Accomplishments for 2009: Part One, Books

I should have read more this year. And it is the same every year.  But this year I had few excuses. I mean unemployment has some benefits above and beyond stressing over how the bills will be paid and fighting with your family. There are loads of benefits.

 

It gives you time, lots and lots of time. There is finally time to lie around moping, watching movies on your TV. There is time to exercise and to over-eat, to build a catapult that resembled a cat, and to plan for unnecessary surgeries. There is time to dream and to realize the futility of dreaming.  There is time to abandon all hope. There is time to commit crimes and time to justify the crimes to yourself and to plan the alibis. I had the time to write many stupid songs that no one need hear. There is ample time for self-pity and self-delusion. There is time to understand the value of cognitive dissonance. Finally, there is the enough time to really piss away vast quantities of time, periods of time measured not by clocks but by calendars. 

 

There is also some time left over to read.

 

I finally found a copy on-line of one the few books around my house when I was very young. After my mother re-married when I was in 8th grade, we had about 30,000 books in the house ( I think that was the actual estimate), but before that there were just a few. It was the one book my mother had about childcare, entitled "A History of Capital Punishment" by George Ryley Scott, F.Ph.S. (Eng.), F.Z.S., F.R.A.I. Published in 1950, my mother had stolen her copy from the Brooklyn Public Library in 1959; to be fair, perhaps she merely had forgotten to return it.

 

Scott's opus wasn't so much of a discussion about the pros and cons of state justified murder, although that was touched upon in the last quarter of the 300+ pages. That book was "A History of Capital Punishment" (1960) by John Lawrence with comment by Clarence Darrow. George Ryley Scott's book was more a collection of tales, sort of a how to, with lots of pictures. I had spent a great deal of time looking through the book as a young tyke. Among the 38 plates and illustrations, were such childhood favorites of mine as "Chinese Method of Execution by Boiling to Death", "Chinese Method of Execution by Sawing in Two", "Pressing to Death", and of course "Death by The Thousand Cuts". It had been lost from the family library years ago although I suspect my sister had taken it for herself years ago. It was such a pleasure to hold it again and finally read it cover to cover.  Among George Ryley Scott's other fine works include "The History of Corporal Punishment", "The History of Torture Throughout the Ages", "Phallic Worship", "Ten Ladies of Joy", "Curious Customs of Sex and Marriage", "A History of Prostitution", "History of Cockfighting" and a volume each on both modern poultry and modern rabbit keeping.

 

 

I read "The Dillinger Days" by John Toland, published in 1963. It contained ample real-life lessons for any budding bank robber who is genuinely interested in his craft. Any serious artist must know the literature. Good pictures of John as a youngster, swell stories about the Karpis-Barker Gang and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. I borrowed it from my son's school library.

I enjoyed Richard Collin's and David Skover's "The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise and of an American Icon" (2002) as well as "The Essential Lenny Bruce", the transcription of Lenny's bits published by editor John Cohen in 1967. As an aside, I met John Cohen from The New Lost City Rambler's this year, and asked him if he was that John Cohen. He said he wasn't that John Cohen, but mentioned that had once performed with Lenny at the Gate of Horn in Chicago. It really is a small world.

I began learning from and about Lenny over the past couple of years, primarily by listening over and over to his fabulous Carnegie Hall Concert performed at midnight on February 4, 1961. Despite a massive snowstorm and seventeen inches of snow, the concert was packed and was almost certainly the greatest performance of his career. I cannot recommend this recording highly enough. The book about his trials was fascinating history. Did you know that one of Lenny's prosecutors was Johnnie Cochran, or that one of his judges was Thurgood Marshall? It is incredible reading through all the trials how intensely the courts and prosecutors worked to destroy a man because he spoke his mind using as an excuse that he publicly used vulgarity that was already in common parlance in front of a paying audience of adults.

I cannot recommend too highly T. Harry Williams biography of Huey Long. Many still feel that Huey was a dangerous man. Although Dr. Williams is in no way an apologist for Huey, he certainly left me with the feeling that we need more men with Huey's vision today, as well as his balls. Huey understood that the folks he fighting held all the power and the money, and that they fought dirty. Huey understood that the only way to confront power was by wielding greater power. There is good deal of moral ambiguity in his story. I found that fascinating. 

I re-read a few plays this year. Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" and "True West", Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh", and Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire". I enjoyed Ken Anger's "Hollywood Babylon Vol. One and Two". I began my struggle to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I began Proust's 'Swann's Way'. I read some P.G. Wodehouse, and a smattering of poetry, particualry Auden and Larkin. Finished Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" which was fairly light. I read Alan Bennett's wonderful novella "The Uncommon Reader". I tried valiantly to read Michael S. Kochin's "Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art" from 2009; re-reading Kerouac's "On The Road" was much easier and more fun. I did listen to many of the Harry Potter books on CD (my son plays them constantly), and think I will have to read them this year.

Oh yes, I read Jeffrey Lewis' comix "Fuff" volumes 1,3, 4 and 7. Apparently 2, 5 and 6 are out-of-print. I have a copy of the graphic novel "The Beats" to which he contributed to read this month.

And I began to learn playing drums…and learned very little so far.

My goals for next year at least in terms of reading is the lastest edition of Nelson's Pediatrics, finishing the books I started but hadn't finished from last year. Kochin is a mountain I will climb, even if I keep feeling every one of his premises are incorrect. Have begun Ted Morgan' "Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth Century America" from 2003. Taking another stab at the Harry Potter series, and to listen to Ulysses on CD. More Proust? Cervantes? More Waugh, Wodehouse, and WWI history letters and poetry. And I will write a book, maybe, even if it only turns out to be a collection of blogs.

And maybe I will actually get some drums to help with learning how to play them.