All contents are Copyright © Ric Carter
Uncle Ric's Irresponsible Reading List:
I've been an inveterate reader forever. But, over the past too many years, I was too busy work-reading to sit and enjoy a book. I am fixing that thanks partially to my January 1 2017 irresponsibility (retirement). Since it was a new year, and I was in Baltimore first-visiting my first grandchild (Norah), I chose a Baltimore tome. Just finished. So--
#1 Role Models by John Waters
(autographed and acquired at "A John Waters Christmas" in 2014)
It's an ode to those Waters finds admirable and influential to his life.
#2 Winter Goldfinch by my friend Jayne Davis Wall
(autographed)
It's a Southern novel. Jayne is also a wonderful painter
#3 A Pleasant Gale on My Lee by my friend John Morgan
(autographed)
It's childhood reminiscence of his life on the Pamlico Sound and Outer Banks
#4 Cautionary Fables & Fairy Tales, African Edition by several artist/authors
(autographed by my old friend Ma'at Crook)
It's an anthology of graphic short stories.
#5 Robert Capa -- Images of War
A recent gift from a friend with a curious stamp on title page: "Property of the Army Attache Paris, France"
#6 Kinky Friedman -- Armadilloes and Old Lace
Kinky is one of the genius, Renaissance men of our day.
#7 Russian Summer by Norman Spinrad
It was science fiction that made reading a joy for me. Spinrad is an old favorite.
#8 Tom Robbins -- Skinny Legs and All
My favorite writer on metaphysics and religion, a man of great joy!
#9 Paul Duncan — Stanley Kubrick, The Complete Films
A nice collection of anecdotes and analysis of one of the greatest filmmakers. Includes lots of behind the scenes photos from the films.
#10 Wassily Kandinsky & Franz Marc — The Blaue Reiter Almanac
A classic of modern art from 1912. Kandinsky and Marc invited thoughtful pieces on the emergence of modern artists and its ties to ancient and primitive art.
#11 Leslie Charteris — The Saint in Miami
Kitty picked it up at her Gran’s house a couple of weeks ago. The first of The Saint books I’ve read. Don’t know why, similar to James Bond novels that got me through high school, not to mention the ‘60s TV show I was very fond of. Fun, adventure “vacation” reading.
Published in 1940, it was no surprise to find The Saint fighting a Nazi fifth column operation in the USA. Clearly a piece aimed at pushing the US to join the European Allies in the new war.
#12 Paul Hadley Davis — Parallel Allegory
The Story of a Journey Across the Pristine Continent of a Lost Planet
An autographed copy of a novel by a friend. Paul is a musician and (recently) retired university chemistry lecturer. May be considered scifi, but perhaps better perceived as a self exploration of our journey through life and its lonely truth.
#13 Mitch Albom — Tuesdays with Morrie
Thank you, Doug Sliker, for making me get of my ass and finally read this sweet, lovely book. I always respected Albom for his sports work in Detroit and his presence on ESPN’s late great Sports Reporters. Learning to die teaches you to live.
#14 Randy Poe — Skydog - The Duane Allman Story
One of the greatest guitar players of all time. It’s a story of being driven.
#15 Sam Stephenson — Gene Smith’s Sink - A Wide-Angle View
I have known and respected the author since he was in high school here when I worked at The Washington Daily News. This book is a bit of a surprise to me in that it is NOT (to me) a standard biography. Having not kept myself properly educated, I’m not quite sure if I understand exactly the approach on Sam’s observations on one of photography’s flawed giants.
As best I can figure, “A Wide-Angle View” of the title refers to observing the people who orbited and intersected the life of the great documentary humanitarian rather than just telling stories of what the subject did. Sometimes they tell you directly about Gene, other times it is someone else’s story which shines a light in a corner of Gene’s world. I find it a satisfying addition, especially if you know a bit about Smith in the first place. Photographers and cinematographers may call it an “establishing shot.” Sam shares many rich tales from Smith’s universe.
Gene Smith’s Sink strikes me as very filmic. It is rather like the documentaries one can see these days in which the film-maker includes himself and his education as an integral part of the production. It’s a great tool for giving the reader a direct experience of discovery. Very satisfying.
#16 Just Down the Road… in Our Own Words
Many oral histories of communities in Gates County, my home. It was collected by the Gates County Historical Society in 2009. Some fun stories, but with more begatting than Genesis.
#17 Kinky Friedman — The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover
With Kinky, just as Lone Star Beer, too much is not enough.
#18 Hugo Ball — A Flight Out of Time
Ball was a founder of Dada. I had higher hopes for this diary. Finding out that in his later years he edited it to suit his then current bent of finding his way back into the Church rather put me off. Was looking for more on the Dada movement.
#19 Lonnie A Squires — Tall Tales and Short Stories
Inscribed to “Louise. “
Lonnie was one of Little Washington’s creative characters. This is a 1985 collection of stories on Lonnie’s memories and local characters. Lonnieism: “Now chasing ladies is always a ticklish business unless you happen to find one that is not ticklish.”
#20 Allen Ginsberg — Reality Sandwiches
My relationship wit poetry is labored. I love it when I know the poet and can hear the voice—it becomes music. I got this City Lights edition in the ‘60s.
#21 Armstrong, Collins & Aldrin — First on the Moon
Written by Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin
I have always been a huge fan of our space program, so finally getting around to reading First on the Moon (which has been on my shelf for years since picking it up at some fleamarket of junk store) was a real treat. Just enough science, just enough personality—obviously a rah-rah publication for the program.
#22 Thad Stem Jr. & Alan Butler — Senator Sam Ervin’s Best Stories
More conversation than stories. I may have enjoyed it much more if I had a pre-existing appreciation of Mr. Stem. But as it was, I would have preferred more Sam and less Stem.
#23 Mark Twain — Letters from the Earth, Uncensored Writings
One of my two favorite writers pokes a bit at the Biblical perspective.
#24 Juanita Miser Lyerly — Cobalt Blues & Hard Times
An unpublished diary of dying including poems and remembrances of her childhood. Touchingly personal.
#25 Stephen Hawking — The Universe in a Nutshell
New physics is not a simple thing, nor does give one damn about common sense. I’ve seldom reread as many paragraphs as I have in this book. I still don’t understand, but I did pick up a fresh inkling here and there.
#26 Howard R. Garis — Uncle Wiggily Longears (1914-15)
inscribed: “George Hubert Cox Jr, from Mother 1929”
Full of wonderfully hyperbolic prose, it contains 52 short stories of the adventures of an old “rabbit gentleman” with rheumatism. (That’s a fresh tale each week for a year.) I don’t particularly remember the stories from childhood, but I DO remember it as one of my first board games.
#27 Ernest Hemingway — The Old Man and the Sea
(1952 a very early Book Club edition)
A wonderful story that would have been even more so if Spencer Tracey did not pop into my mind’s eye periodically. It was much more positive than I remembered, but maybe I’m just an old man who’s seen the sea.
#28 Peter Makuck — Costly Habits (2002)
A collection of short stories (one of my favorite forms) by an old friend and distinguished professor emeritus of English at East Carolina University. His stories, to me, are tales of us grudginly accepting our own mundane foibles. I see myself in too many of them. Best of all, this collection made me reestablish contact with Peter.
#29 Henri Cartier-Bresson — Scrap Book (2007)
As much as anyone, Cartier-Bresson defined street photography as we know it today — you’ve probably heard of “the decisive moment.” This book contains several essays and HCB’s 1932-1946 scrapbook that he used to promote his career as a recognized artist.
Although I find the essays a bit “art babble,” the photography selection and reproduction is outstanding. I enjoyed HCB’s lack of respect for a couple of current “rules” of street photography: not making eye-contact with the subject and photographing the subject from the back. I also appreciated his indecision in choosing the best of similar shots. I’ve always found “The Decisive Moment” rather vague and maybe even misleading. I was happy to be reminded the name of his first major book (1952) bore the name Images à la Sauvette (Images On the Run), it was changed to The Decisive Moment when published in the USA.
#30 Barry Miles — Zappa - A Biography (2004)
Frank Zappa has been my most important musician since I first heard his music in 1967 or so. This biography walks the tightrope of his genius and his hubris. The book is sobering and requires relistening to a few albums to restore the idol.
#31 John G. Bragaw — Random Shots (1945)
John Bragaw was a Little Washington businessman and a columnist for The Washington Progress and The State Magazine. I found two copies of it recently going through boxes of old things in a warehouse. I returned one to its owner and read the other. The volume is a collection of a now dead style of patter column that relates anecdotes and jokes and personal perspective. I never knew Mr Bragaw, but I remember his company and really liked his daughter Lalla.
The droll writing is mostly enjoyable, but I was struck by the degree that racial “humor” was still acceptable in the mid-’40s by “polite company.” Maybe I should brace myself for the next few years.
#32 F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby (1925)
As an experiment, I reread The Great Gatsby for the first time since I was in school. I was right, being made to read it in class was a disservice to the book (and probably many others). That is, of course, a rebellious defect in my character, not the educational system. I find it much easier to find meaning in things when I’m not reading it to find its meaning.
A timely quote: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...”
#33 Hans Richter — DADA, Art and Anti-Art (1965)
This is the book I was hoping for when I was disappointed by Hugo Ball’s diaries (Uncle Ric’s #18). Richter tells us what everyone in the Dada movement was doing across years and the globe, not just his late-life noodlings. Dada is the art movement which best speaks to me and long has. 100 years after its first breaths, these similarly insane times times call for its resurrection.
From Werner Haftmann’s postscript: “One thing [the Dadaist and Richter] regarded with uncompromising seriousness: the autonomy of the self. Every spontaneous impulse, every message from within, was therefore greeted as an expression of pure reality. Every possible artistic technique suited his purpose of provoking these impulses. Absolute spontaneity, chance regarded as the intervention of mysterious and wonderful forces, pure automatism as a revelation of that store of hidden reality within the individual over which consciousness has no control — these were the techniques which opened the way to a more comprehensive view of the relationship between Self and the world. The artist was free to turn either toward visible, logically explicable objects or ideas, or completely away from them; but he was free above all to come face to face with himself.”
#34 David Foster Wallace — Infinite Jest (1996)
I must be a low-brow. I had heard the praises and McArthur Genius embrace of David Foster Wallace, so I bit of the big candy bar of Infinite Jest. I read it all (okay, I skipped some of the footnotes) over several weeks, two library renewals, a hurricane, and the removal of my gall bladder. I found some parts breezy and easy and other parts laborious and plodding. He is very effective writing the mind-view thought trains of obsessive/depressive personalities. What it ended up seeming to me was a large scale experiment with several writing styles—an uncompleted, abandoned exercise.
Don’t misunderstand, I actually have a quite accepting attitude about form (style) over function (content). I love those cars with HUGE wheels. I enjoy Cam Newton’s outrageous post-game fashions. I love outrageously ugly cameras and cars. There are some interesting writing styles in the book, though I find them inconsistently so. And, most disappointingly, all the style was for naught. I felt tossed about among personalities and communities – treading water and never going anywhere.
One other striking impression — the hopeless unhappiness of many of the situations and characters. Was this an autobiographical cry of horror from Wallace? Is Infinite Jest just a 1000-page suicide note?
#35 Thomas Jefferson — The Jefferson Bible
Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment and a Deist, believed that Christ’s teachings had been obscured by the organized church. Many have shared that belief. In his later years, and after discussing the project with several friends (especially Joseph Priestly), Jefferson finally did the job himself.
He sat down with copies of the New Testament (in English, French, Greek, and Latin) and cut from it the words of Jesus and the parts he considered factual. He pasted them in a book and had them bound. The supernatural contents of the Gospels were deleted. The Beacon Press edition I have includes some remarks on its place in history and only the English entires.
#36 F. Roy Johnson — Tales from Old Carolina
Traditional and Historical Sketches of the Area Between and About the Chowan River and Great Dismal Swamp
This is an oldie from 1965, which I think Mom gave it to me one Christmas. It’s full of tall tales and history from my home, Gates County, NC. Gates County has long been a no-man’s land crammed in between the Virginia state line, the Chowan River’s swamps, and the Great Dismal Swamp. It has long been a place people disappeared to—Civil War deserters from both sides, runaway slaves, loners, and criminals. A place where people had to be tougher because living was off the grid and and law and order were sketchy at best.
The book is a pleasurable mash-up of BS and historical truth. I learned some things, laughed a bunch, and even saw a few names I knew. There are still more than the normal number of characters connected to Gates County, and it’s still largely off the grid. Hell, today, there is only one stop light in the county.
#37 Roland Penrose — Man Ray
An artistic biography of Dadaist/Surrealist Man Ray by his friend and fellow Surrealist Roland Penrose. A nice overview of Ray’s career with lots of his works included. Man Ray was extremely versatile (photography, painting, drafting, sculpture, ironic readymades) and is an old favorite of mine and a close friend of my very favorite artist — Marcel Duchamp.
“A playful slip of the tongue can arouse doubts about the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion, and the objects of Man Ray are the products of a game in which he delights to tease out all-too-rigid belief in reality.”
#38 Stephen Kirk — First in Flight - The Wright Brothers in North Carolina
This 1995 book focuses on the time the Wright Brothers spent on the Outer Banks doing their research leading to manned, powered flight. It’s a lovely portrait of the feel and look of the Banks in the days before bridges and strip malls. It’s a story filled with local names that are familiar to this day. It’s a story of personal relationships and local lifestyles. My next trip to Nags Head will include a visit to the Wright Memorial with a much better appreciation for what I am seeing.
#39 Mike Schafer & Joe Welsh — Streamliners, The History of a Railroad Icon
From the 1930s through the 1960s rail passengers were treated to stylish streamlined trains, some with staggeringly beautiful art deco lines. It was the day of fine dining two level lounge cars, of sleeper suite cars, of Vista-Domed sightseeing cars built to appreciate America’s natural beauty.
#40 Angus Konstam — Duel of the Ironclads (USS Monitor & CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads 1862)
This book focuses more on the production and politics of the budding ironclad vessels than it does on the battle itself. What I really love the book for is its many illustrations, both modern renditions of the fleet’s individual craft and photos and illustrations from the time.
#41 Anthony Boucher (editor) — The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (8th Series)
This discard from the NCMH Patient Library was published in 1959, about the time I started reading science fiction. No wonder I got hooked. This collection includes Poul Anderson, Isaac Assimov, Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, CM Kornbluth, and others. Science fiction short stories are known for their humor, surprise and disrespect for reality.
#42 Douglas LeTell Rights — The American Indian in North Carolina
This 1947 book gives a good overview of the movement of the Tar Heel State’s indigenous population. There’s a little of everything here about their games, arts, habits, and fate.