Despite my hope that Bob Dylan would get it (he was a long shot I know), this year Alice Munro has won the Nobel Price In Literature today (October 10, 2013).
The Swedish Academy called Munro a “master of the contemporary short story.”
“A true master of the form,” Salman Rushdie said of Munro.
Get the full story here.
Body/Head pushes into the noise-rock frontier.
By Michael Goldberg
The bright lights shine on Kim Gordon. The New Yorker, which never profiled Sonic Youth during the group’s 30 years as one of New York’s most celebrated and influential bands, kicked things off by devoting six upfront pages to Gordon this past June.
Since then, as the early October release date of Coming Apart, the album she recorded with her current musical collaborator Bill Nace under the name Body/Head, came and went, other major publications devoted space to Gordon. From the New York Times and Rolling Stone to Pitchfork, writers have been more than excited to talk to Gordon about whatever she’s willing to talk about, including her new, challenging noise rock.
“I wasn’t trained as a musician,” Gordon told the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff. “But I did grow up listening to a lot of jazz records, and John Coltrane.”
Coming Apart’s opening song, “Abstract,” Gordon said, has a structure similar to Coltrane’s Meditations: “You have a theme,” she said, “and it falls apart, and then it comes back.”
To read the rest of this column, head over to Addicted To Noise.
The Italian writer Elena Ferrante is one of my favorite living novelists. She won me over with her heartbreaking 2012 novel, “My Brilliant Friend,” the first volume of a trilogy. It’s the story of two friends, Lila and Elena.
We start when the two are kids, and we follow them into their teenage years and Lila’s marriage. The two girls live in Naples and their families are dirt poor. The girls or people they know suffer many misfortunes. And yet this is an inspirational book. It’s narrated by Elena long after all that she recounts has happened.
There are two great pieces you can read to get up to speed on Ferrante.
The first ran last year in the New Yorker following publication of the first book of her trilogy. Read it here.
More recently, the New York Times ran this review of “Story of a New Name,” the second volume.
Hopefully the third volume will be published in a year or so.
Banksy’s latest art work has appeared in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Typical Banksy.
No audio to go with this one.
OK, so you looked at that long list of Bowie’s 100 favorite books. Now get some analysis regards 15 of them from Flavorwire.
In light of the recent focus on Dylan’s early ’70s period due to the release of Another Self Portrait, check out this story (with illustrations) about a children’s picture book based on New Morning’s word jazz piece, “If Dogs Run Free.”
Head to Brain Pickings.
Dig this! Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, which is hosting a David Bowie exhibit, “David Bowie is,” has posted a list of Bowie’s 100 favorite books.
And here it is:
The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, 2008
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007
The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard, 2007
Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage, 2007
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters, 2002
The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens, 2001
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler, 1997
A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes, 1997
The Insult, Rupert Thomson, 1996
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon, 1995
The Bird Artist, Howard Norman, 1994
Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard, 1993
Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto, 1992
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, 1990
David Bomberg, Richard Cork, 1988
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick, 1986
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1986
Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd, 1985
Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey, 1984
Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter, 1984
Money, Martin Amis, 1984
White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1984
Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, 1984
The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984
A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1980
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980
Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1980
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1980
Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess, 1980
Raw (a ‘graphix magazine’) 1980-91
Viz (magazine) 1979 –
The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, 1979
Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz, 1978
In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan, 1978
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1977
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976
Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders, 1975
Mystery Train, Greil Marcus, 1975
Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara, 1974
Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich, 1972
In Bluebeard’s Castle : Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner, 1971
Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky, 1971
The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillete, 1970
The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf, 1968
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn, 1968
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967
Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg, 1967
Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. , 1966
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965
City of Night, John Rechy, 1965
Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964
Puckoon, Spike Milligan, 1963
The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford, 1963
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima, 1963
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, 1963
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell, 1962
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, 1961
Private Eye (magazine) 1961 –
On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding, 1961
Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage, 1961
Strange People, Frank Edwards, 1961
The Divided Self, R. D. Laing, 1960
All The Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd,1960
Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse, 1959
The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, 1958
On The Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957
The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, 1957
Room at the Top, John Braine, 1957
A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, 1956
The Outsider, Colin Wilson, 1956
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949
The Street, Ann Petry, 1946
Black Boy, Richard Wright, 1945
In a fascinating Op/Ed piece in today’s (Spet. 29, 2013) New York Times titled “Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Nobel’s Door,” culture critic Bill Wyman argues that it’s time for the Swedish Academy to honor Dylan, “a fierce and uncompromising poet whose writing, 50 years on, still crackles with relevance,” and give him the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Read Wyman’s essay here.
Robert Christgau, self-described “Dean of Rock Criticism, has had his music blog, Expert Witness, cancelled by Microsoft’s MSN.
At Christgau’s website he wrote on Sept. 20, 2013:
“Just woke up so I won’t go into too much detail at the moment, but now I can make it official. As rumored, Expert Witness will be no more at MSN as of October 1. As I understand it, Microsoft is shutting down the entire MSN freelance arts operation at that time, including its film coverage, where the estimable Glenn Kenny has done so much good work, as well as my music colleagues Maura Johnston, Alan Light, and the other bloggers. I got this news 12 days ago, at which time I’d stockpiled enough reviews to get me through my last scheduled post on September 27, and since I do write for money stopped all CG-style writing at that time. I’ll have more to say in the hours and days to come, but that’s the nub of it. Thanks to all who comment here and all who lurk and all who never look at the comments because in the online world that’s usually such a waste of time, as it has never been here.”
For more of the story, head to Consequence of Sound.
Carolyn Cassady, who will forever be remembered as the model for Camille, the second wife of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s Great American Novel “On The Road,” died on Friday near her home in Bracknell, England. In real life, Ms. Cassady was married to (and later divorced from) Neal Cassady, who Kerouac based Moriarty on. She was briefly Kerouac’s lover, with the encouragement of her husband. Her daughter Cathy Sylvia confirmed that Ms. Cassady lapsed into a coma after an emergency appendectomy, according to the New York Times. Ms. Cassady wrote two books, “Heart Beat: My Life With Jack and Neal” (1976) and “Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (1990).
For more, read obits in The Guardian and The New York Times.