Post-solstice thread with the mostest - what have you been reading? (2010 remix)

A new thread was suggested. A new thread has been supplied. I am too busy now getting ready for Xmas visitors to read, but I promise to get back to you all. Shall I pencil in Dec 26?

'America, Empire of Liberty' - David Reynolds

Just finished Willard Gibbs by Muriel Rukeyser. Amazing.

New England history, Henry Adams and ancestors, William James and clan, entropy, the IG Farben cartel up to WW2, Africans... Thomas Pynchon with his parallel roots read this book very early on and used it as a map, it's self-evident.

Henderson speaks now of the parts: scientists have avoided what Gibbs dared to consider, systems with many components, except when they could use the statistical treatment. In the problems, great complexity is reached immediately, for all those changing factors depend on each other as the members of a society, and secondary changes increase at breakneck speed as the number increases very slightly. "The nature of the case will be more readily appreciated by reference to another branch of biology in which our intuitions are better practiced. Consider a human society of n individuals and let n equal successively 2, 3, 10, and 20." With two or three persons, we have the short story, in which relationships are often successfully managed, Henderson continues; with ten individuals to keep alive, he doubts whether the greatest poets or novelists have done their work of description successfully; and with twenty characters, he says description is possible only if most of the figures are puppets. One thinks of Tolstoy, of Shakespeare or Balzac as masters of such equilibrium, but counting the few who have dared to consider systems of living complexity, one recognizes another possible use of Gibbs's powerful results.

Challenge accepted!

That was the pale life, whose faces were read distantly, and slipped away, whose letters were torn up, burned, anyway destroyed. The life behind that burned. Hill-slopes, scattered yellow and blue with the familiar flowers and the flowering trees, and the darker wooded hills of Germany and the light-pointed Riviera; the return forever home, to know these streets, only these few streets except for the handful of trips made to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, at which the sparks of contact with the men who could possibly find his thought were struck. But of his life there is left only a husk of legend, the cast-off and repudiated anecdotes, and the little stories theat suddenly illuminate one side of greatness. The other side is its own youth and strengthening; to that side his death was only a minor episode. That life began with the shaping of the first images; he thought in images, and as these designs and balances, the strict intricate dances of equilbrium, came through, the new sciences took root. And they grew with a jungle growth, not in the restricted avenues of commerce, but in their applications which are the applications of of any kind of truth purified...

Ladies and gentlemen, case closed.

'the financial lives of the poets' by jess walter - dug it, quick read

'future missionaries of america' by matthew vollmer - enjoying it on the whole, a little too same-y, liked the title story best

also i just ordered like $60 worth of tao lin books - i dont make wise choices w/ $

did you order them from him? if i were going to spend that much on tao lin i would order them from him and 'personalised'

i just read shoplifting. like, today. he is definitely talented but, you know, i don't know.

lol yes i think i do know...

naw i dont really want them personalized idk maybe i should have

The new Alice Munro - wow! so far - excellent Christmas gift

reading Day of the Jackal right now; was excited at first, less so after discovering it's largely fiction!

james, post here if you notice the weird name mix-up in the last story!

'the financial lives of the poets' by jess walter - dug it, quick read
is this good? i just got it from my boss for Xmas, oddly enough!

Just read Alice Munro, 'Hateship, Friendship...'
Now reading Patrick Lane, 'There Is a Season' - his memoir.

james, post here if you notice the weird name mix-up in the last story!

Now I feel dense--I did not notice this! Who/what?

last paragraph of 250, first paragraph of 251: sophia is called sonya (more than once!)

i just read shoplifting. like, today. he is definitely talented but, you know, i don't know.

There's a good interview with Tao Lin on Bookworm.

I don't know, either. I'm kind of inclined to wait and see what he writes in 10 years.

But this is amusing:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw091203tao_lin/bw091203Tao_Lin480x172.jpg

great comments thread

ricky garni · 1 week ago
Martha is right. I am 52, and I don't get Tao Lin. And I do not think of him as a modern existentialist. What comes across to me is a general laziness, lack of craft and discipline, lack of inventiveness, lack of imagination. I came across a lot of writing like Tao Lin's when I taught school, and I sincerely do not mean this as an offense, but this style of writing was most prevalent among students who were on Ritalin.

(...)

Chrys Avenue · 1 week ago
Hi Mr./Ms. Garni,
I am Tao Lin's publisher. Could you please reply here or send me an email at i✧✧✧@mhpbo✧✧✧.c✧✧. I would like to get your permission to use the following quote of yours on the back cover of Mr. Lin's next book:

"I came across a lot of writing like Tao Lin's when I taught school, and I sincerely do not mean this as an offense, but this style of writing was most prevalent among students who were on Ritalin."

Thank you in advance.

-CA

mr.bf · 1 week ago
i'm 64 years old. i look at tao's blog almost every day and shit talk him where ever i can. i used to try to write books, now i just write in the comments section of tao lin interviews. i want everyone to know tao is bad at writing and art and being a human. if you think tao lin is good, you are also probably bad.

Ritaolin · 1 week ago
I like Ritalin. It's like opening a door and then just standing there with the doorknob in your hand and not walking through the door. That's what Ritalin feels like. I am not Tao Lin. I am RiTaolin.
Reply1 reply · active 1 week ago
0
Ann · 1 week ago
I like Ritalin too. But I've never heard of this Tao Lin person.
Why does this strange comments page appear when you google "Ritalin"?

John A. Williams! Why didn't people tell me about him? (Okay, people did and I didn't listen). Since The Man Who Cried I Am is sort of about Wright, I've been reading some Wright too -- the later, nonfiction, of which an anthology was published last year, and then a book (Popular Fronts) about Wright and his circle in Chicago in the 30s-40s (although its less about wright, and I think argues that it is less "his circle" than folks think) and from there on to Willard Motley's 2nd book (his first one -- Knock On Any Door -- has to be one of the best works of straightforward social realism I've read) which I think is relatively unknown, and from there, Frank London Brown and soforth.

last paragraph of 250, first paragraph of 251: sophia is called sonya (more than once!)

Weirdly, this is not in mine--but thi is the UK edeition, printed later. Maybe someone spotted the error.

I was given the Paris Review Interviews as a gift and have racing through them. Like eating marshmallows.

The new Alice Munro - wow! so far - excellent Christmas gift

yah its r good huh - "some women" in particular, which made me kind of dizzy

that fallada translation "everyone dies alone" isnt all that great. in fact its kind of boring

A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe

finished:

Kiss Me Judas, Will Christopher Baer

started yesterday:

2666, Roberto Bolano

Waa! I loved the Fallada too! The only Michael Hofmann translation I haven't enjoyed is 'Land of Green Plums', and the problems I had were not with the translation but the original book, I suspect.

disappointing pile of holiday reading:

martin scott, thraxas at the races
geeta dayal's 33 1/3 book on eno's another green world
george r.r. martin, a storm of swords
david denby, snark
tao lin, shoplifting from american apparel
robert v.s. redick, the red wolf conspiracy
eric ambler, a passage of arms
joyce carol oates, rape: a love story

they were all ok i guess

After the excellent Leo Perutz: Master of the Day of Judgement (ace between-wars Viennese fiction about a deadly book -- OR IS IT?!?) and the very enjoyable Madison Smartt Bell: Silent Cut (1980s thriller republished by Hard Case Crime), I have hit three duds in a row.

Alison Whitelock: Poking Seaweed with a Stick and Running Away from the Smell -- turned out to be not very compeling misery memoir, written in Scots, gave up after 50 pages

Helen fitzgerald: The Devil's Staircase -- blurb made it look interesting ("Bronnie has just arrived in London from Australia. She's never had sex, taken drugs, or killed anyone. Within a month, she's done all three."), but first half was sketchily and unbelievably written, and then it turned into sadistic torture porn--gave up after 100 pages

Peter Handke: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick -- liked another book by Handke, but this one so far seems pretty spurious. Will finish it, but only becase it's under 90 pages long.

ive read quite a bunch l8ly but the best of it was p highsmith's "this sweet sickness" which had an enjoyably clammy early january quality. also:

dan choan: await your reply
sarah waters: the little stranger
fallada: everyone dies alone
durham: acaia trilogy books 1 & 2 (<-- these sucked fyi)

Not been reading much except the Paris Review Interviews - more or less finished vols 2,3,4. Also re-read Fiesta (Hemingway); rereading Mrs Dalloway very slowly; Simon Mawer's "The Glass Room" (enjoyable read, well written, crafted and researched, no particular originality or distinction of style, a bit lifestyle-magaziney, the sexual content is a bit soft-porn and doesn't ring true, but a decent choice for a long train journey or flight). Next Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood I think.

l c knights -- 'drama and society in the age of jonson'

2666, Roberto Bolano
Tender, Nigel Slater
The Happy Prince and Other Short Stories, Oscar Wilde

on the go at the moment.

Return From The Dead: Classic Mummy Stories (very mediocre entry in the Tales Of Mystery & Supernatural line - most of the book is taken up by a frankly dull Bram Stoker novella. Then there's Poe beating a far too obvious joke into the ground, and something called "The Mummy" by Jane Webb which is actually pretty awesome crazy sci-fi until you realise it's just an excerpt from a novel. Two pretty great Conan Doyle short stories rescue the package.)
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami - two volumes in, and decided to take a brief respite to read...
The Quare Fellow, Brendan Behan

Read a compilation of short pieces, mostly on the subject of theater, by Robertson Davies, Happy Alchemy, published posthumously. A modest, but pleasant book.

Now starting The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, in NYRB Classics series. (The Introduction by Terry Teachout was lousy, btw.) If I can just get used to the narrator's voice, which was a bit problematic in the first twenty pages I've read, due to some rather strained efforts at establishing her quirkiness credentials, I think the novel may prove to be at least half of what it is built up to be.

Having read alimosina's description of the Willard Gibbs upthread, now reading Muriel Rukeyser's Traces of Thomas Hariot. Very enjoyable.

My brother bought me a cheap edition of some 'Tales of Unease', as the collection has it of Conan Doyle - the first of which is one of of the mummy stories that Daniel_Rf mentions. The introduction goes quite a long way in trying to suggest this was the origination of Mummy-as-horror lit. I wouldn't like to say: there's none of the lumbering swaddling that characterises later imagery, but I certainly don't know of anything earlier. Egyptology in Victorian genre fiction anyone?

Who took the photo on the front of Dud Avocado? I've seen it before somewhere, but can't remember where, and it's bugging me.

Photo credit is given to Erwin Blumenfeld (for NYRB edition).

Working on both De Capo Best Music Writing 2009 and E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea: Gay Black Men of the South. Picked up the lateset issue of The Black Scholar, themed "The Politics of Biracialism".

i finished love is colder than death: the life & times of rainer werner fassbinder and i liked it a lot. i'm gonna start the piano teacher because it's due next week.

i just read another one of hers. it was brilliant/horrible

In 2010 so far:

Julio Cortazar - Hopscotch. I went for the reading in the 'mad' sequence instead of chapters 1-56-ignore the rest. Not sure it mattered too much.

Dave Hickey - Air guitar was a much better account of a bohemian and his thoughts, if you like, than Hoposcotch - provoked a lot more. An amazing collection and one that I'll return to over and over.

Proust - The Prisoner. He is unique as a writer in that he can be simultaneously exciting to read yet also very slow and downright AWKWARD. As for much of 2009's autumn, it goes on.

Finally getting back into reading again after a long hiatus. I picked up Viktor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf and I'm about 1/4 of the way through and thoroughly enjoying it. He goes off on these ridiculous tangents full of great analogies and then 20 pages later that old tangent is tied back into the story beautifully.
Can anyone recommend any similar contemporary writers?

I was reading a tolerably awful memoir about D&D called The Elfish Gene, but I left it in a common room and someone seems to have taken it. I'm kind of annoyed, I was assuming it was a book no one would actually find appealing enough to take

seriously? i would steal it! not to read it though

I'm finally reading Cloud Atlas, I'm ~100 pages in and just starting to get where this is going (although the different sections have been very enjoyable on their own). I'm glad I read Ghostwritten first.

man, i hope whoever took my book is actually planning to read it. it would annoy me if they just took it for the fun of it.

I recently finished The Language Of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief by Francis Collins. The subtitle is misleading, since very little, if any, of the book qualifies as scientific evidence for belief. The apologetics are borrowed mainly from C.S. Lewis, and there's no compelling reason to read Collins's retelling rather than the original in Lewis. However, where Collins shines is in his very clear and readable description of the intellectual foundations of modern biology in evolutionary theory. Actually a better subtitle would have been "A Believer Presents Evidence For Evolution", since that's what most of the book is. Collins's thesis is that faith and science are not incompatible, which is really more of a philosophical matter than a scientific one. Collins is not a particularly subtle or rigorous philosopher, but his description of his own integration of faith and science and his personal experience of faith is down-to-earth, unassuming, and tolerant - which is an attitude that is too often missing from the "God debate".

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

...both for one of my university classes, this one on the Beat generation.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman, for pleasure. Half-way through, really liking it.

finished 2666. To be hones, I kept falling in and out of love with that book...

The Virgin Suicides, Geoffrey Eugenides

cracked a bio of Federico Garcia Lorca, but about to abandon it, as I'm starting a novel soon (I hope)...

Interesting re the Collins, which I'd seen and thought about buying. I think this is where the likes of Dawkins fucks up - I'm not religious, but I can see perfectly clearly that religion and science are not incompatible, even though some particular creation myths may be devalued by scientific discoveries. In implying otherwise Dawkins overreaches and gives the believers' lobby an easy target. From your description it seems Collins has taken aim at that, while his title pretends he's doing something more interesting and ambitious. I'd feel conned if I bought a book with that title and all I got was a demonstration that a belief in evolution isn't incompatible with a belief in god (plus some added C S Lewis).

As an analogy let's say a boy says he's too scared to go to bed because there's an evil bogie man in the wardrobe. Its supernatural nature is such that it can obliterate all evidence of its existence from human beings except when it chooses otherwise. His parents naturally tell him the bogie man doesn't exist and he can go back to bed. The boy argues that his parents have no way of proving that. This is pretty much the same argument as the one that religious belief is incapable of being disproved by science. In the absence of evidence - the sort of thing that can be confirmed by science - most of us would have no difficulty in telling the boy his belief is nonsense and he can go to sleep safely. Science can't disprove the existence of the bogie man, but it doesn't follow that a belief that the bogie man exists is as legitimate as the belief that it doesn't.

Natsumi Soseki: Botchan

Chris Paling: After the Raid

John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos -- recently "rediscovered" previously unpublished book he wrote at the same time as 'Triffids'... weird, as has the style and writing quality of later Wyndham, but the plot is pure pulp like Wndham's 1930s magazine SF (Nazi clones, flying saucers, etc)

been reading a lot!!!!!!! (enthusiasm)

highsmith: the ripley pentology (not a word?) best was "ripley underground" i think but i generally loved all of these. its weird that movies of these books tend to be not v good because i kept thinking abt how visual they are

w tevis: the hustler.
marcus: age of wire and string
walbert: short history of women

not as into the rest of these and in fact havent managed to finish the walbert

collection of Poe. So far read: The Pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson, The Fall of the House of Usher, something about Raggedy Mountain or whatever. They've all been aight imo but not really been blown away. In the mood for reading some stories and it's a fairly hefty collection that will keep me occupied for some time, so will persevere.

Poe loves writing "at length" and "phantasmagoric".

As an analogy let's say a boy says he's too scared to go to bed because there's an evil bogie man in the wardrobe

I can see your point with the bogeyman analogy. However, Collins is making a somewhat different case than that. The idea of God as a bogeyman who covers his tracks so that humans can't find any evidence of him is pretty close to the young-earth creationist model that Collins specifically criticizes in this book. His point is not that God tries to hide evidence of himself. On the contrary, Collins believes that many scientific discoveries are highly suggestive of a divine presence. As an example, he talks about how pre-20th century cosmology, some scientifically-minded atheists held that the universe had always existed in something like its current form, thus leaving no place for a creator. He says they would have been shocked by the discovery that the universe, and perhaps time itself, has a starting point. This is incredibly difficult for we humans to fathom, and to him, he finds this suggestive of a possible divine action. He goes on to elaborate how the process of evolution is suggestive of the unfolding of a divine plan.

Stanley Fish yesterday on another forthcoming book on religion and science:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/must-there-be-a-bottom-line/

Thanks for that nate. Intelligent review, but on the face of it the book is articulating a position close to my own (the review's vague on what claims are being made for religion, but I suspect that means the book's not saying anything new or very interesting on that). I'm more interested in writers that will challenge what I think than writers who will confirm it.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Quilp is great, Nell is already a bore. It's not quite carrying me with it, but I'm going to persevere.

Taking the plunge and reading Moby-Dick. Have made it past the infamous chapter 32.

i read moby dick in the summer and really enjoyed it. Though must admit to enjoying the plot developing more than i enjoyed the details about cetology and the latter seemed to outweight the former by a lot. What is "the infamous chapter 32"?

finished the day of the jackal and it was pretty awful. also finished cathedral, pretty good but very same-y.

32 is the first big info-dump, dividing all the whales into folios, etc, with lots of gratuitous detail--the first chapter where the story completely vanishes, i think.

Finished it last night--really liked it, but I suspect having a taste for the style of 19th-century encyclopedias was on my side here. You do feel as though nothing actually HAPPENS between pages 250 and 550.

Now I am on the train for 90 mins per day I am crushing books again. Last week: 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs — The Election that Changed the Country by James Chace (thanks alfred). Good times from my favourite period of history. Psyched again about this crazy Scorcese film about Roosevelt pre-presidency.

This week: Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. Pretty funny, feel like I had already heard all the wisdom pre-digested by others though.

Next week: Uncommon Carriers (I think tombot recommended this) and then I will either start Jane Eyre or Infinte Jest.

Does anyone have any comments on The Right Stuff before I pick it up? I liked bonfire of the vanitities and I like space, so I'm pretty sure I will give it a shot, but is it a known dud?

The Right Stuff has a lot of inside skinny on the space program, and makes its hay on the difference between the public (propaganda) face of NASA and the space race vs. the reality for the astronauts and their families. If you can stand Tom Wolfe's stylistic tics (often one step away from Captain America comics), and you also have a fair sense of how NASA was presented to the public in the 1960s, you'll probably enjoy it.

A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe

This is a great freaking book.

I read nothing but mysteries over December. Just finished the Riddle-Master Trilogy by Patricia McKillip, which was really interesting, frequently frustrating, but ultimately satisfying.

yah mckillip is really rad - shld reread her

Finished The Old Curiosity Shop. Really not one of his best, although Quilp is magnificent. Nell and her grandfather's Pilgrim's Progress across the country allows for some great moments (the giants serving the dwarfs in the caravans, the man brought up in the foundry, the punch and judy show), but they themselves are insufferable. Actually, I don't mind Nell, but her grandfather really is tiresome beyond belief, always feebly patting at your sleeve to grab your attention.

Also, The Grotesque in Art and Literature - Wilhelm Kayser. Sure I must have read this, or at least looked at this before at university - it's the lodestone for modern examinations of the grotesque - but don't remember any of it if I did. Throws up lots of stuff for further reading - must look at Bonaventura's Nachtwachen for instance.

And also Volume I of Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings. Read Illuminations before, but was specifically interested in the essay The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism.

thanks aimless

Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole. Chortles coming pretty frequently

Just finished To Kill a Mockingbird and wow <3 <3 <3 <3 so glad I wasn't like others and forced to read this as a child and could just appreciate it properly.

Before I go on to the last volume of the Proust I've finished/will be finishing a few short-ish bks:

Klaus Kinski - Kinski Uncut
John Fahey - How Bluegrass Music Destroyed my Life
David Ohle - Motorman

A book/writer I'd never heard of until I picked it up, one of those cheaparse Wordsworth supernatural classic volumes: 'The Beast with Five Fingers' by W F Harvey: great stuff. Sort of M R James / Saki / Somerset Maugham crossover style, from the 1920s.

Fuck-mykindle, grabbed Luc Sante's Lowlife. Very rich. Maybe too much for my peasized "brane"

Just read Blair Worden's recent book, The English Civil Wars. Good, clear, bleak summary of the whole messy business. Was drawn in by the summary in a disapproving LRB review:

An incompetent king spawned a needless crisis that was then worsened by his narrow-minded, self-interested opponents. No one wanted the war but it lasted more than ten years and nothing good came of it

There's a view of history I can get behind.

Also reading other 1640-60 bits, & Worden's book on Philip Sidney.

Uncommon Carriers was mostly great. The chapters felt a bit magazine-y, which was not helped by the New Yorker style (I stumble over 'coöperating' every time I read it, it's just ridic.). I had to skip the Thoreau down the river chapter because I had no idea what he was talking about. He seemed to assume I know the detailed local geography, Thoreau's life and had read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Week_on_the_Concord_and_Merrimack_Rivers. Also, as far as I read, it had nothing to do with the book as advertised: awesome large-scale freight. But the bits about awesome large-scale freight were awesome, so good stuff.

Started Jane Eyre this morning. Already absurdly Victorian. Where's that thread about 'in every victorian novel ever'?

The Right Hand Of Doom & Other Tales Of Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard
The Outfit, Richard Stark

John Gray - Straw Dogs - I was fully intended to like this, but my good intentions fell apart after the first 15 pages or so. Gray seems unwilling or unable to make a cogent case for anything - instead he just keeps repeating the same things over and over again - his argument is basically variations on "We're all animals - ANIMALS - DON'T YOU SEE?!" It might be provocative over the course of a short essay piece, but at book length this quickly becomes tiresome.

John Kennedy Toole - Confederacy of Dunces - I finally got around to reading this, and it turns out it is actually pretty funny. It's perhaps a bit too long, some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional, and some of the satire may have dated a bit, but the main character of Ignatius Reilly is surely one of literature's great comic creations.

Been trying to read a book a week this year. Not doing so good. Here's the only two I've finished:

Julian Barnes - "Nothing to be Afraid of"
David Michaels - "Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health"

Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Weep Not Child -- interesting but oddly straightforward early novel set during the Mau Mau uprising, from the writer whose name is the most fun to say out loud

Stefan Grabinski: In Sarah's House -- polish supernatural stories from 1910-ish; really cool, including one about a bloodsucking monster that lives in old chimneys, preying on chimneysweeps

Edna Mazya: Love Burns -- Israeli academic whose wife is having an affair semi-accidentally kills the other man with his pipe, has to deal with corpse, lies, etc -- very good, but not remotely funny (despite what the blurbs all said), unless well-rendered lovesickness, misery and conscience pangs are your idea of comedy

John Lanchester: Whoops! -- readable and very entertaining book about the global financial crisisTM

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
The Dynamic Structure of Everday Life by Philip E. Agre
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev via a Penguin translation

wrt to the last, with lots of underlining in green ballpoint from high school

Just started Inherent Vice finally. Not sure why it's taken so long - I started Against the Day the moment it came out. Something about the cover maybe. Just entering into the combination of slightly knotty language and filmic parody at the moment.

Might just have to wait a little while longer before continuing tho - got in to work this morning and finally (after three years) got a replacement key for my locker. Slightly warily opened it, expecting a banana, terrifylingly transformed, but under the the various bits of vastly out-of-date unfinished paperwork was... The Divine Invasion by Philip K Dick!

FIRST BRITISH PUBLICATION OF HIS NEWEST MASTERPIECE.

This has made my day.

I read nothing but mysteries over December. Just finished the Riddle-Master Trilogy by Patricia McKillip, which was really interesting, frequently frustrating, but ultimately satisfying.

― franny glass, Saturday, 30 January 2010 04:38 (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yah mckillip is really rad - shld reread her

― b( ۠·_۠·)b (Lamp), Saturday, 30 January 2010 04:57 (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is much else of hers good? I think the riddle-master set is a bit of a bodge job ... the second one feels a bit like an expansion pack. feels like structurally it could have been a lot better if it hadn't had to have been an trilogy

the way the 'land-law' idea works is interesting, not sure it amounts to much more than a justification of the same old same old though

Just started Inherent Vice finally. Not sure why it's taken so long - I started Against the Day the moment it came out. Something about the cover maybe. Just entering into the combination of slightly knotty language and filmic parody at the moment. the familiar easy Pynchon swing, late '60s west coast atmos, and Chandleresque plot line.

Must have been a different book I was reading - I think it was because of the rather fractured opening conversational exchanges and just an uncharacteristic (for reading Pynchon) familiarity with the world he was describing - not that I've ever been anywhere near the west coast, but through films and books. Felt like it was a kind of parody, but if anything it's more like homage.

Very enjoyable at the moment.

Mishima - The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Yukio does it again! At the end of it I wanted to promise to myself that I'd read it again in 10 years and enjoy it as much.
Joseph Roth - Zipper and his Father. A really unexpected, and quite brilliant, portrait of 1930s Euro cinema in the middle of this.

Now its the last volume of Proust. Quite amazing I will finish this (finish as in 'get to the last word of it')

THE YEAR THUS FAR:

MOBY DICK
ORSON WELLES: THE ROAD TO XANADU and
ORSON WELLES: HELLO AMERICANS (currently in progress: Lady From Shanghai has begun filming; now officially at the stage where you're asking "well let's see how this goes horribly, horribly awry")

you're asking "well let's see how this goes horribly, horribly awry"

careless - "asking" should be "wondering". ALSO: One of the above titles is not by Simon Callow.

What'd you think of Moby Dick?

More books about Newfoundland: The Shipping News now, Galore by Michael Crummey on deck.

is much else of hers good? I think the riddle-master set is a bit of a bodge job ... the second one feels a bit like an expansion pack. feels like structurally it could have been a lot better if it hadn't had to have been an trilogy

went looking after the first post u quoted and looks like i only ever read the 1st book in the trilogy~~ generally like her stand-alone fantasy its like a girlier, more lyrical ggk. well probably not as good with character stuff but i think theyre dreamy and far-seeing in similar ways~~~

song for the basilisk the best out of what ive read (not much)

i havent read anything in almost a month because ive been stuck on one book 4ever

taking a break from swedish police novels -- last six boox Ive read were by Henning Mankell -- and working my way through The Collected Stories of JG Ballard. Reading his early stories now, they're more conventional/scientific sci-fi than you might expect, with intricate twists & surprise endings but you can see the Ballardian themes/obsessions start to emerge/evolve. what sets him apart from genre is his diamond-brilliant prose. and his writing is why I vastly prefer Ballard to PK Dick (who I respect but find physically hard to read). never gonna finish 1000+ pages by the time this book is due back at the library, even with renewals, but finishing it will be worth whatever fines are incurred.

jane eyre had a rather silly first and last 50 pages, but the rest was solid romance. i believe i understood it. it's about women, right?

started infinte jest yesterday.

No it is about a fight between a cross-dressing gypsy and a monster with a flamethrower who lives in an attic. Great book, would read again.

Finished Europeana, first eye-catcher from the books of the 00s. Punishing almost at those moments when it drifts out into an almost cheerful look at things then twangs back to the death camps. Well judged and executed. Couldn't be much longer.

I see I haven't spoken about what I'm reading for quite a while now. Mostly I have not been reading books. I found the Dud Avocado didn't chime with my mood, so I ditched it.

I now seem to be reading the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh - and enjoying it, too. Although Waugh seems grimly determined to introduce his Catholicism into the work, so far it has proved to be a trivial sideshow to the story and characters, which suits me fine.

Bulgakov's 'A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel)', which I have just started and thus have very little to say about.

Tried reading Rabbit Run but it was seemingly everything I hate about 50s american writing. now about to start Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

I just finished Eat, Pray, Love. I guess I can see why it's so popular - it combines a lot of popular genres pretty effectively: the tell-all memoir, the travelogue, the spiritual self-help book. Gilbert keeps a lot of balls in the air and writes pretty well, even though you sometimes get the feeling that the "reality" on offer here - as with any reality show - has been somewhat exaggerated for effect.

Keep going with Rabbit Run, a hoy hoy - I felt that way for the first few pages, but once it gets going it's wonderful, and they keep on getting better

Sex, Lies and Headlocks

Attempting to assuage my unhealthy fascination with Vince McMahon.

http://i292.photobucket.com/albums/mm34/Kanesfeel2/Holycrap.jpg

http://obsessedwithsports.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/vince-mcmahon1.jpg

On the death of Owen Hart -

A child in the front row, assuming it was all part of the act, gleefully pointed at Hart's body, waving the Styrofoam middle finger he'd bought earlier.

Image on the Edge - Michael Camille

I could begin, like St Bernard, by asking what do they all mean, those lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, hard-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somesaulting jongleurs that protrude at the edges of medieval buildings, sculptures and illuminated manuscripts.

In fact he's most interested in them as liminal ambiguity, which leads to some fun riffing on semiotics, psychoanalysis , theory etc. Padding it out with Lilian Randall's more traditional meaning-based approach in essays available through JSTOR, eg The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare

Towards the end of the thirteenth century there emerged in the margins of North French illuminated manuscripts a motif whose meaning and origin have not yet been fully clarified. The motif depicts a man combatting a snail.

Best first sentence to an essay ever.

Finally getting around to Cormac McCarthy's 'the road'. I am pretty certain i will love it but am finding the beginning a bit of a chore (this is generally how i always feel with books tho).

working my way through The Collected Stories of JG Ballard. Reading his early stories now, they're more conventional/scientific sci-fi than you might expect, with intricate twists & surprise endings but you can see the Ballardian themes/obsessions start to emerge/evolve. what sets him apart from genre is his diamond-brilliant prose

I far prefer his earlier stuff, the later stories are overwhelmed by his themes - whatever they are, basically all the characters seem to have near-psychotic and cryptically ineffable obsessions, and the stories read like the insides of their minds, dessicated and inexplicable.

Track 12 is a flawless masterpiece imo. The symmetry between the sounds of the titular track and the protagonists manner of death is a great idea and beautifully, perfectly described.

Tried reading Rabbit Run but it was seemingly everything I hate about 50s american writing. now about to start Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

― 80085 (a hoy hoy), Wednesday, February 10, 2010 3:43 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark

lol this is how I felt about it too, never got past the first 50 pages. vaguely remember the inside of a vagina being described as akin to soft velvet.

I like his earlier stuff better too but it's a little too telegraphed xp

Ooo, more info on sex lies and headlocks plz

lol I read that post as referring to a single book and thought "oh, so that's how they got the idea for the WWF -they saw a picture of a man combatting a snail"

Yeah, I didn't differentiate it too cleverly.

Snail combat -

http://theidiotandthedog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/snail-combat.jpg

Actually, that's probably a bit naughty - copyright and all that. Shd probably get taken down? Dammit, it's snail combat tho.

I don't think copyright lawyers are always checking ilb for infringement.

Ha ha. Yes, now you put it like that, it's probably ok. Just going back to the conflation of gothic marginalia (ass-kissing priests) and WWE (ass-kissing acrobats), am now determined to push through some v sketchy thesis concerning artifical romance warfare structures in courtly France/symbolism of grotesque marginalia/Punchinello martinet of Vince McMahon and travelling circus of the WWE Universe.

reproducing scans of old books, even scans made by other people, is not, in general, infringing (although it gets a bit cloudy depending on jurisdiction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.)

Tried reading Rabbit Run but it was seemingly everything I hate about 50s american writing. now about to start Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

― 80085 (a hoy hoy), Wednesday, February 10, 2010 3:43 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark

lol this is how I felt about it too, never got past the first 50 pages. vaguely remember the inside of a vagina being described as akin to soft velvet.

― 99. The Juggalo Teacher (dyao)

it's the inside of a ballet shoe.

personally i always wondered what he was doing fucking a ballet shoe

Tryin' out ChatRoulette

highsmith: the ripley pentology (not a word?) best was "ripley underground" i think but i generally loved all of these. its weird that movies of these books tend to be not v good because i kept thinking abt how visual they are

Do you have to read these in order?

(xpost) Err, sorry about that, I just read the thread about that over on ILE.

I've been reading quite a few good things lately, but I haven't a damned thing to say about any of it.
Just started in on DeLillo's "Ratner's Star" after pausing it halfway through over the Christmas break. For some reason this is by far the toughest time I've had with DeLillo, who I generally enjoy reading. Perhaps the problem was that it's more of a picaresque than I'm used to. Getting back in now though, and having a good time of it, particularly as I started to see it as something of a Alice In Crazy Science Wonderland story. I kinda liked how the last chapter ended pretty much with DeLillo making fun of his own plotting, too. ("He went back to his room and waited. [...] He kept expecting someone to turn up. Or a note to come under the door. Or a drawing or poem. Or a message scrawled on the teleboard screen. Or a videotaped delivered in some extraordinary way.")

Do you have to read these in order?

Not necessarily, but it definitely helps. And the last couple really need you to have read the first one, in that certain chickens attempt to come home to roost.

I loved 'Ripley Underwater', too.

yah mckillip is really rad - shld reread her

― b( ۠·_۠·)b (Lamp), Saturday, 30 January 2010 04:57 (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is much else of hers good? I think the riddle-master set is a bit of a bodge job ... the second one feels a bit like an expansion pack. feels like structurally it could have been a lot better if it hadn't had to have been an trilogy

the way the 'land-law' idea works is interesting, not sure it amounts to much more than a justification of the same old same old though

(Just saw this discussion) I agree it could have done with a LOT of editing - I got seriously sick of the groundhog-day-style 'Morgon goes to a new castle and is nearly murdered in the night' pattern - and I also hated how it didn't explain anything, ever, including basic tenets of the actual plot, until like the last two chapters. But I liked the mythology it built up, and the end result was cool.

And now I'm reading 'Summer in Baden-Baden', a fictionalized account of Dostoevsky and his wife spending time in Germany. It's awesome, except I haven't read enough Dostoevsky to really be getting everything out of it. I love the Russians, but I sort of seem to read *around* the really good ones instead of sinking my teeth into them.

I started to read Summer in Baden-Baden but it made me dislike Dostoevsky or it made me have an opinion about him so I stopped after the description of his epileptic fit, not because of epilepsy but because of the description of his relationship with his wife. I also did not like this in David Remnick's account of Solzhenitsyn: his wife seemed too capable and he too autocratic and out of touch.

Thanks James - I have borrowed Ripley's game and another one of her non-Ripley bks (The Cry of the Owl).

So this week I have finished Proust's Time Regained. The only Time there will be now is for contemplation. If I allow myself a moment of reflection my best quality as a reader (maybe my only one) is persistence...but this was terrific, shame I kept starting and stopping, but there's plenty of Time for re-readings, as I think I'm a Proustian 4 life now (one of those things you can pick up and tunr page after page at any point, pretty much). The essay in the middle of this last volume (a 50 page reflection in a middle of what was my meant to be a party) was probably one of the highlights of the whole lot.

Will chase Saint-Simon and Chateaubriand's Memoris and Denton Welch's diaries are in here somewhere (ILL ws quick)

Followed this with:

Gide - The Immoralist. Didn't care for this at all.
Irmgard Keun - Child of all Nations. This was like 'kids say the funniest things' with 'kids say the wisest things' crossed with Hitler. V good.

Last night: Joseph Roth - Job. Great stuff. Its the 3rd/4th thing by him and its all adding up to a really interesting dissection of all these facets of 1930s European life. Does sadness so well, pitching it just right.

Anyone read Gide's diaries?

I loved Job and Child of All Nations. I have the Gide diaries, but haven't tackled them yet (forbiddingly huge with tiny
type)

Reading Frederick Barthelme's 'Natural Selection': no idea where it's going, but loving it so far.

That Keun description, by the way, is perfect.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future. Really interesting, just published by NYRB, he never even bothered to try to publish these stories when he was alive.

Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys. Very enjoyable, not quite as mesmerizing to me as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Currently reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

George Steiner on Céline in the TLS. Longish biographical essay via the medium of examining his anti-Semitism, fascism and other misanthropic and racial manias. Good as far as it goes. Except it's kind of supposed to be a review of the new Gallimard edition of his Lettres.

Did you even read the letters, George?

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future. Really interesting, just published by NYRB, he never even bothered to try to publish these stories when he was alive.

That book is so, so good.

Time to get serious with my 'to read' list - some of which is stuff I've been meaning to read for a while and other stuff that ILX/B has thrown up. So, starting with Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by HW Janson. It's a biggie, so I might jump around a bit, but am zipping along happily enough at the moment -

"The question is this: is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels."

While Disraeli's argument hardly meets the challenge of Darwinism on its own ground, it serves to remind us that man had been aware of his kinship to the ape long before the rise of modern science. In fact, the theory of biological evolution as applied to man may be said to represent not the fist but the last phase in the development of the idea.

In my sights are Mad Travelers by Ian Hacking, courtesy Plasmon here.

and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, mentioned on the books of the decade thread.

See you in about a month's time.

Ugh, not the first.

In one of the sermons of Hugh of St Victor (C12th), we read that "even though the ape is a most vile, filthy, and detestable animal, the clerics like to keep it in their houses and to display it in their windows, so as to impress the passing rabble with the glory of their possessions.

Guns, Germs and Steel is fantastic, if you're into all-explaining 'this is why it is as it is' framework ways of thinking. I lap that stuff up.

I picked up the TLS and I share the disappointment...not so much that Steiner didn't give the impression he read many of the letters (but yeah, that's a problem). More that I expected a bit more of an account of his writing, what makes Celine worth the effort today when it seems quite easy to get hold of many other misanthropic writers.

Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb
John Cheever - Falconer
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Jean Brodie is the pick off the above.

Just started on Day of the Owl by Highsmith

Although I guess most can see why Celine is perhaps a cut above. I just wanted Steiner to talk more about it

Guns, Germs and Steel is fantastic, if you're into all-explaining 'this is why it is as it is' framework ways of thinking. I lap that stuff up.

Turns out Apes and Ape Lore consists of largely separable essays, so I read the ones on Ape as figura diaboli, Ape as sinner, history of Ape in science and lit, and an account of the Titian Laocoon cartoon focusing on the controversy between Vesalius and Jacobus Sylvius as an explanation of Titian's ape-parody of the Laocoon. (Vesalius said Galen had clearly taken his lessons on human anatomy from ape dissections, hence the lack of distinction between the two anatomies - so furious was Jacobus Sylvius about this attack on Galen that he wrote a counterblast saying that in fact it was because nature had decayed (that old chestnut) since ancient times, and that the similarity in Galen's anatomies were because humans were more like apes then - a sort of lolvolution - and Vesalius pointed out that classical sculpture, with its clear indications of an understand of human anatomy, gave the lie to this - message-board zings and challops just took longer to deliver in those days)

Anyway, have decided to put that by for a bit and go for Guns, Germs and Steel, and well, I'm struggling a bit. I guess I've never really seen as the concept of intelligence as making sense outside of environmental, technological and social contexts, so his argument against people who say that people of less developed cultures are backward feels a bit straw mannish (I mean, I'm sure there are members of the public who believe that, but are there really people in the academic environment who still subscribe to what is effectively a form of skull measuring/socially contextualised IQ tests?)

Also his argument that environmental and subsequent technological context influences history and societies doesn't really feel like something I need convincing of - that's pretty much how history and geography were presented at school, so it doesn't feel as innovative an argument as he presents it.

However, am really enjoying the specifics of detailing the mechanisms of developments from prehistory to modern history - especially because I'm totally ignorant about prehistory (and also the history of places like Polynesia). But then this stuff feels more like straight history than 'interwoven theory of everything' (which I always enjoy, but am automatically suspicious of.)

I'm also sceptical about his future of human history as science stuff. Absolutely in favour of introducing scientific methodologies and evidence, but one crucial part of science is prediction and that's when his approach can begin to look a bit leaky, even reductive. So yes, his method as part of historical investigation, but not as 'explains everything' history.

I kind of link this sort of thing in to very militant scientists (like Dawkins) who deny the presence of mystery as a part of human understanding, as part of the methodology of understanding. (Tho I know that 'science exploring the mysteries of the universe' is totally part of their schtick.)

If I didn't feel this was waaay too long already and prob belongs in another thread I'd ramble on in true pub bore fashion about how this is interestingly paralleled with introducing umpiring technology to cricket, but really really got to do some work.

Actually what really soured me on him was the bit where he goes about how farmhands were 'squandering' their money on drink and how disappointed he was when an Indian he'd formerly respected staggered drunkenly in after an all night binge. 'It was therefore a shocking disappointment etc.'

Aw, go to hell, I thought.

Haven't reached that part yet, it sounds depressing. Wasn't overly bothered by the straw mannish part, however: it's much too common an argument (even if it's not advanced in serious circles) for something like this to ignore; it'd be an elephant in the room for the common reader.

don't spare us the umpire technology Gamaliel - actually, the way they've built it around the ball-width of uncertainty is a thing of wonder to me.

I hated that strawman, and it keeps appearing - I deliberately didn't mention it because it's not that important and I felt my reaction was a bit disproortionate, but evidently not. It's hard to imagine people actually thinking that any more, though it does seem like one way in which US and European thinking has diverged - it'd be easier to get that strawman in a separate-races-but-equal mindset than a one-race-we-just-live-in-different-places one (I generalise of course)

It's hard to imagine people actually thinking that any more

I'm sure there were a few posts along that line on Have Your Say just the other week, but I can't find them and don't fancy wading through the cesspool any longer than necessary.

I'm glad it wasn't just me - I had to keep reminding myself that after all he's right about that and of course there are people like that, and anyway, as you say, it's not at all important for what he's saying, just got under my skin slightly is all.

Shame on you for encouraging me while I've got a beer in my hand, Ismael. I guess what I generally take an issue with on the subject of umpiring technology is the idea that you kind find epistemological certainty with that technology - I tend to think that certainty as to what has actually happened is infinitely postponed. I wouldn't say that to Beefy of course - I'd just say, hey commentary dudes, you spend so long arguing about these things even with replays, does that not tip the wink that some things are unverifiable? That actually you'd just be better off with keeping some on-pitch umpire (admittedly non-omniscient, but crucially omnipotent/a temporary and arbitrary god to keep the order of the on-pitch universe) who will judge matters on what they look like. And it is what things look like rather than some supposed truth of the matter that is important.

Why is the lbw rule there? To prevent the batsman using his legs/pads to prevent the ball hitting the stumps and therefore make him play. So if a player looks like he's just taken an indeterminate step forward and the ball beats him for speed/swings in and hits him on the pads and it looks like it's plumb, that's more important than it turning out on computer examination that it just slid down/just missed the bails. If however a player has taken a long forward lunge and the ball hits him just beneath the knee roll, and the old decision would be 'no way I can give that', but on referral it turns out to be just clipping the top of off stump, then it is the old decision that is corrrect, and not the new one. A player wafts and inaudibly to human ear touches the ball? So what? We can ascertain the truth of the appearance of the universe, but to attempts ascertain the actual truth of the universe is a deluded mania.

I've got a lot of time for the former Guardian, now Mail cricket writer Laurence Donnegan [crucial break as Gamaliel smells pizza burning in oven] but his continual defence of the introduction of technology is completely misplaced. It's just meant to get rid of howlers, is his point, but then you have people debating whether it's a howler or not - once again, epistemological uncertainty is always with us.

And yes, the ball-width of uncertainty - what, you build in uncertainty into a system which is supposed to produce certainty? It's obvious that you can't have a tiny bit of ball hitting leg/off stump and showing the bails flying off, because that effectively increases the width of the stumps by a ball either side. But then you have a situation where you have to introduce an element of leeway and suddenly you're as far from certainty as you were before.

This kind of links in (in my warped head) with ineffable mystery generally being infinitely postponed but never got rid of and remaining infinite, no matter the advances of science. And I'm completely on the side of the scientist against the deliberate mystifier, the mystical misleader and obscurantist - scientific rigour is an amazing thing, but the bourne that separates what we know and what we don't know, although forever shifting, also never moves.

Obviously crap umpires giving crap decisions (Ian Howell anyone?) is terrifically annoying, but off the field third umpires deciding the important points of action? via a method unavailable to those seeing it live? the disappointment as you jump up or groan when the ump's finger goes up only to be replaced by realisation that you're going to have to wait a bit while the tv footage is reviewed, followed by a small echo of the original emotion? Is that what you really want instead of bitching about an umpire every now and then?

And commentators, given to pontificating on what they see with an air of authority (no, no, of course not you Beefy) obviously get annoyed that sometimes you just can't tell conclusively - but it's not possible to fix reality, to perceive absolute truth, even with snicko and hot spot (both of which have uses, but also are both incredibly limited).

And you can't have this as a referral system by the players because it becomes a tactical power (teams wantonly using a remaining referral in the final over just in case) and if a team has used its referrals, then a howler could quite easily occur without being rectified. Equally you can't have it in the hands of umpires because they would naturally end up referring everything as doubt was cast in their minds. Already the doubt creeps in (I think) with umpires unwilling to give certain decisions in the knowledge that one side or the other will appeal if they feel there's been a mistake strongly enough. Christ, I'm sounding like GK Chesterton in Orthodoxy, which is wrong (cricket, essentially a closed universe but the universe, we just don't know)

And finally you realise you've taken most of the action off the pitch, out of the hands of human agency, away from the live crowd, away from the people who are supposed to be enjoying it. Although it seems slightly glib, I totally agree with Gideon Haigh's judgement: “When cricket is thought to be too important to be left to mere humans, then it is in danger of mattering too much to be enjoyed.”

Ok, I feel slightly guilty now. You can have your thread back. Hope this challops doesn't come back to bite me on the ass. Basically I'm enjoying the book, tho. All dat Polynesian shit is fascinating.

christ, tl even I dr.

Well, I'm convinced, except for one thing - while I ideologically agree with condemning the third umpire for taking the excitement away from the moment, my experience this summer was quite the opposite. Admittedly special circumstances (last day of the Ashes) but the buzz round our part of The Oval as Ponting then Clarke were referred and rumours spread of what the replays might or might not be showing, then rumours of what view Nasser or Warney were taking of it, topped off by the decision itself, was drama of a kind I've never experienced elsewhere. Maybe if I attend outside the next papal conclave I'll get close.

Yep, that's true. Especially if you've got a lw radio/some kind of commentary or someone near has, like you say, everyone suddenly gets talking about it - the tension can build up a hell of a lot. I think I probably still feel uneasy about the off-field action tho.

Also, I had tickets for the Monday, so damn you and your referrals (fortunately had also gone on the Friday - Stuart Broad's astonishing spell which actually seemed like a dream after the event.)

spook country - william gibson. really only just started this, after recently reading neuromancer - which i enjoyed, but i feel like it's above my head.
the age of grief - jane smiley. i love this woman. totally been on a mission to read all her stuff, and am really enjoying this collection. i think maybe i love her almost as much as i love munro, which is really saying something.
the lives of girls and women - alice munro. one of the first of hers i read, but since i have a shit memory i'm rereading it.

wtf

Nicely done Gamaliel, though I think the technology has been really beneficial to Tennis and could really be a great thing for Football but its hard to argue that it has benefitted cricket beyond judging run outs. For football it would be where the odd ball has crossed the line or judging whether the player has been fouled outside/inside the area, then to correct the odd howler from the linesman; also, to punish any players who have commited a foul which the ref was not in the position to see...

Basically I think the technology as we have it is good to see whether an object has crossed a line, but in the special case of judging lbw, where you're simulating and extrapolating form a number of factors, it does go wrong.

Now: Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano. Hard going, but then the odd stunner of a paragraph comes in to keep me going...

Harry Houdini: On Deception -- writings on skepticism and fraud-busting

Charlie Huston: Sleepless -- near-future sci-fi, where the horrible fatal familial insomnia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia) disease becomes contagious; rather good

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridien -- I tried, I really did, but gave up halfway, even though I've liked the other McCarthys I've read; but this was just an endless grim parade of horrible people doing horrible things, and I just didn't care enough to continue

My aversion to McCarthy is more general (I've read 3, Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country). I annoyingly lost a long post excoriating The Road sometime back. NCFOM is no better. Nothing against McCarthy personally (he seems ok in interviews) but I think these are seriously bad novels.

yesss

I'm currently reading Paul Morley's Words And Music. I've found that I enjoy it a lot more if I just skim over the parts having to do with Kylie Minogue driving a car (which eliminates about a third of the book, but makes it a lot more readable). My favorite bits so far are the timeline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dany_Laferriere's, L'énigme du retour, about a Haitian-Canadian writer who returns to Haiti after learning of his father's death. I've had it since Xmas and didn't really pay much attention to the subject and now I'm both curious and a little spooked.

finished jonathan dee's the privileges this morning. feels like ive been reading it 4ever. have sum ~thoughts~ but theyre p uncertain at this point - can a book be 'successful' if it doesnt 'achieve' anything? can u admire a book w/o 'understanding' it? - need 2 think some more abt this.

still: recommended imo book 'feels' 'important'

Henry Green: Back -- man, he's good. Shame this is one of the few of his books he didn't give an '-ing' title too, though. Could have been 'Returning'.

one time in a class I was talking about Henry Green books and I was like
"I understand Nothing but I don't understand Loving"
and the teacher smirked and was like
"yeah that sounds about right"
and I was like
"o"
and everyone laughed

u shld have asked if the professor wanted 2 make out w/ u "o"

Italo Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies

-- a more interesting idea than it is an actual pleasure to read

Read Falling and Laughing: the Restoration of Edwyn Collins on a flight yesterday.

Finished Galore by Michael Crummey and really liked it! A cross between 100 Years of Solitude and Independent People.

read a buncha crap this month

condolences

Let try and guess, not long before a spring thread has to be started...

I finished The Prize by Daniel Yergin, 1991 Pulitzer-winning history of the oil industry. Absolutely epic stuff, loads of fascinating stories of the earliest days of the industry in Pennsylvania, the guys who built Shell, intrigue in the Middle East, and all points in between. The only mild criticism is slightly too many passages dealing with the political manoeuvres necessary to get things through Congress, etc. which do not make for fascinating tales for the unAmerican reader.

Great book though, I now can't see any geopolitical development through any other prism.

opinion on Henry Miller?

Try this ILB thread: Henry Miller. He is also discussed in passing in a few other threads which are not devoted to him entirely.

ok cool, thanks i've been wanting to get into his writing for a while now

Yes, must be almost time for that spring thread.

For the end of winter, I've been enjoying Heather O'Donoghue's From Asgard to Valhalla, which is a terrific account of the Norse myths, their sources & afterlife. Dense but v readable - a large amount of information enjoyably & reliably given.

There was a fair bit of other stuff too, can't remember that much, haven't been reading with enthusiasm (ugh February). Read Stiff by Mary Roach off the back of the books poll; she's a very likable & funny writer, really personable, but I faded on it by the end.

Dipping stuff: Casanova, Basil Bunting, Sir Philip Sidney

Half way through Infinite Jest. Massive lols about four or five times, ooh that's clever a couple of times, but barely hanging in there tbh. Going to need to read some serious Dickens to get over this.

Totally lost my cool in public at the description of the old AA guy describing his first solid poop in years, looking round and thinking he'd dropped his wallet in the toilet.

Shiva Naipaul: North of South -- really interesting, funny travels through 1970s Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia -- why is all his fiction OP?

Danilo Kis: The Encyclopedia of the Dead -- semi-Borgesish Serbian short stories

And one of those cheapo Worsdsworth supernatural fiction books, Australian Ghost Stories (lots of Colonial-era murder, mayhem and other fun stuff)

I've been enjoying Heather O'Donoghue's From Asgard to Valhalla

ok I finished this & tbh she was a bit better on philology & Thomas Gray than Bathory and The Mighty Thor, but she has a go, & still a v good read & strong on how Norse stuff gets tangled up in race politics.

Danilo Kis: The Encyclopedia of the Dead -- semi-Borgesish Serbian short stories

I couldn't get into them. They didn't seem like one thing or another.

Australian Ghost Stories

Somewhere there is a book called Terror Australis: the Best of Australian Horror. Don't ask me what it's like because I can't imagine.

arnaldur indridason - jar city

pretty awesome icelandic mystery novel. reminds me a lot of henning mankell's 'faceless killers', complete with a cynical and somewhat depressed police officer with an emotionally distant and troubled daughter and the killing of an elderly man whose past is murky and has perhaps come back to haunt him. it's an equally excellent book, too.

Shiva Naipaul: North of South -- really interesting, funny travels through 1970s Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia

the scene where he gets hustled by a shoeshine guy is one of the funniest things I've ever read: "You're a hard man to please, Bwana"

It's really great. I also really like the bit where he's talking to a white American woman who's come to "have a genuine ethnic African experience". When he asks a nearby Tanzanian what that means, the man replies "It means she wants to fuck lots of black men."

And the taxi ride from hell (over a dozen passengers in a car, plus livestock).

I agree with alimosina about the is, too: I've ground to a halt halfway through.

I had intended to read The True History of the Kelly Gang but going to the outback doesn't appeal at the moment, so instead it's Cantona: The Rebel who would be King by Philippe Auclair and a visit to Marseilles instead. Quite engaging, though Cantona himself doesn't really feature in close-up yet, and it's more like studying him scurrying about under a magnifying glass.

It's also got something I've noticed from a few Latin translations, namely a tendency to overwordiness or indulgent digressions, so that authorbecomes more prominent than subject. It's a little hard to deal with after my usual tight journalistic prose.

Finished Under the Volcano (some great 'hell on earth' passages), now its The Journals of Denton Welch. Pulled me through a tough commute this morning.

I'm not sure the Journals pulled me through anything, but I did enjoy them v much. Have you got the recentish edition or the Jocelyn Brooke edited ones?

that indrithason book was the first glum nordic private detective novel i read. it's a good'un. the follow-up books aren't quite so much; there's nothing in them as resonant as jar city itself. they made a movie a year or so ago. i still haven't seen it.

Re: Danilo Kis, I thought Garden, Ashes and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich were really strong and awesome. I wasn't so keen on Hourglass or Encyclopedia of the Dead - just devolved into incoherence in places, although it could be me missing the point.

I'm reading Crime and Punishment. The crime hasn't actually been committed yet, but I think we're getting close. It's good stuff for my commute.

I finished Paul Morley's Words and Music. It ended pretty much as it began, unevenly but with flashes of occasional brilliance.

I just re-read my post above about C&P and I'm now wondering if that's the most flippant and irrelevant comment it's possible to make about Dostoevsky.

I'm not sure the Journals pulled me through anything, but I did enjoy them v much. Have you got the recentish edition or the Jocelyn Brooke edited ones?

― 'virgin' should be 'wizard' (GamalielRatsey), Wednesday, March 3, 2010 Bookmark

Erm, got me through is more correct, me thinks.

Its edited by Michael De-la-Noy. Have you looked at both editions? How do they compare?

I have - read the J Brooke ones first (I'm a big fan and got to Brooke thru him) and then looked at the MDLN intro and bits Brooke had omitted.

MDLN just has a lot more stuff in and fewer excisions - in the main a plus, tho I think he's a tiny bit snotty about the Brooke one; people were just a lot more sensitive to potential libel in those days (not out of legal fear I think, but professional courtesy).

The only possible loss is a certain lightness of touch with the Brooke one, a gossamer sense of narrative (sthing he himself was good at), whereas the more recent one suffers very slightly from the modern curse of inclusivity imo.

But on the whole I'd probably plump for the MDLN if I had to read one.

'Got to Welch thru him' obv.

I just re-read my post above about C&P and I'm now wondering if that's the most flippant and irrelevant comment it's possible to make about Dostoevsky.

When I came out, the hall thundered applause, and for a long, very long time, they would not let me speak. I bowed, made gestures, asking them to let me read — nothing was of any avail: raptures, enthusiasm (all because of the Karamazovs). At last I began reading: I was interrupted positively at each page, and at moments at each phrase, by a thunder of applause. I read loudly, with fire. All that I wrote about Tatyana was received with enthusiasm. (This is a great victory for our idea over the twenty-five years of delusions!) When at the end I proclaimed the universal union of people, the hall was as though in hysterics, and when I finished, — I cannot tell you about the roar, about the wail of ecstasy: strangers among the public cried, wept, embraced one another, and swore to one another to be better, not to hate one another from henceforth, but to love. The order of the session was upset; all rushed to me to the platform — grand ladies, students, Secretaries of State, students — all embraced, kissed me. All the members of our Society who were on the platform embraced me and kissed me, and all, literally all, cried for ecstasy. The calls for me lasted half an hour; they waved their handkerchiefs; suddenly, for instance, two old men, strangers to me, stopped me: "We have been enemies for twenty years, we have not spoken to one another, and now we have embraced and made peace. It is you who have reconciled us. You are our saint, you are our prophet!" "Prophet, prophet!" the crowd shouted. Turgenev, about whom I had put in a good word in my speech, threw himself at me to embrace me with tears. Annenkov ran up to press my hand and kiss my shoulder. "You are a genius, you are more than a genius!" they both said to me. Ivan Aksakov ran up to the platform and declared to the public that my speech — is not a mere speech, but a political event! A cloud had been hiding the horizon, and now Dostoevsky's words, like the sun, have driven it away, have shed their light upon all. From this moment begins true brotherhood, and there will be no more misunderstanding. "Yes, yes!" they all cried, and embraced again, and wept again. The sitting was closed. I tried to escape behind the scenes, but everybody forced their way in there from the hall, mostly women. They kissed my hands, would not let me be. The students rushed in. One of them, in tears, fell down before me on the floor in hysterics and lost consciousness. Complete, completest victory! Yuriev rang his bell and announced that the "Society of Lovers of Russian Literature" unanimously elected me honorary member. Again wailing and shouting. After an interval almost of an hour the session was resumed. All the other speakers had a mind not to read. Aksakov got up and declared that he would not read his speech since all had been said and all had been solved by the great word of our genius — Dostoevsky. However, we all made him speak. The reading went on, and meanwhile a conspiracy was arranged. I was worn out and wanted to go home, but they forced me to stay. In that one hour they managed to get a sumptuous laurel crown, a yard and a half across, and at the end of the sitting a number of ladies (over a hundred) stormed the platform and crowned me in sight of the whole hall with the wreath: "From women of Russia, of whom you spoke so much good!"

- Dostoevsky, Letters and Reminiscence

ba ha. Nice one, alimosina.

Finished Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses by Ian Hacking. Excellent, full of local historical detail, rigorous but relaxed and humane analysis. Hacking is ultimately cautious about his lines of thought (controversial enough already perhaps) and, as a non-medical person (other than the inevitable collection of endlessly turned-over neuroses and sketchy ailments), it's definitely interesting to read Plasmon's posts where I read about the book in the first place.

Yesterday was dealing with the all too real and genuine illness which is slight cold + hangover, and long and complicated words were bowing my head with pain. Comfort food was an absolute medical necessity, and whipped through The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr. Read it before, twice perhaps, and the only new observations that I'd make are 1) the reason I think Gideon Fell is more successful than JDC's other detectives is the sense of mystical force he is given, and 2) JDC's mastery of the artifices of detective fiction - so that he suffers slightly from that effect where the extent of his skill is such that it seems natural, and less obvious than if his devices were clunkier, it's the only reason I can think of for his comparative neglect.

Just read the ever-excellent John Lanchester's alarming article on what he thinks the future of the economic crisis will be - in the LRB.

Now going to hit Agape Agape by Gaddis and, courtesy the top books of the decade countdown, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower.

With a pint, of course. Nobody shd be doing all this reading without mental sustenance and aliment.

You can read while hungover?

Not really, no. Even the most basic of sentences can pose insurmountable problems, can seem almost modernistically obscure or inscrutable + shape-shifting characters and apparently dadaist plots seem to suddenly be a feature of even hackneyed crime and detection novels or children's books.

I was able to read this because a) I'd already read it and knew the plot and b) the basic aura of Kentish country house plus satanism and witches seemed soothing, oh, and c) big writing, large leading, small pages.

Finishing Welch's diaries in a hurry last night and this morning before I had to give it back: very enjoyable although I wished I had read the other novels and some short stories before going through it...still, quite a roller coaster between that desire to live a normal life, to do more and enjoy more (the illness is cast as a shadowy presence, probably to do with the editing more than anything but he doesn't dwell on it) and a remembrance for things past (when he kind of could and did it maybe once or twice). The desire to put anything, no matter how embarrassing to others, comes through strongly.

He has a rare intensity as a writer that I can't quite put my finger on. Needs more fleshing out.

Think I'll have a go at this Bolano guy.

Interesting what you say about his desire to put anything. Wd definitely agree. I think I'd see it as ultimately some (understandably) morbid version of aestheticism - he fetishizes the surface detail of things, so that the beauty of a thing is almost imbued with a moral significance, and for Welch, people and the way they interact are part of that aestheticism.

That reminds me of something I was reading the other day

Contrary to Sana'i who states that the sensory world is a trap in which beauty does not correspond to an ontological quality, Ibn 'Arabi is completely indifferent to that truth, only retaining the idea of a continuum between sensory beauty and intelligential Beauty.

I don't think there's much doubting that, on the whole, objects are prioritized over people, that people are unsatisfactory objects, in particular that they age.

Why this isn't repellant, at least not for me, is the vividness which this set of priorities gives his descriptions of the material world (a vividness that is at times close to revelation) and the correspondant lack of sentiment with which he treats people (I keep on wanting to say 'humans', which is sort of the effect he has).

By no means my favourite writer, he's at times rather repellent I think, but definitely interesting with lots of plus points (he's very good at dialogue for one).

Yes to 'lack of sentiment' (one of his books is called Brave and Cruel, maybe its more than just a title) and 'morbid version of aestheticism'.

I think Proust subscribes to that continuum x1000, if I am understanding that quote correctly.

Bolano is good so far (Distant Star). Ignored because I didn't have the time for 2666 or Savage Detectives, and a growing distaste for magical realism, digging into Latin 'dictator' fiction instead.

Just read the ever-excellent John Lanchester's alarming article on what he thinks the future of the economic crisis will be - in the LRB.

His book on the same, 'Whoops!', is thoroughly enjoyable.

Now reading William Langewiesche's 'The Atomic Bazaar' (excellent), and a little OUP 1982 paperback called 'London After the Bomb: What a Nuclear Attack Really Means', which thoroughly puts the boot into the then-govt's 'Protect and Survive' bullshit.

^ tell me more. The 'protect and survive' stuff I found pretty amazing.

It looks at all the governmental assumptions in what was released to the public, and shows how ridiculous they were. Assumptions such as 6 nuclear bombs hitting London wouldn't break any windows or damage any roofs, so people who stayed indoors would be safe from fallout; that a family of four could stay in a shelter the size of the underneath area of a dining table, with enough food and water for 14 days, and then emerge into safety (instead of into fierce, lethal radiation); and the internal government memos that repeatedly indicated that the role of the army (who would now have all powers they deemed fit) after the bombs dropped would be to protect the remaining government FROM civilians, rather than to help the civilians.

Crazy stuff.

OMG idk why you're reading that you're in like Australia it's not like New Zealand have bombs.

I'm on Memoirs Of A Public Baby by Philip O'Connor, as yet unfinished & not sure if I will. Fine post on it from Alimosina, dunno I have that much to add. I admire the style a lot - super-dense, strongly visual; also quite disjointed, slightly unpleasant & wearing in large doses. If you like mid-century memoirs from the literary bohemian/pauper-cum-aristo world, prob essential.

In my sudden need to read everything i own, I have gotten through these books in the past week-

The Curious Incident of the dog at nighttime
A serious man
into the wild
halfway through my book of selected ginsberg

and think i'm gonna go for the power and the glory after

(as in read all of, not put down while enjoying and forget it exists. a refreshing change!)

If you like mid-century memoirs from the literary bohemian/pauper-cum-aristo world, prob essential

Wuh-oh.

Any, so Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Clearly massively, frighteningly talented. Well written, great knack of mordant brevity, moving, closely observed, a restrained sense of the absurd.

And yet, and yet - I found myself saying 'Why am I reading this?' quite a lot, or, even worse, a mock homely 'Gee, makes you think, doesn't it?' after every story.

There's a writerly feel to it, which doesn't sit too well with me. This, I think, is clearly my problem - I'm sure WT is a better writer than I am a reader. But I've never been too good with short stories (apart from ghosts and laser guns so to speak). The whole male psyche + Americana (hacking wood/beer cans/neighborly folks) + significant disruptive incident that provides a tangential gloss on the story and is provocative of contemplation of above just feels like too much of a thing. I guess it's just an American version of what Chekhov does, or indeed VS Pritchett, but then I often have the same problem with them too (the short stories anyway).

I get it, I get it, I just don't care. (And yes I do worry slightly, because I'm basically saying I don't care about reading about human relationships - or at least, not just human relationships).

So yes, go read him - more well-adjusted people than me will get a lot out of him I reckon. And he's genuinely moving, and genuinely good. And funny.

Haha yes, the 'mid-century memoirs' description was aimed at you.

Interesting on Wells Tower. I had him pegged as short-story writerly (character portraits in dialogue + describing lawns followed by disruption, self-revelation), which I too can take or leave (not being fully human), but then the Books of The Decade thread made it sound like he was writing crazy shit about sad Vikings, which I am bang on for.

there's only one story about sad Vikings in that collection, but it's a good one

OMG idk why you're reading that you're in like Australia it's not like New Zealand have bombs.

I have a bit of an obsession with end-of-the-world literature, especially nuclear war stuff, from growing up on Johns Wyndham and Christopher. Plus there's a big US missile tracking station in my state, so when we were kids we always assumed we'd be Soviet targets.

I'm on Memoirs Of A Public Baby by Philip O'Connor, as yet unfinished & not sure if I will. Fine post on it from Alimosina, dunno I have that much to add. I admire the style a lot - super-dense, strongly visual; also quite disjointed, slightly unpleasant & wearing in large doses. If you like mid-century memoirs from the literary bohemian/pauper-cum-aristo world, prob essential.

Similarly, am reading Dan Davin's 'Closing Times', memoirs of people like Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dylan Thomas, louis MacNeice, Joyce Carey, etc

And I'd put in a vote for Wells Tower--really liked that collection.

finally finished low life by luc sante. simply perfect. now started some foucault. finally.

I'm in the middle of Don Delillo's Libra, and am hoping the second half is better than the first.

i think i have tried reading that book at least 4 times, and never managed to finish it.

the only thing i have finished so far in march is terence rattigan's ross: a dramatic portrait. it was actually kind of great.

Started Huizinga but switched to Foucault. Why do I bother reading this? I rarely if ever remember any of these books. :-( Still, a fantastic read.

A couple of rather wonderful Hungarian novels (though the first was written in English)...

http://www.penguin.com.au/jpg-large/9780141192062.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1590173392.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Hungarians are totally the greatest Europeans, so definitely going to check those.

i saw a copy of in praise of older women the other day at a charity shop and i think it would still be there if i look tomorrow- worth the £1?

haha cover alone

obv not a us cover, wtf

GamalielRatsey OTM. Yet, Esterhazy gave a reading in town last week and I didn't go.

I favor Ivan Mandy

worth the £1?

Vizinczey is a disciple of Stendhal. His ideal is a sort of merciless analytic clarity in the light of which everyone is hypocritical and vain.

Personally I don't like that constant unmasking and reducing. I like to keep my illusions of depth.

:-( I have yet to read Stendhal. Passed by his house though. lol.
I do like constant analysis b ut it does leave you... naked after a while.

Distant Star: a tad of a ramble in the end -- but always interesting, quite a few bits on the right-wing and the avant-garde, it'd be really interesting to read what some of this stuff might be based on.

I found quite a range of cultural name-dropping, which is why it never felt like name-dropping. Guess its called engagement.

Patricia Highsmith - Ripley's Game

Now: Ford Maddox Ford: The Good Soldier

worth the £1? Definitely! Though you won't get that sexy cover, I suspect.

Rupley's Game and The Good Soldier are both way, way, way great. I envy you reading them for the 1st time.

it wasn't there :( ended up buying madame bovary (!) instead.

I'm reading Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin. I like the idea that not every novel (or novella) has to be 900 pages long, though I do wish maybe they'd prorate the price a bit for <100 page books.

Btw- It was this very thread where I first heard of this book so shout-outs to thomp and others who wrote about this above. I finished it already. That's the nice thing about <100 page books. I thought it was overall pretty good. The beginning and end are strong - the middle is a bit patchy - but it's short enough that it doesn't get too bogged down in the patchy parts.

Agree re "The Good Soldier" and "Ripley".

I've just finished "The Childrens' Book" by A S Byatt. An odd book which I really enjoyed, although it's not hard to imagine lots of people losing patience with it. Byatt's strengths and weaknesses are pretty clear cut. Her novel is very thoroughly researched, and she doesn't wear her learning lightly. Everything, including much esoterica, is highly detailed, there is an almost ridiculous number of characters and the sheer quantity of information can be very difficult to assimilate unless you have a very good memory for detail, which I don't. She's generally more comfortable with ideas than character or dialogue. And yet she has a great feel for the intellectual and artistic life of the period (just before the First World War) - Fabianism, the suffragettes, the obsession with folktales and fairytales, and what now looks like absurd complacency about the continuation of a certain kind of civilisation that was blown out of the water in 1914.

I loved the Highsmith, especially -- but I'm not as keen on unreliable narration, I found it a tad...smug, as to how far FMF took the device. Don't know, need to think this one through a lot more.

That AS Byatt is kinda interesting, might chase that. Way keener on WWI than WWII. Like so much European fiction from the 20s to the 40s because the feel of profound changes (because of higher society complacency, amongst other things) seeps through. Might be interesting to read someone who is writing as if looking back, not in the thick of it (unlike Musil or Proust, say)

Now: David Ohle - Pisstown Chaos

Then its Carlo Emilio Gadda - Acquaintance with Grief

When I read the FMF I think the orthodox view was that he'd more or less "invented" the unreliable narrator - maybe an oversimplification but possibly the first to use it in such a sustained and controlled way?

That's a good point about Byatt. There's a (monstrous) character whose obviously based to some extent on D H Lawrence, which got me thinking about the extent to which Lawrence is obviously going to be much better at conveying how it felt to be alive at that time, but Byatt is going to be better at identifying the ways in which it will seem queer/interesting/porentous etc to us.

Aaargh, whose s/be who's. I'm no pedant but that grates.

now reading: affluence and discontent: the anatomy of consumer societies by eugene linden

(veddy interesting!)

Dipping my toe into Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, not sure if I'll be able to handle 300 pages of realistic suburban angst though.

It's really good.

Revolutionary Road has been on my list for awhile.

Ok, read Whoops by John Lanchester. It's great, informal, clear style - read it in about a day and a half. Obv it's top on all the financial mechanisms and madness, and it really is great on these.

But there are also narratives he has running in the background, like the coronation of finance over industry in the UK, not just as a sector, but as a philosophy - things like that get me almost as angry as anything else.

There was a line on another thread that said they'd be more likely to trust The Economist than the LRB. I don't really buy that for several reasons - one, Lanchester knows his stuff; two, part of the reason to read this book is to try and make good the disconnect between 'real world' stuff and high finance, so the fact it's coming from outside the traditional financial institutions and their media is a good thing, not a cause for suspicion; and three, something that Lanchester himself nails, people involved in the City still don't get it. I had it, god help me you get what you deserve, at a dinner party, where slightly but only slightly shamefully I ended up shouting down a City lawyer with the words an awful lot of people have said, 'You still don't get it, do you?' - there are whole systemic articles of faith which people are refusing to give up. It's like The Penultimate Truth by PKD or something. Everything's arse about face. Lanchester describes Economist articles in the same way - they're brilliant and interesting, but they all end up the same way, advocating the same policies that got us in the mess in the first place.

This book will give you ammo, should you wish, to pwn they asses without shouting and fist banging - perhaps more importantly it's interesting and witty and a great read.

Oh, and I was reading something today - John Smith's (Pocahontas guy) Generall Historie of Virginia - that reminded me in a tangential way of it all -

But the worst was our guilded refiners with their golden promises made all men their slaves in hope of recompences; there was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold, such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the sands least they should by there art make gold of his bones: little neede there was and lesse reason, the ship should stay, there wages run on, our victualls consume 14. weekes, that the Mariners might say, they did helpe to build such a golden Church that we can say the raine washed neere to nothing in 14. dayes. .. never any thing did more torment him, then to see all necessary busines neglected, to fraught such a drunken ship with so much guilded durt.

(Oh, WT's Sad vikings were great btw.)

Great Whoops summary. Wish I was half as articulate!

Reading 'Running Away' by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, a groovy Dalkey Archive book, and first of his I've read. Wonderful style, and I have no idea where it's going, but enjoying every moment.

Wow. Is that a book? I'd love to have a proper go at an on-the-spot account of the new world. I've tried Bernal Diaz's History of the Conquest of New Spain more than once, but just got bogged down in the olde worlde style. Someone should do a straight modern translation.

was an xp to Gamaliel

Finished "Netherlands", wasn't as blown away by the prose as some people on the 00s poll thread, somehow the voice just didn't quite appeal enough, although plenty of the sentiments of regretful passivity touched a nerve. Somewhat childishly the phrase which grabbed my attention the most was "in the taxi home [...] my wife, mooning out of the window at rainy Regent's Park". lulz.

"Netherland" singular that is

xpost Ismael

I was actually just reading it here.

It's pretty readable, I'd say, although I was just skimming through.

Really liked the Lancaster article on the LRB -- on the one hand very negative, almost relentelessly so with that in-house LRB tone, but he does analyse that. Then there's the 'I don't know have all the answers' bit, and the 'Labour will do admin slightly better than the Tories' is probably the best argument I heard going for Brown & co.

Gamaliel have you read the piece on Celine in the latest LRB?

No, I haven't. Was going to pick it up, but didn't get round to it. Is it any good?

Its excellent! Really interesting account of late Celine (the fear of being forgotten, I had no idea he was out of fashion by the 50s) and blows the recent Steiner piece on him out of the water.

When I say 'excellent' and 'interesting' I also mean necessary (having not read the biography). About time someone wrote something essay-lenght about one of the post-'Death on Credit' novels, which have all now been translated.

Yes, I saw that. Almost picked up Rigadon the other day. I did like North very much when I read it, which is a while ago now.

Got to read Whoops!. My only slight worry - & it's a bit perverse - is that he's so good at explaining stuff that it's hard to tell whether he really knows his stuff or not. Like the correction here where he's got some sums badly wrong make me worry a bit. But the LRB articles have been amazing - he's the best explainer of finance to the arts-degree classes that we've had.

I'm rereading Money while waiting for The Pregnant Widow to arrive. Finding it better than I feared I might - the metafictional 'Martin Amis - do you know his stuff?' business is the only clunky problem for me.

Also Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland.

Damn, I think I'm like 3 LRBs behind (always thus, means I end up too late for eg chat about the Hoffmann attack on Zweig), but that Celine article sounds intersting. I finally read the Steiner one - it was a bit peculiar, but I did like it - didn't actually review the book under review, yes, but thought it was right to pick at Celine as being a really unusual problem, and felt the 'it's a puzzler alright' conclusion was fair.

xpost - Ugh, that mistake's a bit ugly. Still, in the main, the explanations aren't so much mathematical (although there is a bit of this at the beginning of the book) and more how things like derivatives, options, futures and credit default swaps operate. But yes, he does carry you along rather, especially someone as financially innumerate as me.

I've never failed to enjoy Money whenever I've returned to it, apart from the metafictional end, yes. Still, with Experience, my favourite.

Its not even the 'financially inumerate', as such -- plenty of people who are comfortable with numbers on a basic-to-intermediate level, or who aren't afriad of equations, might be stumped by things like the 'bond market'. Reading about inflation will seldom be as interesting as reading Celine, I'm afraid.

I guess many suspect that bankers and the services they provide are useless, that hedge funds serve no purpose whatsoever - but its the confidence for someone who doesn't know much about it to say so to people who do know, in such a way as to subsequently demand changes to the way things are that is the problem? So someone like Lancaster could be welcome.

(I talked about the attack on Zweig on the 'World of Yesterday' thread, btw, very rock-critic like in the way Hoffmann almost mocked Zweig's suicide; also if you read that article with his piece on Hugo van Hoffmannstahl its quite interesting)

Steiner on Celine had a lot of potential - no lift-off tho'.

Revolutionary Road has been on my list for awhile.

About 60 pages in now. I like that the Frank Wheeler character is becoming less sympathetic - it makes it easier to distance myself from all the painful things that keep happening to him.

re-reading "a portrait of the artist as a young man" and at the same time reading Albert Camus "The First Man" and "Killing Pablo" by Mark Bowden.

found george saunders' essay collection and wells towers' short story collection remaindered yesterday, read the former and now halfway through the latter. which has kind of stopped affecting me, i don't know. it's worrying that it's basically ten years' work. writing seems hard.

also there's this 'my life has come unmoored ... SYMBOL' thing going on. objects of decay. a poisonous animal, tainted meat, a fungal infection. in three out of five stories so far!

a dead bird
a stomach wound

i feel like having the viking story at the end is unfair to it. like: it's more obviously 'early work', or the work of someone learning how his chops work + how to flex them -- whereas the sea cucumber story, say, seems very, very assured.

http://images.indiebound.com/876/278/9780307278876.jpg

i just read – and loved, loved, loved, tod wodicka's all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well and recommend it with all of my heart, though a bit of caution about its weirdness. it reminds me in a funny way of gunter grass or bohumil hrabal.

but I'm not as keen on unreliable narration, I found it a tad...smug, as to how far FMF took the device. Don't know, need to think this one through a lot more.

yeah I thought the left turns in The Good Soldier were really well-executed, but the ending was melodramatic far beyond any reasonable suspension of belief...which to me seemed because the narrator's plight (nor that of any of the characters) was not nearly as significant and/or interesting as Ford Madox Ford believed it to be...

the wodicka book looks like one i ought to / might like

yeah, I'm totally gonna check it out.

JG Ballard short stories got me through work today. Thanks JG.

I dread to think what your job could be

Ha ha. I was thinking the story Manhole 69 was very like where I work in fact.

Yikes.

Oh yes, and another IK books of the decade provoked read - thanks Ismael. Xpost

I just been there too long, alimosina. At least I hope that's the case and my colleagues and I are not all entering some perma-wakeful catatonic state of ego-claustrophobia.