I do write this blog, of course, and before that I used to produce an apazine every two months for about a decade and a half, so there's plenty of written evidence to support my cultural experience but it's a sporadic trail at best. About the only time I ever tried to keep any kind of strict account of my reading habits was that one time in the 'eighties, when I hand-wrote a review of every book I read for a year.
Actually, I didn't even make it to the end of the year. I think I gave up in about October. That journal must be somewhere in the house. I wonder if I could find it...
The answer to that turns out to be "No", which is just as well. Otherwise, this would have derailed into a post about all the books I read in 1986 or whenever it was instead of what it's supposed to be, which is a review of Girl To City by Amy Rigby.
As I've said before, I tend not to write much about books here, even though I probably read at least forty or fifty every year. I don't know exactly how many since I'm not kwriting down the titles or using one of those websites or apps that collects and collates the details (Something even the thought of which gives me the shivers...) but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the discard pile.
I tend to put each book I've read in a stack on the floor and keep adding more until the tower threatens to fall over. Then I start another one next to it. Eventually, when the whole thing becomes unstable, I'm forced to sort through them and find somewhere more permanent, generally another stack in another room. The perils of having a large house- there's always somewhere to put things, until one day there isn't...
The main reason I don't write as much about books as I do music or games or TV is that I work in a bookshop and I get a lot of my books for free, most of them as proofs which, as a training course I had to do this week reminded me, cannot be reviewed anywhere. Well, not legally.
I could review the published titles I read, many of which I also get for nothing, but I always feel a moral obligation to give my employer first refusal. It's not compulsory but it is strongly suggested that we place reviews of books we've read on our website, something I have never done. I don't want to put my reviews on any commercial website, whether or not its owned by someone who pays my bills, so the compromise is not to write any reviews at all.
When I finally retire, I imagine I'll start reviewing books I've read here although chances are they'll be old ones. Once I stop getting my books for free, I plan to start an extensive re-reading program.
I used to consider re-reading to be considerably more important than reading. My mantra used to be that the third time was the charm. I had a rationale all worked out, too.
- Read One is for pleasure. You're enjoying the book so much you let it all wash over you. After you finish you're left with a strong emotional impression but it's most likely weak on detail.
- Read Two is for comparison. As you progress through the book, things come back to you and you inevitably frame your new experience in terms of your old. You end up knowing how well the book has stood up to your memory of it and whether it meets your expectations but once again you probably haven't paid all that much attention to the technicalities.
- Read Three is for appraisal. By now, you probably know what to expect and the immediacy of your reactions should be muted. This is when all those details you never noticed before start to make themselves known and when you begin to understand the finer points of the structure and the architectonics.
Any reads after that are either indulgence, obsession or you're an academic of some sort. God help you.
That was how I used to see it. I've loosened my views a little. There are many ways to approach a text. Still, the Three-Read Method seems pretty reliable to me.
With all that in mind, I'm happy to review Girl To City here for a couple or three reasons.
Firstly, I paid for it myself. Granted, I only paid half price because that's a perk of my job but the training course I just did made no mention of the discount we get implying any responsibility beyond not abusing it by selling the books on EBay.
I will not be selling Girl To City on EBay or anywhere else. I will be keeping it and one day re-reading it because it's very good. And then, no doubt, reading it a third time to discover what I really think about it. The older I get, the worse that plan begins to look.
Secondly, I have no intention of reviewing it properly. Mostly I just wanted to mention it so as to give it what little publicity I can, in the hope someone else might decide to get hold of a copy and read it, thereby giving themselves the pleasure and also putting a very small remittance into Amy's pocket.
Thirdly, in March the sequel, Girl To Country, will be published in the U.K. (It's out in the U.S. already, I believe.) I'll be getting a copy as soon as it's available and chances are I'll post about that one, too. If I was really patient, I suppose I'd wait until then and review the pair of them together but although I am quite patient I'm not a fucking stone.
Fourthly, though, and the real reason I wanted to post about it, was to embed this excellent promo video, which Amy made herself.
You won't really know if you haven't read the book but that's truly excellent visual summary of the whole thing, coupled with a lyric that also stands as an extremely concentrated record of the core of the story. Quite brilliantly conceived, in fact. Pretty much a work of art in its own right, that video.
The only reason I know abut Amy Rigby at all is because she's been Wreckless Eric's musical and romantic partner for a good, long while now. I'm going to apologize for that right now. It's a crappy way to come to anyone's work but it can't be helped. That is what happened.
I've always been something of a Wreckless fan, although I can't claim to have kept up with his career the way I have, say, Lloyd Cole or Lana. A few years back, probably around the time of the pandemic, I thought to check what Wreckless was up to and I ended up buying a couple of CDs and subscribing to his excellent, if too-infrequently updated blog. Since he now both records and performs alongside his partner, I was introduced osmotically to Amy Rigby, who also happens to be a first-rate blogger. (I find the fact that he's on Blogger while she's on WordPress oddly amusing. I wonder if it means anything?)
It was the quality of Amy's blogging that made me want to read her memoir. Having read it, I can say she's not just a great blogger, she's a top-flight memoirist.
Memoir is a dangerous genre. There's a lot of... I guess the current buzzword would be slop. It's not like we ever needed AI for that. Ghost writers have been pumping it out by the barrel-load for decades. Good memoirs, though, are thrilling. This is a very good memoir.
It's good because it's extremely well-written. Amy Rigby has a strong and immediately recognizable prose style, lyrical, personal, warm and occasionally self-deprecating. In common with other songwriters whose books I've read, her prose has a musicality that lifts it off the page. It's a sensual pleasure similar to listening to her sing.
It's also good because she's had a ridiculously rich and interesting life, even though she barely seems to realize just how rich and interesting it's been. Some memoirs drop names on every page. Amy doesn't drop names, she scatters them like someone kicking through autumn leaves, scarcely noticing as they fly up all around.
She lived in New York from the late '70s through to the '90s, arriving as an art student in her late teens, with a stint in London for good measure, leaving as a feted singer-songwriter with a rapturously-reviewed album. In-between, she met and hung out with just about everyone in the NY punk and no-wave scenes, sang, recorded and performed with everyone from Robert Quine to Warren Zevon and pretty much lived the fantasy life almost everyone I knew in the 'eighties would have killed to have had.
None of it made her any money. None of it made her famous enough that anyone reading this will ever have heard of her. (Prove me wrong in the comments, I dare you.) She was in several bands, none of whose names you will recognize. I was fairly cognizant of the scenes she was a part of, or thought I was, and I'd never even seen the names so much as mentioned in passing until I read her book.
Even her incredibly well-received and reviewed mid-nineties album, the magnificently-named Diary of a Mod Housewife, apparently famous enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry, rang absolutely no bells with me. I've listened to it online now and I can recommend it most highly. The song that backtracks the promo, Summer of My Wasted Youth, is from another album, the equally well-named Middlescence. I need to get CDs of all her albums...
Girl To Country is one of the least-glamorous music memoirs I've read, although that's a competitive field. In many cases, though, the lack of glamor is in itself glamorous, as in James Young's memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about the time he spent with touring with a heroin-addicted Nico or Nina Antonia's The One and Only about heroin addict Peter Perrett.
Unlike the subjects of those books, Amy Rigby isn't a tragic romantic with a fashionable habit. She's a girl from Pittsburgh who doesn't really know what she wants to do other than that she wants to do something. That something turns out to be music and she's good at it, which surprises her more than it surprises anyone.
But all the time she's making music she's also holding down an endless series of temp jobs. She's so good at it they make her Temp of the Month. Playing guitar is cool and all but it don't pay the bills.
Half a century on, she's still out there, trucking her guitar and amp around small clubs in backwater towns, playing her songs to the handful of people who care. It's the rock and roll reality not the rock and roll dream and yet somehow it's the dream all the same. At least she doesn't have to temp any more.
I could go on but better I stop and let you go read the book for yourself. Or if you don't feel up to that level of commitment, at least go read her blog.
I mean, we're all bloggers here, aren't we? You know it's the right thing to do.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment