Category Archives: Books

Paste Culture Club (1/11/2006): Brandi Carlile

Posted on by

She’s had a couple songs on Grey’s Anatomy: I’ve meant to check her out. Has an odd voice; reminiscent simultaneously of K.D. Lang and Jeff Buckley. Sings to the very edges of her range, just short of breaking into falsetto. Interesting.

Also really loved a song they played earlier on: “Slow New York” by Richard Julian.

Interesting tidbits during the “Arthouse” directors segment (taken from that issue of the magazine): Gus Van Sant is going to be the director on the adaptation of Time Traveler’s Wife. (Not that I’ll be seeing it. Loved the book waaaay too much.)

Enjoyed the Pendarvis interviews Beethoven segment also.

And Nada Surf bookends the show — reminds me, I think I have an album of theirs I’ve never listened to. Probably never even taken the plastic off. Got to get to it!

KCRW’s Bookworm: Kurt Vonnegut (4/6).

Posted on by

Great interview. So sad to think Vonnegut doesn’t have that much time left; his mind is still just as sharp and vibrant as ever. Talks a lot about the American public school system. Definitely makes you remember how proudly subversive he’s been for so many years and the amazing life he’s lived — a former soldier. Highly recommend giving this a listen.

KCRW’s Bookworm: Jorie Graham.

Posted on by

Maybe not the best choice for the El ride home: the soothing dulcet sounds of Michael Silverblatt and poet Jorie Graham, combined with the rhythm of the train…I could barely keep my eyes open!
That said, Graham did have a lot of interesting things to say about living in the NOW. About finding a way to get through it: life, the poem, etc. Not waiting for things to change, for it to be the perfect situation…
Either she said stuff about that or I dreamed it, who can say.

Reading Assignments.

Posted on by

Need to buy George Saunders “In Persuasion Nation” and read by June 5 (for me this is forcefeeding short stories. for the rest of you, this is just the right kind of reading for people who ‘don’t have time to read’ so go! read it!) so I can leave Betsy a million comments that week.

Need to buy Yannick Murphy “Here They Come” and read it YESTERDAY as they are already a week into discussing it over at the Lit Blog Co-Op and now I can’t look at the site for fear of learning something I don’t want to know yet but I will so want to know as soon as I’ve read it.

KCRW’s Bookworm: Walter Kirn.

Posted on by

Discussing Kirn’s novel “Mission to America”, which takes people living in a boonies Montana “cult” out into real world 2005. Not necessarily something I’d want to read, but very interesting discussion of those “types” of “religions” (mormonism, scientology, christian science, jehovah witness, seventh day adventists, etc.), and a feeling of nostalgia for 19th-century ideas we, as a culture, have “grown out of.”
America seems to be about this ceaseless business of coming up with crackpot ways to comfort itself.

The book sounds really funny. Also Charles Portis and his book “Masters of Atlantis” which they discuss as an influence. Both sound like a riot. Altho the Portis book I read a while ago (“The Dog of the South”) was more mildly humorous than drop dead funny.

It is dangerous to listen to these podcasts, they just add more, more and more things to my “possibilities” list and that list, and the pile of unread books, are both already deep enough.

But, man, I could definitely fall asleep to the sound of Michael Silverblatt’s voice.

A quote for this dreary Monday.

Posted on by

Some measure of generality must be present in any high-class theorem, but too much tends inevitably to inspidity. ‘Everything is what it is, and not another thing’, and the differences between things are quite as interesting as their resemblances. We do not choose our friends because they embody all the pleasant qualities of humanity, but because they are the people they are. And so in mathematics; a property common to too many objects can hardly be very exciting, and mathematical ideas also become dim unless they have lenty of individuality.
–GH Hardy “A Mathematician’s Apology”

Wow.

Posted on by

Really great interview with Gina Frangello, author of “My Sister’s Continent” a very intense book that kept me awake all the way to Australia…, here. Some great info about the publishing industry.

KCRW’s Bookworm: Octavia Butler.

Posted on by

This was recorded before she died and focuses mainly on her last novel “Fledgling”, a new take on vampires. Although I have not read anything of hers, I really enjoyed listening to what issues she’s interested in exploring in her writing in general and the way in which she came around to writing this novel specifically. (The review on Amazon rhetorically asks: “How many of our happy relationships involve a degree of dominance or dependence that we can’t acknowledge?”) But, man, this book sounds NUTS. (In a good way.)

Beyond exploring Butler’s oeuvre, thinking about this type of book in general really makes me want to reread old stuff like Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, which I haven’t read since…the early 90s sometime I think, in grad school.