one Asian under a groove

Lester Bangs: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987): Really seems like he was the best pure writer music criticism has ever known. I’m just old enough to remember a time when every wannabe tried to write like him, but none had both his intolerance for bullshit and (this is related) his humanitarianism. Or his sense of structure: everything in his 10,000 word Fun House review is in its right place, even the Ayler reference. Bangs is one of the few writers to transcend, at least in print, his self-loathing and self-destructiveness. Music crit doesn’t necessarily need more stream-of-consciousness. It needs more writers who’ll stand up for life, and kick the asses of anyone who won’t.

William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems (ed. Robert Pinsky, 2004): Pinsky is fighting a lonely war to help poetry hang to whatever role it still has in American life. The danger is of turning poetry into something respectable and unchallenging, which with few exceptions is what’s happened in the UK. This selection threads the needle successfully, mixing literal poems with the more opaque stuff. This emphasises that, whatever else the plums in the icebox might mean, they mean plums in the icebox. Appetite whetted, I’ll grab Imaginations next time I’m at the library.

William Shakespare: Hamlet (1600): The great Almereyda update is so 2000. With his snark that doesn’t quite go over the heads of its targets and his ineptitude when he takes action, the contemporary Hamlet would be — what else? — a blogger, probably on WordPress, with a side LiveJournal for the existential shit. Still, Hamlet needs blogging more than blogging needs Hamlet. (Except LiveJournal, which needs whatever it can get.)