August 10 - 13, 2008

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs*

*A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman

2003, hardcover

15 cards

Lately I've been mentioning to people that I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's books. Everyone seems to have read this book, if not his others. I was wondering why I missed out on this slice of pop culture. I think I know now. By the time it came out in paperback, every weekend I was driving to Detroit and sleeping on the couches of friends and going to shows; at the time I was the only person living in East Lansing in their mid-twenties who was not married or not enamoured with sports bars. It would be amazing if I ever lived in the same city as my friends. While I bought a lot of books I didn't read too many of them. I think it's good I didn't read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs because I might not have read the other two Klosterman books I read before this. I might have, but I might not have. He's great at discussing the minute details that form the core existence of people my age (most of us watched Saved by the Bell, have some conscious of Sims, listened to bands like R.E.M. and Billy Joel and the Dixie Chicks, saw Reality Bites, etc.) but as he's written more, he's gotten better at it. The track on cereal is first rate and full of acute observations (that's right- all those creatures wanted to steal cereal- what is up with that?) The front pages includes a CD and the stories song titles and play times. Klosterman draws a distinction between a mix tape and a mix cd, placing the mix tape in a higher category. This book is an enjoyable mix cd, the other two are mix tapes.

Selections:

-(life)- "...nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even it we don't realize it..."

-"...I am alone. And that everyone is alone. I guess I am not a morning person."

-"an evening book"

-"The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer" (low culture vs. Kant or Wittgenstein)

1- "No woman will ever satisfy me....But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either."

3- (movies) "We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love."

-assessment of Coldplay

4- "...perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy."

-"They think everything will work out perfectly in the end..."

-"The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy."

6- footnote- Jordan Catalano from MSCL not being able to read

9- (When Harry Met Sally) "it gave a lot of desperate people hope."

-"Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives."

13- (SIMS) "There is no way to win, except to keep yourself from becoming depressed."

15- "Seinfeld was about nothing, but its underlying message was that nothingness still has a weight and a mass and a conflict."

16- quotes Talking Heads lyrics

-"video technology cages imagination"

19- "I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What the Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive."

36- definition of postmodern

41- (Big Brother not having music) "...without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

44- (Billy Joel, important songs, loneliness) "And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's "lonely lonely," like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder."

-"Black Sabbath is the most underrated band in rock history."

45- "Cheap Trick was good at being cool for everybody."

65- Black Sabbath

70- humorousity

70- Rivers Cuomo- "the Cubism didactic-hobo-core three-piece"

102- "This is why men need to become obsessed with things: It's an extroverted way to pursue solipsism. We are able to study something that defines who we are; therefore, we are able to study ourselves. Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music."

104- (cars- the IROC and Chevy Cavalier make their first appearance- because of my car it seems I fall into the Celtics fan category but it does have 2 doors, not 4)

119- Sylvester Graham!!!! [former resident of the building that houses Sylvester's in Northampton]

120- "Saturday morning commercials for all the best cereals are teaching kids how to figure out what's cool."

121- "They're the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters: cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary."

-"premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it."

122- corduroy

124- "The desire to be cool is- ultimately- the desire to be rescued. It's the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society."

125- 3 questions [#1- No, #2 No, #3A]

127- mix tapes vs. mix cds

128- Saved by the Bell- "people born between 1970 and 1977 [you're wrong here- 1978 factors in too]

130- "I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program."

-"universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation..." [yes!]

131- diner

133- "Important things are inevitably cliche."

138- Angela, My So Called Life- "But Angela was so much an individual that she wasn't like anyone but herself; she didn't reflect any archetype. She was real enough to be interesting, but too real to be important." [but this is why she was so great]

140- "Life is chock full of lies, but the biggest lie is math."

-50-50

147- Reality Bites- Gen Xers- cynical optimists [I owned this soundtrack on tape]

-"This is why Ryder has to pick Hawke."

-"She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence."

156- (films) "What is Reality?"

161- forgetting stuff- "The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality."

167- "...The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.'"

167- but not "old country"

173- "Tastee Freezes are iconic structures in the rural Midwest, because they say something about your hometown; they irrefutably prove your community does not have enough of a population to sustain a Dairy Queen." [Williamston did have a Dairy Queen when I lived there]

175- "lyrics do matter"

176-177- Bob Dylan and Liz Phair cds

178- Johnny Cash- coffee

183- Esprit t-shirts

185- Gacy and mail

194- (list of people who died in the Oklahoma City bombing] "...that virtually everyone's life is only remembered for one thing."

-"I think this is what motivates people to have children...."

211- acquaintance" "'There's one thing worse than talking to a person who knows about nothing,'" he said, 'an that's talking to someone who knows about nothing except music.'"

219- "dying is always original"

229- "As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven't done anything terrible yet."

230- Kierkegaardian leap

July 28 - 30, 2008

The Importance of Music to Girls

Lavinia Greenlaw

2007, hardcover

10 cards

The music issue of The Believer came the other day and in it was an essay by Lavinia Greenlaw. In the essay she deals with issues of relationships, music and being, merging them all into a beautiful telling of life lived. I rushed to the library to find her book which sounded equally wonderful in title, The Importance of Music to Girls (!), and started reading fast and furiously.

It's a good book, it is, but somehow the magic in this essay doesn't carry through the whole book, though some moments are priceless and perfectly captured. It's always odd to me that people who love music, those who listen rather than make it, don't write as universally about its appeal as it seems one could. I haven't figured out the mystery myself by any means. Perhaps by trying to put into words those moments when you listen to music by yourself lets too many other people into the room. I believe someone can do it, and I thought it might be this book, but not so much.

Some excerpts:

14- "For the first time I understood that belonging was a way of escaping myself and of finding a place in the world..."

15- "I could keep up, but I did not belong because I had not learned to contain myself within the figure I was making."

26- records, starting with what's at hand- your parent's collection- Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water

-"I read the titles and listened to the lyrics as if deciphering hieroglyphics."

28- "On this album, Dylan is feeling out the big words in particular and letting them go only when the edges have been worn down."

38- corduroy

46- (Donny Osmond) "...decided he would be my favorite pop star. Somehow I knew I needed one and as I'd never heard of him, I assumed no one else had either. I was looking for my first musical discovery and wanted it to be as private and singular as my feelings about the boy at school."

48- "I began to understand pop as a construction."

-"Marooned among them were bands I was beginning to classify. Like a child filling a stamp album or collecting eggs, I needed to create order and name names."

49- categories

52- "The waiting of childhood, the waiting to be told what was happening, was replace by waiting for something to happen- the arrival of a bus, the appearance of a friend."

84- "I was becoming a girl as instructed by girls but I knew I wasn't a real girl, at least not of this kind."

100- Eddie and the Hot Rods

101- The Damned

110- "...I realized that I was in a room with boys and music but nothing was meant to happen."

111- "As a rule of thumb, rock was for boys and disco was for girls, but soul was a place where we might meet."

112- "The interesting boys did not sing along, they discussed..."

114- "(Why did girls never play air guitar? Did we sing along because singing was what girls did or was it that girls only sand because they didn't play air guitar?)"
118- Punk- collaging images from NME

122- "God Save the Queen"- #1, blank spot on the charts

-"Jamie Reid's cover was more disturbing than the song itself."

127- Quote from Johann Wolfgag von Goethe, A Theory of Colors: "...color...exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union by augmentation and neutralization, by communication and dissolution."

128- "The colors of punk, like its rumor, set off a vibration and cracks began to appear- orange socks, blue hair, lime-green nails, pink trousers."

-"In punk, color combinations were dishwater and vomit. It was a form of aesthetic resistance, a spectrum chosen to remind the world of all that was unnatural or decayed: pink like rubber rather than roses, green like snot rather than leaves."

132- "...while the boys were serious about music, they didn't expect me to be so too."

135- "The strongest impulse I had was toward freedom."

170- Barthes quote (though not an amazing one)

-"The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone."

-"An LP was something of substance and vision."

172- "I bought two Velvet Underground LPs as soon as I found them..."

-"I declared allegiance, took a position and always had a view."

173- Joseph Beuys

-Pompidou Centre- "but I had never before come across a building (or song, or person...?) that did not hide how it was put together."

181- NME- "Serious music criticism was then very serious indeed. Records were assessed not only musically but also according to their cultural context and philosophical connotations."

-"I liked the way these critics wrote and feel under the rhetorical spell of their semicolons, qualifications and parentheses."

183- "These journalists used a cultural vocabulary that we deployed with the same thoughtlessness as teenage slang: postmodern (good), semiotic (?), eclectic (usually good), esoteric (v. good), moderne (trying too hard), postindustrial (interesting), decadent (usually bad)."

-"Irony protected you from accusations of sincerity- so much for being serious."

190- "Daniel and I discussed the world, but only in theory- Barthes and Foucault."

194- "Was it, after all, that men wanted to tell women things and not be told?"

200- t-shirt in a window- "Fuck Art, Let's Dance. I copied it onto the back of a postcard and sent it to Daniel. It was the first love letter I'd ever written."

July 15 - 27, 2008

Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link

2005, Paperback

7 cards

Kelly Link, the book's back cover says, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where I used to live. It would have been wonderful to meet her and talk about wonderful things like Faery Handbags. But then again maybe it's better to read about Faery Handbags, because as she writes, "Meeting writers is usually disappointing at best."

Faery Handbags is the title of the first short story in this captivating book and while it stands out as the shiniest gem in the bunch, the others are enjoyable too in their descriptions and tales told about zombies and the people who wear cat skins. I am always drawn to writers who notice the minor things that make up life, and sometimes the things that make it seem worth living. Link notices Cadbury Creme eggs, Moon Pies and (perhaps invents) squeezeble pork (which, while not something I would enjoy others might), with the best of them (I remember first noticing such slight mentions of everyday things that fill our lives in Douglas Coupland's books). Link arrives at truisms in her stories with moments in thrift stores and with friends and families, truisms that we all need to be reminded of sometimes, and truisms we hope are indeed true.

Some excerpts:

1- "I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. ... Everything is arranged by color, somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful."

2- "But the point is, if you're looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard."

4- Scrabble

-zippery

5- faery handbag

7- "purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people..."

8- "Even nightmares have to sleep now and then."

9- "He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough to figure out how to fit in."

11- "It's better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up."

12- "I also know how to say I love you, but I'm not going to ever say it to anyone again, except Jake, when I find him.

14- Cadbury Creme egg

20- "Remember when you don't know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble."

37- squeezable pork, Moon Pies

39- "The customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole."

52- "'Nobody ever really knows what they want,' Charley said. 'Why should that change after you die?'"

65- "Summer is the time of ghosts. In winter, ghosts are easy to spot."

-"There is no word for war or travel."

77- donuts

119- "her mother has painted a little door. It isn't a real door, except when Tilly goes over to look at it, it is real."

129- "The witch vomits up...love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read)..."

137- "And when you have children you need houses to put them in."

161- "'Do you like museums?' Will says. She looks like a girl who goes to museums."

166- postcard

168- lemurs

170- "Modern art is a wast of time. When the zombies show up you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies."

170-171- things Soap has been thinking about

171- Busby Berkeley

176- "Everyone has a zombie contingency plan."

178- olives

179- "He doesn't belong anywhere."

181- shopleaving

206- orange-juice colored corduroy couch

207- "What kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch."

-"She's an enigma wrapped in a mysterious t-shirt."

208- "When the woman who invented Hello Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, 'Because she has no mouth.'"

-pirate-magicians

212- Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich

218- "Can I ask you a question?"

220- Meeting writers...

235- "It would be easier if I had a brother ...Or a sister. I'm tired of being good all the time. If I had a sibling, then we could take turns being good...but it sucks having to figure out everything all by myself."

236- (calls to the phone booth) J. "complains about all the things there are to complain about, and the silent person on the other end listens and listens."

243- (Talis) "Somebody has to be the person who doesn't [talk]. The person who listens."

244- "Except secrets can't have secrets, they just are."

249- maps

-corn mosaic

250- "Bob Dylan is singing about monkeys."

251- "He writes in his blog about what he's reading."

256- "...I didn't get any postcards."

262- "Imaginary houses are sexy. Real houses are work."

274- records

278- "Tell me a story so that I'll remember you."

287- kazoo

292- giraffes

297- "I love you, but it's not about love, Ed, it's about timing."

May 31 - June 6, 2008

Out of Sheer Rage Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer

1997, hardcover

25 cards

The first book I read by Geoff Dyer was Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. While the title sold me immediately I loved his discussion and reflection upon the train station in Detroit as a ruin. Next I read The Ongoing Moment about photography (which I should probably re-read) where Dyer makes interesting connections in photography. Photography is actually part of Out of Sheer Rage and perhaps it shows how Dyer wrote this later book about photography as much as he shares the process of writing (and not writing) this unique and brilliant book about (and not about) D. H. Lawrence. Out of Sheer Rage came to my attention through the blog, with hidden noise through two posts, this one and this one. It was this quote from Dyer's discussion of islands via Lawrence compelled me to track down this book: "Me neither. All you can think of when you are on a small island is the impossibility of leaving when you want to, either because the island you are on is too big and you want to go to a smaller one or because the island is too small and you want to go to a bigger one.”

A few selected notes (there are many, many more treasures within these covers):

-"It must all be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel." Roland Barthes

1- "Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself."

2- "the writer who had made me want to become a writer. ... I wanted to read him with a purpose."

-"All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for."

4- "...books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment."

5- "I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose but it was impossible to choose- because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose."

12- D. H. Lawrence, "Where does one want to live?"

14- "I love the idea of speaking foreign languages. I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort."

16- The Complete Poems

18-19- that fabulous island quote

19- Rilke's letters

23- "Even writing a postcard required more concentration than I could muster."

28- "...which, on reflection, is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head."

31- Campidoglio- "It's a perfect square. And do you know why it's a perfect square?" "No. Why?" "Because it's not."

33- Nietzsche

34- "I was more interested in photographs of Lawrence than in the books he wrote."

-Michelet and Barthes

35- album and captions idea

-"I did not know what Lawrence looked like."

-Lawrence: "I hate photographs and things of myself, which are never me, and I wonder all the time who it can be."

38- Lawrence: "What do I care for first or last editions? To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding."

40- getting a camera

-"I am a camera"

41- "An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs."

45- "To travel is to eat."

-"The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun."

47- the sea

52- handshake origins

53- "Anything not overlooking something is to be looked down on."

55- people telling you will like something

57- "Opera begins in the market...stall holders have to convey the colour and taste of fruit in their voices."

-"His job was not to sell oregano but to fill the air with the sound of the scent."

59- "A common point of literary pilgrimage is that you often don't know which house you're meant to be visiting. In a sense it doesn't make any difference because it's very difficult to return home unless you have absolute proof that you've been to the right place. Hence the need, I conclude, for a plaque on the wall: to free us from doubt."

72- "Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes."

76- "Museum installations always have a touch of death about them. Houses have to live; they cannot be embalmed."

77- Lawrence hating the town, the town honoring him

81- community and neighborhood

89- Rilke on Rodin

90- Rilke: "For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

94- Goya

-early photograph portraits "people focused their lives 'in the moment rather than hurrying past it.'"

97- photographs and captions

100- corduroy

102- "The best readings of art are art," said George Steiner

104- trace of the self- re-reading a book

107- "...because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end."

109, 111- poems, letters

111- getting nearer to the person

122- "the novelists I like best are...not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscincki, Thomas Bernhard..."

126- "Life for people with children is crammed with obligations and duties to be fulfilled. Nothing is done for pleasure."

-"Most people don't want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted."

129-130- hatred of England

133- "The trajectory of Lawrence's life was not to leave his origins behind but to go beyond them."

134-135-Nietzsche- Human All Too Human- "...in a book written for 'free spirits' who do not yet exist, whose path he is hoping to ease into the world, it is as if he is describing Lawrence's feelings; conversely, Lawrence, at this moment, is, as it were, reading Nietzsche.

-"But when do you return?"

136- Neruda- "He who returns has never left."

-Lawrence- "I feel I shall wander for the rest of my days. But I don't care."

137- Lawrence- last letter: "This place no good!"

-films and books and life

138- "there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free."

-"freedom requires tenaciousness...Freedom is always precarious."

-Lawrence- "Freedom is a gift inside one's soul. You can't have it if it isn't in you."

139- "Catherine Carswell applauded Lawrence for the way 'he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did.'"

140- Lawrence- "It is my destiny to wander."

-"A destiny is not something that awaits us, it is something we have to achieve in the midst of innumerable circumstantial impediments and detours."

-The Question of Geography by John Berger and Nella Bielski- "Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility which is like an aim, if you wish, almost like a law. The job of our lives is to become- day by day, year by year, more conscious of that aim so that it can at last be realised."

141- Rilke- "Basically it's none of our business how somebody manages to grow if only he does grow, if only we're on the trail of our own growth."

142- detour as a straight line

151- writers and painting

-Lawrence's paintings

152- "He knew how to do nothing. He could just sit and be perfectly content."

153- "That's what I'm doing, shaking my fist at the world."

154- doughnuts

156- Lawrence's temper

157- Lawrence: "Damn the world anyhow. And I hate 'understanding' people and I hate more still to be understood. ..."

161- typewriter ribbon

168- "there is no love or life without despair of life"

170- regret, breakdowns

204- "Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it."

205- "To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf."

207- "Lawrence said that one sheds one's sickness in books..."

208- driving vs. flying

211- revisiting a place

222- "Clouds were stampeding across the sky."

225- Lawrence- travel- "What is it, makes one want to go anyway? Why can't one sit still? Why does one create such discomfort from oneself!"

226- Had we not seen and done all these things we would not be the people are are."

-"My greatest urge in life is to do nothing."

230- "Should anyone flatter us by asking what we are looking for, what we are searching for, then we think immediately, almost instinctively in vase terms- God, fulfillment, love- but our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches..."

231- "Add them together and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime."

231-232-"One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable records of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence."

May 26 - 31, 2008

Famous for Fifteen Minutes
My Years with Andy Warhol
By Ultra Violet
1998, hardcover
9 cards

I picked up this book about Warhol, written by one of his Superstars Ultra Violet. Partly about Warhol and partly about Ultra Violet's own life an experiences, a quote at the beginning points out that all conversations are reconstructed, warning one to not take some of the quotations at their word. While interesting in parts, Ultra Violet was out for publicity, in fast pursuit of the media, and the name dropping gets a bit overwhelming at times. She knew (and dated) lots of people including Dali and Ed Ruscha and while she has some great insights, at other times it seems like she's trying to hard to make sweeping statements about the time.

1- "In death, as in life, Warhol deals in contradictions."
3- "I met the King of Pop years ago. His name was Marcel Duchamp. To me, Andy was the Queen of Pop."
5- (Warhol) "He changed the way we look at the world, arguably the way we look at ourselves."
6- "The primary creation of Warhol was Andy Warhol himself."
7- "Magic was a word Andy gargled with for hours."
8- gimlet eye
-"There is no taking of Polaroids in heaven: the ineffable light precludes it."
11- "Here in the Factory the mirrors have come out of their frames and merged into a total environment of silvery reflections and refractions."
12- "...a wonderland where you step in and out of yourself, where memory and fantasy race into each other at full tilt."
-"Maybe what you're creating is artifact not art."
13- "Mirrors- they have the most memories. I am quoting John Graham."
18- Billy Name- "trained in the spirit of Black Mountain. 'All of us carried Rimbaud under our arms.'"
28- doughnuts
31-33- screening of Blow Job
42- worked in a five and dime store
89- luncheonette
90- "In the Factory, Andy always works with loud rock music on. In rock, repetition is the leitmotif. ... the drum, a replica of the heartbeat."
92- "But for Warhol, photography is not just a helping hand. It is a replacement of the chosen object. The photograph becomes the painting. ... no original painting; from the start, there are multiples."
95- "It amazes me that a country as liberal as the United States allows itself to take on the burden of capital punishment."
96- Red Race Riot- "the repetition produces an action painting."
97- subliminal art- "takes objects people are fascinated by and turns them into art."
98- quadruple impact
-"John Cage uses graffiti sounds in his pieces and Merce Cunningham uses everyday noise in his dances."
102- "The Velvet Underground plays so loud you never hear the music."
103- Nico- "She looks like a girl- but when she sings, it's hard to be sure of her sex."
-"The decibels are so deafening that talking is out of the question. That's why Andy loves it so much."
104- "The Velvet Underground is going with music what Andy is doing with images. They repeat and repeat and repeat the same word or phrase until someone screams out, 'Shut up!'"
105- "Minimal music echoes minimal art."
110- Empire "It is a picture postcard of the building transferred to the screen."
125- Duchamp
John Chamberlain- orange corduroy pants

142- Max's Kansas City

144- Brasserie in the Seagram Building

198- "The moon is no cheap date."

205- "Since the sixties people workshop the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone starts at the beaming energy of Edie..."

214- Ed Ruscha

216

221- Polaroid camera

254- "And his camera is still an integral part of his clothing."

273- Fiesta ware

February 26 - March 19, 2008

Chronicles, Volume 1

Bob Dylan

Hardcover, 2004

25 cards

One would expect Bob Dylan to be a great writer, but it is a delight that he is this good. These works shed light on Dylan, his process, his music, as well as his tussles with critics, interviewers, the public and language, and more. Hopefully there will be a volume two.

Excerpts from the cards

p. 7 Conversation with another man:

"What kind of music do you play?"

BD: "Folk Music"

"What kind of music is folk music?"

"I told him it was handed down songs. I hated these kind of questions. Felt I could ignore them."

p. 9 New York City

p. 11 description of the acts at Cafe Wha? and mention of Hubert's Flea Circus

p. 18- strumming-driving people away or drawing them in closer- "There was no in-between."

"Folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say."

p. 20 (grandmother ) "...told me once that happiness isn't on the road to anything. That happiness is the road."

p. 32 "There were a million stories, just everyday New York...you'd have to pull it apart to make any sense of it." and also his comment about romance.

p. 34- On the Road and Howl- 45 records being incapable

"LPs were like the force of gravity..." staring at their covers

p. 35 "I just thought of mainstream culture as lam as hell and a big trick."

p. 36 "I was looking for the part of my education that I never got."

p. 39 "The folksingers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses."

p. 40- art books and artists

p. 42-43 (grandmother) "There are some people you'll just never be able to win over. Just let it go- let it wear itself out."

p. 45- morality and politics

-Vom Kriege Clausewitz's book- "If you think you're a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you're not even capable of dreaming. Dreaming is dangerous."

p. 46- "Horde your energy."

p. 52 "I never looked at songs as either 'good' or 'bad,' only different kinds of good ones."

p. 54- protest songs- "...You have to show people a side of themselves that they don't know is there."

p. 55 "Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that."

-"I watched it intently, thinking I might not see it again."

p. 55-56- tv, destroying minds, "the three-minute song also did the same thing. Symphonies and operas are incredibly long, but the audience never seems to lose its place or fail to follow along. With the three-minute song, the listener doesn't have to remember anything as far back as twenty or even ten minutes ago. There's nothing you have to be able to connect. Nothing to remember."

p. 56 "I didn't feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."

p. 57 corduroy trousers

p. 60 Remington typewriter

p. 65 Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet Theatre

p. 71 "Folk songs are evasive- the truth about life and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be."

-"A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening."

p. 73 T.S. Eliot poem description

-"...Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life... I felt like that too."

p. 77 snowy streets and NYC as a magnet

p. 79 importance of spelling

p. 80 (New York City) "Lot of walking. Got to keep your feet in good shape."

p. 84 NYPL and microfilm- language and rhetoric of newspapers

p. 85 "It's all one long funeral song."

p. 86- different concepts of time in the North and the South

p. 87 Metro Diner, near 6th Ave

p. 88 "Semantics and labels could drive you crazy."

p. 93 "Polka dances always got my blood pumping."

p. 96 "I'd never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad."

-Hank Williams' songs "the archetype rules of poetic songwriting."

p. 99-100 Woody Gurthrie and the box of lyrics that Billy Bragg and Wilco would record

p. 112- Archibald MacLeish- sacrifices

p. 113 1968 "the cities were in flames"

p. 115 "As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now."

"...spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with my generation that I was supposed to be the voice of."

-"Being true to yourself, that was the thing."

p. 118 "Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back."

p. 122 Chekov

p. 123 "The press? I figured you lie to it."

p. 133 "...though he is approaching the perilous age of 30..."

p. 146- live performances

p. 147- keeping his word with himself

p. 148 "My own songs had become strangers to me."

p. 150- lying

p. 153- crowd, cutouts

p. 155 "They came to stare and not participate."

-"...the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn't know what yesterday was."

-"Most music journalists had become nothing more than a public relations staff anyway."

p. 156 "My bright eyes were dull and I could do nothing."

p. 158- Number 2 and popular music

p. 163 "As long as I was alive I was going to stay interested in something."

p. 165 "A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter." "You can write a song anywhere...it helps to be moving."

p. 180- New Orleans "The city is one very long poem."

p. 182- Mason Ruffner- libraries- "reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire to get his language down."

p. 189 "...but the only way to find out, it to find out."

p. 195 "When it's right, you don't have to look for it."

p. 199 small print comment

p. 200- old water tower

p. 201 "...she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. She's always had her own built-in happiness."

p. 202 "Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places."

p. 220 "Sometimes you say things in songs..."

p. 221 "Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them."

p. 226- advice from his Dad

p. 235 "I supposed I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road..."

p. 243 Flo Castner introduced him to Woody's solo music

p. 244 "...his voice was like a stiletto."

p. 245- Woody's book Bound for Glory

p. 247 (Woody) "He painted with words."

p. 265- Suze- "We started talking and my head started to spin."

p. 269- Red Grooms

p. 270- drawings

p. 272 Bertolt Brecht

p. 275 "The audience was the "gentleman" in the song."

-comparing the song to Guernica

p. 283 "Twenty-four hour news coverage would have been a living hell."

p. 284 "When December rolled around, everything slowed down, everything got silent and retrospective, snowy white, deep snow."

p. 288 Suze introduced BD to Rimbaud "Je est un autre."

February - March 8

My Life as a Red Furry Monster
What Being Elmo has Taught Me about Life, Love and Laughing Out Loud
Kevin Clash
2007, hardcover
7 cards

Elmo came late in my Sesame Street viewing life but I was always interested in his personality and outlook on life. Kevin Clash's love for puppet making and desire to be a Muppeteer comes through clearly in this book. While his insights are not earthshaking his points remind you what you know but sometimes forget in the midst of busy, noisy days.

Card highlights
p. 9- the phenomenon of Elmo is linked to love
"the human desire to love and be loved."
p. 10- "'I love you.' Those are magic words- basic, simple, easy to say, but as adults we often forget their power. We often forget to say them."
p. 34-35- "No matter who you are- a big yellow bird, a grouch in a can, a frog in a trench coat, or a furry red monster- you can love and be loved and find your place in the world."
p. 40- Motown music
p. 44- Elmo's laugh
"You will never see Elmo hold himself back from laughing when he feels joy, though he is always careful never to laugh at someone.
p. 49- fabric store- "whump of the bolt" and sound of the pinking shears
p. 51-52 Jim Henson
p. 52 "For a living legend, Jim was one of the most accessible and silliest men I've ever met....Jim was Kermit the Frog....Jim's main goal in life was to have fun."
p. 53- tux for a puppet
p. 86- drawing one's day
p. 87- (art with children) "It's not what you create, it is simply the fact that you are helping that child celebrate the joy of creativity."
p. 88 "Elmo gives us grown-ups the permission kids never nee to let our creative juices flow and maybe, just maybe, to reenter the world of make-believe and let some of our dreams come true."
p. 115- "Elmo knows how to see a child and not a disease or a condition. What Elmo sees is a potential playmate..."
p. 121- "Knowing when to admit you're in over your head takes courage."
p. 122- "You can't be afraid to fail, because you never know true success unless you have a flop or two (or six)."
p. 133-143 (Elmo and friends) "He looks at each meeting as an opportunity for fun."
p. 135- not being a follower
p. 145- No
p. 148 (friends) "You can keep your friends close, just by thinking of them."
p. 170- "...cooperation means more than simply being in agreement with another person. It means offering encouragement and aid, working together to resolve conflicts, compromising and sharing."
-(life as a performer) "...never been a solo act. No life ever is."
p. 177- creative element to the assignment
p. 178- "When we take the time to be creative in our teaching, chances are that we'll be more successful in engaging a child's mind."
-"Kids love to feel in control and smart."
p. 183- ask questions and admit when you don't know something
p. 188- "Dreams are fragile things, but when they've been bolstered by the support of parents and teachers and reinforced with early success, they can withstand the skeptics and take flight."
"Kids are the architects of their own dreams."
p. 199- corduroy pants
p. 205 "Even if one mind closes, thousands of others are opened up."
-moving forward

February 19-21, 2008

The Learners
Chip Kidd
2008
7 cards



The Learners was all you can ever hope a sequel to be. Chip Kidd continues to educate the masses about graphic design but in a rich way that informs while also changing your perception of the world. He also taps into life's rich simplicity. I could imagine myself in the New Haven Utrecht store like Happy, riding on the train to New Haven- the stops as they are called out- and best of yet know the very experiment by Stanley Milgram that is a constant in the story. Perhaps a Communication major is exactly where one needs to start in this world.

Highlights that will not give (too much) of the story away.
p. xii "Shoes are our friends."
p. 4- "Who am I? I am Happy." (this resonates with my recent encounter of Bob Dylan's statement about being happy, that anyone can be happy and his rather so what attitude to that)
-as a graphic designer seeing the world as a problem to solve "one typeface, one drawing, one image at a time."
-"Life is a lifelong assignment that must be constantly analyzed, clarified, figures out, and responded to appropriately."
p. 5- sports comment
p. 12 machine age couch (Tim's class!)
p. 15- Mr. Speer going on inspirational walks (I'm reading Wanderlust a history of walking right now)
p. 17- associations and artificial constructs
p. 19- sign
p. 21- description of the air
p. 22- Baby Laveen!
p. 53- "to draw was to breathe, so the air became lead."
p. 40- drawing a straight line
p. 41- records as distraction
p. 51- the diary of billing hours "recorded evidence of my life on Earth that I otherwise wouldn't have created."
p. 52- a diner booth!
p. 54- good clients (back to my own advertising days)
p. 58- typography
p. 59- "It's not just about what you're saying anymore, it's how your're saying it."
p. 62-63 ad
p. 64- Himillsy!
p. 65 "For Himillsy, living dangerously was the only way to live."
-"...rescuing her from something she didn't want to be saved from."
p. 67- "My whole body was smiling."
p. 68- New Haven's claim for pizza (and hamburgers which Elizabeth supports- I love food history claims and debates.)
p. 68- "but not me"
p. 69- brains..."I'm crazy for them....It's not fair to be actually informed on the subject."
p. 74- "...You have no idea. I listen to you all the time. I always did."
p. 76 "...jumpstarted my heart..."
p. 77- Mom
p. 79- "Time stopped."
p. 80- making the whole page black
p. 81- map
p. 83- Noah's Diner
p. 84 "People are awful."
p. 85 and 86
p. 88-89- quote about Time magazine
p. 90- piece of me- best parts
p. 116- memory and learning
p. 117 "Because, you must know by now: You already test my memory."
p. 118
p. 128- Waltham, MA, Helvetica
p. 141
p. 143- Stanley Milgram
p. 145 "Me: State U- the identity of my life."
p. 146- form
p. 105-06
p. 107 Rheingold ale (like Torpor!)
p. 111- looking inside you
p. 112 "...I became one sock."
p. 115 "I was trying to start a conversation."
p. 159- "Not. Fun."
p. 160- 2 kinds of people
p. 163- "If you intend to die you can do anything."
p. 165- Underwood typewriter (Duchamp!)
p. 166 "a legacy of heralded mediocrity."
p. 173- "What people really want, no matter who they are, is someone to listen to them."
p. 175- Antisappointment
-"wide-wale caramel, duck-patterned corduroys" (also mentioned on p. 178
p. 184 "Christ on a cracker." (Joel!)
p. 187- "...changing the records on the turntable. I loved anticipating what he would play next."
p. 191
p. 199- marcel permanent (Duchamp and Ray!)
p. 203- pickle
p. 205- "Humanity deserved to see itself explained."
p. 206- "Something always means something else."
p. 207- fate
p. 209- "Knobs. Switches. Levers. Buttons...."
p. 211
-"What does Evil look like?"
p. 249- "I am in control of my own undoing."
- Winter and Milgram
-"I. Hate.You."
p. 250-51
p. 253 "I will be twenty-two again, instead of a hundred."
-the solution
p. 254
-intent
p. 257
p. 258- last line

February 3 - 10, 2008

torpor by Chris Kraus
2006- paperback

One Chris Kraus's earlier books was recomended to me a few months ago. It made me fall in love with fiction and literature again even though her books seem to blur fiction with non. As soon as I finished her earlier book I wanted torpor, but it is a book one has to seek out at enlightened bookstores. torpor, in a sense, sought me out since Chris Kraus, who is participating in the Sex Worker's Art Show tour, and it traveled to where I live.

One aspect of this book that caught me by surprise was Sylvie and Jerome's trip to Romania. Before this past August I knew little about Romania. As I learned this fall about this country and its history and art (Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Kristine Stiles, Andrei Codrescu's Hole in the Flag, the film 12:08 East of Bucharest and, soon, the new film 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days)torpor added yet another voice to my unserstanding of the country. I love unexpected overlaps like this that I encounter in reading.

Ghost of Georges Perec, you are next.

This reading resulted in 18 notecards so I will just mention some resonances here.
p. 18 (Thirtysomething the tv show and people at this age) "They no longer want to change the world. Now, they are creating families."
p. 23 fond de l'air
p. 24 (French rationalism) "The notion that the world could be contained by classifying." Mention of Comte de Buffon's Encycolpedia of the Animals- described in terms of what they are not.
p. 25 Rheingold sign
p. 45- (travel) "The future is a promise that's been deferred so long you've nearly given up, but it can be suddenly fulfilled."
p. 46 "All the saddest songs, she thinks, have happiness inside them."
p. 48 and 49 Bedouins
p. 50 Romania's reproductive policy
p. 54- Jerome and Sylvie memorizing Nausea at age 13- proof they "were actually the same person."
-the photograph labels included throughout the book
p. 63- "...places in the world where time stands still..."
p.66 underlining passages in books
p. 67- mention of Dadaist collage (also mention of prints in the manner of George Grosz twice)
p. 68- leaving traces
p. 72 "Do you really think you have accompolished enough to have a child?"
p. 75- city going to sleep
p. 79- history
p. 98- chaos engineered
p. 101- "Were the poets still in charge?"
p. 103- "...when language isn't written down, it's nothing."
p. 107- happiness
p. 117- "What do people do?"
p. 118- "She's terrified of flying. She hates to think her life will end before it has begun."
p. 119- "All she wanted was to talk about the things that interested her and be listened to by someone other than Jerome."
p. 127- Munson's Diner
- Hannah Arendt, you are next after Georges Perec
p. 137 and 186- "'The crisis in language,' Perec once quipped, 'is not in words.'"
same page- holding onto memories in fragments
p. 150- "What if the whole concept of 'relationships' that tormented her was unnecessary?"
p. 152- "Deep down, Jerome didn't merelyl want to be a friend to all the artists: he longer to be one."
p. 157 tenses
p. 189- books, rants
p. 191 "..she thinks: I'm 35 years old. Everything I do now has to matter."
same page- definition of Debrouillard
p. 192- women on the list
p. 193 "...the evening dusk seems Kodachrome and magical..."
same page- buildings holding hands
p. 194 books comment and playing a Lydia Lunch record
p. 196- shoe repair
p. 199- The Balkan Wars (echoing my recent viewing of the film, The Secret Life of Words)
p. 225
p. 269- colors, children's books
p. 270- Proust
p. 273- alone together
p. 280- digging her nails in
p. 283- working at a post office
p. 283- corduroy
same page- grilled cheese at the Town and Country Diner
last chapter- would have tense
p. 285- "The photo is a strange artifact: a souvenir of possibilities that never came to be."