It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track by Ian Penman
It took me by surprise this book.
Nobody writes about music like Ian Penman. I had read his sensational essay, "Swoonatra", on Frank Sinatra on LRB, a couple of years ago. This, and seven more essays are included in this rich, intelligent book published by the beautiful Fizcarraldo Editions. I spent the last two days reading this amazing book on Prince, John Fahey, James Brown, Charlie Parker and Elvis while listening to their music.
It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, is not only about the lives of these damaged musical innovators and fascinating outliers. Penman also writes about their times, the brutality, the murderous conformities and the racial atrocities in mid-century United States.
In the introduction, Ian Penman writes:
I might say that my own life has been one lived without a hometown, or even a definite accent or nationality, and that such an unstable background doubtless shaped my own feelings about ideas of home. I might also say that the current ideal I have for mu own work is a kind of writing that is entirely accessible to whomsoever might happen by: but one that also repays repeated readings, if these occur. In other words: anyone can dip in and out of the text ... but at the same time, there may be a web of half-hidden clues, suggestions, portents insinuated between or behind the lines, there for you to find. If you catch them - great; if you don't, that is also just fine.