As Al Gore notes in his New York Times review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest dispatch from the first row of’ Man Vs. Planet Earth,’ “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” Kolbert has been documenting our continuing assault on our environment and all who live here for some time now.
Gore writes:
Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.
Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.
In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.
Bruce Springsteen in Adelaide. Photo via Bruce Springsteen’s website by Jo Lopez.
Check out photographer Jo Lopez’s photos from Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s second night in Adelaide, Australia on February 12, 2014. — Bruce Springsteen website
The Swans have completed their 13th studio album, To Be Kind, out May 13th. To Be Kind will contain 10 Swans songs and clocks in at over two hours. Guests include St. Vincent. One song, “Bring The Sun,” is 35 minutes in length. — Rolling Stone
Roland has announced that the company is producing a new 808/909 hybrid drum machine that it’s calling the TR-8. “With the TR-8, we have obsessively analysed and faithfully re-created every detail and nuance of the analogue circuitry of these legendary rhythm machines,” Roland states in its description of the TR-8. “The boom and snap of the 808. The thud of the 909. The robotic click of an 808 rim shot or a classic 909 snare roll. It’s all here.” — Pitchfork
Former Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon will write an autobiography with music journalist Andrew Perry as his Boswell. Simon & Schuster plans to publish the book in October. “This book is basically about the life of a serious risk-taker,” Lydon said. “I make things safe for other people to follow on in my wake. I’m a stand-up-and-be-counted fella – but that’s in a world where nobody seems to be able to count.” — New Musical Express
Beck, Kendrick Lamar and Neutral Milk Hotel will headline this year’s Pitchfork music festival, which takes place in Chicago July 18 – 20, 2014. There will be a DJ set from Giorgio Moroder, and performances from Grimes, Pusha T, Kathleen Hanna’s the Julie Ruin, Sun Kil Moon and Tune-Yards. — Billboard
Da La Soul, celebrating the 25th anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising, have made their entire catalog—including remixes, instrumentals and rarities—available free for download on their site until noon ET tomorrow, February 15, 2014. So get on it NOW and get the music while you can. — De La Soul website
Bob Weir rebooted RatDog last August and the group is currently touring for the first time since 2009. The lineup is bassist Rob Wasserman, bassist Robin Sylvester, guitarist Steve Kimock, drummer Jay Lane and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti. RatDog is mixing Grateful Dead songs, RadDog originals, other Bob Weir songs and various covers. — jambands.com
Kimono Kult is the new group that includes former Mars Volta members John Frusciante and Omar Rodríguez-López plus Bosnian Rainbows’ Teri Gender Bender. Check out “La Canción De Alejandra” off their debut EP, Hiding in the Light, due out March 4, 2014.
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In 2001, an intense Bob Dylan fan named Bill Pagel bought the Duluth, Minnesota house where Robert Zimmerman lived before he moved to Hibbing, Minnesota. Five years later, Pagel settled permanently in Hibbing and attempted to buy the other Zimmerman house, the one where Bob lived while growing up, attending high school, etc., before taking off for Minneapolis, New York and stardom.
Kind of puts ones own obsession in perspective — right?
Pagel is one of the serious Dylan fans that Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Kinney writes about in “The Dylanologists,” a book that will be published this May.
Kinney describes himself as a Dylan fan in the book’s introduction:
I first found Dylan in the dusty basement of my childhood home. In the summer before my junior year in high school I was flicking through a pile of vinyl left behind by my older brother. I found a heavy box with five records inside. The man glowering on the front cover looked like he didn’t take orders from anybody. I liked that. I pulled off the top of the box, slid one of the records from a sleeve, fitted the vinyl onto the turntable, and dropped the needle into the groove. The music started, and a switch flipped in my head.
Writer David Kinney.
The album was called Biograph, a retrospective of the first two decades of a recording career still very much in progress. Dylan’s folk ballads were jumbled together with wailing mid-1960s rock classics; his gospel songs shared space with tomfoolery. A maid is beaten to death. A good man is sent to jail. A husband abandons his wife to hunt for treasure with a shadowy figure, and all he finds is an empty casket. There were songs about girls, and war, and politics. I didn’t know who all the characters were: Johanna, Ma Rainey, Cecil B. DeMille, Gypsy Davy. I couldn’t honestly say I knew what Dylan was saying half the time. But the lines were riveting. I wore out those five records. I leaned every word and made them mine, and Dylan grew into an outsize figure in my universe.
I’ve just started reading advanced proofs of the book and it’s very good. There’s a great section in which Dylan shows up in Hibbing to attend a funeral, as seen from the perspective of Linda Hocking, co-owner of Zimmy’s Downtown Bar & Grill, who is hopeful that the great man will stop in for a meal at her restaurant — or at least a piece of cherry pie.
The interior of Zimmy’s in Hibbing, Minnesota.
After all, ten years earlier, shortly after the restaurant was renamed Zimmy’s and decorated with Dylan photos and other paraphernalia, Dylan’s mother Beatty stopped in for lunch, and when asked what she thought of the place, she replied: “Honey, it’s about time somebody did something nice for my son in Hibbing.”
Bob and his mother, Beatty.
Kinney seems to have combined a biography of Dylan with stories of obsessive fans and so far it’s working.
I’ll post a review in late April or early May, once I finish the book and it’s closer to the publication date.
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Kim Gordon’s collection of essays, “Is It My Body?: Selected Texts,” will be published by Sternberg Press later this month.
The book collects essays Gordon wrote for various publications including Artforum in the 1980s and early 1990s.
From the Sternberg Press website:
Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.
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A few days ago I did a post about books Dylan has read and appreciated. There was a lot of interest, and I thought readers would be interested in a second post with more Dylan faves.
These books are either featured on Dylan’s website, or he talks about them in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.
1 The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Invoking the poetic muse was something I didn’t know about yet. Didn’t know enough to start trouble with it, anyway. In a few years’ time I would meet Robert Graves himself in London. We went for a brisk walk around Paddington Square. I wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn’t remember much about it.
2 The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax
From Publishers Weekly (via Bob Dylan’s website):
Working for the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions, legendary roots-music connoisseur Lomax ( Mister Jelly Roll ) visited the Mississippi Delta with his father, folklorist John Lomax, and black folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s; with African American sociologists from Fiske University in the 1940s; and with a PBS film crew in the 1980s, researching the history of the blues in America. Addressing this wonderfully rich vein of scarcely acknowledged Americana, Lomax has written a marvelous appreciation of a region, its people and their music. Burdened early with now long-forgotten technology (500-pound recording machines, etc.) and encountering pronounced racial biases and cultural suspicions about black and white people mixing socially and otherwise, Lomax sought out those in the Delta who knew Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton and others acquainted with musicians once less well known, such as Doc Reese, young McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), Dave Edwards, Eugene Powell and Sam Chatmon. Traveling across the South “from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia,” Lomax discovers the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born. In a memoir that will take its place as an American classic, Lomax records not just his recollections but the voices of hard-working, frequently hard-drinking, spiritual people that otherwise might have been lost to readers.
3 The Blues Line by Eric Sackheim, editor
From Bob Dylan’s website:
Transcribed from 78 rpm recordings and preserved here long after many of the records have disappeared, this collection of nearly three hundred songs from more than one hundred singers celebrates the diversity of feeling and form that defines the blues. Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters are represented with their lesser-known contemporaries—Barefoot Bill, Barbecue Bob, Bumble Bee Slim, and Black Ivory King. This complete anthology also features lyrics by Blind Blake, Victoria Spivey, Blind Willie Johnson, “Funny Paper” Smith, Texas Alexander, Lightning Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Ma Yancey, King Solomon Hill, Skip James, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Son House, Willie Brown, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Gary Davis, Roosevelt Sykes, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sonny Boy Williamson, Kokomo Arnold, Tampa Red, Howlin’Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Patton, and more than 100 others. Dozens of illustrations by Jonathan Shahn are included.
4 Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan
From Bob Dylan’s website:
Ringolevio is a classic American story of self-invention by one of the more mysterious and alluring figures to emerge in the 1960s. Emmett Grogan grew up on New York City’s mean streets, getting hooked on heroin before he was in his teens, kicking the habit and winning a scholarship to a swanky Manhattan private school, pursuing a highly profitable sideline as a Park Avenue burglar, then skipping town to enjoy the dolce vita in Italy. It’s a hard-boiled, sometimes hard-to-believe, wildly entertaining tale that takes a totally unexpected turn when Grogan washes up in sixties San Francisco and becomes a leader of the anarchist group known as the Diggers. The Diggers, devoted to street theater, direct action, and distributing free food, were in the thick of the legendary Summer of Love, and soon Grogan is struggling with the naive narcissism of the hippies, the marketing of revolution as a brand, dogmatic radicals, and false prophets like tripster Timothy Leary. Above all, however, he struggles with himself.
Ringolevio is an enigmatic portrait of a man and his times to set beside Hunter S. Thompson’s stories of fear and loathing, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, or the recent Chronicles of Bob Dylan, who dedicated his 1978 album Street Legal to the memory of Emmett Grogan.
5 Luck and Leather by Honore de Balzac
6 Le Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac
Bob Dylan in Chronicles: I liked the French writer Balzac a log… Balzac was pretty funny. His philosophy is plain and simple, says basically that pure materialism is a recipe for madness. The only true knowledge for Balzac seems to be in superstition. Everything is subject to analysis. Horde your energy. That’s the secret of life. You can learn a lot form Mr.B. It’s funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk’s robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, “What does this mean?” He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.
7 Kaddish and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
From Dylan’s website: Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem inspired by the death in 1956 of his mother Naomi.
Dylan said in 1965: I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected. It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.
8 On War by Carl Von Clausewitz
From Bob Dylan’s website: Bob Dylan mentions Clausewitz on pages 41 and 45 of his Chronicles: Volume One, saying he had “a morbid fascination with this stuff,” that “Clausewitz in some ways is a prophet” and reading Clausewitz can make you “take your own thoughts a little less seriously.” Dylan says that Vom Kriege was one of the books he looked through among those he found in his friend’s personal library as a young man playing at The Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village.
9 Don Juan by Lord Byron
Bob Dylan in Chronicles: I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish.
10 Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw
From Bob Dylan’s website: “The best history of R&B and all its components ever published.”
—John Hammond
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Bob Dylan reads, and over the years he’s read an eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction. He’s name-dropped writers in his songs and in his interviews. “Ballad of a Thin Man” famously mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald:
You’ve been through all of,
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books,
You’re very well read,
It’s well known.
In “Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again,” he sings:
Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley,
With his pointed shoes and his bells,
Speaking to some French girl,
Who says she knows me well.”
Dylan spends pages of his memoir “Chronicles” talking about books and authors.
Below I’ve listed ten books that Dylan has read and appreciated. Some are featured on his website, others he’s spoken about in interviews.
In some cases I’ve included text off Dylan’s website. In others there are quotes from Dylan about the book.
1 Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie
Bob Dylan, in “Chronicles”: I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sound of the words along. Pick up the book anywhere,turn to any page and he hits the ground running. “Bound for Glory” is a hell of a book. It’s huge. Almost too big.
2 The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel “Izzy” Young by Scott Barretta
From Dylan’s website: Israel G. “Izzy” Young was the proprietor of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The literal center of the New York folk music scene, the Center not only sold records, books, and guitar strings but served as a concert hall, meeting spot, and information kiosk for all folk scene events. Among Young’s first customers was Harry Belafonte; among his regular visitors were Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Shortly after his arrival in New York City in 1961, an unknown Bob Dyan banged away at songs on Young’s typewriter. Young would also stage Dylan’s first concert, as well as shows by Joni Mitchell, the Fugs, Emmylou Harris, and Tim Buckley, Doc Watson, Son House, and Mississippi John Hurt.
The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel “Izzy” Young collects Young’s writing, from his regular column “Frets and Frails” for Sing Out! Magazine (1959-1969) to his commentaries on such contentious issues as copyright and commercialism. Also including his personal recollections of seminal figures, from Bob Dylan and Alan Lomax to Harry Smith and Woody Guthrie, this collection removes the rose tinting of past memoirs by offering Young’s detailed, day-by-day accounts. A key collection of primary sources on the American countercultural scene in New York City, this work will interest not only folk music fans, but students and scholars of American social and cultural history.
3 The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry by Angel Flores, editor
From Dylan’s website: Introduction by Patti Smith.
4 On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Bob Dylan on his website: “I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
Bob Dylan in “Chronicles”: Within the first few months that I was in New York I’d lost my interest in the “hungry for kicks” hipster vision that Kerouac illustrates so well iin his book, “On the Road.” That book had been like a bible for me. Not anymore, though. I still loved the breathless, dynamic bob poetry phrases that flowed from Jack’s pen, but now, that charaacter Moriarty seemed out of place, purposeless — seemed like a character who inspired idiocy. He goes through life bumbing and grinding with a bull on top of him.
From Dylan’s website: Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On The Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free.” Based on Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On The Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On The Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
5 One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding by Robert Gover
Dylan praised the book during an interview with Studs Terkel on radio station WFMT in 1963. “I got a friend who wrote a book, it’s called ‘One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding,’ it’s about this straight-A college kid, fraternity guy, and a 14-year-old negro prostitute, and it’s got two dialogues in the same book. One chapter is what he’s doing and what he does, and the next chapter is her view of him. It actually comes out and states something that’s actually true… This guy who wrote it, you can’t label him. He’s unlabelable.”
6 The Oxford Book of English Verse by Christopher Ricks, editor
From Dylan’s website: Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry, chosen and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.” The Oxford Book of English Verse , created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch and selected anew in 1972 by Helen Gardner, has established itself as the foremost anthology of English poetry: ample in span, liberal in the kinds of poetry presented. This completely fresh selection brings in new poems and poets from all ages, and extends the range by another half-century, to include many twentieth-century figures not featured before–among them Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett, Thom Gunn and Elaine Feinstein–right up to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Here, as before, are lyric (beginning with medieval song), satire, hymn, ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad, but also kinds of poetry not previously admitted: the riches of dramatic verse by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster; great works of translation that are themselves true English poetry, such as Chapman’s Homer (bringing in its happy wake Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’), Dryden’s Juvenal, and many others; well-loved nursery rhymes, limericks, even clerihews. English poetry from all parts of the British Isles is firmly represented–Henryson and MacDiarmid, for example, now join Dunbar and Burns from Scotland; James Henry, Austin Clarke, and J. M. Synge now join Allingham and Yeats from Ireland; R. S. Thomas joins Dylan Thomas from Wales–and Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, writing in America before its independence in the 1770s, are given a rightful and rewarding place. Some of the greatest long poems are here in their entirety–Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’–alongside some of the shortest, haikus, squibs, and epigrams.
7 Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians by Thucydides (Author) , Jeremy Mynott (Translator)
Dylan in “Chronicles”: “[It’s ] A narrative which would give you the chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.”
8 Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick
From Dylan’s website: Train to Memphis was hailed on publication as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. Peter Guralnick’s acclaimed book is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis’ humanity, as it traces Elvis’ early years, from humble beginnings to unprecedented success. At the heart of the story is Elvis himself, a poor boy of great ambition and fiery musical passions, who connected with his audience and the age in a way that has yet to be duplicated.
9 The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, by Sonny Barger
Bob Dylan in the 2012 Rolling Stone interview: Look who wrote this book. [Points at coauthors’ names, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman.] Do those names ring a bell? Do they look familiar? Do they? You wonder, “What’s that got to do with me?” But they do look familiar, don’t they? And there’s two of them there. Aren’t there two? One’s not enough? Right? [Dylan’s now seated, smiling.]
I’m going to refer to this place here. [Opens the book to a dog-eared page.] Read it out loud here. Just read it out loud into your tape recorder.
“One of the early presidents of the Berdoo Hell’s Angels was Bobby Zimmerman. On our way home from the 1964 Bass Lake Run, Bobby was riding in his customary spot – front left – when his muffler fell off his bike. Thinking he could go back and retrieve it, Bobby whipped a quick U-turn from the front of the pack. At that same moment, a Richmond Hell’s Angel named Jack Egan was hauling ass from the back of the pack toward the front. Egan was on the wrong side of the road, passing a long line of speeding bikes, just as Bobby whipped his U-turn. Jack broadsided poor Bobby and instantly killed him. We dragged Bobby’s lifeless body to the side of the road. There was nothing we could do but to send somebody on to town for help.” Poor Bobby.
10 Confessions of a Yakuza, Dr. Junichi Saga
In the 2012 Rolling Stone interview Bob Dylan was asked about some lines in songs on Love and Theft that seem to be very close to lines in Saga’s book and Dylan responded: Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It’s true for everybody, but me. I mean, everyone else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.
Seriously?
I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.
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Today the New York Times‘ book critics each listed the books they most enjoyed during 2013. Below are the lists. But to read what they like about each book, head to the New York Times.
In the intro to the lists Janet Maslin writes:
“Let us be the first to tell you: These are quirky lists. They’re supposed to be. These are our favorite books of the year, so please don’t confuse them with 10 Bests, because we can’t make lists like those. For one thing, all of us — Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and I — read so many books on assignment that we don’t have the leeway to be comprehensive. For another, we’ve listed books that we liked as much as we admired. That’s where the quirks come in.
“Each of us has chosen only from among the books personally reviewed during the calendar year. That alone creates big omissions. We cannot review books by reporters for, or writers associated with, The New York Times. That means that at least two widely praised works of nonfiction — Peter Baker’s “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” and Sheri Fink’s “Five Days at Memorial” (part of which originally appeared in The Times Magazine) — weren’t covered by us. The same goes for books by friends. And, yes, there are books we didn’t cover and regret having missed.”
Michiko Kakutani’s list
1 THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt
2 THE EXAMINED LIFE: HOW WE LOSE AND FIND OURSELVES by Stephen Grosz
3 THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE by David Finkel
4 CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT by Edwidge Danticat
5 AFTER THE MUSIC STOPPED: THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, THE RESPONSE, AND THE WORK AHEAD by Alan S. Blinder
6 JOHNNY CASH: THE LIFE by Robert Hilburn
7 MY BELOVED WORLD by Sonia Sotomayor
8 BIG DATA: A REVOLUTION THAT WILL TRANSFORM HOW WE LIVE, WORK, AND THINK by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
9 HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA by Mohsin Hamid
10 TENTH OF DECEMBER: STORIES by George Saunders
Janet Maslin’s list:
1 LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: WAR, DECEIT, IMPERIAL FOLLY AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST by Scott Anderson
2 THE UNKNOWNS by Gabriel Roth
3 SOMEONE by Alice McDermott
4 THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert
5 MANSON: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLES MANSON by Jeff Guinn
6 LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson
7 EMPTY MANSIONS: THE MYSTERIOUS LIFE OF HUGUETTE CLARK AND THE SPENDING OF A GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNE by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.
8 JOHNNY CARSON by Henry Bushkin
9 N0S4A2 by Joe Hill
10 NEVER GO BACK by Lee Child
Dwight Garner’s list
1 THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner
2 THE UNWINDING: AN INNER HISTORY OF THE NEW AMERICA by George Packer
3 MEN WE REAPED: A MEMOIR by Jesmyn Ward
4 CRITICAL MASS: FOUR DECADES OF ESSAYS, REVIEWS, HAND GRENADES, AND HURRAHS by James Wolcott
5 COUNTRY GIRL: A MEMOIR by Edna O’Brien
6 MY PROMISED LAND: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF ISRAEL by Ari Shavit
7 MARGARET FULLER: A NEW AMERICAN LIFE by Megan Marshall
8 THE WET AND THE DRY: A DRINKER’S JOURNEY by Lawrence Osborne
9 THE SKIES BELONG TO US: LOVE AND TERROR IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF HIJACKING by Brendan I. Koerner
10 I WANT TO SHOW YOU MORE: STORIES by Jamie Quatro
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As Flavorwire notes in its intro to “The 10 Best Debut Novels of 2013,” “In composing their first novel, writers must temper their excitement at being given the opportunity to present hundreds of pages to the public with the discipline to create a story memorable enough to bring readers back for their second attempt.”
Here’s what Flavorwire says about Jenni Fagan’s “The Panopticon”:
Told in the lively slang of Anais, an orphaned 15-year-old Scottish girl who’s being hauled off to an unusual home for juvenile offenders over a violent crime she can’t recall whether she committed, The Panopticon is a dreamy document of friendship among young people who society has not only failed but scapegoated. Yet Fagan — an author whose experience as a poet comes through in her evocative prose — doesn’t sugarcoat her story or turn it into a tale of a bad girl gone good. There are moments of triumph for Anais, but there’s no panacea for her lifetime of terrible luck and systemic oppression.
The list:
1 Necessary Errors, Caleb Crain
2 The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman
3 You Are One of Them, Elliott Holt
4 In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Matt Bell
5 The Facdes, Eric Lundgren
6 The Panopticon, Jenni Fagan
7 Tampa, Alissa Nutting
8 The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Ayana Mathis
9 Mira Corpora, Jeff Jackson
10 Elect H. Mouse State Judge, Nelly Reifler
For comments about each novel, head to Flavorwire.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
The late great assemblage artist/ photographer Wallace Berman, who died on his birthday in 1976 at age 50 in a car accident, will be honored at an exhibit of his Beat zine Semina, which he hand-printed on a table-top in his house.
“All components of all nine issues of Wallace Berman’s art/assemblage/beat zine Semina, alongside related ephemera, posters and mail-art [will be exhibited]. Semina bridges appropriation, fine printing, punk-style DIY and collage/montage, this already in the late 1950s!” reads the press release about the show.
“Semina 1955-1964 Art Is Love Is God,” will run from Sunday, December 8 through Thursday, January 9 at Boo-Hooray in New York.
A reception with John Zorn performing will take place on Sunday December 8, from 3PM-6PM.
“Michael McClure called it “a scrapbook of the spirit”. Outside of commerce, Semina was sent through the mail to Wallace Berman’s friends like David Meltzer, William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, and Cameron. The components of Semina were not only submitted, but appropriated from these friends, alongside personal heroes like W. B. Yeats, Hermann Hesse, and Antonin Artaud.
Hand-printed on a table-top at his house, this free-form zine with its loose-leaf poetry and amazing collages, montages and photography, is also most baffling in its vanguard status: nobody had done anything like this before Berman, not even in the days of dada.
Published between 1955 and 1964 in editions ranging from 150 to 350 copies, this rare publication (original issues regularly sell in the five figures) needs to be seen and cherished by anyone interested in American post-war art.
Michael Duncan points out that “Semina’s overarching theme involved a search for how to transcend the ‘monster’ of postwar meaninglessness.”
The spirit of Semina’s assemblage will feel familiar to anybody who has ever stayed up late at night at a copy shop making a punk zine or flyer. The hypnotic and delicious feel of perusing the poetry and imagery is the closest I’ve gotten to capturing those fleeting moments when one remembers components of a distant dream.
On December 8th, Boo-Hooray is publishing Semina 1955-1964 Art Is Love Is God, a 174 page softbound full-color catalogue reproducing each component of each issue of Semina. The catalogue comes with a booklet of annotations and texts by Johan Kugelberg, Adam Davis, Tosh Berman, Shirley Berman, Philip Aarons and Andrew Roth alongside silkscreened artwork, photo prints, flyers and cards, all printed loose-leaf and contained in a pocket on the back board of the catalogue in the spirit of Wallace Berman’s original publication.
This publication is limited to 300 copies and is only available from Boo-Hooray.”
Three short stories written by the late J. D. Salinger found their way online following an eBay auction of a bootlet book titled “Three Stories.”
The stories are “Paula,” “Birthday Boy,” and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.”
Supposed cover of bootleg Salinger book.
At the Reddit website, there is an intense discussion about the situation. This is apparently what the person who leaked the stories had to say:
It took me many weeks of research to find that this book existed and many more weeks to acquire it. I will confirm and take with that take responsibility to the claim that these are accurate to the originals.
Not much is verifiable to the origins of this book I have here. At least I will not confirm anything. What I do know is that someone with access to the originals compiled them together in this self-published collection. There is a single UPC symbol on the back that leads no where. Other than that, it’s existence is not well documented.
Enjoy.
Also posted at the site:
The book “Three Stories” seems to be a copy of a collection originally released in 1999. An eBay who sold a first edition of this collection said the following:
Ebay Seller seymourstainglass wrote:
Paperback. 47 pages. On Copyright page it says printed in London in 1999. Copy number 6 of 25.
3 short stories written by JD Salinger never published at all and that remain in The Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin Untitled or “Paula” (1941)
The untitled manuscript at the Ransom Center is less a story than a series of scenes not yet sewn together. Whether or not this is some form of Salinger’s lost story “Paula” is pure speculation. However, in a letter dated October 31 (1941), Salinger states that he is “finishing a horror story (my first and last) called ‘Mrs. Hincher.’ ” Undoubtedly a reference to the story described here, Salinger’s letter dates its completion to late 1941 or early 1942.
“The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” is largely regarded as the finest of Salinger’s unpublished works. While not having had the opportunity to revue all of the author’s unpublished materials, it is hard to imagine a more important work among them
“Birthday Boy” (1946?)
The short story “Birthday Boy” is accompanied by a letter from Salinger to John Woodburn which refers to “both sets of proofs”. Although undated, the letter probably dates to 1951, the year that Woodburn published The Catcher in the Rye. However, it’s also likely that the letter does not reference Catcher, but a short story sent to placate the editor instead. Salinger’s relationship with Woodburn was brief and somewhat bizarre.
Images of the First edition http://i.imgur.com/98bfQ8K.jpg
Printing/Copyright details http://i.imgur.com/T7nymsT.jpg
