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Ambient Parking Lot
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Fiction. Part fiction, part earnest mockumentary, AMBIENT PARKING LOT follows a band of musicians as they wander the parking structures of urban downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise one that promises to embody their historical moment and deliver them up to the heights of their self-important artistry. Along the way, they make sporadic forays
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One of those many great books that works precisely because it shouldn’t. For as much as I loved Pamela Lu’s eponymous first novel, I kept expecting this novel to choke on its own first-person plural perspective, to slip into a void of grand but ultimately meaningless proclamations, to in short become what those less charitable than I might refer to as “pretentious.” Lu makes art out of sitting on that precipice, coming just short of declaring herself a major generational voice, stopping about a
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This is the best book I read in 2011! I have tons more to say about it here: http://lanternreview.com/blog/2012/02...
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I wanted to pretend the band was just one crazy person with delusions of grandeur, but then members departed, which sure seems like an actual band.
This is tedious in a way I did not expect. I didn’t expect straightforward narrative from something titled “Ambient Parking Lot” that “follows a band of musicians as they wander the parking structures of urban downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise,” but the word ‘quest’ implies some sort of action/narrative. Also, the wo ...more
This is tedious in a way I did not expect. I didn’t expect straightforward narrative from something titled “Ambient Parking Lot” that “follows a band of musicians as they wander the parking structures of urban downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise,” but the word ‘quest’ implies some sort of action/narrative. Also, the wo ...more
Quite a remarkable experience. Packs a lot into a short book. Some reviews and the back cover blurb comment on the sneering tone it sometimes adopts, but there is a real care and tenderness through the whole thing, which is extremely compelling. Zooms, scales and travels in weird ways that I've never read in another work. Sometimes the language feels a bit detached or indelicate but I think the stylistic textures it presents mesh very well.
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one of my favorite books judging by how often i think about it. I read it in 2019 and would like to do so again soon. a sprawling world packed into a modestly sized book. i suspect you could read the chapters out of order but that’s not saying the story’s disjointed
Thursday Afternoon, one of Brian Eno's (many, many) albums, is a single track running about an hour, consisting of sporadically plinked piano keys sprinkled over a cloud of continuous sound, which might be strings or a wind instrument or something else entirely. It is the finest album of its kind--ambient perfection.
Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot reflects the loose structure and peculiar composition of that album (which is also a perfect reading companion). The plot follows the Ambient Parkers, ...more
Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot reflects the loose structure and peculiar composition of that album (which is also a perfect reading companion). The plot follows the Ambient Parkers, ...more
Pamela Lu is such a good writer that it's easy to forgive her for her long bouts of taking the piss out of her main characters... and for the strange fact that nearly all the musical vocabulary/lingo in this book is used wrong. (It's so consistently just-slightly-wrong that I wonder if she's doing it on purpose.)
As with Pamela: A Novel, I read it delightedly and was perplexed pleasantly more often than unpleasantly. And the two long chapters of this book (one a letter, one an interview) create ...more
As with Pamela: A Novel, I read it delightedly and was perplexed pleasantly more often than unpleasantly. And the two long chapters of this book (one a letter, one an interview) create ...more
How could a person have written this scripture I think it exists as a separate world somewhere we just have to find it
Ambient Parking Lot
The summary on the back seemed contrived, but then I finished reading the book and it makes Perfect Sense
THE AMBIENT BARKERS, one of the highlights of the book: "Our scouts were locked in a standoff with a gang of student activists who were wielding baguettes baked in the shape of peace signs." ...more
Ambient Parking Lot
The summary on the back seemed contrived, but then I finished reading the book and it makes Perfect Sense
THE AMBIENT BARKERS, one of the highlights of the book: "Our scouts were locked in a standoff with a gang of student activists who were wielding baguettes baked in the shape of peace signs." ...more
8.3/10
The sheer absurdity of Pamela Lu’s mockumentary on making music from the sounds of light traffic and finding success in it is enough to warrant a recommendation. It’s the humor and tenacity of the novel that pushes it into greatness.
The sheer absurdity of Pamela Lu’s mockumentary on making music from the sounds of light traffic and finding success in it is enough to warrant a recommendation. It’s the humor and tenacity of the novel that pushes it into greatness.
Very interesting ideas at play in this novel. I simply enjoyed the ideas more than the actual execution of the novel.
For fans of Douglas Coupland, absurdity, meta meta and the like.
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Pamela Lu is the author of Ambient Parking Lot (Kenning Editions, 2011), Pamela: A Novel (Atelos, 1998), and The Private Listener, a chapbook from Corollary Press. Her writing also appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error, and has been published in periodicals such as 1913, Antennae, Call, Chain, Chicago Review, Fascicle, and Harper's. She lives and works in the San Francisco Ba
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