1.The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells: The earth’s dire future, predicted – and far too much ignored or denied – not too long ago, is now our daily horrifying present tense, one which Wallace-Wells thoroughly details in chapters like Heat Death, Hunger, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, and Economic Collapse. And, of course I still read just recently another smug and arrogant right-wing denier on the editorial page of Britain’s The Daily Telegraph. And like many others I do become angry whenever it is obvious that the fate of the world and all life forms are at the mercy of childishly egotistical and indifferent leaders and their followers who live only to look the other way.
2.The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition Translated with Commentary by Peter Green may have its critics among classicists regarding translation of specific words or cultural accuracy or even among poets regarding meter and awareness of poetic methods, but this edition does offer the appeal of an energetic personality with an assertive, sometimes confrontational, attitude that makes for a compelling read. Try #16 opening with “Up yours both, and sucks to the pair of you.” There is much here that arouses delight, and who knows what else?
3. I once interviewed author John Banville, a man who spontaneously answered my many questions, including those about writing, in beautifully constructed paragraphs. So, I read his Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir very slowly, surely with the intent to savour his quietly delicious and subtly moving writing. Also, to take in his connection to memory, time, cultural detail, and all else in one’s life that walks a fine line between remembering and reconstructing the past. “Dublin was never my Dublin, which made it all the more alluring. I was born in Wexford…” he begins, and later continues, “December days in the approach to Christmas are short, and end with a sense of soft collapse.” And he later exclaims, “Oh to be unhappy in the arms of Monica Vitti!” when first seeing L’Avventura. Oh, yes, agreed, give me some of that unhappiness!
4.Talking of delicious, the back cover of Peggy to her Playwrights: The Letters of Margaret Ramsey, Play Agent’ with an Introduction by Simon Callow offers the following passage to David Hare from Ms Ramsey, a woman devoted to theatre and writing of the highest standards and writers of the highest integrity: “Fuck the critics. They’ve all compromised or sold out. They are failures. Along comes a shining child of twenty-six and tells them what’s wrong with them. They aren’t big enough to take the blows.” This book is an informed, opinionated, and exciting ride inside the real world of theatrical creativity and politics. Ramsey is a thorough pleasure to read and – why not? – perhaps emulate.
5.Whenever I weary of the ever-present denial of life’s hard realities posing as ‘positive thinking’ or ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality,’ I take an audio recording of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America’ for another listen in the car, and find myself again applauding how this sharply-honed and ‘take no BS writer’ takes on both religious hypocrites and opportunistic new age gurus who make a good buck from the – take your pick – helplessness, gullibility, stupidity, or hopelessness of their followers. Her next book is Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, which, like the first, I’ve read, listened to, and thanked from the bottom of my sanity.
6.Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution tells the story of an artist who has become a personal favorite, and I’m not alone in my high regard since Joshua Reynolds himself esteemed her higher than Van Dyck. I once flipped out over her technical mastery and depiction of character in her Self-portrait in a Straw Hat in London’s National Gallery where I later declared to the bookstore custodian – with her ensuing startled look – that the artist had the most kissable lips in town. Being Marie Antoinette’s favorite portraitist, Vigée le Brun had to quickly depart Paris after 1789, for travels in Italy, Austria, Russia, and England, during which both her clientele and her fame grew. This fascinating but discreet biography is as informed as possible, with sympathetic reference to the artist’s autobiography, and written in the somewhat guarded enthusiasm of academic prose.
7.The closest I ever got to The Band was through interviewing Garth Hudson some years ago in 2005. Recently, I have been deep-diving again into the one-of-a-kind and richly-realized music of The Band and, to support my listening to ten of their albums (okay, one is by a solo Rick Danko), have read two meticulously researched, consistently informative, sometimes eye-opening books: The Band: Pioneers of Americana Music by Craig Harris and The Band FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Fathers of Americana. The Harris book grabbed me early with its reference to If I Had a Hammer, originally The Hammer Song by The Weavers on the Hootenanny label (a 78 rpm recording I once owned). The FAQ chapter on clubs connected to The Band – or Ronnie Hawkins, actually – took me down memory lane of Toronto’s Le Coq d’Or, Warwick Hotel, Friar’s Tavern, Edison Hotel, Steele’s Tavern (yep, I heard Gordon Lightfoot there), Embassy Club, and Hamilton’s Golden Rail and Grange Tavern (there was one other where Hamilton Place was later built – name???). Both books are good reads full of information and certainly make one appreciate The Band even more.
8. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (from 1974 and now revised and reissued in 1987) by film critic Molly Haskell takes an encyclopedic, feminist, acutely perceptive, insightfully critical, and ground-breaking look at the images of woman in film right from cinema’s beginnings. Haskell has a discerning mind and an evocative and razor-sharp writing style to match, so her take on women in cinema is always thought-provoking and challenging as she explores, say, the three types of women characters who appear in the woman’s film – the extraordinary woman, the ordinary woman, and ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary – and considers factors in a film woman’s life like the sacrifices she must make or the afflictions she endures or the choices on her plate or competition with other women. We rethink a great deal because of Haskell, say, about the misrepresentation of Doris Day as a professional virgin. Haskell is right on about Jeanne Moreau, Ingmar Bergman, Catherine Deneuve, and Francois Truffaut who “cannot, does not. lead innocence over the divide into experience.” Much here for both women and men to think about.
I also feel much appreciation for these bedside reads-in-waiting which I’ve been dipping into and, even at this early stage, am much taken by and craving time to further continue reading them:
9.Fighting Theory: Avita Ronell in Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle in which the former, considered by some “one of the most productive, established, and shrewd literary and cultural theorists of our time” displays a compelling ability to think and think about thinking at one go, to run simultaneous lines of thought with all sorts of references brought forth, and a compelling ability with surprising and fresh observations like “French theory exists first of all as a product of exportation from France; cheese, wine, things connected with pleasure, or ‘French kissing’…..The label French connotes pornography, or at least excessive exploration, disordered morality.” I enjoy her recall of meetings with German scholars who criticized her thus: “she’s spoiling our fun…she sees problems in the texts, everything becomes problematic with her.” But then, thinking seems to be a crime in our culture, as it used to be a sin in religion. In any case, this is a book for slow reading of its interweaving concepts and references (Heiddeger, Derrida, and and) and much ensuing thought.
10.No doubt you have often wondered, “What is the relationship between performance and recording? How are modern audiences affected by the trends set in motion by the recording era? What is the impact of recordings on the lives of musicians?” Happily, Robert Philip – a lecturer, music critic, broadcaster, writer, and performer – has also had these questions in mind and he breaks new historical and aesthetic ground in his Performing Music in the Age of Recording. Often we can only piece together a hypothetical take on the styles of Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, and everyone else in the 19th century, but Philip makes such exploration a music-lover’s adventure, especially since we might not have recordings of a composer playing but we do have a student of a student of the composer in question on old 78s. And to think that Philip’s idea of doing research by listening was first met with academic disdain!
11.Yasujiro Ozu is considered by the Japanese to be “the most Japanese of all their directors” says Donald Ritchie in his full-length critical work on the director, Ozu, has its sections titled Introduction, Script, Shooting, Editing, Conclusion, plus a very detailed Biographical Filmography. I’ve been under Ozu’s spell for a long time via Criterion Collection prints of his late in career but sometimes very early in career films, been under the spell of one of his stars, the mysteriously radiant Setsuko Hara (even bought a book of her film photographs from Japan and, yep, it was in Japanese). But it’s hard not to treasure Ozu’s ability to stress subtly the profundities of day to day life, to present light brush stroke insights into human psychology and behavior, to imply so much by nuance. Ozu loved his sake, lots of it especially when working on shooting scripts, and, unmarried, he lived with his mother until her death, and he shows us so much about people and about ourselves with his usually knee-high camera angle and loads of spiritual and directorial artistry that we slowly come to understand.
12. Women Who Read Are Dangerous by Stefan Bollman contains this passage: “Reading now meant identifying with the emotions of another as expressed on paper, and thereby exploring and expanding the horizons of one’s emotional potential.” In other words, women who enter the worlds of worthy authors, enter with their imaginations and minds beyond the immediate control of the patriarchal cultures in which they live. They can learn more of life in the world and thumb a ride on the trajectories of their independent thoughts. Each painting in this beautiful collection of often new discoveries faces a sympathetic and often poetic description, but what often strikes the reader is the intense concentration and unviolated privacy of the depicted reader. Each painting is a world unto itself and we must give of ourselves to enter it.
13. Another essential book on Shakespeare? I used to have six or seven such books which felt fresh with each re-connection, and I’m adding This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith to that list of reference pleasures. How can one resist a book that begins, in the Introduction, with “Lots of what we trot out about Shakespeare…? blah blah blah is just not true, and just not important.” Whatever your take on Shakespeare, this book will challenge it and enlighten you with fresh perspectives on his plays. After reading Smith on Coriolanus, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, I already reread the sixteen page chapter on Coriolanus again, just to enjoy her inventive and informed perspective, her seductively fresh and undeniable writing style, her passionate commitment to Shakespeare as a master of theatricality and theatrical meanings, and her ability to communicate and celebrate the playwright’s “gappy” quality. Smith maintains “Gappiness is Shakespeare’s dominant and defining characteristic. And ambiguity is the oxygen of these works…”