6.22.2015

Jessica Hopper - 'The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic'

There's been oodles of praise for this book. And not without reason. Hopper is a tremendous writer with a true voice of her own. She has an incredible ability to make connections between various artists that I would never associate with each other. She actually made me care about reading reviews of Pearl Jam and Lana Del Rey and Miley Cyrus and Van Morrison. The collection is short, sweet, and rightfully gives her interview with Jim DeRo re: R.Kelley a needed print copy for posterity. The gilded edges of the pages are a bonus snazzy touch.

There's no reason to review the book because everyone else has already harped so much praise about it. So why does this feel like this is me leading up to writing something negative? Because it is...

6.11.2015

Jack Kerouac - 'The Dharma Bums'

I read this book even though I had no intention of doing so. It was sitting at my girlfriend's apartment. I'd just finished reading Italo Calvino's munchkin sized yarn Marcovaldo and needed something new. I started reading and just couldn't stop. The only other book I've read by Kerouac was On The Road, and that one is truly a masterpiece. To cover so much ground, the descriptions of so many settings in one narrative is quite impressive, and even though its primary focus on drugs and woman are certainly more appealing to an adolescent andhertz, they'd probably still resonate with a slightly older / still not fully matured andhertz. So maybe that's why I haven't read anything else by Kerouac, because I knew I would like it even though I didn't want to. Oh well. Pigeonholes be damned. I flew through this thing and found some great segments for Literary Chicago along the way. 

"That's Rhonda, my sister, I grew up with her in the woods in Oregon. She's gonna marry this rich jerk from Chicago, a real square."

"Japhy and I were sitting around in the shack in a drowsy afternoon and suddenly she was in the door, slim and blond and pretty, with her well-dressed Chicago fiance, a very handsome man."

6.08.2015

Kathy Acker (Pt 1)

I've never read anything by Kathy Acker before today. I've seen her name all over the place, name-checked by everyone from Kathleen Hannah to Richard Hell to Kate Zambreno. But every time I venture into a book store, new or used, I fail to find any primary texts from the writer herself. While I'm sure I could have read (and probably have read short texts of) her work online, I've never immersed myself in a novel or collection of essays. I finally found a copy of work with her name on the cover, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, a collection of interviews, prose, dramatic work, essays, and more.

The first piece of the collection, and my introduction to her greater themes, was a couple of interviews from 1989-90 with French literary critic Sylvère Lotringer. The two discuss memory, identity, community, plagiarism, censorship, tattoos, and mythology. The part I really liked was about plagiarism and how we use other people's work. Acker recognizes it's impossible to create without experience in reality, and for her, words and text are just as much a staple of reality as material and experiences. She explains: "What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text." Of course, I'm yet to read any examples of her doing this, but I hope to change that soon.