IdleRich

IdleRich
Also this... one of the few good rock star stories I know. I always feel disappointed by attempts to capture the magic with fictional rock stars... maybe Velvet Goldmine was sort of ok.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Maybe cos Stones, Led Zep... Eagles etc were so ridiculous in themselves and in their excess it's difficult to add much by making stuff up. Anyone got any tips for things that buck the trend?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's definitely fun to read and I like how "to the point" he is (also how he's happy to admit something he loves is trash but not ashamedly) - the barrier here is the music itself, which I'm not so crazy about so far. Even Chuck Berry and Little Richard are of limited interest to me.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Cohn says that rock wasn't as complex as music is "today" (writing this in the late 60s) but that for what it was it was perfect.

I can hear the perfection but to me it's a limited and quite full perfection. Time barrier stuff.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I always find Chuck Berry and Little Richard really perfect pop music... obviously they're not gonna scare people now (well maybe when CB was pissing in young girls' mouths or whatever).
But the other book I mentioned is a novel, really quite odd as i remember.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Maybe cos Stones, Led Zep... Eagles etc were so ridiculous in themselves and in their excess it's difficult to add much by making stuff up. Anyone got any tips for things that buck the trend?

All I can think is the party thrown by the Stones (I think in another version of the story it was Free, but maybe they both did it?) where they had midgets employed to mingle amongst the guests carrying platters of cocaine at ideal sniffing height - which Robert Rankin bettered in one of his novels, about a Grand Millennium Ball, where the midgets had their heads shaved and went around with lines laid out directly on their naked scalps.

The same book mentions "human ashtrays" but doesn't go into details.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
All I can think is the party thrown by the Stones (I think in another version of the story it was Free, but maybe they both did it?) where they had midgets employed to mingle amongst the guests carrying platters of cocaine at ideal sniffing height - which Robert Rankin bettered in one of his novels, about a Grand Millennium Ball, where the midgets had their heads shaved and went around with lines laid out directly on their naked scalps.
The same book mentions "human ashtrays" but doesn't go into details.
Thought it was Queen... must be an urban myth though cos of the way it changes from one band to another.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Thought it was Queen... must be an urban myth though cos of the way it changes from one band to another.

A quick google suggests it really did happen, and Queen was the band in question. Although I like the idea that loads of people were at it, and there was actually a troupe of midgets who made a regular living this way throughout the 70s.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Human cannonballs by day, by night cocaine mirrors.
Oh they just carried the drugs? I thought in the version I heard they had lines on their shaved heads.
 

jenks

thread death
Just finished Lahr's massive biog of Tennessee Williams which is brilliant and depressing in equal measure - final 100 pages watching a talent burn out and screw up is particularly unedifying.

Reading The Five by Hallie Rubenhold - a book about the five 'canonical' victims of the Ripper. What i like about it is that it is not interested in how they died but in how they lived - it reclaims their lives and describes how they lived, yanking the narrative away from the myth and ripperology, instead it is a story of women's lives in the nineteenth century. It's really a book about unwritten lives - working class women who have ended living in the shittiest places and how it came to that.

Also re-reading Stendhal because he has the unflinching cycnical eye which focuses on middle class hypocrisy so well and Julien Sorel is just a brilliant character to follow through nineteenth century France.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Hey jenks you'll know this -

I downloaded DH Lawrence in his entirety on my kindle for 2 quid. I got it for the critical writing/essays but I thought I might read one of his novels, or at least have a bash

Any recommendations on which one to bash?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I wouldn't bother with The Plumed Serpent or Sone and Lovers, the first is bad and racist, the second is depressing... although it's a very long time since I read it.
 

jenks

thread death
Hey jenks you'll know this -

I downloaded DH Lawrence in his entirety on my kindle for 2 quid. I got it for the critical writing/essays but I thought I might read one of his novels, or at least have a bash

Any recommendations on which one to bash?

To be honest the novels haven't worn well - his reputation built on Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. i like the short stories very much - in these tightly compressed works he keeps that sprawling unedited splurge temperament under control. The Prussian Officer collection with Odours of Chrysanthemums is very good - it's a case of realising what a shadow the first world war cast over the twenties. Also the poetry is very good. And, on the essays, whilst peculiar, his essays on American Lit are a good read.

Backlisted did a good Lawrence episode which was very fair to him and might be a good place to jump into him from: https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/dh-lawrence-the-rainbow
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Thanks!

I started reading sons and lovers last night and i ploughed through all the boring stuff about the mining mis en scene and my brain's ears pricked up when he started talking about how the mother's life was depressing and looking at the rest of her life she felt like she was being suffocated.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Thanks!
I started reading sons and lovers last night and i ploughed through all the boring stuff about the mining mis en scene and my brain's ears pricked up when he started talking about how the mother's life was depressing and looking at the rest of her life she felt like she was being suffocated.
Sounds about right, I seem to remember dying really slowly for the rest of the book.
 

catalog

Well-known member
this spinal catastrophism book i read over weekend had a chapter on dh lawrence, about how he was well into psychoanalysis and science generally, i think he wrote some essays on the recapitulation theory (idea that each succeeding evolutionary being contains the genetic material of previous iterations within it ie humans contain all the animals and back right down to worms). Can't remember it exactly, but i remember thinking i didn't expect that. but fits in with his whole primitivism thing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I ended up reading the first chapter of Sons and Lovers last night and I was actually pretty impressed by it.

God knows I don't particularly want to read a book set in some depressing squalid english town* but the insight and cynicism in it + the sense of thwarted romanticism reminds me a little of Flaubert, and I can easily see why Philip Larkin thought it was the best English novel ever written already.

Also apparently later on in the novel the son either wants to fuck or actually DOES fuck his mother. That's spicy stuff.

* brings back bad memories of reading that Orwell novel about the vicar's daughter.
 
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