No knowing much about John Ashberry, I ended up skimming a fair portion of that section of this literary magazine. The poems and prose about birds featured a couple stunning pieces that made this issue well worth reading…

The letter from Beijing was mildly interesting, the story about James Zadroga and Dr. Charles Hirsch was fascinating (imagine what a strange irony it would be if the coroner developed a 9/11 related lung ailment but wasn’t able to receive compensation because of what he revealed about Zadroga – potentially leading the bill named after the cop to fail just because of who it is associated with) on many levels (what an ugly thing that being a junkie would make him less of a hero or that being a martyr would make him more of one), and the fiction by Daniyal Mueenuddin was thankfully different from the standard fare the magazine offers. All in all not a bad issue though not outstanding.

Drab fiction by Alice Munro (of course I’m not claiming I could do better) – nothing very memorable in this issue. The Alex Ross piece on the evolution of classical music audiences was somewhat interesting, and the reviews of the William Maxwell collections and the new novel by Marilynne Robinson were informative to someone like me who only has a glancing familiarity with their work.

Of interest is a brief memoir by John Adams about how he became a composer, but not much else of note (I expected the article on Burma to be better).

Best men’s final ever? Definitely top 3 for me…

This has one of the more interesting short stories I’ve read in quite some time by none other than Jeffrey Eugenides.

While a far-reaching survey of interesting musicians and sound artists, the connections between them frequently seems tenuous, ponderous, or forced. The tone of the book seems firmly rooted in the era in which it was written (mid 90s) as well, which makes the focus on technology-obsessed post-modern neo-primitive hippie ravers amusing if not dated.

Toop seems wary of the burgeoning “spiritual supermarket” that accompanies much of the music and scenes he is discussing; however it isn’t clear to me whether his own trips to the Amazon were to document or to plunder the authentic shamanic sound-world. He seems to want to remove the traditional hierarchy of Western music (the ascendancy of the composer), but the recording and sampling technologies that help accomplish this, also promote the colonization of cultures he seems to want to preserve.

That said, broken up as it is into small morsels of interviews and memories, this is a very accessible read, and offers a useful lineage of many strains of electronic or ambient music – especially the dawn of UK rave culture.

Watching jugglers, mimes, and magicians (card tricks) tell this joke made it worth it for me…

This issue has a short story by Alice Munro, and an interesting “real crime” article about a post-modern Polish novelist and murderer.

Not one of the more engrossing issues, there was however a decent profile of Beppe Grillo.