Microserfs, Douglas Coupland; loaned out, never to be returned. I remember this book as being relatively entertaining. I mostly recall the design of the book–very cool, playful, and ahead of its time. This book will be more interesting in twenty or twenty-five years. Coupland’s site: beautiful.
The Unknown is a sprawling hypertext novel. It’s basically a postmodern choose your own adventure written in a ludic, recursive style. It’s a jumble of ideas, authors (their faves–The Unknown are a collective of sorts–include Thomas Pynchon, Wm Burroughs and Michel Foucault), and half-cooked philosophies.
I loved these things growing up. Images lead to fun links (or grisly death!)
My 11th graders just finished The Crucible. Here are a few images that we looked at in class.
These images remind me of a video I saw a couple of years ago, Inside the Bohemian Grove. This video claims to expose the bizarre rituals of the Bohemian Club, a secret society of world leaders, industrialists, and so on. The important people. To get a relatively mainstream take on the Bohemian Grove meetings go here; of course the internet hordes an abundance of (mis?)information on the BG. Just google it. File under Illuminati/conspiracy/paranoia.
Here’s an image of a Bohemian Grove ritual from a 1915 issue of National Geographic.
Via an excellent and fun blog, robertmonroe.org, a gallery of PKD covers. Check out the gallery here.
Absolutely nothing to do with books, but hey whatever. Guns and Roses have rescheduled their October 20th concert in sweet home Jacksonville FL for Halloween Night. Will Axl show? Will mayhem ensue? Will there be disappointment? Apathy?
And the Gators lost?! And that brawl in Miami?!
Console yourself with this Axl Rose fan art:
Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan:A Biography (1972?); another one from my cousin’s closet, part of the same cache that included Fear and Loathing. This would have been in the very early 1990s. I had always loved Bob Dylan, always–one of the earliest songs I remember taping off of the radio was “Like a Rolling Stone.” I had to call in to request it. I recorded it at the end of my first (and only, at the time) cassette tape–a copy of Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms that my dad had taped from his vinyl for me. By the time I got a hold of Anthony Scaduto’s fantastic bio, I knew a bit about Dylan. I already had a couple of Dylan albums, including one of the first CDs I ever bought, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (still my favorite). Like Fear and Loathing, this book was a door-opener to me. Interestingly, I was mostly enchanted by Dylan’s voice and wordplay before I read this book; that is to say his cult of personality hadn’t really effected me yet. This book changed that.
(I took the edition on the left. The one on the right you can buy online or in your favorite bookstore)
Any true Dylan fan has probably already read this book, but if you consider yourself one (a true fan, that is), and you haven’t read it, make amends. You won’t be disappointed. The book is particularly good if you bookend it with viewings of DA Pennebaker’s extraordinary documentary Don’t Look Back.
Dylan in his later years (i.e. nowadays) is as perplexing as ever. He’s made three of the best albums of his post-60s career, making up for some questionable output. He’s slowed down on the touring quite a bit (saw him about 10 years ago and he blew my mind — who knew what an accomplished guitar player he was?), and made those weird Victoria’s Secret commercials a few years ago. Recently, he made a ruckus when he attacked modern recording techniques in a Rolling Stone interview with one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Lethem.
One of the best things Dylan has done lately is his “Theme Time Radio Hour” on XM satellite radio. The show is thematic; Dylan riffs on the bible, coffee, the weather, all sorts of stuff. His musical taste is fantastic (saying Bob Dylan has good musical taste is sort of like saying water is wet), but it’s really his voice that mesmerizes. It’s a gleeful mix of the sinister with the playful. He actually kind of sounds like the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, especially in a comment from a recent show on the bible: “Nine out of ten Americans have at least one bible in their home. What’s up with the other guy?” Doesn’t look funny in print, but his delivery is unexpectedly hilarious.
If, like me, you can’t afford to subscribe to fancy satellite stations but still want to hear the word of Dylan, never fear! Check out White Man Stew for free downloadable mp3s of complete Dylan shows. You can get the shows as zip files full of divided mp3s, or as one long mp3.
I procured this from my cousin’s closet. My cousin Tripp is ten years older than me; he was in college at the time and I was staying with my aunt and uncle over the summer, in his old bedroom. I’m pretty sure both he and my uncle recommended that I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The edition (not pictured above–I couldn’t find the one I snagged, but it had a similar cover–more on the cover below) could have belonged to Tripp, but it may have belonged to my uncle.
Reading Fear and Loathing was an initiation into some kind of new literature for me. It opened the way to authors like Vonnegut, Wm Burroughs, Herman Hesse, JD Salinger (admittedly, I read some Tom Robbins in this period as well. Ugh). Before HST I was reading lots and lots of science fiction and fantasy books, both classic and trash. I had also read lots of the “adventure classics,” stuff like Robinson Crusoe and Dracula and Great Expectations and the Tarzan novels. And comic books. Always comic books. But Fear and Loathing was something new for me; it combined the fantasy and adventure and weirdness I’d been reading with a political ethos and a sense of social-reality-via-unreality. Surreality. Fear and Loathing contained a whole new set of reading rules for me, chief among them: irony and paradox. All of a sudden, the verity of all past narrators was cast into doubt. I was savvy now. I was ironized. I was, y’know, hip to what may be under a text now, whereas before I was just scanning the text. Or at least it seemed that way. Looking back, I don’t know for sure.
Of course I lent this book out to anyone who seemed vaguely interested. I did this for years, and amazingly, the book kept coming back to me. Must be some mystical sign when I think about it. Who returns books? I loaned it out all the way through college before it finally escaped me for ever. I’m not sure who has it now. At the point this particular edition left me forever, it had a duck-tape cover with title and author in Sharpie-font, courtesy of one innovative reader. I like to think others were initiated by it, but I know that most of the readers I lent it to had already read their revelation-text, whether it was that Kerouac book or Slaughterhouse Five or Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. And I haven’t read this book in years, although I’m a big fan of Terry Gilliam’s movie. Still, it’ll always have a special place in my trunk full of drugs–er, heart.
Another one courtesy of the Andrew Jackson High School Library. Not really a straight up theft; it was a remainder that the librarian gave to me.
This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, right up there with Infinite Jest, King Lear, and The Fortress of Solitude. Everyone should read this book before they die.
Blue (Moby Dick), Jackson Pollock. 1943.
Yes yes yes. I know I know I know. It’s not a book. It’s an album of music. But see now so and yes–it’s just so beautiful. It’s the best “reading music” I’ve come across in a long time. And, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I did obtain it by extra-legal means (it comes out Oct 16, so go buy it from your local record store!)
Harmony in Ultraviolet is Hecker’s third or fourth album, depending on how you want to count his EPs and sundries. This music might be described as “ambient,” although I’m not sure I like that term. Harmony‘s tracks seem to contain impossible oppositions; they hover and sink, they pulsate but are static, they are digital-ice and analog-heat, they express the abstract in a concrete mode. Why write about it here? Well, really, I just love an album that lends itself to reading, and Hecker’s new disc is fantastic to read to.
In 1912, James Weldon Johnson anonymously published The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. It was later republished under Johnson’s name in 1927, at the acme of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man strikes me as a thoroughly postmodern move. This fictional novel is presented as the true life story of a talented man who chooses to “pass” as white so that he might have greater–or at least equal–access to opportunity in America. Autobiography is a fictional novel “passing” as another genre, autobiography. This mirroring wasn’t intended as just a fancy rhetorical device–it was a subversive, incendiary gesture on JWJ’s part, meant to question the mores of white America. In fact, after it’s initial publication, several reviews were written suggesting that the book was a hoax, the premise of these reviews being that a black man could never pass as a white man–let alone marry a white woman and become a landowner of some importance.
Ultimately, the voice in Autobiography problematizes all easy readings. The ex-colored man is a bona fide narcissist with an almost preternatural ability to succeed at everything he attempts–except of course when he is thwarted by racist social norms. The reader seems most encouraged to sympathize with the narrator at these times, when the ex-colored man’s natural and cultivated abilities are confronted or ousted by the dominant system. At other times, the narrator condescends working class blacks he terms “inferior”; he also frequently wishes to sanitize “primitive” forms of black art, such as spirituals and ragtime music, by recasting them in a classical, canonical mode. The ex-colored man clearly feels frustration that the acumen of his genius is constantly delimited by his color, but this frustration sometimes seems aimed at his fellow blacks.
All of this makes for a challenging but brisk and enjoyable read. Paired with JWJ’s real autobiography, Along This Way, a savvy reader can come up with all kinds of ironic, postmodern readings. Or straightforward readings. Or whatever. Read it yourself.
Everything in Jacksonville, Florida should be named after native son James Weldon Johnson.
Well, maybe not everything–that could get confusing. But as it stands, the only thing we Jacksonvillians have bearing that great man’s name is a middle school, and an obscure plaque somewhere downtown–which is great. People love plaques.
James Weldon Johnson Middle School feeds Stanton College Preparatory School, an excellent school that JWJ served as principal of from 1894 to 1902. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I’m a proud graduate of the Stanton School (go Blue Devils!). Under JWJ’s plan, Stanton became the first black high school in Florida. In his autobiography, Along This Way, JWJ discloses the genius of his plans for educational reform: he simply asked the eighth grade class to come back again, partitioned off some rooms, and based the new high school program on the curriculum of his alma mater Atlanta University (now known as Clark). The real genius of this is that he didn’t bother to ask the all-white board of education, who undoubtedly would’ve found some way to say “no.” He just did it, and then let the board come see what he had done. Brilliant.
Why isn’t there a single prominent statue of JWJ in Jacksonville? Or a library named after him? Or even a street? It seems to me that the average Jacksonvillian simply isn’t aware of JWJ, or has only a passing knowledge of who he was, not realizing that he was born and raised here.
So:
1. I will continue writing about James Weldon Johnson on this blog.
2. I challenge every Jacksonvillian to read a book by James Weldon Johnson.
3. Maybe if we read his books, we’ll come to feel his genius, celebrate the fact that he is from our hometown, and honor him appropriately.
I promise I’ll return this one.
This book makes a great introduction to film writing, although I’m not sure it’s necessarily for film fans — more of a theory book, really. This book is from my uncle’s library; for years now, whenever I visit my aunt and uncle down in the Gulf Coast, I pick this book up and read from it. My uncle also has a fantastic book of essays on Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The essays in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (ed. John Belton), written largely in the deconstructionist, post-Derrida vein, did much to influence my own college tries at film writing. I realize now that I learned more about contemporary theory (Lacanian psycholinguistics, Mulvey’s “the gaze,” etc) through these essays than I ever did in a classroom lecture.
I didn’t mean to take this book; I’ll blame this one on the wife. Last time we stayed down in St. Pete Beach, I guess I had left the book out and she simply packed it up. We’re supposed to go down there this weekend; again, I promise to return it.
This one is kind of a double-library theft
The librarian at the high school I teach at keeps a pile of books from the public library system that are mistakenly returned to our school library. I couldn’t help but notice Donald Goines’ Swamp Man on top, with it’s strange, somewhat homoerotic cover. I knew right away that I was going to take it. This book was due back to the Regency Square Library, October 13th, 2000.
Written in 1974, Swamp Man taps into that whole 70s-creepy-shenanigans-rape-in-the-woods-Deliverance vibe. In the backwood swamps of Mississippi, George Jackson hunts down the evil racist crackers who have kidnapped and gangraped his sister Henrietta, killing them off one at a time, swamp man-style.
Goines, a former heroin addict, started writing in prison, cranking out 16 books in five years. He was shot to death in 1974.
Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude deserved the rave reviews it got back in 2003 when it first came out. I think it was a review in The Believer (although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in Nick Hornby’s sometimes-entertaining “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column) that prompted me to order a used copy via Amazon. I loved this book so much that of course I offered it up to Ricotta Parks, who apparently doesn’t read anything longer than a soup label anymore. Never fear, RP, I procured a nice cheap copy at the local B&N yesterday afternoon.
This book has it all: two main characters named after music legends, a magic ring, numerous Brian Eno references, gentrification, a Stan Brakhage-like filmmaker, 1970s Marvel comic books, confused sex, Brooklyn’s pre-hiphop hiphop culture, and a pretty cool Beatles archetype theory. Here is the Beatles archetype theory:
“‘Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can’t help it.’
‘Say the types again.’
‘Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.’
‘Okay, do Star Wars.’
‘Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.'”
Biblioklept’s turn: Cheney Paul, Rove John, Condi Rice George, Bush Ringo.
Reviews, essays, riffs, etc. Most recent first. Updates sporadic at best.
Nietzsche often gets used in popular culture as a kind of shorthand for dark mysterious anger and brooding solipsistic intellect. I take this to be a serious misunderstanding of this fundamentally life-affirming philosophy. Nietzsche’s work was infamously first misappropriated by the Nazis (with the guidance of N’s conniving sister). The Nazi’s misreading of N’s concept of the superman helped gird a genocidal machine with the false semblance of ‘philosophical’ armor.
This weekend the wife and I saw and thoroughly enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine (this is not to be confused with the Roger Hargreaves epic from the Mr. Men and Little Miss series)
This movie depicts the bizarre odyssey of the dysfunctional Hoovers as they try to get little Olive Hoover (charmingly acted by Abigail Breslin) to the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant all the way in California.
Olive’s angry, intense teenage brother Dwayne has not spoken for over 9 months. He communicates only through sullen glares and written notes (sample — “I hate everyone!”)
Dwayne is inseparable from his battered copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He also has a huge banner with an imagistic drawing of Nietzsche (with a powerful mustache) hanging on his wall. A strange moment occurs when suicidal Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) looks at the banner and nonchalantly avers: “Nietzsche, huh?” Frank later claims to be America’s pre-eminent Proust scholar.
I haven’t read Proust.
I liked the movie a lot, and of course I love literary references. But Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher and I hate to see him misrepresented as a humbug or a misanthrope or a miscreant of any sort. Nietzsche wanted people to think for themselves and avoid the static slavery of indoctrination (“the herd”). In this sense, N’s ideas do inform Little Miss Sunshine‘s heroes, the bizarre, nonconformist Hoovers. But N’s work also warns against easy symbols and singular readings, while stressing the importance of embracing life. Nietzsche’s writing is not the mute echo of anger and resentment and hate; Nietzsche’s wiritng is the booming voice of joy and movement and life. And maybe sunshine.
Biblioklept 
