WHAT IS IT ALL BUT LUMINOUS : NOTES FROM AN UNDERGROUND MAN by ART GARFUNKEL : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Picked this one up at the library new book shelf on a whim as I was heading out the door and wish I had the time to deeply read rather than dip in and out. 

It's a poetical book, many stanzas between scenarios with George Harrison and the Beatles, with James Taylor, as well as, of course,his long time associate, sometimes partner, Paul Simon.  Entwined with music legends as he himself became,  born and bar mitzvah'ed Jewish but a Buddhist just the same.  And lists ; the books and the songs and the accomplishments but which leads no doubt that his wife and son and grandchild are the epitome of his life.  He has had a long time writing habit.

A song  is a poem is a song.

I liked this one page 140 of this small hardback.

I was her love pest.
Like aphids in her garden.
Mold on her bloom.
I was fungus underneath her nail.
Crust in her eyelashes.
Trust in the atmosphere.
Dust on the pictures of places we've been.
I'm her old bed linen.
The thrust of the argument.
Honey for the tea in a bear.
There in the X-rays.
I'm the horn in her side
cornucopia.
I am her underwear.
Solder and weld.
Fused in our children.
    Behold and beheld.


Even if you don't know who he is, the poetry is worth it.

C 2019  Christine Trzyna  Book Review All Rights reserved.

COMMENTARY ON JAMES TAYLOR PLACES IN MY PAST

This one goes out to Karen, a friend of mine from art school days, who died of a brain tumor about year ago, leaving a daughter about the age we were when we first met and had our artistic adventures. Only distance allows me to speak of her, and someday to write about her.


"Sometimes I can laugh and cry and I can't remember why."

New Video Summer 2016

GIRLS LIKE US by SHEILA WELLER

GIRLS LIKE US
Sheila Weller
C Kellwell Inc
Atria Books Division of Simon and Shuster

QUICK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA

Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King, perhaps the three most influential singer-songwriters of 20th century popular music; they reflected and influenced pop culture through their unconventional lives and original music that so very many of us still sing in the shower. While Carole embodied the Jewish earth mother who kept her children and family life apart from her career, Carly was the vampish sex positive intellectual with the (frequently) true heart who wasn't always sure she wanted a career. Joni decided early that her creativity would prevail over personal relationships but her angst over giving up her long secret love child for adoption was the underlying theme that effected both profoundly.

OK so guess who made it through all three ladies' lives? That Lothario James Taylor! (I can see you now going right to the index to read the specific parts about James....)

So which lady is most interesting to me? Probably Carly.

But since this book follows the three women through their lives as expressing the challenges of a generation of women, lets go to page 292-293 where we read this....

"On the one hand, being an old lady, or a "lady" - the kind of arty, sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe- well, you couldn't beat that. All over the country, young women were trying to shoehorn their personalities into that fashionable archetype" talkative girls got stoned and talked slower; unaesthetic girls took to wearing dangly jewelry; pragmatic girls started reading their horoscopes. Verbal, argumentative girls pretended to be anti-intellectual and serene. But many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) didn't have to try; they naturally personified this glamorous new femininity.... '

"On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man- and he was always coming out ahead, because he was a man....'

Pages 296-297
"Ladies of the Canyon" (Joni Mitchell's) was released in March 1970 and it was shot though with idealism and idealization: idealized long-skirted ladies, the pitfalls of worshipful love, the chafing between idealistic women and "straight" moneyed men, the inequity between rock star's wealth and a street musician's poverty, the misguided destruction of "paradise," for the sake of money..."