5 favorite short books

1. Of Walking in Ice - Werner Herzog, 64 pp. I just read and reviewed this and it compelled me to do this list.
2. Olt - Kenneth Gangemi, 64 pp. A delirious and distracted narrative of a complete narcissist, a compulsive list maker that cannot find a way to make to make sense of anything or anyone withtout them becoming line items. I read this as a part of a 20th Century Novels class twenty years ago and little scenes of it still stick with me.
3. Remarks on Color - Ludwig Wittgenstein, 63 pp. This book is ostensibly about the properties of color and running the old philosophical bong hit about whether we all see blue the same way through his sweet form of philosophical rigor.
   
4. i six nonlectures - e. e. cummings, 128 pp. One of the many things that bonded me to my friend Joe is that we could both throw out "The hellless hell of compulsory heaven-on-earth emphatically isn't my pale of blueberries" from memory, found on the first page of this powerful and wry set of Charles Norton lectures from the poet.
5. By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolaño , 144 pp. This book seemed a lot shorter; I had it in my mind at 100 pages, but maybe because you burn through the dying priest's recollections, crammed into one enormous paragraph, like a spark traveling down the wick to the eventual explosion. My review of it can be found here.
   

Review of Werner Herzog - Of Walking in Ice: Munich - Paris 23 November - 14 Decenber 1974 by Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog - Of Walking in Ice: Munich - Paris 23 November - 14 Decenber 1974 by Werner Herzog

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is exhilarating. I wish there were more 64-page books on the world packed as densely as this. Composed as a journal written over a week while walking from Munich to Paris, convinced that an ailing friend will hang til he gets there, Of Walking in Ice does not seek to make a grand statement; instead it is an act of contrition, one in which bears witness to the unending flow of statements the world makes rather than making his own.

The narrative flits from one thing to the next just with as little sentimentality as possible. While reading this, you walk through your own life with the same wide eyes, finding profundity in the facts, without romanticizing the minor act of recognizing those facts. You will also read your life in Werner's voice. Just as Werner was breaking into yet another vacation cabin for shelter, a woman came up to the bench where was sitting to ask if I could open her Coke bottle for her. "It's senior-proof," she said. Then the clock tower near us boomed its noon bells. And so on...

Road books always put me in the mind of casting my life as a purposed journey, but this is one of the first to remind me to not dwell too much on each incident but to let it sit empirically profound on it's own terms, because there is another just up ahead.


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Jalapeño and sausage biscuit at Ambrosia Bakery, Baton Rouge, LA

Ambrosia's biscuit dough is alarmingly sweet, too much so for the tried and true biscuit with patty sausage, but holy mother of breakfast pastry, infuse it with cheese, a fistful of fresh jalapeño and crumbled sausage, it explodes out of humble biscuit form into a juicy, citrus-sour chariot of the breakfast gods, bringing the radiant jalapeño glory in the manner of Helios towing the sun and you are Icarus daring to finish each bite.

if it ain't Björk, don't fix it

Grizzly Bear - Verkatimest
School of Seven Bells - Face to Face in High Places (listen)
Björk - Medulla (listen)

dark

The power went out at work.

The dimness, not darkness, was met with mild incredulousness and barely muted glee. I was just glad the light was out. I am a software guy at heart, and we like to be only illuminated by our screens, the brilliance of the things we peck out serving as texture on the lampshade that is the white of our screens. The front part of my office houses a video editing computer that is frequently utilized by people who are not mole rats and thereby need lights.

Weirdly enough, I was listening to Dark Night of the Soul (NPR stream) as it happened, wondering if I should record it since it appears that the infinite wisdom of licesners are holding it up. I think perhaps streaming out of the Proemethan lamp of National Public Radio is the right place for this; it hits me as PBS surrealism, quirky and slyly sensual, but not a touch dangerous. Danger Mouse had an unnerving steadiness in how he makes things things proceed ; it works with Cee-Lo crooning away over it, using it as a tightrope to traverse the ravine of the modern soul, or maybe just modern soul music, but it comes off too over-produced and under-inspired here, like an all-star Starbucks tribute record to David Lynch, for me to go through the trouble of trapping it to keep it at the ready on my phone, a holstered weapon or useful Bat-tool on my utility belt.

I had a similar thought about the similarly named Dark Was the Night concert (also streaming at NPR) I listened to last night as my daughter and her friend tried on their independence at the park last night. There is a sincere preciousness to the bands assembled, and you could hear Bob Boilen think these are special times as he rattles off their precious names: Dirty Projectors, My Brightest Diamond, The Arcade Fire, and the king of sincere preciousness David Byrne. I like all these acts, and am a general supporter of preciousness when it is wrapped around the spark of an individual as if to protect the little flame from being blown out. The album is a stellar listen, and a good cause, but I could feel people smiling a little too easily over whatever airwaves streaming audio streams. I felt enough already about it. These are precious times and we are precious for living in them, OK? Now, give it a rest.

There is almost a saber-rattling positivity to these precious groups that grates at me a little; maybe I am just too cranky to see the world so golden. I am embroiled in Herzog's maddening world of reality vivisected with the sharp scalpel of a personal, fragile spirituality, and that is coloring my view. In his walk from Munich to Paris chronicled in Of Walking in Ice, he nurtures the ridiculous of his zeal.

A pile of garbage on the plain does not want to leave my mind at all; I saw it from a distance and walked faster and faster, finally as if I was seized with mortal terror, I couldn't bear the thought of it being passed by a car before I reached it. Gasping from the mad race, I reached the mountain of garbage, needing quite a long time to recover from all this although the first car passed me several minutes after I had arrived.

(Tuesday 12/3)

This kind of desperate madness is what I want to see coming from preciousness, not an ordered tableau of talent or an expression of how wonderful my friends are and how fortunate I am to have them. There is nothing wrong with wonderful friends and the fortunes to be found in them, for I have both in copious amounts, but there is more than that in the world.

When I got back from a lunch break with Werner on the dark, frozen roads of rural of Germany, the lights were back on.

footing

When I listened to Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheney's Song X the first time in 1988(listen), a couple years after it came out, while the heat off it was fresh in the hearts of the jazz people at the college radio station I worked at, I totally hated the record. I remember thinking "this is why people don't like jazz." It had dumb song titles like "Video Games" and "Mob Job." Some songs were 15 seconds long, some were 13 minutes long and they were all equally annoying. I really disliked this album, and haven't listened to it since.

Now it comes across with the same jarring intimacy that I find throughout Coleman's records. He's poking you in the ribs and jostling you like y'all are old friends. Nothing too heavy, but nothing too light either. It is relentless but not raging. Stream of existence kind of stuff. I'm trying to wrap my brain around Coleman's harmolodics for the libretto for an opera about Coleman I am tentatively working on. In his words, harmolodics is:

the use of the physical and the mental of one's own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group

I'm gathering that the practical musical interpretation is that all aspects of a song are alotted equal intensity: the pace, the energy, the rhythm, the melody are all coming at you in this music at the same speed. If a song is a race and all the components runners, everyone keeps pace and finishes breathlessly in a tie. I'm simplifying things and/or missing the concept entirely. I'm trying to figure out how to apply that to the writing, putting fact, fiction, conjecture, history, context, character, narration, music, truth, apocrypha, etc all on equal footing and make this thing enjoyable to witness.

The Cave of Psychro

Julian Cope offered up his flower of analysis to the Irish doom battalion To Blacken the Pages (myspace) deeming their A Semblance of Something Appertaining to Destuction his January album of the month, and in that blossom lay this bit of metaphoric nectar:

Way up high in the mysterious mountains of central Crete, arduously accessed only via a precarious single trackway, and located in the higher foothills of legendary Mt Ida - the greatest Cretan mountain of all - the vast Antron (or cave) of Immortal Zeus is an inaccessible pad even for a Greek God, and is said to have been chosen as the birthplace of the greatest Greek God of them all, in order that his jealous father Cronos would not find the baby and kill him. Why do I tell you this? Why, because the colossal reverb that informs the music of To Blacken the Pages is very nearly as mighty as that located inside the Antron of Zeus.

so I looked up the Antron of Zeus and found it to also be named Diktaion Antron or Cave of Psychro (some websites have it incorrectly listed as the Cave of Psycho, which would be too good). GreeceIndex.com offered up this little nugget that is now my gold standard for travel brochure copy:

From the very beginning of the excavation, the Cave of Psychro was called the Diktaion Antron, as legend has it that this was where Rhea hid to give birth to Zeus, the Father of Gods and Men, safe from Cronus’s infanticidal tendencies. The goat Amalthea, who according to a different myth was actually a Nymph, nursed Zeus, while the Curetes (mythical daemons and followers of a deity) drowned out his cries by dancing and clashing their spears on their shields. Another legend has it that Zeus was nursed by peaceful bees.

Image of the Cave of Psychro from here

Here is To Blacken the Pages setting "I am screes on her escarpments" from their aforementioned album to footage of atomic bomb tests: