In Order of Completion
1. Thomas Bernhardt. GATHERING EVIDENCE. Bernhardt was recommended by my café pal Fran. These autobiographical pieces, written separately but now arranged chronologically, proved a good place to start. It runs through Burhard’s adolescence and is blisteringly dark and scathingly funny. It lacks chapters and dialogue, as do all his books.
2. Yvonne Martinez. SCABMUGGERS. Yvonne, an ex-labor organizer, is another café friend. This recounts her experiences at a Harvard program for organizers from around the world. (She has adapted it into a play which will premiere in Berkeley shortly.) It is stark, serious, issue-oriented and contains my favorite opening line in recent American letters: “I was raised by felons…”
3, Michael McMillan. TERMINAL EXPOSURE. A collection of art, cartoons and comix by a (once underground) octogenarian previously unknown to me. It came recommended by two people whose opinions I hold in high regard, but was too out-there for me. I needed to be led by the hand and guided to its worth.
4. Kerin Boye. KALLOCAINE. I met Boye in the Peter Weiss book (See below), where she is as a character. A Swedish lesbian poet, she committed suicide in 1941, at age 41, shortly after finishing this dystopian view of a 1984-like society written before Orwell’s book gave that view its name. Credit is due for her foresight that but I didn’t care for it much for the book itself.
5. Peter Weiss. AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE, vol iii. The final book to the trilogy and the one most easily grasped. Reading them all, even over months, was a powerful, unique, informative experience. No dialogue; no chapters; not for the faint of heart.
6. Clare Kahane. NINE LIVES. A good friend of a good friend. We have known her since she was working on a PhD in English. Turns out she had quite a life before that. Tours with Greenwich Village folkies, SF Beats, Berkeley hippy revolutionaries, , and on the road, motorcycling thru the US and Europe. Want to know what a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx was doing in places like that?
7. Thomas Bernhardt. WITTGENSTEIN’S NEPHEW. The funny plays a larger role in this one. My laughter convinced Adele to try it – and she finished!
8. Lazlo Krasnznahorkai. THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE. The most recent Noble Prize winner. Again, no dialogue or chapters. Comic, I think, and not for me. So over-laden I missed the death of a principal character for the first time since THE RECOGNITIONS.
9. Sean Howe. AGENTS OF CHAOS. A biography of Tom Forcade, head of the Underground Press Syndicate, Yippie, Zippie, publisher of “High Times,” and major drug smuggler – and abuser. What a lot of craziness was going on at the time. What did these people imagine they were achieving? I was around, but I missed it.
10. Thomas Bernhardt. THE LOSER. Another striking book. I felt Burkhard lost his way toward the end – if he can be said to have a way. The relationship between an unnamed narrator, who is a piano virtuoso, the title character, who is another, and Glen Gould are at its center. Other musicians and artists to consider what Burkhardt has to say.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.