Words! Words! Words!: Autumn 2012 'What do you read, my lord?' thread

To cite the appropriate exchange from Act II, Scene 2:

LORD POLONIUS
What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET
Words, words, words.

LORD POLONIUS
What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET
Between who?

LORD POLONIUS
I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

---

Thus.

why did you name the reading thread after evony ads?

evony? evony? i know nothing of this evony of which you speak.

xp

Last night I finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is enough of a miracle that it merits notice, because I thought it was very badly written at almost every level. After I finished it, I thought for a while about why it was bad, and what there was about it that was good, and those thoughts are not yet wholly ordered or complete.

I'll return at some point today and enlarge on this, because it puzzles me and seems worth disentangling.

going through the Partisan Review crowd's memoirs 'n' things:

Mary McCarthy - Intellectual Memoirs
Alfred Kazin - Writing Was Everything
Jean Stafford - Boston Adventures

Some Donald Westlake. The Comedy is Finished is a weirdly serendipitous title for his final novel.

Stories by James Tiptree Jr. I love "The Girl Who Was Plugged In."

Almost done with Wolf Hall and then I don't know what, probably the DFW bio.

just started "a naked singularity" by sergio de pava yesterday and am really enjoying it so far. a long dense legal novel that was originally self-published, picked up some glowing praise, and was reprinted by university of chicago press

tbh I kinda feel like PKD shd be more controversial than he really is (xpost to Aimless)

"a naked singularity" by sergio de pava

This is a cool book. I'm curious about his other Xlibris title on Amazon, Personae... anyone read it?

I just finished Running Dog by DeLillo. It was excellent.

still reading this

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312045410l/77936.jpg

really enjoyed the last two books i read; 'howards end' and amos oz's 'panther in the basement'

Mentioned this in another thread but The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson is a hearty meal of a book. I'm currently 2/5ths through its 500 page length.

i am actually reading hamlet! i mean kind of, a little at a time when i have time

spinoza's ethics
leibniz's discourse on metaphysics
george herbert - poetry
a book on the international language movement

A stack of books about pro cycling, which I won't talk about (too niche)
Graham Joyce's The Silent Land, which I won't talk about until I've finished it
A first draft of a friend's novel, struggling a bit with reading on the laptop, but its a good read (always a relief.)

So... feckin useful contribution to the thread there, Zo.

Haven't posted recent reading for a while:

* Julia Strachey: An Integrated Man - started this on the bus this morning; it's like 'Lucky Jim' crossed with Ivy Comptin-Burnett, if you can imagine such a thing

* John Varley: Slow Apocalypse - good, involving but fairly plainly written SF; enjoyed it but not much else to say

* Jakob Wassermann: My First Wife - great stuff, a novel about the world's worst marriage to the world's most hopeless ninny, entered into by the world's most passive loser

* Kevin powers: The Yellow Birds - pretty good Iraq war novel, but not the Remarque-style masterpiece everyone seems to be calling it

I should probably just go ahead and jot down my thoughts about PKD's Palmer Eldritch, even though I'm tired and out of sorts.

Among the glaring weaknesses of this book were:

- the characters. they were weakly drawn, paper thin and scarcely resembled flesh and blood humans in any respect. each was a heap of bits, conjured to meet the exigencies of the plot. they barely rose above the level of hand puppets.

- the dialogue. it succeeded in keeping the plot moving forward, by including the bare bones of information about the thoughts and intentions of the characters, but only rarely succeeded in sounding like anything a real person might have said in those circumstances. it was irredeemably cartoonish.

- the plot. it works ok at the level of single incidents and events, because those events each have a certain amount of interest as they unfold. dick also succeeds in passing the reader from one incident to the next, successively. where it all falls apart is when dick tries near the end of the book to pull it all together and impose a coherent thread running through all the events, an explanation of why they happened as they did. His explanations are incoherent and consequently the plot in total is inchoate and inexplicable.

- the theme. this is tricky because the overt theme dick offers the reader during his grand summation at the close of the book is all bollocks, the real theme of the book is buried and I haven't yet figured out what it was. I do know that it is what made the book tick and what overcomes its many horrible flaws.

Mainly, I can't condemn a book just because its plot is senseless or its characters are silly and its dialogue is highly artificial. All these apply in spades to At Swim-Two-Birds or The Third Policeman, two books I love. So, if you love Palmer Eldritch, none of these criticisms will touch your love and admiration, either.

I did admire the overall sense of play that Dick brought to the book. I swear, to all appearances he had no idea where he would go when he started the first chapter. The only thing that connects the end to the start is that abiding sense of play and his fresh interest in fiddling with ideas and knocking his characters to and fro to see what they did.

My ultimate beef is that, after watching him play with those characters and ideas for a couple hundred pages, I did not feel one inch differently about those ideas than I did before, and for all the sense of potential that hangs about it like a heavy mist, there was no payoff, no achievement, no satisfaction at the conclusion. He'd spent his imagination and taken me nowhere. He'd implied a swim in untold depths and left me sitting in a muddy puddle.

That's alright for pulp. His reputation is bigger than pulp. No sale.

I kind of feel like there should be a separate thread for this

oh wait here we go:

'Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'

It only needs a separate thread if others feel a need to comment on my comments to any large extent.

I will only add to what I wrote above that, having poked around in my mind for the lasting impressions from the book, I would describe its true theme as "Trust nothing. Trust no one. Do not even trust yourself. Delusion and betrayal are knit into the very fabric of reality. You can't win. There is no winning."

theme is something more to do with eucharist and capitalism iirc

i can't remember what the one 'offered the reader at the end' is

Thanks for the warning, Aimless. I've been working through PKD a book a year, I'll avoid that one.

There's a negative passage re: Nabokov in Houellebecq's unpleasant "The possibility of an island" which I read when it came out and liked and re-read and hated. I decided to reread Nabokov out of spite for Michel. I'm first re-reading the books I've read (Lolita, Pnin, Blue Fire, Ada) and then gonna follow with the books I haven't read. Any to seek? Avoid?

Sorry for all the rēd / rėd / rē-rēd / rē-rėd / re: in that last post

"the gift" was like the one nabakov i tried to read and couldn't finish, i think it requires a pretty deep knowledge of russian lit to get what he's doing

haha just looked up that houellebecq quote -- what a douche.

'laughter in the dark' is a favorite.

flambouyant, if you have an established affinity for PKD novels, then don't let me dissuade you. you might agree with the assessment of cherry (soda) in the prior WAYR thread that it's "one of the good ones". Certainly that seems to be the consensus among PKD fans.

There's a negative passage re: Nabokov in Houellebecq's unpleasant "The possibility of an island" which I read when it came out and liked and re-read and hated. I decided to reread Nabokov out of spite for Michel. I'm first re-reading the books I've read (Lolita, Pnin, Blue Fire, Ada) and then gonna follow with the books I haven't read. Any to seek? Avoid?

― flamboyant goon tie included, Thursday, October 4, 2012 1:06 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, i checked out possibility of an island based on someone's recommendation in one of these threads. read the first page, rolled my d.e. picked it up again a week later, got kinda into the magazine stuff, then onto the dogs are unconditional love stuff, then put it down and felt ok about it because misanthropy should be less boring.

the nabokov quote was like ok, whatever.

i would not skip reading stigmata, and i have read basically all of them, and that is one i have read three times

i have trouble with nabokov. i like the early books okay because they are easier to read. the later ones i can never finish. i've tried to read lolita a bunch of times. he reads so strange to me. his sentences. i don't think my brain works that way. i have problems with math.

Is it this quote that we're talking about?

“Yes,” she said. “Nabokov was five years off. What most men like is not the moment that precedes puberty, but the one immediately after. Anyway, he wasn’t a very good writer…”

I too had never been able to bear that mediocre and mannered pseudo-poet, that clumsy imitator of Joyce, who had never been lucky enough to posses the energy that sometimes enabled the insane Irishman to rise above his ponderous prose.

A collapsed pastry, that was what Nabokov’s style had always made me think of.

Yeah, that is weak.

I don't much like Nabokov but there's a story "Signs and Symbols" that I like. It compresses an amazing amount of feeling into just a few pages.

is his prose as bad in the french

His takedown of Larry Clark in same book is hilarious in its insistence, I'll admit. It's not a Bad Book, I think I was just too caught up in the plotting the first time around

Ooh scott I'm sad you don't like late Nabokov, his prose reads great to me, every sentence is like the easiest and most pleasing cryptic crossword clue (not for everybody I'm sure)

i wld def place palmer eldritch in the v upper tier of dick novs, and think of it as the first in a VERY loose trilogy w/ ubik and scanner darkly of drug PANIC bks - that vertiginous acid phear that 'reality' can never be recovered because nothing ever was, anyway. palmer eldritch is one of the funniest dick novs, and one of the scariest, and again, the two bleed into one, continually; dick is such a master of escalating hysteria; laughter in the dark, and in the light.

i have been reading The End by Ian Kershaw, a history of the final eight months or so of Nazi Germany and an attempt to understand why the germans refused to surrender well past the point that the second world war was lost to them. it's not the kind of thing i wld normally read for pleasure (my dad passed it on to me), and at times i've longed for a slightly more subjective and culturalist way of telling; however kershaw's restrained prose style and typical academic caution actually makes the slow careful account of atrocity and endgames even more revolting and disturbing.

That Wasserman novel sounds right up my alley...

I read one of the best novels I've ever encountered this summer: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING (1958) by Alan Sillitoe. Check that is out. Seriously.

ish*

Read Nabokov's The Defense in high school, feeling like I finally caught all the worldly brainwaves broadcast from a first-rate example of Modern Lit. It's the story of a very sheltered Russian chess prodigy, gliding gently down the drain. I think I associated it with late 50s/early 60s Alfred Hitchcock, incl the weekly anthology series he hosted--when it was still 20-something shrewd minutes per episode; The Defense was also concise. Don't know how it would seem now. And I liked another late shortie, Transparent Things.

I moved on from P.K. Dick to reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Like night and day. From thin cartoon characters created only to illustrate with abstract ideas to a novel where observing character is the entirety and every sentence and every detail is crafted in beautiful bas relief.

It's a terrific novel. Thanks for reminding me -- it's been 20 years since I read it. Her last two religio-mystic novels are good too.

bought her latest book of essays and its slow going for me. like reading the bible. or something biblical. i feel like i need to go to college when i read stuff like that. its plainspeak. like plainsong. but really dense for all its plain-ness. i swear i know how to read books. housekeeping one of my favorite novels of all time. i struggled with what came after.

she's some kind of neo-Calvinist, isn't she -- the kind who reveres the density of intelligent 17th century sermons, no?

those nu-calvinists. you gotta watch out for them.

they're trouble.

start another America and burn witches

MOBY DICK (for the first time)

Her last two religio-mystic novels are good too.

You mean Gilead and Home? I loved the former almost despite its religious trappings. The main character was amazing, one of the most generous and generously written I've ever come across, full of sympathy for those around him despite their apparent failings, and constantly trying to do the Right Thing. And although ostensibly he was on the hot line to God to help him do so I could read that just as his way of carefully and considerately thinking over the problem at hand. Home was less overtly religious but also less compelling in terms of character, the two leads much more inward, mired in their own world views, failing to properly connect with others.

I really need to get Housekeeping. I wouldn't touch her essays with a barge pole.

i saw her give a talk on christology that i didn't understand a single word of

well yeah

Still on the Henry James kick (if you can call it a kick, I suppose).

What Maisie Knew - Totally into James' playing with the extent of which adults behave in an adult way, the way they let their guard down (or not) around a child but the thread was lost for me at some point, and again the whole losing of innonence by the gaining of knoowledge (or its concealement).

Like the themes a lot but lost much of the minutiae of plot - need to return to this at some point.

The Aspern Papers - applying the quest for a knowledge to a academicky literary type quest masquarding as unfulfilled relations.

The inevitable break from the above:

Bolano - Antwerp - really loved this -- at a sentence level I liked the formulations he came up in snatches that didn't add up to anything much of a narrative! Loved the construction of utter desolation and emptyness of town, places, people, some of whom have skeletal encounters. The hunchbck annoyed me but I'm reading this post-David Lynch and he wrote this pre-Twin Peaks so I guess that's ok.

I think this was all ok in the end because it was short yet unreleting for all of its short duration.

Haldor Laxness - Under the Glacier. This is an amazing random find at my library. Wonder if the writer of "The Wicker Man" read this (book is from '68 and the film is from '76). V witty, interestingly written as partly a play, then switches to reportage (in a confused third to first person).

(sorry film is from '73)

I used to own Laxness' Independent People for years but never got aroiund to reading past the first couple of chapters. I still want to get back to it someday!

am halfway through swann's way (or a 1/12th of the way through in search of lost time). this fucking guy.

Great, huh..

I happened to also have read Proust's Pleasures and Regrets and many of his own formulations: Habit, the ideas around unfulfilled desires -- and how fulfilling them is the worst things that could happen to you -- but then again not so much here, in these skecthes, around memory. I guess that was yet to come. Kinda quite frightening how all those ideas were there (as well as the notion that life was basically a grim joke) by the time he was 25.

Apparently Under the Glacier is a one-off for Laxness, unlike any of his books.

Not doing enough justice to the quality of Aspen Papers above but I see a thematic commonality w/Proust. That, and a love for Venice.

I finished Housekeeping. Amazing book! Mainly it speaks about absence and transcience in a strange otherworldy tone that I've never seen matched elsewhere.

I can't say I always agreed with the many ex cathedra statements about how the world works, but the book carries such conviction and consistency of view that it is hard to get mad about the perfect, unblemished certainty of these pronouncements. While reading this one it was hard to get past the idea that the author must have some insight most of us lack, however strange that insight might be.

I thought the religious aspects of GILEAD were beautiful...

Maurice Dekobra: The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars -- from 1927, spy/adventure romp: if Modesty Blaise had been much posher, written by a Frenchman and invented decades earlier

Also tried to read the new Michael Chabon, but really couldn't get into it. Partly it was the bad editing (the word 'elegaic' used twice in the first 6 pages, the main character's surname sometimes losing its final S), and partly because it seemed as though he was trying really hard to channel The Wire. Will reattempt at some later stage.

Reminds me: I saw a copy of The Sleeping Car Murders by Sebastien Japrisot. Anybody read it, or any of his others?

did anyone read those justin cronin vampire/plague blockbusters? reading that nyt magazine story made me curious.

plus, these really are the books to namedrop these days: Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn

eugenides did it today in the nyt. think chabon did it last week? snd their was the new yorker thing. all the rage!

eugenides also said this today:

What’s the last truly great book you read?

“The Love of a Good Woman,” by Alice Munro. There’s not one story in there that isn’t perfect. Each time I finished one, I just wanted to lie down on the floor and die. My life was complete. Munro’s prose has such a surface propriety that you’re never prepared for the shocking places her stories take you. She pulls off technical feats, too, like changing the point of view in each section of a single story. This is nearly impossible to do while carrying the necessary narrative freight forward, but she makes it look easy. Most readers don’t notice how technically inventive Munro is because her storytelling and characterization overwhelm their attention.

see, people here aren't most readers. we all know how technically inventive she is. do most people who read munro not know that? i think he sells readers of munro short.

did anyone read those justin cronin vampire/plague blockbusters?

I tried the first one. 300 pages of set-up before you get to the real story, set 100 years later, at which point I bailed. Those 300 pages could be summed up as 'US Govt created vampires in a lab, they got out'.

most recent library haul:

heather love - feeling backwards: loss and the politics of queer history
quentin crisp - the naked civil servant
leslie feinberg - stone butch blues

Currently reading Hunter S Thompson's Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 for election season. I'm a geek about US election books, especially 1972, which I've already read about in Nixonland and Timothy Crouse's brilliant The Boys on the Bus, but even I had to skip through the in-depth explanation of how McGovern reached his delegate tally at the Miami DNC. Lots of great stuff in there - especially the portraits of the Democratic candidates - but boy it's long.

Just finished Mother Night, which is my favourite Vonnegut so far.

plus, these really are the books to namedrop these days: Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn

eugenides did it today in the nyt. think chabon did it last week? snd their was the new yorker thing. all the rage!

― scott seward, Tuesday, 9 October 2012 02:57 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, i heard these mentioned in real life for the first time the other day. the infection is spreading

i'm reading zadie smith's new one. i think it might be actually quite good.

I take it that's the one about the two female friends, one whose life was saved early on by the other's mother--promising excerpt in the New Yorker: oromising, but eventually just stopped, so I hope it's an excerpt. DL, have you read Mailer's St. George and the Godfather? Pretty deft, even witty; not too long or heavily underscored. Everybody knew what was at stake, even without knowing much at all about Watergate yet.

Munro is my favorite living writer. The last two collections are scattershot though.

I picked up a copy of From Heaven Lake, a Vikram Seth book from the mid-eighties about hitchhiking to Tibet. Outdated, but interesting in a retrospective way. Also, short.

reading Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie, absolutely riveting. the new yorker excerpt left out crucial stuff at the beginning, surprisingly

Just finished Memento Mori by Muriel Spark and have just begun Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess (which has an amazing Bill Sanderson cover illustration). What was nice was that MM ends with reference to The Last Four Things and a short way into ToI, The Last Four Things crops up again.

I used to own Laxness' Independent People for years but never got aroiund to reading past the first couple of chapters. I still want to get back to it someday!

Yes! Independent People is such a great book. Fucking devastating.

Cosmocmics - Calvino. a delight.

Peter Terrin: The Guard -- Dutch writer, novel about two guards in the basement of a super-rich high-rise apartment building which has been suddenly evacuated for reasons unknow; they stay on and go mad. Very Ballard, in a good way

marguerite yourcenar - the abyss

edward said, humanism and democratic criticism
richard rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity

I just read a review of Laxness' Under the Glacier: that novel sounds amazing!!!

I wouldn't call it amazing, but it's definitely worth reading. I read that one first, then Independent People, and I'd say Under the Glacier was very good but not great whereas Independent People is one of the best books I've ever read.

I think its a really unique piece.

Kenzaburo Oe - Silent Cry. So is this! From '67, so it uses that energy for a look back to political upheavals in Japanese history and politics (from the post-war capitulation to Western capitalist interests to 1868 and all that!), and goes hard into the personal: using brotherly conflict as metaphor for a country that is not talking to one another, that cannot comprehend what they say with their own language -- which flows into the bits about literary translation (the main protagonists' collaborator has commited suicide; the wheels are always made to turn here!), in a country as isolated as Japan this might have been an exotic occupation.

To be read alongside films made by Nagisa Oshima in this period:a lot here about criminals as outlaws as part-revolutionaries too, and the treatment of Korean immigrants at the hand of Japanese peasants -- way too much here, and I order my thoughts badly -- but so much resonates, even if the characters and human drama might get left out a bit but that could be me not treating this as a mere novel.

You can see the comparison w/something like Fathers and Sons (halfway thru' at the moment). The relationships and romanticism, its snappy dialogue more satisfyingly handled and overall soberly alternated with 'deep' political/philosophical discussions. Perhaps a better novel but Oe's time is different altogether. Blood gusehes from the pages in both, and that's what is needed.

i read that in a day when i was 18 or 19 and thought it was just about the best thing i had ever read

i suppose i knew it was one of those instances of perfect susceptibility so i never read another oe book

"DL, have you read Mailer's St. George and the Godfather?"

Not yet dow, but I'm sure I will. Love the unedited Q&A with McGovern at the end of F&L72. I don't think I've ever read such a candid and thorough post-defeat interview talking about what went wrong - or at least what the candidate thinks went wrong. The scale of McGovern's defeat has always fascinated me. He comes across as a solid guy who's just been hit over the head by a hammer.

I just started The Long Ships, which is dry and deft and very funny so far. You wouldn't think!

I mean for being about Viking raids and killing people out of hand and raping their women.

:The scale of McGovern's defeat" yeah--I said "everybody knew what was at stake," but maybe I should have made it "everybody likely to have read Mailer's book when it first came out." Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter is about a young man whose first son is developmentally-disabled, so Daddy freaks out and runs off into urban Japan's grey shambolic fringes--"underworld doesn't quite say it, but a ready context for his own state of mind. I hadn't yet seen any 60s Japanese movies about that environment when I read the novel, which was a graphic jolt. His son's brain requires immediate attention, so this is from the father's first glimpse:
Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his feelings instantly and directed them. . . and him, the hell away from there.

I just finished The Long Ships! Rollicking! Nice and dry.

I slightly wonder how much of that is in the original Swedish and how much was the translator's good judgment? Not that it matters.

browsing in library after finishing a reasonably long chapter in the perspective of the world by braudel and before going for a walk in st james' park.

picked up The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by E Larson, about the Chicago Exhibition. Obv an interesting subject anyway, but I was also pulled in by the Pynchon/Against the Day link.

I'm a sucker for that sort of hack history style, and I was several pages in before I reluctantly had to put it back on the shelf.

See from Wikipedia that the film rights have been sold

I just read that last month. Frederick Law Olmsted was a particularly fascinating character

What's the significance of the Chicago Exhibition? It seems to come up a lot.

well it was significant in that it brought together basically every important architect in America to create an entire city in an incredibly short time. As well as that, Chicago was seen as kind of a provincial backwater at the time (despite it size) and it kind of put the city on the map culturally. Also had the first ever Ferris wheel!

I have a strange set of recollections of The Devil in the White City. The 1880s menus that included cigar, cigarette and amontillado courses. And that Olmstead shipped his Madeira round the world to let it age.

Re: Oe oh oh oh you must read Nip the buds, shoot the kids just for an "a 23-year-old wrote this?!" moment and Teach us to outgrow our madness. To read Oe alongside contemporaneous Mishima is wild, the contrast between the two

I haven't read Father and sons

the menus are great

Old hotel menus are fascinating. The things that were elevated! Celery!

Among the attendees of the fair were the following: Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Henry Adams, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Nikola Telsa, Ignace Paderewski, Philip Armour and Marshall Field

(^i don't know who all of these people are)

+ shredded wheat

(and a ferris wheel)

I'm going through a bunch of David Leavitt. The Lost Language of Cranes suffers from too many points of view and a neat ending but I teared up a couple of times, especially the scenes b/w our young protagonist and Brad. The Page Turner on the other hand suffers from the same flaws but is almost charmless.

Re: Oe oh oh oh you must read Nip the buds, shoot the kids just for an "a 23-year-old wrote this?!" moment and Teach us to outgrow our madness. To read Oe alongside contemporaneous Mishima is wild, the contrast between the two

Tx, read Nip the Buds... Most great writers have that vision (no matter how macabre or toxic) by their early 20s don't they? I also want to read A Personal Matter. It is interesting to read him alongside Mishma, who touches on the same issues but has a take that is more personal, or maybe the diff is that Mishima has read more French novels whereas Oe has read more French philosophy. Watched Oshima's The Man Who Left his Will on Film. An absurdist concept yet a real sobriety to the whole thing. Hard to describe the sensibility at work, but again its worth seeing some of his films alongside the novels.

Fathers and Sons quite different from all of this. There is room for love to be a disruptive force to whatever ideologies are being worked through, making it for a much more affeting read. The last scene is incredible. Turgenev is the man!

Henry James - In the Cage.

I finished Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe. It's a pretty interesting book, but as a memoir, it has a slight structural problem, which is that it peaks rather early. At age 26, Dyson made his most famous and influential contributions to physics and was rewarded by Robert Oppenheimer with a lifetime appointment to the Institute for Advanced Studies. This occurs about halfway through the book, and after that initial rush, the book kind of drifts for a while, unless you're interested in nuclear policy battles of the 1950s. But then it picks up again with the speculative scientific chapters of the final third.

Now I'm reading Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

I went through that Eisenberg collection two summers ago. Some real marvels.

Finally giving Gibbon - Decline and Fall a shot. Seems more manageable when you can just dl one volume at a time (for free at that). Much more fun to read than most history, so far.

I went for David Byrne overload - both his new How Music Works and also Jonathan Lethem's 33 1/3 entry on Fear of Music. Byrne's book is great so far.

He has this great anecdote about conducting auditions for some solo tour that involved choreographed dancers. They had 50 dancers in a room trying out for 3 parts. One of the audition exercises went kind of like this:

1) each of the 50 dancers, on the fly, is required to make up their own repetitive movement that lasts 8 beats
2) each dancer keeps doing that movement until they see another dancer's movement that they prefer
3) if they see another movement that's preferable, they switch to that movement
4) this process continues until everyone in the room is making the same movement in unison

he describes that as one of the most amazing dance performances he'd ever seen, the 50 strands of repetition gradually morphing into one, almost like survival of the fittest, over the course of 5 minutes.

excellent anecdote

^

Finished The Sun Also Rises on a wet and windy day in Wales yesterday. First Hemmingway I'd ever read. Found the staccato prose a pleasant change of pace after re-reading (snark) The Silmarillion. I was very much enjoying falling into those yawning great chasms between what was said and what was inferred. Don't know a huge amount about Hemmingway beyond what a cursory wikipedia sweep has given me, but crikey, this guy seems to have had some pretty serious issues. Also Brett Ashley, whatafuckingbitch

Last night I picked up The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Jan Morris. The love for Wales is obvious. The need for me to keep reading it is not yet as obvious as I'd like. I'll continue tonight and see where it takes me. If it falters, or I do, I expect I'll give The Pale King a go.

Jude the Obscure

I went through that Eisenberg collection two summers ago. Some real marvels.

It was this story in the NY Review of Books that made me want to read more of her work (don't think this is in the collection though):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/cross-and-move/

Am giving up Harlot High and Low for now: just couldn't get into it. I think it migt have to do with the translation. Anyways I plan on reading a ton of Balzac here p soon and will try again when that happens. Meanwhile, I am going to reread some Conrad novellas before finishing out the year on a huge bender of late PKD

I tossed the Wales book aside. I'm just not so in love with Wales that I needed to read a book-length love letter.

Jim Harrison: The Woman Lit by Fireflies -- 3 novellas. Only started the first one, but loving this so far, after reading a couple of dud books recently I can't even be bothered to type the full titles of

Edith Wharton again, "Souls Belated" collection. So far they're reading like a kind of history 101 of divorce becoming a socially acceptable thing. Which is fine, I mean you can easily get a similar schooling in historical social mores from Austen, say, and it's a period I hadn't really given much thought to before.

yesterday at lunch (Moe's), sitting alone reading (Les Fleurs du Mal), a guy (there with his girl, student sorts) who kept looking at me (with vaguely irritated curiosity) approached my table just before leaving to demand (with same vaguely irritated curiosity) "WHAT BOOK???" (his exact words)

I held it up so he could see it, and fullmouthedly mumbled "Baudelaire". which, now that I think about it, was not the correct answer to his question.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SoM7PE%2BTL._SS500_.jpg

Bernard Snowy, yesterday.

I'm following this manga, btw, and enjoying it. the third part (of four) is out next week in English (or maybe in England).

I'm reading "Hearing Secret Harminies", the final part of Anthomy Powell's "A Dance To The Music Of Time", which is just magnificent and I don't want it to end.

Edith Wharton again, "Souls Belated" collection. So far they're reading like a kind of history 101 of divorce becoming a socially acceptable thing. Which is fine, I mean you can easily get a similar schooling in historical social mores from Austen, say, and it's a period I hadn't really given much thought to before.

It's gonna be my mission to make people read more Wharton.

My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel. Highly entertaining discursive ramble over the great auteur's life and work - although Bunuel acknowledges the contribution of screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, the tone throughout is consistent, extremely idiosyncratic and very very Bunuelian. It's also filled with the most jaw-dropping name-dropping you'll ever come across, eg "Every Saturday, Chaplin invited out little group of Spanish refugees out for dinner. In fact, I often went to his house on the hillside to play tennis, swim, or use the sauna. Every once in a while, Eistenstein would drop by"

Cain - Saramago. it's ok. no more , no less.

'tess of the d'urbervilles' -- first hardy i've ever read. dimly remember the plot from seeing the polanski version a decade ago. first impression: great writing -- vivid and even funny.

Roth When She Was Good. It's good, very good, but I'm reading it all wrong. Twenty minutes each way on my commute means the intensity dissipates too easily. I feel I ought to sit with it for two-hour stretches - time to get a new job maybe.

> 'tess of the d'urbervilles'
> first impression: great writing -- vivid and even funny.

give it a hundred pages...

There's a hilarious scene involving Tess and her baby. A real knee slapper.

well even at this point the plot isn't exactly funny, but there's something kind of arch and knowing about hardy's tone as a narrator that clashes a bit with what i remember of the story.

i just finished it last sunday and it was good but it gets quite grim even though i didn't immediately understand what had happened in the forest. seemed a very small world towards the end as well, with lots of people from first half popping up in second half. impressed by the postal service of the time though 8)

Hardy often and correctly gets his knuckles rapped for generic nature descriptions with an overlay of cynical wink-winking, written in carpentered prose; but the scene at the dairy farm is one of the simplest and most lyrical I've ever read.

I was surprised when i first read Hardy how much humour there was. Some of it pretty black, but still, didn't match up with my preconceptions.

Joseph Roth: Tarabas -- I've been rationing out my last few J Roths, and only have 2 more left after this one. Damn these fuckers who die young.

Whatever James Wood's sins I owe him for introducing me to Roth.

weird someone else reading Hardy, I just finished Jude the Obscure (my first of his, tho I started Return of the Native once)—found it a very enjoyable read. also the old paperback I 'borrowed' from my dad's shelf has this hilarious cover:

http://static.issyvoo.com/cover/jude-the-obscure/show_edca58c655fcceae3110d8b5fe86f01d.jpg

the Egdon Heath intro of The Return of the Native is exactly what I had in mind about Hardy's ponderousness.

But the guy's one of my four or five favorite novelists. And those love lyrics from 1912 destroy me.

ya I really enjoyed the poetry of his I read!

The intro to Return of the Native was lovely. I fell asleep immediately after finishing... but it was lovely, too.

(after finishing that chapter, I mean)

I forgot to mention that I recently read The Periodic Kingdom, P.W. Atkins, a survey of chemistry mainly focussed on the periodic table of the elements and the modern understanding of their atomic structure. It had a few slips into the style of Mr. Science Explains It All And Makes It Fun, but 95% of it was just a readable synopsis and a nice change from fiction.

I'm now reading The Pale King. Its unfinished nature is hard to miss, but it has some good writing and it shows where DFW's approach was headed after IJ.

"weird someone else reading Hardy, I just finished Jude the Obscure"

doubleweird..i just started Jude the Obscure!

I finished Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe. It's a pretty interesting book, but as a memoir, it has a slight structural problem, which is that it peaks rather early.

http://s12.postimage.org/ctbg5fmpn/Rochester_detail.jpg

i started jude on a long plane ride some 3 years ago and have neglected it since. it was christmastime and i'd just gotten some wire and buffy DVDs i should really get around to finishing it

finished hamlet (also on a plane ride! i'm really not about the jet life, i swear) last week. think i'm going to start turgenev's on the eve tonight on alfred's recommendation (and because it's short). loved loved loved first love

whoops

...buffy DVDs, and i got lost in those.

I got your back.

Dumas - The Three Musketeers. Just started.

just read

Pohl - The Gateway Trip (which isn't very good, being mostly a low-reading-grade-level recap of the series, also repeating themes that were done just fine in the first book, the only one i had read)
King - Night Shift (which is great)
Carr - The Blind Barber (above average mystery, not locked room as Carr was known for)

now reading

Chabon - Telegraph Avenue
Lethem - Fear of Music

went mental on donald barthelme but stalled on "teachings of don.b" which seemed to consist of "shooting fish in a barrel"level-satire, and stuff which didn't make the cut. hyperbolic foreword by my arch nemesis pyncho helped none. ditched "vineland" 40 pages from the end, could not have cared less how it might end.
just done david ohle's "the devil in kansas", which was an easy breeze of a read, if not really ohle at all until the last 20 pages. read like a compendium of barry gifford screenplays, nowhere near the level of rug pulling dream-weirdness i expected. feel shortchanged.

I've been bumbling around among public domain adventure stories from 1900-1920-ish and was v pleased with The Man on the Box by Harold McGrath, more so than the general run of little New York City-centric mystery & dramas I've been finding. The narration was a little more knowing and confiding in the reader? (Although it's super cool to read about people catching hansom cabs to places in NY or reference to the 2nd Ave El or whatever. which is half of why I read these.)

The Incomplete Amorist by Edith Nesbit was also an odd gem, I think? I never realized she'd written other than children's books.

Just bought Wolf Flow by K.W. Jeter: gonna see if I can read thru that before Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? arrives via interlibrary loan

Recently read:

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
Michael Ondaatje, In The Skin of a Lion

Liked the first two, not a fan of the latter. Just can't get into Ondaatje.

I went for David Byrne overload - both his new How Music Works and also Jonathan Lethem's 33 1/3 entry on Fear of Music. Byrne's book is great so far.

Ha, yeah me too. Got the Byrne book for my birthday (along with his album with St. Vincent). The Byrne book is really really good.

just finished The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—immensely enjoyable, but I'm still not sure what to make of it. it feels like a book that wants to be 'talked about', but I'm so late to the party on this that I wouldn't know where to look for the critical conversation...

... it has also kindled in me a desire to read Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat, though, since A.) I've never read him, B.) the 'novelization' of life under the Trujillo regime made for some of the most compelling parts of Oscar Wao, and C.) Diaz explicitly refers to Vargas Llosa's book at least once.

I had the exact same reaction. Bought Feast of the Goat but still haven't gotten around to it

That's the comparison that stuck out when by coincidence I read both books in a two-week stretch...and Oscar Wao wilted, I'm afraid. The Dominican slang sounded too writer's workshop to me.

not sure how Dominican slang and a workshop are connected at all. workshops don't work that way.

At the workshops I've attended "Work on slang to make characters more life-like" is a constant thing.

someone said that directly? kinda find that hard to believe. i can see someone saying "you need to work on your dialogue," or something along those lines, but i've never heard those two ideas being connected.

and i've been in lots of workshops, too.

I live in South Florida. Making characters life-like by dropping, say, Cuban slang into dialogue was a refrain at our creative writing department.

i can believe someone saying work on your slang to make it sound more authentic which is one thing, but never add slang to this to make it seem more lifelike, which is another thing entirely.

and yeah it's a good intention that often doesn't work; the dialogue often sounds even more stilted.

well, even so, it's still a weird critique. people code switch all the time, why not add that to fiction?

i guess what we are dancing around is the large point of: most writers in workshops suck at dialog? i can get behind that.

No lie: I had to look up "code switch." We just call it Spanglish here lol

D. K. Goodwin's Team of Rivals

t Alfred: I get where yr coming from about the slang—those constant N-bombs from the narrator were initially offputting but then I thought, maybe this is how (some) Dominicans actually talk? struck me as kind of an awkward first-generation overcompensation thing, which seemed plausible in context.

I would need to reread to confirm this (and maybe compare with the stories in Drown?), but I never got the impression that the slang in Oscar Wao was a crutch; just one component of Diaz's style, which impressed me as a likably vulgar (in all senses of the word) variant on DFW-style postmodern irony.

Currently reading "At Mrs Lippincote's" which has started very well. Recent reads include "The Folks That Live On The Hill" (Amis), decent but a bit disappointing. I think it may be the only one of his mainstream novels I hadn't read and I expected it to be better. Also "Tigers in Red Weather'" seduced by the Stevens quotation but it was not much better than stock airport fare. Been sporadically re-reading chunks of Ulysses.

"At Mrs Lippincote's": looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove this book

thought oscar wao was arch as hell

Yes Mrs Lippincote great so far. With it being Taylor's first it I thought might be a bit thin, but the hit rate of really great observational sentences in the first few chapters is better than in any other book of hers I've read. It surprised me a bit because I don't normally think of her as that kind of writer. She also seems to be giving freer reign to a sardonic streak that's always there in her work but maybe she felt she ought to tone down a little later on.

Too bad about Tigers. On the other hand, it justifies my decision to leave it on the shelf so yay.

i love at mrs. lippincote's too. that's a great one. but i've never really read a book of hers that i didn't like.

i started reading another book by...lee child. i've really gone around the bend. but they are like candy. my dad gave me one for my birthday and i have some of the paperbacks that someone left at the store. i haven't read shoot-em-up/crime/thrillers since i used to read andrew vachss books years ago. kinda similar in some ways. same deadpan/fatalism thing. maybe it helps that lee child is british. he's not a bad writer. and he is definitely good at getting the suspense going in a big way until the final showdown. anyway, they are entertaining and the first honest to gosh modern NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER author i have read in forever. i think i'm becoming a survivalist in my old age. probably gonna start hoarding supplies in the basement soon. between these books and watching season two of the walking dead i've been thinking about exit strategies a lot.

so sad for reacher fans that tom cruise is playing him in the movie. so weird. reacher being 6 foot five and the hugest person alive in the books.

what other crime/thriller etc writers/books does your dad like? Been meaning to ask you that.

elmore leonard. james lee burke. i think he likes michael connelly okay. stephen dobyns. actually, he got me into dobyns too. who i really ended up liking for his poetry! he's a great poet. he lives up where my folks live near saratoga. his mystery books are set there. i think he likes hiaasen too. oh and he really really liked lisa scottoline for a long time. don't know if he still reads her though. and there is a guy who lives up the road from ME and i'm blanking on his name...archer mayor! writes about brattleboro. i should read those for the local color. probably lots of trips to greenfield. oh and i think he reads the john sandford books. think i've seen those at his place.

so i guess world-weary/no-nonsense with a sentimental streak. guess that could describe a lot of crime people. he's not big on csi type procedural stuff. just dudes looking for clues and kicking ass. aging jazz fans. clint types.

I wonder if he would like Teresa Carpenter's nonfiction Missing Beauty? Really well-paced, dense, clear, urban Mass social mapping, how this wayward former high school big girl on campus encounters her nerdcore equivalent (prodigy who discovers just how many science degrees per square inch are to be found in urban Mass[he already knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall]). Think Carpenter won the Pulitzer for that one, but it's pretty good anyway.

Pavese - Devil in the Hills. One of my favourite writers these days - on this one he has displays a truly beautiful and detailed descriptions of nature and the hills (an area he grew up in). Two things: 1) they often strain toward what you think as repetition and yet he comes up with a killer variation -- an acute observation from a different angle, really five degrees not 180; and 2) sometimes he'll repeat an action being performed, say, the way the sun keeps baking bodies, but he'll layer it with their actions -- steadily and assuredly corrupt actions, destructive actions around drink and drugs and relationships -- that gives all of these descriptions something meaningfully savage, not just an exercise in nature documentary. The misogny sprinkled gives it a power, a dark energy will repulse and yet keep drawing you inn too, especially if you've read his diaries where he has these awful affairs, all of whom ended in failure gving rise to periods of intense self-loathing (though it wsn't just because of this).

Hammett - Red Harvest. The drinking that goes on in these bks was noted at a FAP (over a drink of course). Again its about more of a law-breaking corruption, not as arresting as Pavese's (can't help to compare as I happen to have read one book after the other) so I kept focused on the bits around drinking.

Pauline Reage - The Story of O (and no I didn't know Sylvie Kristel passed away a few days ago) (the film version of this and Emmanuelle ws made by the same guy)

I'm about halfway through The Pale King and it makes me sad to think DFW had this stuff pushed out in the world while it was still a foetus. Also, it reminds me that he was a better stylist than sociologist. His extended analyses of Big Social Trends are unfortunately sophomoric.

The setup in the introduction about how DFW was boldly tackling the theme of boredom just doesn't fit the book I am reading. But it would be unfair to judge DFW by this uneven mess. Publishing this was all about squeezing some final dollars out of a popular author.

do you think? i think there was a legitimate demand for it and he wanted it published in some state or another

by comparison

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2e/Although_Of_Course.jpg/250px-Although_Of_Course.jpg

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/12/1_123125_123050_2240796_2277115_101220_cb_fatetimeandlanguage_tn.jpg

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/thisiswater.jpg

i'm not sure what the idea that 'he wanted it published' is based on, but if he did, then so be it. there it is.

i believe he arranged some of it into a preliminary order with a note giving his family dispensation to arrange for its publication. i guess that's not quite the same as "he wanted it published."

just dudes looking for clues and kicking ass. aging jazz fans. clint types.

there is of course a crime-solving jazzbo series:

http://www.billmoodyjazz.com/books.html

x-posting back to junot diaz, last week some co-workers were discussing oscar wao so i chimed in w/"read feast of the goat." they never heard of vargas llosa, of course. diaz is GREAT at capturing contemporary voices and attitudes, to my anglo ears at least, but in a way i think he would be a better non-fiction writer a nuevo journalist if you will.

man "this is water" was gross

it'd be OK as an 'inspirational' tumblr piece that all my friends linked to on fb but i am genuinely baffled by ppl who look up to DFW as some kind of lovable saint who had deep wisdom to impart. this is a guy who was thoughtful enough to organize his last manuscript for posthumous publication but not thoughtful enough to commit suicide in a place where his wife wouldn't be the first to stumble on his body.

I've enjoyed some Wallace but never understood the reverence. The philosophical po-mo bullshit cluttering up much of his non-fiction, the bandana, the self-help book obsession...

the bandana is kind of a deal breaker. i have already talked about him enough on this thread! and i never talk about him. i think it was this thread. none of the guys i lump together with him (in my head) thrill me. lethem, dfw, moody, franzen. that whole crowd. at least chabon wrote the mysteries of pittsburgh (haven't read it since it came out but i really liked it. and a short story collection of his. and the movie of wonder boys.)

October issue of Smithsonian sports a rich chunk of Henry Wiencek's new Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. First part of the title is shared with an erotic fiction, yep appropriately so. The mountain is Monticello, the mansion, garden and some of the farm topping a small town of enterprises, with some white craftsmen and whip-smart overseers, but basically dependent on the labor of slaves, mostly related to each other, many to the master. Some of then are meant to be upwardly mobile in this little world, so not to be "degraded in their own regard" by the whip, but any case, as J.confides, "It is not their labor, but their increase" which generates the most profit (incl.collateral), so keep those babies coming. Suppressed, played down, recently unearthed docs all help to paint quite the vivid picture, but no bog of details. Jefferson was "the pioneer of monetizing slaves, just as he pioneered the industrialization and diversification of slavery."

in fairness to DFW (who i love), nothing he wrote or did offends me as much as the book review franzen did where he contended that male writers who wrote from the POV of female characters did so because they felt 'smallened' and less than fully male.

i can't think of any great living american lit fic writers who aren't ancient. i love lorrie moore (even though her last book sucked and i try not to think about it cuz it makes me wince when i do) but she's just really good and i find her entertaining. don't know if she's a "great" fiction writer. however you would define that. she has written some great short stories. anne beatty in her prime was probably better? i should re-read anne's old books (i gave up on her later stuff).

(i don't read a ton of new fiction though. there might be lots of people 50 and younger in this country who are great. the people who are the most acclaimed though never seem to do much for me.)

I spent most of early 2011 and this summer going through Ann Beattie's story collection. Of course they blur together. But her use of lacuna and timing of dialogue always leave me drawing breaths.

as for Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is kinda all time for me.

You know who's underrated? David Leavitt. I read the flawed but moving The Lost Language of Cranes two weeks ago and wondered if young gay fiction has lost his interest in plumbing familial relations (esp mother-son).

oh i didn't mean the commencement speech was gross; the commencement speech was fine, and had been fine for all the many years it had been freely available online. rushing it out as a little gift book w each sentence ludicrously isolated on a single page to maximize post-death profits was gross.

ended up buying The Feast of the Goat, I'm like halfway thru and enjoying it, but haven't really gotten 'hooked' yet... WE SHALL SEE

"The Princes: A Reconstruction" - essay in a recent Paris Review by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Fine work there.

And The Three Musketeers (300-some pages in) just barrels along heedlessly. Fun stuff.

the book review franzen did where he contended that male writers who wrote from the POV of female characters did so because they felt 'smallened' and less than fully male

haha, what?

i think 'this is water' is a pretty good commencement address because they requested famous author DFW and got member-of-alcoholics-anonymous DFW, sort of; the book form is gross as fuck. rivka galchen reviewing the bio in the nyt was pretty good re the desire to regard him as a moral teacher or whatever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/d-t-maxs-biography-of-david-foster-wallace.html

finished Feast of the Goat—a tough one to get thru, that. favorite bit was the chapter following the one general through the hours immediately after the assassination, but it had many highlights.

I found the pairing with Oscar Wao (which I will probably reread now, at least in part) mutually illuminating, because they have such different focuses—every protagonist in Wao is some sort of alienated outcast loner, just reacting to the external machinery of 'society' and trying not to get crushed. Feast takes the broader/more distant view of 'society' as a totality with no outside, shot thru with class divisions, conflicts of interests, and decisions—it's also a lot drier and none of the characters are very interesting or likable; but I found myself getting invested nonetheless. I think it just might come down to the way that the narrative structure separating past and present starts to break down in the last 1/2 of the book—extended flashbacks taking over the present-day sequences, the harrowing final chapter, etc etc

have also started in on Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, which is basically just "witty writer reflects on his annual vacations to Venice", v.beautiful and calmative

Goat is one of the few novels that made me shut it after absorbing some of the villainy. I knew a little about the Trujillo dictatorship but NO IDEA he was this savage.

I've discovered Armistead Maupin! The serial form and reliance on coincidences dilutes the impact of many sequences, but dialogue and pace are impeccable This is as good as popular fiction gets.

rushing it out as a little gift book w each sentence ludicrously isolated on a single page to maximize post-death profits was gross.

FYI this is what happens when the book isn't long enough to prevent having to hand-carton at the bindery. NB I do not believe we published that thing.

Just now spotted Rebecca West's The New Meaning of Treason at the thrift store. Quickly skimmed, premise looks dubious: she says Pound and Lord Haw-Haw etc. are new cos ideological, not just sell-outs. But seems like anybody branded traitor has rationalizations: a higher loyalty; the money's just for expenses. Still, random grafs look pretty good, and I'm a fan of Mailer's journalism. Should I get this?

What other books of hers should I read?

Her Yugoslavia travel book Black Lamb Grey Falcon: as rich as anything by Mann or Musil.

about halfway through Wolf Flow: it's decent pulp. Obviously the title was intriguing, and there was something about the reviews that made me think it might be the literary equivalent of some of the batshit stuff that made the ILE horror movie rollout a few months ago (along with a lot of stuff that just missed out), but besides the premise--man beat almost to death is cured by evil water--it's fairly standard, like somewhere between Te Shining and a Jim Thompson thriller...

Her Yugoslavia travel book Black Lamb Grey Falcon: as rich as anything by Mann or Musil.

― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 29 October 2012 00:34 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha that's the first thing that's made me actually want to attempt rebecca west you know

lol, well, this actually confuses me because Mann and Musil aren't that much alike.

Mann is not that good, for a start (some of the short stories aside).

well, they're part of the twentieth century tradition of the European Novel of Ideas; I'd have to develop the comparison. West's book depicts how English intellectuals responded to an alien culture in the years between the wars.

If you find Mann ponderous, Felix Krull is the cure. It's actually funny!

Walt Whitman, and CK Williams' short book On Whitman. Just kicking against my longstanding Whitman aversion; Williams is helping - very enthused but very attentive - exciting, rushing-at-it poetry crit!

i haven't read t. mann in a few years but the right translations are vital -- i tried reading h.t. lowe-porter's translation of "royal highness" and it was interminable, though it could just be the novel.

Lowe-Porter's aren't seen in a favourable light (and I recall a few posts in these parts that say this).

I would probably try Mann as translated by John E.Woods

^^^^ yes. It makes a difference.

doktor faustus, the magic mountain, buddenbrooks — all some of the greatest novels of the 20th century, if not of all time

mann and musil are pretty alike!!

i mean okay as far as german-language authors who wrote about their own personal microcosms at great length as a way to tackle from one remove the sweep of central european history, and whose main claim to modernism is in their degree of ironic remove from the structures of the 19th century realist novel, go they're pretty separate

that sentence was translated from the german

Mein Deutsche cousin Krystal just seconded that: "Jah, Woods ist gut mit der Raabe, Rabe, Grass, Archimboldi, Durrenmatt und Mann." Who knocked 'em dead at Woodstock too.

An impression from reading MwQ vs MM, say, is that Musil seems much less concerned about being state of the nation, although I know Musil had a massive ego and probably wanted to be seen that way, but he seems smarter about it?

I'd have to revisit The Magic Mountain. I do find its set up a fucking slog,. Bunch of cardboard cutouts pouring their philosophical POVs as puppetmaster Mann goes on to collect his prizes. I don't think a translator can save this. otoh, I like Death in Venice, and would always give his shorter form stuff the time of day.

xyz&c, how do you feel about thomas love peacock

i found the magic mountain a pretty rewarding slog but gave up when the ten pages in french at about the halfway point were left untranslated

yeah, that was funny; don't do French, eh H.T.? But I kept going past it, enjoyed the rest. Does Woods pull the same thing? Back to The New Meaning of Treason: revised and extended '64 edition, now incl. Philby etc., posted in its entirety here, if I ever wanna scroll that much (a few typos already) http://www.archive.org/stream/newmeaningoftrae000249mbp/newmeaningoftrae000249mbp_djvu.txt

The untranslated French was a very amusing assumption to make about its readers.

re: Peacock, must investigate.

I might even make it to reading Cancer Ward one of these days.

I knew enough schoolboy French to maneuver through it but I relied at that point on a couple critical guides.

i got pissed off and threw the book in the recycling.

I'm not calling anyone a barbarian for being unable to read some fairly simple french, let's make that clear

in that case i'm definitely not calling you a tendentious snob.

all i'm saying is that you can't expect translators to translate everything for you

why would it be translated into english if it wasn't in the original german edition

why wouldn't it be? you could throw it in at the end in an appendix or something

Guessing Woods got his French dictionary out..

I think there's an appendix in modern german editions, so he could have copied that.

(I know this because I am right this moment trying to resist falling into a rabbithole of google-translating + browsing a german language Magic Mountain reading group, just to see how they do things over there.)

ehh who would want to read a load of mitteleuropean malingerers lazing around & making ponderous challops on the internet

salman rushdie - joseph anton

first half reads like a hair-raising thriller as the fatwa bears down and various notables rally round or don't. but something funny happens midway thru as the death-threat pressure begins to ease ever so gradually; salman rushdie becomes not only a cause celebre but a weird sort of celebrity and gets his head turned around by gestures of solidarity from bill clinton and bono. then it's off to the races in terms of name-dropping, making speeches alongside susan sontag and meeting thomas pynchon turns into having lunch with steve martin and gary shandling. that's fine but the final 200 pages or so are pretty disappointing and by the time of 9/11 rushdie seems burned out on giving radical islam much thought which is understandable in human terms but disappointing to me as a reader, seems like a missed opportunity to follow up on some threads he started earlier in the book. midlife crisis starring padma lakshmi sapped all his mental energy? his appeal to her remains mysterious.

edmund white - jack holmes and his friend

this story of a lifelong friendship between two guys gay and straight starts off strong, or at least intriguing, but pretty much falls apart. white's an excellent writer imo and he gamely tries to get inside the straight character's head, so to speak, but after awhile you can tell his heart's just not in it. without being patronizing i would call this a noble failure and respect white for even attempting it.

george v higgins - cogan's trade

another talky new england crime story, not quite as funny/suspenseful as the digger's game but stronger than his uneven later novels. the car descriptions struck a nostalgic chord with my 70s teenage self, these wiseguys and thugs tool around in boat-size LTDs, 442s, de Villes etc.

cynthia carr - fire in the belly: the life and times of david wojnarowicz

this was almost too intense, no scratch that it WAS too intense to read in the end, had to skim the last 100-150 pages cause his slow death from AIDS was just too brutal to consider in such detail. sorry. but the biography is well done, carefully researched and clearly written. david must have had the worst childhood of all time, the mere fact of his survival is such a miracle let along the unique art and writing he wrought from his brief life. how much of his story he invented/exaggerated is an issue carr deals with judiciously, separating fact from myth-making when she can w/o becoming righteous or insensitive or apologetic. no surprise given all he'd been through david was a troubled guy, difficult to be around and hard on friends and foes alike. but a compelling person if not always a likable one. the portrait of the short-lived east village art scene ca 1981-85 here is definitive until somebody writes a book on that (i'll read it). beautiful color insets of his paintings, browse if you see in a book store.

richard polsky - the art prophets

brief profiles of art dealers entrepreneurs and tastemakers, this is way more interesting that it sounds. starts off slow and obvious w/pop art then moves on to less familiar (to me) territory like environmental and native american art. his realistic assessment of "outsider art" is a tonic.

gonna curl up w/nile rodgers' memoir for the rest of this stormy afternoon, "good times"

White's City Boy is his most attractive book in ages imo

woods translates the french iirc. and iirc wasn't untranslated french pretty common in older translations of the russians? (you think it's tough in mann, try reading pre-70s scholarly books where they drop into french, german, latin, and greek without so much as a hey what up.)

and the discourses of settembrini and naphtha seem to have something pretty questionable about them - moreso naphtha's - but that is arguably easy to index to hans's moral/pedagogical development. it's not as if mann wants you to think you're reading kant or something; you're reading about hans caught in the middle of grandstanding intellectual-pedagogical rivals.

i'm not sure what i want to say about 'mann as a thinker' because i haven't read him carefully enough. his artistry is obviously pretty massive, which is part of the problem; he thinks using literature, so it's not like you can just read off 'magic mountain' anything about the quality of his thought. musil codes way more easily as an essayist-investigator and doesn't immediately seem to be as constrained by self-imposed literary structures, which makes him seem smarter and more probing. but they are obviously peers. musil 4 eva but i would totally read 'magic mountain' again (and have plans to read 'faustus', 'buddenbrooks').

try reading Mann's essays! There's a sequence on Goethe that I've only dipped into because my own relationship with Faust is dilettantish at best.

Settembrini and Naphta's increasingly toxic arguments represent the decadence of certain kinds of 19th century isms, no? Positivism, elitism, etc. Fuck, it's been almost twenty years

I don't know if j or xyzzz agree, but Castorp is one of the few blank slates in lit who's actually compelling.

ehh who would want to read a load of mitteleuropean malingerers lazing around & making ponderous challops on the internet

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Monday, October 29, 2012 1:14 PM (1 hour ago)

My impression is that this is the plot for Magic Mountain, give or take an 'on the Internet'

Anyways I just got a book on Gerard de Nerval that leaves p much all the quotes in untranslated French. Looks like I'll be investing in an English-French dictionary some time in the future

One more thing: first page of Do Androids Dream? = stone-cold classic

Yes we are re-creating The Magic Mountain as the original was so unsatisfying!

I could do w/re-visiting. MM is ideally SO my kind of thing (and Doctor Faustus even more so). I'll make sure to get the later translation.

I don't know if j or xyzzz agree, but Castorp is one of the few blank slates in lit who's actually compelling.

yeah hans is a bro

Virginia Woolf fans: how does Jacob's Room fit within her body of work? I get what's going on here, but it's all so fragmented and elliptical that it leaves me with little to grasp onto.

reading musil - confusions of young törless

Finished The Pale King last night. Now that I have the whole (but whole only in a fragmentary way) book under my belt, I can see better how DFW really was trying to play with boredom as subject matter, but it didn't feel like he ever really got a grip on it, no matter how many approaches he tried. It's hard to imagine that he was satisfied with his results, at least in regard to his stated theme.

The book seemed to me much more to be about how thoroughly his characters were embedded into huge systems, inflexible institutions and complex technologies that originally emerged from the minds of humans to meet our needs and desires, but which now escape our ability to control, while yet exerting decisive control over us. The boredom idea, i.e. controlling one's boredom as a means of thriving in this human-built but not human-friendly environment, was never developed nearly as urgently as the idea of how human-unfriendly and crushingly overpowering our systems have become.

It was also possible in this book to isolate his techniques more completely in my attention, so I could see what effects he was getting and how he got them. For example, he had a knack for extended monologue in his authorial voice, and his characters are most compelling, too, when they are also deep in monologue. What I could not decide was the extent to which these monologues flowed from him roughly complete in a torrent, if you will, or else if they were carefully accreted bit by bit, with their many joins smoothed out by careful polishing. I suspect the latter, but it would be a measure of his achievement that he made them so closely resemble the former.

done with the Dominican Republic for now; moving laterally to Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, which has received been so lavished with praise (here and elsewhere) that I expect to be... erm... blown away..... (sorry)

Halldor Laxness: The Atom Station -- enjoyed this quite a lot, though also frequently mystified/confused. Did nothing to dispel my preconceptions of Icelanders as an odd people.

Virginia Woolf fans: how does Jacob's Room fit within her body of work? I get what's going on here, but it's all so fragmented and elliptical that it leaves me with little to grasp onto.

it's been about 18 years but my impressions too.

aimless i sometimes think you are the only person i have ever rationally assess dfw without an axe to grind one way or the other

I finished Philip Roth's When She Was Good. Again, all the elements have always been there, but you can see that now he's hit on his thing of getting the hook in and twisting it, and twisting it, and twisting it until you're as wound up as everyone in the book.

This one had a really odd almost perspective shift in the last section, so that I found my sympathies all at odds with where they'd been hitherto. Very strange, and very neat, to make you root for someone all book and then turn the tables so deftly; I can't recall reading anything quite like it.

It was kinda odd to read a Roth with no Jewish characters. I don't feel like he really got under the skin of Catholicism though, insofar as he was using it as a substitute - all the characters seemed to feed off repression, whether catholic or not, which is fine on its own but I do feel he was partly aiming for loftier themes.

without an axe to grind one way or the other

That's the beauty of knowing one's opinions about books are purely irrelevant to the world at large.

Last night I picked up and started the History of the United States: 1801-1809 by Henry Adams, as reissued by the Library of America. It's too soon to tell if it will 'stick', but HA is definitely using Edward Gibbon as his model, even if his prose is unlikely to sustain that level of exquisiteness.

Haha -- not true. Give it about thirty pages. He WAS our Gibbon.

I spent most of last summer reading it, and part of my graduate thesis used a fair chunk of Adams' essays, and although his posing could be tedious -- he's the scion-who-never-was, the guy who wanted to be asked to lead foreign policy but was too noble to beg -- the calibrated irony is almost European in its breadth.

i have the first of those adams books but haven't cracked it yet.

i wish there were someone out there writing a gibbon-esque history of the post-1945 u.s.

So far I've only read two Adams novels, Esther and Democracy, both pretty droll. Did he write any more fiction? I'll read the history etc. someday (have read excerpts)

That's about it. "Droll" is apt.

My fave character is based on Blaine from Maine (wonder if he read it)

I bought my other half Alice Munro's Hateship, Loveship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage; she hadn't started it so I thought I'd give it a go. I wondered whether it'd stick - small-town Canada is about the most boring setting I can think of. My fears lasted about three pages. This is masterful.

haha god yes

YES

Amazon had Blanchot's Lautreamont & Sade for 9 bucks, so I ordered that + Maldoror (in the Paul Knight translation); I've taken out both from the library before and found them immensely enjoyable. looking forward to singing the praises of evil again this winter.

... ack wrong thread!

Just finished Morrissey: the pageant of his bleeding heart. If you love him and like reading academic stuff about literature, this is your book. Seriously academic, but not dull. Also read the newest Augusten Burroughs, This is how - his take on the self-help book. Very insightful essays about dealing with various emotions and truly dire problems. It was the perfect bookend to Morrissey.

So I've only just finished the first of the Munro stories, but I wanted to say to everyone on here who ever talked her up - you were so right.

This is masterful.
On the basis of this comment, I have bought HLFCM and added it to the queue.

Uh-oh - if this takes a massive nosedive I'll feel bad alright.

You're more likely to enjoy it if you feel pressured to find it good, yeah? Anyway, it was about 40p second-hand, so it's hardly a crippling investment.

"Floating Bridge," Ismael.

I finished the first book of stories in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Some good stuff - emotionally raw at times, makes you wince - but artfully put together. I thought a change of pace would be nice before continuing, so now I'm reading some stories from Steven Millhauser's recent collection We Others. An interesting contrast to the Eisenberg.

how was tess of d'urbervilles in the end?

And did you read the version with or without the undies/cliff scene?

Just started Hatchet Jobs - Dale Peck.

just got to the heavy dialect part in the middle of Cloud Atlas. the next 50 pages will be heavy going.

(also, that's another thing that makes me think of iain m banks as well as the odd palindromic structure)

reading 'i am charlotte simmons' - is fairly engrossing, not as embarrassing as i thought itd be, reminding me of curtis sittenfeld's 'prep'

like a chapter from finishing the steve jobs bio - is fine, mostly hero worship, he sucks as a person

collected amy hempel stories

gonna also start 'the league' a history of the nfl up to like ~'86

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm100008373/murder-in-memoriam-didier-daeninckx-paperback-cover-art.jpg

Its a bit weak as a detective novel I think but the historical stuff (nazi collaborators, the algerian massacre in Paris, 1961) is shocking

I'm about 2/3rds through the new Chabon ('Telegraph Avenue'). The writing is good and I'm enjoying it, but it has moments that read like black people fanfic.

Just finished a review copy of the new (Jan 2013) George Saunders collection---REALLY uneven. He has a few more realistic stories in it, and it really throws the emptiness of the non-realistic stories into sharp relief. Also opens with the longest, weakest story, which seems like a bad idea. But the final story was great.

anyone here read any of Kevin Barry's stuff? I notice he had a story in last week's New Yorker and i'm curious how he comes across to non-Irish readers. I love his writing but I feel like a lot of the humour would be lost if you're not familiar with the distinctly Irish turns of phrase he captures so well

In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms.[1]

uncanny

http://i.imgur.com/dzdKA.png

He has confessed to "haunting bookshops and hiding" to "spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone's tempted by my sweet bait" and has also placed copies of his own work in front of books by other “upcoming” authors.[5]

so have you read any of his stories then

Am now one chapter into The Line Of Beauty.

Jordan: "black people fanfic"?

Just finished a review copy of the new (Jan 2013) George Saunders collection---REALLY uneven. He has a few more realistic stories in it, and it really throws the emptiness of the non-realistic stories into sharp relief. Also opens with the longest, weakest story, which seems like a bad idea. But the final story was great.

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 8 November 2012 22:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I predict I will have a completely opposite set of reactions to this.

i really liked his most recent nyer story

Roth says he's done (writing):
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2012/11/prolific_author_philip_roth_sa.html

Re-read Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the other day, still a stunning, flawless novel IMO.

Trying to tuck into The Known World by Edward P Jones for my MA course for this term (the 21st Century American Novel) - finding it a really arduous read so far...I just don't get on with historical fiction in general, and it's...not very exciting? Maybe it gets better.

that was on my MA last year. no one liked it.

Haven't read that, but I really really like his short stories, Lost In The City and several published since, though haven't yet gotten the second collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children The first is about black people in various D.C. neighborhoods over several decades. A bit like August Wilson. So far, I never guess where where or how his plots will go, with one exception, which seems like slick crime fiction, but even that's more of a character study than the exertion of twists. Still, I can see how he might get courted by TV or Hollywood (hope Paul Thomas Anderson gets him, or Eastwood).

Finished Do Androids Dream?: clearly that should've been my first PKD novel. Really, really good. Now onto Ubik. While I'm waiting for my local public library to get that in, I will probably turn to another Sagittarian--a quick re-read of Conrad's N----- of the Narcissus

Dunno how ILB regards Willa Cather, probably the most consistently excellent American novelist of the post-WWI period. Started reding Shadows on the Rock cuz I've read the Big Novels already

Yeah, I heard a composition by Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins (didn't catch the performer's name) a few days ago, and immediately thought of the description of his playing in My Antonia Have you read The Professor's House? Been a lomg time, but I really got into it. She really didn't care for the social pretentions and shibboleths of the sons and daughters of the pioneers. "Meanwhile life outside goes on all around you",

Dunno how ILB regards Willa Cather,

I regard her as FUCKING ACE, for what it's worth

lolling so hard @ this comment on Rev's redstate link

_Yet more evidence that we have been living in fantasyland for too long now. I don't want to hear that this is all Romney's fault, or all the campaign's fault. The simple fact is that in the run-up to this election, we were fed a steady diet of lies, from all our "loyal" sources. We need to hold not only the Romney campaign accountable, but also the conservative press (specifically the Murdoch press - Fox was the worst of the bunch), and the establishment talking heads like Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan. We need to get clear about something: these people are selling us a product. They have been taking our money and telling us bedtime stories. We complain about the MSM, but can we honestly say that the conservative press has been more honest?

How do we expect to win elections if we can't even get straight facts about the electorate? But maybe it's our own fault. There was practically a revolt around here when Erik said he didn't think the polls were false. And yet he was right, and they were right. Have we become allergic to the truth?_

Re-reading "To The Lighthouse" for class at the moment. Also read this recently...http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Social-Realism-Documentary-Short/dp/1903364418

are you on the same course i was on or are these just the books on every literature MA ever

reading Cousin Bette, my first Balzac, in a good modern Oxford translation by Sylvia Raphael. a tremendously enjoyable mishmash of outrageous opinion/authorial sermonising, gossipy prurience, social/political conflict, and intricate melodrama - can see why Balzac was v. important to Henry James.

a lot of the judgements on characters, races, countries, classes etc seem jaw-droppingly...broadbrush...at times; just today this brutal little paragraph made me laugh:
Madame Crevel, rather an ugly woman, very common and stupid, who died none too soon, had given her husband no joys other than those of paternity.

also it is slightly comic to read abt these aristo frenchmen rushing round frantically collecting mistresses even when it costs them their name, reputation, fortune, good lady wife etc

im doing new media and english, thomp. 'to the lighthouse' is on my literary modernism module. other books are 'howards end', 'women in love' some katherine mansfield short stories, a bit of 'ulysses' and 'good morning midnight'

I expect I will be buried in the Thomas Jefferson administration for the foreseeable future. Only 1050 pp yet to read!

thoughts so far?

A few. This book requires a def committment of time; it is slow-paced, but it is very readable. I expect that by the end I will have a very thorough understanding of the political forces of the time and how they all were resolved. Because the country was so young and the whole democratic experiment was so new in the world, these formative years should be pretty fascinating.

Jordan: "black people fanfic"?

Like, scenes where an ex-NFL millionaire, his bodyguard, and everyone else in the room are casually referencing 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' and Isaac Asimov deep cuts. But maybe everyone in Oakland/Berklee is way into the Jewish sci-fi canon and talks about Tarantino constantly.

I don't mean to be too hard on it because I am enjoying it, but I can't help raising an eyebrow from time to time.

thomp: english and comparative literature at Goldsmiths?

hated oscar wao

what for?? explain yrself!

thomp: english and comparative literature at Goldsmiths?

― Blue Collar Retail Assistant (Dwight Yorke), Sunday, 11 November 2012 23:40 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha that wasn't me either. so basically yeah, they all use the same books! that is unsurprising and depressing

i didn't like oscar wao either, oops

i know mine is a minority opinion bc it seems well-liked by a lot of ppl w/ more clout than me, but i thought it exhibited some of the worst aspects of valueless cultural relativism of the "graphic novels are just as good as thomas mann" kind, blatant homophobia (whether diaz is simply mirroring a tendency of dominican culture or not, it's unappealing), a style that seems to try too hard to be "postmodern", and a general philosophical impoverishment of its characters. in his interviews he seems to make a sort of spurious differentiation between the "whiteboy" literature like e.g. david foster wallace and post-colonial "brown folks" literature, which is basically an external criticism that stems from a mindset that rejects the possibility of a useful sort of dynamic synthesis (which is ironic as the novel seems to be all about an attempt to synthesize disparate cultural influences, even if it is actually only heterogeneous).

Finally read Pere Goriot, which sets my headorama (boarding house in-joke) spinning, but still perfectly focused (albeit laughing x crying O SHIT),I assure you. At present, am brrracing self to encounter motormouth M. Vautrin elsewhere in The Human Comedy!

clouds that is a v good summation of how i feel about it, much better than i could have managed, i would have just been like "unnnh shut about jack kirby, GOD"

+up

For the Wao-haters out there, have you read Drown? May raise the same set of problematics but it's less dependent on pop culture references to define everyone and everything in it. (am about to begin an essay on the notion of passing in relation to Oscar's failed attempts at cultural assimilation in both the US and the DR in comparison with the 'successful' passing of Coleman Silk in Roth's Human Stain)

Thomp: Yeah, I've not read anything jawdroppingly great on any of the courses on the MA (did a primer on american lit last year that took us from Thoreau to Auster, a postmodernist fiction course that, Pale Fire aside, was largely dull (and was essentially a course in which the novel in question was a conduit for another boring conversation about the nature of reality etc) this term I'm doing 21st

...century American fiction, next term it'll be Literature and Philosophy.

I normally try and writer about off-course texts anyway, so ended up doing my essays last year on Clement Greenberg's art criticism in conjunction with beat writing (linking action painting with 'action writing' etc) and postmodern architecture and the urban imagination.

Prompted by posts above and wanting to see if John E Woods' translations are as engaging as people say, rereading The Magic Mountain (or rather 'rereading' - I read it when I was about 15 or 16 and v ambitious or pretentious, so obviously have next to no memory of what happens in it except that there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens), and although I've thought H T Lowe-Porter has a bad rap and is perfectly readable if a little stiff (I went through the first 20 pages of hers too, for the sake of science), this is obviously a better or more present version - readable, precise, feels like there's more tonal subtlety.

there are some debates about time or something

ha

i might join you. but then i always say i will do this on these threads. and then i don't.

dwight i bought 'drown', diaz seemed fundamentally talented enough i didn't want to write him off. but then i haven't read it because, you know, effort. also i like him in interviews.

If you only ever read one other thing by Diaz make it 'Aurora' from that collection - a genuine masterpiece of a short story IMO.

I'll stop going on about him now. Just picked up my first issue of Bookforum...should I expect good things?

there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens

the #1 thing i was looking for when i read MM was the same thing that's telegraphed so much at the beginning, the experience of seven years of time passing, put into novel/narrative form, and for a long time i was expecting to be disappointed, and then somewhere way through the book, i was like, hey, hans has been here forever, or is it really only five years? etc.

Drown is full of wonderful stories but yeah, Aurora might be the best (if it's the one I'm thinking of - the junkie girlfriend one?). Is his collected work available online or anywhere? I don't fancy Oscar Wao for some reason, but I read an SF story in the NYer about an epidemic in Haiti which was terrific.

that was an excerpt from his novel-in-progress (apparently he's been trying to write a sci-fi book for years). He has a new story collection out now though

hi ILB! I have started reading again after a long uninentional hiatus brought about by procrastination :)

am currently reading:
Laurence Bergreen - Over The Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.
Only a little ways in but really enjoying it.

also aquired from the library:
River of Doubt, the book about Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon
Collapse - Jared Diamond.
dunno, was kidn of in and adventure/exploration/ancient civilizations mood, lol.

just recently finished Anthony Flacco's Road Out Of Hell abt the Wineville murders. So the adventure stuff is kind of a palate cleanser

National Book Award winners and others, anybody read 'em?
http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/11/14/national-book-awards-2012-winners/

Reading Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods', which is really good, and oddly like a Donald Westlake comedy in style

The War: A Memoir - Marguerite Duras.

pretty horrifying

just finished Maldoror, still working on the Blanchot essay. may post reflections, later, somewhere

Following Pere Goriot w The Idiot (Penguin Classic, David Magarshack translation). Halfway through, and the women are amazing (it's all amazing, but didn't know D. had such female characters in him, most don't)

The Idiot was the toughest going for me of Dostoevsky's Big Four; I've never actually finished it. I'm wondering if the Magarshack translation would suit me better; I think it was his translation of C&P that I was reading when I decided it was my favorite novel ever.

Portnoy's complaint. such a great first paragraph, (the rest is very funny too )

Reading Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods', which is really good, and oddly like a Donald Westlake comedy in style

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 15 November 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So gonna nominate this for the next ILX book club :)

NO REPEAT AUTHORS

OR NATIONALITIES, RACES, GENDERS

Jeffrey Toobin's The Oath and Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means (a surprising disappointment considering how much I love her).

Drugs, if you loved C&P via Margarshack, def check his translation of The Idiot--got hooked at first skim Tuesday, and it's become a way of life. I am able to do other things in between reading sessions, honest. Although at the moment, it's off to the park, and back on the train for a while--bye!

Almost finished with Brothers Karamozov which is my first Dostoevsky.

Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means (a surprising disappointment considering how much I love her).

O no! THis is one of my fav Sparkses!

It was...I dunno, more amorphous than usual? She's the master of abbreviated narrative, but this novel ended just as it was getting started.

I guess that's true, actually. I just really liked the vibe she set up, of all this not-well-suppressed sexual excitement due to the unexploded bomb.

I wasn't a big fan of it either – felt like she wasn't quite holding her tone at points. Admired its frame or structure though - bluntly placing evil-martyrdom-grace around a club-of-types-of-girls story (the kind of story she'd already taken to bits in Jean Brodie). Climax works, I think.

Ha now I'm sort of convincing myself to reread it, but I've had the Mandelbaum Gate sitting around for years, so maybe that next time I'm going Spark.

actually, make that a question: how's The Mandelbaum Gate? For some reason (length? It looks too long for a Spark book) I've never much fancied it.

Finished The Idiot Friday, been walking around in the reverberations ever since (well, they keep coming back, fairly often). Reminds me of what PKD seemed to be going for with Valis, though more literally there: the novelist vs. and in tandem with the spiritual crackpot side of his brain, seeking a balance, and a struggle. Also, having almost been executed, and always being watched, despite/because of becoming so extremely conservative, he puts his radical testifying in the mouth of the Idiot--whose condition, though it includes D.'s own very real and here indelibly described epilepsy. can also seem like brilliant literary devide--then again, Ippolit's "Confession" includes a manifesto, just about, of the chronically afflicted: his response to society's response to his surprisingly persistent condition and very existence. Also, his illness-related frustrations, his insights and fevered detours intensify his inclinations to shit-stirring. He's among the many Russians who strenuously adapt to the Black Swans, to the Idiot orphan who returns to claim his inheritance--his fortune and his dream homeland--and to Natasha, former child concubine on the loose, or the lam, at any rate. Eight versions of this were attempted. and I like how he lets characters foregrounded in earlier plotlines slide into place here, where they all do their telling bit (in some cases when I'd come to assume they were gone for good). Also, he knows when to examine their interiors, and when just to describe what they did, in whatever elaborate or concise detail. Local rumors and gossip--incl. distortions and canny surmises--appear, when we need a break/set-up for the next suckerpunch.

"brilliant literary *device*", I meant.

i prefer what came immediately before slender means to slender means. peckham rye, bachelors, brodie.

i need to do a spark re-read project. so many of them i read 20+ years ago. then spent the next 20 years filling in gaps as i found stuff that i had missed (or as she wrote them).

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
Memento Mori (1959)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Public Image (1968) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
The Driver's Seat (1970)

there are two of these i haven't read which is all that is keeping me from applauding this as a fucking impeccable run

my phone seems to have eaten my earlier post about the mandelbaum gate. i said that i. it seemed like spark had graham greene in the back of her head when she wrote it, maybe, but that ii. about 40% of what i can remember is that the protagonist has coleridge's rhyming crib on metrical feet stuck in his head throughout and keeps betting people they can't spell 'mississippi'. since then i have remembered that iii. it seems to make a point of avoiding giving you the narrative in a very schematic way.

i liked it, though, though this is probably not the week to read it, what

The Driver's Seat is so good.

cool, coleridge crib sells me, I will finally read it.

It is incredible - I can't think of anyone c20th British with a run of ten novels to match that - and they reflect off one another, it glitters, it's hypnotic.

Maybe Greene? But I've never had a taste for Greene.

1938-1958: Brighton Rock, The Confidential Agent, The Power and the Glory, The Ministry of Fear, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, Loser Takes All, Our Man In Havana. I haven't read them all, but the ones I have ...

yeah, I can see that. I'd still take Spark. I fell off The Ministry of Fear, which was the last one I had a go at, a year or two ago. I'm missing a thriller gene or something. Business with the cake at the start was fun.

Anthony Powell, of course, some people would take Powell.

powell seems a bit of a cheat. i have read more graham greene than i realised.

I've read the entirety of A Dance... and Spark still pwns him.

i've read the entirety of that and six or seven of his other novels and a chunk of the diaries and a bit of the memoirs and i don't know what i'm getting at here actually, i totally agree with you tbh

read 1/3 of A Dance..., I think you can guess where this is going

dance appeals to the part of me that likes grand noble botches, spark appeals to the part of me that likes sonnets. -- was her work in other media any good, come to think?

Not very helpful, but I remember reading and liking her verse. Nothing more precise than that.

I have moments where I can get into the ambition of Dance, & its recording talent but I don't really care about any of it. I felt like I was reading a long, long magazine article about some pointless people. plus the part of my head that immediately dismisses anyone who expresses enthusiasm for the diaries of James Lees-Milne kicks against it - I mean 'snob' always needs unpacking, and that strain in Eng writing is built on national class fault lines and picks up a charge from that at its best (Waugh), but fuck the remainder, novel as polished gossip is its utter horizon.

The novel was never once dull but the examination of Widmerpool came down to how well the English are up the sort of illumination of a shallow man in which Proust excelled -- and the answer is not well.

I retract the statement: the two WWI volumes are boring as hell.

I stopped somewhere in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and no, I never thought it dull exactly – it was readable, it flowed along, slid down etc, but I wasn't engaged or enthused and couldn't really see why people whose opinions I had lots of time for made such a fuss. But I've said all this before. Mysteries of taste. Abed.

Hitchens wrote the best case for it.

That's in Unacknowledged Legislation right? I'll pull it out, read it before bed. It's one of those subjects I don't trust him on tho' - he was virtually an archivist of the British higher gossip - the 'well, as Driberg said to Connolly of Ken Tynan' sort - which basically means he will instinctively stan for Powell. But I'll look at it now again.

yep!

he was virtually an archivist of the British higher gossip

wait wait -- can you explain? He was alert to snobbery: Waugh's, Powell's, even Orwell's.

bout to start Nicole Krauss' The History of Love - am I in for a treat with this one?

no

xps

right - I see that was a bit telegraphed - I absolutely don't think Hitchens was a snob (def not of the Powell family + titles kind), but he did seem to have titanic supply of info and anecdote about world of mid-century British intellectuals, dons, journalists, authors & I think he had special attraction to inside/outside figures, ppl of the Establishment who would cut outside it (Jessica Mitford!), but still could speak its language - those people a large part of London's traditional fitzrovia/haute bohemia life, which is shared milieu with Powell, later parts of A Dance, as I understand it. The habits + patterns of that world's… gossip?… dialect? are common to both.

Tired! That felt more confusing. Maybe I'll have another go after sleep.

re greene and spark (i love them both)--he kept her supplied with crates of quality red wine when she was starting out as he thought her writing was great but knew she wasn't earning enough to buy good booze

"was her work in other media any good, come to think?"

i love her poems! and her short stories. and her autobio is great. never read any of her crit work though. the book on mary shelley or any of the others.

there is a complete poems volume that i want to get. i only have the selected poems, i think.

"I can't think of anyone c20th British with a run of ten novels to match that"

Blindness (1926)
Living (1929)
Party Going (1939)
Pack My Bag (1940)
Caught (1943)
Loving (1945)
Back (1946)
Concluding (1948)
Nothing (1950)
Doting (1952)

i wouldn't take her over spark but i got mad mad love for this string too:

Pastors and Masters (1925)
Brothers and Sisters (1929)
Men and Wives (1931)
More Women Than Men (1933)
A House and Its Head (1935)
Daughters and Sons (1937)
A Family and a Fortune (1939)
Parents and Children (1941)
Elders and Betters (1944)
Manservant and Maidservant

I love Green but there's a few things on that list as amorphous as weak Spark.

I'm eccentric about Green: Concluding is my favorite but Loving usually gets the edge.

i got lots of lady love though. let's here it for my other sweetheart:

Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Excellent Women (1952)
Jane and Prudence (1953)
Less than Angels (1955)
A Glass of Blessings (1958)
No Fond Return of Love (1961)
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
A Few Green Leaves (1980)
Crampton Hodnet

i just thought i'd throw green in there. there's a case to be made. but i'm a spark lover 4ever. i haven't actually read all of them. read two of the fat paperbacks that collected 3 novels each.

but if you guys aren't on the ivy compton-burnett train please do get on. i have such a crush on those books.

Wodehouse gets a pass because he basically wrote a multivolume novel.

forster didn't write ten but if you include his short fiction...

Just bought a copy of A Glass of Blessings last month, will get to reading it soon I hope. My first Pym.

Other 20th Century Brits w/ a 'good run' - A. Huxley, E. Waugh, K. Amis, J.G. Ballard (and other Brit SF authors - B. Aldiss v consistent, for example), Murdoch (who, according to A N Wilson, v much disliked M Spark), B.S. Johnson, E. Taylor, and yeah, def H. Green.

As for A. Powell, I find Simon Raven's 'Alms for Oblivion' sequence funnier, snobbier, nastier, and altogether much more good gossipy fun.

Yeah, I'd probably read more Raven before reading more Powell, he seemed good fun from the one I read… Places Where They Sing I think.

Waugh's probably my favourite c20th British novelist, but I don't think he's especially consistent - I think there's high contrast even in the 30s novels, like yes there's good stuff in Black Mischief, but it's far weaker than A Handful of Dust. But Ballard! Yes!

Alms for Oblivion sounds good! 'Nastier' is something I look for.

Do need to read more Brit writing...so down on the current lot and I shouldn't use that as an excuse.

Powell's Dance nicely points up the distinction between what I enjoy and what I think is in some sort of quasi-objective sense "good". I love reading his stuff, but almost on the guilty pleasure level. I'd have no interest in trying to make a case for him as a great or even very good writer and I'm always mildly surprised when I come across evidence that people whose opinions I respect think of him as one.

Biggest surprise for me was finding out that Donald Westlake was a massive Powell fan - he even includes a reference to DTTMOT in one of his hardboiled novels, Plunder Squad:

"Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he’d started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool."

Found it funny that Tariq Ali is a huge fan (but it sort of makes sense, again, as with Hitchens, it's that counter- or mirror-establishment, radical dissent via Presidency of the Oxford Union)

I'm surprised to find myself in the opposite camp to many of you - I tend to think ADTTMOT is utterly magnificent - though not flawless - and I'm always amazed when I find people whose opinions I respect (like you lot obv) who think otherwise.

as far as current BritLit goes i feel like i need to read those edward st. aubyn books since everybody and their mother keeps raving about them. i want to see what the hubbub is about.

i think i must have a problem with great wars cuz i never finished parade's end, the powell books, or the sword of honour trilogy. i'd like to give the powell series another go someday. i don't think i actually owned all 12 books and for some psychological reason i didn't feel like i had an obligation to keep going. i'm also curious about his 30's novels. i'll bet i'd like some of those.

just finished High Wind in Jamaica—charming, hilarious, big-hearted & mordantly ironic all at once. a keeper, for sure.

should I bother with the movie?

High Wind was my big discovery this summer.

xp hmm iirc a bit too much in the way of thinly veiled child abuse & general savagery for me to agree with at least the first three of your descriptives there.

yeah that book was just ok i thought

xpost he kind of fell over himself with the whole 'describe unpleasantness from the children's uncomprehending perspective' thing (I think this was what I meant by "mordantly ironic" but who knows) but I loved it all the same... I think I fell in love with the carefully-observed zaniness of the children tbrr—took me back to teenage summers as a camp counselor

*fell all over himself—as in, he used that device a lot,

zaniness! one died and the rest showed no concern, one of them killed someone, and one went mad! nah but i get what you mean, it started off with a good sense of rambunctiousness, it just went a bit o_O after that for me.

there was—for me anyway—a weird plausibility to the children's reactions/emotions... undeniable savagery but it's not exactly Lord of the Flies

also, the animals! I think I want a pig now

"there were some good descriptions of cool stuff and it delivered a strong emotional charge via a beautiful myth about (loss of) childhood innocence. A+ novel, would read again."

I finished the first term of the Jefferson administration. I took a break and re-read Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis and am now halfway through Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, which is a workmanlike effort for a debut, but nothing great. Very reflective of the 1950s though.

how you liking Adams?

His analysis of the politics is quite crisp and persuasive. His writing is generally clear and easy to follow. These are formidable virtues in narrative history. He does not have the force or the wit of Gibbon, but who does?

robertson davies!

High Wind is swell. In Hazard is spectacular as well.

AS FOR ME:

The Dog Of The South by Charles Portis - Ha.
The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout - 'Bout 60 pages in. Haven't decided what I think but I know I'm reading on, so implicit approval.

Having found my unread Derek Robinsons in moving boxed stuff around the house, I'm reading 'Piece of Cake'. Very blackly comic novel of WW2 pilots. All the Alan Furst fans on ILB need to try Derek Robinson.

noted

Finished Ubik last night: sheer awesomeness. Now onto Galactic Pot Healer, which already seems way different than the previous two.

gph is my favourite philip k dick novel and in some moods my favourite novel period, but i'm not sure if it's any good

alan furst - mission to paris

nothing "new" but i think this is my favorite by furst so far, the romantic/sex scenes are better ahem executed if nothing else

michael connelly - the drop

can't defend him as a great or even good writer in the literary sense but his LA crime novels are involving pulp, redolent of post-noir cali

leanne shapton - swimming studies

memoir by illustrator/graphic designer about her days as competitive swimmer and musing on time spent in water. meanders and then some but the good bits are really special, totally sent me back to my chlorine-infused days as a swimmer, intense sense memories and emotional insights into an adolescence spent staring at the black lines on the bottom of a pool and being super-competitive. this book got great reviews but frankly i can't imagine non-atheletes digging it though it is nicely written if self-regarding. fwiw her art, interspersed throughout, isn't very good.

pete townshend - who i am

the who were another teenage passion of mine so i saw this in the library and thought why not? liked it better than keith richards though its way different, just as soul-searching and somewhat self-serious as you'd expect also as compelling and impassioned as you'd expect. he's a true 60s guy, into spiritual questing and the guru trip. the navel-gazing was a little boring but the lack of gossip and gross-out stories was refreshing.

plus, he was in the who! how cool is that? i prefer oral history/interview type things over autobios by musicans for the most part (dylan's book being a big big exception cuz it was so amazing) but i would read pete on pete. i never read the keef book either. would buy used someday though. i just can't believe that he remembers anything. or remembers anything accurately anyway. keef not pete.

Finished The History of Love yesterday - it's...alright. Some lovely passages in there but Alma Singer and her brother are a bit too zany-indie-movie for me, but the Leo Gursky chapters are great. The main thing I took away from it though was the need to stop writing endless list sections in my own prose because the ones in this book really weighed it down in parts (a bittersweet feeling as I loved writing listy bits before but have now been shown their capacity to irritate and detract from the story. Ah well).

Onto Jesamyn Ward's Salvage the Bones now.

Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is a nice quiet thing - Dutch reverie on life on an Indonesian island, kinda magic-realism, esp. in the coda, which pulls all the parts together.

Now onto Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

In Hazard is spectacular as well.

Good to know! I found this a few months ago but haven't had the chance to start it yet.

Currently almost finished with What Maisie Knew by Henry James (pretty great) and Charleston and Other Stories by Jose Donoso (worth checking out but I prefer his longer works).

for some reason i was thinking about one of the final scenes from "this side of paradise" the other day and and i saw mr. ferrenby and his friend in the car as big lebowski and phillip seymoun hoffman. now i can't un-think this!

Coetzee - waiting for the barbarians

Reading a bit of 'Ulysses' for class

Ulysses has lots of that

Coetzee - waiting for the barbarians

that's quite rough, even for coetzee

yeah, but it's good and tight though somewhat schematic and doesn't bring something new to the table

Late Coetzee >> Early Coetzee imo

gonna read Summertime soon, we'll see

I finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union, really enjoyed it. Sure, it kind of dissipated in the very end, but the setting, prose, and classic noir beats were pretty dope.

Might stay on the Jewish tip and read The Instructions on a friend's recommendation (he was the first one to actually read the copy that's been getting passed around here).

I'm closing in on the finish of YPU right now, funnily enough. I initially eyerolled my way through the hamfisted tropes - That's right, tough guy, your ex-wife is now your boss! - but eventually I realized that's really all a part of the fun. It is very entertaining.

The Instructions is good

I'm inserting another book between the first and second Jefferson administrations, Assembling California, John MacPhee.

It's a re-read, but the subject matter is timely for me, because my wife and I are fairly deep into figuring out how to prepare for a 9.0 or greater earthquake that is certain to hit the PNW eventually. The perodicity for these big quakes averages about 300 years and the last one was 312 years ago, in 1700 AD; this has been verified through Japanese records of tsunamis, coupled with local evidence on the Oregon and Washington coasts. We figure it makes sense to have a plan for this, even if there's a perfectly good chance it won't happen for another 100 years.

Anyway, the book is great, although MacPhee has a fondness for the more abstruse geologoical jargon, and the book could use a few more diagrams. It is something of a grand summation of where plate tectonics theory and evidence stood, circa 1990. If you can stand some techno-jargon, it is a good book indeed for understanding this stuff.

aimless: are you planning to go on to adams's madison books after TJ?

I own a copy of the Madison admin histories; eventually I expect to read them, too.

man I really enjoyed Galactic Pot Healer.

The complete short stories of JG Ballard volume 2

Dirty Snow - Simenon. His best novel for sure.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea - Stephen Marche

Wholly impressive, often entertaining.

On the Simenon tip has anyone read Pedigree? Been curious about it

Thoroughly enjoyed Salvage the Bones. Ward's description of place and landscape is pretty pretty stunning.

Am meant to read the Colson Whitehead zombie novel for next week but fuck that. Started The Third Policeman this morning.

The Third Policeman is awesome.

The cure for every ailment is a dose of Wodehouse, I've learned.

^^^^so fuckin OTM

srsly – I had to stop myself from reading Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit in one sitting.

got through most of on the eve yesterday on the plane - it's riveting, and contains some of the same flourishes that enderared me to turgenev with first love. bersenyev's quiet despair recalls petrovich's, too; articulating the torture of being "friend-zoned" seems to be one of turgenev's stronger talents. (i've still got 40 pages or so, so no spoilers - elena has just told her parents about the marriage.)

i do think i am sort of souring on constance garnett, the translator, though. it's hard to tell of course, being a non-native reader, but the prose can seem a little awkward at times, almost like it's clear i'm reading a translation. maybe it's just my mind playing tricks on me, because i KNOW it's a translation. idk

k3v, thanks for reminding me that I need to reread "First Love" today.

you most certainly must

Turgenev is the least read of the Major Russians, right? On the Eve is such a perfect, lapidary thing .

he's more of a minor with Bulgakov, Goncharov, right? I wouldn't call him a major

probably read more than Gogol, though, right?

I've seen more writers cite "The Overcoat" in the last few years than, say, F&S.

you know what's fun? Googling any kind of syllabus

sounds like a good class: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/slavic/syllabi/G6204.pdf

turgenev was certainly a major at the time and deserves to remain one; i think what's up is the contemporary idea of Big Fat Important Russian Novels is baffled at the sight of fathers and sons

and yeah kev constance garnett is p tortured a lot of the time. i can't knowledgeably recc a turgenev translation tho.

i revived the dostoevsky thread that only i post in the other day but i just finished rereading demons which is prob my favorite dusty; it is hilarious and upsetting and its narration has all these weird structural inconsistencies a polite word for which is "polyphonic", which i've discovered i really enjoy (i also like when ishmael disappears halfway through moby-dick)

totally!

i mean ishmael disappearing

James unfortunately did a lot to create the false Tolstoy/Dostoevksy vs Turgenev binary, although it's true Turgenev (mostly) had no interest in sprawl.

i've never read turgenev, but i kind of blame pevear and volokhonsky for not translating him.

let's start an email campaign

On The Eve as an Oprah book

there's a mean parody of turgenev in demons actually, right down to his (apparently) irritating habit of kissing you on the cheek. he arranges a choreographed dance for a party wherein each of the four dancers represents something like "the mainstream russian press" or "western thought" and everyone hates it.

lol I remember that, he also delivered this amazingly ridiculous prose-poem speech, didn't he? Demons is def my second-favorite of the Big Four Dusty novels (after greatest-nove-ever-written C&P)

not sure what it says about me that while reading this passage

'Then leave me! You see, Elena, when I was taken ill, I did not lose
consciousness at first; I knew I was on the edge of the abyss;
even in the fever, in delirium I knew, I felt vaguely that it was
death coming to me, I took leave of life, of you, of everything; I
gave up hope. . . . And this return to life so suddenly; this light
after the darkness, you--you--near me, with me--your voice, your
breath. . . . It's more than I can stand! I feel I love you
passionately, I hear you call yourself mine, I cannot answer for
myself. . . You must go!'

my first thought was buffy

xp yeah it's his Last Work (the narrator is skeptical) and called lol merci, and it's totally incoherent and has all these visions of early roman kings and mermaids whistling chopin, and goes way over the ideal length for a public reading (twenty minutes says the narrator). someone yells "you never saw any ancus marcius! that's all just style!"

Style baby! Dylan's still swinging with those early Roman kings (and mermaids whistling Chopin)

alfred, since you won't answer me on twitter: is juan cole's book the best on thurgood marshall's jurisprudence? or is there another you'd recommend?

btw man, the last few chapters of on the eve are chock full of the kind of literary flourishes that make me weak. for an ending i guessed a hundered pages prior, pretty well-done

hundred*

Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography by Georgi M Derluguian, as recommended to me by ogmor a while ago

The enfant terrible of Chechen resistance arrived dressed in a bizarre uniform
(decorated with what he claimed were the insignia of Gengis Khan), a black military
beret reminiscent of Saddam, the checkered Arab qufiya kerchief around his
neck, and with his face mostly obscured by a huge pair of sunglasses. Raduyev had
a good reason to hide his face; it had been badly scarred by a bullet. Rumor had it
that after suffering his head wound, Raduyev went mad, or at least developed an
addiction to painkillers; but to many people his actions before being shot in the
face did not look entirely rational either.

Gentlemen Of The Road by Michael Chabon - On a Chabon kick, I guess. Not a full meal, but a fun lark w/ really neat sentences.

"...preserved from drowning only by gentlemen of the road fated someday to be hanged."

Yeah, that's the stuff.

xp

Also, I suspect some Long Ships influence, which is just super.

Found an recording of Chabon reading - always pleased to hear how enthusiastically dorky his voice is.

alfred, since you won't answer me on twitter:

wait what -- realy?

https://mobile.twitter.com/radiokeller/status/273637228494868480

:(

new-ish poetry: bought, after many months of trepidation, Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate—an amusing (post)modern retelling of Troilus & Criseyde in a crummy midwestern town. found much to love on a first reading, copied some dozen (mostly short) quotations into my lil pocket notebook... need to mull it over a bit more but all in all, I'm satisfied

(only bad taste in my mouth = $18 for a new paperback, c'mon!)

Muriel Spark's Complete Short Stories: this is the stuff

Is the first story "The Ormolu Clock"? My copy of that went missing in a move along with The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. I guess I should take the Aimless approach and avoid angst, but I don't have his sangfroid.

Should have said "share his sangfroid" to accentuate the alliteration.

"adopt the Aimless approach"

Tom, delete ILB now please.

j/k

Hey, the ebook of Curriculum Vitae came out here last month.

Muriel Spark's Complete Short Stories: this is the stuff
Yes, yes it is. "And still, like Squackle-wackle, she was quite an interesting person. It was only in my more vibrant moments that I deplored them."

It opens with 'The Go-Away Bird', which is really a short Spark-style novel in itself. "THe Ormolu Clock' isn't in it. Fuck this "complete" bullshit!

School officially done now as of today. Can read stuff of my own choosing again!

(for the next three weeks or so, that is)

"Late Coetzee >> Early Coetzee imo

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 3 December 2012 12:14 (1 week ago) Permalink

gonna read Summertime soon, we'll see

― nostormo, Monday, 3 December 2012 18:56 (1 week ago) Permalink"

finished Summertime - tend to agree.
very good book.

Erick Kastner: Going to the Dogs - a NYRB book I'd never heard of before, but it's great; written and set in ~1930 Berlin, everything's falling apart, very funny

Went to a guest lecture/reading by Howard Jacobson at Goldsmiths last night...fantastic stuff. He discussed the complete disappointment that haunts you as a writer forever (and this was a lecture hall filled mainly with MA/PhD Creative Writing students), how reading, rather than the novel, is dead, the pointlessness and awfulness of genre fiction and other stuff all with a great deal of charm and humour. Read a bit from his new novel too which sounded interesting....might actually pick up The Finkler Question over xmas and give it a go, it's sat on my shelf for a while.

Highlight was a very elderly woman asking Jacobson whether he used comedy as a way of working out/in more serious topics and then trying to flesh out her question by referencing Borat ("Have you seen hat wonderful male wrestling scene?"). Cue a ten minute chat about the merits of Borat lol

how reading, rather than the novel, is dead, the pointlessness and awfulness of genre fiction

was this all tongue in cheek or is he an actual douche

jacobson is def a literary snob and a cultural conservative, cld well be actual irl douche too.

Certainly comes across that way in the one or two interviews I've been 'luky' enough to see..

He was being serious as far as I could tell.

Re: genre fiction - the majority of his ire was directed at thrillers and it stems from a complete disinterest in plot (plus he said he finds thrillers impossible to understand/his brain doesn't work in that way and he loses track instantly).

lol@ my keyboard.

Reading Pavese's short stories - quite a dose of misogyny scattered throughout these (one of the stories is called that) and a bitterness toward life in general, contrast w/the usually brill descriptions of the Italian countryside. xp

Erich Kastner wrote a marvellous kids' book, Emil and the Detectives, that I loved when I was eight or whatever, and have a copy ready & waiting for my own nipper (about seven years early, ha!). His were among the books burnt by the Nazis in 1933.

Parent Trap is also based on one of his - I did not know that.

Big Emil fan here.

lol Naipaul from his New Republic interview:

I can't read Wodehouse. The thought of, shall we say, facing thee or four months of nothing but Wodehouse novels fills me with horror.

His wife:

Oh God, everybody hates Jane Austen. They don't have the balls to say it. Believe me. Who did we meet the other day,that famous academic who said Jane Austen was rubbish? And I said, "Why don't you stand up and say it." And he said, "Am I mad?" They have all reassessed her, but they just don't want to say it.

Believe her.

That they don't have the balls to say it, or that she really is rubbish? The former seems more likely.

she sounds like a Corner-ite.

Also, who's asking N. to read three or four months of nothing but Wodehouse? Might be a good punishment though.

The only thing better than three months of Wodehouse is sharing an island with no one but Jake Gyllenhaal.

How bout Howie Mandel?

(unless Jake is cool; Howie not so much)

I paused after Burr's conspiracy in Jefferson's 2nd term to read an early novella (1961) by John LeCarre, Call for the Dead. It showed that his strengths were there right from the beginning.

That section of Adams' narrative is gnarled stuff! And I'm still not convinced he committed treason.

If the USA had been more closely analogous to a Great Britain, Burr's activities would have been unambiguously treasonous. But the USA was a country recently formed out of a revolution and founded on a stringent insistence on self-determination, while Burr was operating in the western territories and Louisiana, whose legal status was rather nebulous vis a vis the federal government, so his activities do partake of some of that nebulosity.

However, if Adams's sources are credible, Burr's conspiracy once included a plan to kidnap the president, vice president and pro tem leader of the Senate, which, if true, plainly shows Burr had no scruples about actual treason. He really didn't care a tuppence about treason or no treason, so long as he profited by it.

Vidal's novel makes clear that Burr and Wilkinson conspired to do, well, something or other in the western territories to detach them from the federal government, but, as you point out, their plans shifted as new laws (and states) sprouted around them. \

Burr's Senate trial btw, over which Jeffferson's hated John Marshall presided, is hilarious in both Adams and Vidal.

Wilkinson's treason was much plainer, in that he was an active duty army officer whose sworn duties and alliegance were directly to the USA. Burr's oaths of office had expired with his vice-presidency.

Naipaul is such a dick these days, but I still enjoy his earliest novels. They seem too funny to be the work of the curmudgeonly self-regarding old turd that he's become. One of the best bits in Diana Athill's memoirs is where she describes one of the best parts of retiring from publishing being no longer having to work with Naipaul.

I wish SHIVA Naipaul had lived longer and written more books. He was brilliant.

if i were stuck in a library with only one writer to read it'd probably be wodehouse. i'd be cool with tove jansson or joan didion too. it sure as fuck wouldn't be naipaul.

I wish SHIVA Naipaul had lived longer and written more books. He was brilliant.

i feel like he's the great lost writer of the 70s even though he only wrote what? 3 novels and 2 travel books, collected non-fiction? speaking of shiva i recently found a h/b copy of love & death in a hit country, his last novel and the only book of his i haven't read. looking forward to it.

in a HOT country, natch

ha! i mentioned wodehouse as a candidate on that other thread and i didn't even know that thread came about because of the naipaul quote! funny. i could never read that guy. tried a couple of times. naipaul that is.

oh but anyway i'm reading *A Story That Ends With A Scream* a weird short story collection by James Leo Herlihy. he wrote the novel Midnight Cowboy. which i've never read. all stories from the 60's. published in 1970.

900 pp into Jefferson, but last night I switched over and read half of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, just because I needed some freshening up.

Just finished Mr Nice by Howard Marks this morning, been meaning to for ages. Enjoyed it. Must read the Dope Stories. But would expect most people read those both years ago.

Also very close to end of Leroi Jones Blues People which is very interesting. Really should have got it signed when he came and talked at the local University a few months back. Though might have meant that the book got nicked from the library when I returned it.

Bought a load of books a few days ago several from charity shops and 2nd hand ones, not got names down though.
One that looks really good on the US war on drugs going way back before that got capitalised. Strength of the Wolf, another one I've been looking at for ages and meaning to get, since it was on the shelves in the local 2nd hand bookshop for ages, several copies of it.

This is obviously smug beyond measure but do you actually believe this guy? Less than three days per book when the books include Moby-Dick, Gaddis x2, etc. Does anyone read that fast, that relentlessly?

http://www.vice.com/read/all-the-books-i-read-in-2012

yeah, can believe it - there's some fairly slim poetry volumes in there too, some shortish conceptual/experimental fiction too - I'd say that some board members (ok, naming names - James Morrison, Lamp, Thomp) did or do the same sort of numbers

didn't know about the dennis cooper list that guy mentions. joy williams and ivy compton-burnett, dennis is my kinda guy.

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2008/01/dead-blog-reprints-1-my-50-favorite.html?zx=c1f5895f01ac44b5

DC should have a grove press tattoo.

taking 3 whole days to read a book? the dude's lightweight!
[/smug]

I've been wanting to get into Claude Simon for a while and that Triptych book sounds amazing

john paul ricco - the logic of the lure
clarice lispector - agua viva, a breath of life
ursule molinaro - demons and divas

that guy is reading the wrong steve erickson

almost finished with atul gawande's first book, complications
on to my next turgenev, started fathers and sons last night

A couple hundred pages to go in H.W. Brands' Grant bio (superb), a few stories into Alice Munro's Dear Life, and will start Applebaum's Iron Curtain book in a couple days.

Nabokov's Glory - a few pages in.

getting that grant bio for xmas. can't wait. just started "lolita."

now savoring shiva naipaul's love in a hot country, next oliver sacks' hallucinations

argh love and death in a hot country - like his other books he treats the same themes as his big brother w/more humanity and humor. not that vs naipaul is devoid of empathy and laughs (in his books not his life) but shiva is warmer, less idea-driven & political than vidia's later novels

finished PKD's Maze of Death before break: liked it more than I thought it would, though still a step down from the Androids/Ubik/Pot Healer run. Probably the most distinctive part of it was the made-up religion, much of which pointed ahead to Divine Invasion. I won't comment too much on the all-too-common device that appears towards the end, except to say that to its credit, it is usually not deployed in order to make things bleaker...

While waiting for interlibrary loan to deliver my next PKD book (Our Friends from Frolix 8) I have been a reading a few other things:

- The New Novel: From Queneau to Pinget, by Vivian Mercer. An English-language survey of the roman nouveau movement in France ca 1970

- Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience, by R.A. Durr. Haven't started this yet, but I'm guessing it's a post-beatnik attempt to trace precursors for 60s countercultural fixations to Romantic poetry.

- issue No. 50 of Anime Insider, which has a list of the 50 greatest anime (caveat: only those translated to English). Several favorites of mine placed high, including FLCL, Utena, Evangelion, and so on

Dipping here and there into a couple of poetry collections I got for Christmas, one modernist and one anti-modernist. So far I think I prefer the anti-modernist. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.

Keith Waldrop - Transcendental Studies
Les Murray - Learning Human

finished PKD's Maze of Death before break: liked it more than I thought it would, though still a step down from the Androids/Ubik/Pot Healer run. Probably the most distinctive part of it was the made-up religion, much of which pointed ahead to Divine Invasion. I won't comment too much on the all-too-common device that appears towards the end, except to say that to its credit, it is usually not deployed in order to make things bleaker...

heh i'd never looked at it that way

this is way later than the androids/ubik/pot-healer run i thought?

No. I'd link to the wiki bibliography but I'm on my phone, but Maze is directly after Pot Healer according to that

A Maze was kind of like Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, plot-wise, I thought when reading the former (but had I actually read the latter?) Cameo from Jesus. Still, I wasn't so impressed. But understandable for him to a bit tired after Androids/Ubik/Pot Healer, yeah.

Got Sean O'Brien's Collected for Christmas. read some yesterday on a journey to work - travelling through dawn, big city, the river - felt a fit.

Seemed a bit stretched to me, A Maze of Death. Would agree it's not near the top, but memorable things in it.

Androids w 1966 p 1968
Pot-Healer w 1968 p 1969
Maze ... w 1968 p 1970

According to Sutin. I'd mentally filed 'Maze of Death' as later because I guess that's basically where the divide is, in my head, between Dick as being competent and capable of writing v good SF thrillers -- whatever other level they work on -- and of Dick as having lost that ability, lost in his own head. So I guess that divide is (heh) sometime in mid-1968?

I wouldn't be surprised if it were a desk novel. Similarities to one of the earlier ones. Eye in the Sky?

Also, I'd forgotten that Sutin refers to him as 'Phil' throughout. How annoying.

Maybe I should reread the collected works of Philip K Dick.

I had a sudden yearning to do just this before Christmas, happily succumbed (with Autofac) and see no reason not to continue in the New Year, tho having idly picked up Bleak House for the first time in years am now some way enjoyably into that.

Kinda wondering about this author--anybody read him?---reviewed by Randy Fox in Nashville Scene:
Swords from the Sea, by Harold Lamb
During the first and second decades of the past century, Harold Lamb was one of the top historical adventure writers in the U.S. His carefully researched tales of adventure combined history, humor, realistic violence and occasionally even a hint of fantasy. Forgotten for many years, Lamb’s work has recently been re-discovered by such luminaries as Michael Chabon, whose novel Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure is a direct tribute. This collection focuses on Lamb’s tales of sea-going adventures with Vikings, pirates and even the Revolutionary war naval hero John Paul Jones in service to the Russian navy. It’s entertaining and intelligent reading that makes you want to crack open the history books and dig out the Errol Flynn movies. —RF

reading in a book of samuel delaney interviews (which is a fascinating book) and he says if you agree with liberal humanist politics you will find PKD comforting. a preaching to the converted thing. well, he said it better than that, but it was something like that. also said that dick wrote so much and often badly but it doesn't matter to fans because they agree with his whole political vision.

he might have actually said "liberal/jewish".

I have never read any Harold Lamb, but every era has its top historical fiction writers, and they are rarely better than workmanlike novelists reflecting the conventional thinking of their day. iirc, Lamb thrived mainly in the post WWII era, which was somewhat self-conciously 'serious' and self-improving, so its surprising to see humor liste as a main attraction. He sounds worth a try, but that blurb probably oversells him.

Shakespeare’s Puck, and his folkslore: illustrated from the superstitions of all nations, but more especially from the earliest religion and rites of northern Europe and the Wends by William Bell. One of those books you pick up at a library, when you're at the beginning of trying to chase down a subject, and casting your net fairly wide, which has almost nothing at all pertinent to your cause in it, but which somehow detains you by provoking a sort of whimsical curiosity. Being mid-19th C this was of course in III volumes. And it also exhibited what I suspect to be an admirable Victorian trait, or perhaps a post-Enlightenment pre-21st C trait, where the author expends a vast amount of time researching something that might perhaps (by lesser minds) be considered minor. This can cause, upon consideration of time expended v point of expenditure, a terrifyingly vertiginous sense of mortality, a paralysis of will that sends you scurrying for the elliptic precis of Borges or Bernhard. I love the bravery of their insane tottering intellectual structures - dust, after all, is also death, just less spectacular than the battlefield, and bound between calf skins on a hidden shelf in a dark corners of bookish buildings in sequestered squares. I don't think William Bell was immune to these fears, as, having spent most of Vols I & II going in massive detail through Puck's northern European provenance, he then ups the ante substantially by saying in effect, 'of course, for everything I've been writing about to have any meaning, I need to prove Shakespeare spent a lot of of time in Germany'. So that's what he does. I only flicked through this bit, as I'd spent overlong reading about the mischievous habit of elves tying hair into elf-locks causing plica polonica (which association of evil with 'locks' Bell avers is where we get 'Warlock' from). Still, I saw lots of 'must's/'impossible for him not to's/'can only mean's, and I'm eager to go back and snout out his findings. Borges was great at showing how these sorts of minutely worked, obsessively researched theories and systems are worlds unto themselves. (I always liked that aspect of Pynchon's Against the Day, a pertinent novel for all this stuff).

Oh, I also read a lot of The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. Great topography & mythos but the narrator really f'ed me off and I put it down half read. Happy to be convinced otherwise.

Plus, Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon (Gunn felt a bit ponderous being read in the context of Muldoon's melodious celerity of association, but will come back).

Joseph Andrews, <3 Fielding.

Lightning Rods - Helen DeWitt. Excellent - doing something I'm v interested in, which is using the language of office life in a literary way (Stevie T pointed me to George Saunders' Institutional Monologues a while ago). Lightning Rods a v successful example of this. (Feel My Work Is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti fits here as well).

Incidentally, Lightning Rods among an interesting-looking list of books at Asylum. Quite fancy My Elvis Blackout.

gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

thanks, mp - good thread! pringles and f pohl has a blog. important knowledge I didn't previously have.

with Lamp here, I think:

i am going to reread these i think, i want to talk about books but i read these like three maybe four summers ago and found them kinda obscurantist and gross, like there were a lot of words but not very many ideas. and the ideas he does have are the same ugly ones lots of these books have about the solitary male

I got sick of being in the narrator's head, and the treatment of women in it got me... well, I was going to say angry, but I don't think that's true, it was too silly for that, I just found it tiring. I will read f'ing anything tho, so there's no ruling out me picking it up again.

The post-AIDS Gunn poems are among my favorite late 20th century poetry.

Thanks, Alfred - will check out post-haste.

Still Life

I shall not soon forget
The greyish-yellow skin
To which the face had set:
Lids tights: nothing of his,
No tremor from within,
Played on the surfaces.

He still found breath, and yet
It was an obscure knack.
I shall not soon forget
The angle of his head,
Arrested and reared back
On the crisp field of bed,

Back from what he could neither
Accept, as one opposed,
Nor, as a life-long breather,
Consentingly let go,
The tube his mouth enclosed
In an astonished O.

Hmm, thanks, leaving aside the accumulated weight of the final verse, that 'obscure knack' gives a particularly horrible kick.

oh, and to gloss 'felt a bit ponderous' from upthread - that was more a mood thing than criticism. Even at the time I knew there would be occasions where Muldoon would feel frivolous and Gunn would have heft. False opposition - I just happened to have them both to hand at the same time.

a couple weeks back I picked up Spoon River Anthology, as part of my ongoing exploration into the history of 'free verse'... man, what a book! general consensus seems to be that Masters never wrote anything else even half as good, but I don't think it matters, cuz Spoon River is like the American Decameron

Yeah, I never have read the whole thing, think I'll do that--ditto Paterson---only read The Portable William Carlos Williams (also incl excerpt of his novel White Mule)---a trip. Can see how he appealed to Ginsberg and maybe Dylan).

I've been reading the short story collection The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro. After the first three stories I can see I'm not responding well to her stuff. I'll probably go to a thread where she's the main subject if I want to explain further what I think is going on there.

at first glance she looks...aimless

I'm thinking it has more to do with her persistent use of omniscient narration and her giving undue weight and signifigance to every detail of every sentence, which makes them seem portentious when they are not. For example, in the story Jakarta an unnamed strange man who has been dancing erotically with the new mother at a bohemian party suddenly drops down and kisses her crotch through her cotton pants. Then they part forever.

The fact that the pants were cotton is thrown in there just to make them more tactile and believable, but due to her style, this 'fact' is given an annoying amount of weight that grates on me. Despite all her contrivance that she, as the author, is nowhere to be seen and the voice you hear is coming friom the empty air, my brain refuses to grant her that privilege. I know she is there and I watch what she is doing and I see her pulling the little levers to make things happen.

The result is that I don't respond as I ought to, as rather as she wants me to - and the connection fails. Her characters begin to look too much like marionettes and their actions seem herky-jerky and unconvincing. Her effects depend on tricking you into entering what she tells you, as if it were a whole, rounded, complete reality. With me, that trick falls flat. That doesn't mean it isn't a good trick or she isn't a good writer, but only that I am a poor audience for her type of story.

That's the case with her failed stories. Another flaw: since her style is accretive it sometimes takes two or three dozen pages for the reader to figure out why that section at the beginning set in a train station has significance, therefore when the reader figures out what she's up to the whole story looks like a Mannerist exercise.

From what I remember the keeper in that volume is "Save The Reaper."

How's that different from any other author though? Other than those who let themselves go on a wander. It seems like you're criticising poor choice of detail, or addition of unnecessary detail, rather than style as such.

she has definitely been criticized for highlighting things that don't need to be highlighted. or putting emphasis on things that don't turn out to be important. or adding details that are extraneous. never bothered me.

Enjoyed this quite a bit: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/joy/

Yeah, I never have read the whole thing, think I'll do that--ditto Paterson---only read The Portable William Carlos Williams (also incl excerpt of his novel White Mule)---a trip.

also: starting new year off on right note by finally reading Day of the Locust. what took me so long??? this is amazing! dude beat Pynchon to significant aspects of his postmodern steeze by like 30 years

Nathanael West is so rad. Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million are great too

ya I have the new directions volume that includes Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts; thinking I'll read the latter immediately if not soon

I'm sadly struggling with Lolita. Just finished the first section and I'm thinking about putting it down for a time when I'm more up for its tone. Does all Nabokov have this sort of light, jokey feel? There's some gorgeous sentences here but it's just not getting its claws in me. Think spring or summer would be a better fit for this.

Lolita is very jokey. P.S. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Annabel_Lee

i tried to read lolita more than once. maybe three times. could never do it.

i'll try again when i'm older. i've had more luck with early nabokov.

How does Pale Fire compare? I was thinking about checking that one out.

I'd say try Pnin before the others.

i mean if it helps the narrator's light jokeyness is a ploy to ingratiate himself with you despite being a child rapist so if it's rubbing you the wrong way it's prob working (for vn's purposes not hh's)

pale fire is if anything jokier, actually; half of it "takes place" (prob pointless to work out whether this phrase applies to most of pale fire) in a campy pantomime monarchy and the "narrator" (again) keeps talking about his "powerful automobile". pnin is gentler, more dignified, probably, even tho its protagonist is a befuddled-professor type.

I'm reading The Defense right now and it is pretty great. A few very funny scenes scattered throughout, but not really jokey. Probably not a bad place to start (note that I don't really like Pnin but love Ada so maybe not the best source of advice re Nabokov).

way too much I think. Or at least try to. Took too many books to London with me so had to leave Billie's Blues behind without reading it. Billie Holiday bio which looked like it should be very interesting.

Read Black Ajax by George McDonald Fraser which I'd taken over on a previous trip and hadn't read. Enjoyable as a lot of the writer's material is, this one was about a black bare knuckle boxer in the early 19th century stranded in the UK. Could be construed as a bit racist, not sure about Fraser's own politics so could just be conveying what people of the time's responses would be.
Read this and the Chris Morris biography Disgusting Bliss while laid up in bed with a swollen knee. So probably could have got some way into the Billie Holiday book.

Did allow me to start the White Goddess which i've been meaning to read for years, even before I ordered it online a couple years back and still haven't got very far with.
& now I've just picked up Dark Star the Jerry Garcia oral history which I had several years back but got nicked in a box that a mentally challenged co-resident of a house i lived in took as I moved out. I'd left the box in the hallway with several others waiting for a taxi that never showed & I later found one box upside down and it looking like there was a gap. Also had 2 signed copies of Bad Seed the Nick Cave bio in among some other stuff I'm still not 100% exactly what. So glad to slowly be replacing the books from it I've missed ever since.
slightly annoying.

both lo and PF are very funny, i think: one of the endearing things about VN is that he isn't above the dopiest forms of humor -- puns, slapstick, silly names. he loved the scene in the kubrick film where humbert is struggling to get the hotel cot open, with three stooges-esque results. i was put off reading PF for years because i expected it to be some dull esoteric thing, but a lot of it is just hilarious.

the good thing about PF is it reminds you that Edmund Wilson had a point about Volodya's versifying.

Also love Pnin. The character and tone fit perfectly, there's a pathos to the Pnin's jokiness, which isn't quite Nabokov's - tho maybe in a refracted way it is, as it's a kind-hearted, earnest desire to fit in and be liked, which contains a strain of well-described quixotic romanticism. One way of looking at that is as a more human version of Nabokov's 'knight's move' narrative structures. There's a sense of tilting at a parallel world windmill, and that being at the centre of the narrator's 'real' world, hence the awkward and humorous estrangement that is consistent across a lot of Nabokov's writing, English and Russian. America, after all, was not V's first place of exile. Tricky bugger, mainly because he enjoys being so tricky. Enjoyable tho. Haven't read Lolita for years. My favourite is probably The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

xp

I must admit I find the dopey humour irritating rather than enjoyable, but that I'm v prepared to admit is a failure in me. It is less persistent in the Russian novels I think, so might be a reasonable way of judging which Nabokov a new reader, or an old unsuccessful reader, might want to go to first.

i actually really love the poem in PF, but i've never been able to decide how seriously we're meant to take it, or whether it's even supposed to be good or not. but there's lots of beautiful lines in there.

it does duplicate the flatness of a translation, I must admit.

Yeah I think the issue is that I wasn't at all prepared for it and not really in the mood for it. The Lolita character is pretty incredible... It's like the realist 12 yr old ever. And some sentences are just pure beautiful.

'Let The Great World Spin' - Colum McCann

Going through transcribing old notebooks - this made me laugh/think of ilx:

(of Rupert of Deutz)

This led him into arguments from which he emerged - successfully as he thought - in what his enemies regarded as a cloud of verbiage issuing from a word-drunk writer multiplying allegorical interpretations of Scripture which were already too numerous, and rashly engaging in dialectical arguments for which he had no competence.

(not sure where this is from or indeed who RoD is. might be Apes and Ape Lore or some history of scholasticism I was reading. )

So, Rupert of Deutz was a viking at rash dialectical arguments?

lolita is my favorite novel. when i read it i read an annotated version they had at my library, i wouldn't say it's necessary obviously but it's obviously a very densely allusive and playful novel and i'm not sure i would have gotten as much out of it without the annotations. the guy did a great job (the annotations themselves are probably 120+ pages) and it also includes some great scholarly criticism by the guy who was something of a nabokov obsessive

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/07appel.html?_r=0

seemed like a cool guy

Recently:

Frank - a bio of Frank Sinatra by James Kaplan. I don't read a lot of biographies but often pick up one or two around Christmas. This is decent, throughly researched, generally fair minded and reasonably well written. Long (800 pages only takes us up to the late 50s with a second volume to come sometime). Downsides are a fair bit of novelistic "filling in" of unknowable detail and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude to Sinatra's horndog exploits that verges on the grubby.

Bruce - a bio of Springsteen by Peter Ames Carlin. This was a Christmas present and not something I'd have bought for myself. I was a keen Springsteen fan for around a year or so back in the day but now I can't understand how I could every have enjoyed his music very much. The lyrics and persona are fine but the music is rhythmically and texturally leaden. He's had an interesting life though and this bio, well-researched and sympathetic without being adulatory, is very good of its type.

How It All Began - Penelope Lively. The only Lively I'd read before was Moon Tiger which I thought was terrific. HIAB represents a vertiginous drop in quality from that. Barely a notch above an Aga saga and the basic intellectual concept (the book is supposed to be a kind of illustration of the butterfly effect) isn't explored in an interesting way. But it was an easy and reasonably enjoyable read, so I followed it with

According to Mark - Penelope Lively. This much earlier novel was substantially better while still having too many flaws for me to want to make any great claims for it. An enjoyable escapist read though.

Jerusalem The Golden - Margaret Drabble. First Drabble I've read and I loved it. I had somehow got it into my head that Drabble would be a bit worthy and dry, but this wasn't in the least. Unfortunately skimming through some reviews I get the impression that this won't be typical of her work.

it's pretty cold for autumn now

anybody read Stevenson's Master of Ballentrae?

Autumn shall reign perpetual, until somebody starts a 2013 WAYR thread.

it's the best season; might as well extend it

anybody read Stevenson's Master of Ballentrae?

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 7 January 2013 23:03 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Started reading it at the end of a long Stevenson kick, and decided at that point it was time to end my long Stevenson kick. Found it hard-ish going. That's a 'no', btw.

fwiw, the new 2013 wayr thread has begun.