In the last week or two I've been stumbling across gems from the past, including this book my new boss lent me in hopes that I would "dig it" as much as he. It's called Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, and check it under the Spotlit navbar thingy---> Czech writer Patrik Ourednik is no Howard Zinn--this is not your average prep school required reading. Neither is it Cat's Cradle. If anything it falls somewhere in between, a gray area of lyrical prose on par with Burroughs and David Foster Wallace. Clearly it is an absurdist take on the wars that made us confront other cultures and the revolutions that reformed the future. The tone is without whimsy or condescension (or condensation), and we're often forced to reread the same phrases on several pages, sometimes in making a discordant parallel to something very different.
Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.
-John Donne, "The Flea"
I'm not fifty pages into it, but one of these passages struck me:
"Trees were important in cities as they ensured regeneration of oxygen and the ash from the corpses could be used as fertilizer in fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, because organic fertilizer was starting to be in short supply in Germany. The corpses in the ruins of buildings were huddled up together and sometimes two or three corpses were holding hands or hugging each other and had to be sawn apart to free them. And one woman did not want to cut apart corpses and the commander of the squad in charge of the operation wanted to have her shot for sabotage but in the meantime the soldiers who were supposed to shoot her had deserted." (20)
It's going to be a fast ride through this landscape, and I have a feeling it won't be all too comfortable.
While Mr. Zinn may have the socio-political field covered in terms of exhaustive historical archiving, we have two others that have arguably had equal impact on the arguably most impacting social/artistic phenomena, Rock'n'Roll: Joan Didion and Lester Bangs. Didion served a very important role as the pinprick to the giant pink balloon that was the capitalized Sixties. Her essay,Slouching Towards Bethlemmaintains a venerable position in the cannon of compassionate journalism, and I'll always look to her example of grace and integrity in her writing. It should be pretty obvious my affinity for Lester Bangs given my choice in quotes for the disclaimer of my blog. I became increasingly interested in rock journalism when I read--and subsequently forgot to return to my high school library--Rolling Stone'sIllustrated guide to Rock and Roll in which were included articles by Lester Bangs.
Then he appeared, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the 2000 movieAlmost Famous as the lovably brash mentor to William Miller. Anyway, somehow or another I caught onto his book on Blondie which I just bought, and which will hopefully be arriving on my doorstep, gently loved and awaiting me on top of the reading list.