A selection of essays ranging from early to late in Blanchot's writing career, showing the development of his thought as a literary critic / theorist.A selection of essays ranging from early to late in Blanchot's writing career, showing the development of his thought as a literary critic / theorist. Philosophical, speculative, at times abstract, the various articles suggest different and unusual ways of looking at books, at the literary, and at the activities both of writing and reading. The first essay, for instance, analyzes the act of writing in terms of the Kierkegaardian concept of dread. Other essays comment on the myth of Orpheus, the song of the sirens, and on the concept of the book as a form of absence. Readers of thinkers like Derrida and Barthes will probably find much of interest in Blanchot's writing.
I would read this one again, not only because I am sure I have missed some of the finer points of the arguments Blanchot makes, but also because I enjoyed his style of writing.
Acquired Jan 8, 2021 Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR...more
Essays commenting on various aspects of the television show Twin Peaks, including its relationships with detective fiction and with soap opera; its poEssays commenting on various aspects of the television show Twin Peaks, including its relationships with detective fiction and with soap opera; its popularity as a subject of discussion on early electronic message boards; its representation of women; and its employment of music.
One paper included in the book represents a group discussion in which eight participants analyze the show as a postmodern work; to the extent that the speakers employ the show to refine their ideas of the postmodern, the discussion seems a little circular.
I have not read any of the other books associated with Twin Peaks, but from what I have seen in reviews both on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and Amazon, Full of Secrets is probably one of the more scholarly among them, with its references to Freudian concepts and to postmodern theorists and critics like Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard.
Along with the essays are a calendar dating the events both in the series and in the prequel movie Fire Walk With Me, and a scene by scene breakdown of the television episodes and the film. In addition, there is a cast list, a list of writers and directors, and a comprehensive bibliography.
The book includes a few errors, but in general it has some interesting readings of the show....more
Of the group of light, diverting, frequently humorous essays in this book, the one that has stuck with me most is "I Shook Hands With Shakespeare," anOf the group of light, diverting, frequently humorous essays in this book, the one that has stuck with me most is "I Shook Hands With Shakespeare," an earlier version of the "Six Degrees of Separation" concept.
I am a fan of Will Elder, so I like the inclusion in the book not only of an interview with the cartoonist, but also an article in appreciation of Elder's work by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). I like, too, how the essay by Clowes is immediately followed by an essay in which another writer, Ken Parille, analyzes some of the representational and thematic techniques in Clowes's David Boring (this latter essay had me returning to Clowes's graphic novel for a closer re-reading).
There are other things I found to like about this book, including Jonathan Franzen writing a perceptive consideration of Schultz's Peanuts and Donald Phelps writing lyrically of Lynda Barry's work. One of the more amusing inclusions is an article entitled "Was this review helpful to you?" that reprints some readers' reviews on the Amazon.com website of Joe Matt's Spent.
I had read “Shooting an Elephant� before, in high school, when I thought the essay depressing and long (now it seems very short). Orwell communicates I had read “Shooting an Elephant� before, in high school, when I thought the essay depressing and long (now it seems very short). Orwell communicates the elephant’s pain without employing the lurid details that are typical in descriptions of violence.
Acquired May 22, 2007 P.T. Campbell Bookseller, London, Ontario...more
[Update, Jan 28, 2013: In response to a comment by Claudine Frank, the editor of The Edge of Surrealism, I have removed from this review a passage in [Update, Jan 28, 2013: In response to a comment by Claudine Frank, the editor of The Edge of Surrealism, I have removed from this review a passage in which I mistakenly characterize "The Structure and Nature of Totalitarian Regimes" as having been constructed from notes made by attendees at Caillois's lectures rather than as having been authored by Caillois himself. For Frank's comment and my response, please see the comments section following this review.]
While popularly known for its melting clocks and psychic automatisms, the Surrealist movement had an academic side as well, perhaps best represented in work by theorists like Georges Bataille and his colleague Roger Caillois. The latter is probably best known for “The Praying Mantis,� an essay on analogues in abnormal human psychology and myth of the mating ritual of the cephalophagic insect. That essay is included in The Edge of Surrealism, along with others on a variety of subjects such as secret societies, Satanism, Paris, and “the noon complex.�
The essays are organized chronologically such that one can trace the development of Caillois’s thought as it was shaped both by his personal experiences and by larger historical events. For instance, one text entitled “The Structure and Nature of Totalitarian Regimes� represents a series of lectures Caillois gave in 1940 in which he discussed the sociological and cultural meanings of the fascist movement that had been gaining power in Europe through the previous decade.
One can also trace the maturing of Caillois’s literary style through this book: while the writing in the early essays can sometimes be a little mechanical or clunky, somewhere around the middle of the book a much more flowing and poetic style emerges that seems to gain in polish and self-assurance from one essay to the next.
As a thinker, Caillois is an interdisciplinarian, typically employing in his writings ideas from many different fields including sociology, psychology, biology, history and political science. In some of his later essays, Caillois reflects on his own methods and argues for the significance of interdisciplinarity in academic research (while employing interdisciplinary techniques to make his argument, as in “The Bridgemaker,� which juxtaposes ideas from architecture, etymology, Roman history and anthropology, among other disciplines, in order more fully to explore the issue under discussion).
For each essay, editor Claudine Frank includes an introductory note supplying cultural and intellectual context. If I have a problem with the book, it is with these notes, which sometimes seem to me enthymematic in their alluding to issues and events that might be familiar to an audience already acquainted with Caillois’s work, but not to the general reader in need of a little more expository detail. For the essays, though, this book is a good general introduction to Caillois’s thought.
In Rings of Saturn, Sebald writes about Joseph Conrad, Chinese Empress Tzu Hsi, a matchstick model of Jerusalem, the herring industry, and a number ofIn Rings of Saturn, Sebald writes about Joseph Conrad, Chinese Empress Tzu Hsi, a matchstick model of Jerusalem, the herring industry, and a number of other subjects, each of which is connected in some way to the history and character of East Anglia. The book is interesting not only for what Sebald has to say about these things (or about Thomas Browne’s skull or Michael Hamburger’s studio room) but also for the way Sebald mixes together the historical, the journalistic, the autobiographical and even the novelistic in a prose that is fluent and languorous.
The late David Foster Wallace had an intimidating intellect, and he knew it. I read his emphasis on his Midwestern background in “Derivative Sport in The late David Foster Wallace had an intimidating intellect, and he knew it. I read his emphasis on his Midwestern background in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley� as functioning to reassure the reader that although Wallace’s writing is challenging in the way much postmodern writing is, yet one does not have to be an Ivy League-educated intellectual to enjoy his work. For me, the author’s employment of rambling structures in these essays, his inclusion of confessions to embarrassing facts about himself, and his frequent deployment of a colloquial style that reminds me of nothing so much as the “skaz� of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, all contribute to Wallace’s representation of himself as merely another Joe Anyone who just happens to be most comfortable deploying such conceptual frameworks as Euclidean geometry and postmodern theory within which to express his ideas on subjects like tennis, television and David Lynch.
But make no mistake. Wallace is incredibly smart, and his long sentences with their parentheticals within parentheticals and their linking of complex ideas with complex frameworks in which to explore them constitute a great workout for the brain. It is a highly cerebral exercise, with all the self-referential meta-irony of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid or the webcomic.
I enjoyed the selection a lot, and in particular his essays on tennis in the Midwest, on television and on David Lynch. Although some of the references in his essay on television have dated since the early nineties when he wrote it, Wallace has some very useful points to make about irony in TV advertising and in shows like with regard to what this can tell us about the work of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis and Mark Leyner. The article on David Lynch does not include an interview with the director, but along with his description of his experiences among the film crew, Wallace includes some very good cultural, psychological and philosophical analysis of Lynch’s work (readers who enjoyed Infinite Jest should like this article: among its features is the inclusion of a list of the types of lenses Wallace sees in one of the trailers on the film-set: the list is entirely unnecessary, but it reminded me of the precision of detail in some of the footnotes on James Incandenza and cinematography at the back of the novel; one problem with the article, though, is that it contains a lot of other unnecessary detail and repetitions that could be been left out without detracting from the main points Wallace is interested in making).
Having been on a cruise of the sort he describes in the title essay, I can say that Wallace nails this one.
Of the other essays in the book, that discussing professional tennis player Michael Joyce interested me least, mostly because I know little about the subject (the sport and the athlete); I leave it to other readers to comment on how it works for them.
Acquired Jun 16, 2011 Powell's Books on Hawthorne, Portland, OR...more
Jameson is always a challenging thinker, as much for his capacity for dialectical thought as for his authoritative grasp of the different fields of knJameson is always a challenging thinker, as much for his capacity for dialectical thought as for his authoritative grasp of the different fields of knowledge—history, philosophy, French theory, Marxism, architecture, finance capital—to which he makes reference in the construction of his arguments. In this book, as in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson deploys a Marxist analysis of postmodern culture, arguing that this latter supplies an approach to a reading of the contemporary historical moment which he characterizes, following Ernest Mandel, as “late capitalist.�
The book begins with the much-anthologized essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,� which first appeared in and introduced readers to Jameson’s thought on postmodernism. Later expanded and appearing in its revised form as the first chapter of Postmodernism, the essay is a kind of overview of postmodern culture, exploring among other things what postmodern literature suggests about the blurring of high and low culture in the contemporary moment, what films like or suggest about our sense of our history, and what contemporary architecture might reflect of our experience of postmodern space. The second essay, “Theories of the Postmodern,� was also revised and expanded for Postmodernism; here, Jameson supplies an instance of what he has elsewhere termed “metacommentary,� discussing not postmodernism itself but rather analyzing how this has been theorized by other thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Manfredo Tafuri. A third essay that was subsequently expanded (appearing in its revised form in The Seeds of Time) is “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,� an analysis of transformations in the categories of space and time through the modern and postmodern moments.
Because of the challenging forms Jameson employs to express his ideas in the later versions of these essays, I find it extremely useful to have these earlier versions, in which his thought seems more accessible, because it is in a comparatively rudimentary form.
The essay “Marxism and Postmodernism� is sort of like a break after the rigors of the first three essays: while it, too, is a theoretical work, exploring the relations between the two topics mentioned in the title, it is as personal an essay as I have ever seen from Jameson, who writes here in response to those commentators who had assumed, incorrectly, that Jameson’s beginning his work on postmodernism signified his movement away from Marxist thought.
Following this, we return to the rarefied heights of postmodern theory. I can but scratch the surface of “‘End of Art� or ‘End of History�?� in describing it as an essay in which Jameson adds another level of complexity to his analysis of postmodernism by deploying not only Marxist but Hegelian thought as well in an exploration of two ideas associated with postmodernism, i.e. the “end of art� (see, for instance, Arthur Danto’s book) and the “end of history,� a phrase most closely associated in the postmodern moment with Francis Fukuyama. Moreover, here Jameson employs a reading of the contemporary moment as a comment on Hegel, noting which of the philosopher’s predictions with respect to history turned out to be correct, which turned out to be wrong, and what may have been the causes of Hegel’s mistakes in the latter instances.
“Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity� is another dense, complex and highly theoretical essay. One passage in particular, in which Jameson employs Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet and a number of other writers in an analysis of “image culture� I found particularly entertaining.
In the last two essays, Jameson employs the notion of finance capital as a term with which to mediate postmodern culture with capitalism. “Culture and Finance Capital� is the more general of the two, while “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation� is an exploration of what contemporary architecture reflects of the postmodern moment.
Acquired Nov 15, 2005 Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR...more
Like of Wilson’s other books, this one is dedicated to Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs. Reading it (them--Wilson's books, I mean), oLike of Wilson’s other books, this one is dedicated to Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs. Reading it (them--Wilson's books, I mean), one sees that the dedication does not necessarily imply a personal relationship between this author and those writers. Rather, the subjects about which Wilson writes suggests that he sees himself as carrying on the kind of work Dick and Burroughs did. While Dick and Burroughs are generally known for writing fiction (most of Dick’s novels are science fiction; Burroughs is somewhat more difficult to classify, but he’s typically thought of as a satirist), much of Wilson’s work is nonfiction (the significant exceptions are his Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan and his Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy). Right Where You Are Sitting Now is mostly nonfiction, and while a discussion of alternate universes is one of the subjects on which Wilson comments, many more of the themes and techniques Wilson deploys here are evocative of Burroughs’s work. Wilson’s writings on human longevity and space travel, for instance, resonate with Burroughs’s ideas in The Job - Interviews with William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier, as does his essay on the possible effects technological advances may have on the sexual revolution. In terms of approaches to writing, in some chapters Wilson employs Burroughs’s “cut-up� method (actually the innovation of Brian Gysin, but generally associated with Burroughs); moreover, the texts Wilson cuts up include not only passages from his novel s and passages from other chapters of Right Where You Are Sitting Now, but also passages from the last words of Dutch Schultz, a with which Burroughs worked in some of his writing, most famously in his The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script.
Generally (although generally generalizations should be avoided, as should passive voice), Wilson writes as both satirist and futurist. There is a chapter on Buckminster Fuller. There are chapters analyzing the relation of contemporary political structures to, for instance, capital, and to something Wilson terms “pop ecology� (which latter has since come to be termed “�). There is a particularly good chapter analyzing at the .
The book includes some humorous telegrams, amusing (fictional, I suppose) instances of channel-surfing, and a quiz; in these, and in much of the rest of the book, Wilson calls attention to the relations among language, consciousness and reality (another theme, btw, that is the kind of thing Burroughs writes about.
Although all the essays here are on American subjects, they were initially written for readers of newspapers like and Although all the essays here are on American subjects, they were initially written for readers of newspapers like and , and thus for a British audience. In that context, one would expect the essays to reflect some cultural bias; indeed, insofar as Amis, a British writer, was writing for a British reader, a certain amount of cultural bias would be appropriate. However, as most of the subjects Amis writes about depict some of the less flattering aspects of American culture, it is difficult to determine how much cultural bias these essays actually reflect: while such topics as Elvis Presley’s final years, Brian Depalma’s gore-spattered films, the “televangelist� industry and a representation of the aging Hugh Hefner certainly function to call attention to differences between American and British culture, and even to reflect something of the way that the former is viewed within the latter, it is difficult not to feel in addition that the celebrity excesses Amis describes in fact emblematize for him something essential about the American experience. .
While one might accuse him of snobbery and leave it at that, I think it may be more accurate to say that Amis is lacking awe with regard to those aspects of American culture about which he writes. It is because of this that Amis is able to write about American celebrity culture with such understanding (the distinction I am making here is that a “snob� would not make the effort to understand that which he or she is criticizing). Thus, although there were instances in which Amis was finding negative things to say about other writers whose work I enjoy, I often found myself nodding in agreement with his representations.
Nor is all of it negative. Amis has some positive things to say about the work of writers like John Updike and Saul Bellow. Indeed, in his essay about Gloria Steinem, Amis seems to be making extra efforts to defend her, for instance from stereotypes about feminists.
One thing that might keep one from reading it is that the book is rather dated. In the thirty years since Amis wrote the essays, Ronald Reagan has served two terms as president of the United States, Philip Roth has written many more and Steven Spielberg has made many more . Indeed, some of the essays may have seemed dated at the time Amis originally wrote them: I doubt that the things he said about about Elvis’s death or about Norman Mailer’s or Truman Capote’s public personae were still new even in 1980. On the other hand, it can be interesting to see how little things have changed in the last thirty years: Hugh Hefner seems now, in his eighties, to be living the same kind of life he was in his fifties.
However, if you’re not looking for a book about current events and like Amis’s writing style and are interested in his opinions with regard to writers like Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer, this is a good one to pick up. He has some interesting ideas about how Roth’s work is organized, as well as a penetrating analysis of Joan Didion’s rhetorical structures in her book of essays, WHITE ALBUM. In its simultaneous employment of the styles and approaches both of the gossipy tabloid and the serious literary analysis, the book is both intellectual exercise and guilty pleasure.
Acquired May 28, 2010 Vintage Books, Vancouver WA...more
Typically, the term “journal� denotes a book in which one records one’s experiences and observations from day to day (the term is from the French “jouTypically, the term “journal� denotes a book in which one records one’s experiences and observations from day to day (the term is from the French “journal,� which latter is from the Latin “diurnalis,� both terms meaning “daily�). Calling this work by Cocteau a journal reflects some poetic license: the book does not represent Cocteau’s day-to-day writings about his personal experiences; rather, it is a selection of essays and passages from essays that had already been published in earlier books, such as Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being and Diary of an Unknown (which latter work is as much an example of a “diary� as this text is an example of a “journal.�) However, as the editor and translator, Wallace Fowlie, comments, “No published book of Cocteau is explicitly or avowedly a journal, but in many of his books the tone is that of a personal diary� (Editor’s Note, 239; at the time Fowlie wrote this, in 1956, it was true that none of Cocteau’s published works could be termed diaries or journals in the literal sense of those terms; since then, though, two volumes of Cocteau’s diaries, Past Tense have been made available to the public, with the first appearing in 1983). Even Cocteau seems to comment on the title of this book: in one of the essays included here, he writes of “this journal, which is not really one� (218. The apparent self-reference may be intentional: this book is the result of a collaboration between its translator/ editor and its author.)
Fowlie divides the book by subject (another way the text differs from the typical journal). Cocteau writes about his early life, his writing, his friends (including Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire), filmmaking, and morality. His style is poetic, and the types of imagery he employs, taken from different forms of competition, including the martial, the athletic and the scholastic, seem to have the function of representing Cocteau as performer; certainly they remind the reader of the writer’s background in the theatre. The subjects about which he writes, too, sometimes seem to have this function, as he frequently writes about the large and operatic themes as beauty, art, love, death and the public life.
Acquired May 17, 2010 Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR...more
Luis Bunuel was a surrealist filmmaker who directed films like (1962), in which a group of people are at a party and find Luis Bunuel was a surrealist filmmaker who directed films like (1962), in which a group of people are at a party and find that they cannot leave the room they’re in, and (1967), in which a bored housewife begins working in a brothel during her afternoons.
This book is a collection of some of Bunuel’s writings. It includes the “script� of Bunuel’s eye-opening first film, (1928), which he directed with the painter Salvador Dali. The script is particularly useful because it mentions details that might not be obvious from a screening of a grainy print of the film.
Some of the film treatments in the book are for films that have not actually been made. "Goya and the Duchess of Alba," for instance, is a “straight� romantic narrative about the Spanish royal family and the painter Francisco Goya. "Illegible, the Son of a Flute" is a surrealist narrative like Un Chien Andalou and The Phantom of Liberty; events in this narrative are dreamlike and unreal, and cause and effect relations between different events are sometimes mysterious.
In addition to Bunuel’s film treatments, there are a number of his poems, essays about the history and techniques of cinema, essays about different films (in some of these, Bunuel comments on his own films), a parody of the gossip columns typical of popular movie magazines, and an essay on the history of puppeteering.
Acquired May 3, 2010 Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR...more
It is tempting to say that Burroughs’s writing represents either the urgent dispatches from a social observer warning of impending danger or the ravinIt is tempting to say that Burroughs’s writing represents either the urgent dispatches from a social observer warning of impending danger or the ravings of a paranoid crank. However, as Burroughs himself points out, either/ or thinking is reductive, and so if one wants to get at the complexity of his work, it’s preferable to take a both/ and approach, and indeed, while some of Burroughs’s ideas seem pretty loopy, others are right on (that’s right, I started out with a straw man. Mea culpa).
Although associated with them, as author and individual Burroughs is not really like other members of the Beat Generation. I’ve seen a photograph of him with a couple of the Beats—perhaps it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—and they’re at the beach, and while the others are wearing trunks and T-shirts, Burroughs conspicuously wears a formal suit. It’s like those pictures of the in which everyone has long hair and mod clothes except for Charlie Watts, who looks more like a banker than a drummer in a rock and roll band.
Burroughs has been called the godfather of punk. Some have suggested that his literary experiments with the “� can be read as early experiments in hypertext. He’s best known for Naked Lunch, a novel about heroin and sex that somewhere got spliced with science fiction dystopism and mutated into one of the central texts of social satire of the last fifty years (yes, read it!)
So, The Adding Machine? It’s a book of essays on a number of subjects. There’s literary criticism, as Burroughs discusses the work of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckettand Marcel Proust. There’s philosophy both aesthetic (Burroughs talks about the creative process) and ethical (Burroughs comments on the “Johnsons� he’s known, and contrasts them to the $#!&s he’s met).
Yet although the work is a collection of essays, it’s not necessarily non-fiction. One essay starts out as a fictional dialogue between two film producers, at some point becoming a non-fictional discussion about that could help junkies kick their addiction to heroin, but that is unavailable in America because the has prohibited it. Another begins as literary criticism, with Burroughs commenting on The Great Gatsby; it ends, however, as fiction, with Burroughs suggesting an alternate ending for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, and reproducing a passage of experimental writing in which he “cuts-up� The Great Gatsby with other texts. In addition to these there are the “speculative� essays, in which Burroughs writes about subjects like coincidence or orgone accumulation; the fictionality or non-fictionality of these subjects frequently depends more on the credulity of the reader than on what can be proven scientifically.
The essays are short, some of them only three or four pages long, and more conventionally constructed than are most of his novels. Funny and alarming all at once, Burroughs is a kind of canary in the coalmine, a surreal satirist, as much George Carlin as George Orwell. You might think of him as that character who appears in the opening of the B horror picture—the old timer who can tell you what you want to know about the mysterious goings on “up yonder the old Vineland place.� So if you want to make it past the third reel, you could do worse than to listen to what Burroughs has to say before going to investigate for yourself what’s locked up in the basement of the creepy house that is contemporary Amerika.
Acquired Apr 15, 2010 Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR...more
Non-fiction essays by the punk princess of postmodernism. Many of the essays are about art: the films of Peter Greenaway; the realism of painters likeNon-fiction essays by the punk princess of postmodernism. Many of the essays are about art: the films of Peter Greenaway; the realism of painters like Goya and Carravaggio; the literary work of writers like William S. Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Collette and Samuel R. Delany. In other essays Acker comments on plagiarism and copyright law, on censorship, and on French literary theory.
While some of the essays, such as her introduction to a book about Boxcar Bertha, are in a conventional style, others are experimental in form. For instance, in addition to psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts, Acker employs myth and narrative in her critique of the sexism in American motorcycle culture; she employs a similar approach in her catalog of the artwork of Nayland Blake. An essay about the city of St. Petersburg appears to be more about language than about the city insofar as parts of the essay are in poetry rather than prose, and some of these latter are in untranslated Latin.
Acquired Apr 15, 2010 Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR...more
An anthology of letters, poems, personal essays by, and interviews with some of the main members of the Beat Generation, collected by the editors of aAn anthology of letters, poems, personal essays by, and interviews with some of the main members of the Beat Generation, collected by the editors of a small magazine about the Beats called the unspeakable visions of the individual. There are letters from Jack Kerouacto Neal Cassady and to Allen Ginsberg. There is a letter from William S. Burroughsin which he describes a dream he had. There is some prose from Allen Ginsberg. There are many photographs as well, some showing members of the Beat Generation when the movement was at its height in the fifties, and others showing them later, in the seventies and early eighties (an example of the latter would be the photograph on the cover of the edition of the book I have, in which Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan are sitting at the grave of Jack Kerouac). The book is particularly good for its interviews, for instance with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs (Burroughs discusses how he approaches recording his dreams, and at one point there is an odd moment when the interviewer describes a dream he had and asks Burroughs what he thinks of it). I particularly like this anthology for its interview with Carl Solomon, a Beat with a Dadaist approach whom I think is overlooked in many discussions on the Beats (many know that Allen Ginsberg dedicated “Howl� to him, but my sense is that few have read his funny works, Mishaps, Perhaps and More Mishaps). Along with the work of the white males like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, the book includes the voices of women (Carolyn Cassady, Diane di Prima and Eileen Kaufman) and of persons of color (Amiri Baraka and Ted Joans).
Acquired Feb 10, 2010 Attic Books, London, Ontario...more
Parodies and satires. The sort of thing one finds in , but very literary and very Irish. James Joyce called Flann O’Brien “a real writParodies and satires. The sort of thing one finds in , but very literary and very Irish. James Joyce called Flann O’Brien “a real writer with the true comic spirit,� and this book is a collection of some of the work of “Myles Before Myles� (to misquote a song, his name was Brian O'Nolan, and he called himself Flann O'Brien, but everyone knew him as Myles na cGopaleen). Included in this book are O’Brien’s articles for the student newspaper at , Dublin, articles for the comic magazine The Blather, and a number of letters sent to the editor of in which O’Brien, writing under one pen name, would criticize the writers of other letters to the editor (which letters were also written by O’Brien, but under different pen names). The book will probably be of interest mostly to fans of O’Brien; if you’ve not read him, perhaps the best things with which to start are books like The Third Policeman or At Swim-Two-Birds.
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