July 4, 2009
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bios and bios and bios of books
We seem to spend so much time moving our shit from one side of the room to the other. However, we finally invested in some floor-to-ceiling shelves so now ALL our shit can live in one place. I’m the worst time and space manager in the world and this has been totally intensified since having Violet. At least having these shelves means I don’t have my books mixed up with library books in stacks all over the house.
I have quite a few (auto)biographies. I’m quite addicted to them. I spent all morning putting them in size order. I’ve definitely been off work too long! These are they from largest to smallest
(look, I did my first smiley!):Anita Berber
Henry Miller
Spike Milligan
Janet Frame
Courtney Love
John Peel
Colette
Anais Nin
Simone de Beauvoir
Elsbeth Bathory
Joan of Arc
Marlene Dietrich
Orson Welles
Edith Piaf
Tamara de Lempicka
Philip K Dick
Nancy Spungen
Marianne Faithful
Frances FarmerYum. I want to read them alllllll again please.
Comments (9)
i love biographies. i don’t read nearly enough of them.
i, too, am a poor manager of time and space.
I didn’t know Philip K. Dick had written an autobiography.
The auto-biographies I’ve read have been Surrealist auto-biographies. Which are hardly reliable.
I don’t think I’ve ever read an autobiography, to be honest. Right now, I can’t read shit… me thinks me needs glasses. The bane of getting old. Older.
I read Poppy Z. Brite’s biography of Courtney Love just recently – is that the one you have? I’ve got Frances Farmer’s book as well…
@InvisibleAng - Yeah that’s the one. Have you read the Frances book yet?
@heidenkind - It’s actually a biography of PKD written by Lawrence Sutin. I think Valis would be the closest to autobiographical material by him.
Yeah, a couple of years ago. I found it very affecting, though later I read that a lot had been exaggerated, and that bugged me because I’m one of those annoying ‘but what really happened?’ people. I think, though, that the salient thing is the fact that someone could be committed to an institution on the say-so of people like parents they don’t get on with, who are hardly professional or disinterested parties. Maybe the exaggeration was felt to be necessary in order to get the public’s attention on the overall wrongness of mental health ‘care’ in the US at the time…
I like bios, but I haven’t read any in awhile.
You might like “Martin Eden”, Jack London’s fictional autobiography.