Four Obscure Authors I Enjoy: Kevin Kerrane, Germaine Bree, Paul Krassner, Edwin Denby

Once upon a time, I was something of a compulsive book buyer. If I saw a title, cover, topic, or author that struck my thoughts or mood, I bought it. Sometimes, I read the book; sometimes, it sat among other similar objects in my literary harem, waiting for its summons to pleasure.

However, many of the books nourished me in ways nothing else could, except music. I've kept a number of these through all the years, a variety of residences and circumstances, and personal taste shifts. I have a particular fondness for the more obscure titles in which lively writing, a sense of engagement, and a distaste for bullshit clearly emerge. I've picked four titles that suggest the books' character and something of my own reading preferences.

1. Dollar Sign on the Muscle/Kevin Kerrane -- The author interviewed scouts, front office management, coaches, and former players to paint a picture of talent scouting in the pre-steroid era. His best move was to let the characters speak for themselves. Their language is worth the price of the book -- if you can find it.

2. Marcel Proust and Deliverance From Time/Germaine Bree -- I became aware of Bree's fascinating work on French authors while I was an undergrad at Wisconsin. She was a real scholar who also happened to have personally known some of the writers whose works and thoughts she illuminated for a generation of Americans. No, she didn't know Proust. However, this book provides a very satisfying, lucid exploration of Proust's life and work.

3. Paul Krassner's Impolite Interviews/Paul Krassner -- The author (shown in the photo) edited a magazine of sorts called The Realist in the late 1950s and 1960s. American underground journalism was getting ready to sprout, and Krassner's publication was part of that phenomenon. (Internet hipsters should take note of this historic episode.) Krassner's subjects and questioning style was provocative and stimulating for the time. Some interviews retain a freshness free from hovering publicists, "personal brands," and "image managers." Lenny Bruce as a personal brand?

4. Collected Poems/Edwin Denby -- Denby was a New York dance critic closely connected to the City's art scene. As with many modern poets, he wrote verse because he was driven to do it, and wasn't too concerned about his "audience." To hear Denby read his work, follow this link to the University of Pennsylvania's "Penn Sound/Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing." I don't care for all of Denby's poetry, but I do like Mediterranean Cities, principally because I either lived or visited some of them. Here's Rome; I hope you enjoy it.

Pear-brown Rome, dyed for the days whose blue is sweet

Disencoils as a garden would the wreaths and noses

Waists and loose fountains it adores to prodigate

A fair-weather darling as loose as roses

Soft up to the scar, dead Imperial Rome's;

But an American in the exposed ruins

They meet him like a face unrecognized from home

The mute wide-angle look, to Europe alien;

A stare of big men worried about their weight

Gaze of bounty, but too clumsy to have mourned

Or held, listening to the heartbeat which was a fate

Sky-hues that will return, the slope of solemn ground;

And I to whom darling Europe is foreign

Look home from here, to its mystery, with longing