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[jlhoots]

Timothy Hallinan: Street Music

[ghost of miles]

51 minutes ago, medjuck said:

Are there hard covers now that just use glue?  I guess I haven't noticed.  And are there softcovers that are sewn?   I should go look at my library.

Not sure about hardcovers in general, but the relaunched Modern Library series uses glue bindings for its hardbacks.  Also not a fan of the olive-green jackets they adopted for the contemporary volumes.  

[Brad]

On 5/28/2020 at 10:39 PM, ghost of miles said:

Brad, would love to hear your thoughts on To Have And Have Not after you finish it. It’s always seemed to have a bit of a footnote status in Hemingway’s oeuvre as his purported entry in the annals of leftist 1930s literature and remembered primarily as the springboard for the much-more-famous movie, but I’ve always been curious to read it.

As Joe mentioned the book has nothing in common with the Bogart movie. However, I can’t think of Harry Morgan without thinking of Bogie. Without ruining the plot in case you want to read it, Hemingway tries to paint a picture of people in the Depression trying to get by. His style of writing tries to reflect that hard scrabble life. Towards the last third of the book he introduces the “haves” and his writing writing reflects characters you see in those 1930s or 1940s high society movies. He also throws in a few Cubans attempting to revolt against Baptista. It’s a bit of a hodge pudge and I’m not sure it all completely works. Not my favorite Hemingway but worth a read. 

Edited May 30, 2020 by Brad

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, Brad said:

However, I can’t think of Harry Morgan without thinking of Bogie.

I can't help but think of Jack Webb. Or Cara Williams.

[Brad]

[Matthew]

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone.

 

[jazzbo]

[felser]

[ghost of miles]

Damn, this is a good book.  Really seems to capture the vibe of 1969, at least from the vantage point of being on the road with the Stones--a road that's leading to Altamont:

[Simon8]

Ben Marcus' Notes From The Fog

Edited June 9, 2020 by Simon8

[HutchFan]

Accompaniment to my recent explorations of Prokofiev's music:

Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography by Harlow Robinson (Robert Hale, London, 1987)

 

[ghost of miles]

Just starting:

[jazzbo]

Finished re-reading:

 

 

Started to re-read:

[ejp626]

Aristophanes The Clouds & The Birds (trans. Arrowsmith & Parker)

I know it is a truism that comedy translates rather less well than tragedy, but I was still astounded at how hard it was to get through these two pieces.  Just did not enjoy either of them at all, aside from a few moments here and there.  (The amount of physical violence played for laughs in The Birds was pretty close to the Three Stooges, and I've never been one that liked that sort of thing at all, though it is true I can be a bit more forgiving if combined with clever wordplay a la Shakespeare.)  For me at least, I think I would have been better off with translations that were looser translations or even adaptations than these quite faithful translations.  Going to put this aside for quite a while before getting around to Lysistrata.

As the libraries are now taking book returns, I need to prioritize getting through these books anyway, so that means finally sitting down and getting through the second half of Camus's Plague and Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being.

[ejp626]

On 2020-02-24 at 10:31 AM, ejp626 said:

 also have a fairly recent (well, new in English) short story collection by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, The Word of the Speechless (NYRB) on hold at the library.

 

It appears The Word of the Speechless is a pretty good sampler, 19 or so stories across Ribeyro's whole career, but is only a very small taste.  Perhaps this will inspire a translation of the rest of the stories and possibly his remaining 2 novels (Chronicle of San Gabriel has been translated into English).

I read about half the stories right away but it took a surprisingly long time to get through the rest of them.  "The Insignia" is fairly clever though quite short.  I liked "Nuit Caprense Cirius Illuminata" where it is just a bit unclear whether the narrator runs into an old flame in Capri or does he run into a phantom of a different sort from the past.  I'm still mulling over "Silvio in El Rosedal" which has some Borgesian touches (a code hidden in a rose garden) but ends in a much more melancholy key.  This might actually be the strongest story in the collection, but I'll give it some time and reread it and see if I still feel the same. 

One story I did not care for was "For Smokers Only," which I hope for Ribeyro's sake was fictional and not auto-biographical when he discusses becoming deeply addicted to cigarettes and, at one point, selling off his entire book collection to allow him to buy more cigarettes.  And then talks about sneaking cigarettes, even when under medical treatment.  Though it seems this was largely true to life, and he did ultimately die of lung cancer at the age of 65.  Sad...

[medjuck]

 The first has too much sociology but is worth buying just for the chapter on the Blue Devils.  The second is lurid but fascinating. Both have many footnotes that are easy to access because the page numbers they refer to are listed at the top of the pages in the footnotes chapter.  Is this a new practice or just something I haven't noticed before (or don't remember). 

Edited June 17, 2020 by medjuck

[ejp626]

12 hours ago, medjuck said:

Both have many footnotes that are easy to access because the page numbers they refer to are listed at the top of the pages in the footnotes chapter.  Is this a new practice or just something I haven't noticed before (or don't remember). 

I've definitely seen this before, though this sounds like you have a long section of endnotes rather than footnotes per se.  Generally this is something that would be done if you have more than 1 page of endnotes per chapter.  Otherwise you just navigate through based on chapter numbering.

[Big Beat Steve]

14 minutes ago, ejp626 said:

I've definitely seen this before, though this sounds like you have a long section of endnotes rather than footnotes per se.  Generally this is something that would be done if you have more than 1 page of endnotes per chapter.  Otherwise you just navigate through based on chapter numbering.

Yes, what Medjuck said sounds like endnotes at the very end of the book (not at the end of each chapter).
Quickly checking my music books, I have seen such endnote chapters with references at the top of the pages to indicate the pages in the main chapters that the endnotes refer to in "Lost Chords" by Richard M. Sudhalter, "Record Makers and Breakers" by John Broven and "The Jazz of the Southwest" by Jean A. Boyd.
OTOH, "After Django" by Tom Perchard and "Jazz Diasporas" by Rashida K. Braggs", for instance, do not have these top-of-the-page references in their endnote chapters, which makes them annoying to use as when you want to read the notes of the main chapter you have to flip and search much more through the endnote pages to locate the section you need (and bookmarks tend to slip out at the worst moment ).

[medjuck]

7 hours ago, ejp626 said:

I've definitely seen this before, though this sounds like you have a long section of endnotes rather than footnotes per se.  Generally this is something that would be done if you have more than 1 page of endnotes per chapter.  Otherwise you just navigate through based on chapter numbering.

Yes, both books have many pages of footnotes.

[Matthew]

Essentials: 52 Must-See Movies and Why They Matter by Jeremy Arnold. Nice book just to pick up and read at your leisure.

[Brad]

A newly discovered Hemingway story, Pursuit as Happiness, that appeared in the New Yorker.

Here’s an interview with Sean Hemingway, Hemingway’s grandson, Ernest Hemingway’s Grandson on an Unpublished Story from the Author’s Archive

Edited June 18, 2020 by Brad

[Bluesnik]

I've always enjoyed Gioia. Wether on West Coast Jazz, the History of Jazz, or the Blues (and I still have an unread book about Standards). But this is something else. Here he reflects on the subversive role of music before being assimilated into the mainstream and becoming recognized. I quote from the introduction:

"When we celebrate the songs of previous eras,  the repectable music of cultural elites gets almost all the attention, while the subversive efforts of outsiders and rebels fall from view. The history books downplay or hide essential elements of music that are considered disreputable or irrational (...). They whitewash key elements of a four thousand-year history of disruptors and insurgents creating musical revolutions, instead celebrating assimilators within the mainstream power structure who borrowed these innovations while diluting their impact and disguising their sources. (...). The real history of music is not respectable. Far from it. Neither is it boring".

A bold mission statement.

Edited June 26, 2020 by Bluesnik

[jlhoots]

Megha Majumdar: A Burning

[ejp626]

11 minutes ago, jlhoots said:

Megha Majumdar: A Burning

In queue at the library.  Let us know what you think.  Thanks.

Finally buckling down and finishing Camus's The Plague.  Probably will wrap up tonight.

[Brad]

2 hours ago, ejp626 said:

Finally buckling down and finishing Camus's The Plague.  Probably will wrap up tonight.

Sounds painful. If so, why bother?

I’m making another run at Berlin Alexanderplatz. If it won’t take off, I will probably sell my copy.