-- Topica Digest --
RE: The Merton Parka Library
By [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 08:23:52 +0000
From: Jules <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: The Merton Parka Library
Sorry about butting into the discussion but "essential mod reading"?
Some sort of Readers Digest of "mod" literature? I guess prose and
poetry written by a mod would qualify in that sense but otherwise I
guess I would rely on any (?) mods taste and style to acquire the
literature that furthers and enhances said persons life and continous
evolution. Then one could always look to authors and artists who have
eitherinfluenced modernist aesthetics and/or philosophy. But that would
maybe be equating mod and modernism. "Daengaah, daengaah!", in the words
of Crocodile Hunter Steve...
Personally when wanting to read soothing prose I�m very fond of Boris
Vian, Albert Camus, Graham Greene and Yukio Mishima amongst others. The
connection to "mod" and even modernism could be (in Camus and even Vians
case) that existenstialism and the culture around it seems to have very
much influenced proto-mods however tired and clich�-ridden that may see.
I read Mishima becuse I�m a bastard. At the moment I�m reading Elias
Canettis "Crowd power" (if I remember correctly) and re-reading my Boris
Vian collection for an article in the making.
A list of suggested reading for the eager mind would be the books
you have already mentioned. If interested in how black culture came to
be (and my apologies to any Americans out there, I�m from Europe so bear
with my ignorance) the influence it is maybe some books about the
civilrights movement (which would tie in with Hebdige for instance), the
Black Panthers books from Ramparts for a sort of inside view and also
Franz Fanon. Last year I received a book as a gift "the Land where The
Blues Began", by Alan Lomax which I would recommend to almost anyone
with or without an interest in black music.
I would also recommend the literature section on www.uppers.net where
our literature editor has collected prose and poetry by mods and
likeminded... Quite unique I should think, but don�t take my word for
it, check it out yourself.
There is also a nice discussion going on in the uppers.net debate pages
about philosophy, art and literature.
May your shadow never grow bulkier
/jules olivier
www.uppers.net
ps. please bear with any grammatical errors and maybe chalk them up to
me not being an anglosaxon. Though I do enjoy the "piss 'n' vinegar" as
someone put it...
Arriva Dorellik wrote:
> But I'm genuinely curious, what might you all consider
> to be essential Mod reading? It's easy enough to list
> the texts on the subject (Cohn, Hebdige, Barnes,
> Rawlings, Hewitt, et al.), there are perhaps some
> obvious titles that went into the making of the
> subject (MacInnes, Pearce, et al.), but ... well, what
> else? Let me know ...
>
> And ditto for movies. Rawlings, for example, mentions
> Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960),
> which surprised me because I hadn't seen it come up
> before in that context, but it makes perfect sense.
> Here's a helpful hyperlink ...
>
> http://freespace.virgin.net/david.walker15/visual.html
>
> Morgan!, by the way, is back out now, if only on DVD.
> Think The Knack ... and How to Get It, except
> substitute International Communism for The Knack and a
> gorilla suit for Rita Tushingham. Brilliant!
>
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End of [EMAIL PROTECTED] digest, issue 836
