Book Corner 2025.4

by Sally Rooney

This is not my kind of book – very talky-thinky. Dense pages with no paragraph breaks consisting entirely of people talking or thinking about their feelings.

I don’t like Sally Rooney, and this book reenforced that. I had read one book, NORMAL PEOPLE, and liked exactly one half of it. Now I have double the sample size. I don’t like her women and I don’t like her sex scenes. I preferred the young woman in the first half of NORMAL and I prefer sex scenes where people keep their socks on and not everything is wonderful.

It dragged in the middle. I thought, I get it, I get it, the “neurodivergent” guy is the most well-adjusted character in the book. I don’t buy Ivan as neurodivergent, FYI, if that’s what she had in mind, which it may not be; it may just be what readers are projecting onto him. He was a skinny guy that was really into chess. But he was as talky-thinky as anyone else when you got right down to it.

I loathed Naomi. I came to hate any scene where she was even mentioned, let alone appeared in. Why was everyone around Peter acting as if this were a perfectly appropriate relationship for him? To quote Woody Allen’s alien scene in STARDUST MEMORIES, “Hey look, I’m a super intelligent being, by your standards I have an IQ of 1600, and I cant’ even understand what [Peter] expected out of that relationship with [Naomi].”

Positives:

I thought it was really interesting about how concerned the characters were with what other people would think. Margaret says that the net you’re caught in, the net of other people, you can’t get out of it, because life IS the net. And Peter couldn’t get past what other people would about him being in a weird “throuple.” I think characters grown up in the US would not have these attitudes. If they had twinges of self-consciousness they’d shrug them off – Who cares what people think? I’m an adult, he/she/they are adults, this is our life to choose. Most of the rest of the world is very different; apparently even first-world places like Ireland.

It was actually beautiful how she conveyed the grief of the two brothers. Whenever the narration came around back to their father, in any way, whichever brother’s perspective she may have been inhabiting, you really felt the loss and the struggle he was going through; like real grief, large swathes of (narrative) time might go by without giving a thought to the loss, but a reminder would crash it down again.

Comin’ Along

My gravity has failed & negativity won’t pull me through.

Loom Threadin’

Half done.

Spent a chunk of the afternoon beginning the warp measuring for the annual ‘project’ and listening to (some of) Dylan’s first electric albums get literally deconstructed in The Bootleg Series – The Cutting Edge 1965-1966. Six discs, one entirely dedicated to “Like a Rolling Stone.” I guess I’ve had this since it came out about 10 years ago, but I seldom haul it out to give it the attention it deserves.

Adding More Goats to the World

I made another goat, but I’m still not satisfied. Beads all the same size now, but some are the wrong shape; it matters! And need a much darker gray.

Book Corner 2025.3

by Peter Ames Carlin

Kind of dull – like the band. And I say that with R.E.M. firmly in my top 5 of favorite artists. They just never struck me as very interesting as people. The book does not disabuse me of said notion. Or maybe I’m not being fair – it’s not that they wouldn’t be very interesting people to get to know; but just not to get to know by reading about them.

Regarding the work, the book is pretty much all-out fanboy. Almost everything they make is great.

From My Back Pages

What came next? I pulled out HIGHWAY 61 & BLONDE ON BLONDE again when I was 16 or so. Now I was hooked. Harmonica-forward wacky lyric rock & roll. I didn’t know anyone who was into Dylan. It felt like my own little discovery. Ha!

My dear friend Marianne took a listen to one of the albums I was playing in my bedroom. With mild distaste she said something like, “He’s just saying any random words he thinks of.” I shrugged.

I can’t remember if next came BIOGRAPH or the first two albums, the eponymous BOB DYLAN and TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN. All purchased for me by my sweet boyfriend, who could kind of take Dylan or leave him. Though he was a fan of the song “Positively 4th Street” – he was a cynical sort.

BIOGRAPH is a 10-sided compilation, really a fabulous mix of stuff artfully curated & arranged. But it doesn’t have very good representation of the 70s. Mostly it’s awful Rolling Thunder Revue stuff. I liked a few late acoustic numbers like “Every Grain of Sand” and “You’re a Big Girl Now.” But I decided I was firmly a 1960s Dylan fan. I started collecting all the albums and stopped at PAT GARRET & BILLY THE KID.

Did it end there? Oh no…

Book Corner 2025.2

by Brette Warshaw

What I learned:

Stout and porter were only invented in the 1700s. Guinness was the first stout.
Broccolini was invented in the 1990s and first called “Asparation”. Because it was like “asparagus.” Um, yeah.
The first rum distillery in North America went up in the 1600s on none other than… Staten Island.

Book Corner 2025.1

by Benoit Clerc

In the midst of this newly conceived Dylan obsession, I read a compendium of every David Bowie song ever recorded. Well, most of it. I don’t like his later period (post-LET’S DANCE)… I just can’t get into any of the albums of the 90s and later. Too jazzy, or something. I do have his final album, BLACKSTAR, which I listen to respectfully, because it was his last. And I really felt moved to come to the end of this book and read about his final work, because of the way he went out. Bowie kept his illness secret from the public and never stopped working. He died two days after his last album came out. A lot of artists I love are dead, but the loss of Bowie really moved me.

How It Began for Me

When I was about 12 or not much older, a neighbor came by with a pile of LP’s he had found in the trash, to see if we wanted any. There were some various late 60s artists; I recall there was some Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield but those didn’t interest me at the time. But there were two Bob Dylan albums, HIGHWAY 61 & BLONDE ON BLONDE. I knew the song “Like a Rolling Stone” from the radio and liked it (I really liked the Rolling Stones at the time and anything remotely tangential to them). I took those two albums for myself. I also knew the song “Rainy Day Women”, but I didn’t know that was the title. I thought it was obviously called “Everybody Must Get Stoned”; so, I didn’t realize I knew one of the songs on BLONDE ON BLONDE.

I put HIGHWAY 61 on the turntable and listened to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then I let the next song play, which is “Tombstone Blues.” The song opens with, “The sweet pretty things are getting off course, the city fathers they are trying to endorse, the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse, but the town has no need to be nervous.” This was far too wacky for 12-year-old me. I took the needle off the record. I put a cassette into the player, put the needle back to the beginning, and hit “record.” With “Like a Rolling Stone” now immortalized on my mix tape, I put the albums aside, for the next four years, and… to be continued.