Monday, February 29, 2016

the last book I ever read (Frank's Home by Richard Nelson, excerpt one)

from Frank's Home by Richard Nelson:

FRANK: Sometimes—I think I am America.

CATHERINE: Father . . .

HELEN: What’s wrong?

CATHERINE: I hate it when he talks like that.

FRANK (Continuing his thought): Or what’s left of it.



Sunday, February 28, 2016

the last book I ever read (Sam Shepard's Fool for Love, excerpt three)

from Fool for Love by Sam Shepard:

EDDIE: You were gone.

THE OLD MAN: Somebody could’ve found me! Somebody could’ve hunted me down. I wasn’t that impossible to find.

EDDIE: You were gone.



Saturday, February 27, 2016

the last book I ever read (Sam Shepard's Fool for Love, excerpt two)

from Fool for Love by Sam Shepard:

MARTIN: (after pause) Do you want some help getting up off the floor?

EDDIE: I like it down here. Less tension. You notice how when you’re standing up, there’s a lot more tension?



Friday, February 26, 2016

the last book I ever read (Sam Shepard's Fool for Love, excerpt one)

from Fool for Love by Sam Shepard:

MAY: So, now we’re gonna’ get real mean and sloppy, is that it? Just like old times.

EDDIE: Well, I haven’t dropped the reins in quite a while ya’ know. I’ve been real good. I have. No hooch. No slammer. No women. No nothin’. I been a pretty boring kind of a guy actually. I figure I owe it to myself. Once a once.



Thursday, February 25, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt eight)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

JOE
Suddenly lunges to his feet dazedly—mumbles in humbled apology.
Scuse me, White Boys. Scuse me for livin’. I don’t want to be where I’s not wanted.
He makes his way swayingly to the opening in the curtain at rear and tacks down to the middle table of the three at right, front. He feels his way around it to the table at its left and gets to the chair in back of CAPTAIN LEWIS.

CHUCK
Gets up—in a callous, brutal tone.
My pig’s in de back room, ain’t she? I wanna collect de dough I wouldn’t take dis mornin’, like a sucker, before she blows it.
He goes rear.



Wednesday, February 24, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt seven)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

LARRY
Turns on HICKEY with bitter defiance.
And now it’s my turn, I suppose? What is it I’m to do to achieve this blessed peace of yours?

HICKEY
Grins at him.
Why, we’ve discussed all that, Larry. Just stop lying to yourself—



Tuesday, February 23, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt six)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

HICKEY
With an amused wink at HOPE.
Now, listen, Jimmy, you needn’t go on. We’ve all heard that story about how you came back to Cape Town and found her in the hay with a staff officer. We know you like to believe that was what started you on the booze and ruined your life.

JIMMY
Stammers.
I—I’m talking to Harry. Will you kindly keep out of—
With a pitiful defiance.
My life is not ruined!



Monday, February 22, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt five)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

HOPE
Walking? Bejees, do you mean to say you walked?

HICKEY
I sure did. All the way from the wilds of darkest Astoria. Didn’t mind it a bit, either. I seemed to get here before I knew it. I’m a bit tired and sleepy but otherwise feel great.
Kiddingly.
That ought to encourage you, Governor—show you a little walk around the war is nothing to be so scared about.
He winks at the others. HOPE stiffens resentfully for a second. HICKEY goes on.
I didn’t make such bad time either for a fat guy, considering it’s a hell of a ways, and I sat in the park a while thinking. It was going on twelve when I went in the bedroom to tell Evelyn I was leaving. Six hours, say. No, less than that. I’d been standing on the corner some time before Cora and Chuck came along, thinking about all of you. Of course, I was only kidding Cora with that stuff about saving you.
Then seriously.
No, I wasn’t either. But I didn’t mean booze. I meant save you from pipe dreams. I know now, from my experience, they’re the things that really poison and ruin a guy’s life and keep him from finding any peace. If you knew how free and contented I feel now. I’m like a new man. And the cure for them is so damned simple, once you have the nerve. Just the old dope of honesty is the best policy—honesty with yourself, I mean. Just stop lying about yourself and kidding yourself about tomorrows.
He is staring ahead of him now as if he were talking aloud to himself as much as to them. Their eyes are fixed on him with uneasy resentment. His manner becomes apologetic again.
Hell, this begins to sound like a damned sermon on the way to lead the good life. Forget that part of it. It’s in my blood, I guess. My old man used to whale salvation into my heinie with a birch rod. He was a preacher in the sticks of Indiana, like I’ve told you. I got my knack of sales gab from him, too. He was the boy who could sell those Hoosier hayseeds building lots along the Golden Street!
Taking on a salesman’s persuasiveness.
Now listen, boys and girls, don’t look at me as if I was trying to sell you a goldbrick. Nothing up my sleeve, honest. Let’s take an example. Any one of you. Take you, Governor. That walk around the ward you never take—



Sunday, February 21, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt four)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

CORA
No, dis round’s on me. I run into luck. Dat’s why I dragged Chuch outa bed to celebrate. It was a sailor. I rolled him.
She giggles.
Listen, it was a scream. I’ve run into some nutty souses, but dis guy was de nuttiest. De booze dey dish out around de Brooklyn Navy Yard must be as terrible bug-juice as Harry’s. My dogs was givin’ out when I seen dis guy holdin’ up a lamppost, so I hurried to get him before a cop did. I says, “Hello, Handsome, wanta have a good time?” Jees, he was paralyzed! One of dem polite jags. He tries to bow to me, imagine, and I had to prop him up or he’d fell on his nose. And what d’yuh tink he said? “Lady,” he says, “can yuh kindly tell me de nearest way to de Museum of Natural History?”
They all laugh.
Can yuh imagine! At two A.M. As if I’d know where de dump was anyway. But I says, “Sure ting, Honey Boy, I’ll be only too glad.” So I steered him into a side street where it was dark and propped him against a wall and give him a frisk.
She giggles.
And what d’yuh tink he does? Jees, I ain’t lyin’, he begins to laugh, de big sap! He says, “Quit ticklin’ me.” While I was friskin’ him for his roll! I near died! Den I toined him ‘round and give him a push to start him. “Just keep goin’,” I told him. “It’s a big white building on your right. You can’t miss it. He must be swimmin’ in de North River yet!
They all laugh.



Saturday, February 20, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt three)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

LARRY
Then you can blame your imagination—and forget it.
He changes the subject abruptly.
You asked me why I quit the Movement. I had a lot of good reasons. One was myself, and another was my comrades, and the last was the breed of swine called men in general. For myself, I was forced to admit, at the end of thirty years’ devotion to the Cause, that I was never made for it. I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you’re damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it’s all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything, especially revolution, you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white. As for my comrades in the Great Cause, I felt as Horace Walpole did about England, that he could love it if it weren’t for the people in it. The material the ideal free society must be constructed from is men themselves and you can’t build a marble temple out of a mixture of mud and manure. When man’s soul isn’t a sow’s ear, it will be time enough to dream of silk purses.
He chuckles sardonically—then irritably as if suddenly provoked at himself for talking so much.
Well, that’s why I quit the Movement, if it leaves you any wiser. At any rate, you see it had nothing to do with your mother.

PARRITT
Smiles almost mockingly.
Oh, sure, I see. But I’ll be Mother has always thought it was on her account. You know her, Larry. To hear her go on sometimes, you’d think she was the Movement.



Friday, February 19, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt two)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

PARRITT
It’s funny Mother kept in touch with you so long. When she’s finished with anyone, she’s finished. She’s always been proud of that. And you know how she feels about the Movement. Like a revivalist preacher about religion. Anyone who loses faith in it is more than dead to her; he’s a Judas who ought to be boiled in oil. Yet she seemed to forgive you.

LARRY
Sardonically.
She didn’t, don’t worry. She wrote to denounce me and try to bring the sinner to repentance and a belief in the One True Faith again.



Thursday, February 18, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, excerpt one)

from The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill:

JOE
Cheering up.
If? Man, when I don’t want a drink, you call de morgue, tell dem come take Joe’s body away, ‘cause he’s sure enuf dead. Gimme de bottle quick, Rocky, before he changes his mind!



Wednesday, February 17, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt twelve)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Allen Toussaint and I were walking across the lobby of a fine but nearly deserted hotel, located just across Canal Street from the French Quarter. An older gentleman had just entered the rear door and was coming toward us when he recognized Allen and stopped in his tracks. His grim expression lit up. He became elated and emotional, grasping and shaking Allen’s hand vigorously, as if his very presence were a sign that all was not lost in the shattered city.

He didn’t speak at first, but his expression said, “If you are back, then we are all back.”

I have never doubted that Allen was a prince in a thin disguise.



Tuesday, February 16, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt eleven)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

When I came over to visit in the last days of Advent, the front door was answered and I saw the imposing black-clad figure filling a doorframe in the hallway. He offered a hand that swallowed mine and spoke the words familiar from countless television appearances: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”

He looked extraordinarily like himself.



Monday, February 15, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt ten)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Before I knew where I was, I found myself walking to Richard Hell’s apartment in Alphabet City. I was trying not to draw attention to myself by wearing my black leather jacket, tinted lenses, and Chelsea boots. I was also carrying a battered tweed instrument case containing a red 1961 Fender Stratocaster that I had impulsively bought on Forty-eighth Street that afternoon with my first-ever credit card after two or three too many martinis at lunchtime.

There were voices shouting after me in Spanish, but I refused to engage, and walked on, giving a fair imitation of a sense of purpose. I was going to sing Richard’s “You Gotta Lose” with him and the Voidoids at CBGB’s in aid of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. I was on good terms with at least one of the other evangelists, but it was a long way from singing with Rusty at Harold and Sylvia Hikins’s poetry nights in Freshfields.



Sunday, February 14, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt nine)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Late at night after the sessions, I listened repeatedly to the newly released All Mod Cons by The Jam. What I felt about it was nothing like rivalry, more just admiration. Paul Weller and I were writing completely different songs, but The Jam’s record was such a big and different step up from their previous release that I was moved to put aside a good song like “Tiny Steps” simply because it owed too much to the music and lyrics of This Year’s Model.



Saturday, February 13, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt eight)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Our driver was an outrageously camp fellow from Florence.

That’s Florence, Alabama, by the way.

He used to amuse himself by baiting and flirting with macho truck drivers over the CB radio.

Given that we were often the only such tour bus on most stretches of highway, I thought that there was a good chance we might pull in to refuel and find a lynching party of hostile truckers lying in wait for him and “the horny buffalo”—gay prostitutes he had claimed were his passengers.

We were initially innocent of what this term actually meant, but we definitely didn’t think it was a good idea for his CB handle to be “The Cocaine Kid.” Eventually, we prevailed on him to change it to something more discreet.



Friday, February 12, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt seven)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Two men who I later learned were John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd came to our dressing room masquerading as people from the sanitation department. I suppose them doing a bit for us offstage was intended as a compliment, but as I didn’t know who they were, the joke seemed at our expense.

Everything got very tense. The prevailing mood on both sides was somewhere between jaded and self-important.

All the time, record company reps kept banging on about us doing “Less Than Zero,” a song that seemed much less likely to be understood by the American audience than almost anything else on what I already thought of as our “old record”: My Aim is True.

I was thinking about the future.



Thursday, February 11, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt six)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

When Pete Thomas had been a young teenager, he’d discovered he lived in the same town as the drummer from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and spent so much time walking past his house accidentally on purpose that a roadie invited the lad in. Mitch Mitchell was reportedly dressed in a sunflower-yellow satin blouse and matching velvet flares and sitting in a room with two drum kits and all the Experience’s amplifiers. He poured young Pete his first vodka and orange and played him an Elvin Jones record.

I’d say he’s never been the same since.



Wednesday, February 10, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt five)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

The Joe Loss Blue Beats—a horn-led nonet—cut “Patsy Girl” for HMV Records. It was a novelty song that my father wrote, inspired by a Jamaican woman who used to make tea at band rehearsals. People would probably take offense now at the West Indian accent that my father affected, by in ’64, “Patsy Girl” was just regarded as harmless fun and had a great tumbling trumpet coda played by Vic Mustard.

The B-side was more topical. It was a lover’s plea delivered in the style of the then named Cassius Clay, called “I’m the Greatest.”

Neither the A- nor B-sides sounded anything at all like any real ska records and the record sank without a trace.

Except, that is, in Germany, where “Patsy Girl” became a Top 10 hit almost two years later.



Tuesday, February 9, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt four)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

The next morning, I took the train to the Bickershaw Festival in a field near Wigan, with just a blanket and pair of boots to protect me.

We’d all seen the film Woodstock, so we knew that girls ran around without their shirts on at rock festivals, a prospect nearly as exciting as seeing The Flamin’ Groovies.

The scene that actually confronted the latecomer looked like a slow day behind the lines on the approach to the Western Front. I remember seeing The Kinks wearing pastel suits and wondering how they could have remained so remarkably untouched by the filth. I wandered around dazed and damp until I quite accidentally ran into some friends who allowed me to curl up at the end of their tent in one of the human-size padded-paper sleeping bags that were being sold at a profit on the edge of the muddy field. Then I fell asleep, shivering.

I was awakened by the distorted voice of Captain Beefheart booming “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby.” I thought the Martians had landed.

The running order was in utter chaos by this time, and I think it was about three a.m., or maybe it just felt that way, but The Magic Band sounded perfect at that hour.



Monday, February 8, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt three)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

I was born in the same hospital in which Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. I apologize in advance that I have not been the same boon to mankind.

There are many places in London that offer a sense of belonging: Camden, Stepney, Hampstead, Brixton, and even Shepherd’s Bush. Paddington is not one of these, unless you are a fictional bear. It is a place for passing through, a mainline station on the Monopoly board.

The location of my first family home, West Kensington, was borrowed from a nearby Underground station. It suggested more gentility than the area deserved. The neighborhood might have been more correctly associated with Olympia and the hall that, in its time, had hosted the Ideal Homes Exhibition. It might also have been the only venue that could accommodate both a rally by the British Union of Fascists and the Crufts dog show, although unfortunately not at the same time.



Sunday, February 7, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt two)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Halfway between the two large studio rooms was a smaller mixing suite. For half a week, the final mixes of The Jam’s new double A-side, “Town Called Malice”/ “Precious,” could be heard blasting out every time the control room door swung open.

The next day, I ran into Alice Cooper on his way to work. He was a very likable fellow and completely free of snakes. I immediately ran out to the big HMV record shop on Oxford Street and bought copies of School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies and asked Alice to sign them for Steve Nieve, as he had claimed they were the only rock and roll records that he knew when he had joined The Attractions.



Saturday, February 6, 2016

the last book I ever read (Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, excerpt one)

from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello:

Back in early ’78, I’d asked Mick Jones to play on our next single, “Pump It Up,” and someone started the ridiculous rumor that we were actually trying to poach him to be The Attractions’ lead guitarist, and since then there had been a little bit of a “hands off” attitude between our managers. The idea was never remotely in my mind and we didn’t even end up using Mick’s guitar on “Pump It Up,” although he did play a great part that sounded like police sirens on “Big Tears,” the B-side of the single.

Now Mick was out on the studio floor with the volume and the reverb on his amp cranked all the way up to “obliterate.” I thought to myself, That’ll never work. But when London Calling came out I couldn’t believe how great everything sounded. I was completely and utterly wrong. It sounded ragged and thrilling.



Friday, February 5, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Door by Magda Szabó, excerpt twelve)

from The Door by Magda Szabó:

“Get out. Go and make a speech on television. Write a novel, or run off back to Athens. If they send me home from here, don’t any of you try to come anywhere near me, Adélka has left her scissors here and I’ll use them on anyone who comes near me. Why are you so concerned about my fate? There are plenty of care homes. This is the most wonderful country in the world, and I’ve the legal right to be sick for two whole years. That’s what your friend said. Now go. I’ve things to do.”



Thursday, February 4, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Door by Magda Szabó, excerpt eleven)

from The Door by Magda Szabó:

We both stayed silent. Never had there been a more mysterious, more mute or inscrutable figure than hers that afternoon, with the dark descending and the branches beating on the windows. I sat down next to her, with the NO VISITORS sign in my hands.

“How many cats are left?” she finally asked, from behind her veil. Her voice was every bit as unreal as her invisible face.

At this stage it would make no difference.



Wednesday, February 3, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Door by Magda Szabó, excerpt ten)

from The Door by Magda Szabó:

Easter fell early that year, at the beginning of April, and our last day there was Good Friday. I have an enduring memory of going to church, and of the dead Christ laid out on a bier. A gilded basket stood in the doorway, filled with rose petals, and as you entered you scattered them over the body of the Son of God, until He was completely covered. Later, they rang the bell in a little campanile, and all the old people of the village came and stood around it. When they noticed us in the entrance to the church throwing handfuls of petals over the sacred corpse, they came up to my husband and gestured to him that he should join them in mourning the Saviour. I can still see him ringing the bell, his thick blond hair, already shot with grey, tugged by the sea breeze. Next they put the bell rope into my hands. I think I must have pleased them, because I wept copiously all the time I was pulling it, but the tears had nothing to do with the ceremony, they were only for myself. The next day we went back to Athens and left for home from Helicon airport. The journey was as unreal as they always are. The Greek writers were kinder to me than seemed possible, pressing farewell baskets laden with gifts into my hands as to someone who had been knocked over by a goods train. They even accompanied us to the airport. If they never again invite another Hungarian writer, I am the cause.



Tuesday, February 2, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Door by Magda Szabó, excerpt nine)

from The Door by Magda Szabó:

Fury – and fever – blazed rose-red in her face, and she resumed her sweeping with even greater violence, as if she had a personal vendetta with the snow, which she alone could settle. Sutu and the handyman’s wife, she shouted after me, were bringing her food, enough for the whole street, so there was nothing for me to worry about. She hated being spied on; she’d never in her life gone in for hysterics, but if we nagged her enough she might experiment to see what it was like. Her words were drowned by choking, followed by a fit of coughing, then she turned away. Those days she never had Viola with her. She said she didn’t have time to run around with him, and it wasn’t good for a dog to stay still; so I should take him home, into the warmth. There was no need for him to catch a cold as well.



Monday, February 1, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Door by Magda Szabó, excerpt eight)

from The Door by Magda Szabó:

I could no longer make out her face. The sky had suddenly clouded over. All day I had been expecting rain and so far it had held off, but it is almost always windy on Good Friday, with driving rain. Now, towards the end of the day, the tears of lamentation for Christ were arriving once again, if rather later. I couldn’t go back. They were falling in fat drops, and the legendary wind had sprung up afresh, signaling the outbreak of a storm, as if the universe were panting for air, or had begun to breathe in our ears. I knew the one thing Emerence dreaded was a storm, and that there was no point in resisting. If I didn’t go with her she would drag me back in. Viola had drawn his tail in and was whimpering. He was already on the porch, scratching at the eternally closed door, wanting to hide. The lightning had begun to slash the sky and thunder rumbled between the howls of the dog. It was all pure electricity, a sudden sheet of pure blue flame, then nothing but pure water and perfect blackness.