Books Read - 2014

As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2014, in chronological order of completion. As usual, links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts—though this year there were very few of either. The whole year featured just 13 posts overall prior to this one (down from only 25 from last year), several of which are only excerpts, or don't reference current reading at all. So it was an exceedingly slow year blogging-wise.

Following the list are comments and observations, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.

1. The Meaning of Freedom, Angelia Y. Davis
2. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, & Komozi Woodard, eds.
3. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin
4. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, Catherine Clinton
5. Either/Or, Part I, Søren Kierkegaard (Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, trans.)
6. Glass, Irony & God, Anne Carson
7. The Black Woman: An Anthology, Toni Cade Bambara, ed.
8. Men In The Off Hours, Anne Carson
9. Plainwater, Anne Carson
10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
11. The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson
12. The Silent Crossing, Pascal Quignard (Chris Turner, trans.)
13. Highway 61 Revisited, Mark Polizzotti
14. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, W.E.B. Du Bois
15. The Hamlet, William Faulkner
16. The Wave, Evelyn Scott
17. On Strike Against God, Joanna Russ
18. Once Upon A Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan, Ian Bell
19. Gargantua & Pantagruel, Rabelais (J.M. Cohen, trans.)
20. The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee
21. Odd Number, Gilbert Sorrentino
22. Blues People, LeRoi Jones
23. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James, ed.
24. The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delany
25. My Struggle, Book Three, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
26. Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet (Barbara Bray, trans.)
27. "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, David M. Oshinsky
28. Generosity, Richard Powers
29. Black Feminist Thought (Updated 2nd Edition), Patricia Hill Collins
30. Strangers in the Universe, Clifford D. Simak
31. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
32. Authority, Jeff VanderMeer
33. Hotel Andromeda, Gabriel Josipovici
34. Understanding Waldorf Education, Jack Petrash
35. Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus
36. Wars I Have Seen, Gertrude Stein
37. Report From Part One, Gwendolyn Brooks
38. Civil Wars, June Jordan
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
40. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Percival Everett
41. American Desert, Percival Everett
42. Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer
43. Trouble on Triton, Samuel R. Delany
44. Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, June Jordan
45. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
46. Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks (re-read)
47. Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, June Jordan
48. Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston
49. Erasure, Percival Everett
50. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
(George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds.)
51. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
52. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
53. Home, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
54. What Ever Happened To Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)
55. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
56. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller (Ruth Ward, trans.)

Some statistics
Number of which substantial portions were read last year: 3
Number that are re-reads: 4
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 22
Number of books that were borrowed from friends: 7
Number of books read on the Kindle: 1 (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
Number of books written by men: 31
Number of different men represented: 24
Number of books written by women: 25
Number of different women represented: 16 (Note: two books, Want to Start a Revolution? & The Black Woman, are multi-author collections; the former is primarily woman writers, the latter entirely woman writers)
Number of books by American authors: 40
Number of American authors: 25
Number of books by black American authors: 22
Number of black American authors: 13
Number of black American women: 8 (13 books)
Number of black American men: 5 (9 books)
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 9
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 4
Number of non-American, English-language authors of color: 0
Number of books in translation: 7 (including Beckett's Letters)
Number of authors of books in translation: 7
Number of translated books by woman authors: 1 (Miller)
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 4 (German, French, Norwegian, Danish)
Most represented foreign language: French (4: Rabelais, Quignard, Genet, Beckett)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners:3 (Beckett, Coetzee, Faulkner)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 1 (Sorrentino's Odd Number is contained in Pack of Lies)
Number of other Dalkey books: 0

Number of novels: 22
Number of collections of short stories: 1 (Simak)
Number of books of poetry: 4 (to the extent that Carson's books can so easily be thus categorized)
Number that are plays or written for stage: 0
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 7
Number of science fiction books written by women: 1

Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 10
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 1
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 6
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 18
Number about pop music: 4
Number about Bob Dylan: 4
Number about science: 0
Number explicitly feminist or about feminism: 3
Number about parenting or education: 2
Number that are anthropology: 0

Number of books from before 1800: 1 (Rabelais!)
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 2 (Jacobs, Kierkegaard)
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915 to 1940: 4 (Scott, DuBois, Hurston's Their Eyes, Faulkner)
Number of books from 1941 to 1950: 2 (Hurston's Dirt Tracks, Stein)
Number of books from 1951 to 1960: 3
Number of books from 1961 to 1970: 5
Number of books from 1971 to 1980: 4
Number of books from 1981 to 1990: 4
Number of books from 1991 to 1999: 5
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 16
Number of books from 2011 to 2014: 10 

Comments & Observations:
I began this year in media res with two books, Angela Davis' The Meaning of Freedom and the multi-author essay collection, Want to Start a Revolution? The latter I managed to write about, at least a little bit, but I was remiss in not writing about the former, as I was in not writing about so much of my reading this year. Davis' book, which as a collection of speeches and other talks might seem minor when compared to her Autobiography or Women, Race, and Class, is in fact very much worth reading. Some of the questions she raises in her talks, some of the links made, as for example between prisons and slavery, led to my decision to make (American) slavery and its aftermath and legacy (some admittedly very broad ideas that I mean very broadly) a special focus in my reading going forward. In this, history, memoir, slave narrative, biography, and so on, served (and will serve) as my intentional reading choices.

I'd long felt I wanted to, but several of Davis' remarks led me to actually take the time to read DuBois' long but simply essential history, Black Reconstruction. I had so much I thought I'd wanted to say about that book, but never could bring myself to begin a real essay. Suffice it to say here that the current American political situation makes a lot more depressing sense after reading Black Reconstruction than it did before. Alongside this, I was also reading the Davis Reader, which has many excellent essays. Fascinated by what she said in one of them about the convict lease system (and the failure of Frederick Douglass and, to a lesser extent DuBois, to say anything about this post-Reconstruction atrocity), I read David Oshinsky's "Worse Than Slavery". This is a pretty good book, but the title is misleading and I have to think intentionally provocative. The title references what someone said about the convict lease system, but the book itself is not primarily about the convict lease system, rather the convict lease system is one element on the way to what is really the main topic, the Parchman Farm prison labor system (still important and very bad, but no one seemed to confuse it with slavery). Also, the book focuses a little too much on 'colorful characters', and as such gives off a whiff of 'narrative non-fiction', a book written by someone who flits from topic to topic, writing well-written books. Whereas something like the convict lease system, and prison labor in general, I think, would benefit greatly from both the urgency and theoretical base someone like Davis would bring to it.

Beyond Du Bois' history, I read Catherine Clinton's useful biography of Harriet Tubman and, finally, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The death of Amiri Baraka, embarrassingly, led me to finally read the excellent Blues People (published when he was known as LeRoi Jones, and which I've owned a copy of for probably 20 years without reading), which also dovetailed nicely with one of the Davis Reader essays. This made me want to read more Jones/Baraka, which led me to look for the Reader I thought I had, but I fear that this was one of the books I discarded in my big purge. One of the few regrets on that front, but a regret it is. A reference by Davis to Jean Genet's comments about the Black Panthers in his Prisoner of Love had me digging that book out, not least because I had no memory of the Black Panthers having been in it when I'd read the first half of Prisoner of Love about ten years ago. I'd thought the memoir excellent at that time, yet still never returned to its second half. What I did this time was look up all references to the Black Panthers, read those, then read the rest of the book from where I'd left off. [Relevant update: I should definitely say here that the book is a primarily a memoir of Genet's time spent with Palestinian rebels in the early 1970s.]

Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought was unfortunately a bit of a slog for me, which is too bad because I think it's an important book. After that, I read multiple books each by Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Zora Neale Hurston. Highlights in this group were Brooks' intriguing sort of memoir Report From Part One, Jordan's fantastic essay collection Civil Wars, and Hurston's classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (it deserves its reputation) and fascinating autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. And I finally had some success with James Baldwin's essays, reading both Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. About half of Notes, especially, is composed of utterly crucial essays that really every American should read.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is the first fiction I've mentioned in these notes, perhaps surprisingly. In fact, it took four months before I read any fiction at all this year, so it's fitting. While in the midst of Black Reconstruction, I was packing books for a move, and came across Faulkner's The Hamlet, the only Faulkner book I own that I had not yet read. I set it aside to read once I'd finished the Du Bois. Same was true of Evelyn Scott's The Wave. Interestingly, The Hamlet concerns poor whites in Reconstruction Mississippi (or probably just post-Reconstruction), and The Wave is Scott's big 'modernist' (so the back copy says) Civil War novel - and it's in many ways quite brilliant. Reading at that time two novels by Southern white writers about the Civil War period and its aftermath is not how I would have designed it, honestly; this was one of those accidents of history, as it were: I had them on hand, so they moved to the top of the pile.

Prior to said move in April, I'd noticed our then-housemate's copy of Anne Carson's Glass, Irony & God and quickly read it. I loved it. This led to a brief Carson focus, in which I read four of her poetry-cum-essay collections. I'd've read more, probably, but ran through my friend's copies, moved, then got re-focused on other things. I expect to return to Carson at some point, perhaps soon. That was about the only 'poetry' I read in 2014, though as usual, I did sample stray pages from the likes of Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, etc. This doesn't really belong here, but here it goes: I read another Gertrude Stein book, her strange and wonderful World War II memoir, Wars I Have Seen. Ditto Pascal Quignard's again more or less uncategorizable book The Silent Crossing - uncategorizable except that it's much like his other book, The Roving Shadows, which readers will recall that I read last year. After fully embracing the latter when I read it, I had many reservations about The Silent Crossing. I'd hoped to pull them together for a blog post, and may still. But in brief, I had several problems with the general theme this time round.

Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of - or at least began in earnest - without yet completing by the year's end:

The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Gerald Horne
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, Saidiya Hartman
Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, Antero Pietila
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (this one just missed the cutoff, alas, and will in short-order be the first book completed for 2015)

Books I'd read substantial portions of in 2013 and had fully expected to return to in 2014 but in fact never did: 

Feminisms, Warhol and Price Herndl, editors
Direct Action: An Ethnography, David Graeber
Praeterita, John Ruskin
Selected Prose, 1909-1965, Ezra Pound

Back to fiction, I again read a clutch of science fiction novels, including Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which I liked, two more knotty books from Samuel R. Delany, and Jeff VanderMeer's much ballyhooed 2014 Southern Reach trilogy (Ethan more or less captured how I felt about the latter, despite being generally entertained). Off science fiction, I returned to old friend Gilbert Sorrentino, for his novel Odd Number, the first of what is now the Pack of Lies pseudo-trilogy. I tried to dive right into the second novel, Rose Theatre, but found it more or less unreadable at the time. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus was a strange experience, seeming weirdly inconsequential when placed aside his recent books. A trip to the library for another purpose had me picking up Richard Powers' Generosity. Powers was once my favorite novelist, which seems odd saying now. I used to snap his novels up immediately upon publication, but I'd passed on this one (as well as his new one, Orfeo, as yet). It was an enjoyable read. I'd had some interesting thoughts about it at the time, which have all more or less dissipated. At a separate library visit, my eye caught a recent novel by Percival Everett, a writer I'd long been curious about, but for some reason been somewhat skeptical of. I ended up reading three of his novels, beginning with the one that caught my eye. This one, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I thought was excellent, so I immediately and eagerly dove into American Desert from 2004, which was quite the opposite. Though it's not without its entertaining moments, I frankly disliked it; it seemed utterly pointless, and the prose perfunctory. It was then with less enthusiasm that I later tried the novel he's best known for, Erasure, but thankfully this one is much better. Moving along, readers will remember my re-reads of Marilynne Robinson's excellent novels Gilead and Home, both of which I managed to blog about.

I shouldn't forget that I finished Gargantua & Pantagruel and read Part I of Either/Or. Thoughts perhaps worthy of sharing on each remain as yet languishing in sketchy draft form. And since Rabelais and Kierkegaard are both at least in part associated in my mind with this blog's patron saint, Gabriel Josipovici, now seems a good place to mention that I read his latest novel Hotel Andromeda, which was up to his usual high standards, and re-read his wonderful What Ever Happened to Modernism? And there was volume III of Knausgaard's My Struggle, known elsewhere as "Boyhood Island". As with the first two volumes, I fairly consumed it, reading it very quickly, and found much to appreciate, but the urgency of the first volume seems to be gone.

Finally, I read four books about the music and/or life of Bob Dylan. First came Clinton Heylin's very informative, and for that useful and interesting, but often obnoxious and overall ploddingly written biography, Behind the Shades Revisited. Mark Polizzotti's enjoyable entry in the 33 1/3 series, about the great album Highway 61 Revisited, is much better. As was the first part of Ian Bell's two-part biography, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan. Bell can be repetitive, but his approach is much more exploratory and curious than Heylin's, and his ideas more interesting, which makes for a more enjoyable reading experience no less than does his superior prose. All of this, and my ongoing full-blown Dylan obsession, led me to read a book I'd honestly mocked the existence of when it was first published, Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone, which in the event I found to be very much a typical good Greil Marcus book, which is to say generally enjoyable, and by turns fascinating and ridiculous.

[Update: I realized, after posting this earlier, that I didn't really characterize my reading year, nor name specific favorites. I don't need to do either, of course, but I felt I wanted to. If I had to name, say, five favorite books of the year (not including re-reads), I think I'd go with Black Reconstruction;  Glass, Irony & God; Civil Wars; The Meaning of Freedom; and about half of Notes of a Native Son (that is, the good stuff in it is so good as to completely outweigh the not as good stuff). Overall it was a bit of a strange year. Looking back, it feels very choppy. I felt primarily focused on black writers and black history and experience, yet the stats don't bear that out. Or at least not in any straightforward way. Throughout the year, there were many marvelous pages in books that were frequently slogs. Not to mention that I was often wading through books in tired circumstances. This is not new either. Or books I found fascinating, or wholly engaging, but that I would have a hard time claiming as personal favorites. I don't know. This paragraph is pointless.]

And with that, I'll close here. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading. See you next year.

Notes on re-reading Home

After re-reading Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, I have meanwhile also re-read her Home, the second novel of what has, with the publication this year of Lila, turned out to be a trilogy of sorts. And I'm reminded of a few other points. First, before even beginning to re-read Home, I remembered the sinking feeling I'd had when I began reading it the first time. Gilead, as noted, takes the form of an elderly preacher's notebook, intended to be read by his now seven year-old son when he is an adult; thus it is a document that as such seems to justify its own existence. Home, on the other hand, is a third person narrative primarily from the point of view of one of the barely mentioned characters in Gilead. Gilead is open, whereas Home appeared at first glance to be . . . just another novel. Having now finished my re-read of it as well, the novel definitely overcomes my initial apprehension, though I can see how it would be taken, still, for just another novel, albeit a very good one. But I think it's more than that.

Though I don't plan a major treatment here, I find it useful to think of these books in the terms used by Josipovici in his essay "The Bible Open and Closed", which can be found in his collection, The Singer on the Shore (and which I previously wrote about here). He says in that essay that

we in our culture have a problem with narrative. What does it mean? we ask. What is the guy trying to say? And if the book in question is a sacred text the problems grow even more acute. For then it is even more important to understand clearly what it is saying, since our very lives may depend upon it. We need to feel we are dealing with a text that is closed, in the sense that its meaning can be clearly understood and translated into other terms; yet the Bible, like all narratives, but, as I hope to show, even more than most, is open, that is, it resists translation into other terms and asks not so much to be understood as lived with, however puzzling and ambiguous it may seem.

It is perhaps fortuitous for my purposes here that Robinson's novels are deeply concerned with religious life and even the Bible (which facts seem to put too many people off of reading, or appreciating, them), so we might well ask, what is she trying to say, what does it all mean? While Home might come across as a conventional "realist" novel, it seems to me that the narrative remains very much open. It occurs to me that this is a milder version of the argument advanced by Ethan in his recent post, discussing Agota Kristof's great sequence of novels alongside Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. The first books in each of those trilogies (The Notebook and Annihilation, respectively) are

both open wounds. But though both trilogies depart from their notebooks for a kind of "broader view" once the first volume is done with, they do so in dramatically different ways; and where in the remainder of her trilogy Kristof insists on keeping the wound open (not least by bringing out the implications of the verb "present" in my previous sentence), VanderMeer seems almost frantic in his rush to patch the wound up — without regard for what "the condition for a cure" might be.

I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to use the word wound to describe Gilead, but certainly it is open. And with Home, at any rate, Robinson does not seem to be "frantically rushing to patch the wound up" (not least because her books have appeared over the course of ten years, rather than all in the same year, as with VanderMeer's), or to especially be filling in the blanks of that openness. Home intersects with Gilead at an angle, and remains off-kilter from it, as far as our childish desire to have more information about certain events goes. Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize liking a novel that is really more conservative than I want to admit.

Short Note on Re-reading Gilead

This week I have re-read Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead, in part in anticipation of reading her recently published new novel, and also just because. It's a great book. Of course, I'm hardly alone in saying this. It did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize, and was, I gather, fairly widely read, for a literary novel. And yet it strikes me that the book is under-appreciated. I suspect that the religious content throws many readers. (The book takes the form of an elderly preacher writing to his now seven year-old son, words he expects the boy to read when he is an adult.) Certainly I have encountered numerous bewildered responses to the novel, readers simply unable or unwilling to process the religious material, who somehow seem to read it as some kind of tract. This is unfortunate, and baffling. Readers of this blog know that I am not a religious person, yet I have had no trouble with the religious nature of this novel. Indeed, I name it among the more important novels I have read, and I am actually saddened by the capacity people have to misread the book. It is, in many ways, what used to be called "wisdom literature", yet it is also a marvelous, and subtle, literary performance. And, it seems to me, a wholly appropriate literary response to our current situation, in the sense in which I have here attempted to channel or expand on Josipovici and others.

Noted: June Jordan

In Civil Wars, her incredible book of essays published in 1981, June Jordan wrote this in the preface contextualizing her 1978 essay, "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death", otherwise offered without comment, in light of the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and countless other recent and ongoing police/white atrocities:

            It seems to me that my whole life has been regularized by the apparently normal events of white/police violence against the Black community. Over and over and over again a child is killed by police because he is a Black boy. Sometimes it gets to the point that, when my son is around the house and I leave on an errand by myself, when I come back the first thing I do is to call, “Christopher?” I have to know: Is he all right?

            One year after the police murder of Arthur Miller [“a highly respected, Black civic leader of Bedford-Stuyvesant”] and the Hassidic assault upon Victor Rhodes [in Crown Heights, 30 to 50 Hassidic “patrols” attacked Rhodes, who was walking his girlfriend home from a party], I got the chance, through a fellowship to Yaddo, to write a full-length drama, The Issue, about freedom, police violence, and Black life. Early on, the hero of this play, Lloyd Wilson, makes this statement:

They want to keep score! (Furious and slow and clear). Look at this garbage. All the way back to 1964. Then it was that pig, in Manhattan, Lieutenant Gilligan. Shot the kid who was fooling around with a water gun. And there was Newark: Did you ever see the cover of Life magazine: Black boy bleeding to death on the street. Cops shot him through the back of the head. The kid was running with a six-pack. Of beer. Every mothafucking year they do this, three/four times, at a minimum. All you got to do is let it be Christmas or Thanksgiving or spring or summer or Monday or Sunday and they act like killers on the loose, complete with license. But we! We getting good at funerals/funeral oratory. Good at rallies. Good at speeches and quotes for the press. It’s a ritual: They murder our children. And what do we do about it? We cry real hard real loud. Then it’s over: That’s that. If I was a pig, behind all of that crying for all of that dying, I would blow away a nigga a day. Why the hell not.

            I wrote this play in June and July, 1979. In August, Brooklyn police murdered Luis Baez, shooting him sixteen times. My friends, Alexis DeVeaux and Gwendolyn
Hardwick, and I went to a Brooklyn rally held to protest the killings. After the rally, approximately one thousand demonstrators followed Reverend Herbert Daughtry on a peaceful march through the streets, chanting a people united can never be defeated. The police rioted, driving police cars into the crowds and chasing unarmed demonstrators with drawn guns. We literally crawled across the concrete sidewalks to safety

            One year later, 1980, the courts ruled that no indictment of the Hassidic suspects was possible due to “insufficient identification.” No police were indicted in the murder of Arthur Miller.

            Two months later, Miami police beat Arthur MacDuffie to death, for a traffic violation. The media seem surprised by the violence of the response of the Black community in Miami.

            Do not be surprised.

Noted: Gertrude Stein

From Wars I Have Seen (1945):

The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe, which has a great deal to do with wars and wars being what they are. It really has.

I once asked some one who should know why public servants in the army in every branch of government service did not seem to have the kind of judgment that the man in the street any man or any woman has about what is happening. Oh he answered the reason is simple, they are specialists, and to a specialist his specialty is the whole of everything and if his specialty is in good order and it generally is then everything must be succeeding. (pp. 52-53)

Fragment of a thought on the trouble with writing about Blanchot

Whenever I have attempted to write about Maurice Blanchot, I've felt the need to admit to a struggle, to confess that I'm not sure I quite understood the essay in question. I've been annoyed by this - perhaps you have too, you who have read - though maybe I should not. Part of the problem is that the very nature of Blanchot's inquiry does not allow for summary. The tendency when reading is to summarize - is it not? - to try to reduce the points to a manageable size? But Blanchot writes against reduction. He refuses reduction. He examines a text, or a figure, or a tradition, exploring it from many possible angles, rarely, it seems, settling on a particular interpretation. And his essays speak to each other, and to and with the philosophical and literary traditions, with great erudition, so that by beginning one essay, one enters into the flow of a tributary of thought, though one that doesn't necessarily lead one to any specific conclusion. But how to write about what I find there? Excerpts can be misleading, and anyway difficult to isolate.

Noted: Jean Genet

From Prisoner of Love (1986), Genet's memoir of his time spent with the Palestinians in the early 1970s (translation by Barbara Bray):

I'm not at all sure that when the Congress at Basle, after considering Argentina and Uganda, finally decided that the Jews should settle in Palestine, the choice was divinely inspired. After all, what the Jews call the Promised Land was promised first of all to one vagabond who'd walked all the way from Chaldea and another who'd come from Egypt. But the country known as the Holy Land is famous because of the events recorded in the New Testament. The Jews ought to hate it rather than love it. It gave birth to those who became their worst enemies, starting with St. Paul. Without him and Jesus, who would remember Jerusalem, Nazareth and the carpenter, Bethlehem or the Sea of  Galilee? The Gospels are full of them.

"The English Protestants knew the place from the Old Testament too."

"Have you ever had a good look at stuffed animals? The geography of the Old Testament is stuffed. Nature plays hardly any part in Jewish history. Except for the bits about the exiles. They mention Ninevah and Ur, Egypt and Sinai. But they never come alive like the Sea of Galilee, or even Golgotha." (p.282)

But you must write

Is it possible to be a writer and yet not write? Not writing, continually not writing, wouldn't you eventually have to accept that you are not a writer? Does it matter? The fact of it? Or the label? Surely not the label.

I've been quiet, for long stretches, and longer. I've had good reasons; I've had bad reasons. It bothers me. Why does it bother me, the silence? Presumably I feel some need? Some need not being met? Some need I am not meeting?

But then why do you write? -- A: I am not one of those who think with a wet quill in hand; much less one of those who abandon themselves to their passions before the open inkwell, sitting on their chair and staring at the paper. I am annoyed and ashamed of all writing; to me, writing is nature's call -- to speak of it even in simile is repugnant to me. B: But why, then, do you write? -- A: Well, my friend, I say this in confidence: until now, I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts. -- B: And why do you want to get rid of them? -- A: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I have to. -- B: Enough! Enough! (The Gay Science, Book II, section 93)  (Taken from Being In Lieu.)

I do feel this weird need to get rid of the thoughts I have, weird, I think, because I all too often don't do it anyway... and also obscurely feel that the project I've supposedly and half-assedly taken on here is somehow socially important.... why do I feel that? What do I mean by it? It bothers me even more that I'm not getting the thoughts out there, as if I'm letting them down, or time is running out on them, the ideas... why? it's not as though I feel like what I'd write could change anything of any size, expand any wider conversation, so what is it? just the need for the subjects to be taken up generally with any seriousness? As if I could impact that? Or is it not just that? It's not: they are personally important to me. The subjects matter, the writing matters. Yet the silence persists.

Last year I read volume two of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. Among other things, this volume covers his move to Sweden, falling in love and having children with his partner Linda, and the writing of his astonishing second novel, A Time for Everything. He writes about taking care of the children so Linda could attend classes. He admits to some bitterness - and it is in some of these passages that the first real whiff of misogyny creeps in. Yet he is devoted to his children, or so it seems. He writes:

. . . He looked at me and said with the natural authority that was typical of him: "But you must write, Karl Ove!"
     And when push came to shove, when a knife was at my throat, this was what mattered most.
     But why?
     Children were life, and who would turn their back on life?
     And writing, what else was it but death? Letters, what else were they but bones in a cemetery?

Who would turn their back on life? The history of writing has, in many ways, been a part of the history of men off doing things while women maintain life, and children in particular. Writing is a solitary activity. It suffers from distraction. Children are distracting! Women who have tried to write have grappled with this problem, given that they are still expected to attend to life. My attention, here at the blog, has been trained not only on certain literary matters, but on socio-political matters. I am overtly feminist in my outlook and have written about that too. I have sought to connect these matters, but have rarely been capable of much more than gestures in that direction. My sense is that they are connected anyway.

Who would turn their back on life? This question nags at me, suggests things. Not writing is not a new problem for me, nor, to be sure, is it a new subject for a post - the linked post is from 2007, folks, so I'm not trying to blame my not writing on the responsibilities of life. Far from it, in fact; it runs deeper. Yet the question still presents itself. So consider it presented.

Given that, a possible thread for future posts: consider questions of trust and play, as found in Josipovici's fiction and literary criticism, and discuss with, or alongside, storytelling and play as producing meaning for children.

"What do we want? That our children may dwell in peace."

[I read Assata Shakur's excellent autobiography, Assata, in the Spring of last year (2013). This post was begun soon thereafter, but I never got around to finishing it.]

Until very recently, I knew next to nothing about Assata Shakur. She was only brought to my attention when the FBI recently increased its bounty (from $1 million to $2 million) for her capture, and placed her on its "most wanted" list. This prompted lots of discussion online; among other things, in response to this move, an Assata Teach-In was organized (see also this one page comic, which summarizes things nicely, and this two-part - one, two - interview with her regarding her treatment upon her original capture). This was how I ended up reading her autobiography, Assata.   

The book begins with her account of the events leading to her arrest, and from there alternates between chapters about her childhood and youth, and chapters about her prison experience and legal defense. In that way it is structurally not unlike Angela Davis' own autobiography. There is indeed much that could be said about Assata, but I want to talk about one aspect in particular. 

This passage appears toward the end of the book:

My mother brings my daughter to see me at the clinton correctional facility for women in new jersey, where i had been sent from alderson. I am delirious. She looks so tall. I run up to kiss her. She barely responds. She is distant and stand-offish. Pangs of guilt and sorrow fill my chest. I can see that my child is suffering. It is stupid to ask what is wrong. She is four years old, and except for these pitiful little visits—although my mother has brought her to see me every week, wherever I am, with the exception of the time I was in alderson—she has never been with her mother. I can feel something welling up in my baby. I look at my mother, my face a question mark. My mother is suffering too. I try to play. I make my arms into an elephant's trunk stalking around the visiting room jungle. It does not work. My daughter refuses to play baby elephant, or tiger, or anything. She looks at me like i am the buffoon I must look like. I try the choo-choo train routine and la, la, la song, but she is not amused. I try talking to her, but she is puffed up and sullen.

I go over and try to hug her. In a hot second she is all over me. All i can feel are these little four-year-old fists banging away at me. Every bit of her force is in those punches, they really hurt. I let her hit me until she is tired. "It's all right, " i tell her. "Let it all out." She is standing in front of me, her face contorted with anger, looking spent. She backs away and leans against the wall. "It's okay," i tell her. "Mommy understands." "You're not my mother," she screams, the tears rolling down her face. "You're not my mother and I hate you." I feel like crying too. I know she is confused about who i am. She calls me Mommy Assata and she calls my mother Mommy.

I try to pick her up. She knocks my hand away. "You can get out of here, if you want to," she screams. "You just don't want to." "No, i can't," I say weakly. "Yes you can," she accuses. "You just don't want to."

I look helplessly at my mother. Her face is choked with pain. "Tell her to try to open the bars," she says in a whisper.

"I can't open the door," i tell my daughter. "I can't get through the bars. You try and open the bars."

My daughter goes over to the barred door that leads to the visiting room. She pulls and she pushes. She yanks and she hits and she kicks the bars until she falls on the floor, a heap of exhaustion. I go over and pick her up. I hold and rock and kiss her. There is a look of resignation on her face that i can't stand. We spend the rest of the visit talking and playing quietly on the floor. When the guard says the visit is over, i cling to her for dear life. She holds her head high, and her back straight as she walks out of the prison. She waves good-bye to me, her face clouded and worried, looking like a little adult. I go back to my cage and cry until i vomit. I decide that it is time to leave.

My reaction to this passage was visceral—anger, deep sadness, despair, all of it. And having written most of the above last year, I couldn't decide what to do with it. I didn't just want to post the excerpt by itself, but I wasn't - and am still not - prepared to write at length about my reaction and the kinds of connections the passage brings to mind.

But the anger... it should be simple, but the ongoing history of white supremacy in this country makes nothing simple. That Assata Shakur's daughter should ever have been separated from her mother, that she should have believed that her mother did not want to be out of prison: these are great crimes, inexcusable crimes, all too common crimes. There has been much talk in recent weeks of reparations for slavery. It's not clear to me how a debt like that could ever be repaid. How even individual crimes, like those against Assata Shakur and her daughter, could ever be adequately atoned for.

Unsure how else to proceed, allow me to close with a quotation from Shirley Graham Du Bois, which I came across in an essay about her, by Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens, featured in the Want to Start a Revolution? collection:

"I am only one Negro mother who has seen the doors of a great hospital closed against her dying son. . . . What do we want? That our children may dwell in peace."

Not All Men

In the spirit of the Not *All* Men tumblr, I present this passage from Joanna Russ' excellent, and uncategorizable, On Strike Against God (1980):

God, had I been a liar when I'd said we ought to judge people as individuals? Of course not! I'd had a bad analyst—well, there's no guarantee. I'd had a nice, crazy, bruised husband. Well, he'd had a bad family. There's no reason to spend time with people you don't like. [...] I said to my demon that there are, after all, nice people and nasty people, and the art of life is to cultivate the former and avoid the latter. That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won't let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries' asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some.

Noted: W.E.B. Du Bois

From Du Bois' monumental and essential Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880:

The discussion which has raged round the Reconstruction legislation is of the same metaphysical stripe characterizing all fetich-worship of the Constitution. If one means by "constitutional" something provided for in that instrument or foreseen by its authors or reasonably implicit in its words, then the Reconstruction Acts were undoubtedly unconstitutional; and so, for that matter, was the Civil War. In fact, the main measure of government during 1861-1870 were "unconstitutional." The only action possibly contemplated by the authors of the Constitution was secession; that action, the constitutional fathers feared and deprecated, but their instrument did not forbid it and distinctly implied the legality of a state withdrawing from the "more perfect union."

Certainly no one could argue that the founders contemplated civil war to preserve the Union or that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Yet, unconstitutionally, the South made it a pro-slavery document and unconstitutionally the North prevented the destruction of the Union on account of slavery; and after the war revolutionary measures rebuilt what revolution had disrupted, and formed a new United States on a basis broader than the old Constitution and different from its original conception.

And why not? No more idiotic program could be laid down than to require a people to follow a written rule of government 90 years old, if that rule had been definitely broken in order to preserve the unity of government and to destroy an economic anachronism. In such a crisis legalists may insist that consistency with precedent is more important than firm and far-sighted rebuilding. But manifestly, it is not.

Notes on Want to Start a Revolution?

One of my main ongoing projects is to learn more about the experiences and contributions of black women in the United States. I've come to the general position that black women are central to - well, to any possible just future. It therefore seems extremely important to understand what black women have said and done, and are doing. To that end, I read Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, a collection of essays edited by Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard. As the editors put it in their introduction:

This volume reframes women in black radicalism by consciously not categorizing these women within one movement (whether Left, Black Power, "second-wave" feminism,  or Third World liberation movements) but tracing their work across many spaces. Bringing them together in one collection challenges the framework that has long presented the radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s in separate and distinct movements. Therefore, while it is clearly viable to organize the women's contributions based on their affiliation with the civil rights, Black Power, "second-wave" feminism, and U.S. communist movements, such a framework obscures the full breadth of their contributions to black radicalism. Rosa Parks's iconic status within the civil rights movement overshadows her lifelong radical commitment; Johnnie Tillmon's interventions in Black Power politics are often lost when viewed through the lens of welfare right activism; and national radicals such as Florynce Kennedy and Vicki Garvin drop out altogether as their varied political affiliations resist neat categorization. ...[T]his anthology intentionally resists marking these women as activists defined exclusively within any singular movement and makes visible the ways these black women radicals redefined movement politics.

For the most part, the women - and activities - discussed in the book's essays were completely (shamefully) unknown to me prior to reading. Certainly I was well aware of Rosa Parks' "iconic status", I'd heard of Shirley Chisholm and her status as the first black woman to run for president (though I didn't know anything else about her), and last year I read Assata Shakur's excellent memoir, Assata, but beyond that I couldn't tell you much. So I found the book very helpful in both teaching me things I didn't know, and pointing me toward several other books and writers. (Indeed, the book is a bibliographical goldmine.)

Favorite chapters include Theoharis' piece on Rosa Parks, which succeeded in whetting my appetite for her full-length biography, The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks. Similarly, Joy James has convinced me that Assata Shakur is even more interesting than I already thought she was from reading Assata, and I look forward to reading Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, James' book from which her essay on Shakur is adapted, as well as Shakur's own writings beyond her memoir. "We Do Whatever Becomes Necessary", Premilla Nadasen's essay on Johnnie Tillmon, Black Power, and welfare rights, touched on - yet did not pursue! - some passing comments of Tillmon's which sounded a lot to me like Wages for Housework ideas. And I was especially interested in a chapter about the Black Panther Party's Community School in Oakland, by (former Panther) Ericka Huggins and Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest. The ideas informing this school, the work that went into it, its successes - for me, this is thrilling, important stuff. But with an undercurrent of sadness and anger, for obviously the Community Schools no longer exist.

I think I found Want to Start a Revolution? most valuable in highlighting the work done - from the 1930s into the 1980s - by these women, and many others. Perhaps that sounds trivial, but I don't mean for it to, because the work is not trivial at all, it's just generally ignored, and then forgotten. Joy James writes, in her introduction to The Angela Y. Davis Reader, summarizing one of Davis' points, that

many women who devoted their lives to organizing for revolutionary, socialist society produced neither theoretical nor autobiographical literature. In the absence of such writings, their intellectual and political agency has often "disappeared" or been dismissed.

In fact, even if they have produced theoretical or autobiographical literature, as a few of the women profiled in Want to Start a Revolution? have, the work and agency of black women has still often been dismissed and denied, and, again, forgotten. We would do well to remember.

Anne Carson's "The Gender of Sound", etc.

I recently read my first Anne Carson book, 1995's Glass, Irony & God. I liked it! A lot! In particular, I loved the opening poem, "The Glass Essay", which concerns loneliness and Emily Brontë, and which among other things succeeds in making me interested in re-reading Wuthering Heights and curious about Brontë's poetry. Unexpected!

I also loved the final piece, an actual prose essay, called "The Gender of Sound". This post concerns "The Gender of Sound". The essay raised a number of connections and suggestions in my mind, and I'd like to gesture here towards some of them, without actually investigating them in much detail here. Briefly, the essay discusses some of the historical meanings invested in sounds made by women, versus those made by men. "It is," she begins, "in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God." What follows is an array of evidence from Greek and Roman literary sources on the sounds made by women, those sounds being viewed beyond the pale of civilization, animal-like, frightening, anathema, thus in need of isolation, along with some more modern commentary, including references to Margaret Thatcher, Hemingway's remarks on his break with Gertrude Stein, and Freud's silliness on "hysteria".

Of particular importance here is the Greek notion of sophrosyne:

Verbal continence is an essential feature of the masculine virtue of sophrosyne ("prudence, soundness of mind, moderation, temperance, self-control") that organizes most patriarchal thinking on ethical or emotional matters. Woman as a species is frequently said to lack the ordering principle of sophrosyne. [...] So too, ancient discussions of the virtue of sophrosyne demonstrate clearly that, where it is applied to women, this word has different definition than for men. Female sophrosyne is coextensive with female obedience to male direction and rarely means more than chastity. When it does mean more, the allusion is often to sound. A husband exhorting his wife or concubine to sophrosyne is likely to mean "Be quiet!" [...] In general the women of classical literature are a species given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound—to shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams of pain or of pleasure and eruptions of raw emotion in general. [...] When a man lets his current emotions come up to his mouth and out through his tongue he is thereby feminized... [...]

It is a fundamental assumption of these gender stereotypes that a man in his proper condition of sophrosyne should be able to dissociate himself from his own emotions and so control their sound. It is a corollary assumption that man's proper civic responsibility towards women is to control her sound for her insofar as she cannot control it herself. 

While reading this superb essay, I was immediately reminded of three other books: Elizabeth V. Spelman's Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Chris Knight's Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, and George Thomson's Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean. And when searching for posts I've written related to those books and their subjects, this post reminded me that I'd discussed Thomson's book as a way of exploring something from a collection of Paul Feyerabend's lectures, The Tyranny of Science.

In her book, Spelman doesn't really address the kind of material Carson covers, but she does interrogate certain feminist arguments that rely on Plato's and/or Aristotle's ideas about "equality", and in doing so demonstrates the deficiencies in those arguments and how they have helped lead feminism into some serious problems, both theoretical and practical, when it comes to inclusiveness. But Carson's evidence from the Greek literary sources - and the apparent anxiety about women on display in them - suggests to me that leaning on Plato or Aristotle for theoretical support when trying to make a feminist case is even more problematic than it already seemed, given the milieu in which their ideas were taking shape, in which women were expected to be uninvolved politically, unless they acted like what was expected of men.

As for the evidence from the Greeks specifically, I was struck how the attitudes towards women reflected even more ancient practices and beliefs, and I couldn't help think about the source of those practices and beliefs, which called to mind Thomson's detailed study. And, again, the evident anxiety in the Greek sources, the considerable work being done to keep the woman separate from "civilization" (the cited authors seem very concerned about the need to isolate the women and their sounds), leads me again to Thomson, but also to Knight's great Blood Relations, which I have made many references to over the years (I can't help but wonder if Carson knows either of these books—Knight's was published just a few years after her essay).

In my post about Blood Relations, I wrote:

In his detailed survey of the ethnographic record, Knight notes in several places that, built into many of the myths, into the systems of taboos and the origin stories, is the admission by men that the true power originally belonged to women and that the men took it from them and now must prevent women from taking part in it.

And in my post discussing the Thomson and Feyeraband books -The wish was father to the thought - I suggested, first, in connection with Feyeraband's discussion of Greek attitudes towards women and birth, that "the Oresteia is in a sense a dramatization of the domestication of the female, a manifestation of the hiding, the covering up, of the older matriarchal order." Which led me, second, to introduce Thomson's arguments about the inability of, for example, Aristotle or Herodotus to integrate available information about other cultures into their understanding of their own, for, as Thomson put it,

If such things as primitive communism, group-marriage, and matriarchy were admitted into the beginnings of Greek civilisation, what would become of the dogma, on which the ruling class leant more and more heavily as the city-state declined, that its economic basis in private property, slave labour, and the subjection of women rested on natural justice? If the writings of the later materialists, Demokritos and Epicurus, had not perished, we might well have possessed a more penetrating analysis of early Greek society than Aristotle's. But they perished partly for that reason. Plato wanted the works of Demokritos to be burnt, and his wish has been fulfilled.

As Ethan observed in a comment to that post, history is written by the victors. That's one apt cliche, the truth of which is perhaps all too easily forgotten. Here's another one: old attitudes die hard.

Returning to Anne Carson, here is the last paragraph of "The Gender of Sound":

In considering the question, how do our presumptions about gender affect the way we hear sounds? I have cast my net rather wide and have mingled evidence from different periods of time and different forms of cultural expression—in a way that reviewers of my work like to dismiss as ethnographic naïveté. I think there is a place for naïveté in ethnography, at the very least as an irritant. Sometimes when I am reading a Greek text I force myself to look up all the words in the dictionary, even the ones I think I know. It is surprising what you can learn that way. Some of the words turn out to sound quite different than you thought. Sometimes the way they sound can make you ask questions you wouldn't otherwise ask. Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.

I love her passing defense of ethnographic naïveté (and I especially like her apparent throwaway line of it "at the very least as an irritant"). People get wrapped up in their specialties, dismissing outside attempts to understand and incorporate disparate materials. But more to the point, given what I've suggested and cited above, of course I think she is right to question this idea of sophrosyne, which seems obviously to contain within it considerable anxiety about women and the possibility of women's power. We would do well to rid ourselves of it.

Music Roundup 2013

In the interest of seeing if this thing still works, let's get a blog post out. But baby-steps, something small. What about music? I used to write about music here. Gave it up for being a chore, at least how I'd originally conceived of what I was doing on the blog.

Ok. Here, then, is a list of albums released in 2013 that I can say with some confidence that I liked. Just because. In alphabetical order by artist, no ranking. Maybe with some remarks.

Barn Owl, V — gorgeous guitar and electronic drones.

Beyoncé, Beyoncé — I've liked some of her earlier songs ("Naughty Girl" is a favorite), but this record is a monster.

David Bowie, The Next Day — I had a huge Bowie phase in 2012, finally got to really know his great 70s run of albums; this came out right on the heels of that, as I was also trying out his "later" albums. I can't say I've really spent a lot time with this one, but I've liked it when I've listened to it.

Bill Callahan, Dream River — Of course, as previously blogged (here and, sort of, here), I'm a huge fan. I think this is his best overall album under his own name, which makes it his best since Smog's A River Ain't Too Much To Love.

Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You — this is growing on me; I don't know if she'll ever be able to replace Fox Confessor Brings The Flood in my affections, but she doesn't have to if it's as good as this.

Bob Dylan, Another Self Portrait: (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 — oh boy: this came out right smack in the middle of my (still ongoing) full-blown Dylan obsession, which began in the first week of July and pretty much occupied the rest of the year. In fact, I listened to Dylan exclusively for about half that time, which is one reason why the remarks for some of the other records here are fairly perfunctory. Perhaps I'll write some more about that in a later post. As for this, it came as a surprise to most of us - two cds of outtakes and alternate mixes from one of Dylan's most maligned periods? In the event, it's an often lovely collection. Personal favorites are "Pretty Saro", the alternate version of "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue", the stripped-down "Copper Kettle", and the demo recording of "When I Paint My Masterpiece".

Kevin Gates, The Luca Brasi Story — I started downloading the occasional mixtape in the last year or so, mainly based on recommendations from reviewer friends who know something about rap. This one came to my attention first via old blog-friend Brandon Soderberg, but it was really David Ford's enthusiasm for it that sold me. And it's quite good. (I also downloaded that Migos tape, but though I seem to recall liking it the handful of times I played it, my memory's really hazy about it, so in the interest of honesty, I'm leaving it off.)

Gorguts, Colored Sands — This is metal - I guess death metal? Dunno, I never can keep that stuff straight. Regardless, hah, it's pretty great.

Glenn Jones, My Garden State — these are very nice Fahey-style solo acoustic guitar pieces; in fact, I think every time a song has come up on shuffle from this album, my first thought has been that it is Fahey, before the super-clean modern production clears that right up.

Le1f, Fly Zone and Tree House — I really dig Le1f's unusual style of rapping, and the music on his mixtapes, from a variety of producers, including himself and Nguzunguzu (see below), is consistently interesting and idiosyncratic.

Kelela, Cut 4 Me - another mixtape, this one R&B, again with producer credits for Nguzunguzu. I think Ethan told me about this one, plus Tom Breihan named it Stereogum's Mixtape of the Week back in October... (oh yeah, now that I think about it, The Luca Brasi Story was also mixtape of the week earlier in the year).

Kvelertak, Meir — another metal album, this one I listened to a lot in the late Spring... it reminds me a bit of Bon Scott-era AC/DC.

Janelle Monáe, Electric Lady — I was very excited about this one when it came out, and I like it a lot, but I ended up not spending as much time with it as I expected, because Dylan. Though a few of the tunes, such as "Primetime", her lovely duet with Miguel, have made their way onto frequently played playlists.

The Necks, Open — surely we all know what this band is by now, right? Jazz isn't quite right, ambient isn't either, though both words perhaps gesture towards an idea of the thing. Consistently beautiful, at any rate. This one's no less lovely than some of their others, though perhaps a mite less absorbing.

Nguzunguzu, Skycell — only just got this one, so haven't spent as much time with it as I would like yet, but it's typically good. Time will tell if I like it quite as much as Timesup.

Pere Ubu, Lady From Shanghai — My favorite Ubu album in a great long while, which is meant as no disrespect to any of the others, but it's just that good. Finally got to see them play in September, in DC with BDR, and it was a wonderful concert.

Throwing Muses, Purgatory/Paradise — unlikely as it may seem, this - their first album since the last reunion ten years ago - may actually be the best Throwing Muses album, which is definitely saying something. Whether it is or not, it's simply great, a real gift.

Yo La Tengo, Fade — this is not by any means the best Yo La Tengo album, but it is my favorite of theirs since probably 2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out


Yeah, this exercise more than ever reminded me why I don't write about music much anymore. Cliches and boring adjectives and superlatives abound, with little to say about the actual music itself, whether how it sounds or what it means to me. Still, some good records; check 'em out, if you haven't already.