RECOMMENDED BOOKS 32 plus 27
These are some of the books I’ve read or re-read or have kept dipping into over the last few years. The few I’ve disliked shall remain absent and anonymous, but the titles in the following two lists have so very much to offer, that I ask you to check them out.
The 27 books in LIST #2 include comments about them from my previous blogs. For the 32 books in LIST #1, about which I have no comments for now, I suggest you Google them and read about them until you feel you cannot live without them.
LIST # 1
1–Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England by Richard Beard
2–Piano Notes by Charles Rosen
3–Encounter by Milam Kundera
4–Venice by Marie-Jose Gransard
5–Solitude by Anthony Storr
6–Felice by Georges Simenon
7–The Blue Room by Georges Simenon
8–A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories by Georges Simenon
9–The Rough Guide to Punk by Al Spicer
10–Hollywood Lesbians: From Garbo to Foster by Boze Hadleigh
11–The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide by Anthony Tommasini
12–Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer
13–Legendary Voices Volumes 1 & 2 by Nigel Douglas
14-The Art of Reading: An Illustrated History of Books in Print by Jamie Camplin & Maria Ranauro
15-Carringtons Letters, Dora Carrington: Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships Edited by Anne Chisholm
16-The Globe Guide to Shakespeare: The Plays, The Productions, The Life
17-The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
18-A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
19-The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing
20- Love Letters Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
21-The Seagull Anton Chekhov Translated by Nelson, Pevear, Volokhonsky
22- Eminent Victorians: The Illustrated Edition by Lytton Strachey
23-Six Poets Hardy to Larkin: An Anthology by Alan Bennett
24- The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valery
25-Poirot and Me by David Suchet
26-The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems
27-The Complete Poems of Anne Akhmatova trans by Judith Hemschemeyer
28-Music in Art by Ausoni
29-Artists’ Techniques and Materials by Antonella Fuga
30-Love and the Erotic in Art by Stefano Zuffi
31-The Complete Kobzar: The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko trans Peter Fedynsky
32-W. H. Auden: Selected Poems
LIST #2
1- If You Should Fail by Joe Moran
2-Casablanca: Script and Legend
3-Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir by Eddie Mueller
4-The Story of Women and Art
5-Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister
6-Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine
7-Fighting Theory: Avital Ronell in Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle. Translated by Catherine Porter
8-The Films of Fay Wray by Roy Kinnard and Tony Crnkovich
9-Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood by Mike Lasalle
10-Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year Study by Kurt Andersen
11-Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel by Allan R. Ellenberger
12-Early Recordings and Musical Style; changing tastes in instrumental performance 1900-1950 by Robert Philip
13-Beethoven’s Conversation Books Volume 1 Nos. 1 To 8 (February to March 1820 Edited and Translated by Theodore Albrecht
14-The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
15-The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition Translated with Commentary by Peter Green
16-Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville
17-Peggy to her Playwrights: The Letters of Margaret Ramsey, Play Agent’ with an Introduction by Simon Callow
18-Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America’ Barbara Ehrenreich
19-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution
20-The Band: Pioneers of Americana Music by Craig Harris and The Band FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Fathers of Americana.
21-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
22-Women Who Read Are Dangerous by Stefan Bollman
23-Yasujiro Ozu by Donald Ritchie
24-This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith
25-The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide, published by Backbeat Books, Yanow
26-Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers 1800-1900,
27-University of Toronto: An Architectural Tour Larry Wayne Richards’
1-IF YOU SHOULD FAIL BY JOE MORAN: We live and we fail, repeatedly, over and over, endlessly. Why? Because we are alive, because we are human. Of course, you can’t tell this to the folks at McMaster University near my home, since they promise, blank at heart and thus blanketly, the achievement of excellence to all who enter here (thank you, Dante, for “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – but that was another kind of hell). Moran eschews the automatic, empty-souled, and out-of-touch, cowardly “positive thinking” of our time and prefers our looking into the mirror, where fourth-placed Olympians and Leonard da Vinci (yes, even the master reconsidered as a failure) also dwell. One feels a new beauty to one’s fucked-up life while reading Moran’s hard-hitting but insightful, provocative, and very kind book.
2-CASABLANCA: SCRIPT AND LEGEND: Certainly, there are six essays included here by the likes of Roger Ebert and Umberto Eco, but it’s an especial pleasure to read the truly classic film’s script and mutter the lines under one’s breath as one’s memory and imagination work side by side, with the help of “25 classic stills” included in the book, to become Bogie, or Ilsa if you will, and bring the film to life again for the thousandth time.
3-DARK CITY: THE LOST WORLD OF FILM NOIR: Eddie Muller’s now “Revised and Expanded Edition” appears on glossy paper with sharply-focused photos throughout, so the book is both a visual and tactile delight that one holds respectfully but lovingly in one’s hands. Muller, who hosts TCM’s weekly Noir Alley, is encyclopedic in his references and here he lives and breathes the idiom with an infectious writing style that sends us all, unselfconsciously, back to the forties and fifties. This is underbelly of America stuff, stylishly done, and very irresistible, whether you own a trench coat or not.
4-THE STORY OF WOMEN AND ART: If you want to explore the hollow, pretentious, cowardly, self-centred, artificial, destructive, stifling, unsportsmanlike, clueless, selfish, jealous, self-limiting, phony, spiritually-vacant, culture-killing, and pathetic (etc,etc.etc.) dominance of patriarchy in our culture, two invigoratingly passionate and scholarly-based series from historian Amanda Vickery are essential viewing: “The Story of Women and Power” and “The Story of Women and Art,” both highly-recommended, will surprise you at every turn, inform you richly, make you angry in your heart, fill you with admiring respect, and inspire you in ways you didn’t yet know about.
5-CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX By Kate Lister This endlessly informative, perkily and energetically written, sometimes humorous and always challenging book ends with the following: “We must talk about consent, pleasure, masturbation, pornography, love, relationships and our own bodies. Because the only way we will dispel shame is to drag sex out in the open and have a good long look at it. History has shown us how damaging shaming sexual practices. in their myriad forms, can be. Let’s learn the lesson.”
Chapter titles include A History of the Cunt, A History of Virginity Tests, Medieval Impotence Tests, Sex and Cycling, Sex Work in the Ancient World, Filthy Fannies, Hair Today Gone Tomorrow and too often one learns how medical/cultural authority has been male stupidity at its egotistical and terrified worst. Images include an “Indian gouache painting of a giant penis copulating with a female devil c. 1900” and a photo titled: “Anonymous same-sex Victorian lovers enjoy a spot of cross-dressing and mutual masturbation.” Also included is a photo with the caption: “Tart cards in a British phone box in 2004.”
6-CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS by Viv Albertine In the seventies, male-dominated, and virtuoso-worshipping rock scene in Britain, what better course for a female revolution than through a band called The Slits with a drummer called Paloma aka Palmolive, a guitarist and a bass player who knew almost nothing at first about their instruments, and a totally uninhibited lead singer aged fourteen about whom we read: “..halfway through the set she was dying for a piss, she didn’t want to leave the stage and couldn’t bear to be uncomfortable, so she just pulled down her leggings and knickers and pissed on the stage – all over the next band’s guitarist’s pedals as it happened – I was so impressed. No girl had pissed on the stage before, but Ari didn’t do it to be a rebel or to shock, it was much more subversive than that: she just needed a piss. In these times when girls are so uptight and secretive about their bodies and desperately trying to be ‘feminine’, she is a revolutionary.”
This hard-to-put-down, unflinchingly yet casually honest, uninhibited, and instinctively perceptive autobiographical account by guitarist Viv Albertine, friend of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten and tour-mate of The Clash, inspires affection and admiration as it takes us into the life of a young woman learning the ropes not only of making music but subtly of existence.
7-FIGHTING THEORY: AVITAL RONELL IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE. Translated by Catherine Porter
“According to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, democracy in America began with a violent break, one that has haunted America ever since, because this violence (as we are seeing it today) keeps returning in a ruthless or ungovernable way. … And for Nietzsche as for Mary Shelly, America is a sort of laboratory that contains and spikes monstrosity also.” Elsewhere, Ronell says, “The hatred directed against women that comes out in the Judeo-Christian is hatred directed against the impulse to know.” …. Or try this, “I try to show that idiocy, for Wordsworth, for Rilke, for Wallace Stevens and others, is poetry itself. It is the place of extreme nonknowing, or rather the site of an absence of relation to knowledge, a place of pure reflection that nevertheless has nothing to do with philosophy or cognition.”
Ronell’s scope could be daunting as could her high-speed chase and nabbing of relevancies, but it is indeed an inspiring ride that stimulates, teases, informs, and dances with the reader’s mind. Learning doesn’t need to plod if it can fly, and Ronell’s mind certainly soars, all with a sense of humour and deep human feeling. As a result, it’s time to reread some Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida and and and….and read some more Ronell. Ronell comes across as instinctively hip in pulling in her densely-populated realm of ideas, and exciting as she does so. Is this book, as it challenges on every line, intimidating? Or does Ronell with her articulation of provocative ideas and connections constantly provide a reader with a freshly-watered path of seeds for the mind.
A very fulfilling experience.
Review # 2: Fighting Theory: Avital Ronell in Conversation with Anne Avital 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 (Heidegger, Derrida, and and) and much ensuing thought.
8-THE FILMS OF FAY WRAY BY Roy Kinnard and Tony Crnkovich
I think I was first curious about actress Fay Wray because she was born on an Alberta farm and, of course, was later famously paired with King Kong in both jungle and atop the Empire State Building. It’s strange how one becomes gradually fascinated by a porcelain-skinned screen actress, one whose eyes seem often rooted in a trance as she speaks with precise early talkies diction, and I progressed in no particular order through the following:
The Wedding March of 1928 with Erich von Stroheim; The Finger Points of 1931 – and the somewhat stilted early sound-era acting shows – based upon the murder of an idealistic reporter who took on gangsters and was killed for it; The Most Dangerous Game of 1932 with Joel McRea and Fay Wray stranded on a remote island where a madman Russian count enjoys hunting human prey – it is here we first have a leggy Wray in tattered dress and wide-eyed stare of horror; the classic King Kong of 1932 with its “notorious censored scene” of ape undressing woman and Miss Wray on all cylinders with wide-wide-eyed stares and screams at many a turn (terrific photos of all included); 1934’s Once to Every Woman with Wray as “dedicated nurse Mary Fanshawe in love with, and soon disillusioned by, that cheating Dr. Preston; the 1934 crime melodrama Woman in the Dark, with its Dashiell Hammett roots; and two personal favorites – a charming comedy, The Richest Girl in the World, with costars Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea, and a suspenseful The Clairvoyant in which Wray “certainly holds her own opposite Claude Rains, one of the screen’s greatest actors.” Rains is another one I’ve been checking out.
9-COMPLICATED WOMEN: SEX AND POWER IN PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD by Mike LaSalle
It was indeed a “true Golden Age of women’s films” from 1929 to 1934, and we are told why: “Between 1929 and 1934, women in American film were modern! They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers, and, in general, acted the way many think women acted after 1968…. Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties ‘good or bad – sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along and blasted away these stereotypes. Garbo turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale. Meanwhile, Norma Shearer succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she’d never been: the bedroom. Garbo and Shearer took the stereotypes and made them complicated.”
Of course, these two ladies were not alone – their companions soon included, to name only several, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West – but then the “Production Code became law in Hollywood,” vigorously propelled by Joseph Breen, an avid Catholic, political reactionary, and anti-Semite who wrote, “These damn Jews are a dirty filthy lot.” In other words, Breen pulled real life and creativity, with much help, up the ass of right-wing America and the Catholic church. As a result, films in Hollywood were bound and gagged for three decades to follow. This too is a very important book.
10-FANTASYLAND: HOW AMERICA WENT HAYWIRE, A 500-YEAR STUDY by Kurt Andersen
Okay, let’s do Trump first. Author Kurt Anderson, co-founder in 1986 and, for seven years editor, of Spy magazine recalls the following concerning Donald Trump: “we devoted dozens of pages exposing and satirizing his lies, brutishness, egomania, and absurdity. Now everybody knows what we knew then. It was kind of providential that he came along just as we were creating a magazine to chronicle America’s rich and powerful jerks…. Trump’s reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed…Among the many shocking things about Trump is his irreligiosity – that our Christian party chose the candidate who was the least Christian of the lot, and that white evangelicals nonetheless approve of President Trump overwhelmingly.”
In this context in which a major country’s leader is a liar, cowardly bully, and a ridiculous and egomaniacal ass, he has, according to perverted logic, a great number of followers. They too live a reality-denying and fantasy existence “as the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe what you want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.”
This brilliantly conceived and realized book is informative, mind-opening, keenly insightful, and gripping in its detailed and intriguing narrative. It is also disturbing as hell, and after each dip into the text I need a break from this unrelenting account of a fucked-up country whose founding dreams were made of Puritanical severity, whose exploratory impetus was out and out greed, whose nobility of heart was too often racist and sexist suppression, and whose rugged individualism was self-centred and immature inability to face life as it is without hypocrisy. I’ve personally known, admired, loved even, a number of Americans who were and are special human beings. They despair of Trump, and his America, as much as the rest of us – and despair of his followers.
11-MIRIAM HOPKINS: LIFE AND FILMS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL by Allan R. Ellenberger
What is it about the great actresses who emerged in the thirties? A subtle feminine grandeur? A confidence of being that imbued every performance with solid but unforced presence? A blend of individual human personality and complex technical smarts that shaped every character with distinct qualities? A long-lasting impact because we can’t imagine their performances done any other way? A knack for greatness in the art of acting? The mystery of everyday womanhood?
Here are the films of Miriam Hopkins I have watched from one to ten times already and will again watch again any time anywhere. Take the dinner scene of Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise directed with a polished sense of sexual fun and European sophistication for adults by Ernest Lubitsch – she pickpockets his watch, he her garter, and both delight in the game, and so do we. Or watch the two films in which Hopkins and her archrival Bette Davis star together – Old Acquaintance and The Old Maid – and compare how two theatrical presences emerge and hold their ground, each in competition with the other. In the former film, Davis gets to shake Hopkins quite violently and no doubt quite happily so– it’s in the script. Yet in Men Are Not Gods, Hopkins is quite touching in her compassion for an actress who is pregnant and the actor, her husband, with whom Hopkins is in love.
Or what about the two men and Hopkins of Design for Living and her believably casual final resolution – why not have both? Hopkins is quite at home in The Heiress among de Haviland, Clift and Richardson and gut-wrenching during and after the rape in The Story of Temple Drake. Do you know a sexier moment in film than when Hopkins as the “sluttish” Champaigne Ivy sits naked and sheet-covered on a bed and dangling her naked leg to tempt Dr Jekyll to “come back soon?”
Perhaps Hopkins was “one of the most difficult stars in Hollywood” but she was also gifted and admirably gutsy in taking charge of her film and stage careers. She had intellectuals Dreiser, Parker, and Stein as friends and had “a close and enduring friendship with Tennessee Williams.” In The Richest Girl in the World, the scene where Hopkins realizes she is coming to love Joel McCrea is a lesson in reaction acting with Hopkins doing a whole palette of expressions – I’ve watched this scene several dozen times. And I recommend this book about an underrated and overlooked major actress.
12-EARLY RECORDINGS AND MUSICAL STYLE; changing tastes in instrumental performance 1900-1950 by Robert Philip
Author Robert Philip spells out his purpose at the outset: “Recordings show how performance has gradually changed from the early twentieth century to our own time”. and we can witness how “performing styles can be seen as remnants of nineteenth century style.” “They demonstrate how the practices of the late twentieth century, including those we take entirely for granted, have evolved. The greatest value of this is that it forces us to question unspoken assumptions about modern taste, and about the ways in which we use it to justify our interpretations of earlier performance practice.”
The recordings of the early twentieth century are the link between two eras and they provide a “valuable key to understanding both the development of modern performance practice, and the practices of earlier centuries,” Philip also points out. One of the themes running through this book is that “musicians do not necessarily do what they say” … “and that in many cases it would be impossible to deduce everyday features of performance without the recordings” Philip takes us through quite detailed comparisons and discussions in chapters titled, for example, Flexibility of Tempo, String Vibrato, Orchestral Portamento, Tempo Rubato, and Long and Short Notes.
Be warned that you’ll inevitably compile a list of performances you have to hear, really hear. I am so tempted by this passage: “On recordings, the contrast between the old and the new school is very vivid. Sometimes the two styles can be heard side by side, for example in the famous recording of J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins made in 1915 by Kreisler and Zimbalist. This shows very clearly the difference between Kreisler’s continuous vibrato, which was unusual at that date, and Zimbalist’s traditional, more sparing use of it…”
Review # 2- 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!
13-BEETHOVEN’S CONVERSATION BOOKS VOLUME 1 NOS. 1 TO 8 (FEBRUARY TO MARCH 1820 Edited and Translated by Theodore Albrecht
Beethoven lovers rejoice! A few months ago, this announcement grabbed my attention: “A complete new edition of Beethoven’s conversation books, now translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Covering a period associated with the revolutionary style of what we call “late Beethoven”, these often lively and compelling conversations are now finally accessible in English for the scholar and Beethoven-lover.”
Beethoven had increasing deafness from around 1798 and by 1818, he’d begun “carrying blank booklets with him, for his acquaintances to jot their sides of conversations, while he answered aloud. Often, he himself used the pocket-sized booklets to make shopping lists and other reminders, including occasional early sketches for his compositions. Today, 139 of these booklets survive, covering the years 1818 up to the composer’s death in 1827 and including such topics as music, history, politics, art, literature, theatre, religion, and education as perceived on a day-to-day basis in post-Napoleonic Europe.”
I’m now reading “February 1818 to March 1820” which means having a huge number of “new footnotes exclusive to this edition and brand-new introductions” in support of comments written by a variety of individuals who chatted and dined and drank with Beethoven. We don’t learn much of Beethoven’s own thinking, since the books usually contain questions and responses of Beethoven’s company at the time and not Beethoven’s own verbal comments and responses.
The editor has much to deal with, from, say, the self-serving forging of entries of Schindler, Beethoven’s occasional friend/secretary, to even the changing of numbering system on Vienna’s streets, to passing indications – perhaps – of Beethoven’s being commissioned to compose the Missa Solemnis. Let’s face it, these books, chaotic and mysterious as they can be on each page, do suggest fascinating aspects of the day-to-day life of a great composer. What did Beethoven say to evoke a specific comment, one often wonders, and one is gradually drawn, in countless fragments of conversation, into the world of a great creative spirit and mind.
14-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.
15- 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?
16-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!
17-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.
18-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.
19-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.
20-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.
21-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.
22-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.
23-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.
24-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…”
25-SCOTT YANOW has, for over thirty years, written for every key jazz magazine around, from DownBeat to Coda, and I’ve long heeded his reviews in the All Music Guide to Jazz. He is thoroughly-brewed in both his love and knowledge of jazz; he is balanced, giving but firm, and engagingly passionate in his assessments; he has a knack for placing crucial historical and biographical facts; and yes, he is a pleasure to read. In his appropriately titled THE JAZZ SINGERS: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE, published by Backbeat Books, Yanow provides profiles of over 500 vocalists in the idiom from the likes of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton up to the freshly-minted breed of today that includes Diana Krall and Cassandra Wilson. You’ll find here many lesser known but worthy vocalists, recommended recordings, often websites of the singers, and chapters titled “198 Other Jazz Singers of Today,”55 Others Who Have Also Sung Jazz,” “30 Jazz Vocal Groups,” and a listing of suggested DVDs. One reason, I’ll read and re-read this Guide is for a fresh take on the singers; for example, I’ve known swing and classic jazz singer Alex Pangman for some years and still learned new stuff from Yanow’s entry on Alex.
26-SHAKESPEARE FOR THE PEOPLE: WORKING-CLASS READERS 1800-1900, published by Cambridge University Press, is a compelling study that is rich with humanity, partly because author Andrew Murphy uses as his resource more than a hundred fascinating autobiographical texts, from the era, in either published and manuscript form. Thus, we discover the profound connection between bard and working-class readership, with special focus upon radical readers “for whom Shakespeare’s work had a special political resonance.” We also learn how access to cheaper editions and public elementary education in Britain developed over the nineteenth century and how, in time, Shakespeare became “annexed” by an academic elite while the working class also turned instead to “mass-circulation newspapers or fiction.” We meet numerous individuals in this intriguing study, like Betsy Cadwaladyr who worked as a servant, ship steward, and nurse in the Crimean War with Florence Nightingale, all the while a diligent reader –and actor- of Shakespeare.
27-Because I did my M.A. at U of T, even before some of the buildings discussed herein were built, LARRY WAYNE RICHARDS’ handsomely produced UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: AN ARCHITECTURAL TOUR from Princeton Architectural Press brings many memories of decades ago to vivid recollection, especially because Tom Arban’s stunning photographs are both bold and mysterious at one time and Richards’ text well serves both historical and guidebook ends. More than 170 buildings from all three campuses –St. George, Scarborough, and Mississauga- are featured, and one can read the background of, say, University College of 1858, Hart House of 1919, Massey College of 1963, and even the Royal Ontario Museum with photographs from both 1914 when it opened and today when it went wild on Bloor Street in architect Daniel Libeskind’s hands.
JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to others?
