Ben Watson — Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

Despite my love for free jazz, I've long struggled with some of the guitarists to circle around that movement, most especially Derek Bailey, whose brand of playing makes even the loose tag of "jazz" insufficient and limiting. I'd hoped this book would help sell me on him a bit more, and while Watson at times makes Bailey sound so fascinating, so worthy of repeated listening, the author often resorts to Marxist caterwauling about the superiority of nonmaterial music over commercial product (and you oughta see some of the people he argues are mainstream sell-outs). It picks up toward the end when Bailey's own period of comfortable, rewarding musicianship seems to make the biographer happy and content as well, but this was a sadly frustrating read that only deepens the sense that Bailey is for "superior minds," with all the tedium that entails.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

Alain Badiou — In Praise of Love

As Badiou lays out in the early portions of his chat with Truong, love relies on risk, the cautious willingness of both parties to expose themselves to someone different. That in and of itself is not a particularly bold observation, but Badiou constructs philosophical language on top of a layman argument. The risk, then, is not merely rewarding for its sense of the unknown but for the very difference between people, of learning to see things “from the point of view of two and not one.” Even the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas insufficiently accounts for this radical reorientation, in Badiou’s view: Levinas sees the Other as a means for discovering the Self, but Badiou conceives of love as a means of bridging Self and Other into a shared third perspective that sees the world in an entirely different way.

Read the rest at Spectrum Culture.

Book Review: A Crack-Up at the Race Riots, by Harmony Korine

On the back of his latest (and greatest) film, Harmony Korine has reissued of his sui generis collection of fragments, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots. The latter, sadly, is far from cause for celebration: its scattershot movement between shaggy-dog shards, cultural appropriation and pretentious but obvious name-dropping displays the worst of the artist. In fact, Korine's subsequently improved film work suggests that this book served as a kind of mental clearing of Korine's most irritating tics. For that reason more than anything else, Crack-Up is worth a read by the curious, but be sure to have a copy of Julien Donkey-Boy on hand to see how this nonsense could somehow result in something beautiful.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #16: Laurent Binet—HHhH: A Novel

If two things in this world have been done to death they are the WWII historical novel and glib, self-referential postmodernism that sidesteps narrative for telling the audience how hard it is to write a narrative. But by God, Laurent Binet managed to throw these things together and wind up with the best new book I've read in years. Binet's digressions, though routinely amusing and occasionally a bit grating, add to the overall effect of Binet's attempt to lionize the Czech and Slovak assassins who killed Reinhard Heydritch, possibly the most dangerous Nazi under Hitler and the true architect of the Holocaust. Binet manages to turn all of his story-interrupting tics into reflections of our continuing (possibly endless) quest to make sense of the horror of Nazi policy, and he also increases the tension of the stranger-than-fiction events he recounts with his interruptions and tics. Translated with terrific informality by Sam Taylor, HHhH is a fleet but unexpectedly powerful account of one of the few tales of WWII not covered to death, despite it being one of the most crucial events of the whole war.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #15: James Joyce—Finnegans Wake

Regular readers might remember my original plans to offer regular updates on my trek through Joyce's final and most abstruse work, Finnegans Wake. But as soon as I set to work on that, the book dove so deeply into incomprehensibility that to even attempt to summarize what I'd read would consist of nothing more than Skeleton Key summaries. Unlike Ulysses, with its connected but distinct chapters offering unique perspectives and pleasures at every turn, the Wake varied as its sections are, flow together with such abandon that I got nowhere trying to parse individual elements of the book/

It was only when I stopped trying to get a handle on the book, to even get a basic footing of where I was, that I even began to get into the Wake. Around that time, however, the book started to make some kind of sense. Based around Viconian cycles, the Wake is, narratively speaking, easy to figure out. After all, Joyce repeats the story ad nauseam, of the protagonist's social rise and subsequent fall from grace over a lewd encounter in a park and his irrepressible guilt. The same characters appear to reenact the basics over and over, each time as new figures with new, gnarlier paths to the same outlet. And in HCE's all-pervasive sense of guilt is the guilt of Ireland past and present, an anthropomorphic realization of the suffocating cloud of Catholicism that hovers over Joyce's ex-pat recreation of his homeland. The only deliverance comes through the water form of HCE's wife, ALP, whose mysterious letter has the power to wash away her husband's sins (or her husband entirely). But ALP, like Joyce's best women characters—Molly Bloom, Gretta Conroy—exists outside her husband's hopeless encasement in Ireland's moral carbon monoxide. ALP's chapter, filled with river names and the constant burbling of water imagery, is perhaps the most poetic, liberated passage Joyce ever wrote.

50 Book Pledge #14: Simon Reynolds — Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

The post-punk era of music charted in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again constitutes my favorite period of popular (sic) music of the last century. Reynolds' broad overview gives a fair encapsulation of why that is: he persuasively argues that the punk movement quickly reduced itself to regressive rock riffs and a simplistic, unadventurous rebellion that actually reinforced the rock it was meant to destroy. Post-punk, on the other hand, delivered on the promise of their '76 and '77 forbears. Reynolds displays an admirably open appraisal of the various forms of music produced during this six-year period of explosive creativity, lending equal artistic credence to the extreme noise pollution of industrial and just plain out-there bands as well as androgynous, image-conscious synthpop bands. Reynolds finds certain links between all these offshoot genres, noting the intellectual, even Brechtian approach to pop that defined some hit-makers looking to corrupt the machine from within and without, or the debt owed to producers like Giorgio Moroder and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Compared to the purist tone of so much punk writing, Reynolds almost verges on the anti-rockist, and he puts forward the case that Donna Summer had as much impact on this fertile period as the Velvet Underground or Can.

The book falters in its lack of focus, suffering the typical overview's flaw of giving just enough information to intrigue the reader before moving the next group of scene. And if Reynolds critiques so much of punk's values and value judgments, he is not so unlike them in his routine estimation of a group's first work as their best. Not only does he cease exploring this kind of music at the 1984 mark, he rarely even makes vague reference to what some groups did after this cutoff. For example, he speaks of Depeche Mode's early promise without ever touching upon its true creative peak at the end of the decade. Nevertheless, Reynolds at least differs in his appraisal of the early peaks of punks vs. those of the next wave: where punk bands generally fell apart because they could only muster enough energy and spark for one statement, so many post-punk bands assembled out of such varied tastes and intellectual goals that they collapsed from too much artistry, not too little. I added more than a dozen groups to a list of bands to check out reading this book, and I've already discovered some great gems from it. Recommended

50 Book Pledge #13: Alan Greenberg—Every Night the Trees Disappear

A Werner Herzog film shoot is an invariably absurd, harrowing thing, and few matched the intensity and insanity of the production of Heart of Glass. At least, that's the impression I got from Every Night the Trees Disappear, a revised edition of the making-of book written by Alan Greenberg, one of Herzog's early admirers, friends, and witnesses. Greenberg packs his diary with stories of Herzog philosophizing madly, controlling his actors through hypnosis and fear, and treating a pile of dead flies with more reverence and respect than human life. It's a mad tale, but also one that reveals a great deal about how Herzog works, and how he thinks.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #12: Patrick deWitt — The Sisters Brothers

FINALLY getting back to reading after a busy end to my internship and then a week of just being out of it. I took a break from my Finnegans Wake reading and my tear through the Song of Ice and Fire series to check out this highly recommended dark-comic Western. I absolutely loved it. Clearly drawing on Cormac McCarthy, deWitt realizes he cannot capture McCarthy's almost Russian gift for human profundity in minute observation and instead strives to tell a more intimate story of two brother hitmen out on a task routinely interrupted by bleak oddities. It starts off hilarious, twisting that McCarthy style into deadpan humor with greater aplomb even than the Coen brothers' take on No Country for Old Men. Yet the closer it gets to its destination, the more The Sisters Brothers becomes an affecting, insightful view onto filial bonds, strained by differing, sometimes diametrically opposed, personalities and ambitions yet unbreakable and endlessly supportive. Even the sideplot about Eli's put-upon horse Tub is oddly touching, each new indignity suffered by the poor beast a fresh blow. I cared about that pathetic creature as much as I did the protagonists, which is an impressive feat in its own right given their reprehensible lives and the sad banality of Eli's inner narration. This book has been a huge hit lately among a lot of people I follow on Twitter, and I can see why they raved about it. One of my favorite contemporary reads.

Geoff Dyer — Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

I mentioned reading this a few weeks back and that a full review was on the way. It's finally up at Spectrum Culture. Zona was a great read, illuminating in its anecdotal production details but best for Dyer's beautiful, sometimes poignant thoughts on one of the greatest of all films. There are some hiccups and digressions that grate, but for the most part this is one of the best books on a single movie I've yet read. Highly recommended.

Check out my full review now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #6: Philip Pullman — The Golden Compass

Having seen and quickly forgotten the decent 2007 adaptation of this book, I never got around to its source material, which is a shame because I would have treasured this as a teenager. An accessible fantasy book warning against religion, The Golden Compass could have helped my rough transition into atheism by giving me a storytelling backup, not merely the boring den of facts. And I must say, it's a fantastically swift read, even taking into account I'm an adult and this book can be easily read by children. The narrative momentum never falters in this first installment, and I more or less plunged headlong into the next installment the second I finished.

Robert K. Massie — Catherine the Great

This could have been a great text. Instead, it feels more like a very good introduction to Catherine II for middle schoolers, maybe high-school freshmen or sophomores. It is a genuinely engaging read, however, wonderfully paced and informative with the exception of one too many esoteric asides. Massie has a clear enthusiasm for the material that generally overpowers the nagging realization that he offers no particularly revealing insights on the subject. Overall I gave it a positive score, though I admit it made me look for superior biographies of one of Russia's most fascinating rulers (and therefore most fascinating rulers of any nation).

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #5: Albert Camus — The Stranger

A short novel, but the way Camus writes, it'd breeze by at six times the length. His spare style nevertheless burrows deep into his cryptic protagonist, to the point that it contains ideas well beyond existentialism. A clear absurdist streak marks the meaningless progression of events that occur to Monsieur Meursault, who nihilistically recognizes their meaninglessness despite the occasional, wistful desire to connect with something. Matthew Ward's translation is, I believe, now the standard (for such a relatively recent translation, it is ubiquitous as the default English version), but it's easy to see why. He Americanizes much of the text while still leaving a few crucial words untranslated, especially "Maman," which he rightly ascribes a significance that "Mother" would not convey the same way. I had no excuse for not reading this, and it delighted me through the depression it gave me. In that sense, it's not unlike Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a (dis)similarly bleak novella that manages to capture a multifaceted worldview and nuanced emotional palette with scarcely more than a hundred pages.

50 Book Pledge #4: Robert K. Massie — Catherine the Great

I can't really talk about this at present, as I'm meant to review this intriguing but occasionally narrow-minded biography for Spectrum Culture. Suffice to say, Massie's enthusiasm for Russian history is clear even without prior knowledge of his other books on various Russian leaders, and I am always both amused and deeply troubled to see just how eerily history constantly repeats itself in this vast, tortured country. Massie routinely compares Catherine's rule to the other "great" tsar, Peter, but he could just as easily have linked elements of her reign and some reactions to it to the Bolshevik revolution, even Stalinism. I'll have more to say about the book later, but for now I'll just leave you with a timid endorsement. I'll make my reservations (and compliments) plain near the end of the month.

50 Book Pledge #3: Martin Amis — Money

Like a Bret Easton Ellis novel as written by John Kennedy Toole, Martin Amis' Money is a savage gutting of the Reagan era as seen through the eyes of a clever but myopic and narcissistic glutton. John Self may not be as fat as Ignatius J. Reilly, but his appetites are more varied and vulgar, as his primary love is money, the root of all evil that allows him to trace his way along several crass desires. As Self gets deeper and deeper into the movie production from hell, everything slowly tilts off its axis until the detestable man is almost rendered sympathetic by the orgy of self-absorption and ego-stroking that surrounds him. I've yet to read a better takedown of the movie industry and celebrity, and the moralistic comeuppance that collapses on the narrative in the final chapters is so uproarious and insane that Amis narrowly avoids preaching for the ghastly hilarity of it all. I'd previously known of Amis solely as Christopher Hitchens' best friend, but now I'm eager to delve into the next book of his I can get my hands on.

50 Book Pledge #2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — A Study in Scarlet

BBC's simply fantastic Sherlock series inspired me to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I was happy to stumble across some great new hardcovers from Barnes & Noble that collect all of Doyle's Holmes books into two volumes that cost only $8 apiece. I started, naturally, at the beginning, with Doyle's debut Sherlock novel, A Study in Scarlet. Man, it's amazing he ever built an iconic series out of this book, as it awkwardly ports over the mystery of Edgar Allen Poe (who is namechecked unflatteringly) without carrying over much of the suspense. It hardly even qualifies as a detective novel, with Holmes solving the case almost instantly and Doyle dragging the thing out by suddenly diverting into a strange flashback that uses inaccuracies about Mormons to paint an unintentionally hilarious "sinister" portrait of the religion. Doyle would go on to make one of the most well-known characters in literary history, but you'd never know it just by reading this.

50 Book Pledge #1: Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire

Nabokov's Pale Fire may be even better than his Lolita. A total put-on of a work—consisting of a poem by one "John Shade" and a foreword and commentary by Charles Kinbote—Pale Fire almost immediately reveals itself to be a farce, with the foreword so self serving on Kinbote's part that even the praise he lavishes upon his "dear" friend John is, on some level, all about him. The poem itself is neglected, a beautifully structured poem of unabashedly prosaic subject matter, speculating on life by way of the sights and sounds immediately at the poet's disposal. This style was anachronistic even when Nabokov published the book, but there's something charming about "Shade's" creation. That only makes Kinbote's resultant breakdown of the poem all the more hilarious. Vividly skewering the ability of critics to read anything in a work of art, especially if it conforms to some preconceived notion they have going into a piece, the notes flagrantly ignore the sensual (in the literal sense) quality of the poem to speculate about Shade's supposed allusions to the country of Zembla, which Kinbote may or may not have ruled before being deposed. There's not a single page of these notes that didn't make me laugh, even when it delved into darker realms of black comedy. Nabokov loved his pranks and jokes, and Pale Fire is his most immaculately crafted gag.

Jennifer Egan — A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel/short story collection/who-cares A Visit from the Goon Squad has racked up enough accolades for a defining work of our time. After reading it, I can only pray "our time" is not set in literary stone by such shoddy, ignorant documentation. The much-touted stylistic shifts are hardly whirlwinds of upheaval, and the characters are drawn so thinly as to be nothing more than vehicles for easy tragedy, tragedy that works neither on a human level nor the allegorical, societal plane she seeks to pinpoint. A few bright spots of wit and clarity can be found among the detritus, but I regret to say I  found the book to be such a disappointment of half-baked literary knowledge and easily exploited tropes that I was stunned to learn that it was not, in fact, some English major's creative writing exercise.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Books I Read in 2011

I fell shamefully behind on reading when I went to college, first overburdened by an engineering course load then spending so much time writing stories for journalism assignments or delving deeper and deeper into film to tend to my literary interests. This year I vowed to get back into the groove and challenged myself to read 40 books before New Year's. Just last week, I succeeded. For the most part, I read a lot of great books over the year, so I thought I'd share some brief thoughts for them after the jump.

Richard Ellmann — James Joyce

Richard Ellmann's James Joyce is, quite simply, the best artistic biography I've ever read. Like the work of David McCullough, Ellmann's book is not only meticulously researched (nearly 100 pages are devoted to endnotes) but so lyrically written as to be almost novelistic. At first I did not understand the need for a biography of Joyce, given how autobiographical his work is, but Ellmann beautifully ties even the most minor incidents and acquaintances of Joyce's life into his flowing corpus. In fact, James Joyce could serve as well as a set of notes for Dubliners, Exiles, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake as it does a biography.

Progressing in chronological order, Ellmann sidesteps this predictable, typically tedious structure by making clear how much of Joyce's growth as an artist was specifically related to his constant change. Where others might devote chapters to the subjects that influenced and inspired the artist, Ellmann makes it clear that, more than anything else, time was the great preoccupation of Joyce. Joyce never stopped dealing with the forces that shaped him, he just added countless new observations and studies until he built from microcosmic fragments of Dublin life to a dream language of the universal man. Amazingly, Ellmann captures every nuance of this constant evolution without ever losing sight of the man. Then again, for Joyce, life and literature were one and the same.

Harry Potter Books, Ranked

Compared to my marked indifference to the films, the Harry Potter books continue to charm me long after I move beyond YA fiction. The endless exposition does get to me at times, but there's a reason these books caught on: the relatable characters, the engaging plot and the element of surprise that remains in these works after numerous rereads and a general understanding of its wholesale ripoff of classical hero archetypes. I've cheered on Neville or been smitten by Hermione as much as I've been affected by any characters in fiction. So, to offset the light cynicism of my film post, allow me to take a more pleasant stroll down Memory Lane with Rowling's novels.