Books Read 2011

77. Composed On The Tongue- Allen Ginsberg

I had no idea that Ezra Pound renounced his war time antisemitism until reading his interview with Ginsberg collected in this book, calling his earlier views “stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice...," and then his writing in general “stupidity and ignorance all the way through...” I think I may have mentioned this before, I once brought The Cantos to Greece with me as my only book, I read around 300 pages before giving up and buying a couple very XXX dime-store (beach kiosk)  erotica novels. I was enjoying The Cantos, just not as beach reading. I also read this Suspect Thoughts book that Brandon Brown brought called Nike, it took place in Athens, I remember someone getting set on fire at the end. I used to have this friend who would tell anyone who would listen that he'd read The Cantos at least 3 times all the way through, this was super embarrassing, it just wasn't true, and anyone could tell he was lying.The part where Allen Ginsberg sings Bob Dylan songs to a mute and possibly annoyed Ezra Pound had me cringing.

78. Luna #6

Getting through this was excruciating. I was reading it in my car and it was slow-death everyday, ruining my lunch break. I had to relegate it to the bathroom so I would be foreced to read it everyday on the toilet, I ended up finishing it 2 weeks later. 

79. Golden Gate Interviews With 5 San Francisco Poets- ed. David Meltzer

The Kenneth Rexroth interview is some epic shit, man. "Interview" is a misnomer though, Meltzer barely gets a word in, more accurately, it's a 50 page (at least) monologue hurled at David Meltzer. It's phenomenal, hilarious, sort of manic, masculine and incredibly smart. The Lew Welch interview was pretty great too, talk about manic...I read somewhere that the Welch interview took hour and hours, that they recorded deep into the night, that they were sitting in utter dark by the time the interview concluded, the parts about his mother were pretty disturbing and sad. 

80. UFOs Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record- Leslie Kean

UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) exist. There is no doubt (as this book painstakingly details), they are well documented by governments all over the world. France's COMETA Report, Britain's MoD investigations and recent release of Top Secret files to the National Archive, Brazil, Chile, Russia and on and on. Sadly, the USA is still covering up (for myriad hypothetical reasons as Kean lays out). UFO/ UAP doesn't mean alien, this is not a book about abductions, or space travel, or interdementional travel or whatever. This is a book about governmental and military persons going on the record about the fact that unidentified aerial phenomena (mostly in the form of physics defying disc shaped craft) exist and are well documented through photo, radar reports, military report testimony, video and audio recording. I was glad to see this book kind of blow up when it was released, Kean didn't approach her subject as a UFOologist bur rather the investigative reporter she was trained as. With this book Kean brought a ton of much needed credibility to the often mocked (but less so lately) subject.

81. Big Bell #4

I was hanging out with Stian and Dutchface and Ryan and his girlfriend who doesn't like me very much last Saturday. We got brunch, we went to The Gold Cane. I walked in and yelled "MORRIS!", and Jason Morris yelled back "SAKKIS!"...You see, Jason Morris, the editor of Big Bell magazine bartends at The Gold Cane (the only bar worth visiting in the Upper Haight), if you're ever in SF during baseball season and you feel like catching a game and a beer and chatting with some poets while you do it, The Gold Cane is yer spot. "Let's go GIANTS...oh man I re-read The Hotel Wentley Poems last night...", or "FUCK YEAH POSEY!...what's that line, 'The moon is God's big yellow eye remembering,' yo Morris can I get another Rolling Rock, um, oh shit, I love this song!, haha, whoa, Suicide Squeeze, don't see that much...when's the new Spicer book coming out, yeah, the 2nd one from Wesleyan, CHEERS!, don't know, haven't talked to KK about it for a while...scored a run!..."