books books books

[David Futrelle <dfutrelle24@xxxxxxxxx>]

The proposed book club sounds interesting to this list newbie. Couple of
questions. 

1) Could someone re-post or just email me more info about how the book
club will work? 

2) It?s a big list of some pretty big books ? both in their ambitions
and their page count -- many of which are pretty academic in nature. As
someone who spent more than a few years in grad school I have some
tolerance for academic prose, but unless there are some sharp
insights/interesting tidbits of info here ? well, life is short and I?ve
already spent a good deal of it reading 400 page academic tomes, so my
question is: Anyone read these books, or other books by the various
authors in question? 

If you have, or if someone else whose opinions you trust has recommended
them enthusiastically, could you post your thoughts/reviews on the list?
(Or, heck, cut and paste brief Amazon reviews.) 

Books I?ve read;

Ocean of Sound and England?s Dreaming -- both classics, and both are
nicely written, but I?m guessing a lot of people have already read than. 

The Ambient Century. I plowed through this one because the subject was
interesting to me, and it definitely covers a ton of ground (as the
subtitle puts it, from Mahler to Trance, with stops along the way on
everyone from Satie to Terry Riley to Eno to Air). But the book as I
recall is pretty sloppy and lacking in insight about many of the people
it shoehorns in. (I?m not the only one thinking this ? check the reviews
on Amazon.)

Books that sound interesting to me: 

People Funny Boy? A giant book on a fascinating character and musical
innovator (Lee Scratch Perry) but is this book any good? 

One that sounds like it could be interesting: Noise, Water, Meat: A
History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts Douglas Kahn 

Here?s the Amazon review: "The dual task here is to listen through
history to sound and through sound to history." 

This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the
twentieth century by listening to it--to the emphatic
and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of
postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid
sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses,
screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first
half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas
Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music,
visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the
history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions,
listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that
generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin
Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein,
Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono,
Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov. ]] 

PS: I just subscribed to this group a couple days back. What a lovely
introduction! Though it would be nice if those posting endless
irrelevant screeds, some of them in languages I don?t understand, would
kindly remember not to quote six levels of previous quotes in their replies.

-- 
davidFUTRELLE
futrelle@xxxxxxxx
http://www.dimflash.com

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