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[Brad]

I read the To Have and Have Not last year and it’s a terrific book. I don’t believe in judging a different time or milieu by today’s standards although I’m sure that will happen and by today’s standards they are objectionable. If you want to look at Fitzgerald his views about Jews (although perhaps not as blatant as Hemingway’s) were not good either but to me this was part of telling the story.

I’m glad you’re not calling for banning Hemingway although I wasn’t aware you were so powerful. 

20 hours ago, ejp626 said:

I don't think time will be very kind with Hemingway, as so many of his characters embody toxic masculinity.

Before making such a conclusion which, frankly, isn’t worth much comment, I suggest you read the following: A Death in the Afternoon

Edited March 15, 2021 by Brad

[mjazzg]

51 minutes ago, Brad said:

I read the To Have and Have Not last year and it’s a terrific book. I don’t believe in judging a different time or milieu by today’s standards although I’m sure that will happen and by today’s standards they are objectionable. If you want to look at Fitzgerald his views about Jews (although perhaps not as blatant as Hemingway’s) were not good either but to me this was part of telling the story.

I’m glad you’re not calling for banning Hemingway although I wasn’t aware you were so powerful. 

Before making such a conclusion which, frankly, isn’t worth much comment, I suggest you read the following: A Death in the Afternoon

Interesting read.

I think it's quite easy to read Wolff alluding to something akin to the 'toxic masculinity' that ejp626 mentions here (apologies for the font size, posting from my phone)

"In his later work, especially in the novels, we can see Hemingway the writer sometimes yielding to the persona he developed, the persona we boys aspired to: tough, taciturn, knowing, self-sufficient, superior. This could bleed into the work, painting his leading men in caricature."

Edited March 15, 2021 by mjazzg

[Brad]

15 hours ago, mjazzg said:

Interesting read.

I think it's quite easy to read Wolff alluding to something akin to the 'toxic masculinity' that ejp626 mentions here (apologies for the font size, posting from my phone)

"In his later work, especially in the novels, we can see Hemingway the writer sometimes yielding to the persona he developed, the persona we boys aspired to: tough, taciturn, knowing, self-sufficient, superior. This could bleed into the work, painting his leading men in caricature."

That was the Hemingway persona: the hard boiled tough man, a men among men. Obviously, that doesn’t fly today and you wouldn’t write that way today. It’s a different age and that’s my point about interpreting writing from 70 to 80 years ago by today’s standards.

Wolff also finished the paragraph you cited by saying the following:

“But in the stories you find almost nothing of that. Indeed, I am struck most forcefully by their humanity, their feeling for human fragility.”

That’s why Hemingway will endure.

Public TV is doing a Ken Burns program on Hemingway. It will be interesting to see how they treat him. 

Edited March 16, 2021 by Brad

[Brad]

This is a quite interesting article about Nabokov’s Lolita that appeared in the New York Times about 10 days ago.

How ‘Lolita’ Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture

[soulpope]

[JSngry]

Starting on this one, after setting it aside for other things:

[jlhoots]

Ayad Akhtar: Homeland Elegies (for the 2nd time).

[mjazzg]

10 hours ago, jlhoots said:

Ayad Akhtar: Homeland Elegies (for the 2nd time).

I'm waiting for the paperback edition of that. Looks enticing.

[ghost of miles]

[jlhoots]

Kirstin Valdez Quade: The Five Wounds

[Ken Dryden]

[Brad]

On 4/7/2021 at 0:23 PM, ghost of miles said:

The author has come under fire for sexual assault allegations and the publisher has stopped shipping and promoting his book. 

[Brad]

I ran across this story via an interview by Ethan Iverson with Gerald Early; the interview was discussed here.

Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin.

https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/Baldwin-Sonnys-Blues.pdf

It's taken from The Jazz Fiction Anthology, published by Indiana University Press.  

[soulpope]

[jlhoots]

Bradford Morrow: The Forgers

Edited April 29, 2021 by jlhoots

[Brad]

I’ve just finished 

and now onto Mary Dearborn’s bio of Hemingway. 

[soulpope]

[rostasi]

The OCCAM Ocean Issue, focuses on the radical musical eco-system of French composer Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM Ocean project. In a first for the publication, this issue is built solely around interviews with the performers that have collaborated with Radigue to produce this body of work over the last decade. Contributors include Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson, Rhodri Davies, Catherine Lamb, Julia Eckhardt, Silvia Tarozzi, Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, Laetitia Sonami, and Frédéric Blondy. All interviews were conducted by SA’s editor, Nate Wooley, also a performer of Radigue’s music. The issue features an opening invocation from Radigue herself, followed by writing on the history and practice of the OCCAM pieces, interviews, and a concluding essay by Wooley on his own experience performing OCCAM X. This special issue concludes with the last of a three-part series of “exquisite corpse” compositions, written especially for SA by inti figgis-vezueta in response to the preceding work of Moor Mother and Amirtha Kidambi. 

This issue also comes with a special one-of-a-kind pull-out poster detailing the entire OCCAM Ocean composition in all of its interconnected glory. Designed by Remake Designs, this is a unique graphic perspective on the human web of collaboration that Radigue has created.  Pre-orders of SA26 come with a free download of Sound American's False Start conversation with Eliane and clarinetist Carol Robinson.

[jlhoots]

Gabriela Garcia: Of Women & Salt

[rostasi]

I Tried 5 Composers’ (Ridiculous) Daily Routines

[Bluesnik]

Rereading this fine novel I discovered and enjoyed in the early 80s. When Bertolucci made it into a film by the late 80s, I had a project of interviewing Paul Bowles in Tangiers, where he lived. It would have been a fine project which would have sold well to lifestyle or fashion magazines, like Elle or Vogue, or papers. But I never did it. But my infatuation with Bowles grew to such a degree I own nearly everything he has ever written, and by the beginning of the 90s, shortly after his death I think, I also had a biography of him brought over from NY. The movie, by the way, is very good, with John Malkovich in the leading role. I have been in Morocco and the Sahara and can assure it. If you ever get the chance to see it, don't miss it.

A scene from that movie:

 

I consider Bowles a protobeat.

Edited May 14, 2021 by Bluesnik

[jlhoots]

Cherie Jones: How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

[rostasi]

[rostasi]

Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Naima Karlsson and Magnus Nygren. Introduction by Lawrence Kumpf and Magnus Nygren. Text by Keith Knox, Rita Knox, Bengt af Klintberg, Iris R. Orton, Åke Holmquist, Pandit Pran Nath, John Esam, Michael Lindfield, Sidsel Paaske, George Trolin, Alan Halkyard, Moki Cherry, Don Cherry, Ben Young, Christer Bothén, Ruba Katrib, and Fumi Okiji. Interviews by Keith Knox and Rita Knox with Don Cherry, Terry Riley, and Steve Roney.

Avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry (née Karlsson) met in Sweden in the late sixties. They began to live and perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmentalist activism, children’s education, and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Organic Music Societies, Blank Forms’ sixth anthology, is a special issue released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name devoted to the couple’s multimedia collaborations. The first English-language publication on either figure, the book highlights models for collectivism and pedagogy deployed in the Cherrys’ interpersonal and artistic work through the presentation of archival documents alongside newly translated and commissioned writings by musicians, scholars, and artists alike.

Beginning with an overview by Blank Forms Artistic Director Lawrence Kumpf and Don Cherry biographer Magnus Nygren, this volume further explores Don’s work of the period through a piece on his Relativity Suite by Ben Young and an essay on the diasporic quality of his music by Fumi Okiji. Ruba Katrib emphasizes the domestic element of Moki’s practice in a biographical survey accompanied by full-color reproductions of Moki’s vivid tapestries, paintings, and sculptures, which were used as performance environments by Don’s ensembles during the Sweden years and beyond. Two selections of Moki’s unpublished writings—consisting of autobiography, observations, illustrations, and diary entries, as well as poetry and aphorisms—are framed by tributes from her daughter Neneh Cherry and granddaughter Naima Karlsson. Swedish Cherry collaborator Christer Bothén contributes period travelogues from Morocco, Mali, and New York, providing insight into the cross-cultural communication that would soon come to be called “world music.”

The collection also features several previously unpublished interviews with Don, conducted by Christopher R. Brewster and Keith Knox. A regular visitor to the Cherry schoolhouse in rural Sweden, Knox documented the family’s magnetic milieu in his until-now unpublished Tågarp Publication. Reproduced here in its entirety, the journal includes an interview with Terry Riley, an essay on Pandit Pran Nath, and reports on counter-cultural education programs in Stockholm, including the Bombay Free School and the esoteric Forest University.

Taken together, the texts, artwork, and abundant photographs collected in Organic Music Societies shine a long overdue spotlight on Don and Moki’s prescient and collaborative experiments in the art of living.

[mjazzg]

14 minutes ago, rostasi said:

 

 

I have that on pre-order, published in a couple of weeks here.  how is it?