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)

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

 

Fascinating, dark, neglected novel from 1959. A violent, tormented English veterarian and his withdrawn, abused wife and their ignored, well-meaning 15 year old daughter. The daughter suffers through the death of her mother and her father's new rakish mistress, and beginnings experiencing acute psychological distress, including the (imagined?) ability to levitate. 

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald

 

Stunning, track-by-track dissection of the Beatles' recordings.

MacDonald's forewords to his several editions are piercing sociological essays on British (and American) culture.

He has strong negative opinions about many of the later Beatles' tracks, the ones where he feels (with good reasoning) that the drugs had taken over and the spontaneous and unplanned ideas almost completely took over the painstaking craftsmanship of the earlier songs.

The Hunter by Tana French

 

Liked this one, a "sequel" of sorts to her recent novel "The Hunter." 

But it's a slow burner, and her Irish idiomatic dialogue gets a little wearying. 

More secrets and betrays and bad parenting in a remote Irish town, centered on the transplanted American retired detective and the somewhat-abandoned, previously-feral 15 year old girl he cares for and attempts to instruct.

I do long for the earlier Dublin murder squad novels though.

Sheila arranges the shirt on a hanger and hooks it onto the back of a chair. She says, "I shoulda picked ye a better father."

"Then we wouldn't exist," Trey points out.

Sheila's mouth twists in amusement. "No woman believes that," she says. "No mother, anyhow. We don't say it to the men, so as not to hurt their feelings -- they're awful sensitive. But you'd be the same no matter who I got to sire you. Different hair, maybe, or different eyes, if I'd went with a dark fella. Wee little things like that. But you'd be the same same."

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

 

Great luxurious read. Rather than being shot, a Russian nobleman is confined for the rest of his life to a tiny attic room, 10 feet square, in a grand hotel in the heart of Moscow across from the Kremlin. The novel covers the next thirty years of his life, as he struggles to maintain his outstanding character and morals through the birth of the modern Soviet Union.

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 by Peter Schjeldal

 

It is becoming evident to me that I'd read read about something than experience it. Take painting for instance. I have little patience with an art gallery -- my legs grow as bored as my eyes walking room to room, dodging the poseurs and tourists -- I find it completely uncomfortable to stare at paintings on a wall for hours, all that standing, all that taking of little steps to move in closer and move from one side of a canvas to the other.

But I like very much to read great writers talking about paintings. And Schjeldahl is one of them (seems to be in the Ashbery school of art criticism, which I'm also a fan of.) Such close, imaginative, lively, informed thinking makes an artist and his work and his life a thousand times more interesting to me.

The show was conceived on the Planet of the Scholars, where every question is considered except "So what?" [178]

I began to imagine the artist's [Picasso's] pictures as a steamrolled sculpture. [190]

Cartier-Bresson: [Photography] is a marvelous profession while it remains a modest one. [320]

James by Percival Everett

 

Another classic from Everett, this time longer and "more conventional" than his other novels, a resonant and deeply felt re-telling of the brunt of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who in this version is far from the ignorant version Mark Twain gives us.

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 Memoriam by Alice Winn

 

Stunning WWI novel about two English schoolboys who fall in love, enlist, and then meet again in the trenches at the battle of the Somme.  Terribly sad, quite beautiful - and even ends well! Well, not for most, that is. It's apparently Winn's first novel, but seems a much accomplished and polished and thoughtful work. Her close writing about men on the battlefield is exquisite.

Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir by Jann S. Wenner

 

Had to put it down not even halfway through. Though the dude knew everybody from the 1960s, his sly and immodest style of claiming to influence almost any important work that took place during his tenure as publisher of Rolling Stone became too annoying for me to take.

Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

Munro's first published book, and a fitting way to kick off my retrospective of her important body of work. She hasn't yet unleashed the "time torquing" technique of her later work, but the stories are wonderfully detailed and the characters deeply engraved.

The story “A Trip to the Coast” ends in a decidedly Flannery O'Connor manner. 

"Walker Brothers Cowboy"

"The Shining Houses"

"Images"

"Thanks for the Ride"

"The Office"

"An Ounce of Cure"

"The Time of Death"

"Day of the Butterfly"

"Boys and Girls"

"Postcard"

"Red Dress—1946"

"Sunday Afternoon"

"A Trip to the Coast"

"The Peace of Utrecht"

"Dance of the Happy Shades"

The Pigman by Paul Zindel

 

Revisiting this 1968 YA title after fifty years! Still pretty good, pretty sad, little melodramatic, but basically a strong story. The ending particularly bittersweet -- narrator's rumination on how the whole human race are "baboons" waiting around the monkey house for someone to visit.