Vagabond, a memoir by Tim Curry

 

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA by Thomas Powers

 

I may have believed I read this before, and certainly did read the footnote that references my father, who served as an aide to Richard Helms, and who gave to agent Victor Marchetti a copy of FESTIVAL OF SPIES, written by David St. John, a pseudonym for infamous Watergate participant Howard Hunt, as Helms had a box of those sort of CIA-friendly spy novels in his office and liked to hand them out.

But this time I really did read every word of it - and though it is dry and acronym-laden, and hard to follow, its reputation precedes it as THE best CIA book ever published when it appeared in 1979. (Have no idea whether that is still true, as a tide of revelations and books have appeared since then.)

This book came at the end of a massive tide of post-Watergate bloodletting and scapegoating of the national intelligence community that Helm's CIA (and the first 30 years of a national intelligence service) never quite got over. Intelligence (in Powers' words, the only way during the Cold War of "waging peace) has always been mandatory for any country. 

p. 43 "Analysts deduce what spies have failed to learn."

The Best American Essays 2007 edited by David Foster Wallace.

 

Fascinating essay about the culture of sexualization  and the sexual revolution by Mark Greif called "Afternoon of the Sex Children."

Great analysis of the Iraq Wars.

Amazing opening essay about a man dying in an apartment fire.

Came for the Wallace imprimataur, and it's ringing true.

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.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson

 

Have had this on the shelf for literally 35 years - but have I ever read this? No sign of markings, no memory. And it's a lot to take in: none of the colorful and hallucinatory characters and action of LAS VEGAS, which I remember well (well, mostly for the drugs). And the 1972 McGovern presidential candidacy is not something I know a thing about.

Thompson's political writing style (if one can call it that) is absurd - he reports a ton about what other reporters are reporting, and he reports on his own personality.

After suffering through the first 2/3rds of the book, I finally got to August 1972 (chapters run chronologically by month for the year) and it's finally paying off - after an especially dull long section about the McGovern campaign leadership's machinations at the convention to delay declaring victory until the Humphrey and Muskie forces were completely confused and demoralized (can you tell I didn't even understand the section? or quite finish it?).

Thompson barely touches on policy or governmental action: he dwells on the political as personal, on polling and popularity, on the athleticism of devoted journalits. V. odd book. 

And HST pops in this quote late in the book for no apparent reason (good quote though):

Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race—small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them … They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They threaten to take [the land] away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland.” Excerpt from Sioux chief Sitting Bull’s speech at the Powder River Council in 1877.

In The Early Times by Tad Friend

 

Good. Weird. Pretentious.

A brilliantly written and odd book, mostly a memoir and an autobiographic essay by career New Yorker writer Tad friend, but verging at times on crystalline fiction, on sappy self-help relationship book, as furtive apologia by an unreliable narrator who cheats repeatedly on his wife, and finds in his father's life both a justification and a source of blame for this.

Friend's Wasp-y background -- born and raised in New England, his father a distinguished East Asian Studies professor an author and president of Swarthmore, a preppy education and avocations (Tad was a nationally ranked squash player - as was his father) -- this chill and chilly background is at odds with Friend's confessional intention.

If you love a demanding task that requires both discipline and talent...-- you eventually discover an innate boundary: you can apprehend real virtuosity, especially as it's used to best you, but you can never quite incorporate it. You will never be more than almost great...Yet the truly great players sacrifice so much that they stare back at us with equal longing. Or so we console ourselves. [115]

"Oversight" is a Janus word, like "buckle" or "cleave": it means both supervision and neglect [122]

'Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.' - James Salter [128]

'Think well on this, my sweet:

Our bodies need not truly beat 

Upon each other,

But, past their funerary heat.

Will slide together perfectly,

Grain and micrograin

Intimate and without stain,

Closer than ever they were in life.' -Day Friend (Tad's father) [155]

Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell

 

Good long short memoir about an eccentric Greenwich Village character in the 1940s and 1950 who claimed to be writing an oral history of modern world but turned out to be doing not so much, simply revising again and again the same several chapters of his own early life. But how he was lovingly supported by hundreds of intellectuals and others in Manhattan, and cherished for his oddness.

Driven to this by my reading of the Harry Smith bio of Szwed, as Smith and Gould share many similarities.

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

 

Where do I start about this remarkable book? A political prisoner in Italy, a doctor and painter, in 1942-1943 is sentenced/banished by the fascist Mussolini regime to a remote peasant region in the southern part of the country. Whereupon he makes notes for an anthropological, social history of the region and its people. The peasants' superstitions and conduct are vividly conjured.

"We're not Christians," they say. "Christ stopped sort of here, at Eboli." "Christian," in their way of speaking means "human beings." and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We're not Christians, we're not human beings; we're not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. (p. 3)

tax collector who is also a clarinetist (35)

disgraced priest (40-41)

The mayor and schoolmaster was at this moment exercising his teaching function. He was sitting on a balcony just off the classroom and having a smoke while he looked at the people in this square below... He had a long cane in his hand, and, without moving from his chair, he restored order within by striking through the window with astonishing accuracy... (44-5)

public latrine built by fascists - no function (46)

man who inflates dead goats to strip the skin and make flasks of it (46-7

drawing room cut up into dark prison cells (50)

two political prisoners who take turns cooking lunch for each, and setting it out - but who are not allowed to see each other and fraternize (51-2)

He was on obese, heavy, deaf old man, greedy and grasping like an enormous silk-worm. (59)

the peasants relationship to the state (76-78)

shitting outside (96)

Giulia physical description: Her face as a whole had a strongly archaic character, not classical in Greek or Roman sense, but stemming from an antiquity more mysterious and more cruel which had sprung always from the same ground, and which was unrelated to man, but linked with the soil and its everlasting animal deities. (105)

The Last Days of Roger Federer

 

How Music Works by David Bryne

 

Fascinating breakdown of music by a fascinating musician.

The Journals of John Cheever

 

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady

 

Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee

vivid and psychologically compelling.  but bone-dry and humorless.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Cyberwars by Kathleen Hall Jamieson

The View from Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior

Short moral essays on the decay of the American economy and culture, and politics and government, from 2011-2013.  Depressing.

Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Re-read my tattered, literally falling to pieces copy of this 1962 long essay by James Baldwin, a remarkably prescient screed against white complacency and black bewilderment.

Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.

This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.

Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.

But at the bottom of my heart  I do not believe this, I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are.  We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.  Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only Western nation with both the power and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats by Allen Ginsberg

A great primer on the core Beat poets provided by the core of the core himself, Allen Ginsberg.  Oral transcripts of his freewheeling lectures over a 20 year period, the chapters are miniature paraphrases and riffs and memories of the poet and the poem/volume in question.  It's a great way to read the Beats.  Ginsberg's jazzy conversational tone is effective in explicating jazzy conversational poetry and prose.  The chapters on Kerouac (taking up much of the first half of the book) are good, even though at times he just quotes pages of Kerouac at length and lets Kerouac speak.  Kerouac is a fascinating figure -- and clearly enthralling to Ginsberg, who's more than half in love with him, this giant personality who in retrospect seems a sort of doper/speed freak Whitman: are all of his novels and poems really one long piece, like Leaves of Grass?  He certainly revisited and revised and reimagined and renamed and fiddled with his own autobiography again and again.

King Pleasure was interesting because he was one of the few people who took Charlie Parker music and simply took syllables and by following each note he made actual sentences, poetic sentences. (p. 32)

In a sense, what's happening with Burroughs and with Kerouac, the person has become a shaman, the body of the life has turned prophetic, and the message is coming through that body. (p. 191)

"O foot tired in climes so mysterious,
Don't go down the outside for nothing."
Kerouac, from Scattered Poems

"A lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?"
Kerouac

He [Kerouac]'s considered a naive or a primitive, but Kerouac had a better grasp on American manners and political manners than most writers..." p. 214

This [from On the Road] is quite smart about 42nd Street, because when you look deep into 42nd Street you realize there's water at both ends of the street, but when you're in the middle of 42nd Street you think you're in the middle of the continent with all the neon blinking and the tall buildings.  (p. 235)

In terms of the popular culture, Kerouac was preternaturally brilliant and penetrant.  I think that's why the whole Beat Generation, beginning in the mid-fifties, had so much power.  Not that Kerouac was that smart, or Burroughs, but that what they were looking at was very basic and common sense.  American cultural mentality, media consciousness, Hollywood, radio, TV, the news magazines that intellectuals nourished themselves on were so shallow in their spiritual ambition that any basic statement, even if couched in bohemian terms, was a revelation.  p. 239

"In the Morgue" poem by Gregory Corso

That [Dean Moriarty's description of a saxophone player in On The Road]'s a pretty accurate description of inspiration, which is to say breath.  I would now define it by hindsight as unobstructed breath, as a physiciological state of unobstructed breathing, which is known as inspiration, spiritus, breath.