Books
I found myself most interested by the fact that so many of the changes that took place at WBCN made absolute sense to me, even if I had an aesthetic beef with them.
There are hundreds of studies to be analyzed and many experts who could have been interviewed in depth, but both authors have chosen to write breezy books that can be characterized as “journalism-lite.”
It’s hard to grasp how Jonathan Lethem assimilated all this material — historical and fantastic — and gave it new narrative life in Dissident Gardens, except by granting, to start with, his special genius for absorption.
If Patrizia Cavalli’s poetry is egocentric, even probably autobiographical, its narrator shows a detachment enabling her to observe herself from one remove, even when she describes herself in the élans of attraction.
George Scialabba is still outfoxing the professional eggheads in For the Republic, his third collection of essays on political and cultural topics.
Hilary Holladay’s biography of Herbert Huncke provides valuable insight into a person and world that were begging to be explored.
There is a paucity of richness in The Goddess Chronicle. The myth might have been, but wasn’t, mined for tales of compassion, or inevitability of sorrow, or the psychology of misogyny or of revenge, or the strictures of fate.
Scissors is a roman à clef. But Stéphane Michaka has not composed a fictionalized biography mapping out the itinerary of Raymond Carver’s life. The novelist above all focuses on the creative process in which a writer named “Raymond” is involved.
Yoko Ono has always been the kind of artist more interested in getting into your head than convincing you to occupy hers.
Perhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.
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