I know it's been a crazy and strange year when I look at the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books for 2006 and I have only even HEARD of three of them (The Road, by Cormac McCarthy; Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, by David Maraniss; and State of Denial, by Bob Woodward).I may have been busy, but I'm glad to see that people have kept writing anyway. All I do is readreadread, but I pledge to read an actual book in 2007.
Above: Allen Ginsberg — as photographed by William S. Burroughs — on the rooftop of his Lower East Side apartment, between Avenues B and C, in the Fall of 1953.
This is a great first paragraph by Walter Kirn that opens the Times review of his collected poems:
"Gay, in the lotus position, with a beard, wreathed in a cloud of marijuana smoke and renowned as the author of a “dirty” poem whose first public reading in a West Coast gallery was said to have turned the 1950s into the ’60s in a single night, Allen Ginsberg embodied, as a figure, some great cold war climax of human disinhibition. Ginsberg, the hang-loose anti-Ike. Ginsberg, the Organization Man unzipped. The vulnerable obverse of the Bomb. He had the belly of a Buddha, the facial hair of a Walt Whitman and — except for the ever-present black glasses that hinted at a conformist path not taken — he was easier to imagine naked than any Homo sapiens since Adam."
I like that line, "the ever present black glasses that hinted at a conformist path not taken". It seems in reverse of where we've all been and the opposite of the way people think...I too vow to read more books in 2007. Except for being busy writing my own book, I don't have a job!
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