bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Friday, May 20, 2005 ::

What I've been up to, part 1
Thanks, all you virtual friends, Romans, countrymen (lend me your URLs!), for slaying the fatted calf in my honor upon my return from dining with the swineherds. Thought I'd tell you folks a bit about what's been happening the past -- what's it been, six months?

I've been working, reading, living, listening to music, and trying to work on that book about the spiritual aspects of punk rock. It's been nearly two years in the making now, but I'm still at three-and-a-half chapters (that's the intro, chapter 1, chapter 2 and a good start on chapter 3). I work on it in fits and starts. I get my hands on some great source material, think that I need to jam some more of what I learn into the book (the introduction's about 7,000 pages or so now; every argument in support of my thesis must be crammed into the intro, I keep thinking), and then find more great source material. For such a short-lived movement, there sure has been a lot of stuff written about punk. A lot of it is the same stuff, hashed out over and over again. (I'm talking about the "survey" materials, not the in-depth books about the Clash, the Ramones or Tesco's fave, Darby Crash.) But some of the materials shed new light on the movement.

This week, I finished reading (and rereading parts of)Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer and the novel Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing (three stars [out of five] for both; mini-reviews on the sidebar). While the Strummer book -- a collection of essays -- gave me a lot of good material about the Clash and some nice quotes from Strummer to shoehorn into the manuscript, the book is an uncritical look at Strummer. He is idolized as the Patron Saint of Punk. I probably won't get much for the book from my reading of Tales... but it was an interesting novel of letters, zines and stuff, all strung together in a nice little DIY-looking package.

Also this week, I picked up a couple of more academic books about punk from the library: Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style, by Tricia Henry (a 1989 book that examines punk's roots, focusing on the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls and Sex Pistols), and Punk Rock: So What?, a collection of essays edited by Roger Sabin. I haven't cracked the spine on that one yet.

I've been reading some other stuff, too (see sidebar).

Coming in part 2, what I've been listening to.

:: Andrew 07:22 + ::
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