Feed Your Head

You know you want it!

Here is new book list and sadly it lacks fiction but full of interesting reads nonetheless.



As I Walked Out One Evening – W.H. Auden
Since I finished Leaves of Grass I figured I would continue to expand my poetry knowledge I moved on to this one since I really like the poem Funeral Blues read by John Hannah’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral. I am not that good at reviewing poetry but I will say that this isn’t heavy stuff. Light, shorter poems that are quite lovely and enjoyable. If you aren’t that into poetry but feel that you should be familiar with a famous poet, this is the book for you. Another poet who is funny, clever, in an almost childlike way is Stevie Smith.

Love, Loss, and What I Wore - Ilene Beckerman
At first glance this would appear to be a novelty book but despite the simplicity of the writing and amateur illustrations by the author, it has quite a lot of depth. Beckerman recalls clothing that conjures up memories of significant times of her life. She speaks of her girl scout uniform, her prom dress (she remembers this vividly but can’t remember the boy she went with), the dress she wore when she told her husband she didn’t want to be married to him anymore, and when she lost a child in infancy. She grew up in Manhattan during the 40’s and 50’s and recounts her life through wardrobe up to the 90’s. I think I could write a book like this which makes it so special. Maybe I will.

Edie, An American Biography - Jean Stein and George Plimpton
I read this book this winter (I am pulling this one out since I haven’t been reading all too much lately) and after I finished I felt like I knew her. Before I was convinced she was this debutant socialite fashonista who wandered into the 60’s New York scene to do drugs and party. I was very wrong. Her family was fucked up. Edie was fucked up. Although her family was very wealthy two of her brothers committed suicide before they were thirty and Edie was an amphetamine addicted bulimic who was in and out of mental intuitions most of her life and sexually abused by her father. It was interesting for me to learn that relationship with Andy Warhol was only about a year and a half and she only dated Bob Dylan for a few weeks although it is believed by many that Just Like a Woman was written about her; the girl who set fire to the Chelsea Hotel when trying to cook a baked potato. This book is entirely compiled by interviews of people that knew Edie Sedgwick and her family including Patti Smith, Betsey Johnson, Lou Reed, and many more.

The night of her all too early death from an overdose of barbiturates she was at a party in Santa Barbara when a palm reader told her that her life line was very short, she replied “I know”.

How Sassy Changed My Life- Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer
Leslie lent this book to me the night we went to see Dar Williams a few weeks ago. Sassy changed her life, and although I read it off and on I wished I read it with the regularity that I did Teen and YM.

Santa Evita - Tomas Eloy Martinez
A book about a corpse?! So good but I will let Amazon do the talking on this one:

Among the great corpses of our age are Lenin, Mao Zedong and Stalin. Mao, at least, is still on view for the masses to see, some two decades after his demise. But no corpse engendered as much intrigue as that of Eva Peron. Elevated to near sainthood in Argentina after her death in 1952, her perfectly preserved corpse was seized by the Argentine Army following the ouster of her husband in 1955. By then, her corpse was the equivalent of a sacred relic, and while army officials wanted to keep it out of the hands of Peronists, they were loath to destroy the corpse for fear of the wrath that might follow. Tomas Eloy Martinez has reassembled the story of the corpse of Eve Peron in Santa Evita, and in the process, produced a riveting, rich book that not only tells the tale of one of the more bizarre sagas in the history of South American politics, but that also gets to the heart of the age-old human impulse to create myths and tell stories.