tale by her. It was good, doubly depressing because it's mainly about the governments oppression of women (first their bank accounts are frozen, then they are sent home from work, and so on worse and worse). Oryx and Crake was far more gnarly. I liked it a little better. I also just read that Atwood will be making it into a trilogy.

Somehow all this fiction reading makes me feel dumb (I don't know why), I need to get back into a non-fiction loop. I've been thinking a lot about collective unconciousness. suggestions?

The Corner

Before David Simon and Ed Burns made The Wire-- they wrote The Corner. Its brilliant, of course. And it shares many themes with The Wire. But its also more focused then The Wire. The 600 pages of The Corner focus on a year in the life of a handful of real people who lived near the corners of Fayette and Monroe in East Baltimore in the early 1990s.

A consequence of this focus is that the physical, cultural and allegorical world of the corner that Simon and Burns depict- in their words "an existential crisis rooted not only in race-- which the corner has slowly transcended-- but in the unresolved disaster of the American Rust-belt" where "an increasingly draconian legal system's inability to mitigate against human frailty and despair, against economic neglect and institutional racism, against a failed educational system and the marginalization of America's urban populations "- is personalized.

The people caught in this world are humanized. You identify with them. You hope for them. You cry for them. You live in awe of them. Coupled with Simon and Burns extended and brilliant discussions of how the corner has developed, how its economy functions, its culture, the failure of the war on drugs, wellfare and the institutional abandonment of the underclass, you are given an intimate connection to people forced to live under conditions where

"To see it in retrospect, to look backward across thirty years on the Fayette streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology....cursed as we are with a permanent urban underclass, an unremitting and increasingly futile drug war, and Third World conditions in the hearts of our cities, the American experiment seems, as the millennium to have found a limit."

Yet, in the people who make it out, who make something where all others fall tragically to the corner- in the unbelievable example of Ella Thompson- who following the murder of her 12 year daughter against all realism holds runs the local community centre- or Fran Boyd or Tyreeka Freamon, you gain some hope. For, on The Corner "no ending is certain and hope itself endures.' Even as "The Corner is, itself, immutable." That is until we "acknowledge[ing] honestly the depth and complexity of the problem." In other words, we face what has created the corner in its own image- capitalism- and transcending it before it is too late.

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One of Monty Python's funniest sketches is The Summarize Proust Competition. Contestants are given 15 seconds to summarize Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Its funny because of the typically absurdist Python twist; Remembrance of Things Past is a seven volume work that is impossible to summarize at all, let alone in 15 minutes.

Roberto Bolano's magnum opus 2666 is just like Proust. Its futile to summarize. So I will follow the lead of other reviewers and offer a pat summary of the structure; Its 890 pages, broken into 5 parts, with digressions. The five parts consist of different stories which sometime intersect and somehow connect with the background of the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican border town of St. Theresa. (based on the true events of the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez read this article). I'm tempted to say these murders- while obviously horrific in their own right- are also an allegory, like the Baltimore of The Wire, for the general state humanity is now in.

Still, the problem with this pat summary is that it doesn't do the job. If anything its too straight forward and off putting and quite simply doesn't do justice to the dizzy, addictive contrapuntal variation of settings, style, imagery, inventiveness, characters and tone, which has endless brilliant sentences like this which rival any of the best social and political thought;

"Names, names, names. Those who made the revolution and those who were devoured by that same revolution, though it wasn't the same but another, not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream."

and this which rival any of the best surreal humor;

He meets a jazz musician who tells him about chickens that talk and probably think

"the worst of it," the musician say to him, "is that the governments of the planet know it and that's why so many people raise chickens."

The boy objects that the chickens are raised to be eaten. The musician says that's what the chickens want. And he finishes by saying "Fucking masochistic chickens, they have our leaders by the balls."


I guess all I can say is that 2666 is incredible. Its one of the best books I've ever read. I read it in two weeks in what little spare time I have. I couldn't stop because it was so good. Now I kinda wish i'd taken my time. In many ways im still processing it. I want to read it again.

Illuminating the Ties That Bind Pollock & Krasner

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
by Ines Janet Engelmann (Prestel)

This is a brief book but gets to the point and is printed on a heavy stock so it features some really nice color (and b&w) plates of Krasner's and Pollock's work throughout, side-by-side (arranged chronologically and comparatively).

Translated from German by a Scot, so the wording and punctuation is a little interesting - such as a consistent manner of using exclamation points I'm not accustomed to seeing in a work of non-fiction.

I appreciate that the author, Engelmann, doesn't sugar-coat Krasner's and Pollock's relationship but presents it for the intense, difficult, wonderfully productive and creative but ultimately self-imploding relationship that it became. The book describes on what levels and in which ways the relationship worked and was beneficial to each - as individuals, as artists, as companions - until Pollock drained what they'd had and it was no longer working for Krasner. I LOVE that she got all his money - like finally being paid for her work - not her painting, but what she had sacrificed to be with and support him.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I bought The Savage Detectives as the third part of a 3 for the price of two deal at the bookstore. The bookstore had the two David Simon books as part of the 3 for 2 deal, so I felt obligated to get the third for free. But I had some trouble finding the third. I finally decided on The Savage Detectives because I had read great reviews of Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives was 200 pages shorter, so less of a gamble.

This was a few months back. The Savage Detectives sat on my shelf. I read a brilliantly suggestive book on French theories hidden affinity with neoliberalism. I read most of David Simon's Homicide: a Year on the Killing Streets. I also read for school and was busy working.

Last weekend my schedule opened up and I took the weekend off. I decided to read a book. I tried to get Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, but after walking to campus, found out the library was closed. So I decided to give The Savage Detectives a try.

Do you have a word for those incredible moments when something just clicks and you are immediately engrossed in music, film, literature? When the work and the artist become your new obsession? I don't. I can't imagine that one word can fully describe it. But, its what happened from the very first sentence of The Savage Detectives, which has this superb first paragraph;

"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."

What follows is futile to summarize. Its too rich. Too multi-layered. Too good to reduce.( I'm sure I've missed the majority of jokes, references etc.) I can only describe it as a combination of Please Kill Me, Studs Terkel, Sentimental Education and the better part of the Beats meets Borges. It is essential that you read this book.

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

Hello Bumpidee Readers. Maybe you are too busy reading to post anything this summer--I know I have been, particularly in the past month or so. I just finished this one:



Written in 1985, The Good Terrorist takes place in a communist squat in London during the Thatcher Era. The plot centers on securing the house as a legal squat and dealing with the mundane day-to-day workings of the household, as well as the tensions between the different group members and their politics and what it is they are really prepared to do for 'the revolution'. They are living in the Cold War era and dealing with possible 'Russian Spies' as well as the I.R.A.

The main character, Alice, is presented mostly from the exterior. Unhealthily obsessed with her annoying 'revolutionary' partner-in-crime kind-of boyfriend Jasper (who actually seems to be gay), Alice does all the 'women's work' and much of the work in general. In this way, the author presents the reality of sexism and women's relationship to the 'left', which is pretty convincing and realistic. Because her character is very realistic--not heroic, nor a victim--and is presented through her actions--generally work--there is a distance created between the reader and the normal process of 'identifying' with the main character.

As I read the book, I kept thinking --'this is so not written by an American writer' and was reminded of films like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and Blow Up My Town, as well as Bertold Brecht. Works of art where the point of a narrative is not to create a character the reader can 'identify with' or even like, but rather encourages a distance where analysis is encouraged, specifically surrounding issues of gender and work and economics. Jean Luc Godard also does this...so does Robert Bresson.

I also thought of European existentialist novels I have read, such as Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Stranger by Albert Camus and The Trial by Franz Kafka. At times I wondered if Lessing was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins at all, but if so I think Lessing is a better writer from a craft-of-writing point of view. I was also reminded of the few Russian writers I have read, particularly Dostoevsky--thinking a little bit about Crime and Punishment in particular.

I won't tell you what happens or how I felt about it, because mostly it just made me think a lot about the themes addressed. It is a compelling work-- I thouht a lot about how writers employ different narrative techniques for various ends. Her command of language and vivid power of description really sunk in with this book. I was really impressed by how well the story was put together. The way it unfolded felt really inevitable. It was very much like a film, totally suspenseful--once I got into it I couldn't put it down--it came across like a thriller or a mystery without feeling manipulative or cheap.

All this convinced me that Doris Lessing is a master crafts person. I was left wondering why she wrote this particular book at this time. I don't really know what her politics are (even though I did google her) but she made most of the characters seem naive and a little ridiculous by the end, though really nuanced and (humanly) flawed in ways that could come off as cynical to a younger person but appealed to my current frame of mind. I liked how ultimately the characters exist in relation to their class backgrounds and how she has Alice's "bourgeois" mom come in at the end and really bring reality back into the picture.

In Search of Moby Dick: The Quest for the White Whale

an ethno-cultural-historio-contemporary-travel adventure kinda book

by Tim Severin

Pretty exciting and educational, especially the descriptions of the specialized hunting skills of the islanders Severin stays and speaks with. I appreciate that Severin isn't out to discredit Melville but to sort fact from fiction in the quest for determining if such a whale, or whales, such as Moby Dick existed, through his investigation of the various ways in which these whales have come to reside in maritime history, myth and legend, and the public imagination.

Severin is also interested in how Melville developed the tale of Moby Dick, how he arrived at/gleaned information and experience that informed the novel. As far as his encounters with and relationship to the islanders, Severin's writing comes across as mostly objective, respectful, allowing people, environments and situations to speak for themselves, in a sense...

Written in 2000, it's interesting, and disheartening, to consider how things have changed in the last 9 years that seemed to have negatively, rather than beneficially, impacted the islands' inhabitants and their cultures, particularly the loss of the substantial food source afforded by hunting whales. While local governments have been banning hunting and promoting whale watching instead, what efforts have been made to replace the loss of food and bartering material whales had provided?

In addition to how government changes are effecting/re-shaping these cultures, there have been fewer and fewer whales frequenting the waters around the islands in recent years...

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

I always heard that Nancy Drew was written by a guy. After reading this, I have learned that while that is partially true, it's not the whole story. Nancy Drew was an idea generated by a male publisher who wrote a bunch of treatments, then hired a writer to flesh out the stories. She developed the characters and followed the plot outlines creating by the male publisher but actually wrote the books herself. She was on a schedule where she wrote about one a month for a long time. While the books were credited to Carolyn Keene, they were actually a collaboration. Carolyn Keene never existed. They were total hits and they kept doing it for years. Then the publisher guy died. His daughter took over his publishing industry, which was kind of unheard of at the time, and kept the arrangement going. This book follows her success as a female CEO on a publishing empire and I kind of skipped over that part because I'm not really interested in females-in-business as feminist-success-story. Still it's pretty cool that this happened and totally interesting in light of the character "Nancy Drew". Later on another woman starting writing the books. Also at some point the early books were re-written, so that while the books you may have read in the 70s were probably the same books your mom may have read in the 50's, the books your mom read were Not the same as the books your grandma read, even though they were titled the same--so there are multiple versions of the same title depending on the year they were published.
If that all sounds confusing, yet interesting, then read the book! It can be done in one or two evenings, especially if you skip over the boring parts.
Writing style is not compelling and the author isn't strong on analysis but if you don't know this history and are a Nancy Drew fan, it's pretty satisfying on that level alone. I'm just excited to discover that Nancy Drew was a frankenstein creation whose character was influenced by several different independent women.

The Hours

So, if you read my other post, you are probably not surprised that I did go ahead and read this one--rather than Mrs. Dalloway again... I don' know how I feel about it. I kind of HATE the writing style--it takes a lot of liberties with the narration and since it's based on 1. history and 2. another novel it seems a little disrespectful with its representations.

There's also a few contrived spots--like there is this whole part about winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then it won the Pulitzer Prize. There's a scene where Meryl Streep the actress is spotted by "Clarissa" in New York and then a few years later, Meryl Streep plays the character Clarissa in the movie version of the novel. Those things really annoyed me, but ok, might not be the fault of the author per se.

I guess what I like is that it's a meditation on death, mortality and suicide. So it's the themes I'm drawn to more than the writing-style or work itself.

George Pelecanos

I never read crime fiction. In fact, I hadn't read any type of fiction for years. Then I watched The Wire. It was an obsession. Consumed, I watched the entire series in a few weeks. I devoted entire Sundays to it. Then it was over. My free time was too free. It became indeterminate, homogeneous, empty and anxious. Thankfully, Steve Dore recommended George Pelecanos.

George Pelecanos was a writer/producer on The Wire. He writes crime fiction set in DC. Its a lot like The Wire; realist stories of people- mostly men- caught in social, civic and institutional decay. His writing style is taught and mesmerizing. He also has stellar taste in music, which plays a significant contextual element in his work.

So, now I've got a new Sunday routine. I read a George Pelecanos book. I've read nearly everyone in Brighton Hove library. They have all been good. Some, like The Night Gardener, The Turnaround and Hard Revolution, have been superb.

Update. Today I'm reading Pelecanos' Hell To Pay. Here is an example of his themes and style:

Friends, relatives, police and print and broadcast media heavily attended Joe Wilder's showing at a funeral parlor near the old Posin's Deli on Georgia Avenue. At one point, traffic had been rerouted on the stripe to accommodate the influx of cars. Except for a few aquaintances and a couple of black plainclothes homicide men assigned to the case, few came to pay their respects to Lorenze Wilder on the other side of town.

The boy and his uncle were buried the next day in Glenwood Cemetary in Northeast, not far from where they had been murdered.

Because of the numbing consistency of the murder rate, and because lower-class black life held little value in the media's eyes, the violent deaths of young black men and women in the District of Columbia had not been deemed particularly newsworthy for the past fifteen years. Murders of young blacks rarely made the lead-off in the TV news and were routinely buried inside the Metro section of the Washington Post, the details consisting of a paragraph or two at best, the victims often unidentified, the follow-up nil.

Suburban liberals plastered Free Tibet stickers on the bumpers of their cars, seemingly unconcerned that just a few short miles from the White House, American children were enslaved in nighmare neighborhoods, living amid gunfire and drugs and attending dilapidated public schools. The nation was outraged at high school shootings in white neighborhoods, but young black men and women were murdered without fanfare in the nations capital every single day.

The shooting death of Joe Wilder, though, was different. Like a few high-profile cases over the years, it involved the death of an innocent child. For a few days after the homicide, the Wilder murder was the lead story on the local television news and made top-of-the-fold Metro as well. Even national politicians jumped into the fray, denouncing the culture of violence in the inner cities. As the witness at the ice-cream shop had mentioned the loud rap music coming from the open windows of the shooter's car, these same politicians had gone on to condemn those twin chestnuts, hip-hop and Hollywood. At no time did these bought-and-sold politicians mention the conditions that created that culture, or the handguns, as easily available as a carton of milk, that had killed the boy.

Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography

So I picked this one up the other day...reflecting on why I keep reading biographies and memoirs...it also ties into my current examination of Virginia Woolf. Hermione Lee has written several prestigious full length biographies and she also wrote Biography: A Very Short Introduction --so she is clearly an expert on the subject. Her essay about Virginia Woolf reflects a complex understanding of the medium.
She starts off with the claim that biography is fiction. Her opening sentence plainly states,"Biography is a process of making up or making over". Secondly, she notes that facts are facts and do indeed exist and can be uncovered and documented. To illustrate her point she recalls an experience where a minor event in her life was once recounted (incorrectly) in another person's biography. Realizing that this tiny experience of having a moment in her life misrepresented is just a microcosm of what those who are 'biographised' experience on a much larger scale, she notes that biography is often felt as a betrayal by the living subject --and/or for those whose lives intersect with someone who has been biographised. She then quotes Ted Hughes as having once said "I hope each one of us owns the facts of his or her own life".
She writes:

"No wonder that such strong emotions of blame and anger can circulate around biography, or that it is likely to be seen, in the worst cases, as a form of betrayal. For those with an investment in a life-story (whether as relatives, descendants, friends lovers, colleagues, admirers, scholars or devoted readers) a kind of despair can be felt if what's judged to be an inauthentic version of the life gains currency and prevails."

She goes on to explore Virginia Woolf's life-story by reflecting on The Hours, in both movie and book form.
I was really fascinated by The Hours when I saw it, which was troubling because I didn't think it was that great of a movie. Still, I have watched it several times and think of it often. There are some kind of bad parts in it-- I actually think the whole movie is kind of a mess--yet still, despite the bad acting and melodrama, it captivates me as a profound meditation on suicide, life and mortality. I have read Mrs. Dalloway twice and yet it is The Hours that is stuck in my head. This is kind of a drag, honestly, and I feel a nagging urge to keep re-reading it until it is rectified.
Reading Lee's essay, I am reminded that The Hours was based on a novel by Michael Cunningham that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. I never read it. I'm thinking I should, but will probably just read Mrs. Dalloway again. First I will finish this essay by Hermione Lee and probably search out more of her writing on Woolf.

Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill

my favorite living writer has a new book of short stories out. i've read several of the stories multiple times but haven't finished them all. some great stuff in this one. she just keeps getting better. i don't know how to evaluate fiction for a blog. maybe will write more about it later. just wanted to recommend this for summer reading.