Winter weather reading: beats, hipsters, and vision quests

 

When the winter weather outside is frightful, cyber-shopping makes more sense than ever. With a few clicks  all of us can go back to dreaming of sugarplums, or whatever makes the winter holidays special for each of us. Here are some books reviewed by others that are worth a year-end browse by the fire.

 

 

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation: Ann and Samuel Charters (University Press of Mississippi): ... Holmes, a good friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and a founding member of the original Beat circle in New York City, also wrote several novels that were respectably reviewed. But he lacked the charisma and theatricality of the later Beat writers, and struggled for literary success even as his friends reached explosive levels of fame. It's only because of these legendary friends, and not because of his own fiction, that John Clellon Holmes merits an extensive literary biography by Ann and Samuel Charters today. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation is unusual among literary biographies because its hero never had a breakout success. Instead, he filled out his career with dead end manuscripts, odd magazine assignments and college teaching jobs. In this sense, Brother-Souls is actually a more accurate glimpse of how most writers live than any typical biography of a famous writer. (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

 

 

 

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry, Introduction by Michael Pollan (Counterpoint Press, above) If you aren't already familiar with Wendell Berry's essays and his fiction, Bringing It to the Table is an excellent introduction, and if you're already an admirer, wanting to spread the word to people on your holiday gift list, this book is a fine addition to Berry's recent publications. Born in 1934, Berry has been publishing poetry, fiction in long and short forms, and essays since the 1960s; he has been working a farm in Kentucky for about as many years. In an essay from 2006 he recalls, "In 1964 my wife Tanya and I bought a rough and neglected little farm on which we intended to grow as much of our own food as we could." Although he came from a farming background, he asked for advice from an organic gardener who was his editor at the time, and seeking out the source of that man's principles, he discovered The Soil and Health, by the British agricultural scientist Sir Alfred Howard. Berry says of Howard, "I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't expect to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subject of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subject of life in this world." (Jim Quitsland, Sound Food)

What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: Mark Greif, et al (n+1 Books) All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. But to those of you who are reading What Was the Hipster in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primordial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking. (Anonymous, Atomic Books)

Fishers of Men – The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, Adam Elenbaas (Tarcher Press): The cross-generational stories surrounding Elenbaas and his father, and his father and grandfather, sanctify the Freudian influence on drug writing. From the opening chapter when his father lays bleeding, holding a hunting knife, till the final modernist resolution, redefinition of all the relationships occur. It’s very reminiscent of the poem "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.” The Freudian model, which places so much emphasis on a child’s relationship with its parents as a foundation for personality structure, is being played out once more as a literary structure: “One of the most intense psychological settings in the world – the visionary space of ayahuasca” (201). The combination of the psychedelic experience and psychodynamic models is firm territory, not only in Fishers of Men, but in modern drug writing generally. (Rob, editor, The Psychedelic Press UK)

25 best non-fiction books: an Open Culture readers' poll

Open Culture asked its readers to name the best non-fiction books (of all time!) and, as this kind of open-call goes, the results were pretty broad and with a few surprises here and there. The top 25 were selected primarily through a process of repeat nominees, and it would be interesting to see what else was nominated but didn't make the cut -- for example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

 

Still the list leaves a wide range of reading -- much of it 20th century history, some American school-room classics, and the thoughts of a Roman emperor. Commenters tossed a few zingers: only two women writers made the top 25, and suggested Beryl Markham's excellent West With the Night and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

 

And at least the number one nomination reveals all that heavy reading doesn't ruin a sense of humor.

 

It is encouraging to see that the list isn't top-heavy with university-taught philosophy: whoever the readers of Open Culture might be, they are obviously reading for themselves and not for a college curriculum. And not a single book about the death of the printed word -- an encouraging sign that readers are still cracking open books, although Open Culture contributor Sheerly Avni does admit that the selection process "leaned toward books that are available for free online."

 

The List, in descending order:

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

Wendell Berry - The Way of Ignorance

Joseph Mitchell - Up in the Old Hotel

Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe

Norman Lewis - Voices of the Old Sea

Joan Didion - The White Album

Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Tony Judt - Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Henry David Thoreau - Walden

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods

George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem

Booker T. Washington - Up From Slavery

Jorge Luis Borges - Other Inquisitions (1937-1952)

Marcus Rediker - Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell, trans. Tao Te Ching

Victor Klemperer - I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (1933-1941)

Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families

Winston Churchill - A History of the English Speaking Peoples

and as any journalist might add to the top 25:

Lastly, and only in part because we’ve been warned that we would be roundly scolded for the omission: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White.

Censorship: "a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America"

 

In America, issues of politics and censorship play an increasingly large role in determining what facts readers learn about events. From the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times -- leaked by Daniel Ellsberg -- to the jailing of of Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks case, government agencies claim issues of national security to keep sensitive and allegedly damaging information from being released while Individual rights remain at risk.

Censorship can affect mass-market publication, too, as in the case of Operation Dark Heart (see below). At one point the Defense Department threatened to buy up all copies of the book in order to prevent it from reaching bookstores; St. Martin's Press agreed to a partial compromise -- but one that involves redacting (blacking out) classified text.

At the Banned Books site there is a long list of censored and banned titles, many of which were challenged by American government agencies. Writers using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain material have been questioned and refused access. Publishers have long fought such pre-publication censorship. In one case (Fair Game, the Valerie Plame book) the outed C.I.A. operative found a way around government censorship: she published the redacted text and amended an afterward by a second writer, who reveals the public record of all the redacted material.

 

"We believe attempts to censor ideas to which we have access--whether in books, magazines, plays, works of art, television, movies or song--are not simply isolated instances of harassment by diverse special-interest groups. Rather they are part of a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America. ... Censorship cannot eliminate evil. It can only kill freedom. We believe Americans have the right to buy, stores have the right to sell, authors have the right to write and publishers have the right to publish Constitutionally-protected material. Period."

(Excerpt from a letter to 28 newspapers, signed by Ed Morrow, president, American Booksellers Assn. and Harry Hoffman, president, Walden Book Co., Inc., 1990).

Here's a brief sample of titles which have been under investigation by government agencies, taken from the Banned Books site:

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (2007) Written by Valerie Plame Wilson, who claims her cover was intentionally disclosed by the Bush administration. Portions of Fair Game are blacked-out and indicate, say the publishers, places where the CIA has demanded redactions. The extensive afterword by reporter Laura Rozen, drawn from interviews and the public record, is included to provide context to Plame Wilson's story.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971) by Mike Royko. A Ridgefield, CT school board in 1972 banned this book from the high school reading list, claiming it "downgrades police departments."

The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974) by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. The CIA obtained a court injunction against this book's publication stating the author, a former CIA employee, violated his contract which states that he cannot write about the CIA without the agency's approval. First amendment activists opposed this ruling, "raising the question of whether a citizen can sign away his First Amendment rights." After prolonged litigation, the CIA succeeded in having 168 passages deleted.

Deadly Deceits (My 25 Years in the CIA) (1983) by Ralph McGheehee. The CIA delayed the publication of this book for three years, objecting to 397 passages, even though much of what the author wrote about was already public knowledge.

Freedom and Order (1966) by Henry Steele Commager. The U.S. Information Agency had this book banned from its overseas libraries because of its condemnation of American policies in Vietnam.

Operation Dark Heart (2010): On Friday, August 13, 2010, just as St. Martin’s Press was readying its initial shipment of Operation Dark Heart, the Department of Defense expressed concern that its publication could cause damage to U.S. national security. The publication of the initial edition was canceled. However, after consulting with the author, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin's Press agreed to incorporate some of the government’s changes, which includes redacting classified text, into a revised edition.

Pentagon Papers (1971) Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, this 3,000-page history of U.S. involvement in Indochina was kept a secret even from the Johnson administration and banned from publication by court order. The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled and lied to the public regarding their intentions. The New York Times was printing portions of it when the order to stop publication came down. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision and Bantam proceeded to publish a paperback edition. Daniel Ellsberg, who originally leaked the document to the Times in 1971, said at the end of 2010 that “every attack now made on WikiLeaks and JulianAssange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

Read me! TED speakers offer their summer reading lists

Ah, summer. The season of good intentions, precious free time washed away by busy vacations and cookouts, must-see blockbusters at the googolplex, trips to emergency rooms from pratfalls and bug bites and the certain, overwhelming realization that, really, it's too-darn-hot to think by July 4th. 

So summer is also the time when readers hope against hope to get to "a few books" this season. 

The good folks at TED have made the glorious agony of summer reading even more acute by asking their lecturers to suggest reading lists. From Jane Eyre to The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, there are plenty of ideas here to make a porch-side stack to go on top of the books one has already promised repeatedly to read.

It's enough to make a reader lie down and take a long afternoon nap just to consider all of the books that will likely never be opened. Here, to take one example, is the list by TEDster Karen Wickre, the editorial director of Twitter, that illustrates the range of what I could be reading in the next few months ...  if I wasn't out buying ice cream, and more sunblock for those lazy afternoon dozes in the hammock. Still, a summer reading list is always a wonderful thing to contemplate: I see I've read at least some of these suggestions in summers past. There is always hope.

Karen Wickre is an an avid reader and supporter of TED. Her curation philosophy: “These six titles reflect my passions — graphic non-fiction, home and Buddhism, loosely defined. I hope you discover something that speaks to you in any one of them.”

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit. “Such a terrific story: how Northern California became the nexus and nurturer of early technologies, outsized dreams and failures. Little has changed in 150 years.”

Are You My Mother? By Alison Bechdel. “The saga of Alison’s gnarly relationship with her complicated, mixed-signal-emitting mother. It’s rich in self-awareness, humor, and a hard-won understanding of how life works.”

Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chodron. “I have my share of Buddhism for Westerners titles; the ones I return to are by Pema Chodron. The chapters are short readings that guide us through the various difficulties of being human in a modern world.”

Home: What It Means and Why It Matters by Mary Gordon. “A lovely exploration of what makes a space into home, and how acutely we feel longing for that ideal. As a nester of the first order, I love understanding the deeper impulses.”

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies. “A whimsical (and dark) graphical exploration of our old ideas of what the future could mean, and our grownup understanding of its limitations.”

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. “This cabinet of wonders offers a secret bookstore, Google, magical characters and digital natives interacting and exploring the pull of old and new. Sloan is deft and affectionate.”

Poetry for summertime reading on the porch

In these days with endless opportunity of online publishing it's difficult to think of poetry-in-print as little more than a bookshelf in the far corner of the megastore, a disarray of thin-spined volumes of verse waiting for discovery. Self-publishing is only one aspect of overcoming the challenge of getting poetry to paper; here are five varied titles that are worth tracking down, works by the honored poet as well as the hungry one. The reviews are from selected sites, as noted.

(Above) The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, Robert Hass (HarperCollins) This lustrous retrospective collection, drawn from five previous books, beginning with Field Guide (1973), opens with a generous selection of new poems redolent of Whitman and the blues. Narrative poems are droll and astringent in their musings over love’s paradoxes and history’s shifting claims, children’s pleasures, poverty, and danger. A National Book Award winner and former poet laureate prized for his insights into human nature and our place in the web of life, Californian Hass distills experiences down to their essence as he limns landscapes, portrays friends and loved ones, and imagines the struggles of strangers. The ordinary is cracked open to reveal metaphysical riddles in poems that feel so natural, their formal complexities nearly elude our detection. Legacies and ruptures, sex and food, the journaling impulse to stop time, the “strangeness of living,” all become catalysts for the tonic perceptions shared by this compassionate master poet who declares, “Joy seized me.” (Donna Seaman)

Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, Lisa Robertson (Coach House) Robertson makes it clear throughoutMagenta Soul Whip that this collection of poems from different projects and times in the past decade or so is an investigation, a search: the writer as read on these pages is struggling along with the reader. We are both perhaps a bit insecure, definitely defiantly smart, and not entirely sure that epic precedents of history-as-it-has-been-remembered (and told) really can reveal the 'nature' of things. Robertson is also concerned with a more literal literary evocation of 'nature' — animals, elements, roots, honey, and 'the body' all circle into and out of these works despite the different voices and forms of the different sections. (Martinesque, Ampersand)

Other Flowers, James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus) From early poems in which Schuyler sensitively describes his youth in the Midwest and East Aurora, N.Y., to highly charged observations of the streetscapes, seasons, and social life of New York City, both longtime readers of Schuyler and those new to his work will find an abundance of surprising, moving material. Most of the poems are less than a page long, but nearly all are packed with visual and emotional punch, exploding with color and sensation: Downriver, by the delicately webbed gasometers/ and the antennae, frailly tensile,/ lumber kindles into golden flames/ curling like shavings from a plane. The editors have included useful notes, which give dates of composition where possible, and brief descriptions of the many poets, painters, and neighborhoods that Schuyler wrote his poems to and about. (Amazon)

Wait, C.K. Williams (Farrar, Straus) Williams’ poems enter the brain with such force and velocity, you don’t so much read as ride them. But for all their propulsion, every element stays in sharp focus: mindscapes of fractal intricacy. Landscapes where birds peck for food, heifers rush a fence, and a girl throws down her bicycle. Williams’ poems deliver us to strange crossroads, where a thrush feeds a chick with a misshapen head and a young woman pushes an infant with Down syndrome in a stroller. Where a family comes upon a POW camp for Germans in an American city park. Williams evokes beauty and “filth / and fetor and rot.” He rails against and marvels over time. He poses impossible metaphysical questions, undermines the cherished notion of moral evolution, looks squarely at death, and mocks poetry’s pretensions. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Williams has long been a poet of conscience and outrage, and how galvanizing are these magnificent protests against war and the entire spectrum of injustices. (Donna Seaman, Booklist)

Lighthead, Terrance Hayes (Penguin) With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched. (Amazon)

25 suggestions for Memorial Day weekend reading to combat brain-freeze

Admit it: the long Memorial Day weekend is approaching and you just can't decide if you're ready for another beach book, or picture-perfect book about barbeque, or breathless celebrity tell-all brain-freeze. Besides, you have to save something nap-inducing for the long, lazy days of summer, still a month away. What to read now?

Tyler Coates, online at Flavorwire, offers a smart list of 25 essential non-fiction books -- some serious, some humorous, ranging from gimlet-eyed memoir to astute history -- with lesbian / bi / gay / transgender authors and subjects. Several recommended titles qualify as classics (Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On), and there are more recent books of lives led in- or out-of-the-closet. 

As with any online list, readers have responded with their own additions. The genderbending A Low Life in High Heels by Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn would be a good, entertaining extra. Coates makes the point that the broad selection, with topics from gender politics to AIDS to literary outlaws, isn't meant to be complete. At the very least, The Life of Roman Novarro (André Soares) qualifies as both a Hollywood bio and a beach read that could make it to the waterside before before Labor Day. An excerpt from the list and Coates' comments:

The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser. Kaiser’s historical look at how gay men informed the culture of America’s urban areas — particularly New York City — spans 56 years from the periods of silent acceptance, the tumultuous pre-Stonewall years, the empowering ’70s, and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. This collection of speeches and essays from the influential and outspoken Audre Lorde touches on racism, sexism, and homophobia without losing a sense of hope for positive results in the face of class struggles. 

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring. A contemporary of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Samuel Steward lived an extraordinary secret sexual life which he chronicled in great detail in a collection of journals.  

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel’s gorgeous and heartbreaking graphic memoir follows the artist as she grapples with both her own sexuality and the revelation that her cold, distant father led a secret life as a gay man. 

Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. The internationally renowned poet shares his life story, from his adolescence spent fighting for the Castro regime to his imprisonment for his sexuality to his flight from Cuba to his deathbed in New York City. 

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. Legendary transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein details her transition from a heterosexual man to a lesbian woman in this modern classic about challenging gender and cultural norms. 

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio. Bayard Rush was responsible for teaching the principles of non-violent protest to Martin Luther King, Jr., yet his status as an openly gay man in the midst of the civil rights movement kept him from being recognized for the efforts and activism he accomplished. 

Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by André Soares. This biography tells the story of the first Latin American movie star, whose death was one of the most shocking scandals of the early days of Hollywood. 

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncy. Chauncy’s history of gay life in New York decades before the impact of the Stonewall riots is a surprising account that defies the notion that homosexuality was hidden out of view until the 1960s.