Autumn Rhythm: Musings on Time, Tide, Aging, Dying, and Such Biz

By Richard Meltzer

Book Overview

A sublime and moving collection of essays by an eloquent master writer, Autumn Rhythm is equal parts candor, courage, humor, and desperation. A true-tongued, almost joyous gallows humor permeates the book, a meditation on what it's like to be on the outer edge of "boomerhood," on the cusp of official seniority; what it's like to have been so long associated with a youth movement-rock music-yet to no longer be young.Autumn Rhythm comes from a man whose work has always been music as much as it's been about it, and who now brings his syncopation of word, sound, and sense to the subject of life itself, as lived and lost: a frank, brilliant, and ultimately poetic contemplation of physical decline, the deaths of friends and family, and the confounding, ever-accelerating changes in our culture."A rant in Meltzer's] finest and funniest manner, an epic vernacular monologue with stylistic roots in nineteenth-century humorists Bill Nye, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306813815
• ISBN13: 9780306813818
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWW!

If only he'd left out the dream (and subsequent - copious - discussion) about effing his mother. The book gets off to a cracking start, but takes a nosedive after aforementioned freudian dream, and never fully recovers. Ends with Meltzer asserting (through denial) he is the "new Bukowski." Silly old fart.

Rants on Geezerhood from Old Man Meltzer

This is an uneven collection of rants and reflections on growing old from the grey area between middle and old age. Like most people who find the world changing more quickly than their ability to adjust to those changes as they grow old, Meltzer strives to make a virtue out of his inability to adapt to computers and the Internet, indiscriminately lumping them together with MTV and other, less benign, cultural excrescences. These sections are rather hackneyed and about what you'd hear from any aging 60's-survivor barfly muttering over his beer. More effective are Meltzer's unflinching descriptions of the physical decay and the loss of old friends and enemies that accompany staying alive over time. Read and heed, young people, and see what you have to look forward to (not that there's much you can do about it).

He's Ba-a-ack!

He's a curmudgeon always was, a cat with a taste for sour cream, a brilliant distressingly human type guy. Won't lie down and go to sleep on top of pedestals. Falls off roaring words, heart blazing from both barrels. He's a rock, jazz, and culture critic I first remember from the sixties. He saw through the ominous commercialization of music and culture back then, and he's been sawing through ever since. If you're aging and alive as ever, remember something huge happening in the 60's that had nothing to do with misty water-colored memories, wonder how the exhilarating changes that took place for so many of us could have been so thoroughly distorted, effaced and buried in reams of ridicule, 'serious' criticism and nostalgic pap, (whew but true), Meltzer might be just what your bruised spirit needs.If yr a cat with a taste for sour creem.