Austin Kleon (Posts tagged books i have read)

Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths And Disasters

It’s the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination — one cool read is this book, which includes KG’s transcription of radio broadcasts from the day. You can watch him read the whole JFK section here, but I think the text is much weirder and disorienting.

From Dwight Garner’s NYTimes review:

In his chapter about President Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Goldsmith tunes in to KLIF, a radio station in Dallas. Ads for Armour Star broad-breasted turkeys (Thanksgiving was approaching) and Falstaff beer segue into “I Have a Boyfriend,” a hit by the Chiffons. He prints the lyrics:
(Boom-sh-boom)
(Boom-sh-boom)
He made a promise
(Boom)
(Whoo-eee-whoo)
He’ll never make me cry
(Boom-sh-boom)
Every time we kiss good night
Feels so good to hold him tight …
Then an announcer cuts in: “This is a KLIF bulletin from Dallas. Three shots reportedly were fired at the motorcade of President Kennedy today near the downtown section. KLIF news is checking out the report. We will have further reports. Stay tuned.”
The station cuts back to “I Have a Boyfriend.” It broadcasts advertisements for pimple cream and a Sandra Dee movie, and plays Tommy Roe’s song “Everybody” before switching over to cover the breaking news.)

Indeed, the ads are some of the best parts:

The first of the two most glorious holidays of the year is coming. So it won’t be long until you make a most important meat purchase.

I mean, those sentences are both completely mundane and super weird—which is exactly what KG is trying to highlight.

(Photos via book designer, Krzysztof Poluchowicz)

Filed under: my reading year 2013

kenneth goldsmith seven american deaths and disasters jfk my reading year 2013 advertising transcription Krzysztof Poluchowicz books i have read

Heraclitus, Fragments

Man, translations are so damned tricky. I was a little underwhelmed by this one—turns out, for a reason. (If somebody else has a translation they recommend, lemme know.)

heraclitus fragments my reading year 2013 books i have read

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“ Perhaps you need some tidy aphorism to tuck away in the back of your mind…
”
What’s interesting about reading “classic” books is just how fucking weird most of them are. Consider Meditations:
“ Not only was it not... — Marcus Aurelius, *Meditations*
*Perhaps you need some tidy aphorism to tuck away in the back of your mind…*
What’s interesting about reading “classic” books is just how fucking *weird* most of them are. Consider *Meditations*:
Not only was it not written for publication, but Marcus clearly had no expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it….[T]he “you” of the text is not a generic “you,” but the emperor himself….It is not a diary, at least in the conventional sense. The entries contain little or nothing related to Marcus’s day-to-day life: few names, no dates and, with two exceptions, no places. It also lacks the sense of audience—the reader over one’s shoulder—that tends to characterize even the most secretive diarist….[It] is not tentative and exploratory…and it contains little or nothing that is original. It suggests not a mind recording new perceptions or experimenting with new arguments, but one obsessively repeating and reframing ideas long familiar but imperfectly absorbed.
It is, as Gregory Hays, the translator, puts it: “a self-help book in the most literal sense.” It’s Aurelius helping himself, reminding himself of what he needs to do, which leads to the “repetitiveness” of the text—“the continual circling back to the same few problems.” The entries in the book are “‘spiritual exercises’ composed to provide momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life.”
The book feels modern because it’s *unfinished*—there’s no solid organizing principle or structure to it, so the reader has to do a lot of the work, pulling out the threads, connecting entries, and making sense of the whole. It seems to me a book ripe for remixing and reshuffling—I’d love my friends who have such huge boners for the book to make top-ten lists of their “greatest hits” from the book.
(Actually if you click Mark’s “stoicism” tag, there’s a bunch of good quotes there.)
Mine:
Uncomplicate yourself.
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is *this* what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
The things you think about determine the quality of your thoughts.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that.
People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now.
Get a move on—if you have it in you—and don’t worry about whether anyone will give you credit for it. And don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it as unimportant.
To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.
As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.”
Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.
UPDATE: One thing I need to point out: I actually didn’t have a great time reading this book, because I tried to read it straight through, start to finish. Because it’s so repetitive and collage-like, it can be kind of mind-numbing if you to try to devour it at once. To me, it’s best read in little chunks, like a bathroom book, over several days.
Filed under: my reading year 2013

marcus aurelius meditations stoicism philosophy my reading year 2013 books i have read

Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Here’s David Kirby in the NYTimes:

In many ways, “Madness, Rack, and Honey” reads like a steroid-boosted version of a commonplace book, those thinking persons’ scrapbooks that became popular in early modern Europe and contained quotations from the classics, scraps of conversation, poem fragments, recipes, proverbs and lists of every sort. With all of Ruefle’s borrowings and rephrasings, it’s difficult sometimes to tell exactly who’s talking, which may be the idea. One authority burrows into another, as when the painter Cy Twombly is cited as quoting the poet John Crowe Ransom’s assertion that “the image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.” I believe the rappers call this “sampling.”

I like her idea for a class called “Footnotes”:

“For years I planned a theoretical course called Footnotes. In it, the students would read a footnoted edition of a definitive text—I thought it might as well be The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge—and proceed diligently to read every book mentioned in the footnotes (or the books by those authors mentioned) an in turn all those mentioned in the footnotes of the footnoted books, and so on and so on, stopping only when one was led back, by a footnote, to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.”

And her connection between drawing and writing:

“The greatest lesson in writing I ever had was given to me in an art class. The drawing instructor took a sheet of paper and held up a pencil. She very lightly put the pencil on the piece of paper and applied a little pressure; by bringing her hand a little ways in one direction, she left a mark upon the paper. “That’s all there is to it,” she said, “but it’s a miracle. Once there was nothing, and now there’s a mark.”

And here is a bunch of sentences I underlined:

“if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path”
“dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there”
“fear is overcome by procedure”
“In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time.”
“I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back…”
“I do not care if I am writing a poem or a letter—it is just making marks on a sheet of paper that delights and envelops me.”
“Poets are dead people talking about being alive.”
“Insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.’ That’s writing poetry, but hey, it’s also getting out of bed every morning.”
“For me, there is no difference between writing and drawing.”
“When I make contact with a piece of paper without looking up I am happy.”

Really enjoyed this. Recommended.

Filed under: my reading year 2013

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Nicholson Baker, Traveling Sprinkler
This Dwight Garner review does the book justice:
“ “Traveling Sprinkler,” for all its felicities, is B-grade Baker. Graded on the curve of all his stuff, it would actually score something worse than a B. It’s his... — Nicholson Baker, *Traveling Sprinkler*
This Dwight Garner review does the book justice:
“Traveling Sprinkler,” for all its felicities, is B-grade Baker. Graded on the curve of all his stuff, it would actually score something worse than a B. It’s his most aimless and least realized novel. At one point, Paul falls asleep while narrating it, and we sympathize. Poor guy. Poor us.
I once said that I liked Nicholson Baker because his books put me to sleep but *they aren’t boring*. This book was *very* boring, and yet, I couldn’t stop reading it, mostly because there were these little nuggets of goodness scattered throughout.
But really, Paul Chowder just needs a blog. Garner, again:
When Paul says, “I used to want to start a museum of the water fountain,” or muses about what happened to NPR’s Bob Edwards, you think: this has gotten pretty dire. This is filibustering. This is what Twitter accounts are for.
If you still haven’t read Baker, I highly recommend *The Anthologist*.
Filed under: Nicholson Baker, my reading year 2013

nicholson baker my reading year 2013 books i have read

Richard Pryor, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences

Huge fan of Pryor, and had been meaning to read this for years. Finally picked it up after reading this Dave Chappelle profile in The Believer:

Another book you should buy if you can spare twenty bucks is Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, Richard Pryor’s autobiography. In it, he tells of a dinner party thrown in his honor by Bobby Darin. Pryor is seated across from Groucho Marx, who told him “that he’d seen me on The Merv Griffin Show a few weeks earlier, when I’d guested with Jerry Lewis.”
It hadn’t been one of my better moments—Jerry and I had gotten laughs by spitting on each other, and Groucho, it turned out, had a few things to say about that.
“Young man, you’re a comic?” he asked.
“Yes,” I nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“So how do you want to end up? Have you thought about that? Do you want a career you’re proud of? Or do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis?”
The man was right… I could feel the stirrings of an identity crisis. It was coming on like the beginning of an acid trip. Groucho’s comments spoke to me. “Wake up, Richard. Yes, you are an ignorant jerk, pimping your talent like a cheap whore. But you don’t have to stay that way. You have a brain. Use it.”
The next sentence? “The thing was, I didn’t have to.”

Unfortunately, it’s a terrible book. Not terrible in that it’s poorly written or structured or bad, but in the fact that everything that happens inside its pages is terrible. Pryor was a really tortured man—he grew up around pimps and whores, was sexually abused at a young age, snorted and smoked insane amounts of cocaine¹, and chased “pussy” his whole life like a maniac (he often uses the word “bitch” to refer to many of his half dozen wives).²

And yet, in his own terms, he was one funny motherfucker. The very best of him is in his comedy, and I highly recommend That Nigger’s Crazy (YouTube) for an introduction to his work. (Most of his stuff is out of print, though you can get it in a box set.)³

A previous book borrower did the math—literally! on the last page of the book—on Pryor’s cocaine habit: comes out to $20,833 a month. ↩︎
You also won’t learn anything about the craft of stand-up comedy here. For that, read Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. ↩︎
There’s also a good New Yorker profile of Pryor from 1999 that’s worth reading. ↩︎