"He was calm because of the Mandrax"

At the Phoenix, James Parker on recent lives of Rod Stewart and Leonard Cohen:

Rod spent much of his adolescence perfecting, and then maintaining, his exquisite ragged bouffant, or "bouff": "Picture me if you will, then, carefully dressed and styled for the night, accompanied by my mates, and standing down in Archway Station as the train thunders in — and all of us cowering into the wall, with our arms up over our heads, trying to protect our bouffs from getting toppled by the wind."

Closing tabs

Can't explain why it was such a tiring week: maybe it's just a tiring point in the semester? Anyway, I'm knackered, and am going to take the evening completely off for phenomenal laziness that may or may not involve novel-reading and a couple episodes of the (non-appealing) new season of Fringe.

On Tuesday I went to a lovely event - my long-ago tenth-grade English teacher Charlotte Pierce-Baker, now a professor at Vanderbilt, was at Columbia to speak about her distressing and moving memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother's Story of a Bipolar Son. Haven't read it yet, but will do so soon.

Will Wiles on being published by Amazon's new literary fiction imprint (same publisher that's bringing out my novel in the spring).

Two takes: Phil Dyess-Nugent and James Parker on Neil Young's new memoir.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Fry on various matters to do with theory and literature (good list of reading recommendations at the end!).

Check out Tough Mudder pics!

Light reading around the edges: Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins (and here's a bonus link) and Invisible Murder, the second installment in an excellent Danish crime series.

Rock biorhythms

At the Phoenix, James Parker on the new Metallica bio:

The most vivid and engaging passages of Enter Night, actually, are in this key of reminiscence: Wall bumping into Ulrich at the Hammersmith Odeon, the little drummer for some reason on crutches ("His outraged eyes studied mine. A precocious child growing rapidly into a full-on fuck of a man"); Mustaine emerging crackling from some toilet or drug tabernacle to be interviewed ("He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it"); Hammett chatting pleasantly about essential oils and then clamming up at the arrival of macho man Hetfield ("As we all walked into the bar together, I noticed Kirk affecting a sort of mini-Hetfield saunter. Safety in numbers, I found myself doing the same"). It makes one wish that Wall could have departed further from the conventions of rock biography — got more personal or more poetic/fragmentary, or written a book called My Life In Heavy Metal. Except that Steve Almond already wrote that book, and it had fuck-all to do with heavy metal.