Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Katha Pollitt: LEARNING TO DRIVE (2007); Erica Jong: SEDUCING THE DEMON (2006)

So...two memoirs by two of our poets...one better known for her political essays, the other for her sexually liberationist novels. One a collection of essays, the other a unitary memoir that began as a writing manual. Both, despite a bit of furor over the Pollitt and the supposed "bestselling" status of the Jong, are already out of print, at least by the measure of primary Amazon availability...

The hassle over the Pollitt came mostly from such quarters as the dancer and repressed-anger sexual submissive Toni Bentley (whose most famous recent work is a fussily-written account of a no-strings/fetishistically all-anal-sex affair and how that helped her find her spiritual self) who was shocked, shocked that Pollitt would be such a man-hater as to “cyberstalk” (actually, just engine-search and read about) her ex-boyfriend. Bentley was accorded considerable space in the New York Times Book Review to expound on this thesis and the other obvious sins of Pollitt, who seems an oddly unembitteredly heterosexual target for such a backhanded slap at feminism. Pollitt’s book is actually a rather cheerful, for the most part, collection of essays about her life at various times, including accounts of good and bad affairs, her early life and her parents’ marriage, her literary career and particularly her early gig as an editor for a soft-core porn novel publisher in the 1970s, a decent source of pay for a young poet and rather eye-opening in several ways. Also, she learns, rather late in life, how to drive a car…happily, this is not employed in any distended way as a metaphor. Those who have read Pollitt’s essays in The Nation and elsewhere can expect a rather similar mix of down to Earth sensibility and incisive observation. It’s typical of our most overrated paper, and certainly of its ridiculous literary desk, that they so eccentrically hoped to sink it…and perhaps they helped.

Jong’s book is less sharply-written than Pollitt’s, as is perhaps not too surprising…poets, and particularly poets who have found greater success with prose, often are relatively lax in the “looser” form, one which less obviously demands (though it still demands, for artistic success, for the craft) concision or at least a sense of when concision can be temporarily forgotten. Jong’s still has a bit of the writer’s guide about it, while mostly being a series of anecdotes about her affairs and passage through the literary world, writing erotica rather than editing it but otherwise not treading too terribly different a path in many ways than Pollitt…just, perhaps, a somewhat more public life, and certainly one which saw an early infusion of cash and attention. I couldn’t shake the sense that Jong is a bit less happy than Pollitt, who seems to have found a rather comfortable place for herself emotionally by her narratives’ end, but both books provide a useful and entertaining opportunity to know a bit of the lives of two of our more engaging feminist literary lions.

(Pollitt’s most recent Nation column on the stands deals with the debate over Jonathan Franzen and Gary Shteyngart’s publicists arranging for their work to suck up all the Literary Hype Opportunities of late; she’s kind enough to refer to Franzen as a good writer, though the current Atlantic features B. R. Myers's review of Franzen’s Freedom that rather forcefully states something akin to my own perception of the man’s work as second-rate, at best, ersatz Philip Roth with a few hints of Robert Coover tossed in.) Jong's book was rather negatively reviewed in the NYT as well, as she notes in this reflection on her life after its publication...

For more of today’s selection of “Forgotten” books, please see Patti Abbott’s blog.

October 1st's "Forgotten" Books:
Paul Bishop: This Girl For Hire by G.G. Fickling
Bill Crider: The Gone Man by Brad Solomon
Scott Cupp: Dread Island by Joe R. Lansdale
Ed Gorman: The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch
Randy Johnson: Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser
George Kelley: Four Color Fear edited by Gregg Sadowski
Todd Mason: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
Richard Robinson: 12 Worlds of Alan E. Nourse by Alan E. Nourse

Friday's Rapidly Vanishing Books: THE FINAL SOLUTION by Michael Chabon (THE PARIS REVIEW, 2003)

Michael Chabon, who among other things has guest-edited two of the best issues of the eclectic fiction magazine McSweeney's (and those issues subsequently republished as anthologies, covers below), also has written my favorite bit of Sherlockiana..."The Final Solution," a novella first published in The Paris Review in 2003 and published in a surprisingly unpopular chapbook (cover at left) the next year, involves the very elderly but still game Holmes (who is never named in the story) trying to plumb the mystery surrounding a child refugee from the Nazi pogroms, and his pet parrot. Thus Chabon's chief obsessions, from the systematic attack on Europe's Jews to pop-culture heroes (particularly in a fantasticated crime-fiction context), are mostly if not all exercised, and in fine and charming prose, with ready wit and only a late slip into the entirely fantasticated that I think slightly weakens the story, but the critic and novelist John Clute has argued with me that that little bit actually sums and reinforces the very point of the story...you probably won't be sorry to see which of us you agree with more, if you're game and can find a copy afoot (unlike most of my FFBs, this one is still readily in print, I believe...just not nearly as readily available as nearly every other Chabon book).

Patti Abbott's taking the week off, so look to her eventual listing, and perhaps I'll put one together when for a breath I tarry...these are the Chabon McSweeney's issues in their book form:

October 1st's "Forgotten" Books:

Paul Bishop: This Girl For Hire by G.G. Fickling

Bill Crider: The Gone Man by Brad Solomon

Scott Cupp: Dread Island by Joe R. Lansdale

Ed Gorman: The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch

Randy Johnson: Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser

George Kelley: Four Color Fear edited by Gregg Sadowski

Richard Robinson: 12 Worlds of Alan E. Nourse by Alan E. Nourse

September's "Forgotten" Music: RAINY DAY (and, THE BUNCH)

A number of folks in the loose assembly of early 1980s LA-based bands which became known collectively as the "Paisley Underground" got together to record some tracks that were released in 1984 as Rainy Day. This album has not yet been released in any digital format, as far as I know...somewhere, I have a cassette copy, which probably wouldn't sell for the inflated prices that the LP does.

As Amazon.com puts it:
Rainy Day (Self-Titled)
Rainy Day (Author), Susanna Hoffs & Vicki Peterson (Author), David & Steven Roback (Author), Will Glenn (Author), Michael Quercio (Author), Matthew Piucci (Author), Dennis Duck (Author), Kendra Smith (Author), Ethan James (Author), Karl Precoda (Author) | Format: Vinyl

Only three tracks have been posted, and reposted, around the web, that I've found, but they do give a sense of the charm of this collection of covers of folk-rock songs and work that draws on the folk-rock of the '60s, even as such bands as the Bangs/Bangles and the Dream Syndicate did themselves.  ***2014 update: here's a full-album post:



As Jenny Woolworth put it in her Women in Punk Blog:

Included here for you today are three songs: ”Flying on the Ground is Wrong” (featuring Kendra Smith on vocals, David Roback on guitar and Susanna Hoffs on backing vocals), “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (featuring Susanna Hoffs on vocals and guitar, David Roback on guitar, bass and tambourine and Kendra Smith on backing vocals) and “I’ll Keep it With Mine” (featuring Susanna Hoffs on lead vocals, David Roback on guitar and tambourine and Will Glenn on violin).

And this kind selection leaves off the fine reading of Alex Chilton's "Holocaust" and a handful of others...to wit, from the Lossless Music site:

Track Listing:

1 I'll Keep It With Mine
2 John Riley
3 Flying on the Ground Is Wrong
4 Sloop John B.
5 Soon Be Home
6 Holocaust
7 On the Way Home
8 I'll Be Your Mirror
9 Rainy Day, Dream Away

1. I'll Keep It With Mine
Written by Bob Dylan; originally recorded by Nico.
Personnel: Susanna Hoffs - lead vocal; David Roback - guitar, tambourine; Will Glenn - violin; Michael Quercio - bass guitar.

2. John Riley
Written by Phil Belmonte, Bob Gibson, Ricky Neff; previously recorded by the Byrds, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, and others.
Personnel: Michael Quercio - lead vocal, bass guitar; Matthew Piucci - acoustic 12-string; David Roback - electric 12-string, background vocals; Will Glenn - violin, background vocals; Dennis Duck - drums.

3. Flying on the Ground is Wrong
Written by Neil Young; originally recorded by Buffalo Springfield.
Personnel: Kendra Smith - lead and background vocals; David Roback - guitar; Susanna Hoffs - background vocals.

4. Sloop John B.
Traditional; best known as a Beach Boys hit.
Personnel: Michael Quercio - lead vocal, bass guitar, percussion; Ethan James - keyboards; Dennis Duck - drums; David Roback - guitar, congas.

5. Soon Be Home
Written by Pete Townshend; originally recorded by the Who, as Part V of "A Quick One While He's Away".
Personnel: David Roback - lead vocal, guitars; Michael Quercio - bass guitar, drums; Vicki Peterson - background vocals; Susanna Hoffs - background vocals; Spock - tambourine.

6. Holocaust
Written by Alex Chilton; originally recorded by Big Star.
Personnel: Kendra Smith - lead vocal; Steven Roback - piano; Will Glenn - cello; David Roback - guitar; Ethan James - backwards piano.

7. On the Way Home
Written by Neil Young; originally recorded by Buffalo Springfield.
Personnel: David Roback - vocals, guitar.

8. I'll Be Your Mirror
Written by Lou Reed; originally recorded by the Velvet Underground and Nico.
Personnel: Susanna Hoffs - lead vocal, guitar; David Roback - lead guitar, bass guitar, tambourine; Sue and Kendra - background vocals.

9. Rainy Day, Dream Away
Written by Jimi Hendrix; originally recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Personnel: Michael Quercio - lead vocal; Ethan James - bass guitar, keyboard; Dennis Duck - drums; Karl Precoda - guitar; David Roback - congas.

One of the other discussions of this album that I've found on the web noted that it reminded the author of that other collection of covers of older songs by a group of folk-rockers (no bones about it folk-rockers in this case), the album recorded by the largely Fairport Convention-member/ex-member conglomerate and entitled Rock On (and here swiping from Wikipedia):

Sandy Denny lead vocals from Rock On:








Track listing(s)

Original LP album
"Crazy Arms"
"That'll Be the Day"
"Don't Be Cruel"
"The Loco-Motion"
"My Girl the Month of May"
"Love's Made a Fool of You"
"Willie and the Hand Jive"
"Jambalaya (On The Bayou)"
"When Will I Be Loved"
"Nadine"
"Sweet Little Rock 'n' Roller"
"Learning the Game"

Flexi-disc included with original LP
"Let There Be Drums"

Fledg'ling Records FLED 3042 CD bonus tracks
"Let There Be Drums"
"Twenty Flight Rock"
"High School Confidential"
"La Bamba"

Personnel
Gerry Conway - drums and percussion (not the comics/tv Conway)
Tony Cox - piano
Sandy Denny - vocals
Pat Donaldson - bass
Ashley Hutchings - vocals
Trevor Lucas - vocals, 12-string guitar
Dave Mattacks - drums and percussion
Linda Thompson - vocals
Richard Thompson - vocals, guitars
Ian Whiteman - piano
The Dundee Horns - brass

And this one is now an overpriced collectible, too, in its CD release (I have the vinyl from Island). But the (Amazon samples) link above will give you a taste of what they were on about (2014 additional video links)...sadly, events today keep me from writing up the paean to folk-rock and its extensions I hoped to...

Please see Scott Parker's blog for the other "forgotten" music this month...

FFB : Firsts: NEW BLACK MASK, ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S ANTHOLOGY, NEW WORLD WRITING, TRIQUARTERLY, WORKS IN PROGRESS and other periodical books and littles

The last major subsets of "firsts" among the fiction magazines that got me hooked were arguably books, most of them...Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for January, 1978 was the first adult fiction magazine purchased for me new, 75c and the best bargain in fiction magazines at the time. And, unusually for AHMM covers of the time, it was competently composed...and there were memorable stories from Lawrence Block and Jack Ritchie, particularly. Inasmuch as I'd already collected some mid-'60s back issues, and read a few more borrowed from the Enfield Central Library, I was given the funds to buy a subscription...and not too long after, I was able to procure a copy of the first Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, which many reference sources would prefer not to call a magazine, despite being issued periodically to newsstands by magazine publisher Davis Publications (who also issued Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Ellery Queen's Anthologies, which the Hitchcock item imitated), although a Dial Press hardcover edition was also published which tried to disguise the all-AHMM selections as one of the eclectic anthologies Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur would ghost for Hitchcock and Random House. These, instead, were edited by the magazine's editors...in the manner of the many previous Dell paperbacks taking their contents from AHMM. The early AHA issues/volumes had a Very rich backfile to draw on, so you can see how addictive they could be, as well...at about the same time, I was not only also picking up new issues of EQMM and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but was always happy to stumble over such treasures of the recent past as The Saint Mystery Magazine,,,and, several years later, in 1985, a clangourous new porject popped up, the New Black Mask, even as MSMM was beginning to go into its final tailspin, Each issue of New Black Mask, all published as books by HBJ, which would also sell you a subcription to the series just like a magazine, featured a remarkable mix of writers spanning the range of hardboiled and noir ficton and bit beyond. I actually picked up the last volum as NBM to keep first, then collected most of the rest as I catch could, and also the successor series, A Matter of Crime (after the trademark holders of Black Mask challenged NBM's right to use the title).

I started reading the eclectic little magazines (as distinct from fantasy-fiction littles such as Whispers), aside from arguably Short Story International (which was a nonprofit that used good paper and charged twices as much for itself per issue than most of the other fiction digests...but it was on newsstands, unlike most littles), with TriQuarterly, which in its first decade particularly was offering one great issue after another, particularly when Robert Onopa was associated with the magazine, in the latter '70s. A snobbish backlash over the SF issue (Algis Budrys, Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Samuel Delany) severed most of the staff, including Onopa, from the magazine, which has yet to fully recover its quality of those years...the subscribers, I guess, had been pushed to their limits by the previous western (Dorothy Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, et al.), "Love and Hate," and other theme issues, including "Prose for Borges" and more. (TriQuarterly has gone web-only just recently.) Of course, even before I began reading the little magazines that were no-bones-about-it magazines (such as also The Paris Review and Antaeus...it took me a while to find The Ontario Review and Boulevard and the comparitively dull Story revival), I had found some of the periodical book/magazine projects that had begun in the 1950s, such as New World Writing (the 6th volume/issue featured a long excerpt from Louis Armstrong's memoirs, contemporary Japanese haiku in translation, and more),
and their modern descendents, such as the Doubleday Literary Guild loss-leader Works in Progress (which in the first issue I had offered the best chunk of Alix Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen). I tumbled to New Directions and New American Review (later simply American Review) and Evergreen Review (in those largely post-censorial times) not long after.
...come to think of it, mentioning Evergreen reminds me of two other categories of fiction magazine that I haven't quite yet nostalgically surveyed...the humorous and the erotic (the latter had quite a vogue in the '80s and '90s, ranging from Yellow Silk to Paramour, from Future Sex to Blue Blood).

For more "forgotten" books this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: Joanna Russ: HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING (UTP 1985), TO WRITE LIKE A WOMAN (IUP 1995), THE COUNTRY YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN (LUP 2007)

Joanna Russ was kind of a fortuitous presence in my early reading of adult fantastic ficiton...her hilarious "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" was in Robert Silverberg's anthology Infinite Jests ("Are you edible? I am not edible."--an early exposure, for me, to what I call a story of apparatus), which I read when I was about eleven...at about the same time, I saw my first issue of F&SF on a newsstand, at the drugstore where I bought my comics and the occasional book or National Lampoon, the January 1976 issue with Russ's "My Boat" leading it off...it and Stuart Dybek's "Horror Movie" looked intriguing, but it cost a Whole Buck, and I could get four comics for that, if I even had a whole buck on me at the time. Meanwhile, the first F&SF I owned was the November 1971, featuring Russ as the book reviewer, leading off her column with Shulamith Firestone's speculative feminist nonfiction, The Dialectic of Sex.



Her three important nonfiction books primarily about literature, as opposed to the mixed collection of essays Magic Mommas..., which I've briefly reviewed previously, and her last completely new published work so far, history of the feminist revival What Are We Fighting For?, are all witty, challenging, and often brilliant...and often harder to find than her only sustainedly in-print novel, the brilliant The Female Man. How to Suppress Women's Writing is a a book-length study; To Write Like a Woman a collection of longer essays, and The Country You Have Never Seen mostly a collection of her book reviews, public letters, and shorter essays. The first two are excerpted on Google Books at the hypertext links...it both is and is not remarkable how much of her work has been Google Booked, given her importance and her relative lack of support by her publishers...though, notably, all three of today's books are in print, from their respective university presses. I'm not sure if Russ is on record as wary/annoyed by Google's book project as Ursula Le Guin has been...but Russ is at least semi-retired as a public figure, having a degenerative back problem that had her writing most of her later works standing up. (As someone who is wondering what the hell is suddenly up with his worsening eyes, I have nothing but sympathy.)

Suppress was Russ's first extended work of nonfiction, and is an excellent approach to the subject at hand, well documented and willing to note where the exceptions to the overarching problem exist, however partially. I like To Write even better, particularly "Someone's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband," a brilliant quick study of the state of the supermarket gothic in their first flourish (they are not quite back in the nonetheless related form of the paranormal romance). The Firestone-led column is one of the many review-essays and related writing collected in Country, which collectively allow for Russ's playfulness and wit to express themselves perhaps most blatantly...another F&SF essay memorably runs through a series of metaphors for the books under discussion, each except the last considered as a variety of toy rabbit.

Russ began her academic/creative career in drama, as I recall, rather like her near-exact contemporary Barry Malzberg...they were both writing stage drama while working within academe, at least as grad students; Kate Laity has done something similar, while going on to profess while freelancing, while Malzberg left campus to become a full-time freelancer and off-and-on literary agent and editor; Russ, I believe, split the difference, continuing to teach in drama off and on while conducting her literary career...the latter in prose rather than in drama. Hence also one of her several points of community with Fritz Leiber, who was first professionally an actor before he was a writer and who consistently wrote prose with a dramatic sense to it, often in dramatic or near-dramatic form. (Then there are all the busy screenwriters who are among "our" prose writers, such as Leigh Brackett, Robert Bloch, Henry Slesar, William Goldman, George R. R. Martin, Alan Brennert, Harlan Ellison, Bruce Jay Friedman, Jules Feiffer [the last two also stage playwrights] and others...while Jack Sharkey might've been one of the few to eventually make a career mostly based on stage drama, writing dozens of one-act plays for Samuel French and their clients in mostly community and amateur theater.

That's only one point between Leiber and Russ, who also both wrote among the most challenging work in fantastic-fiction (i.e. Leiber's Conjure Wife and "Coming Attraction" and "The Night He Cried" [with the arguably limited target, looming larger at the time, of Mickey Spillane's fiction and its influence) to Russ's The Female Man and her affectionate parodies of Lovecraft and vicious ones of Heinlein and his imitators), their mutual love for bringing an extra dimension or several to adventure fantasy (Leiber and Russ even wrote one story each which feature the other's avatars Fafhrd and Alyx within their own fiction cycles), and, of course, both serving as reviewers and columnists for the most visible fantasy amgazines on newsstands in the 1970s, among other markets.

Country might be the last new book we see from Russ, and that is a pity, except only in that it's a fine collection of work from throughout that career, and worth the stiff price of the paperback edition (or even the very stiff price of the stiffer format). It occurs to me that Liverpool delayed its publication...Russ might've wanted it out in 2005, making neat ten year itnervals betwen her purely liteary nonfiction books. (But maybe not.)

And it occurs to me that I don't remember if I had the wit to suggest to Patti Abbott, when she asked me about utopian and dystopian fiction, that The Female Man goes beyond its seeds in "When It Changed" to posit a throughline of incomplete dystopia and utopia at every stage of its narrative, not even least the parts set in the here and now of its composition-space/time...along with Damon Knight's "The Country of the Kind," one of the more challenging and meliorated of utopias for its larger implications (even as Leiber's "Coming Attraction" and Kate Wilhelm's "The Winter Beach" and its expansion Welcome, Chaos among other work are meliorated dystopia).

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for a rundown of the other, more prompt Friday "Forgotten" Books for this week.