I just now finished Philip Roth's I Married A Communist, and in doing so I finally finished Roth's 1990s Nathan Zuckerman trilogy (the other two books being The Human Stain and American Pastoral, but not in that order.) The book was very good, although not quite as awe-inspiring as the other two (at least in my opinion. Halpern called The Human Stain one of Roth's worst novels. Which makes me wonder if Halpern has read The Plot Against America which was essentially a noble failure.) Roth has another Nathan Zuckerman novel coming out soon, and I'll probably wind up putting it on the list of books I ask for at Christmas. I really want to read the earlier Zuckerman novels before this one. It's probably not necessary- I read these three books all out of order, but I kind of want to go about this next one the right way, especially since I'm now pretty sure that Roth is the best living writer I know of (sorry Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushide and Thomas Pynchon).
I'm still reading Woody Guthrie's autobiography, but I'm not entirely sure what "literary" book I'm going to pick up now. I have an enormous stack of books on my bookshelf that I haven't gotten to yet, and every night they sit there and mock me while I watch television or play video games. It's somewhat hard to intellectually justify rescuing the princess yet again when one still hasn't bothered to crack open Beckett's trilogy. At least, that's the way it feels to me sometimes. And then I really want to pick up Ulysses again, and there's that stack of books that the other James gave me a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven't opened the latest Pynchon 800 page era-defining opus that I got for Christmas last year, and I really should start in on Proust while I have no real responsibilities, and people like me really are supposed to have read more than one Jane Austen novel (and that one novel should not be Persuasion) and...it goes on and on.
Anyway. Tonight, unless catastrophe strikes again, I'll finally get to see Atmosphere play the Cat's Cradle. Two years ago I had a ticket to see the Twin Cities' finest non-Albino hip hop act, but then I broke my fucking shoulder and instead of seeing Slug and Ant (plus P.O.S. and Blueprint as the opening acts) I wound up with my arm in a sling, watching Six Feet Under reruns while comfortably doped. This show tonight should be good, but I'm curious about what the crowd will be like, or rather, how many people there tonight will be like some of the cats I spoke with at the Sage Francis and El-P shows- people who aren't really into hip-hop per se, but rather into one or two specific (and usually white) hip hop act. The kind of people, I think, that Sage had in mind when he wrote "This is hip-hop for the people./Stop calling it emo". Or maybe not, and I just like that line and wanted to quote it. I'm curious how many people at the Cradle tonight will also be there for the Ninth Wonder show in a few weeks, or when Little Brother returns to the Cradle in December, as compared to how many of them are more likely to be at the Of Montreal show on Friday. (Please take note- I'm not judging these people- after all, I'll be at both Atmosphere and Of Montreal myself. I certainly don't think that you have to be a hip hop head to like almost any given specific hip hop act. I'm just kind of morbidly curious about people who only listen to one or two hip hop acts, and seem resistant to the idea of branching out into all that the music has to offer. Hoom. I'm guessing that I've put my foot far enough into my mouth now, so I'm just going to stop.) At any rate, I really hope Atmosphere plays "Angelface" and "Always Coming Back Home To You" and maybe "Pour Me Another" and "If I Was Santa Claus", and I hope that I don't somehow give myself a catastrophic injury between now and 9:30 or so tonight.
Expect a review of the show in a day or two. Expect more bullshit hand wringing about my reading habits. Expect NC State to win maybe one or two more games this football season, and expect to be happy with that. Expect something good from the basketball team. Expect whatever you like, really.
3 comments:
No. That one novel should not have been Persuasion. No. No.
Whatever you do, don't ask Halpern about Roth; I contacted him last week, and he's since given me two reading assignments (the short stories of D.H. Lawrence and long modernist novel - The Man Without Qualities). He also expects the two of us to finish up Proust by the spring of 2009, because he has a course on it and we're expected to be enrolled.
Just thought you should know.
I am also absolutely haunted by Ulysses.
Well, at least I have until the spring of 2009. Wait... he means for us to read it in the original French, doesn't he?
Have you read that book Blindness he kept talking about?
Damn, I didn't ask. Probably. I'll ask when I meet with him on Thursday.
Funny thing about Blindness...whenever he talked about it, it seemed slightly familiar, and when I went to check it out, I realized that I had already read it years ago.
Which is why sometimes I don't know why I bother reading at all.
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