{"id":69558,"date":"2013-08-02T09:31:15","date_gmt":"2013-08-02T13:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=69558"},"modified":"2013-11-11T10:13:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T15:13:00","slug":"stuff-ive-been-reading-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=69558","title":{"rendered":"Stuff I’ve Been Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"robespierre\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n— Over my vacation I finished Hilary Mantel’s novel A Place of Greater Safety<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, which – wow, I can’t believe I’m saying this – I think I liked even more than Wolf Hall<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. A Place of Greater Safety<\/i> is her novel about three of the main characters of the French Revolution, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre. Pretty much everyone in the book (and there is a cast of literally thousands) is a person from real life. It is unbelievable, how she wove together the three strands of those three very different individuals (who, of course, all started out on the same side before, like “Saturn” they “devoured” one another). She humanizes them, certainly – and anyone who has read Wolf Hall<\/i> and Bring Up the Bodies<\/i> knows how good Mantel is with men in power, the struggles for power, the Machiavellian manueverings of those who strive for power. I think it’s ADORABLE that the critical establishment as well as the publishing industry continues to believe that women excel in “domestic” situations, romances, marriage, and that men write “bigger” novels. (Of course that is also assuming that men never write about home life or love in their novels. Really? John Irving? Jonathan Franzen? They don’t write about love? Okay. Guess it just LOOKS different when women do it. Right? Uh-huh.) Regardless: Don DeLillo, Mr. Great American Novel, hasn’t come close to achieving what Mantel achieved in A Place of Greater Safety<\/i>, Wolf Hall<\/i>, Bring Up the Bodies<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. (I like some of Don DeLillo’s stuff, but we’re talking comparison here. His magnum opus, Underworld<\/i>, isn’t NEAR the accomplishment of what Mantel has pulled off in no less than three books.) I am happy with almost a revengeful feeling that she won the Booker prize twice. GOOD. Stick it to ’em, Hilary. So of course, after finishing A Place of Greater Safety<\/i>, I had to pull out Thomas Carlyle’s ponderous melodramatic history of the French Revolution, and lost myself in Googling like a maniac. And I came across the following: Hilary Mantel’s superb review of a book of essays about Robespierre<\/a>. I know what I thought of of Robespierre, before I dug deeper. Some of my opinions still stand. He is the end-result of Rousseau’s theories (Rousseau was his main inspiration), but of course nobody could see that at the time, and still probably can’t. Well, Camille Desmoulins could, and threw it back in his face in their final meeting. Rousseau had written “Burning isn’t answering”, meaning: burning books is no answer. Robespierre had closed the major revolutionary newspaper. Desmoulins, a brilliant man, reminded Robespierre of Rousseau’s comment, which I imagine had to cut to the core. Robespierre is the natural result of pure idealism taken to its most extreme form. In other words: Run for the hills. This is my instinctive response to anyone who goes gaga over Utopias, the perfectability of man, visions of a perfect world, “Imagine all the people”, whatever. I’ve said before that if John Lennon’s song were the platform for a political candidate, I wouldn’t vote for said person. I am actually frightened of the Utopia pictured in that song. I hear a yearning for totalitarian control in most Utopian burblings. I’ve written about that before<\/a>. I also highly recommend Hilary Mantel’s novel, which is very very long but I could not put it down. I TORE through that thing. If you want a taste of Mantel on Robespierre, before plunging in, read that article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

— Martin Scorsese’s beautiful essay “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema”<\/a>. It’s very emotional, as well as informative. <\/p>\n

\n\"dream_boogie_the_triumph_of_sam_cooke_300x460\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n— I finished Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, Peter Guralnick’s wonderful biography of Sam Cooke. I have such mixed feelings about Sam Cooke as a person (and no mixed feelings at all about him as an artist). I think he was a dick. But that voice, those songs. He sure had magic in him! Guralnick really lays it all out. He’s excellent, too, on the pioneering business model that Sam Cooke represented, for musicians as well as for the demographic of black musicians. He was turned on by producing others, you can tell. Guralnick talks about all of the law suits and wranglings with RCA and Columbia, etc., for Sam Cooke and his partner, J.W. Alexander, to gain ownership of the Sam Cooke catalogue, and it’s fascinating<\/em>. The aftermath of his death is upsetting, the behavior of his wife, selling off his business for bargain-basement prices because … oh who the hell knows why. It’s a shame. Who knows what else he would have gone on to do. However, he wasn’t killed by racism, as his friends were theorizing – “they got him because he rose too high – nobody wants a black man to succeed… ” etc. All of these are understandable reactions, especially considering the powder-keg that was America at that time. Sam Cooke experienced racism, of course, especially in the Jim Crow South (the images of all of those gospel quartets traveling around with food in the car because they knew that if they got hungry they couldn’t just eat anywhere) – and he seemed to have internalized a lot of that rage and self-loathing. He compartmentalized aspects of himself, a survival technique. But he wasn’t killed in some conspiracy to “get” him because he was rising too high – he was killed because he picked up a prostitute (which, fine, no judgment – but it shows his lack of judgment at that point: he was getting to be too big a star to be behaving in this way. There are discreet call girls and then there are crazy hookers you pick up in a bar. If you’re a star, you had best know the difference.) and then he violently attacked a random woman who thought he would kill her so she shot him. I have zero doubt that Sam Cooke was very scary in that motel office. He wasn’t planning on killing that woman, but how the hell was she supposed to know that? She’s supposed to wait for him to get really REALLY REALLY scary before she defends herself? He threw people up against walls, he threw chairs when someone said “No” to him. This woman said “No, you can’t come in here” and it was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. He was completely indiscreet that night, completely drunk and out of his mind, and you need to be better at handling yourself in public with people you don’t know\/trust if you want to be one of the biggest stars in the world. That’s not a racism thing, that’s reality. I understand why his family\/friends couldn’t believe that that was how he died and assigned all kinds of conspiratorial meanings to it. But he hid a lot, he hid his violent nasty nature from everyone, although everyone knew he had such nastiness in him. You just read how that whole thing went down and you think, “Sam, my God, just STOP. You do not want to die right now, and you do not want to die like this.” The interviews with Bobby Womack often made me laugh out loud (he is very entertaining and expressive), and the anecdotes about touring England with Little Richard are HILARIOUS. Little Richard was out of his MIND!! What a showman. Sam’s determination to have his own label, create his own albums, have a roster of artists, is inspiring. It’s pioneering thinking. He also saw the future. His buddies were making fun of The Rolling Stones, and he knew they were going to be huge and “change the industry” – but that is just one example. He was far-seeing. Guralnick is, as always, excellent on breaking down the recording sessions, the developing takes, the way Sam worked, how he arranged things, how he came up with ideas. It makes you want to play the song in question and then re-read the paragraph about the recording of said song (which I did throughout my reading of the book). I have no problem with him being a dick, by the way. I didn’t particularly like<\/i> hanging out with him throughout the book, and found some of the subsidiary characters (like his business partner, JW Alexander), far more sympathetic. His being a dick doesn’t take away from the music or his accomplishments. It was a ferocious time of upheaval. “Change was gonna come” … it was happening right then. The whole country was being a dick at that point. I can sense Guralnick’s dismay at some of the revelations he uncovered, because he loved Cooke’s music so much. I can separate the two. I listen to the music and lose myself, it’s such happy and yet bittersweet\/nostalgic, the feeling he gives me. Fine, he beat up his wife and rejected his own son and was pretty shady with some of those who helped him out along the way. Once you were no longer of use to him, buh-bye. But Sam Cooke was an innovator, and a determined man, and was just starting to rise above the accepted narrative of successful black American life. He died in 1964. One can only imagine what he would have accomplished in the following tumultuous years and beyond. BUMMER. <\/p>\n

Gonna listen to Sam’s jamming version of “Tennessee Waltz”, and get the bummer out of my system!<\/p>\n