portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Aquarium Drunkard Book Club Chapter Three feat. Brian Eno

 

Aquarium Drunkard also posted his third part of the book club featuring titles new and not so by Baba Ram Dass ( personal hero either of Be Here Now) Orson Welles, Paul Theroux, Oliver Stone and Bill Graham but also featuring a title from my Christmas list a signed copy of Brian Eno's 25th Anniversary Edition of 'A Year With Swollen Appendices' revised and with new entries about which he says

Welcome back to the stacks. It’s Aquarium Drunkard’s Book Club, our monthly gathering of recent (or not so recent) recommended reading. Your librarians this month are Justin Gage, Tyler Wilcox, Kyle Fortinsky, and Jason P. Woodbury.

Aquarium Drunkard - Book Club - Chapter Three 


A Year With Swollen Appendices (25th Anniversary Edition), Brian Eno:Heading into 1995, Brian Eno decided to keep a diary. His year of missives and notes—sometimes short, sometimes expansive—form the core of A Year With Swollen Appendices, where they are supplemented by the titular appendices, in which Eno expounds on his creative theories and practices, correspondences with Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, and, for this newly released 25th anniversary edition, a 2020 introduction by the author in which he ponders evolutions in language and the breakdown of consensus reality. Given its unorthodox fashioning, A Year With Swollen Appendices doesn’t make for a straightforward read. But Eno’s jokes, rambles, gripes, complex internal arguments, visits with friends, and descriptions of meals, conversations, travel, and pornography consumption build up to a sum much greater than their parts. Crucially, it offers intimate glimpses of studio work with David Bowie (working on 1995’s Outside), U2 (working on the Passengers album), James, and Jah Wobble, in which we get a sense of what makes Eno a “drifting clarifier,” to borrow Brand’s description. “Generally, my feeling is towards less: less eating, less drinking, less wasting, less playing by the rules and recipes. All of that that I want in favor of more thinking on the feet, more improvising, more surprises, more laughs,” Eno writes on January 10. It’s a good summation of what the book provides: in its abundance of autobiographical detail, it nonetheless provides a big picture view, light on its feet and open to seemingly endless possibilities and ways to uncover them.


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