Book Review

Space-Age & Pop-Art Dreams

Robert Cochrane — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 23:13:23 +0000

Space-Age & Pop-Art Dreams Robert Cochrane January 14, 2024 - 18:13

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Across My Dreams With Nets Of Wonder (Fisher King Publishing) - John Howard

For a man to whom narrative has played a salient part in his songs, it came as little surprise that English tunesmith John Howard seamlessly transferred his attention to creating a trilogy of engaging and evocative memoirs outlining his erratic but lifelong sojourn in music. Now his fertile imagination has delivered a febrile and fantastical novel, Across My Dreams With Nets Of Wonder, whose title has been lifted from Bob Lind's evergreen 1965 hit "Elusive Butterfly" whose subject matter is a delightful motif fluttering throughout a text of extraordinary articulation and finesse.

Part Alan Bennett meets Doctor Who, Back To The Future reimagined by Ealing Studios, here is a novel not short on ambition. Elements of science fiction seamlessly blend with a sense of magic realism. Still, in Howard's matter-of-fact vision, there's an everyday element to unusual and unexpected turns and twists within his assured and diligent prose. Science Faction is a term that more easily encapsulates his tale of extraordinary and unlikely events rendered acceptable to the reader via his understated handling of quirks, strangeness, and charm. There's also a neat blast of art history sneaking across within the chapters.

At the heart of the novel resides a delightful subtext. An affectionate cavalcade of postcards and polaroids a la '60s London in full swing with pop music as the beat in the heart. Cameos cascade. Marc Bolan and David Bowie in their early twenties as gouache young, ambitious things, Joe Meek and his largely forgotten crush and prodigy Heinz, the Beatles, and a litany of girl singers sparkle like light through the scratches on a once glitzy newsreel. You don't need to be a music aficionado to capture and enjoy the vibe, but if you are, it adds an extra frisson of pleasure.

Just as the disparate strands of Howard's ambitious themes seem to become engulfed by the breadth and depth of his grand design, they gradually resolve their existence as they become woven into the page-turning narrative -- no mean feat in itself.

Funny but imbued with a Proustian sense of sadness, this is a dynamic tour de force about time, ambition, and the true nature of what resides beneath our mannered, social surfaces most daily situations rely upon. It effortlessly crafts historic interactions into playful narratives. Einstein and Turing become a pair of space-age houseboys on a spaceship, and an A.I. Marilyn Monroe steals the show towards and at the end.

A dizzying accomplishment, this is a serious novel with a playfulness of heart. It is a page-turner that strikes a depth and poignancy either absent or avoided in most accessible fiction. This unique offering deserves the wider audience that a movie could provide, but for now, it deserves to be shown in the expansive private cinema of the mind.

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The Amplified Come As You Are

Steve Holtje — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 15:26:28 +0000

The Amplified Come As You Are Steve Holtje December 16, 2023 - 10:26

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Michael Azerrad: The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (HarperOne)

Is it okay to review a book in which I am thanked? And the author's been a friend for over four decades? Maybe if I reveal that stuff up front, like I just did…

Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana was originally published by Doubleday in 1993 -- the year before Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain died. Azerrad had interviewed the members of Nirvana for a 1992 Rolling Stone cover story, and Cobain had approved of it enough that later in '92, when he and wife Courtney Love wanted someone to write a Nirvana book, they approached Azerrad, who of course said yes. There was some time pressure -- the book, it was eventually decided, had to be released in conjunction with the release of Nirvana's next album -- but Azerrad was nonetheless able to interview loads of people involved in the lives of the Nirvana members (including a whopping twenty-five hours of interviews with Cobain alone) and delivered a tome which has appeared on multiple lists of the best books on rock topics. In an age when rock albums regularly get expanded in anniversary editions, why not do the same thing with a rock book?

There are two ways of documenting a band: in the moment, or in retrospect. The Amplified Come As You Are is the best of both worlds. Anyone who follows Michael Azerrad on social media can see that he is strongly committed to making sure that assertions, received wisdom, etc. be fact-checked against reality, complete with citations. It turns out he's just as hard on himself. This thirtieth-anniversary revamping of what was the very first book on Nirvana ends up being about twice as long as the original version, and a lot of that additional length comes from Azerrad correcting himself. Much of what he is correcting comes from Cobain confabulating for comic effect or to pre-emptively stave off potential criticism (often deploying a tactic which Azerrad calls "smokescreening by exaggeration"), and flat-out lying about everything from his taste in music to details of his love life to, inevitably, covering up his heroin use. Courtney Love is guilty of image-burnishing as well, but is less of a focus, and Azerrad deliberately avoids detailing the many anti-Courtney stories while acknowledging that they're out there. She comes off as a complex person, intelligent and driven but undiplomatic, alienating people with her blunt behavior.

Most painful are the frequent foreshadowings of Cobain's suicide. Azerrad -- who calls himself an idiot multiple times -- writes, in one of the new bits, "It's excruciating to come across all the references to suicide in this book. But things like that can be difficult to see when you're right in the thick of it." Azerrad spends a considerable amount of space taking advantage of hindsight, which leads to an acute analysis of Cobain's psyche, especially his feelings of inferiority, the ways in which his self-defeating behavior reflects his ambivalence and his difficult youth, the ways in which he tries to have it both ways regarding ambition and approval, and the frequent foreshadowing of his demise.

Azerrad especially reproaches himself for his handling of the heroin topic. His most self-critical passage might be this one: "When Krist said, 'I was afraid of what I might see,' he probably spoke for a lot of people around Kurt: avoid confrontation, just get on with things, and maybe the problem will just go away. That's denial. I did that, too -- I was dimly aware that Kurt was doing heroin more than he admitted; I just didn't want to dig into it. It would have jeopardized my book. And I feared the wrath of their management and legal team… It would have betrayed the trust Kurt had for me -- but was it really trust? Or was it faith -- faith that he could play me, or at least that I would look the other way? Was it my place as a journalist to rat him out? Did I even know how to deal with such information responsibly and constructively? I just kept writing my Nirvana biography and left out the more sensational 'Kurtney' stuff."

On the other hand, Azerrad did get a fair amount of heroin discussion into the book, and he sometimes called out Cobain, as in this passage: "'I can't stand people who don't confront anyone,' Kurt says, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself is a prime offender in this regard." He also included Cobain making horrible threats of violence against some journalists who had offended him, and though Cobain apparently had no problem with those quotes being included, Azerrad clearly realized that they did not display Cobain in a favorable light (he refers to the "undeniable creepiness of the answering machine tapes"). One of the things I got from reading this new edition is a new appreciation for how well-rounded a portrait (warts and all) Azerrad delivered; true, things were even worse than he realized, but he still included much more negative information than most rock biographies done with the cooperation of its subjects deliver. (But not "authorized"; that is generally understood to include the subjects' right to control the text, whereas Azerrad's contract specifically disallowed that.) Yet he had to struggle with some difficult decisions: he had been told that Cobaine cheated on the urine tests he had to submit in order to keep daughter Frances Bean after Children's Services had taken her away from the couple, but he left that out of the book because "I was just not going to pursue it and perhaps be responsible for them losing their child again, maybe for good." I have never, in my three-decades-plus time in music journalism, had to make a decision with even a hundredth of the possible impact of that.

It's not all angst, though. Azerrad has a sardonic sense of humor that often comes out in passages such as, "So the real villains weren't people who never touted punk ideals -- it was the opportunists, the poseurs who hitched themselves to the indie community but didn't emulate its values. The villains were also those who originally embraced those ideals and then betrayed them. Someone had to police these people." It's no wonder that he shows sympathy for Love, who has a somewhat similar (albeit more overstated) sense of humor -- though he also, at one point, remarks on a quote of hers, "Actually, it's not penitence if your only regret is that you got caught."

Azerrad occasionally talks about the nuts and bolts of songwriting/music-making, such as Kurt's use of polytonality (using chords outside the key of the song), without getting especially technical even while explaining it well. Another example is how Cobain picks words that sound good sung more than working on making the lyrics make sense. This focus on picking words with vowels that work well in particular musical contexts is something that Burt Bacharach goes into detail about in his autobiography (which I highly recommend) -- that Cobain, barely musically educated and having learned songwriting through a combination of paying attention to others’ songs and seeing what worked in his own trial-and-error self-education, figured out by himself.

Do I find some faults in the book? Yes. There is a story about using a guitar drop-tuning, in which the lower of the two E strings is tuned down a whole step to D: "For 'Blew,' Kurt tuned down to what's called a 'drop-D' tuning, but before recording the song, the band didn't realize they were already in that tuning and went down a whole step lower than they meant to, which explains the track's extraordinarily heavy sound." This doesn't quite make sense. First, it's unclear whether Kurt or "the band" (Kurt plus Krist) erred. More to the point, when listening to the recording, it's clear that both bass and guitar are tuned down even further than another whole step, C, as they are both playing low Bs, so both bass and guitar were tuned down. That cannot have been an accident. It also is revealing that the guitar part is all riffs, no chords -- Cobain perhaps didn't want to (or couldn't) deal with figuring out chords with one string tuned differently than usual. Instead, this story seems like Kurt making up an entertaining explanation instead of going with the more mundane reality of the situation -- a tactic that Azerrad calls out repeatedly in the "amplified" sections of the book.

There are also contradictory passages regarding the Vanity Fair/Hirschberg article: "Hirschberg couldn't confirm either statement because they weren't true: Kurt was on record -- in my Rolling Stone cover story, for instance -- as saying that he'd started doing heroin long before he even met Courtney." And again: "…various factual errors throughout the piece would seem to compromise Hirschberg's accuracy. For instance, she wrote that Danny Goldberg was a vice president at Polygram Records, when in fact he was a vice president of Atlantic." Three other errors are mentioned in the same paragraph. But later, in one of the new passages, Azerrad refers to Vanity Fair as "a major magazine with a diligent fact-checking department."

But obviously a 618-page book that only contains two inaccuracies has a pretty good batting average. Even Homer nods, as the saying goes.

Or three: Azerrad states that Lemonheads' It’s a Shame About Ray is merely "a decent album." I know that the following Lemonheads release contained the group's biggest hit, but It's a Shame About Ray is by far my favorite Lemonheads record to put on. De gustibus non est disputandum. I kid, I kid.

But enough of my frivolity. A final, post-Cobaine-suicide, chapter was added to a reprint of the original book; I had never read it until now. Anybody who can get through it without shedding tears is probably too dispassionate to have appreciated Nirvana's music. But the most stunning thing about the book in its present state is that it seems like it would be a good read even for someone who doesn't care about Nirvana, because as now presented, it is a fascinating examination of a band's rise and demise; life and death, personality flaws and mistakes and the ways in which someone in the public eye deals with them; the psychological journey of that band's leader, and for that matter of the other players; the intricacies of the music business at a crucial turning point; and the tricky issues a journalist must face in the moment and the later reflections on those issues. Even, I would say, the psychological journey of that journalist: Azerrad is unabashedly emotional at times, especially in the last few chapters.

Given the time of year, this book will make for an excellent stocking-stuffer -- if it's an XXL stocking.

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The Dry Mirth of Malice

Robert Cochrane — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:14:37 +0000

The Dry Mirth of Malice Robert Cochrane November 5, 2023 - 19:14

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Mistletoe Malice KATHLEEN FARRELL (Faber & Faber)

By the time of her death in 1999, the writer Kathleen Farrell hadn't published a novel since the 1962 appearance of The Limitations of Love; then came silence, though she continued to sporadically appear in various short story anthologies, sharing literary space with Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, William Trevor, and Muriel Spark.

Farrell was, in many ways, a writer's writer. Her pared-down observations about human nature were much appreciated by a select few, but her works sold modestly and never made it into paperback. She remained valued by those who encountered her books, evidenced by the appreciative tone of the obituaries she garnered in celebration of a voice worthy of recall.

There remains unsparing darkness to her output; though never explicitly ruthless, her view of human nature was far from cozy; the reason why her tone may have jarred with a post-war audience seeking comfort instead of exposure. Her characters have been described as unsympathetic, which, indeed, they mostly are. It would have seemed a heresy to her to sweeten the truth she was trying to expose via her cryptic and steely observations. That would have utterly diminished the remit of her entire exercise.

Mistletoe Malice, her debut novel from 1951, contains all her future strategies. Dry in tone and challenging by nature, Farrell takes few prisoners. A woefully dysfunctional family gathers in a coastal cottage to celebrate Christmas under the watchful and controlling eye of their matriarch, Rachel, who is slavishly attended by her goose of a niece, Bess. As her brood assembles like a conference of unruly birds, tensions begin to creak, and ancient resentments raise their heads from long, disgruntled slumbers. It becomes the perfect setting for everything that Christmas shouldn't be but all too often is.

This novel seems better suited to present times than when it first appeared. Farrell's witty and unforgiving insights raise smiles of the knowing and uncomfortable kind. It is a perfect gift of discomfort dressed as a celebration. Endurance is maintained in the face of great expectations. All is deftly handled, and despite the characters being far from palatable, understanding, but not dislike, is the reader's ultimate reward.

Kathleen Farrell was friends with Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, and C.P. Snow. A survivor of a lost literary era, she played chess with Quentin Crisp and befriended Barry Humphries in his early days in London. For twenty years, she shared her life with the mercurial novelist Kay Dick, a relationship that physically ended in 1962 but which was only really concluded with Kathleen's death since they lived a stone's throw from each other in Hove.

Farrell remarked towards the end of her life that leaving her literary estate to anyone seemed futile since nobody would ever be interested in her work. She may have been pushed into the margins of memory by the angry young men of the Fifties and later by the cacophony of the swinging Sixties, but her relevance has rightfully resurfaced.

Here is a clear, fine intelligence, an observer of foibles, a voice from another time that so effortlessly transcends it.

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Steaming and Streaming: The Wondrous Rants of Laurie Stone

Brandon Judell — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 17:21:38 +0000

Steaming and Streaming: The Wondrous Rants of Laurie Stone Brandon Judell June 27, 2022 - 13:21

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Simone de Beauvoir notes in the opening of All Said and Done, the fourth volume of her autobiography: "[S]ometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement -- why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it sometimes astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep into this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?"

And by what chance, after finishing de Beauvoir, are we lucky enough to be able to jump into Laurie Stone's own explorations of self through sex (with both strangers and known quantities), film, womanhood, feminism, Sex in the City, the joys of catering, dogs (both dead and alive), life with "the man I live with," plus the invigorating power of Nature:

"Alongside a roadside, I dug up a clump of wild rose, soaked the roots in a tub of water for several days, and planted it in the front yard. Most of the branches turned brown, but a few spindly ones retained their leaves, and after some time one of the tiny branches sprouted new leaves. It was thrilling."

Little deaths. Little births.

Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing that Is Happening (dottir press) is an oft-laugh-out-loud collection of Ms. Stone's daily Facebook takes on the world’s carryings-on as prismed through a staunch feminist's eyes. One should also be aware that this, the latest of her memoirs, coincides somewhat with the emergence of COVID and the author's move from New York City to more rural environs with a gent quite brilliant in his own right.

If you are not excited by now, you might for some reason be unfamiliar with Ms. Stone's muscular prose. For decades, her take-no-prisoners judgments have brightened the pages of the Village Voice (1974-1999), The Nation, Evergreen Review, and numerous tomes such as Laughing in the Dark: A Decade of Subversive Comedy. Ms. Stone was even honored by The National Book Critics Circle. More acclaim should be forthcoming.

Ms. Stone began recording these daily thoughts while her sister was slowly passing away. These were in a way "postcards" to her sibling, a desire to show where she, Ms. Stone, had landed and how she got to where she was. Each section is labeled with a date, and a locale, and sometimes a mere word or phrase such as "Give Peas a Chance" or "Apartment."

I never read more than one entry a day, spacing them out over 60 days, so I could enjoy savoring this volume for as long as possible. . . and delight in it I did.

Of course, sometimes reading a nonfiction book by someone you know is a bit unsettling -- and I do know Ms. Stone, although distantly in recent years. Why? Because you can't respond as you would over a latte at Starbucks.

I found myself highlighting a sentence or two on nearly every page as I did with her other works, making comments or doodling stars in the margins. Places to return to. Then if she mentioned a composer (e.g. Scriabin), I'd listen to the same, trying to perceive that Stoned moment as she did herself.

Other times, when she had me laugh, for example with The Rabbi Joke that begins on page 92, I couldn't wait to phone someone and share.

Each section of Streaming often tops or at least equals the previous one, but wait until you get to page 142 where "Friend" begins, a remembrance about an impassioned friendship gone wrong, a dead dog, a story written about a dead dog, and so much more. You can't help but chortle through Laurie's tears. She has that type of talent. If this tale had been written as fiction, it would be making one of those annual collections of best short stories. Which reminds me that Audre Lorde once wrote: "When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak." And speak this author does on Facebook, relentlessly adding by the hour new reminiscences, cultural critiques, and ripostes to the day's political shenanigans.

Only a person as self-assured as Ms. Stone would be so brazenly verbose, so fearlessly uncensored. Yet often she lets us know that she can get hurt and she can hurt as when she quotes Joan Didion: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

Or after reading a friend's obit who was quoted as saying "feeling love had been the best of life," Ms. Stone recalls:

"Reading the obit made me happy. What a great way to look back on a life! Then I remembered I love hating. Or am I good at it. Who knows the difference?"

Last week, at an SRO reading in the Fulton Street McNally Jackson bookstore, a young woman praised the author as "brave" for being on the frontlines of the feminist fight for decades, not just with words but also in her daily actions. Ms. Stone, sitting in front of shelving hosting bios of Hitler and Stalin, and not far from Eleanor Roosevelt’s, tried to argue that she wasn’t brave at all. She lost that battle.

However, more memorable that night, at least to me, was the conversation my two godsons had after the event. The brothers had listened intently as Ms. Stone read a metaphorical, tongue-in-cheek tale of her supposedly having sex with Orthodox Jewish men who washed her female sexual residue off their penises while admitting they would never have children with a woman like her. "We [women of that era] thought it was so sexy!" What follows in the same paragraph is a detailed putdown of the doggy-style approach to lovemaking: "This was supposed to be the hottest of hot sex positions -- it said so in all of the movies and all the TV shows -- and we knew it was the worst, but hey, who were we to argue?"

The elder brother noted in awe, "I never heard about sex from a woman's perspective." The younger sibling nodded. Once again, Ms. Stone, who might not have sold as many books as she should have that night, had continued to transform lives.

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Life After Music, Music After Life

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 13:43:30 +0000

Life After Music, Music After Life Robert Cochrane June 14, 2022 - 09:43

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In The Eyeline Of Furtherance

by JOHN HOWARD (Fisher King)

This latest memoir is English singer-songwriter John Howard's third appraisal of his tryst with life. Covering the last two decades of the century gone, it details the underside of a convoluted but event strewn sojourn in music.

By virtue of happenstance, personal charm and a fan's knowledge of pop songs, Howard enters the world of men in suits, set in their ways and driven by a need to have their own sense of self-importance constantly confirmed. An avenue through which he navigates with good grace, despite it being festooned with antiquated sharks, Dickensian in mode.

Once the "next big thing" signed to CBS Records in 1973 he becomes fifteen years later a licensing A&R man for budget labels, a brief stint at MCA and then Reader's Digest. His previous career being a time he barely mentions to his colleagues, if at all.

There pervades an air for the reader of sadness at a man of his obvious gifts being reduced to licensing the elderly recordings of stars on their descent from fame. It is a fascinating insight into the underside of the tapestry of ambition and success. Careers in decline, an audience aging with their icons in a sadly Proustian fashion. Howard however is in his element and simply goes with the flow. Compilations of budget priced records and compact discs that still clutter market stalls, charity shops and thrift stores, the bane of any vinyl junky in that need for a hit, the detritus of his efforts.

Here walk the ghosts of vinyl pasts. Lonnie Donnegan, Bert Weedon, Acker Bilk, with the occasional near modern blast of Madness & Culture Club, who now most definitely belong to the trade of nostalgia also. Along the way is a lost Dusty Springfield project, sadly curtailed by illness and the Grim Reaper, a previously unknown Doris Day platter from 1968, and vignettes from the likes of the indomitable Brenda Lee and the vastly underrated Elkie Brooks. People who maintain a following without a reliable recording deal. The potency of nostalgia.

There are other moments of more personal transcription. Howard's vivid portrayal of his bereavements through Aids, sensitively recreates an era of paranoia and loss. It is a timely reminder and testament to, a wave of grief that has thankfully been depleted of its savagery. Forgotten lives remembered like those lost in a war.

He writes with exasperated tenderness about his late father's difficult second marriage to a woman whose mental health problems, sadly undiagnosed, made her a controlling and vindictive presence. Alan Bennett meets Samuel Beckett. I met his father once and found him to a be a genial soul, but one ill-prepared for the level of coercive control to which he was daily, mostly secretly, subjected to.

His wife routinely censored his newspapers with scissors of any women he might have found attractive. In every dream home a heartache as Bryan Ferry so evocatively intoned. Howard briefly earned some brief-lived kudos from her by facilitating an after-show introduction to her hero Barry Manilow. An irony she refused to sanction by hanging a photograph of the occasion on their bedroom wall. It proves a saddening centre to the book, both frightening yet absurd. His father even pleads with his son not to let her know he watched television when he visited him, because she had to sanction everything he viewed.

As the book progresses the muse of Howard's rarely mentioned former pop career flits and flutters in mostly unrewarding ways. Songs recorded for children's records, a near chart hit he penned, covered by family entertainer Des O'Connor ( it reached No 76 in the UK charts) and a lost album consumed by the implosion of the record label that was days away from releasing it.

From these pages Howard emerges as an assured, charming soul with the heart of a fan. There's a delightful cameo encounter with Beach Boy Bruce Johnson, and the night when an unusual and unexpected attack of the jitters robbed him of a conversation with his idol Paul McCartney. This is a wonderful journey into a lost world of record companies, largely swept aside by the digital age. There are many insufferable dinosaurs, given the light of print and memory. One unsavory European is particulary vile, but his arrogance allows Howard a well-rewarded final say. A rare example of karma in full flow.

For the past twenty years John Howard has been consistently productive. A myriad of albums and songs have tumbled forth as he has gained the rightful respect of of his peers. Though he says he has no wish to annotate his 21st century revival, I fear that would be an oversight since his return to music with such vitality and aplomb happens rarely. Bill Fay and Sixto Rodriguez being two notable exceptions. This book is in some ways his years in the wilderness, but is a funny and rewardingly touching read.

It is vital and imperative that he transcribes his return to the land of promise he always had a divine right to inhabit, the best revenge being able to live and wear it well.

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A Great Littleness

Robert Cochrane — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 21:01:21 +0000

A Great Littleness Robert Cochrane June 10, 2022 - 17:01

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Maud Martha

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (Faber & Faber)

First published in 1953 Maud Martha is the sole novel by Pulitzer Prize winning African American Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks 1917-2000. It should seem a quaint period piece about race, sadly it stands as beautifully eloquent and relevant as it did on its first appearance. The conversations it provokes anew, as pertinent in a different century, a sure indication that change occurs slowly, and usually takes backward steps.

Shaped via collection of painterly, personal episodes, thirty-four to be precise. Though often erroneously described as non-linear in construction, more on account of its brilliantly unorthodox sentences, than any absence of actual plot, this is a "coming of age" affair. Truly a poet's flexible collision with prose, an exercise in rendering the mundane profound, capturing great insights from small thoughts and events.

The issues tackled remain thorny. Seen through the eyes of a young black girl in Chicago, the reader is touched by her many realisations about her racial identity. The casual acceptance of her race of the 'n' word so as not to appear techy, the elevation of her pale skinned sister over her darker complexion, and the fact Maud Martha is grateful that her honey colored husband has chosen a wife less pretty and as dark as she.

Brooks writes with a deceptively poetic dreaminess, but one that entails no lack of bite. Her short sections possess a visceral edge honed by astute observations on the meaninglessness, meaningful aspects most lives encapsulate. Her patronage from ignorant white employer, so engrained its perpetrator is oblivious of her crime. Still shockingly pertinent.

The novel ends with the close of World War 2, in a tone of hopeful resolution.

"But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world -- or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower, for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between or out of -- beastly inconvenient! -- the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere."

The flower in question the humble dandelion, the same bloom whose beauty she praises so eloquently at the novel's inception. As humanity continues to destroy its habitat, and those left defenseless, Gwendolyn Brooks' masterful little parable about race, has tendrils that caress the nature of the entire human condition.

A multi-faceted gem, deft, wise and beautiful.

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Memories From a Faded Era

Dusty Wright — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:23:41 +0000

Memories From a Faded Era Dusty Wright September 17, 2007 - 10:23

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Dandelion: Memoir of a Free Spirit

By Catherine James

(St. Martin's Press)

Catherine James has lived eight lives in 57 short years and her autobiography devastates with emotional sabotages that seem so outrageous that you swear you must be reading fiction.

I read the advance copy in one sitting, blown away by the poignancy and ease with which Miss James shares her years of perilous plight. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her Hollywood femme fatale mother Diana reads like Mommy Dearest meets Piper Laurie's character in the movie adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.

Chapter after chapter she is left pummeled by another emotional battering from someone close to her. Even when she's able to finally run away from tortuous reality, which is one of her early blessings, she encounters emotional hardships that rival any I've read or seen in film. Only her grandmother Mimi -- one of the few normal eccentrics she encounters -- is courageous enough to try to shield her beloved granddaughter from harm's way, although she ultimately loses her. To say that she was trapped in a house ruled by a witch would be a gross understatement of the human condition.

Her mother continually tortures her both physically and emotionally, whether it's tying her to chair or locking her in closet to keep four-year-old Catherine in line so that Mom might socialize on the town without worry. Or not feeding her and making her swill hot sauce or dishwashing soap for punishment. Poor young Catherine is not out of harm's way until she is finally able to run away from her forever. And not until the very end of the memoir is there any contrition from Mom, as though that would suffice the years, though Ms. James emotionally detached herself from her shamelessly narcissistic and destructive mother years earlier. She continually denies her daughter's safety in all areas of parenthood. You'd be hard pressed to find such abuses in today's family courts.

Thankfully she is befriended by many wonderful and colorful characters along the way who help shine a brilliant light on her budding spirit, including such very famous folks as Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, and Roger Daltrey, to name but a few. From the musically charged '60s of Los Angeles to Andy Warhol's Factory in New York to the swinging parties of London and back to the woodsy solitude of Connecticut, mature beyond years Ms. James crisscrosses America seeking solace in a tranquil corner. Her unlucky-in-love character remains optimistic even when her life seems to be spiraling out of control.

Time and time again you are certain the fates will finally cast a favorable light on such a courageous soul. But it is not to be. Even as a pregnant teenager, she is able to rise above her condition and find the silver lining in a seemingly desperate situation. When Denny Laine, her son Damian's father, once of The Moody Blues, Ginger Baker's Airforce, and Paul McCartney's Wings, swoops her up, you think she's turned the corner. But the physically abusive rocker only adds more heartache and pain to the young bruised beauty's tale.

Her supremely dysfunctional family will remain with you long after you've finished this book. And her triumphant spirit will make most readers take stock at how petty most of life's seemingly unfair inequities might actually be quite trivial in comparison. Dandelion deserves to be picked from your local bookstore shelf immediately.

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