if i compiled a personal 'canon'
the primary criterion would be
how often, day to day
i'm reminded of an artist's work
(so i'm including
influential performers
along with authors)
pre-1960
Peanuts
by my 'canon' standard (above)
Schulz is certainly in the top 20
for his portrait of childhood in the early strips
is surely unequalled
(pogo left little impact)
New Yorker cartoons
Chas Addams and Saul Steinberg especially
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
early 1960s
Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Pig-Detective
i read all these
and tried to write my first fan letter in verse:
i like freddy/ i think he's steady
i like jinx/ i think he... stinks?
Phantom Tollbooth
Andy Griffith
stamp collecting
Beatles/ Richard Lester/ John Lennon
In His Own Write, Help, and Hard Day's Night especially [Lester fan]
Hardy Boys
Heathkit
their manuals and catalogs
along with Edmund Scientific
were an enduring influence
world almanacs
devoured them
coin collecting
Martin Gardner's mathematical recreations
a very positive influence
monthly in Scientific American
and collected in books
James Bond
Ian Fleming's sexual kinks
in smuggled paperbacks
baseball stats
i spent the summer of '65
graphing baseball stats
Mad magazine
rather too lowbrow
Minivac 601
a programmable 6-relay computer
designed by Claude Shannon
later 1960s
Lewis Carroll
via Martin Gardner
Yes I Can by Sammy Davis Jr
one of the first grownup books
i remember reading
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
easy to interpret
an older girl's dream:
her friends were sliding down a log
into a pond
but she was scared of splinters
Tolkien
Roget
a lifelong fascination
Asimov's Intelligent Man's Guide to Science
Ray Bradbury
rare literary scifi
Wff'n'Proof
a logic game i played alone
aided by a programmed textbook on logic
Estes model rockets
not very successfully
Super-8 moviemaking
Ulysses, Ellmann
my sister introduced me to a constrant stream
of hip lit borrowed from the public library
Catch 22
surprisingly enduring
Tin Drum
Barbarella (movie)
Autobiography of a Yogi
via the Sgt Pepper's cover
Donald E Westlake
comic crime novels, soon outgrown
Sondheim crosswords, Springbok jigsaws
the composer, in the late 60s
created elegant weekly crosswords
in the british style
for New York magazine
Vonnegut, Brautigan, Castaneda
60s inevitables
Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, Music Scene w/David Steinberg (tv)
Dick Cavett (tv)
Christopher Cerf's "World's Largest Cheese"
brainy silliness i adored [Az]
"One Million" by Hendrik Hertzberg
bold visualisation experiment
200 pages each with 5000 dots [Az]
Finnegans Wake, Norman O Brown
Firesign Theatre
meets the 'canon' criterion
Luscher Color Test
inexplicably fascinating
slow to outgrow
astrology
started c1967 when my sister
ordered a computerised horoscope
finally outgrew in 1974
at best provided random noise
i could project personality theories onto
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
[Az]
early 1970s
Incredible String Band
their lyrics easily make my canon [fan]
Wallace Stevens
Rider-Waite tarot
Psychology Today magazine
challenged me to my life's work
Arthur Koestler
Act of Creation, Ghost in the Machine
provocative multidisciplinary thinking
Samuelson's Economics
computer simulation
Jay Forrester, Bucky Fuller's World Game, Antioch College seminar
Janov, Perls, Ouspensky, Gaskin, Wilhelm Reich
fringe psych/ occultism
a course at antioch
called 'science and experience: east and west'
introduced me to various fringe schools
American Heritage Dictionary
with proto-indo-european roots!
Joyce Carol Oates
soon outgrown
Updike
gradually outgrown
Durant's "Story of Philosophy"
Robert Altman (movies)
probably canonical
Krishnamurti
the ultimate koan
there is no path [fan]
Whole Earth Catalog (WEC)
portal to much good obscure reading
Bucky Fuller
especially "Intuition"
(anticipating my theory of whitespace)
Pinter's "Homecoming"
American Film Theater series
Skinner's "Walden Two"
John McPhee's early nonfiction
G Spencer Brown (GSB)
Laws of Form
and Only Two Can Play This Game
via WEC [fan]
Pynchon
with Joyce, the topmost in my canon
Nabokov
slowly partly outgrown [fan]
Robert Stone
[fan]
William Blake
especially his marginal annotations [fan]
in Erdman's edition [Az]
probably via GSB
AN Whitehead
outgrown stylish obscurantism (Process and Reality)
JL Austin
philosophy done right
Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge"
also Stephen Toulmin
later 1970s
Scott Joplin's Bethena
a ragtime novel
Joseph McElroy
[fan]
Iris Murdoch
[fan]
Renata Adler
her first is neglected genius [Az]
Robert Pirsig
Tom Wolfe's Painted Word (etc)
[Az]
Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy
Vance Bourjaily
readable but unfashionable
Mary McCarthy
Peter Dickinson
wonderful mysteries and kids' books [fan]
le Carre
[fan]
Walker Percy
especially Love in the Ruins
Joni Mitchell
definitely canon [fan]
Wright Morris
James Purdy
Thomas McGuane
Joyce Maynard
Barbara Pym
Stephen Gaskin's books and sermons
Blanche McCrary Boyd
[Az] [fan]
Selfish Gene; Sociobiology
worldchanging
Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness
faded if not outgrown
Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express
firsthand drug psychosis [Az]
Velikovsky
not the astrophysics
but the chronologies (now outgrown)
Kleist's "On The Marionette Theatre"
[etext]
early 1980s
White Goddess, Robert Graves
Mary Beth Edelson (art)
goddess-installation in Buffalo 1980
Operators and Things
canonical
via WEC i think [Az]
Man's Place in Nature by CF Hockett
[Az]
Robert Anton Wilson, Colin Wilson
unrelated literary twins
William Wharton
[fan]
Elmore Leonard
topnotch crime escapism
Steve Wozniak, Bill Budge (code)
i learned my bad programming habits
from Woz's brilliant
Apple ][ machine language monitor
my good habits from Budge's tutorials in ?Softcell
Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
useful but outgrown
Feynman's QED
SCTV, Monty Python (belatedly)
especially catherine o'hara
WXRT w/Bobby Skafish
Steppenwolf's Say Goodnight, Gracie (tv)
[IMDb] good luck finding it
[part two]
.
