Here are 2 book reviews about 2 women authors.
Sept. 13, 2016 "Into the groove": I cut out this article by John Semley in the Globe and Mail on Feb. 21, 2015. This is a book about Sonic Youth band member Kim Gordon's book Girl in a Band. I don't like Sonic Youth, but I did like this review.
“Throughout one’s life,” wrote Kim Gordon in her 1980 essay Trash Drugs and Male Bonding, “One becomes ‘out of tune.’”
Gordon was describing a performance by Rhys Chatham, an American avant-gardist and veteran of the early eighties NYC “No Wave” scene. Chatham’s music (like that of Gordon’s band, Sonic Youth) begins out of tune.
Guitars are dissonant and discordant, misstrung, raked with screwdrivers and jammed-through with drumsticks. The music bows and quivers, pulling at the perimeter that guards rhythm against noise. The din is sculpted and shaped into something at once resembling and resisting music.
As Gordon writes, “To achieve perfection and purity of form in music is impossible.” Artists such as Sonic Youth aren’t particularly interested in trying. It’s the impure, writes Gordon, that’s more exciting.
Between 1981 and the band’s breakup 30 years later, Kim Gordon provided the throbbing foundation for Sonic Youth. As guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo wailed in wonky tunings, Gordon held down the low end as the band’s bass player.
Third fiddle in the group she co-founded with Moore – to whom she was married for 27 years – Gordon, the one so excited by the aural impurity of Rhys Chatham and other noisy NYC No Wavers, was, cliché of clichés, the female bassist in a male-dominated alt-rock band.
It’s a role embraced with more than a little wry irony in the title of Gordon’s excellent new memoir, Girl in a Band. And in a book that’s very much about Gordon exerting authorial control over her own life, it’s a cliché she happily undermines. “Being a girl bass player is ideal,” she writes, “because the swirl of Sonic Youth makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong.”
Gordon begins her story at the end – the dissolution of her marriage with Moore and Sonic Youth’s final concert. “When we came out onstage for our last show,” she begins, “the night was all about the boys.” Positioning herself on the outside, peering in on the dynamics of her own band and her own life, Gordon seems to share more affinity with the fans watching her farewell bow (“I remember wondering what the audience was picking up on or thinking about this raw, weird pornography of strain and distance”).
Her mind also wanders to the pilled-flannel platoons of Gen-X and millennial alt-rock kids who seemed to take news of Gordon and Moore’s split as a personal affront. As she writes, “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact … was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure – a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”
Plenty of the hype surrounding “The Kim Gordon Book” stems from Gordon and Moore’s separation, with Girl in a Band promising lascivious details about the split, and the third party who drove them apart (Gordon refers to her only as “the woman”).
Yes, rest assured, the book addresses this stuff head-on in its later pages. Gordon’s not ashamed to reveal her snooping through her husband’s e-mails and phone bills, or to dissect how the husband’s affair “turned him into a serial liar.” She doesn’t dither in lambasting her ex, describing his 2011 solo record Demolished Thoughts as “a collection of sophomoric, self-obsessed, mostly acoustic mini-suicide notes.”
Pretty much as a rule, Kim Gordon’s not at all shy about speaking her mind. A friend recently used the phrase “mean as a snake” to compliment author Patricia Highsmith. It comes to mind when reading Gordon’s barbed appraisals of fellow musicians, artists and other media types.
It’s refreshing to hear that even in the ’80s nobody seemed to like kitschy pop-art tradesman Jeff Koons. Elsewhere: Courtney Love is “a car crash” and Lydia Lunch is “a little predatory.”
And as was widely reported this week, in advance copies of the book it seemed as if Gordon was practically daring pop-music moll Lana Del Rey to straight-up commit suicide: “If she truly believes it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, why doesn’t she just off herself?” She (or a compassionate editor) must have had second thoughts; the passage has been amended.
There’s something bracing in Gordon’s apparent meanness. For a feminist icon, she exhibits little use for more modern iterations of gender politics, where ennobling maxims such as “choose your choice” are taken as sufficiently political.
Feminism, for Gordon, is more than the belief that “women can do whatever they want.”
Gordon finds the most potent expressions of femininity in unlikelier, even cornier places. She exalts Madonna for being “realistic about her body type.” She tragically eulogizes soft-rock singer Karen Carpenter, who died of complications of her anorexia, as “the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others.”
It may be her intellect, poise or the wisdom of age (likely some lucky alchemy of all three) but Gordon’s insights into everything from body politics to male friendships feel devastatingly accurate.
As she coils through her career as a musician, visual artist, journalist, fashion designer, actor and alt-rock idol, Gordon remains true to a sort of fully fleshed-out idea of herself that most of us can only hope to aspire to.
Introducing all the climactic band/marriage breakup stuff at the start makes Girl in a Band feel a bit like it’s winding down in its last chapters. But Gordon finds offbeat, melancholic catharsis in her closing description of a casual early-morning make-out session in front of her L.A. home.
“It sounds like I’m someone else entirely now,” she reflects, “and I guess I am.” There, at 61 years of age, sucking face in the back of a car in the streets of her youth, the enigmatic, mercurial Gordon proves as excitingly out-of-tune as ever.
Oct. 28, 2016 "Some home truths as source of new fiction": Today I found this book review by Lois Abraham in the Edmonton Journal. It is about the book Commonwealth by Ann Patchett:
My opinion: This part stood out to me the most:
“I always think about Jane Fonda. When Jane Fonda was in boarding school she read in a fan magazine that her mother had committed suicide and she never knew ... Those are the kind of things that sort of stick in your memory or your consciousness and you think what would it be like to find out something so essential about yourself and your own life in a public forum.”
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