What are you reading?

I hate that stage.

BTW, it's good to see you all.

Haven't reached the point where I can't put down Perdido Street Station, but I'll keep at it be/c so many people have said it's the best book they've ever read. I guess that's just a matter of opinion.

I don't usually read manga, but Phoenix has been one of the most interesting and different graphic novels I've ever read. I know I'm going to get addicted to the whole series.

I really like all of Narayan's Malgudi novels and stories. They're all equally light, really, so if you enjoyed one you'll enjoy the others as much. I also read one travel journal by him, in which I really didn't like him at all.

cos I have finished RING ROAD, at last.

+ still reading MACNEICE

Currently reading: "Lucky You" by Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen's usual bunch of corrupt officials, scam artists, social misfits and cynical journalists a Florida crime/environment caper. This is my 5th or 6th Hiaasen novel and they are getting a bit samey but good fun nonetheless.

Next up: Lance Armstrong's autobiography "It's Not About The Bike" which a colleague assures me is a good read. I have a feeling I won't see it through, I find it hard to relate to a man who takes his bike on his honeymoon.

Also reading This is America?: Lawrence, Kansas in the 1960's because I'm from Kansas and it sparked my interest at the used bookstore. Pretty good thus far, but I'm not entirely sure it would entertain anyone not from Kansas. Maybe it gets more universal later on.

Finished Jonathan Coe's, What a Carve Up. I'd give it 9/10 on the Mikey G scale.

Now finishing Hiram Bingham's Peruvian journals and then onto The Travels of Marco Polo.

Didn't this movie open last weekend?

Just finished 'Preston Falls' by David Gates (sought out because Gates writes a v OTM intro to the new classics edition of DB's '60 Stories') and it wasn't what I expected at all - it's a very thorough, Richard Fordy study of a relationship falling apart - but I enjoyed it almost despite myself.

i) The stall owner had forgotten to write a price on the cover
ii) The can of Stella in his left hand
iii) The joint in his right hand.

Currently on "From The Corner Of His Eye" by Dean Koontz. He's a bit hit and miss but so far this seems like one of the better ones.

Perhaps you should try reading Catcher in the Rye again after a year or so.-- Fred
Someone once said that to me about Gormenghast and I've been wary ever since.

I think the swimmng pool library is only interesting for the firbank references. (I'm almost finished the book - nantwich prison life) the natwick diaries episodes remind me a bit of the orton/kennth williams ones and are also "interesting". but most of the characters in the book are boring, arrogant and hard-to-like or even get interested in (esp. william beckwith). the exception being perhaps the roops kid, with his child-like interest in homosexual life.

I have the book.

Reading: Behan, BORSTAL BOY; Collins, STILL SUITABLE FOR MINERS.

And lots of LRB lately.

("17:25 four black children started [illegible] items from the fruits and veg but i went there and drove them out of store then they were really in for chocolates and other sweets")

(pages and pages, a full book, i have misrepresented the relentless mundaneness here tho) similar to:

pessoa - book of disquiet, (still!) intermittently when i'm out. ho-hum

i wanted to like this much more than i actually did.

Its 20 odd essays, written mostly by people who have suffered from mental illness at one time or another, its not very cohesive as a whole but definetely worth a read.

The book was Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, about Alexander the Great. Stirring stuff, but I'm enjoying the second book in the series, The Persian Boy a lot more. It doesn't make the same assumptions about a person's classical education. In that it doesn't assume that a person has one, when a person may very well not. To me, Argos is a place where tiny pens live, and Troy is the counsellor on the starship Enterprise.

Pierre Lotti was a 19th c. French novelist, very popular in his days. (all novels in popular romantic oriental-ism) I find it hardly readable now, it could be a camp novel if you're in the right mood (which probably means it's just bad ;-)

Lotti himself was so taken when his Turkish maitresse began to have other affairs (according to Cocteau maitresse shoud be read as male lover) that he escaped in heavy decadent orientalism in his home in Paris. I have bought a postcard of him in his harem room at home, wearing complete Turkish costume, all very Huysmans/Des Essientes.

I bought his novel (plus an essay on his visit to Istanboul, which is probalby more readable) last week while visting Istanboul myself (at the Pierre Loti Cafe!!)

A nice bonus with the Aurelius is that my father bought it in the mid-60s or so, when he was only a few years older than I am now, and the book's full of underlined passages, margin-notes etc.

Also AMM music is great; that is a prob the hataz must overcome.

Øystein, 'The Body Artist' is pants. If you are already a Delillo fan, avoid at all cost. If you aren't, skip it and go straight to 'White Noise'.

Now I'm back to 'The Return of Reginald Perrin'. All good.

Oh, and 'Jennifer Government' was ok. I would have liked less thriller and more satire, and also fewer characters. But it's quite easy to see how it could all come true.

I have a nice library haul to go through now... First off: JG Ballard's Rushing To Paradise. This paperback cover has one wonderfully tacky cover too.

No wonder I never finish anything.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/Images/Books/Batch2/014180100X.JPG

X-post: Yes, Erickson is fantastic ('Leap Year' is the only one I haven't read of his, I think), but that's a whole other thread...

I like Gordon Legge.

It's pretty nice design, though. I tried reading it once when I was a teen. Perhaps I should try again.

and you are reading...?

I'm reading a book about Brazilian football and it is boss.

Going back to Philip K Dick next and also plan to pick up a copy of Last Exit To Brooklyn, something I've been getting round to for years.

Anyways, I'm currently reading these novels:
Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar"
Eugene Zamiatin's "We"

Next up are Sinclar Lewis' Babbitt and Horace Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto.

He didn't write as much as you might think.

Such a poet.

Such a critic.

Such a 'poet-critic'?

I don't remember it being related to Absalom, Absalom, but I may be forgetting.

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien. This was a reread, as it had been over a decade. It's an uneven book, but in part that is because it has many pages of flabbergasting genius that unavoidably makes the less-inspired stuff look more ordinary. There is no plot. It simply leaves off writing more.

Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome. Obviously, I am not alone in reading this one this summer. Another one of those books where the digressions are everything. A bit of lace, but fine lace.

Touching the Void, Joe Simpson. Now a major motion picture. A classic of the "I survived my personal hell!" genre, and much better written than most.

Company of Adventurers, Peter Newman. This bills itself as "a history of the Hudson's Bay Company." In truth, it is a poorly-organized set of anecdotes, snippets and brief biographies that share the Hudson's Bay Company as a unifying thread. The author knows how to a tell a story, provided the story is 10 pages long. As for the HBC, he develops no theme, has few ideas and nothing much to say. Some ripping yarns, though.

The Dalkey Archive, Flann O'Brien. Another reread. It confirmed my recollection that this is the weakest of O'Brien's books. He recycles some of the good bits from The Third Policeman, but in a less interesting vehicle. The lack of plot, which usually is no impediment in O'Brien's books, hobbles this one, because the quality of brilliance isn't as dazzling as in his earlier stuff.

It's surprisingly good, like Sean Wright Phillips.

"Dante said that the hottest place in hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral... and we are passionate. This is a year for passion."

Now I'm reading volume two of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series: A Tale of the Future. I loved the first, so this one shouldn't disappoint.

[sniff, sniff sniff] So far, this book has the most amazing ability to make you recall scents. There was a passage about fireworks and I swear that I could suddenly smell a match that had just been struck. So weird...

I just finished White Teeth by Zadie Smith this morning, and fortunately remembered to bring my next book, Strong Opinions by V. Nabokov (a collection of essays and interviews) to read at lunch.

Sorry you've given up on The New Life, Archel, it's probably my favourite recently written novel. But even I'll admit that Pamuk's style of writing can sometimes be almost the opposite of page-turning. It's very dense, there's too many ideas, events, twists and turns on evry page.

One thing I would say is that far more of the loose ends and strange occurences in the middle section of the book are tied up and explained by the end than I expected. You have to trust Pamuk even when he just seems to be being weird for the sake of it.

But a lot of the pleasure I got from the book was the sense of smalltown Turkey, this huge land I knew next to nothing about.

But, I kept at it and it was a good story. Sad, though. Ann Packer's writing reminds me a lot of Ann Patchett's.

I also found a first edition (1971) of Moominvalley in November in a small Edinburgh bookshop for a grand total of £6. I have been celebrating by laying with ladies of ill-repute.

I liked Underworld, a lot, but I'll put off any more DeLillo until the winter semester break.

I wonder how the novel/graphic novel format is going to flow...

The interview gets weird when she gets mad at editor Gary Groth for not reviewing her last book when it came out. He backpedals furiously.

Cute. Luckily my brain is still child-sized so I can appreciate these books. They are beautifully written and illustrated.

Currently re-reading The Wasp Factory (prompted by an ILB discussion) - it certainly isn't having anywhere near the same impact as it did first time round and obviously it's all a bit flat when you know how it ends but I still think it's a very well crafted debut novel and I disagree with those who said Banks was playing on the shock value to make a name for himself.

I finished Jealousy last night. I guess it didn't pay off in the way I hoped it would, but I still enjoyed it. The subtle paranoia and the repetitions were well-done, especially within the short structure. I don't think he overplayed the nicely creepy "invisible narrator" tactic either. I keep feeling that if I plotted out the events of the novel in the order that they actually happened and utilized the included floor plan of the house to figure out where everyone is at all times, I might uncover some fabulous secret, but this is probably a red herring. What didn't you like about it?
I'm going to continue on to "In the Labyrinth" next.

Last night I almost picked up

I bought a lot of books yesterday. Some of which are in the mail. Several of the books I bought yesterday I will probably never read.

(It might be worth pointing out that I didn't know anything about Martin Luther, the Reformation, etc, perhaps it is old hat to you.)

Yesterday I bought a 'pre-owned' book by HENRY GREEN. It is LOVING/LIVING/PARTY GOING. I am pleased.

Anyhoo, I'm currently reading the following:
Alfred Bester - Tiger! Tiger! (AKA The Stars, My Destination)
It's pretty entertaining so far. I've heard that his other major novel, The Demolished Man, is supposed to be better, albeit [even] more pulpy. I like the idea of people being able to teleport by willpower, but choose not to do it once they reach a certain economic stature. The richer you get, the more antiquated means of transportation do you go by.
I wonder if I'll ever get tired of this sort of thing... I've probably passed the age where I'm supposed to have grown out of it, so I suppose I'm doomed for life now.

Charles Babbage - Passages from the life of a philosopher
Well, I -am- an information technology student, so I guess it's natural that I'd eventually want to start reading this sort of thing.
While he's not really credited as having been an inspiration for the creation of computers, few contest that his analytical engine was still essentially the first computer. He's quite explicit in noting that this is no autobiography though, rather "[it] relates a variety of isolated circumstances in which I have taken part [...] The selection has been made in some cases from the importance of the matter. In others, from the celebrity of the persons concerned; whilst several of them furnish interesting illustrations of human character."
In other words... Bitter old guy talks crap about everyone! (I hope... I'm not too far into it yet)

Tim Berners-Lee - Weaving The Web
More IT-history. Since there's no doubt that I'm a nerd, I might as well relish in it. It's basically a history of how he envisioned the net, and how it came to be, and insights on various parts of how it is, and what he hopes it'll become.

I decided to take a break between the two Robbe-Grillets and read "Why Things Bite Back" by Edward Tenner first. So far it's kind of a dud. Yes, new technology can have unforeseen circumstances. No shit.

I like it!

I have finished Words and Music at last, and started The Moveigoer.

Tiger! Tiger! is terrific too. I see no reason to grow out of writers as good as Bester at all.

I picked up Joe Queenan's "My Goodness" and am reading it as something lighter to read when I'm not up for "Decline and Fall", but so far it isn't nearly as enjoyable as his other books.

i just got it. it's next after i finish re-reading the rotters' club.

I finished it a couple of weeks ago. It's GRATE.

Rock, it is a different book. It's by some jackanapes called Jamie O'Neill, and it's about, well, it's about being gay around the time of the Easter Rising, I suppose. It's a very good book, almost as good as it thinks it is. I did get stuck in an annoying bit of it for a while which was not funny, educational, or germane to the story and so I became cross. But shortly after that it pulled itself out of the mud and got on with things. As you do in wartime.

I've written quite a few words on earlier threads on this forum about My Problem With Flann O'Brien (synopsis: nyeh, it's not that funny really) so I won't bore you with my opinion any further.

I am currently reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is BRILLIANT and I am only sad that there is not more of it.

For me, 99 Novels = Krautrocksampler. The enthusiasm is too much; I want to experience everything on those lists.

So is PJ Miller!!

And A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, which seems to have been hyped a lot. I think it lives up to it - very simply plotted but addictive. Before that it was Giving Up The Ghost by Hilary Mantel, which should be taught as a model for memoir-writing I think.

Now I'm reading The Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn. It's about Anne Boleyn and also Henry VIII's confectioner Lucy Cornwallis. I'm not much of a one for historical novels usually and I just got this one because I like her other (contemporary) books and I'm friends with her husband. (Is that a bad reason?)

because I found it very cheap, and because JtN invoked it in his Morley article, which made me think it must be a significant model to know.

It's funny, though not exactly engaging. It's engaging, but also disengaging? It's disarming, but heavily armed. It's sometimes well-written, possibly; perhaps sometimes knowingly, if not deliberately, not well-written.

Now reading "Life of Pi", which I must admit that I gave up on last year because of the foreword. Still reading the abridged "Guide of the perplexed" by Moses Maimonides.

Right now I'm reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell and am completely absorbed in the story-line. It's creative and a little creepy and a little funny and the characters are wonderfully likeable and dislikeable and I can't say enough good things about it (at least up till this point - about 200 more pages to go, so I hope it doesn't flounder). Unfortuantely, it's only out in hardcover and it's heavy as all get out to lug around all day.

Meanwhile I have finished 'Vineland' and have moved on to the Penguin Classics edition of the 'Odyssey'.

I'm envying you your holidays, Trish. Read with joy!

Ha ha, I read that as The Queen of Subtitles.

I seem to have got a bit stuck with that King James Bible book, just when King James comes in.

Queen of Subtitles sounds interesting!

Also I am reading poorly-written signs. I was in Evans doing some clothes shopping today and I noticed they were advertising sandles for €12. SANDLES! What the hell is wrong with people?

I was wondering yesterday whether JtN had actually gone off Murakami and was offloading his wares partly because of this, or whether the decision was purely utilitarian. But either way, I have about four of them now.

Would you like, or care, to tell me, for instance in order, which ones are best? (I hope I have not missed you saying this elsewhere.)

Haruki Murakami

Previous to this, the last novel I read was Iain M Banks' "Inversions," which I never quite got hooked on, and found it to be surprisingly slow going. It was nice overall though, and gave a different outlook than what we usually get in his Culture series.

Perhaps you shouldn't read this until you're done with the delightful Handful of Dust.
Waugh! What Is He Good For?

Otherwise, Histoire de l'Anglophobie en France by Jean Guiffan. My alltime favorite refernce is to Louis Martin's L'Anglais est-il un Juif?. The worst side of French culture in a nutshell.

It's on the Booker short list and seems to be 2nd favourite behind David Mitchell.

It was either ILB / ILE or Freaky Trigger and I prefer writing for the latter at the moment.

There are some really good posters on here, mind (Michael White and missajim spring to mind and accentmonkey too). And praise be to Scott, who set this board up and deserves credit and cake.

I just finished What to Keep - Rachel Cline and am now making my way through Kristin Gore's new book Sammy's Hill - so far so good.

I'm not sure whether his style is unlike anyone - its very conversational and he wz very good, funny, readable, direct, reminding me of John cage. I agree about how he keeps ticking over, saying lots of things in a page, unlike his music, which just develops and never quite gets anywhere - or I get lost by the time it does, you know.

I had a problem with some of his opinions - I didn't get what his problem with stockhausen but that's bcz my ear tell me that feldman does push sounds around but maybe not to the extent that stockhausen does; maybe that's the mindset you have to make original music, quibble with everything. Liked how he'd link painting with his music -one of many things I enjoyed.

right now - gary indiana's mini bk on pasolini's 'salo'.

re. Feldman. I enjoyed the book alot but don't really have the background knowledge to question his opinions too much. You know alot more about this kind of music than i do. The best parts of the book for the relative layman are when he talks about living in the same building as Cage and meeting Rauschenburg and Johns etc. It seems incredibly evocative of the era and makes you wish you were around at that time.

re. Hollinghurst - i'm just about to start "The Line of Beauty" (luckily gay sex is my thing, ha) and am not long finished Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" which seemed to me to be much less than the sum of it's parts, unfortunately. I'm quite a fan of Mitchells though and would rather like to see him win the booker in spite of my reservations. I think it's quite likely Hollinghurst will win though.

jed- I don't know about composition in terms of theory so its all surface really (heh). I wz just wondering about this idea that he doesn't 'push sounds around' - I think i know what he means but...not quite. The bk, as you say, is also about his friends and art - and I know next to nothing abt many of those people - I found it moving at times; at how he'd back his friends; at how he felt that he and they were doing something new and interesting. It moved me.

Did you watch that performance of string quartet (II) btw?

Better yet, I found the whole of The Man Who Was Friday online as well, right here(Bartleby.com). The foreword to my father's paperback copy of this one was where I first heard of Jurgen. Hooray!

That said, I love Orwell for his essays, and think his fiction is mostly "meh".

next, Robert Stead's 'Grain', a novel about prairie life from 1926. Can you tell I'm taking 'History of the Canadian Prairies'?

oh, also "The Power Game: How Washington Works", some 800+ pages mostly on the Reagan administration et al by Hedrick Smith. It's good stuff but really frustrating in a WTF sense.

-- Rabin the Cat

I've read the first sentence of that book, and want to read the whole book as a result.

and hi Mikey, nice to see you back! sorry about your leg...

Am now reading The 9/11 Commission Report. So far, it's been sad and hard to put down.

At book club tonight, we're talking about Camus - The Outsider (L'Etranger for you Francophiles). Quick, give me something intelligent to say so everyone thinks I'm brilliant.

All I've got so far is the fact that the Cure made a song out of it. Not a good justification of any book.

On my holidays I did read Middlesex, which was top class and made me not want to go out and do holiday stuff. Also Krakatoa by Simon Winchester, which was interesting but suffered from being packed a little too full of extraneous information. Then Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination, which was also GRATE and very beautifully written, even if the actual characters were rubbish and their motivations, beyond bludgeoning revenge, were questionable. And I read Trawler by Redmond O'Hanlon, which I greatly enjoyed and would have enjoyed even more if there had been a little less of the sleep-deprived ranting and more facts about wacky creatures of the deep.
Now I'm reading The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart, about the group of Cambridge scientists who split the atom. It is trying very hard to explain things in a way that even a monkey-brained idiot like me can understand, and so far I think I get it. It's also just kind of an interesting story.
Next up is I, Claudius, or maybe Funeral Games. Oh, I just don't know!
Wales, also, is lovely. There are lots of birds and seals and dolphins and things to look at, and the beer is yummy. Recommended.

Now rereading David Mitchell's Ghostwritten after seeing him at a reading last night. And I never reread books. I heart David Mitchell.

Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and Gwendoline Riley's Sick Notes are on deck.

After staying in the Ouidah Suite of the Chatiwn hotel. I thought a reread was in order.

"firbank explained that he attended the services of cambridge's enormous parish church...instead of the undergraduates' mass...because he required vast spaces for his "uprisings of mysticism""

My last read was about Meissen pottery. Might as well continue the Dresden theme. So it goes etc.

Archel: I did indeed like The Princess Bride fairly much, though I do sort of wish I'd read it ten years ago instead. The wry "abridger"'s comments throughout were a hoot.

It's about YOU.

I am glad I have finished 1984. It was good, but I really struggled at times.

Miller, some noticed Poetry Day, for instance the Mark Radcliffe show with S. Armitage: but that was not very interesting, alas.

Was Poetry Day any good for you?

The Dangers of Teleport song
I teleported home one night, with Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's Leg

I, have learnt much new stuff. From it. Its great.

Foxy, no I haven't. Is it chock full of LIES, by any chance?

I finished Sputnik Sweetheart. Either I didn't get it or it was just crap, because it just seemed resolutely insubstantial and I did not give a toss about anyone in it or what happened to them.

Can someone explain it to me?

recently have read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald and parts of The Autobiography of Mark Twain

slowly getting through Ulysses, trying to do 10 pages a day when I have some really undivided, uninterrupted time to concentrate.

picking Dance Dance Dance back up today, i really enjoyed what i'd read so far but had to put it down to read some books for a class.

That's the kind of thing I say after I've been drinking.

Over the past few days I read "The Malacia Tapestry" by Brian Aldiss. Or, to be honest, tried to read it... I managed to get about halfway in, but by then I had to give up, due to my complete lack of interest in what it told me.

I've started on Charles Maturin's Melmoth The Wanderer now, which is a whole lot more fascinating.

well, so far I just read the first chapter: pretty amazing in details and live. can't wait to go on! (there will be some brutal and canabilistic scenes coming up, it is said, but if its all written in that high standard flaubert style, I don't mind)

I don't really hate Bob Dylan, but I have to come up with some reasons to hate him before Monday, because I need the free publicity for the shop.

Yeah, well, I'm not proud of it. As one of my other mates pointed out, it's a bit sad when a telly programme has to persuade people to adopt an extreme view that doesn't reflect how they really feel in order to generate some kind of controversy. I genuinely believe that no-one should be getting that worked up about some singer who hasn't done anything worthwhile in thirty years, particularly when there are so many other things that we could be devoting the time and energy to.

That said, I find that his new book (to bring this back to books), which I have been reading, is very poorly written and most unengaging.

I found a hardback of The Corner for $2 at Salvation Army but if I read it before bed I don't go to bed.

The Granta Book of the American Short Story is available for quick access. After reading Harold Brodkey's story "The State of Grace" in it, I had to get a book of his from the library, so a laminated copy of The World Is the Home of Love and Death sits on my dresser, waiting for me to make time for it.

I'm kinda not reading anything right now, it's a bit sad.

Anyway... I have just started Sheepshagger but I am already baulking a bit, on the third page.

Now pulling my eyes along the lines of Herbert Read's "The Green Child", which I had no idea what to expect from, but which is having a great impact on me, making it both hard to put down, and harder yet to turn out of the ol' headbox. Lovely use of simple, yet vivid language, too.

I don't remember anything about Poetry Day, but I have recovered my Ivor Cutler CD, which is now up for sale on Amazon, along with the rest of my worldly possessions.

'Peoplewatching' was a bit rub, I thought. Didn't finish it. Yet. i.

Frank O'Hara again, sometimes.

Not having read any of his novels, I had always thought of Lethem as this McSweeney's set writer who thought he was being "experimental." Perhaps that's what his earlier stuff was like, but this is wonderful, warm, and very human.

Currently reading Maradona's autobiography. That man has some ego.

Pynchon, again, for me, just now.

As for me, I'm reading Dance Dance Dance, and this time, Murakami is pissed off. Seriously, he's got attitude in this one!

Started 'Leap Year', the only Steve Erickson I haven't read.

I finished The Corner. I suppose it has its problems as a book -- too long, long passages of author preaching -- but it worked some kind of miracle. It's devestating but I looked forward to reading it every day. I'm about to finish the Clinton White House vs the Media book.

I have just now remembered that The Curious Incident in the Nighttime with the Dog or whatever it's called has been waiting for me at the library for like a week, well, damn, I hope it's still waiting.

The graphic description of her vagina was unexpected. I'm not joking.

That essay on feminism -- gosh, Kingsley Amis must have been so proud of her.

I have been to Ignatius of Loyola's Museum or Basillica or whatever it is. At Loyola. They have little models of his life story, like Michael Bentine's Potty Time.

I have finished 'The Sea, The Sea'. It is very good. Now I will start a new book. It might be 'The Line of Beauty' which I got out of the library.

Very good thus far.

I finished Cloud Atlas - it was good.

Anyway, I finished Anne Frank's Diary. Predictable or what? Ha ha, I'm not funny.

Started Orlando by Virginia Woolf; a witty satire on Disneyworld.

:(:(:(:(:(:(

it is for a bet friend who needs advice and discussion

i have no idea but its rampant on ILE too.

I like it, it is not annoying.

I am, perhaps, slightly disappointed to find that The Pinefox does not favour this style in his published, works.

Am I missing something?

The writing is like walking through syrup.

PJM, your point re. Didion is very good, but I am not very well-read, so I have not read it. Oddly, I, too, have taken The Line of Beauty out of the library. I feel as though your attitude to gay sexuality has not changed since sinister. Nor, I imagine, has mine, whatever it is.

I don't know how all you people manage to read Richard Farina.

Being and Time is not worth reading.

It took me a few tries to read it. The movie is far, far better.

I have just started on the new Roth.

(Which is not to say that I disagree with you, actually.)

-- PJ Miller (pjmiller6...) (webmail), August 11th, 2004 11:54 AM. (PJ Miller)

I have attempted to do italics. I wonder if it will work.

I am disturbed to see that I have only finished one of these books, so far. I need to sort myself out. I don't think I'm going to finish The Line of Beauty either, at least not yet. It is very cumbersome in hardback.

the things she talks about in the way she talks about them, with that clean eye of hers is ahead of her time, I think. I was struck reading through the book, when I remembered that these are a bunch of 'immanent critiques', envois from the frontline - struck by how much her writing feels very modern, as if she was able to affect the feelings of disgust at & nostalgia for the sixties as she lived through them.

Overall, yes. I found it very Pynchonesque, which is strange, since both he and Pynchon were at Cornell around the same time and even knew each other. There must have been something in the water, I guess.

I think the book is basically a thinly disguised roman a clef, as Pynchon says in the Introduction. Not knowing any of the real people behind the characters though, I still got a heady sense of what it must have been like to be on a college campus in the early 60s. Farina takes a lot of risks as a writer, and many of them pay off.

As for his attitude towards women, which you alluded to, I would say that it is conflicted, and I don't necessarily approve of it, but it's the psychology of the main character that he is trying to capture, and I think he does that.

it's an interesting contrast with tom wolfe. they covered similar issues, but wolfe's 60s/70s material seems so time-capsule dated in comparison.

Well, the loopy plot twists, the large cast of characters with odd names and even odder behavior, the blurring of the line between reality and hallucination, the hints at allegorical symbolism that never quite resolve - the writing at times seems as enamored of sophomoric hi-jinx as the sophomores it describes - which I think contributes to its effect. I think I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much if I wasn't already a Pynchon fan. My mind would constantly find parallels between this book and the Pynchon oevre. For instance, when the gang carefully lifts Gnossos's enormous turd out of the toilet so they can have it preserved, one thinks of the similarly coprophiliac scene in Gravity's Rainbow when Slothrop dives into the toilet after the lost harmonica. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about the connection between these scenes and the mental age of the characters (and writers?)

I suppose I already knew that, in a way.

I've started Friday Night Lights based on my wife's recommendation, but I'm not sure I want to deal with anything that "reveals America, warts and all" right now. I've had my fill of American showing me its misplaced priorities.

Unless you meant something else.

Ahoy there, me hearties! I am reading Rites of Passage by William Golding. It makes me feel a bit seasick. I suppose this is quite clever.

Didion shows the Doors 'recording', ie. doing nothing. I suppose that illustrates the maxim 'First, do no harm'.

'scots criminal law'

'the political unconscious'

'birds of america'

I have a kind of affection for the penultimate.

I must respect the first.

The second, only you know.

"School? Oh, you mean the thing going on in the background while I was listening to the Beatles?"

I have gone madly middle-brow and am reading 'Notes on a Scandal' by Zoe Heller, 'The Taxi Driver's Daughter' by Julia Darling and 'Atonement' by Ian McEwan. I WAS reading 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' which I'd finally picked up in a charity shop, but alas it was in my bag which was stolen on Sunday :(

Found it in a bag I nicked.

I am slowly reading Rumours of a Hurricane which I expected to be worse than it is.

I know, I know. It's that mischevious streak surfacing again.

I'm sort of scared by that bit where the old guy speaks for thirty pages about the subtle beauty of kicking a dog to death. I don't remember which of the books it's in though.

Seriously, how and where? I've been mugged before: Story here: http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/seven/2004_09_01_seven_archive.html (down the bottom somewhere)

I hope you're OK.

If it's any consolation, I was mugged twice in a week once. I know it isn't.

Is nowhere safe?

i'm really enjoying the Homes book. quite entertaining.

There, you wanted to know that, didn't you? I hope you're ok, Archel.

And Rabin, if you're around, I do remember that ages ago you asked me for specific examples of Bill Bryson's patronising attitude because you always thought that he loved Britain. I agree that he does, but he seems to love it in spite of all its funny little ways. I can't be more specific than that because I donated the book after I read it, I just don't like him. I do remember him making several inaccurate statements about the Irish language, which really annoyed me for two reasons. One, I found it kind of patronising, and two, if he can't be bothered to be right about that, how do I know he's right about the things I don't know?

I finished reading Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, and I really recommend it. I thought it was great.

I feel sorry fo Scott's mugger. A Hawkwind tape! What poor spoils.

I am still reading 'Rites of Passage'. I don't like it much. I would like to read a jolly book. Can anyone recommend a jolly book?

Years later I was mugged in the snow and it was much more frightening for some reason. I was walking home and a car stopped in the middle of the street and a guy ran out of the car and up to me. He grabbed me and went thru my pockets. He pulled out a couple of dollars, looked at them, and then threw them on the snowy ground in disgust. I am such a disappointment to the criminals of the world.

I'm flying through that Homes book. It would make a great movie. But maybe the whole American Beauty/David Lynch tearing-the-curtains-off-of-suburbia thing has been done to death by now. (and yet, i watch Desperate Housewives every week. So, apparently I haven't gotten enough yet.) Nothing will probably ever beat the tag-team of Alfred Hitchcock & Thornton Wilder & Shadow Of A Doubt anyway.

I might finally read some Peter Carey next. I've got Jack Maggs & The Tax Inspector. Which should I read first? hmmmmmm......

Fighting Fantasy: Deathtrap Dungeon - Ian Livingstone

We have to bring dice to our next meeting. We'll probably get beaten up discussing it. And rightly so.

Paraphrased from Jonathan Coe - What a Carve Up.

Jolly, what?

I've never been mugged, though I've twice had a purse stolen from my bag, and that was bad enough.

We told the police and found his mug shot on what I can only describe as a gypsy thief database.

Then we got mugged. My ex didn't end up scoring. Which, I suppose, was OK -- the guy went back to Iowa or wherever, kept in touch with my ex, and eventually admitted he was HIV+.

I couldn't find anything decent, so I'm reading Harry Pooter No.5

Did anyone else remember to send John McGahern a birthday card yesterday? No? Just me then.

Now starting "A Mighty Heart" by Mariane Pearl, the biography about her husband Danny, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped & killed in Pakistan.

DEATHTRAP DUNGEON is ace.

I have never been mugged. I live in South London, sometimes, see.

Cozen, we have to talk about Sean O'Brien, again, I think.

I am reading 'who is the? bring back the... who isThe Prince by Machiavelli. For a nosy parker it's an interesting book. I am also reading the Sunday papers.

Next, I've got 'Something Happened', 'The Maltese Falcon', Mezz Mezzrow's 'Really The Blues' and Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor' to choose from.

I guess the easy answer is the war.

I got a book by Ian 'not Kenny' Sansom. It's about babies and I got it from the charity shop.

It's really good!

oh, no. that's bad and untrue and and all that. roundly terrible.

But Cozen, no, the piece was not terrible, at all. It was good - just didn't hit a new height, for such a good writer. He is good on readers, I guess; and I like the line from Edmund Wilson about reading in summer, and all that. Very Michael Wood.

There was a great piece on Powell by Michael Wood in 2000 or so, but that's another story, or at least, another review.

PJM: here's a funny thing: today I took THE LINE OF BEAUTY back to the library, not having got past p.1, and must pay a 70p fine! It's a good thing I didn't delay returning it even longer.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n03/wood01_.html

Reviewers are always sternly instructed to check page proofs against finished copies of books, and I do, I will. But the proofs of Anthony Powell's A Writer's Notebook provide, along with numerous unimportant oddities of phrase and spelling which seem to be errors of transcription from script to voice to type to print ('I would like to thank my wife, who read the manuscript book onto tape, and also Helen Gould, who typed it'), one lovely new alignment which ought not to be allowed simply to vanish into its own correction. It's good to get things right, but we don't have to rush it. Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time has 12 volumes, of which the tenth is called Books Do Furnish a Room; he wrote two further, later novels, not in the sequence, called O How the Wheel Becomes It and The Fisher King. The Powell offered to us here, in the pre-title list of his books, is the author of a nine-volume sequence of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time, and a further four-volume sequence called Books to Furnish a Room.

The attraction of the slip is manifold. It is just the kind of thing that would happen within a Powell novel. It would be followed by various comic complications, intricate embarrassments, sundry opportunities for adultery or switches of sexual allegiance, and might involve a politician or two. It would go 'rackety', to use a favourite Powell word. In his Journals he mentions 'rackety parties', 'the rackety side of life' (this in connection with Scott Fitzgerald), a 'somewhat rackety woman', and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin's novel Jill is said to be 'an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate'. 'Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,' Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually women, who have this link. They fall for, or hang out with, composers, writers, singers, painters, get involved in little magazines or dubious publishing houses. The link, presumably, is a certain freedom from what's expected; but the rackety types are a lot freer than the intellectuals, and they notch up love affairs of a kind the intellectuals can only dream of.

The slip also points us directly to the title of the tenth volume in the sequence of novels, and to Powell's continuing preoccupation with reading or the lack of it. The phrase is the nickname of one Lindsay Bagshaw, a shabby but not disagreeable literary operator, who brings out some of Powell's best comic writing. Bagshaw has been taken as a representation of Malcolm Muggeridge, a connection which Powell, in his Journals, first denies then half accepts. Well, perhaps he just denies intending it. 'This too never intended,' he notes - the other connection he is refusing is that of the fictional don Sillery with the historical Maurice Bowra. But then Powell adds that rereading his own novels 'brought Malcolm to mind more than once in case of Bagshaw, quite involuntary on my part'. Bagshaw is 'not in the front rank of literary critics', indeed we are told 'there might have been difficulty in squeezing him into an already overcrowded and grimacing back row,' but he is a survivor, possessed of a 'wheedling, self-deprecatory manner', which has 'procured him a wide variety of jobs, extracted him from equally extensive misadventures'. 'His movements,' we learn, when the narrator, after many years of not seeing him, catches sight of Bagshaw on a railway platform, 'suggested hope to avoid recognition, while a not absolutely respectable undertaking was accomplished.' There are two stories about how he came by his nickname. In one, Bagshaw is drunk, and, seeking to verify a quotation from Palgrave's Golden Treasury, pulls over a vast bookcase on himself. As the many volumes fall on him, he is said to have commented: 'Books do furnish a room.' In the other story, he is about to sleep with the wife of a well-known drama critic - the chap himself is away at the first night of The Apple Cart - and glancing around the critic's booklined study, and demonstrating what the erring lady took to be an extreme lack of sensibility, he is supposed to have remarked: 'Books do furnish a room.' The narrator thinks neither story is likely to be true, but that makes the nickname all the more irresistible. Drink, sex and scholarship point to one end. Bagshaw knows that books are not furniture, but his jokes and his career suggest an easy understanding of all the people who can't imagine what else books would be.

Powell himself would probably have been amused by the slip on the pre-title page, since he shares Bagshaw's perception of the place, if not the value, of books in the social world. Most of the characters in the novels themselves are the reverse of great readers. 'Books,' we are told, 'were by no means the first interest' of Sir Magnus Donners, the industrialist. That is putting the matter mildly, although it is true that when he thought he was dying, Sir Magnus set himself 'to read the best - only the best - of all literatures, English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian'. Even then, of course, he left a few literatures out, and when he learned the doctors had got the diagnosis wrong, he just 'went back to making money, governing the country, achieving all-time records in utterance of conversational cliché', as the narrator's friend Moreland phrases it. There is also Bill Truscott, tipped for greatness when he was a young man, who turns with age into a stodgy civil servant, and tells the narrator: 'I never read novels nowadays.' Perhaps remembering his old reputation for sophistication, or in the narrator's fussy but very funny phrasing, 'possibly thinking that admission . . . suggested a too headlong falling off from what had once been an all-embracing intellectual coverage', he then corrects himself. 'That is, you understand, I don't find much time, with so many things going on - as we all have - of course, I fully intend . . . and naturally . . .' A few years later, the narrator, himself a novelist, is seated at dinner next to a woman who says brightly: 'I'm afraid I haven't read any of your books. I believe you write books, don't you? I hope you won't mind that.' Not much he can do if he does mind, and he mildly tells us he is 'in the process of picking out one of the several routine replies designed to bridge this not at all uncommon conversational opening' when a rackety interruption dispenses with all need to respond. But he certainly could have found, among the routine replies, a remark about books furnishing a room.

Powell's Notebook is not a journal (he published two volumes of journals, as well as four volumes of memoirs, and the two novels I have mentioned, after he finished A Dance to the Music of Time), but a slender, concentrated gathering, over a very long time, of phrases and names and jokes and ideas. Powell himself says he doesn't know when he started it, but, taking his cue from the early appearance of a name which surfaces in his first novel, Afternoon Men, supposes the date must have been around 1930. On the last page, the phrase 'Under Review' is offered as a possible title, and since Powell published a collection of criticism called that in 1991, the closing date might be around 1990 or a little before. A Dance to the Music of Time was published between 1951 (A Question of Upbringing) and 1975 (Hearing Secret Harmonies). Powell was born in 1905 and died in 2000.

Powell comments in the Notebook on 'Henry James's inability to invent good proper names' - the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times - and certainly suffers from no such inability himself. 'Drawbridge, a butler', he writes. 'Blackhead, a civil servant'. 'Stringham . . . Roderick . . . Watkin . . . Tokenhouse'. But then we might remember that Powell borrowed the name of Widmerpool, his lamentably, pompously comic recurring character, from a Cromwellian captain of horse. Powell says in his introduction that 'increasingly, throughout the Notebook, Shakespeare became my companion, his point of view ever more congenial.' This sounds pretty grand, even Widmerpoolish, and it's a pleasure to report that what Powell gets out of Shakespeare, on the evidence of the Notebook, is mainly a series of wonderful anachronistic jokes, as when he recalls the character in Antony and Cleopatra (Scarus), who says just before the battle for Alexandria that he has 'yet room for six scotches more'. The OED gives 'incision, cut, score or gash' as the first meaning for 'scotch', and cites this passage. Powell also notes that Sonnets 74, 77 and 82 indicate that 'the Young Man was a reviewer.' The indicative phases are: 'When thou reviewest this, thou dost review/The very part was consecrate to thee'; 'The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear,/And of this book this learning mayst thou taste'; 'The dedicated words which writers use/Of their fair subject, blessing every book'.

There are certainly lumpy and blinkered moments in the Notebook. 'One of the basic human rights is to make fun of people,' Powell says. 'It is now threatened.' It's a pleasure to make fun of people, and it's good to be able to take it. But it looks more like a privilege than a right. Not all of Powell's joke are hilarious ('he had taken an aegrotat in the university of life'; 'one touch of Nietzsche makes the whole world kin'; 'those whom the sods love die young'), but it seems hard to demand a perfect score from a notebook, and many of the jokes manage to be both obvious and oblique ('a male prostitute called samphire, because he was a "dreadful trade"'; 'I saw them coming up the street together looking like Culture and Anarchy'; 'did Tiny Tim not die at all, but grew up to join the firm of Scrooge and Marley and become like Tiny Rowland?'). A 'Jubilee Ode' for the Queen runs:

Though she may not ponder Borges
When she's cutting meat for corgis
At least a dozen answer to her helm
And in visiting a Naafi
She rarely quotes Cavafy
She's an expert on the bloodstock of her realm.

There are pithy phrases of the kind one imagines notebooks are designed for (but rarely contain): 'an author who allows himself a good deal of platitude'; 'it's too late now to die young'; 'the beauties of yesterday become muttering, mad old women.'

All this is entertaining, but I don't think we can claim it's revealing. There are thoughts here of the kind one imagines novelists storing up for themselves or their characters, but not many of them. A reflection on large families ('I am an only child, accordingly there has always seemed to me something sinister about large families') finds its way into the narrator's mind in At Lady Molly's. An idea about reading ('reading novels demands almost as much talent as writing them') is given to the writer X. Trapnel in Books Do Furnish a Room. The closest we get to an insight about what drives or organises the fiction is perhaps this remark: 'a great deal of individual success in life is based on not having the slightest idea of what other people are like.' We might back it up by this apparently unrelated comment: 'the English, unlike the Americans or even continentals, never really believe in the existence of the world around them.' Not knowing what other people are like, which may go with not knowing what we ourselves are like - 'self-love is so often unrequited,' Powell says in another jotting - allows us to ignore all kinds of differences and obstacles, while not believing in the existence of the world around us allows us to trample on and even steal whole chunks of it without thinking it real enough to suffer loss or damage. A version of empire, familiar enough in its domestic or intimate instances, too. But ignorance and error will only take us so far, and they can bring with them, in Powell's fiction and in lived history, colossal and frequently comic comeuppances. 'Success in life', for Powell the novelist, is an object of curiosity, a form of social behaviour to be tracked with interest, but always from a distance, and none of his more reflective characters, however fully achieved their art or thought or career, could be called 'a success'. The very idea usually produces its counter-image immediately, like the sight of the only manuscript of Trapnel's novel floating in the Regent's Park Canal, where his mistress has dumped it. 'Do you know what all that mass of paper looks like,' Trapnel says, lucid although very drunk. 'A manuscript. Probably someone's first novel. Authors always talk of burning their first novel. I believe this one's drowned his.' Then he fishes the book out of the water and realises it is his. 'I never thought of this,' he says. 'I never thought she'd destroy my book.' The narrator comments: 'He stood there, still smiling slightly, almost as if he were embarrassed by what had happened.' This is the revenge of the rackety on the very idea of success, and we realise that for Powell it's not only successful people who haven't the slightest idea of what other people are like. Or rather we do have the slightest idea, but only the slightest. Its slightness is our undoing.

In A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell has his narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, talk constantly, and rather ploddingly, of pattern and design. The very title, with its glance at Poussin, evokes rhythm and return, and the novels are devoted to coincidence, both as a sort of realism of the improbable - an implied claim that actual life has more coincidences than most fiction allows itself - and as a structuring principle, which Powell himself calls a convention and a convenience. 'Life continued in its mysterious, patterned way,' Jenkins says when he comes across Widmerpool in a quite new context after not seeing him for some time, but it's not at all clear that life does anything of the sort, even in Powell's novels. A little later, Jenkins tries to find 'some parallel, however far-fetched', between Widmerpool and the retired General Conyers (a man who holds the theory 'that poodles, owing to their keen natural intelligence, could profitably be trained as gun dogs' - the next we hear of him he is 'indisposed' after falling 'headlong from the stable loft where the poodles' food was stored'). Jenkins says he is 'hoping to construct one of those formal designs in human behaviour which for some reason afford an obscure satisfaction to the mind: making the more apparent inconsistencies of life easier to bear'. This is pretty vague, but it's clear that Jenkins would like to find the designs he is forced extravagantly to construct, and that life's patterned way, when it is not a convenience, is a consolatory fantasy.

The more you read Powell, the more ironic the title of his sequence becomes. Characters do disappear and return, like figures in a dance; although some of them just disappear, as several of them shockingly do in a bombing raid in The Soldier's Art. But when they return, their situation or behaviour usually mocks the very idea of pattern or prediction, and Jenkins remarks on his own bafflement even more frequently than he remarks on the dance effect. 'One never learns to expect the obvious,' he says. 'To be told something that comes as a surprise, then find everyone has known about it for ages, is no uncommon experience.' By the end of the sequence it's clear that only someone like the unctuous and obnoxious Canon Paul Fenneau is still talking about the music of time: 'To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.' To everyone else, there is scarcely anything except surprises. Jenkins even manages, while on military service during the war, to visit Cabourg, Proust's Balbec, without knowing he has been there until he has left, and is provoked to characteristic musings. His 'faint sense of disappointment' is 'in its way suitably Proustian too': 'a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond 100 per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.'

Prose like this, of course, is what makes Powell unreadable for many, and Jenkins's own regular apologies for his bumbling don't help a great deal. He sees himself as indulging in 'rather banal reflections', and has no illusions about the 'subtlety' of his 'speculations'. His 'professional reflections', he says at one point, are 'at best subjective, at worst intolerably tedious'. But then this just means his impersonation of a bore is at times so perfect as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, and I don't think anything at all can be said in defence of sentences like: 'In a writer's life, as time shortens, work tends to predominate, among other things resulting in a reduction of attendance at large conjunctions of people.' Fewer parties, in other words. And Jenkins's discretion about his private life is downright pathological. 'With the age of 30 in sight a sense of guilt in relation to that subject makes itself increasingly felt.' 'That subject' is marriage: the passive mood hides what it's supposed to hide, but also reveals that a lot of hiding is going on. The following instance is even stranger, because it begins in the first person and slithers off into generalised allegory: 'I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films.' Oh, that time of life. Trying to make the individual self disappear, Jenkins succeeds only in absurdly universalising it.

In his Journals 1987-89, where he reports on a rereading of the whole of A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell says he thinks the work is 'as far from A la recherche in one direction as from The Forsyte Saga in another'. At times it seems even further from any lived human life than it is from either. But Powell goes on to distinguish himself from Waugh and the resort to farce. This is helpful, and we are left, those of us who keep reading Powell and keep quietly laughing, with a sense of discreet comedy which needs further definition. In Books Do Furnish a Room Jenkins comments on a distinction Burton makes between satire and comedy: he calls it an 'antithesis'. On the last page of the last volume Jenkins quotes Burton again, this time distinguishing between 'comical' and 'tragical matters'. Of course comedy often slips into tragedy, satire or farce, and a good thing too. But Powell's 'tone' - a term he uses often and a compositional element he worries about a lot - rests on the maintenance of a comedy which doesn't slip, or slips only into pallor, not into another genre. He allows himself, to borrow his own phrase, a good deal of platitude, but that's not all there is.

Stealth and obliquity are essential to Powell's style. 'Without making excessive claims for Sir Bertram's imperturbability, or good humour, one could see that it took more than an excited elderly man . . . socially to discompose him these days.' This may mean that the irascible and unpleasant Sir Bertram has acquired a little self-control, or has traded his bad temper for pompousness, or just got old and tired, but what's funny is the (wild) idea of making excessive claims for his imperturbability or good humour - one has only to think of them to see that any claims at all would be out of place. We can find effects like these everywhere in Powell: in an image like that of 'the unbelievably inexpert adjustment' of a soldier's false teeth - horrors of dentistry lurk in the formal phrasing - or that of certain British officers, failing to live up to Marshal Lyautey's requirement of 'gaiety' in a military man, who 'had to be admitted to fall unequivocally short in that respect'. 'Unbelievably inexpert' and 'unequivocally short' look like simple periphrasis; like 'large conjunctions of people', or 'a sense of guilt in relation to that subject'. But they are periphrasis as irony rather than avoidance; like sentences in Jane Austen, they take you back to the issues they pretend to abandon.

A characteristic experience in reading Powell is laughing two sentences too late - not because you've only just got the joke (there isn't a joke), but because the comic implications of the earlier sentence were so beautifully disguised in bumbling. When Charles Stringham, a friend of Jenkins, mentions his time at Oxford, he does so with flamboyant understatement: 'I explained . . . that my own college days had been among the most melancholic of a life not untinged by shadow.' When Jenkins himself offers the same sentiment, he manages to sound like Dr Johnson rewriting Salad Days:

Reverting to the university at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition. As the train drew up at the platform, before the local climate had time to impair health, academic contacts disturb the spirit, a more imminent gloom was re-established, its sinewy grip in a flash making one young again.

Everything is closely placed here: the word 'reverting', the balanced clauses, the 'sinewy grip', and the startling equation of youth with misery. Powell makes us laugh by turning upside down what we took to be the truth. And at his best, he makes us laugh again, because the upside down version now looks a little truer than the other one.

Another characteristic reading experience, which occurs largely at the level of the chapters rather than the sentences, is being ready to laugh a little too soon. Powell structures his novels through set-pieces, usually social occasions, elaborately prepared, and then wrecked by a ludicrous (or occasionally disastrous) interruption. The effect is not farcical but it is, most of the time, comic. We know the interruption is coming, we even know it's likely to involve Widmerpool, but we don't know how, and we are already amused by the waiting. A funeral starts in a country church, for example:

Rain was pouring down in steely diagonals across the gravestones. Within the medieval building, large for a country church, the temperature was lower than in the open, the interior like a wintry cave . . . There was a longish, rather nerve-wracking wait, emphasised by much coughing and clearing of throats. Then came manifestations from the porch.

'Manifestations' is one of Powell's carefully unspecific words. We don't know what they are yet, or who's producing them, but we do know they will be rackety and funny. And we know, or hope for, something else. We expect the interruption not only to break up the formal occasion, but to enhance it or confirm it in some way, fill it out, just as Powell's best sentences make the upside down version of the truth look truer. In this instance the interruption comes from Widmerpool and five other people, first having an argument outside the church and then 'advancing up the aisle in diamond formation'. They are the ragged and various remnants of the dead man's life in publishing and politics, a sort of disgraceful moving tableau of his past. A little earlier, Powell evokes a previous funeral in the same place, where a party of German prisoners of war improbably wandered across the churchyard, 'forming a rough-and-ready, unknowing guard of honour' to the just buried corpse, which happened to be that of a war hero. Jenkins's speculations here do not abandon his cautious and middle-winded idiom, but they do offer a full-blown theory of what Powell thinks is happening when we seem to hear the music of time.

As so often on such occasions, the sharp contrast between life and death was emphasised by one of those incongruous incidents that seem to bear on the character or habits of the deceased. So far from diminishing the nature of the ceremony, their aptness often increases its intensity, bypassing, so to speak, ingenuities of ritual and music, bridging with some peculiar fitness the gulf presented to the imagination by the fact of death. The sensibilities are brought up with a start to accept what has happened by action or scene, outwardly untimed, inwardly apposite.

Untimed and apposite. Lacking 'formal design' or anything resembling a 'mysterious, patterned way', life in Powell's novels, and indeed often outside them, manages to provide a comic and moving commentary on itself, because unscripted chance can behave like a writer, and because the imagination, desperate or just idle, is haunted by the idea of aptness, which others have called a rage for order. Taking Shakespeare's scotches as our Scotches begins to look less like a lamentable if wonderful joke, and more like a miniature instance of how far we are ready to go for our untimed music.

(He = JtN, not MW.)

(Must reread this shebang; I recall it as being quite marvellous.)

I would like to reply: huh, he should see my notebooks - but no, it would not convince.

Are we going to discuss your CD, or SO'B, or whatever, some time?

Cozen, I want to send you something again, today, I mean, something else, today. I will try to remember to do it. It's not something that I did mesel.

About the CD, though, Cozen -- odd! ?

Currently reading The Minority Report (collected shorts by Philip K Dick). Mostly straightforward sci-fi but with the odd bit of PKD weirdness. The most disappointing PKD work I've read since the "Early Novels" collection.

No idea what's next.I might try Archie McPherson's Jock Stein biog.

Must remember ILB exists, I forget to come in here for months at a time.

I'm reading Lawrence Block, of whom I believe Martin is a fan. I'm not sure yet that I can truly enjoy the work of someone who'd call a book 'The Cancelled Czech', but it's early days...

Set in the ha ha, 'near future'.

I still can't find Diary of a Nobody.

Guide to Financial Markets is very good though.

Unlike The Independent, but that is a newspaper.

I just this minute got a poetry book in the mail - The Brink by Jacob Polley - so I'll be dipping in and out of that now too.

Sorry you didn't like Block, Archel!

Norman Lewis - The Tomb in Seville (about a journey made in 1934 when Primo de Rivera was agitating for a fight.)

From the Jefferson:

"Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken."

(Actually he spells it "œconomy".)

Is it any good? I enjoyed the first two in this series but I've read mixed reports about this one.

So I believe this is another mixed review for you!