Feb. 2006: What are you reading?

the chandler is much funnier than i thought it would be.

That has been tempting me. I'll put it on the pile.

If you are a dial up user, for heavens sake: Click on "Settings" on the bottom of the page, and change your setting to "Only show the last 50 messages" (or whatever it is). There is no reason to torture yourself.

Give the Lizards a little credit, the whole point of implementing the feature was to keep dial-up users from having to download 1000 messages each time they wanted to check a thread!

"A director of a football club should underwrite any potential bills. £2,000 should cover it."

Last weekend, Chris Kamara called Spurs' Young-Pyo Lee "that Chinese lad"

Perhaps things haven't changed that much. Or perhaps Kamara isn't representative.

Haha! I was the one reading it a couple of weeks ago; I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't recommend reading it with the expectations I had.

I am now currently reading Tom Jones, which is proving to be a hell of a bawdy-good time.

he's diabolical!

It's funny- I was actually trying to think of his name the other day, because I remembered reading some interesting articles by him about evolution in Discover magazine. The name that kept popping into my head was Jared Diamond, but I knew that wasn't him. Thanks for the recommendation - I'll check it out.

I've just started "Gilead", by M. Robinson (I take it as a personal point of honour to read every pulitzer-winning novel).

The last novel I read was B.E. Ellis' "Lunar Park". Not life-affirming but definitely enjoyable. Plus, there is something "nasty" in the way B.E. toys with his public image. A faux-memoir where he confesses vices that might well be real? Nasty, nasty....

The text didn't seem that hard. Mind you, it wasn't that interesting.

Christos Tsiolkas - Dead Europe (no idea why; I don't have much in common with a gay man in Australia returning to his Greek roots)
James Ellroy - Because The Night (and now I can't get Patti Smith out of my head)
Philip K. Dick - Dr. Futurity (this one seems the most promising...)

But none of them feel right. It's all because Slouching Towards Bethlehem hasn't arrived from the little book shop in Australia yet. Boo to the U.S. Postal Service!

Book limbo sucks.

Just so you know, the life of the City has just (p160 or so)atrophied from a sober economic powerhouse to a nest of languid, self-regarding bourgeois frippery. Just in case you literary fops think that sounds like a good thing, there's widespread grinding poverty too, and what's more it's freezing cold, for months every year and the canals are little more than raw sewage.

Ah, the eighteenth century.

A travel book on Liechtenstein using world cup qualification as a theme. Hasn't started too well, too many Brysonesque humour stabs. I like this though (talking about a pub off Charing Cross Road), "I went to the bar and an Australian sloshed four fifths of a pint in"

Bee Season is really very good. It reminds me of a less ambitious On Beauty, all self-delusion and dysfunctional over-achieveing families.

Next I'm reading Free Culture by Laurence Lessig.

I had the best of Aha playing in the background. That could be the reason I'm getting bored with all self-deprecating 'humour'.

Aha, of course, are Nordic pop kings.

Zadie Smith- White Teeth
Josephine Tey- Daughter of Time
Primo Levi- If This Is a Man
Ken Kesey- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I started reading David Bellos's translation of Life: A User's Manual.

I also read several of Edgar Allan Poe's short tales, something I haven't done in a couple of years; I still find his wide range of interests -- and lively imagination -- to be quite fascinating.

Have you noticed how Poe uses the word 'cognizant' in many of his stories? It must have been his favourite word. In fact I think Poe said so on the favourite word thread.

I've decided to clench the intellectual fist, so I'm reading Moominpappa at Sea.

I am at the dirty old man, if you mean the merchant banker.

Brent Milano - Vinyl Junkies (yuck)
Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver
Peter Ackroyd - The Clerkenwell Tales
Bill Ayers- Fugitive Days

Started

Trav S.D. - No Applause-Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous
Mark Caldwell - New York Night: The Mystique and Its History
Susan Braudy - Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left

SDS/Weather Underground were founded at my college, Univ of Mich. Ten years after after the failed revolution, some people I knew lived off-campus in a former "safe house"of either the weather people or black panthers that supposedly had machine gun turrets built into rooms on the top floor!

I have grown unused to reading architecture books, something I did a fair bit of in the olden days. I'd forgotten the way they talk about articulating the mass of a building, or architectonics, or skilful mastering of the rhythm of the horizontals, or whatever. It's good.

How are you getting on with the Sciascia, Accentmonkey? If you like "The Moro Affair" but want to read some fiction might I recommend "The Day of the Owl", which is aces and oddly has something of a similar atmosphere. I can recommend "Candido" too but that is a very different sort of book. I like "TMA", mostly, but found it a bit unsatisfying at the end, I wanted someone to update the story.

again.

Moreso their refusal to accept that statistics become more valid as the sample size becomes larger.

good, spare writing though all the characters speak too similarly

But: the snippits of Johnson's poetry and the source-footnoting by Boswell are so antiquarian in form/concern and irrelevent to this 21st c. reader that they're largely skipped.

Also I've been a bit sidetracked by Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shadow of the Sun which is absorbing and wonderful.

Also, the pacing is very ... unmodern ... and as soon as the narrative becomes somewhat absorbing, along'll come an epistolary-tripwire with damnably slow paragraphs of 18th c. apologetics, modesty toposes (topi?) and political arch-witticisms outmoded by the time of the American revolution, e.g.,

"My Dear Sir Piuma,

who has, perhaps, less Gentle and Considered time for Correspondence concerns than our Jacobite peer, Esteemed in Gutters and Ginhouses Everywhere, Lord N-----t has for his Wife and Mistress Con-Fuzed, all though be it For Matters of Politick and Serious Purpose, and not a Surfeit of Vigor, most Overly Compensated For, Take ye Upon thyself the Unlight Burden of My Unctuous Missive and Consider An Invite to Social Discourse its Purpose, if Your Heavy Obligations Permit it viz. Coffee and Oysters at the Redd Pike House this Forthcoming Thursday the Fifth. Mayhaps your Presence Be Return Enough As Reply, do not trouble Yours Self with Expense of Reply
Lest Your
Devoted Intimate
R. C-----;

Feel He has Enroached upon But a Moment of Your Time.

I've just started P.G. Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens. It's quite a relief after spending all week suffering through James.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders and Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal are next on the pile.

I wonder if you (or anyone) found the book's momentum, its thrust, as obscure as I have.

Yes, I am still talking about Michael Wood.

--

Not Quite Nasty
Colin Burrow
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess by Andrew Biswell · Picador, 434 pp, £20.00

There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached this state ‘unfashionable’, and usually throw such stuff away without thinking any more about it. Everyone sees a 1960s sideboard or a 1980s haircut as dated, and, beyond an embarrassed smile at our folly for ever having admired such cheesy horrors, these things rarely give rise to any thought. But unfashionable things are much more complicated and intriguing phenomena than they might appear. They open a gap in our ways of perceiving because they fall between our aesthetic and our historical sense. When we look at unfashionable objects our senses tell us that an age has passed, but we don’t yet have a means of giving those things the benefit of a historical perspective. The unfashionable embarrasses us – how can I have worn that? – but when the first blush is over it should challenge us to think about how our tastes are made and why they change.

Anthony Burgess is a 1960s sideboard of a writer. His range was improbable. He published 32 novels, composed symphonies, wrote two books on Joyce, a biography of Shakespeare and a study of the English language, as well as a large number of film scripts, most of which never entered production. He died in 1993, and is at the moment passing through the droop in reputation which most dead writers endure before they can become history. Four years ago he was the victim of what was generally regarded as a loathsome biography by Roger Lewis, who presented him as a pompous, psychologically damaged second-rater. Lewis’s biography was no fun to read, but it was interesting for what it revealed about responses to the unfashionable. It was written by a lapsed admirer, and showed exactly what happens when a reader realises that he no longer likes what he thought he liked, but hasn’t yet worked out how to detach himself from his former feeling. The result is rage and loathing, which is chiefly a warped form of embarrassment about one’s former admiration.

Andrew Biswell’s new biography, which generously allows Burgess’s friends and enemies to speak in their own voices, flushes out the worst aspects of Lewis. It presents Burgess’s life with a sobriety and care that are at once admirable and slightly chilling. Burgess’s life was always one of the main sources of his fiction, so much so that his two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You’ve Had Your Time (1990), make it very hard to work out where life ends and art begins. Many of the central events of his life became stories, which were retold in different versions on talkshows and in novels. How much time did his father really devote to playing the piano in the local cinema in Manchester, as against his less glamorous day job as a tobacconist? Was his mother really a music- hall starlet known as the Beautiful Belle Burgess? Biswell kindly remarks that no lady of that name appears on any of the playbills he’s examined.

There are at least some facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his writing. He was baptised a Catholic as John Burgess Wilson in Manchester in 1917, the offspring of a mother who did something on the stage and a father who did something with pianos and perhaps rather more with cigarettes. After his mother and sister died of the flu in 1918 he was brought up by a stepmother whom he profoundly disliked, representing her in fiction as an earwax-picking slut. After a grammar-school education (which, if we believe his autobiography, climaxed in his seduction by a radical librarienne), he went to Manchester University, where he studied English with L.C. Knights and H.B. Charlton, whom he liked to call H.B. Charlatan. As an undergraduate he was no more and no less of a poseur than most. He wore a floppy brimmed dark hat, and wrote a few bad poems, which he later published as the work of the not very good fictional poet F.X. Enderby.

In the 1940s and 1950s he was engaged in programmes of world education in Englishness which were supposed to take the edge off the British retreat from empire. In Gibraltar he served as an officer in the Education Corps, lecturing on ‘The British Way and Purpose’ scheme, which presented a loosely socialist outlook to the troops, while also envisioning a world of self-rule after the British had gone home.

While he was stationed in Gibraltar, his first wife, Lynne, was assaulted by GIs, possibly miscarried, and certainly suffered a long-term gynaecological disorder as a result. She drank. He drank. They went to Malaya, where she drank more and slept with a range of people, while he taught at a variety of improbably English schools, and battled with headmasters as he had earlier battled with his superior officers in the army. He too may have slept with a few people, though his autobiography probably adds the odd fictional notch to his bedpost. Then in 1959 he either collapsed, or just lay down in the classroom and decided not to move in order to see what would happen. He was dashed home with a suspected brain tumour – though the story of the tumour may have been made up either by him or by his wife. Then (he claimed) he tried to escape from hospital and was chased down the street by his doctor, Roger Bannister, the four-minute-mile-running neurologist. (Again, Biswell gently pricks this little bubble of Burgessian fantasy.) Fear of death may have given him the impetus to write, or maybe a fictional fear of death gave him a desire to make himself the perfect simulacrum of a man of letters. He did not die, though he continued to devour gin and cigarettes (80 a day in his prime) with a more than mortal appetite. After the non-tumour incident he set to work writing a thousand words a day, seven days a week – a regime which, he said, with statistical justification only, would enable one to write War and Peace every year.

The drink and the misery of his first wife (who is with distressing regularity described as ‘awful’ by the witnesses Biswell quotes) ended with her death from liver failure in 1968: a crate of gin was, it’s said, delivered to their house each week, and Burgess would wake her with a glass of her preferred poison. After Lynne’s death, Burgess’s life begins to lose its early colour. He fled abroad in a camper van with his second wife, an Italian countess whom he married in September 1968. Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange made him notorious in 1971, though Burgess groused throughout his later life that Kubrick distorted the novel and that anyway the book itself was peripheral to his output. His hyper-Tolstoyan verbal productivity made him rich, and one reason for packing his new wife and his typewriter into the camper van was to stop the beastly government, as he saw it, stealing his money. Film treatments, musicals based on Joyce’s Ulysses and on the life of Shakespeare, novels, cascades of reviews: all welled out of the various villas and tax-havens between which Burgess moved in his later years. Meanwhile the gin continued to flow in, though perhaps less copiously than before. With a second wife still alive, Burgess himself was reluctant to suggest in his autobiography that this period was enlivened by philandering (though he did once claim to have slept with women of almost every nationality but not with an Englishwoman), and even the diligent Biswell can’t find anything very exciting to say about his late period. He worked hard. He drank hard. He hated bad reviews. He died.

Biswell does almost too good a job of setting out these facts. He makes Burgess appear to be not just historically explicable, but almost historically determined. Burgess was by education a words man. He was at one point part of an organisation that aimed to free the world by teaching it. This disposed him to believe that words, and perhaps also education (at least if it emphasised individual autonomy), were potentially redemptive. But a relentless theme of his fiction is a directly contrary belief in the necessary fallibility of individuals and the impossibility of systematic reform. For the later Burgess, the socialist state, Communism in Russia and educational utopianism (not to mention the wicked levels of taxation required by all of these) were examples of what he called ‘neo-Pelagianism’. That is, all of them were founded on a belief that human beings were perfectible, and that salvation could be achieved by human endeavour alone. Original sin was for Burgess not just a human reality but a human good, or at least preferable to beliefs that mankind could be refashioned by system.

This configuration of conflicting beliefs looks now historical enough for it to seem that Burgess was a victim of circumstance rather than a free agent. A Catholic upbringing, a sense of sin; a wartime engaged in educationally disseminated reform; financial success; a desire to flee a form of socialism of which the most visible sign was a 90 per cent rate of income tax; a wish to retain the structurally conservative model of Englishness in which he had been educated, combined with a willingness to value linguistic experimentation as a substitute for systematic social reform: these are the intellectual foundations that give us A Clockwork Orange, which, with its wildly innovative vocabulary and its venomous hostility towards any kind of state-based attempts to reform the individual, is by no means as peripheral to the Burgess canon as he wanted it to be. These forces also generate the lonely, dyspeptic, unhappy, incapable poet F.X. Enderby, to whom Burgess came fictionally to ascribe many of his own poems and many of the incidents of his own life in a quartet of novels: Inside Mr Enderby (1963), Enderby Outside (1968), The Clockwork Testament (1974) and Enderby’s Dark Lady (1984). Enderby’s combination of emotional paralysis, uncontrolled rage, ill-timed erotic lunges and aggression is a joke self-portrait, but it isn’t just a joke. Within the body of preoccupations with which Burgess’s life equipped him, almost the only form that a writer could bear would be Enderby’s mix of unworldliness, wordiness and introverted aggression. Despite Burgess’s conviction that the fact of human free will mattered more than whether or not that agency was used to good or ill effect, he was in his view of the writer’s role entirely a victim of his times.

There are two big questions about Burgess that Biswell scrupulously fails to answer. The first is the big aesthetic question: how good was he? The second is more local: why don’t most readers today either read him or like him? The big one is hard to answer at the moment because the answers to the second are so evident. Burgess’s writings are for a variety of reasons likely to make people of my generation feel uncomfortable. It’s not quite a matter of class or tone or age, though it’s partly that. Larkin and Amis, born five years after him, make it easy for bien pensant readers to whip themselves into a froth of self-righteous horror because they are so much manipulators of indignation, sorrow and revulsion, and they took a positive delight in being shocking. Burgess, though, is politically unsituated, or politically confused, in ways that can cloud literary judgments and perhaps even disturb them.

There is a residue in his work of the civic socialism of Manchester, and even of the Labour government of 1945. As someone who was present in Malaya in the final years of the British presence there, he was, historically speaking, post-colonial. His fiction is full of contempt for expats who can’t be bothered to learn languages other than English, but it now seems undercharged with post-colonial unease, and can be unsettlingly bipolar in its colonial attitudes. In the early Malayan novels, most of the British characters are nutcases, some of them perverted nutcases; indigenous people tend to be classic embodiments of the exotic – homosexual Malayan servants, axe-murdering rebels, or Eastern queens of amorphous beauty who aspire to speak perfect Bloomsbury English. Right up until Earthly Powers (1980), Malayans are associated with a mephitic, vengeful magic, and with petty acts of exploitation to win cash. There is an aspiration towards a world language and a world literature in Burgess which is uncomfortably yoked with a jingoism over which he seems to have less than perfect control.

By the 1960s, Burgess had developed a posture of opposition to the age that was not quite the viciously funny conservatism of Kingsley Amis, nor the affable nobbishness of Anthony Powell. He retained the defiant awkwardness of someone who wanted it to be known that he was a grammar-school boy made good, but he became in many of his attitudes the least attractive kind of creature in the world: a tax exile (in Malta and elsewhere) whose opinions were admired by Auberon Waugh. As he put it in one of the more self-hating passages of his autobiography, ‘I suppose I was dour about the new sexuality because no ageing man likes to see the young doing better than he did . . . I hungered for those girls in miniskirts, but they were not for me. Long-haired louts in pubs called me “dad”.’ He hated hairy people like the Beatles, and even presented a fictional version of John Lennon as a jumped-up oik who thinks he is the liberator of the world but is in fact so completely dominated by egoism and greed that he fakes his own assassination as a publicity stunt.

Burgess in the 1970s too often sounded like somebody’s dad who has spent too long drinking gin with other expats in Malta. But that tone of voice is never steady enough or quite credible enough for you to hate him. The Clockwork Testament, third of the Enderby novels, is based on Burgess’s experience as a visiting professor at City College, New York during a period when that university had a completely open admissions policy. Biswell’s biography includes an affectionate description of Burgess’s time there by Joseph Heller, who remembers that Burgess would listen to and take seriously all his pupils: ‘His desire to teach, to bring about a positive change in what were sometimes rather deranged minds, exceeded by far his need for self-preservation.’ The version of City College that comes out of The Clockwork Testament, though, is of crazed, mostly black undergraduates who insist on their freedom of expression, when as far as Enderby can see they have no knowledge and no emotions worth expressing. In the description of his time at CCNY in his autobiography, Burgess was even keener to lock himself into a persona of grumpy conservatism: ‘Poetry, said the black man, hating me with hot eyes, was essentially emotion, but I said it was essentially words.’ In these works he wants you not to like him. The would-be educational liberator becomes the despairing believer in the viciousness and intractable sinfulness of mankind, especially the bit of mankind that is young and black.

Burgess’s confused and not quite nasty response to his times (it is not quite nasty because it is so clearly a pose) makes it extremely hard to assess how good he is. There are those who think he was a miracle of style. Others regard him as a verbalist, someone who could perceive no reality beyond words, who liked the bigger ones the best, and who wanted his readers to cry out with ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ as they reached for their dictionaries. Geoffrey Grigson, in a review that Burgess seems to have learned by heart, said that his journalism was driven by a desire to convince himself that ‘an insatiable liking for words amounts to an ability to use them well and to distinct purpose.’ The look-at-me cleverness is certainly there throughout his fiction. His novel about Shakespeare, Nothing like the Sun (1964), is particularly full of misfiring bits of attention-seeking. When Will laments his sickness, while the ‘mobbled queen’ Elizabeth I is on progress, there is a classic piece of Burgessian talent abuse: ‘I can hardly move, sick not in my body but only in my soul, centre of my sinful earth. I lie on my unmade bed listening to time’s ruin, threats of Antichrist, new galleons on the sea, the queen’s grand climacteric, portents in the heavens, a horse eating its foal, ghosts gliding as on a buttered pavement.’ This is a terrible piece of writing, but not unrepresentative. The little glances at obvious bits of Shakespeare, from Hamlet, through The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets, make it seem as though Will thought only in Famous Quotations, and those Famous Quotations are syntactically redundant in a way that makes them audibly no more than add-ons. By the time the sentence arrives at the hideously un-Shakespearean ‘buttered pavement’ it is all too ready to slip over. The overlay of learning – misguided showing-off rather than postmodern self-consciousness – blows away any intimacy with Shakespeare. You wind up watching Burgess mechanically anatomising Shakespeare’s words.

But despite all the show there can be a kind of brilliance in his work. Burgess is at his best, and his funniest, when he is a grammarian and a phonologist. He has a good ear for social register, and is happiest representing the voices of people who have moved just outside their natural idiom or social class. He is particularly good at learnedly foul, demobbed English-student soldier-speak. In Time for a Tiger (1956), the beanpole hero acquires a stray dog:

‘Her name’s Cough,’ said Nabby Adams apologetically. ‘That’s all she’ll answer to. I suppose the other bloke was always telling her to get from under his feet, or something like that.’

‘I don’t quite see that,’ said Fenella.

This gets its readers thinking inside the phonics and social proprieties of language in a way that’s genuinely funny: the unuttered sound of what the previous owner was always shouting at the dog becomes a name and a summons to the poor animal. The music of cursing was particularly important to Burgess, largely because swear words are non-literal, grammatically transposable, and sound-centred. He was delighted when he heard an army engineer say of a broken-down truck: ‘Fuck it. The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.’ His book on the English language, A Mouthful of Air (1992), used this as an example of how the same English stem could function as an imperative, adjective, noun, adverb and past participle. He liked a word that was made to carry a particular sense and a particular grammatical form purely by its position within the syntax of a sentence, and he liked, too, the indecorum of using ‘fuck’ as an example of the versatility of English.

His fascination with syntax and sound comes from his experience as a teacher of English as a foreign language, but it can enable him to make his readers do more than watch him write. The ‘Nadsat’ spoken by Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange doesn’t force its readers to admire the trickiness of Anthony Burgess; rather it makes them look inside the mechanics of their own understanding, and use their grasp of syntax and whatever ghosts of etymological knowledge they might have as a means of construing the sense of individual words from their context. It also becomes funny and sinister by being combined with the stylised over-formality and periodic bathos of Alex’s voice: ‘I was told to take off my horrible prison platties and I was given a really beautiful set of pyjamas, O my brothers, in plain green, the heighth of bedwear fashion.’ Burgess wanted to be remembered as a thinker about freedom, an analyst of empire, a writer of Joycean dazzles who was as prolific as Dickens and as panoptic as Tolstoy. He was and perhaps will come to be valued chiefly as a state-of-English novelist, a game-player in phonology and sociolinguistics. His was a sharp but minor talent: he had an ear for idiolect, register, and the interplay of word and grammatical structure, and what that ear heard and reproduced just about compensates for his self-presentations as a grumpy old man.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/burr01_.html

Aimless, I found this exchange just now when I was searching the archives.

Last week I read "Heart of Darkness" at the dazzling pace of about 20 pages per day. I expected to finish it in one sitting, but the damn thing was rather too evocative, so I kept getting lost in the thoughts and images that sprung out of it. Clearly I need me some mo' Conrad.

I'm now reading Linn Ullmann's "Et Velsignet Barn" ("A Blessed Child", I suppose an English translation is forthcoming, though I don't know if they'll translate the title that literally)
This is my first time reading any of her work, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how good it is. The whole "celebrity parents" thing is rarely a good sign.

(We are sending work to Kenya to get it done on the cheap, so I thought I would get a bit of background.)

I have decided that life is far too short for Robert Rankin, and am reading Matthew Sharpe 'The Sleeping Father' instead.

This is the point where I state that Heart Of Darkness is a massively racist pile of shit.

I read two "great literature" novels in high school that rather explicitly screamed "THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU" at me; Heart Of Darkness was one, the other was The Jungle.

Conrad completely lost me when he was describing the native guide (or was he a porter, I can't remember now) as a monkey in a wholly-inappropriate suit; his entire frame of mind was coming from a position that basically denied even the possibility of humanity to the indigenous characters in the book. In fact, most of his point could be summed up as "How hard do you have to push before you turn a civilized man into an evil, dirty darkie?"

Sinclair's propaganda piece completely, totally and throroughly offended me because of the way it demonized the black workers who were taking away jobs from the good Polish protagonists. I found it even more offensive because the book should have been targeting black people as proletariat allies but settled instead for making all of its black characters act like voodoo death cultists firmly in the throes of physical passion and taking-away-jobs-from-poor-white-immigrants-ness.

(At the same time, you could obviously claim that Conrad was more about "You think the darkies are so evil? You are just the same, whitey, but with a thick layer of cruft doing a poor job of covering it up." And that any sense of "it takes THIS MUCH to get you to be like them" is more about making a more "exciting" story and making it more "realistic" to people who aren't prone to thinking it's at all possible -- "oh it's possible all right although yes it would take a lot of doing, perhaps less than you think." I'm not saying this is a more accurate assessment. But it doens't matter because the book is tedious either way.)

I realized that a nanosecond after hitting "Submit".

Now reading: vol 2 of Trotsky's own "History of the Russian Revolution".

I am now reading "To Crush The Serpent" by Yashar Kemal, which I'm enjoying so far.

John Peel's "Margrave Of The Marshes" (he's rather blasé about years of physical and sexual abuse at school. I find myself getting upset that he's not upset enough)
William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" (my 2nd reading of this, I love it when it flows but frequently find myself tuning out and unable to work out what I'm reading)
Iain M Banks "Against A Dark Background" (scifi thing that's taking an AGE to get going, and I usually enjoy Banks)
Ian Maitland "Cathedral" (10p withdrawn library book - horror set in and around an English public school - quite disturbing and pays more than a passing nod to The Wasp Factor and The Cement Garden, what is it with Ians?)

Lined up are the Peel (auto)biography and Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Both daunting, sizewise. They weigh a ton too.

Still Oldest Living Etc - I have just finished Consider The Lobster in the meantime, though.

I started Gwendoline Riley's second novel, while I was waiting for someone to show up. It is readable, I suppose. But I don't know if I will read it yet.

I would like to state the following things for the record:

1. I came to my conclusions about Heart Of Darkness without ever reading Achebe's essay before a few days ago.

2. It is very difficult for me to read something that is such a product of its time without ruminating on the repercussions of what my life would have been like had I lived during those times. The character in Heart Of Darkness whose lot in life most closely resembled what mine probably would have been was described as being a monkey in a suit. Ergo, as far as I'm concerned this book can fuck off.

Now I'm reading another book about Amsterdam School architecture, in this case "The Amsterdam School: Dutch Expressionist Architecture", ed. De Wit. I'm going on holiday tomorrow, this is in praparation.

I've been reading poetry that I have to review - luckily it was quite good for once. Last time I wrote a critical review I got into trouble :(

Novels set in Amsterdam / the Netherlands. Name your favourites please. I like "In The Dutch Mountains" and "Rituals" by Cees Nooteboom. I also like "On The Water" by H M van den Brink. Any further recommendations?

Isn't it nice when you have to review something and it's good?

I love Amsterdam. I've spent many hours just noodling around there, not all of them stoned.

I read Michael Pye's The Drowning Room last year. It was just the kind of deathly depressing novel about ye olde Dutch society that I love. Also Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever is quite fun.

a) wilfully misreading me;
b) not understanding my point with my last post (ie, I am not cribbing a position from Achebe; in fact, I did not know what Achebe's opinion was until it was posted to this thread);
c) deciding that since Achebe is famous and I am not, my conclusion might as well be rolled into Achebe's, even though his is coming from a position of artistic discrimination and mine is coming from a position of negative reader identification?

In turn I was confused by your own post: it quoted mine as if intending to respond to it but then appeared, from my perspective at least, to go off at a wild tangent. What did it have to do with me if your position did not derive from Achebe's? I had never thought it did. Why were you reiterating your own negative experience of reading to the book? It wasn't something I had called into question or would be likely to.

Nevertheless, your post implied a disagreement with me, pugnaciously expessed, and a response seemed to be called for. It would have been impertinent for me to comment on the authenticity of your response to the book, and I assumed, wrongly it now appears, that I was being invited, instead, to comment on the on the wider implications of such a response.

I don't agree that Achebe's position is not, in large measure, "negative reader identification"; in the debate that followed in the wake of his article the implications of such negative reader response by black readers was extensively discussed. I don't intend to suggest that your negative response can be rolled into or made identical to Achebe's, or anyone else's, but that the principles arising from it may be broadly similar and can be discussed as such, and indeed already have been, at great length.

now I'm halfway through State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen which is both more subtle and more shocking than even jaded Iraq observers might imagine. The ineptitude of the CIA is matched only by the Bushies' politicization of every aspect of pre/post-war intelligence.

next I'm looking at the Simon Reynolds postpunk book and then maybe something on Nazi Germany, perhaps Ian Kershaw's Hitler biography.

Dan I had no idea that you were black until you said so in your response to my post, after which I certainly didn't treat you as "invisible". No-one picks up on every preceding post in a discussion like this. You were no more invisible than J.D. or Casuistry or anyone else whose posts I didn't respond to.

I totally lost interest in OoH when it started to be about people.

I'm reading Thomas Perry's Dead Aim, just finished (maybe a week or two back), Gerard Jones Men of Tomorrow: Gangsters, Geeks and the BIrth of the Comic Book, and I promise I'm gonna go back and finish the very enjoyable (but I got distracted by Showcase Presents Jonah Hex) Busted Flush by Brad Smith.

next possibly those books about the armchair-detective rabbit, and stuff on joyce

I was reading it on the train last night and couldn't stop laughing, got myself some strange looks. I don't remember it being this funny last time.

Heart of Darkness is narrated by a narrator though. To claim Conrad was a racist is like claiming that Conrad went round saying "by Jove!" all the time.

Which he might have done, for all I know.

i have not heard of that short story collection, beth, but i will get it should i happen to see a copy. i have a run of seven or so early philip k dicks to get round to soon, plus i want to get on to le guin's 'the left hand of darkness' (which i can't believe i haven't read yet) and 'always coming home' (which i can)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0425073009/qid=1140837799/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-9677339-7654339?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

I'm reading China Miéville's "The Scar". I've bounced off the opening chapter a couple of times (the whole "Cray-man out huntin' with his octopus" thing! Ugh!) but I've decided to give it a chance now. I did like "Perdido Street Station" after all, and most people seem to find this to be the stronger of the two.
I can sort of understand why people keep comparing him with Mervyn Peake, but I think it's misguiding.

Now it's Mo-Jo.

The comic book illustrator Kavalier is secure in the knowledge that what he does is art; his partner, Clay, is not - he has a keen sense of inferiority from working in an art-form despised by the intelligentsia and a longing to write proper, respectable novels.

I suspect Chabon would like to be Kavalier but he is in fact Clay - too insecure to write the much better novel he could have written if he could have freed himself of some of his more self-consciously literary aspirations.

There are still gaps, but judging by the fact that Nick's sister hasn't gone out of her way to help either of the biographers, I guess we'll have to wait for Gabrielle's memoirs.

His songs though, are just sublime.

Of course, it's more about Dutch culture and society than it is about football, as all such books always are. The football is - if you will - a jumping-off point. Writing a book like this must be fun. I imagine it involves composing Two Big Lists, in this case, one big list of What Dutch People Are Like, and then another about What Dutch Football Is Like. Marry the two up, discard anything that doesn't fit, couple of interviews, Bob's yer uncle.

It's very good, "Brilliant Orange" and does give you (me) things to think about. If I start getting all itchy about cultural generalisations, that's my problem. It's the book's problem, too, but it's a problem only if I'm looking for a textbook rather than a natter.

I read some of it on a double decker train, and I hoped Archel would be pleased.

I'm about halfway through Edger Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, which I've been wanting to dig into for a few years - since the R. Buckner album that set some of the poems to music. Maybe the formula of so many pieces, each one less than a page, written from the same perspective (dead man or woman looking back on their life from the grave), gets slightly tiresome. But the almost relentless negativity is kind of fun.

£3.

The Oxford Murders - worst book ever! Can't decide whether it is bad enough to be interesting.