CLBella wrote:
thanks sau sounds tempting enough
i've been reading patti smiths 'just kids', robert bolano's Savage detectives- of which i've only read the first section but has made me laugh- not so great with a twisted rib- and Town Smokes by Pinckney Benedict which are intense short stories set in the american south...
The first time I read your comment I had just started reading...'Just Kids'! Good photographs in there. Having visited New York and loving it I enjoyed reading about the areas I went to and she lived in and knew...knows. Tompkins Park area, the Bowery and CBGBs, East Village, Avenue C, B, A, or wherever it was!
Currently reading 'Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England' - how's that for a title? - by David Cressy. Certainly helps readers appreciate free speech in England today. For saying something the 'powers that be' didn't like you could get your ears cut off, or put in a pillory and have an ear nailed to it. For treasonous talk you could get hung, drawn, quartered, and/or burnt.
I have got a lot of reading 'done' since the start of the year. 'Satan's Circus' by Mike Dash - about a New York cop who is the only US police officer to die in the electric chair. In the late 1800s to early 1900s New York businesses had to pay protection money...not to the Mafia but the police! Highly recommended. Not bad for a writer from England. There are even extracts on Mike Dash's own very good site...
http://www.mikedash.com/Plus Nick Kent's 'Apathy for the Devil'; 'Cultural Cleansing in Iraq'; 'This Time We Went Too Far', about the invasion of Gaza in 2008/09; those last two for light relief! :-(; 'It's Only a Movie' by Mark Kermode.