Literary Review

This is an obvious must-read for anyone interested in punk rock: the story of the main force behind one of the top five American punk bands, Hüsker Dü. And though by page 150 Hüsker Dü has broken up, there's a lot of interesting stuff after that. By which I don't just mean his also excellent band Sugar, his solo albums, etc. More than most music bios, this is the story of a man whose job just happens to be "musician."

That's not to say that it's an entertaining book full of uproarious anecdotes like Keith Richards's autobiography. This book lacks that sort of celebrity dazzle and charm; Mould's wit is dark and wry (such as his memory of a Finnish festival performance where he "saw an inebriated local approach one of the festival agents and, mistaking him for a tree, began to urinate on his leg") rather than sparkling and exuberant.

As the publisher's website explains, New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914-1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful."

Few American publishers have been more useful to the cause of poetry. Yes, ND has published much great prose as well, both original (notably a huge number of Henry Miller essay collections), and in translation (Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the success of which funded many other projects; Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea) or reprinted/collected (Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories). Nonetheless, poetry -- less often supported by the major presses, especially early in a poet’s career -- is where the press has made its biggest impact.

Deliverance from Evil

By Frances Hill (Overlook Press)

In the recesses of America's collective psyche, there's a dark area of madness. Madness of the kind that took place in the God-fearing Puritan village of Salem in 1692, when a group of pubescent girls orchestrated so much mayhem that they destroyed the lives of hundreds of people, and caused more than a dozen upstanding citizens to be hanged as witches. How could it have happened in a rational society? How could people have stood by to let such madness play out? And if it happened once, can it happen again?  

Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography by Robert Rosen (Headpress)

Ever wonder what kind of creature lurked beyond the green XXX door, helping create the $8 billion a year monster that is the porn industry? Ever wonder how Marvel’s X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, and Spiderman himself were behind it all?

The superhero tale is revealed in the just released, no-holes-barred Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography about men of steel, women of easy persuasion, phone sex, and the revolutionary fusion of computers and erotica.

The author is porn wunderkind Robert Rosen, known to men's magazine fans as Bobby Paradise. He studied under Catch-22's Joseph Heller at New York's City College in the '70s. He spent the next eight years freelancing and writing speeches for the Secretary of the Air Force. Between gigs, he drove a cab.

Ken Krimstein's new book, Kvetch as Kvetch Can, is available for consumption.

Herman Leonard soaked his film in chemicals before he headed out to capture jazz players, so its emulsion would be able to capture low light images. That's the left brain.

Smoke from cigarettes explodes, curls, whispers, hisses, and punctuates jazz giants from Duke to Billie to Louie to Miles -- a literal expression of a cliche, "cooking," that instead of making the image smaller, enlarges it. That's the right brain.

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang (Norton Books)

There seems to be a new trend in biography. An author takes a deep "core sample" of the entirety of the world around the biography's subject, often even injecting his or her personal experiences researching and writing the book. Weather, stock tables, the history of minstrel shows or solid state engineering or cooking can weave in and out amidst unexpected finds at flea markets and wars.

A bellwether of this kind of tome, for this reviewer at least, was David Hajdu's magisterial Ten Cent Plague, a history of the comic books that could be an x-ray of American art and politics of our time. Yunte Huang's new, essential tome about Charlie Chan is a thrilling addition to this trend.

Life Class by Diana Athill (Granta)

Diana Athill published Stet in 2000, her amusing and revealing account of her life as an literary editor, when she was 82. One could have been forgiven for considering it an astute piece of literary housekeeping, the final gasp of a pen that was about to be laid down for good. It was her fourth installment of memoirs.