Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard

 

A fascinating memoir. Ballard beautifully and deeply engages with his vivid memories of his childhood in Shanghai - first idyllic and strange, then blinkered and strange in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. Reading this with pleasure at the same time I'm struggling to finish his 1975 novel HIGH-RISE (and as I have struggled over the years with his science fiction.)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

 

Struggling with this. Wolfe's style is sweeping and brilliant, but I'm finding it difficult to engage with any of the characters - or the narrator. Is that what his style of journlism was all about?  A favorite of mine, BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME by Dennis Farina, has much more gravity for me: I identify with, marvel at, pull for, and end up loving the doomed narrator.

There is Happiness: New and Selected Stories by Brad Watson

 

Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life by Tim Riley

 

Liking this so far - great writing and namedropping on music from the Beatles era that influenced/was influenced by them. The later biographical material itself is mostly familiar to me from my other recent readings. The early biographical material about Lennon's childhood is vivid and dramatic.

Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony

 

Promising premise falls off in second half.

More aardvark! Less Republican yuppie 2nd person address!

Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation by Philip Norman

 

okay. filling in the gaps from my previous Beatles' readings.

Up Against It by Joe Orton

 

Familiar Orton ground - the unusual nature of this treatment is that it was (allegedly) considered by Brian Epstein and the Beatles for their follow-up film to HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Would have been amazing to see - although Orton cut the main characters from four to two. The action is predicatable - damaged, violent, crime-focused young men attack - and are attacked by - a damaged, violent, criminal society.

The Likeness by Tana French

 

I love Tana French's work, find it addictive, and this one eventually worked its way under my skin. But it was way too long. The premise was cunning if farfetched - an undercover detective has her (undercover and abandoned) identity stolen by a young woman who looks exactly like her, and ends up murdered. The detective infiltrates the group home the victim lived in (with four close friends) to try to find out clues toward the identity of her murderer.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

 

Struggling to get through this. Ballard has an odd, clinical, detached narrative style that fits his futurism - but is none too pleasurable. 

A gigantic modern high-rise in Britain in an unnamed future begins to distintergrate as its 2000 inhabitants begin violently attacking each other, first by sector (bottom, middle, top) and then by floor.

Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, with Barry Miles

 

Pretty good, lots on insights, a little annoying in Miles insistence on his own place in the Beatles history, but that's a small point. The chapter on the London cultural and arts scene - when McCartney had bought a house in town, while the other three Beatles had retired to the suburban countryside - is interesting, although McCartney (as always) sound a little glib and fey when discuss art that's not pop and rock songs.

Good source of McCartney's assigning "percentages" of authorship credit to himself and Lennon. Who knows what actually went on? Their whole career was magical and creative and, I'm sure, chaotic. But they wrote 180 songs the likes of which had never been seen before - and won't be seen again.

Confidence by Denise Mina

 

Really underwhelming. A disappointment. Two podcasters on a wild goose chase. Phoned in plot, insubstantial characters. 

Three Hundred Paces: The Journal of Corporal Otis Truitt, CSA by William Cannon

 

Innocent by Scott Turow

 

Good, page turning, hard to put down, even though I haven't read PRESUMED INNOCENT, unlike everyone else in the world. The inner working of the judicial world - as a judge and a prosecutor who've worked together for 20 years face off in a murder trial that eerily echoes the same crime 20 years earlier.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott

 

Deeply immersed. Very important poet to me, my first extended deep dive, met him at Northwestern, been reading him and thinking about his work ever since then.

The 1980s section devastating, where Gunn loses dozens of loved ones in the space of a year or so. Unimaginable until now when I read of how he took it full on, trying to survive it and gain some meaning from the carnage. 

And his "old age" as it were, is tragic as presented, although he is never really self-pitying. In his late 60s, he vigorously renewed his passion for drugs and picking up young men as sexual tricks, often homeless and troubled, although he cared for them as he could toward his purpose. He certainly died as he lived, with a fierceness and a care for the person he was with, and did not put on much of the dress of one ageing slowly and gracefully. He did not want that.

Yvor Winters definition of a poem: a statement in words about the human experience (p. 130)

The Sense of Movement was about a "specifically contemporary" kind of "malaise," the attempt "to understand one's deliberate aimlessness, having the courage of one's convictions, reaching a purpose only by making the right rejections." (147)

Gunn's love of Camus, particularly THE PLAGUE. (162)

Gunn on Lowell, and his aims for a personal autobiographical essay (209)

Gunn on Robert Creeley (218)

from TG piece about TOUCH: There remains open the possibility that one can deliberately and consciously attempt to create in oneself a field which will be spontaneously fertile for the tests of sympathy[.]... I do not mean that one can simply love everybody because one wants to, but that one can try to avoid all the situations in which love is impossible. (229)

Gertrude Stein: "She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting."

"Only Tony White, among my close friends, became an exception. He dropped out, coolly and deliberately, from the life of applause, having coming to see how the need for it complicates one's existence quite unnecessarily." 

... loss is loss, and time often only helps to show how deep and wide it is. (296)

Mike Kitay: "Tony Tanner was a good example of a smart friend Thom had, but he didn't like Tony's problems." (303)

"'The proverb is: A cat in gloves catches no mice. [...] I mentioned my proverb to a San Francisco poet, and he capped it with one of his own: And mice in high heels have a terrible time getting away from cats.'" (335)

TG on Duncan's definition of the Romantic movement: "the intellectual adventure of not knowing." (409)

"a poem is a record of activity" (422)

Thom saw these poems [in limited edition Unsought Intimacies] as "distinct from confessional poetry, which is a form of indirect boasting about pain, not so indirect maybe. When there is pain in these poems, it is a cause for deep regret." (431)