It’s Not Happening

Jessie got me listening to the Wiretap podcast a while back, and I’ve been meaning to recommend it for a long time. It’s an unusual format, mixing readings, fake interviews, real interviews and staged conversations between the host (Jonathan Goldstein, whom some of you may have heard on This American Life) and his embellished friends and family. The characters and pacing take a while to click, but this episode from a few weeks ago is perfectly accessible and well worth a listen. About half the show is taken up with an awesome email exchange between Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with good old David Sedaris taking the role of Armstrong. Try it!

I read this while I was away, and it was near-perfect vacation reading. It pushes the big red nostalgia button that nerds of a certain age have for classic video games and, to a lesser extent, 80s pop culture. The plot itself is pretty much the same old lone-hero-fights-the-man-and-learns-something-important-about-himself ringading that has worked so well for centuries, but if you came to RP1 looking for experimental plot structure, you haven’t been paying attention. It feels a bit as if Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman collaborated in an effort to cash in on their strengths, and that’s probably as much as most of my people need to hear to run out and get it.

Not sure what Vlasta will think of this, but I like the idea.

The face of the future.

I’ve been (correctly) typecast as someone who enjoys the hell out of books about the early days of real science, so this was a welcome Christmas gift from Jill & Tom. It took me far too long to start and even longer to finish as I kept getting distracted. John Hunter was the first surgeon to apply anything like empirical observation to his field, and he also pioneered the field of living one’s life as an irascible, workaholic jerk.

It’s a great story, filled with body snatching and extra-gruesome pre-anesthesia surgical procedures, but Moore does foreshadow Hunter’s sad ending with the heaviest hands. It’s still good fun for the most part, so if you can take a downer denouement and gore-soaked pages, knock yourself out!

Jessie wants me to get back to posting my thoughts on the books I read, so here we are. Did you know Patti Smith was involved romantically with Robert Mapplethorpe when they were young and new to NYC? I didn’t. This book is a memoir of their time together, bookended by scenes from Mapplethorpe’s premature death. It’s sweet and somewhat breezy, even when it’s reporting on the dark places that both artists visited as they edged toward success and greater creative freedom.

It’s certainly well worth a read for anyone interested in either artist. It also guides the reader through the extremely fertile NYC underground art scene of the late 60s and 70s, but there’s not much new here beyond the primary relationship. Smith shows an unexpected side of herself: weak, passive, filled with self-doubt and desperate for guidance and validation. (My limited understanding of her work led me to believe she had a strong, confident voice, which maybe means I am once again an idiot.) Mapplethorpe comes across as an otherworldly, saintly figure without whom Smith would be a lesser person. As a poem, sort of an elegy for their shared youth, it works pretty well, but it left me wanting an outsider’s perspective on the relationship.

Note: If name-dropping irritates you, pass on by.

Second note: The bookends evoke the still-fresh shock of massive, unexpected grief that struck the gay community and the art world in the 80s. For some, it’s still fresh. Powerful stuff.

Also note: One of the main reasons I stopped doing this was my deep embarrassment over how few books I’ve been finishing lately. I’m not sure when the next one will drop.