Fresh Book Reports (2) from Penn's private blog. Enjoy! (Patreon)

The Philosophy of Modern Song – Bob Dylan – 221028 – Wow, I was lucky enough to get this a few weeks before it comes out and I read it carefully. There are 66 chapters, and each chapter is about a modern song. I was so excited that I started to read it right away, and after the first three chapters, I realized I had to listen to each song he was writing about first, and then read what Bob wrote.

There is nothing like this book.

Actually, there is something just like this book, but it’s not a book – Imagine your best friend. If your best friend knew everything about music. And if your best friend was wise and knew about life. And if your best friend was crazier than a shithouse rat. And if your best friend had the biggest record collection in the world and knew every song in it backwards and forwards and had listened to each one a hundred times and could play and sing them all (that’s what I meant by knew everything about music), and if your best friend won a Nobel Prize.

Okay?

Now imagine that you’re sitting with that best friend, and they are playing music for you. And there is no pattern, that you can discern, for the song choices or the order of the songs.  No pattern, but it makes perfect sense. They are playing “Take Me from This Garden of Evil” (Jimmy Wages) and “The Whiffenpoof Song” (Bing Crosby), “CIA Man” (The Fugs) “My Prayer” (The Platters) “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” (Cher), “Come On-a My House”, (Rosemary Clooney), “Witchy Woman” (Eagles) – you get the idea. Actually, you don’t get the idea at all. I tried to pick a few choices to give the vibe, but . . . I can’t. It’s all over the place. There’s Stephen Foster and Warren Zevon in there. “Ball of Confusion” by the Temps. I like to think I know a little bit about music, but there were a bunch I had never heard of. Never. No bells rung in my head. Maybe you’ve heard of “Ruby, Are You Mad?” by The Osborne Brothers, but how about “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” by Uncle Dave Macon?  You know that?  And yeah, the Clash, and Tommy Edwards, and the Grateful Dead, and go ahead, ignore Bob’s advice and look back, did you notice The Fugs and Rosemary Clooney?  Little Richard, Johnny Cash, and Bobby Darin have two songs each in here. It’s fucking nuts. And Bob does not give a fuck. There is stuff he writes in here, stuff that Bill Mahar would never even dare think, that would end anyone else’s career, but he’s Bob and he never gave a fuck. 60 years before the Nobel Bob didn’t give a fuck. It’s astounding. It’s very carefully written, but not with any of the bullshit filters, it’s just written to be good, not careful.

There is a lot of philosophy, and there are stories and laugh out loud jokes.

We now all have every song we’d ever want to hear at our fingertips (most every song in here is in Apple Music and the three that weren’t, The Fugs, Uncle Dave, and the Drifters, I think, but they were on YouTube and easy to find), and that’s wonderful. It blows my mind that we all have bigger record collections than Bob in the palms of our hands, but . . . I do miss going over to friends’ houses and having them play music for me. And I loved playing music for friends. Some of the best times in my life were going over to Eddie’s apartment in NYC and having him just run from record to record, and saying “Have you heard this?,” playing a track and talking about it. Or when I met Jonesy, and he invited me over and played me jazz and talked about his passion and anything else that popped into his head. Or M.C. Kostek. And I’ve played a lot of music for my friends too. I remember playing stuff for Teller – Lou, Springsteen, and . . .Dylan, and that was a big part of getting to know each other.

I hope this book reminds us to start doing that again more. You know, it’s what life really is. It might be all that matters.

I’m not the guy you go to for design, but even a might-as-well-be-blind-guy like me can notice that this book is a visual masterpiece.  Coco did the most amazing design I’ve ever seen. It puts you in the mood for the words, and it ties everything together even though it can’t be tied together. The feeling of being in the room talking music is visually there too. It’s not the album covers, it’s deeper than that, it’s just right.

This book is a perfect art object and a perfect event. And it spills into the world because you have to listen to each song. It’s so wonderful.

I read this book on paper (that’s very very rare for me) and I’m kind of glad I couldn’t highlight because it would have been the whole book. I don’t really need to highlight because I’ll read it again, and again, and I’ll probably just memorize it, so highlights won’t matter.

After song number 59, I had to take a break before the last 7 to go to Tulsa for a book signing (my book – no one wants me to sign Bob’s) and I visited The Bob Dylan Center with Steven Banks. It’s amazing, we watched every video, and listened to everything, and read everything and studied and Glenn asked the big cheese “Has anyone spent more time here?” and he said, “Not yet.”

So, I’ve been deep in Dylan world for the past few weeks (the past 52 years?) and it’s been something.

Wow.

If all I got out of this book was “A Certain Girl” and really getting The Drifters for the first time, it would have been worth my time.  But in a certain way it gave me back a direct love of music and, weirdly, for a book, the social aspect of listening to records. Goddamn.

Hey, when it comes out, get a copy, listen to all the songs, and let’s talk about them. Let’s play them and lots other music for each other and talk about them.

Yup, I liked this book.

The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray – 221029 – Mac King suggested this book to me. I read it in a really disjointed way. I really didn’t do it right. It would have been better to flow through, but reading all the Spanish, and friends having books coming out that I wanted to read, I broke it up.  It’s a witty playwright, being very honest and just writing what he’s thinking while smoking.  When he wrote it (2000) he was about my age and, he makes it feel like he’s just sitting around looking at the world around him and watching his friends die while he smokes. Mac is right, it’s a really interesting book. I guess Mac is reading more of them (there are other volumes), but I’ve got a bit too many books to read now. But I’m glad Mac had me read this. As I look over my highlights, it is a really funny and honest book.

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riding hood, Little Red Riding Hood, why would a little girl walking through the woods to visit her granny be wearing a riding hood, and what is a riding hood - in as much as I can visualize it, I see it as dark and sinister, as sported by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, for instance, or the Ku Klux Klan, is there something in the story I'm failing to remember, an explanation of Red Riding Hood's wearing a red riding hood, it can't be that Hood is her surname, Red and Riding her Christian (given, they try to compel us to say, these days, in case we offend a Muslim) names - highly unlikely, Red is a name for Irish-American baseball players, Riding as a middle name? Well, I suppose it's possible, no odder than my own, come to think of it,

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Grandma gave me all the love I needed - and more. 'All you can eat - and more!' reads the sign outside some of the hamburger joints in the States - but the comparison doesn't hold, to be offered more hamburgers than you can eat induces nausea. More love than you need - well, there's no such thing, in a Grandma's case, my Grandma's case.

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caught my naked self in the mirror. Great stomach drooping, like a kangaroo's pouch, though without the opening at the top, thank God - when I stretched my arms out, their pits seemed to have dewlaps, or would wattles be the word? Old. Old's the word.

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Wittgenstein's remark, which I usually think is nonsensical, that our understanding of the world depends on the way we interpret the silence around us.

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a mother like Mummy would be spending a lot of time in the courts and jail even, but we live in exceptionally stupid days, nasty and stupid, in which phrases do the work not only of thinking but of feeling - an innocent child', we invariably say, when we all know somewhere in our systems that there isn't, and never has been, such a creature.

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So he went out and saith unto him, `Why, why are you about to dash yourself down to your death?' And the young man saith, `Well, the world stinks, all its inhabitants stink, there is no good in it, there is no good in me, why should I go on living, why, why?' So the old man saith unto him, `Come, come into my little hut, and we will talk a while, grant me this wish, at least, for your soul's sake.' And the young man went with him unto and into his hut, and they talked a while, a very very long while, and then they came out of his hut, and they both threw themselves over the cliff.

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"`Everybody for himself!" said the elephant, as he danced among the chickens'.

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but I had a sudden longing to have lunch with Harold, as we'd used to regularly, when we were youngish men, fit and able - able for what? well, lunch in my case

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I got an enlargement of the first Hank Janson cover I'd ever seen, Sister, Don't Hate Me - the title I'd forgotten, the cover unforgettable, a young blonde, gag around her mouth, hands bound behind her back, stocking legs tucked under her, her face turned towards us, the large blue eyes innocent and alarmed, a curl of hair tumbling over a mildly troubled forehead - talk about madeleines - hah! - I really went through the most astonishing tumble of emotions, the confusion of desire and thrilled shame, the twelve-and-a-half-year-old standing at the bookstall beside Leicester Square station, and yet what was I, actually, as I experienced all that, all those years shed, what was I but a man of sixty-five, bent mournfully and salaciously over his computer, or thus I believed I would have appeared to anyone looking through the window, if that anyone had been me - but if it had been somebody else, Victoria, for instance, Victoria, yes, Victoria would have seen her elderly husband toiling at his work as ever,

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This was, no doubt, the worst period of my childhood, and so probably of my life

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I went to the window, stared out at the drizzle, wondering who would want to go out in that who didn't have to, and went out in it, though I didn't have to - or perhaps I did, who knows?

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I wonder if I could have gone through with it and accepted my winnings, or whether, not that honesty would have prevailed, whether my nerve would have failed, in other words, which was the stronger current in my nature, the cheating or the cowardly.

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whimsical schoolmaster phrases, `sometimes a stranger to the truth',

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did I love my father? I don't think - Do I love Law and Order? - I know I do. Is it the word that's at fault, or is it my use of the word, or is it my self, my incapacity? Apply the Plato principle that we should love people for their virtues. What were my father's virtues? What are Law and Order's virtues? - That's easy, just consider how it works: each episode has the same structure, three neat little acts. 1) The discovery of the crime (usually a body) and the police investigation. 2) The involvement of the DA's office and the arrest. 3) The trial and conviction - or sometimes the acquittal. Formally very dapper, you see, but flexible within its conventions - even though the official characters are always the same, and played by the same actors, there is a variety of story, of milieu, of incidental characters, played by those marvellous American character actors who give you a glimpse of a whole life in a two-minute scene - a grieving mother, an overworked guy behind a deli counter, a sixteen- year-old Hispanic with a gun under his bed and drugs in his pocket, so the scene-by-scene texture is terrific - as is the dialogue, snappy, authentic, moving the story along - and it's usually a pretty snappy and authentic story that's moved along, with often a twist that really twists - on top of which you get lots of detail about police work, along with lots of detail about the way the law works in New York - and in the one I've just watched, the conflict between the way it works in New York and the way it works, and doesn't work, in Los Angeles, made specially enjoyable by its exhilarating contempt for all things Californian - even to the faces, those round Californian faces, neatly featured, large shiny teeth, smoothly tailored hair, and there among them the New York faces, faces to which I am now addicted, slightly unhygienic, with pocks and other blemishes, slightly more used up, slightly more comically rancorous than the last time I saw them - So there it is, that's what I love about Law and Order.

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Things look bad for tomorrow, according to a television weather-woman - rather pleasant-looking and young - say forty-eight, or so - but with a nasal and downward-sloping voice - when I first came across that sort of voice I assumed that compassion-politics were at work, high-profile jobs for the vocally challenged sort of thing, but I've since been told that they're trained to speak like that, the idea being that they should sound not just not posh, but positively anti-posh - posh-bashing, I suppose it could be called - so what I was hearing from this pleasant- looking young woman of forty-eight or so was a posh-bashing weather report, promising rain tomorrow.

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these hallucinations, if that's what they are, come to me when I'm depressed - a good thing too, one might say, otherwise how would one know one was depressed?

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this was the moment foretold, kind of thing.

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in fact I suspect the truth is that there's no such thing as a synonym, if a synonym will do instead of the word you're using then you're probably not using the right word, so let's leave it that his eyes were full of a wry, lively, melancholy

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I must look up in the dictionary the connection between tumour and tumescent, by the way, if there is one. The latter can't be the adjective from the former, surely?

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as if I'd been playing tiddlywinks for an eternity, but without a cup to wink the tiddle, tiddle the wink into

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And then there's `reinvent', you see it and hear it all the time, somebody has `completely reinvented' herself as a feisty, foxy, tart or fart, whatever - now why do I find this so irritating, no, worse than that, offensive, and tinged with a kind of blasphemy - well, for one thing, in order to reinvent, you have to invent, and who therefore is this self-inventing and self-reinventing self, rather like that definition of God as thought thinking on itself, yes, that's it, I suppose, people who say they have reinvented themselves are thinking of themselves as god-like, and people who describe other people as reinventing themselves are attributing god-like powers to the self, which is a poor, miserable, partly suffocated thing, on the whole - I suppose that really all they mean, the hordes of journalists etc. who are so addicted to the phrase, is `change', but that's a simple word that contains, when applied to people, some proper element of mystery -'he changed.

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On the other hand, I've recently heard myself using phrases quite alien to me - borrowed, really, or are they inherited? from my parents' generation. I used to hear them when I was growing up, a play `was really rather amusing', they used to say and I now say - said just the other evening - and it was of a play that I'd actually disliked

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So one comes at last into one's inheritance - as they spoke in their thirties, so I speak in my sixties.

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Well, just as don't care was made to care, can't happen was made to happen

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- one of the advantages of being a smoker, you can set fire to things without effort, almost passively, while sitting down - like this: place the passport on the floor, to the side of your chair, light your cigarette, smoke for a while - quite a while, so as not to waste it - then let the arm drop, the eyelids droop, the fingers open, the cigarette fall - and come to think of it, you could actually burn your old passport instead of your new one, who would know the difference from the ashes?

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Toronto seems ugly but pleasant - the city ugly, but the people pleasant, which is better than the other way around (Paris) or neither (Athens),