7.31.2015

Kathy Acker (Pt 2)

I'd put this book down for awhile and finally finished it the other week (part one here). Acker is...well, you probably already know about her reputation. Difficult is one word. Some call her problematic. The last piece in this book, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, is the testimony of The Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in Germany and their reasons for banning the book Tough Girls Don't Cry. In addition to the hypersexual content and coarse language throughout, they cite the book as being difficult to follow, adopting too many styles, and for plagiarism.

I can't argue that this book should be read my minors. I've thought about this in the past when I first read Naked Lunch. Or first heard the Velvet Underground. I wonder if I have kids what kind of media I would expose them to, or what of mine they would find on their own. I'm all for the possibility of expansion of ideas especially in children and teenagers. But how does one determine when one can begin to handle such dark and surreal or evocative and cerebral texts? Making works taboo only makes them more attractive.

The disjointedness of Acker makes me think I won't read anything of hers again, or at least any non-non-fiction work (essays, interviews, etc). I like her thoughts but can't get into the prose. I think I could have appreciated this experimental writing style actually if I were still in high school or college. She eschews conventional tactics entirely. Of course, this is also a work of her earliest material, and maybe I need to find the Acker that's best for me.

I've thought a lot lately too about conventional texts and sounds. Music becomes more monotonous to me over time. Musicians have decided that one note must be followed by another of only two or three notes, or can be played simultaneously with a handful of notes. It's boring. Granted, I've heard much more music than I have read literature. But will we get to the point where writing too becomes so predictable? That any given word can only be followed by a handful of words? Are we already there?

Anyway, here's a now defunct website that put Kathy Acker lines into the comic Cathy.

7.24.2015

Ron Currie Jr. - 'Everything Matters!'

I had high hopes for this book especially after how much I gushed about God is Dead. I don't know, even though I finished this book within 36 hours, I wasn't as blown away as I expected to be.

On the plus side, there was plenty of Literary Chicago, since one of the main characters plays for the Cubs.

"Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out. Uncle Rodney explained this to me. It's a band and a city and when I'm older he'll take me to Chicago to see Chicago play, he says."

"Chicago is not the ideal place to go to when you've recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside."

"...except this time you were not a toddler but a twenty-year-old man, lying on a bench near the Dearborn Street bridge, staring straight up to where the stars would have been were they not  obscured by the megawatt towers..."

7.22.2015

Pitchfork Music Festival 2015

The following is a bit of notes I took on Saturday afternoon. An existential/Wallace Shawn style exploration on identity and creation. 

Attention. That's what's on my mind right now, sitting in the grass in Union Park at the Pitchfork Music Festival. What am I here to devote my attention to? How do I decide how to use my attention? Is attention the most important thing at an environment like this? Or is it best to have divided attention?

Are we here for art or diversion? Or other? (commerce)

Bully from Nashville starts. I'm still sitting. There's a decent crowd for the early side of the day on the smaller stage. Various forms of attention are around me. People totally focused, me with divided attention, as my attention is primarily on my thoughts. But I'm also processing the music.

If what and how we consume is dictated by marketing, is what and how we create also a product of that same marketing? Does the "I" ever have a say in creation? Is creation just an expression of consumption?, ie, what am I doing here? Is there an "I" here? Or is my "I" just someone else's creations that I've consumed? And if I've never decided what I've consumed, then how can I say I've created anything? And what have I consumed to have made me think these thoughts?

So why am I here? What's the difference between habit and ritual? There's supposed to be something sacred about ritual, right? (I may just be thinking that because a church is looking down at me) But what if you hold nothing sacred? Can that be true though, literature, the Clash, the simple act of helping someone up off the ground.

7.13.2015

Reading list (1/2)'15

First half of 2015 is up. Been keeping busy this year. I'm a firm believer that you can't be a better writer without being a better reader. Here's what I read for the first half of the year. Bolded my favorites. Gonna try to devote the second half of the year to reading more 2015 stuff.

Uki Goni - The Real Odessa (2002)
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go (2005)
James Tadd Adcox - Does Not Love (2014)
Jami Attenberg - The Melting Season (2011)
John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van (2014)
Leslie Jamison - The Empathy Exams (2014)
Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man (2002)
Eugene Ionesco - Rhinoceros and Other Plays (1994 edition / originally written in 1959)
Louise Erdich - The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red (1998)
Ron Currie Jr - God is Dead (2007)
Albert Camus - The Rebel (1951)
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood (1936)
Wallace Shawn - the Fever (1990)
Italo Calvino - Marcovaldo (1963)
Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums (1958)
Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic (2015)
Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars (2015)
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Ron Currie, Jr. - Everything Matters! (2009)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Slaughterhouse Five (1969) (reread) (just as good as it was in high school)
Wallace Shawn - The Designated Mourner (1996) (reread)

Apparently The Empathy Exams is my favorite book I've read recently I haven't written about. I think I was so surprised by how captivating it was that I didn't realize how much I was in love with it until much later on. Not to mention it's one of the few non-fiction books I've read this year. Anyway. That is all. On to the next ones...