"In that progress of life which seems stillness itself,"-- WHAT ARE YOU READING SPRING 2013?

Let's not drop the ball again, gang! I'm p.excited for the next 3 months of reading.

Currently rereading Spring and All (see title) + various early (minor?) Eliot poems. An endlessly fruitful agon, that.

Also steadily plowing thru The Moonstone -- after a great deal (~150 pp) of amusingly Shandyesque dilatory prelude, the inevitable mysterious theft of the titular stone has FINALLY come to pass, along with a barely perceptible increase in the narrator's sense of urgency.

Jeffrey Frank's Ike and Dick, about the fraught relationship between Eisenhower and his vice president.

Isherwood's sixties journals.

George Saunders' latest collection.

reading saul bellow's herzog

gonna start the new sam lipsyte short stories also

xp have you read A Single Man? I heard about it a few months ago & was almost tempted to pick it up in a bookstore recently, mostly for reasons of 'historical significance' or w/e, but changed my mind at the last second & bought some poems instead

I've begun reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. A third through the first book, will probably take a break before I begin book two. Also, I'm reading Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, on using quantum physics to rethink... a lot, I suppose, I've only read the introduction.

A Single Man is a marvel. The movie offended me.

THE WORLD IS NEW

I'm kinda between books atm. Last night i was just trolling around in my guidebooks, thinking bout camping and hiking destinations for the upcoming summer season. I've got The Recognitions by Wm Gaddis as the probable 'next book up', but I may take a brief detour or two or three before I get cracking on it.

almost finished with jane bowles' collected writings and i like her so much i may never read anything her husband wrote

Commuting book, more World War II: The End by Ian Kershaw. A bunch of egomaniacs pursuing insane, grandiose schemes in an atmosphere of increasing decadence; while outside a miserable, cowed population faces the death rattle of a once-great city.

Bedtime book: Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. A study of New York's early seventies music scene.

Broken April - Ismail Kadere

65 years of washington - juan jose saer

lmost finished with jane bowles' collected writings and i like her so much i may never read anything her husband wrote

a portable Jane Bowles was reissued in the nineties; need to give it a go.

Her husband is marvelous, particularly teh short fiction.

Sorry Alfred meant to come back to you on House of Mirth but got wrapped up in other things. Probably just as well I could feel hobby-horse verbosity coming on.

I'd love to read it!

Also steadily plowing thru The Moonstone -- after a great deal (~150 pp) of amusingly Shandyesque dilatory prelude, the inevitable mysterious theft of the titular stone has FINALLY come to pass, along with a barely perceptible increase in the narrator's sense of urgency.

i was amazed at how good the moonstone is once it gets going.

i'm reading a sport and a pastime for two more nights, don't know after that.

Alfred, what was offensive in the screen version of A Single Man?

It sentimentalized the novel, especially in one unforgivable change.

What was the change? I saw the movie, haven't yet read the book.

Remember a phone conversation with his dead lover's parents? In the book he IS invited to the funeral.

Hard to imagine, the way the movie presents things. I'll have to read it. Thought the movie was substantial enough, though something of a soap opera too.

Julianne Moore was unwatchable.

read a little dos passos last night - got to feeling like i should commit to 'u.s.a.' just to stick it to the haters ('dos passos is not all that')

Reading mostly drama academic type books - The Moving Body by Le Coq, Michael Chekov's To The Actor and just finished Declan Donnelan's The Actor And The Target.

I just ordered Independent People to carry around for when I need a break.

I'm surprised by the extent to which the acting stuff is of philosophical value. I mean, I guess you'd imagine it would be, but it really is the study of life itself.

It's not how I'd imagined it, but I can sort of see what you might mean. Have you got a choice quote or example?

The Engineer of Human Souls - Josef Škvorecký. ironic, enoyable, sort of a Kundera style novel.

I started on The Recognitions. I see at once that this is a novel where people do not speak much. Dialogue is extremely sparse and what there is is constantly interrupted by the narrator and surrounded with decorative cushions embroidered with authoritative additional observations. As a rule the narrator mediates every act, thought and tiny detail through the filter of a very ornate and involved prose style.

Weirdly, his next book, JR, consists of almost nothing but scraps of dialogue stitched together with almost no narrator evident.

After nearly 3 months I have finished Williams' IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN.

Really wanna read the recognitions & the man without qualities but in both cases the copy I have is simply TOO BIG to carry around. I think I'd have to quit my job before getting round to them.

Started de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, a deferred pleasure.

Really wanna read the recognitions & the man without qualities but in both cases the copy I have is simply TOO BIG to carry around. I think I'd have to quit my job before getting round to them.

― beau 'daedaly (wins)

Have library copy of Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde that will go back basically unread for the same reason.

In Denmark The Man Without Qualities is four books. Which really helps a lot. The first book is 330 pages, I can read that in the month I can have it from the library. Then I can read something else and return to Musil book 2 after I've forgotten what it was all about. Perfect.

The Recognitions is quite good. Perhaps it didn't need to be 900 pages, and it's not as dazzling as a lot of what it inspired, but it was good. I really want to read JR as well, but I've got a lot of those postmodern mammoths, and I've only finished a few...

My dalkey archive copy of The Recognitions weighs 2.5 lbs. I must be aware of how I hold it, so as not to make my wrists sore.

ebooks yo

Figured these doorsteps and their authors were ebook-averse so didn't bother to look.

Hm. They have The Recognitions and Under The Volcano finally.

Xps yeah the dalkey one is the one I have. The musil is a recentish translation published as one volume. Thing is I like long books, but they should at least be portable! These are unnecessarily massive.

The weight thing is also why I haven't tackled the tunnel yet. My heart sank when it arrived.

The Tunnel has been sitting on my shelf for a long time now. Maybe should nominate for ILB reading group.

OTOH see cheap German e-editions of Musil.

I carried that Musil around for ages, it's big but was fine in a bag with umbrella, notepad, just standard really. I guess everyone's commute differs.

Edition of The Recognitions I just peeked at has intro by William Gass in which he conflates his own name with that of Gaddis, William Gibson and a few other Willie Gs

That's the one I've got! I'm a little obsessed with gass actually, devoured omensetter's luck and the stories and the essays and the novellas, everything but the tunnel. He just brought out a third novel, middle c. I hope it's smallish.

I don't commute, but I work at a t€$¢o & my locker simply won't accommodate these monsters. I do a lot of my reading in pubs, and carry a medium-sized tote bag. The huge books just about fit but they're a pain in the arse to lug around & they don't leave a lot of space in the bag. I guess ebooks are the answer, yeah.

I've only read Willie Master's Wife by Gass, but it was really good. I should read his long books as well, at some point, I reckon.

Ismael, re actors and life studies, that's one of the best parts of this collection, which I posted about on What Have You Purchased Lately? (if you look for it, one of AbeBooks' indie merchants had a copy half the price of Amazon's guys)

The Free Southern Theater: A Documentary of the South's Radical Black Theater, with Journals, Letters, Poetry Essays and a Play Written By Those Who Built It starts with an account of an NYC fundraiser, hosted by Harry Belafonte, then back to the often-dangerous boondocks, where this Mississippi-founded troupe brought the shows--- audiences were really on top of Waiting For Godot, for instance.(Later material could be quite different.) Things get suitably complicated (and stay somewhat perilous) in New Orleans, where we also get the most microscopically detailed descriptions of everyday people in the 60s I've ever seen. Actors should always have to go out and write this stuff down; every composition student should. These guys weren't students, just staying sharp, on a working afternoon off. Then on to Planet Texas....really an amazing cache of testimonies, written as or soon after it all happens.

― dow, Tuesday, February 5, 2013 9:28 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Radical Black" is a late tag for this initially integrated company and repertoire. Always necessarily adaptive, The FST was transformed as outside pressures came to include those of/from the increasingly besieged Civil Rights-to-Black Power struggle/paradigm shift

― dow, Tuesday, February 5, 2013 9:45 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Raced through Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her at the weekend and loved every second of it; I know he really does only write about one topic (the dominican-american immigrant experience refracted through the lens of men treating women terribly) but he does it so well I don't care.

Started Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory the other night. Don't think I like seeing ultra-modern references in novels yet.

I got an inkling for Diaz yesterday and ordered This Is How You Lose Her, then printed out and devoured Miss Lora over lunch. He is so good. Glad to hear it measures it.

An edition of the Keats letters, as well as Helen Vendler's intimidating The Odes of John Keats.

Vendler seems cool. I wanna read more of her stuff, particularly the book on Yeats and the one on Wallace Stevens' long poems.

I'd like to read those eventually. I thought an interesting comment in the Keats book was her saying that her reading of Keats is influenced by a set of oblique responses to Keats that she discerns in Wallace Stevens. Not sure what that means, as I haven't immersed in Stevens yet.

Left a few off last time, finished a few more

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

Ripped thru this like a thriller, so good. Finally got around to reading just a few weeks before he died, oddly.

Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning - Jonathan Mahler

NYC in the nadir year of 1977 as seen thru the Yankees struggles. As a non sports fan I found it effective and engaging. Similar to Will Hermes book on 70s music in NY but better written IMO. Also drawn from secondary sources like Hermes and somewhat distanced as a result.

I finished the Patrick Melrose quartet and that Scientology thing but need to THINK a little before weighing in

Ooh, that NY book sounds interesting. How aware do you need to be of baseball for it to make sense?

Vendler's The Music of What Happens is one of my favorite collection of essays on poetry.

You don't think Love Goes To Buildings On Fire is well-written, lovebug?

james - it's not badly written but i think the tone and content are uneven. where mahler is a seamless read, different threads integrated.

ismael - you'll enjoy it even if you know *zip* about baseball, the focus is on outsize personalities like billy martin and reggie jackson

OK, fair enough, it's kind of obvious which scenes he knows less well than others.

i'm reading gordon lish's 'peru'. it's not what i expected

cavell's film book, unhappily. and rereading some pynchon. and a bit of 2666. and 'homicide'. the other day i read about spherical geometry.

Sartre - Saint Genet.

Robert Parry - Fooling America

Inspired to purchase this one after some discussion on the Watergate thread (thx Alfred). Bush Sr presidency framed in terms of 'conventional wisdom' vs actual events, heavy focus on CIA/contra/etc. Am enjoying it so far.

so nice to see the nice-gentleman tag unpeeled from Poppy Bush.

Exactly! Kindly elder statesman my ASS

I rewatched the Dan Rather-Bush argument last week and, boy, does Bush not come off well at all; he was as whiny, thin-skinned, and petty as his idiot son.

I meant to look it up when I read that chapter and I never did. hmm. Project for this morning methinks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqwQw3THRvU

autobiography of red - anne carson

taking this slooow and enjoying every minute.

finished wolf hall before that. It was as awesome as everyone made it sound.

"I thought this was a news program!'

...

Petulant, whiny, infantile. Without historical context you could be forgiven for assuming that Bush lost the election.

Finished this week - Going Clear by Lawrence Wright and Why Does The World Exist by Jim Holt.
Just begun - Progress of Stories by Laura Riding and The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.
All highly recommended.

cavell's film book, unhappily.

why unhappily? I have this, thought it looked pretty cool tho I haven't got around to reading it yet.

The Charterhouse Of Parma by Stendahl - 390 pages in. Like the sense of (no doubt short-lived) exhiliration which has taken over, post-confinement.

Stendhal might be the funnest of the Great Writers -- a commitment to sensation.

Parma might be the best novel i read last year.
i liked it better than The Red and the Black.

He does so love "politics" as a game. He exults in it.

Also, shit, the guy knows how to keep the velocity up.

Haven't revisited his work in many years but probably should, given my username.

he loved examining human psychology too, and was quite good at that.

He wrote it in seven weeks. It sounds topper, I should check it out.

cavell's film book, unhappily.

why unhappily? I have this, thought it looked pretty cool tho I haven't got around to reading it yet.

i've already read the majority of his other books, even studied them extensively, and it seems to me like it's the worst of them. but that may just be a function of what i want from it and what i'm getting. or it could be that i mentioned reading it while in the least satisfactory part, which for me is the middle section on 'myths', which intensifies some of his worst qualities as a philosopher-critic. but he does acknowledge (at the beginning of the additional essay at the end of the book) that his aims and such are at odds with his usual practice.

A Various Art, edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville
Wanting Everything - Dorothy Rowe
The Passions - Robert C Solomon (not started this yet)

Glenn Patterson - The Mill For Grinding Old People Young
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

I don't read a lot of philosophy anymore, but I still have head-quarrels with Cavell. I'd take the criticism without the ordinary language influences if I could.

I finished the first part of Musil, and began a reread of Pynchon's Inherent Vice. I'll read a Danish collection of articles on Deleuze as well. Seems fine, not too pretentious.

William Carlos Williams, SELECTED POEMS

if you find a favorite, be so kind as to tell us, please. thx.

Robert Altman the Oral Biography - Mitchell Zuckoff
The 10 Cent Plague - David Hadju

A favourite WCW poem?

yes

But I rarely find poems that stand out in my mind well above the rest of a poet's work, so there is no expectation on my part that you will identify a favorite. I only was curious to see if one emerged.

after reading nothing but wodehouse for the last few months, i've decided to go ahead and read (or rather, reread in all but two instances) the novels of aldous huxley in chronological order, not entirely sure why or how far i'll get... then maybe finally move onto those thomas love peacock novels i've had sitting around for years/decades.

coming from someone who reads and enjoys poetry, while more or less wholly ignorant of its technical aspects, the two wcw poems that i always remember are the self-portrait about dancing naked in front of a mirror while his family's asleep in bed (la danse russe?) and the poem about a sycamore growing through the concrete of a city sidewalk. looking forward to doing more than just dipping into patterson one of these days.

"The Desert Music" (long post-stroke poem about a trip to Mexico) is good; there's also a short one I can't recall the name of, in (I think) the same volume, which beautifully describes an orchestra.

I am currently reading Daniel Levin Becker's Oulipo book, having enjoyed his recent translation of Georges Perec's dream diary. Compared to Warren Motte's Primer of Potential Literature (the only other 'introduction' I'm aware of in English), Becker's a lot less focused on the heavy combinatoric stuff; but I think he's performed a valuable service in bringing out the cultural milieu and the personalities of some of the minor figures.

... in other words, explaining why and how it was possible for these dorks to become slightly-famous

Amity Shlaes' Coolidge bio lol

why

Will check out that Oulipo book, thanks.

Not really a "book" book, but the Walking Dead comic is insanely addicting.

why

― mookieproof, Tuesday, April 2, 2013

who doesn't like reading myths?

snoopheadshake.gif

I'm on Yeats, reading "Lapis Lazuli" with increasing shivers. I love this poem. It has a kind of musical acceleration and peak that reminds me of "Kubla Khan".

or this chiller:

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

coolidge said that?

in three words

"Flies are cool."

i grew up on coolidge avenue : /

to be fair, it was only two blocks long

thrift

I bogged down in The Recognitions after about 70 pp. I read yet another paragraph of english forced into roccocco curlicues, glanced briefly at the remaining 880 pp and suddenly became overwhelmingly weary. It was a trudge I could not face.

I next read a brief memoir of a childhood in a homestead in remote SE Oregon, called A Child of the Steens. This has no relation to Big HOOS, but rather refers to a mountain named Steens. Compared to Gaddis this one was simplicity itself.

I read a recent anthology of John McPhee non-fic pieces called Silk Parachute. It was uneven. He's old and he's winding down.

Now I am starting The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas (2003 Penguin edition). It is not precisely literature and not precisely trash, but rather some amazing fusion of the two. It may yet bore me with its melodrama before I can finish it, but it has my attention for now.

I go back and forth from scholarly texts and books that impress university professors and academics to (sometimes dumb) popular culture books.

Right now I'm in the pop culture book side of things, as I'm finishing up The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau just came in the mail, so I'll be reading that one next.

I'm also reading some Neil Young books--one of them is more of a reference book--as well as The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick.

3/4 of the way through Julian Barnes' England, England and it might possibly be the worst thing I've read in years.

Yes! His reputation is completely mystifying.

FINALLY hitting the home stretch of "fathers and sons". i read so slowly sometimes

It's so painfully unfunny. One of the big comic setpieces is the reveal that a media mogul likes to dress up as a baby and shit himself after being tossed off by a prostitute. You wouldn't find that funny if you wrote/read it at the age of 14. Just...awful.

Not sure what to read next, got the following over the weekend so tell me what to plump for:

Colson Whitehead - Colossus of New York
Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking
Norman Mailer - Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Joe Queenan - My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-lived Search for Sainthood.

I started 'A Naked Singularity' (Sergio De La Pava) last night, so far so good. This has really been my year of long books, which has largely been made possible by having them on my phone (lots more opportunities to read a few pages).

Almost done with Humphrey Jennings' Pandaemonium. Amazing compendium obv, *makes you think* especially about our current technical revolution and how we're really only at the beginning of it. He isn't half a miserablist though.

Humphrey Jennings the filmmaker? Guess I had heard about that book but never saw it and haven't thought about it in decades. Be interested to check it out.

New edition due to it being some kind of inspiration(*) for Danny Boyle re: the Olympics opening ceremony.

(*) apols to mark s

oops, 'influence' is mark s bugbear.

finished the new sam lipsyte short stories book -- hes gotten really skilled @ a type of minimalism that works for me. the difference btwn this 1 and my memory of 'venus drive' is p stark

mentioned it elsewhere, but now am reading in earnest + enjoying immensely david gooblars 'the major phases of philip roth'

xpost The Year of Magical Thinking was very engrossing; ditto Miami and The Siege of Chicago, but I read it long ago, and don't remember it very well. He really could be an astute eyewitness though, judging by Armies of the Night, St. George and The Dragon (McGovern vs. Nixon), and the best pieces in Cannibals and Christians, among others. Really got into Whitehead's Zone One; will have to check The Colossus. Queenan's always just seemed like a traveling suitcase, chock-full of professionally cranked-up resentments, but I may have missed something (never tried a whole book).
Judith Thurman on Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson---much shorter than her amazing subscription-only piece, which was my introduction to Fuller---but this has some stuff that didn't fit in the opus, and certainly stands on its on, the very last phrase makes me draw back a little ("hard chesse, my lad," as Fuller might say)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/the-master-letters-of-margaret-fuller-and-emily-dickinson.html

I've been reading the Anonymous Writing (and Criticising) Group I: Buses, Birds and Blether

You should too, and critique as ye see fit. This hasn't quite, as yet, generated the vibrancy I'd been hoping for - but all is not lost! Sharpen those claws and let rip!

Has anyone read any Arthur Schnitzler?

Dream Story to see where Eyes Wide Shut came from; same as everyone else I imagine

Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace - I think this is my favourite book of hers I've read so far. Ambitious, brilliantly constructed, intriguing and its even amusing at times (which is remarkable for Atwood).

Diego Gambetta's The Sicilian Mafia, which I've meant to read for a while - kind of a (I think) rational-choice-theory sociology of protection-as-an-industry, theories of trust & markets & intermediaries in environment where state is not a respected actor.

Dumas won me over. I have only a few pages left in Man in the Iron Mask (btw, in this translation the mask is described as "burnished steel").

His writing tosses aside all pretense of probablility, but he always keeps the pot at a rolling boil and his psychology, if inadequate to the fantastic events he imposes on the reader, is usually sound in other ways, so the reader is carried along happily on the tide of the story and not too bothered by the craziness.

Next in the queue, Haldor Laxness's Independent People.

Reading John Waters' Role Models, into it more than his movies.

waters is a good writer, love his movies too tho

The Count of Monte Christo was my favorite novel for years.

reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which somehow has escaped me over the years. Flawed, but a lot of fun.

Only fifty pages in but this book has amazed me so far with its supple prose and range of allusions (Musil, Lewis Mumford, Lippmann), woven together to show how the climate of transnational fear under which the New Deal unfurled.

Struggling with Walter Percy's The Moviegoer. It's not difficult or long, it just doesn't appear to have a plot yet. Even though it's very well-written it's like an anti-page-turner. Haven't had this experience with a book for a long time.

Big fan of that book as well as The Last Gentleman, but feel like you might have to be in the right mood to read it.

SPRIIIING BREAK

Yes, Spring Break is a good time to read Walker Percy.

I loved the moviegoer but don't really remember anything about it apart from general vibes. Walker's love in the ruins is a cool book.

Reading gass's middle c, unsurprisingly I adore it. I feel like I should be turned off by his misanthropy (a central riff involves the main character revising endless iterations of the statement "the fear that mankind will not survive has been replaced by the fear it will endure") but there's something so celebratory about his prose, esp his obvious love of image, that undercuts the bitterness.

Also flipping through the paris review interviews and a wyndham lewis prose anthology

the julian symonds one?

semi-excited about the idea of new gass, i don't know. is one of you 'thinlinednotepaper' on tumblr btw, i feel like i've asked this before

i am reading fanny burney's evelina and three versions of catullus |:

I am approaching the halfway mark in Independent People and apart from a dearth of deliberate murders and bloody reprisals it has a very marked resemblance to the old Icelandic sagas. This to me is a good thing. It also has moments of wry, understated humor which I appreciate.

three versions of catullus

His poetry seems to attract more translation attempts than any other ancient poet. Of all the versions I've scanned I think I like Horace Gregory's best; he gives Catullus a freshness and even a kind of innocence that may not really exist in the original, but is more engaging than the other versions I've looked at.

http://www.holoka.com/pdf-files/catullus.pdf

this has the only text of one of his i can find online. it's kind of an interesting find, has poems from ten or so translations in some cases presented for comparison

i have peter whigham's, which is sort of an okay post-poundian thing, but with not particularly thought-through ideas i think about what he's doing with his revisions; generally better on the foul stuff than on the other stuff; good introduction relating the themes and modes of the short and long poems;

guy lee's, which is the epitome of annoying scholarship in a lot of ways; apparently hewing very close to the latin meter but i mean i'm taking his word for that;

and brandon brown's, which is only a translation of catullus insofar is he informs the reader every few pages that the book is a translation of catullus

Gregory's version was first published in 1931. It was reprinted by Grove Press in the 1960s and was the most widely available translation for a time, but it is increasingly hard to locate.

It's easy to see why the 20th century paid so much homage to Catullus, compared to staid Virgil or the mild & mannerly Horace. It's kind of amazing Catullus survived two millenia of militant christian prudery.

i wish there was a section in the bookstore where all translations were like brandon brown's

i mean for that to work you have to imagine that there are bookstores but you get the general idea

Washington Square, and for the first time I sense a streak of cruelty in James' manipulations. He seems to relish each turn of the screw (and there are more than enough of them in this work). Also I get the feeling that he is less than generous to the female characters - he's happy to let the villainies of Townsend and Dr Sloper speak for themselves, but Mrs Penniman gets skewered by the narrator at every turn, and poor Catherine has her own share of pointed asides, over and above what it would take to let us know what a dull gem she is.

Still amazing though.

oh I don't deny it. The movie extends more sympathy.

I am approaching the halfway mark in /Independent People/ and apart from a dearth of deliberate murders and bloody reprisals it has a very marked resemblance to the old Icelandic sagas. This to me is a good thing. It also has moments of wry, understated humor which I appreciate.

First I'll need to finish Independent People, then I'd have to find a copy of The Long Ships and read it. After which I'd be happy to stack them next to one another.

In Season One Episode Two of Boardwalk Empire, Mrs. Schroder reads The Ivory Tower, while recuperating from a spousal-abuse-induced miscarriage. Somehow I wouldn't think Henry J. would be the go-to author in such a situation, but I've never heard of that book. Anybody familiar with it?

the julian symonds one?

no, one E.W.F Tomlin (I'm happy to assume those initials stand for earth, wind & fire). Never read any lewis before, finding it very readable which is a relief for a dunce like me

The Ivory Tower was republished by NYRB in about 2006 as I recall
I think it is very very late James
unless I am mixing all this up with something else

wayne koestenbaum - hotel theory (the two-column thing is trickier for me to navigate than i thought it would be)

no pinefox you are correct - ivory tower is unfinished and was only published after james' death. it seems a p recondite choice, but not having read it, i don't know if it has a spousal-abuse-induced-miscarriage theme, also.

there's another late late (eg post-golden bowl) HJ abt time travel that i haven't read (yet!)

just finished emilie bickerton's A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema, which was good fun - astute summary of the key theoretical/political issues at stake, with a side order of leftish critique of the current dismal state of criticism/cinema/life etc. bickerton occasionally shows her hand - she seems obsessed by cahiers' relative indifference to fassbinder, and is sniffily brusque abt carax, techine and assayas (all former cahiers contributors, obv.) it left me feeling v nostalgic for the glory years of impenetrable SCREEN issues dedicated to suture etc

The Ivory Tower is as good as any late period James but its scenic structure – often no more than a couple characters talking to each other at a time, punctuated by bursts of Jamesian rumination – takes adjusting. This period of James reminds me of classic Ozu.

the julian symonds one?

no, one E.W.F Tomlin (I'm happy to assume those initials stand for earth, wind & fire). Never read any lewis before, finding it very readable which is a relief for a dunce like me

think he's generally best read in small doses tbh. wd make an exception for Tarr, and maybe Self-Condemned, tho it's been a while since I read it. His short essay on going blind, The Sea-Mists of Winter, in (I think) Blasting and Bombardiering, is excellent. There's a bit in the autobiography, describing his time in Canada, after he'd gone blind. He'd sit in the freezing hotel room (v well described in Self-Condemned), and used a frame with wires strung across it, over paper, so he could write in a straight line, know he'd reached the edge of the page and continue down until he reached the bottom. Apparently his wife, Froanna, came home and found him writing, but with no paper in the frame, and had been for some time.

http://www.npg.org.uk/wyndhamlewis/froanna/froannapage/053.gif

When I read Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici - not a writer I feel particularly enthusiastic about generally - there was an image in it of over-writing continuously the same page.I can't remember anything about it, other than it reminded me strongly of that Lewis biographical fragment. I don't think it was that rather hackeneyed from a critical point of view notion of the palimpsest, which after all is a kind of device for remembering, but the opposite - an image similar to the Lewis one of meaningless recording, almost worse than forgetting. Maybe someone who's read it more recently or has a better memory will be able to fill in the details. Another literary example is when the landlady finds Lucian's drug-fuelled, crazed over-written page at the end of Arthur Machen's Hill of Dreams. The record and production of his deeply felt experience has resulted in nothing, a nothing rather more than nothing. Maybe there are other examples out there. For some reason I find it a frightening or disturbing image. Accumulation of experience a lunatic scrawl.

that's his wife Froanna, I should have said. I really like his portraits. Always crap at hands tho and often left them unfinished. When he went, or as he was going blind, his paintings took on a strange, other-worldly appearance. There's a wonderful partially coloured sketch of Vikings Landing at somewhere or other, and it looks like it might be on another planet, or what science fiction might be like if we were the alien lifeform depicting earth in some way. It's beautiful and strange. I was going through a book of his portraits, black and white, a number of years ago now, and started writing something about them:

Heads of hair are remarkable sculpted helmets, faces are assemblies of esoteric curves and planes, mundanely arranged - the gown of a surgeon becomes an ethereal hieratic robe of exquisite line, his surgeon's hands are emphasised and alien in their solidity, bow-ties form origami cruxes, in terms of texture faces are almost entirely smooth, nose, mouth and philtrum describe baroque and unusual interstices, symbolic prows.

The eyes are strange.

Sometimes they are entirely black - one of the most vivid memories of looking through the collection is of turning the page to the Marchioness of Cholmendly. The beautiful, empty oval of her face is striking after the shrewd expressions of character on the men and then you look in to the black eyes and notice in the left one a soft flare of white light, and in the right, strikingly, a single thin line of light. The effect is disconcerting and haunting.

Sometimes, equally strikingly, the cornea will be white, the iris black, and the pupil white, which gives the subject the appearance, especially with that uniformly textured skin, almost of a robot.

the weirdest things cause dead air in this place

you mean like the name 'froanna'?

you know it completely passed me by that there was anything unusual about that name

is it, like, traditional to your isle?

I own a Penguin Modern Classics paperback of Crome Yellow that uses Froanna's portrait as the cover illustration, so I was familiar with it already. It always struck me as a very fine portrait.

i don't think the syllable 'fro' is as funny to the british

remembered that it wasn't quite as simple as her being called 'Froanna' but couldn't remember why:

In 1930, Wyndham Lewis married Gladys Anne Hoskins (1900–79), affectionately known as 'Froanna'.

that tells us nothing

Great posts, fizzles. "The sea-mists of the winter" is in this anthology, I might skip ahead to it.

that tells us nothing

― the bitcoin comic (thomp), Thursday, 18 April 2013 09:24 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

worse than nothing.

From what I recall - I should give it another read - The Sea Mists of Winter is good in part because it has that quality where an intellectually ferocious man, not generally given to pathos (either for himself or others), confronts or describes a situation that has inherent pathos - here, the moment a painter, and an intensely visual artist no matter what the mode, realises they are going blind. There is a bleak matter-of-factness about it that has a greater effect (on me anyway) than someone generally emotive, or affective. It seems rather more 'human' than a lot of his other work (that inhuman quality is after all something that makes his work distinctive), and is refreshing as much as anything else as a bit of a change.

so what led you to exploring the corpus of wyndham lewis so fully might one ask

from memory, symonds' places the sea mists of winter right at the end of his anthology, kind of adding to its pathos given the spluttering volcanic effect of his earlier prose. also, the black sparrow press edition of self condemned (in addition to an unused alternate ending) has a bunch of lewis' sketches of his wife throughout its pages, quite a lot less harsh than most of the art of his that i'm familiar with.

um, reading huxley's antic hay (which namedrops and supposedly includes a character based on lewis)

Harold Nicholson's The Congress of Vienna. I miss this old-fashioned historical portraiture. This is one-stop shopping for acerbic sketches of Castlereagh, Metternich, and Napoleon.

well done Fizzles, thanks for your eloquent and informed thoughts

practically makes me want to ILB FAP

I am rereading The Fortress of Solitude

I may be some time

Are you going to be live blogging it for us?

Feel like I should have phrased that differently:
You will be live blogging it for us, of course.

beginning the second part of the sun also rises. my first hemingway. outside a short story or two.

after about 50 pages i realized why his style (which took adjusting) seemed familiar to me - it reminded me of scott seward posts

I do not imagine that people want to see my thoughts on the book (with which I am quite familiar, but then again, unfamiliar enough for the rereading to be really yielding it all up to me again)

It is much easier to read this second time around - and I suppose it feels better

certain things about it still frustrate me

Forgive me if I've posted this here, but a friend of mine is directing a new musical version of it./street_team

here before

of TFOS ??

Trying to decide if it's best, while I have my two month break from courses starting tomorrow, to read Amnesia Moon, or to re-read TFOS.

About to crack open Ian Svenonius's "

Also reading The Wealth of Nations -- easy to skim parts since so much of it is kind of in the collective consciousness by now.

sry Ian Svenonius's "Supernatural Strategies For Making a Rock'n'Roll Group"

i am reading 'the woman in white'. it is er a page turner i guess

Yes, TFOS. Think it just had a short preview run in Dallas and will come to The Public Theater next year.

That is remarkable!

crypto, it is probably best to read books you haven't read, all things considered, so you might as well read AM, which, unlike most books, I have read

unless you don't like SF for instance

there is no doubt that TFOS is a better book

by SF I mean science fiction not something else

for instance San Francisco which is a setting in the book

Truthfully, I'm hoping to have the time to read both (as well as about 20 other things), but TFOS feels like one I need to spend more time with.

Think you should just watch Star Trek: TOS instead

just finished 2 newfoundland pre-confederation historical novels.. the big why by michael winter, based on the life of hacky leftist painter/illustrator rockwell kent, which evokes the language of newfoundland more elegantly and ruffer than any other novel and is dirty and nearly perfect. and the wreckage by michael crummey, which begins with a pair of touring film screeners fucking around in newfoundland outports and the romance between a catholic boy from the south shore and a methodist girl from the north shore and features a superb outdoor cunnilingus scene, but then all of a sudden the pair is split up and the girl is in the city and is being helped by a jolly lebanese family, who teach her how to make baba ganoush and enjoy life and the boy joins up and is captured by a japanese guy in singapore, who happens to have been raised in vancouver. reminded me of brian fawcett's critique of jane urquhart's the stone carvers: canadian multiculturalism as imagined by the eastern academic elite popping up in the canadian historical novel, the vaguely distasteful way that the minority characters are described (it's more that the community and the thoughts and the language of the methodist outport families from the north shore read so true and alive and the lebanese and japanese characters are slightly silly caricatures), the not glaring but slightly distracting mixing up or misunderstanding of historical details.

i read the first 50 pages of cormac mccarthy's the crossing before i came downstairs. billy or boyd was tracking a she-wolf.

i grabbed a used copy of the second coming after walker percy was mentioned on this thread.

Also reading The Wealth of Nations -- easy to skim parts since so much of it is kind of in the collective consciousness by now.

Reading his Theory of Moral Sentiments at the moment, strange, entertaining, likeable - grand theory of psychology based on us being sympathising calculators - passages of reasoned psychological analysis bursting into dramatic set-pieces on the horrors of bad conscience etc

Every thing seems hostile, and he would be glad to fly to some inhospitable desert, where he might never more behold the face of a human creature, nor read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crimes. But solitude is still more dreadful than society. His own thoughts can present him with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and disastrous, the melancholy forebodings of incomprehensible misery and ruin

I can see why c18th novel people are so wild on it.

Reading around other Scottish Enlightenment moral theorists - Hume, Hutcheson.

Well you can't beat a bit of Hume.

`Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. `Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me.

otm, though it took me years to appreciate it.

woof that sounds great

yeah, I started out of mild curiosity & lingering 18th-century duty (it's clearly 'important' for sentiment, and as a psychology somewhere behind Wealth of Nations), but i'm now very into it - it is fun.

that quote's fantastic. great hangover description.

(the Smith)

so what led you to exploring the corpus of wyndham lewis so fully might one ask

― the bitcoin comic (thomp), Thursday, 18 April 2013 13:19 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

think it's fair to say that I just really like him. his satiric and visual approach makes something like the Apes of God incredibly unrewarding to read, dull over extended periods, he was not seemingly a very nice person (see the WHERE'S THE FUCKING STIPEND anecdote amongst many many others), though apparently a v generous art critic for the Listener fairly late in life. As I said here, 'although recanted relatively early to some people, his fascism is still what it looks like'. His painting is generally much better than his writing, and his less-considered literary criticism, in fact much of his writing, is marred by a brutal obstreperousness.

And yet, the fact he was always swimming against whatever tide he could find produces so much energy. His prose, on a sentence-by-sentence level, is wonderful (tho clearly that is not the whole definition of 'prose'). I like his 'Engine Fight Talk'. I find his aesthetic of the surface, an aesthetic predominantly yoked closely to his theories of satire, to be compelling partly because noticeably different from Romantic notions of transcendental inner self. I like the cacophony of ideas.

Satire is, in the most extreme practice of its theory, an inhumane, static, conservative, bloody form, which denies notions of hope and 'changing for the better'. I like it, but it's an odd form, in some important ways, not art, or at least standing rather moodily on the edge of the art party.

I like the fact that Time & Western Man is such a monumental dead end. Find something appealing in the notion of philosophy that stands in almost total opposition to currently prevailing notions, not because it is 'right' (it's ultimately rather horrible I think), but because, to use Joyce's phrase of the bit in T&WM dealing with Ulysses, it's the 'best adverse criticism' there is - it is the point at which the rails fork, the point of departure - 'this way lies obscurity'. It has an entire canon of people, thought, who don't seem to be mentioned so much elsewhere, so that it's almost a counterfactual canon (tho quite how Magnasco is apparently so completely unknown is beyond me - my favourite Baroque artist by far, one of my favourite artists of any period).

His book on Shakespeare, The Lion & the Fox is v good I think.

And I barely read him any more. Read most of it between 16-21 really. Maybe a bit later, there were some good retrospectives at the Courtauld, National Portrait Gallery and another one at the Esoterick, or Cubitt, I can't remember.

it's when you can only explain why you like a thing with that many qualifications that you know you really like it

Brad Gooch's Flannery O'Connor bio. Gooch's good looks are staring at me from this paperback.

I just found the Joseph COnrad omnibus that I got out of the library a while back so been reading a couple of chapters of Lord Jim. He's moved on about twice since the trial so far.

Also just read Optical Sounds issue #5 which is pretty great, as per usual.

& thinking of picking up Albert Pary's book on terrorism from Robespierre to the Weathermen since it's turned up cheap locally. Not sure if it still goes as far as Arafat which was its initial title . Didn't grab it yesterday cos I thought I'd look it up first. Not the easiest thing to find much info on apparently. No comments on Amazon etc couldn't see reviews elsewhere, just didn't want to wind up with some Daily Mail level rightwing batshittery. Looks like this was a writer who was an ex-soviet who moved to the US in th emiddle of the 20th century so while it is likely to be somewhat rightwing I think it's going to be above tabloid level.

Hope it goes well, but Anticommunists were given that capital A in part because the ex-Stalinists tended to go to opposite extremes, pronouncement-wise anyway.
Were novelists, at least best-selling ones, not as subject as Hollywood workers to McCarthyist reprisals? I ask because I've been reading From Here To Eternity, copyright 1951, which, right out of the box, is pretty much Fuck Yall to the Order of all things, military and civilian, re strictures of class, race, even gender. The author even leaps from dark salty comedy of masculinity to the mind of the officer's wife: has some trouble finding purchase, but effective enough, in part because of the clumsiness, which counters the smooth presentation of military male social mapping. He does better with Prewett's Nisei girlfriend, his "shackjob." So far, nobody remotely like Burt Lancaster has showed up:, the evil Top Sergeant is gratifyingly more wily than Ernest Borgine's character; Clift as Prewett; Sinatra as Maggio seem perfectly matched (though been a while since I've seen the movie).

finished sonali deraniyagala's "wave" and kevin powers' "the yellow birds" recently. the latter was OK but idg the hype, very wooden and over-written in parts. odd for a /poet/

finished collins. reading ralph ellison's 'three days before the shooting'. an odd experience.

picked up Brighton Rock a few days ago and passed the halfway mark earlier today... Coen bros must love this dude, right?

While browsing at Powell's Books I picked up a copy of The Long Ships and read a few random pages of it. I can easily say that Independent People is nowhere near as action-filled or colorful. Instead, IP is filled with grim poverty, elemental emotions, people living in isolation and hunger. It has no long ships or broad swords and no glory at all.

It has some points of similarity with Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil, but where Hamsun's book is essentially optimistic and in tune with nineteenth century ideas of progress, Laxness impassively allows the poverty and isolation of his characters to flay them before our eyes. Which is not to say he lacks sympathy for them, only that he does not succumb to even the slightest trace of sentimentality in portraying them.

i've tried to read independent people a few times over the last 15 years but the bleakness, while understandable and reasonable, wore me out

Wow, thanks for giving such a careful response, Aimless.

read "bartleby, the scrivener" for the first time today. wolf it down during commute & over lunch. amazing

I finished the last 40 pp of Independent People last night and I need to rescind my remark about "even the slightest trace of sentimentality". Laxness pulled the rug out from under that impression in his ending, where he apparently felt the need to shine a bright light on the moral of the story, lest it be missed. While it cannot be classed as a happy ending, there is a noticable skewing of the tone in order to bring Laxness' socialist leanings to the foreground.

Now reading "War Like the Thunderbolt" by Russell Bonds, a history of the Battle of Atlanta. One of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long time, in terms of being well written and successfully integrating contemporary observations and modern day analysis.

"the sun also rises" is my kind of book so far, it's just people getting drunk all day and being sarcastic with each other

Edward St. Aubyn - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk

The first one hooked me, though Bad News felt slightly over the top and inauthentic. Some Hope was the best, the extended party scene was hilarious and the tell-all conversation between Patrick and his mate had me in tears. Mothers Milk, I thought are we really going to do the baby narrator thing? Sigh. Will catch up to At Last at some point.

Lawrence Wright - Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & The Prison Of Belief

The slickest thing I've read on this cult, smoothly written and thoroughly reported as you'd expect from a New Yorker writer. Not sure there are any revelations here but many revealing details flesh out the portrait of LRH (as he's known) along with his punk successor David Mi$c@v@ge. Tom Cruise comes off a creepy true believer while John Travolta is matter-of-factly presented as a gay or bi man whose sexuality was used as blackmail by the "church" for years. I came away marveling at human credulity, maybe there's no understanding why anyone would fall into this particular trap.

Jeffrey Frank - Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage

Enjoyed this investigation of the Eisenhower-Nixon relationship though I would've liked more on the actual presidency and less on Nixon's wilderness years in the 60s when Ike seemed to be a peripheral presence. Worthwhile if you're at all interested in the U.S. during the under-examined 1950s.

Michael Connelly - The Black Box

More L.A. crime from this solid mainstream novelist, this one centers around a flashback to the 90s riots illuminated by modern police tech.

David Foster Wallace - Both Flesh & Not

A grab-bag of non-fiction, not as consistent as A Supposedly Fun Thing but contains a few jems like his New Journalism treatment of the US Open.

Richard Hell - I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp

Punk rock pioneer, post NY school poet, junkie Lothario, juvenile delinquent - the Voidoid crammed a lot of living into his first thirty years or so. Less sentimental that Patti Smith's memoir and more self-analytical, mercilessly so at times. I'm a fan but have to say he's a better songwriter than poet or for that matter prose writer. Like his music this book is jagged, brilliant but leaves me w/vague queasy suspicion of great(er) potential unrealized.

about to start James Mann - The Obamaians and a friend just lent me volume 3 of Wm Manchester on Churchill with hearty recommendations.

I'm on a second reading of The Line of Beauty, pretty amazed at it. It seems to balance everything perfectly--the romance coming through in spite of the relentless delineations of small stupidities and social miscues. He isn't generous to the people, and I'm not entirely sure whether that's in the name of comedy or in the name of realism.

it's funny cos it's true

I read about a third of "The Line of Beauty" on an airplane once, didn't get into it at all, and just gave up. Heard nothing but raves about it though, so I guess I should give it another try some day.

Jeffrey Frank - Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage

Enjoyed this investigation of the Eisenhower-Nixon relationship though I would've liked more on the actual presidency and less on Nixon's wilderness years in the 60s when Ike seemed to be a peripheral presence. Worthwhile if you're at all interested in the U.S. during the under-examined 1950s.

It was pretty good. It makes better sense when set against the two most recent Ike bios.

Mine:

Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It Away. I'd saved this one. After a disorienting start – present and past commingle, two characters with same name – it gets going, with a shattering conclusion.

Timothy Phelps - Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination

Is it you who is reading the Flannery O'Connor bio, Alfred? Yes, it is, Ctrl-F tells me.

After the grimness of Laxness I am giving myself a break with a book by Bill Bryson, Made in America (pub. date 1994). It is his usual entertaining heap of odd anecdotes swept together in a pile. In this case he is using American English and its genesis as the framework to keep the pile from being utterly shapeless.

i remember enjoying that bryson book.

almost finished with c.v. wedgwood's short bio 'oliver cromwell,' which is excellent.

reading pulphead. fun book. writes like a more generous joan didion, refracted through george saunders & dfw

don't get all the ~hype~ but it does read well

thanks for reminding me!

almost finished with c.v. wedgwood's short bio 'oliver cromwell,' which is excellent.

What I know about Cromwell I learned in high school so this looks like a good start.

I'm about 3/4ths through 'A Naked Singularity' (Sergio De La Pava) and I'll be sad when it's done. So fun. Not sure what's up next.

wedgwood's an incredible writer -- pretty much every sentence sparkles. i'll finally have to get around to her book on the 30 years' war now.

I started it last summer and put it down for silly reasons.

me too and I've just this week re-committed to getting through it

it's my at-home bedside table book. takes a lot of concentration to read though, I find

I'm not allowing myself to pick up gibbon's decline & fall until I've completed the wedgwood

she wrote a book on Richelieu!

the cromwell book is funny because she obviously has this sentimental admiration for his character, but the actual portrait she paints is really pretty damning:

"England was now under a military despotism which interfered in every sphere of private life. Individual freedom, in political matters at least, had seldom been at a lower ebb -- certainly not for the last hundred years. ... Furthermore, (Cromwell) was undermining public confidence and self-respect by a system of spies and intelligencers such as has never been seen in England since. His rule by the summer of 1655 had developed many of the most repulsive characteristics of tyranny."

CUT TO:

RICHARD MILHOUSE NIXON in Oval Office, JERKING OFF furiously.

j.d. i might pick that up; i found the three christopher hill books i'd abandoned for lack of context again today and maybe that's the book i need to get into them

i am finding 1,000 oversize pages of unfinished ralph ellison hard to get into so keep taking breaks to read x men comics and play dragon quest ix

today i started reading and then rapidly gave up enough to just skim gerald edelman's 'wider than the sky', which like everything i have read on theories of consciousness just made me want to give up on everything

I'm on a second reading of The Line of Beauty...

Damn, this was a poorly constructed post. I swear it flowed okay in my head.

Alan Holinghurst wants a word with you. In his study. Wear knickers.

Damn you poetic justice.

Anyway, I've also started rereading Middlemarch, after a distracted first reading a couple summers ago. Hoping it'll turn out to be the best novel ever.

it really is though!!

that thing is like 900pp long, w/tiny print

you need another edition

is there an abridged 120pp vn?

not sure I've read a book over 700 pages long tbf

do we have a thread on the longest single book you've ever read

Dorothea and Casaubon lived happily ever after.

anything over 150 pages these days really sets off my continuous partial attention

I read Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time but I've read DC comics with more complexity.

i feel like this isn't a helpful measure of 'complexity'

i mean, smth like infinite crisis is very 'complex' on one level but on another few, eh, not so much

i find that with pre-20th c. english fiction it v much helps to be aware of the divisions in the original publication and take it slow and give yourself breaks. -- a 600+ page victorian novel isn't really as 'long' as a 600+ page modern novel. -- yes, i am trying to get this definition of 'long' past after arguing about something as subjective as 'complexity'.

i read all three volumes of isaac asimov's autobiography when i was 10, which prob tops 1,500 pages. iirc it consists largely of humorous anecdotes involving himself and the famous people he's met.

i read all of powell but i gave up pretty quick on infinite crisis, come to think

i have given up several pages in to both proust and the chinese classic 'the story of the stone, or, (untranslatable)' of which the latter, i think, is the longest thing i ever gave up on

Middlemarch is page-turny though. It doesn't make you suffer. The plot doesn't flag at any point.

i think that is understating it tbh!! i mean it's not just a page turner (though it is!), it's well-structured in a way that seems breathtaking in its artistry to me

I said on one of these threads that as works of architecture -- balance, proportion, height -- Eliot's novels only bow to James'.

plus Middlemarch is a fuckin page turner.

The longest book I've read is all sixteen volumes of Arabian Nights. It's mainly just people having sex, though, so it's pretty easy to get through,

Have started on volume six of Proust (second half of Guermantes Way) Begins with the famous sequence with the grandmother. So amazing.

Plus Middlemarch radiates with light and warmth. James I find cold.

you're cold

Brrr.

I'm about 3/4ths through 'A Naked Singularity' (Sergio De La Pava) and I'll be sad when it's done. So fun. Not sure what's up next.

probably subconsciously remembering this thread i pulled out hilary spurling's guide to 'a dance ..' and wound up rereading the last few pages of 'temporary kings'. latter quite good, actually.

allowing for the not-quite-rightness of the dialogue in the scene moreland and stevens are reporting. probably a big failing of the last three books that he never managed to give pamela flitton/widmerpool a distinctive voice of her own, now i think about it; they'd hang together a lot better if it weren't for that.

'A Naked Singularity'

I liked this one more as a miscellany than as a whole. There were hundreds of funny/weird moments, but I'm not sure what the novel as a whole was meant to be.

no one liked my hemingway review :(

i did, but neediness is not very hemingway

Just read the awesome Speedboat by Renata Adler (NYRBC).
Also, The Translator by Leila Aboulela
& Ancient Light by John Banville
plus a whole bunch of greek tragedy

Currently reading Henry Handel Richardson's 'The Getting of Wisdom'. I just love boarding school stories, religious childhoods, etc..

Stormed through Will Self's Psycho Too as a fun little break from trying to understand Heidegger and alterity. Great fun. Tempted to read Umbrella after having read the review of it in the NYRB...though I find Self's novels (aside from How the Dead Live) a real slog. The Butt was particularly arduous. Anyone read it yet?

'the story of the stone, or, (untranslatable)' of which the latter, i think, is the longest thing i ever gave up on I read a one-volume version of it under the "or" title, usually translated as Dream of the Red Chamber. 20 years ago, and I'm not seeing the cover online, so don't remember which translation, but I still feel the one big plot twist, in a string of scenes around the Prince's neck. Another fuckin pageturner.

yeah it's normally that: but the translator's introduction had this whole thing about how it's not only also 'dreams of red mansions', but 'red mansions' functions synecdochally in the 18th-c. vernacular chinese as something like 'upper-class women' ...

i don't think in all honesty i could go so far as to call it a pageturner. i did look for my copy again a while back, though, and then realised i'd left it with a friend.

'A Naked Singularity'

I liked this one more as a miscellany than as a whole. There were hundreds of funny/weird moments, but I'm not sure what the novel as a whole was meant to be.

I agree with this, but in a good way, I think it's meant to be what it is. I still have ~100 pages to go and it's meandering by nature, but it's not like it lacks narrative threads or abandons them never to return, right? I mean, the main plot elements are constantly being temporarily set aside for random digressions, but so far they're always returned to at some point (and sometimes in spectacularly satisfying fashion). Unless you meant more in terms of theme/meaning?

Yeah, basically theme/meaning. I love it for the details, like the idea of pulling off the perfect heist using only swords. But I have trouble giving a succinct description of what the book as a whole means/accomplishes.

I guess it's about talent, ambition, obsession with perfection, plus the legal and prison system. But why that title, why the metaphysical strangeness of the ending? It's a bit of a puzzle.

xp but so far they're always returned to at some point (and sometimes in spectacularly satisfying fashion) Pretty much my experience with Dream of the Red ChamberOnce you realize the hallways will always bring you back, it becomes its own kind of pageturner, not that I read it nonstop; I try not to do that anyway.

lol I forgot to finish a naked singularity. Just clean forgot about it! I should def go back to it later, it's very fun & readable but agree that it doesn't add up to much (I reckon I was around halfway through when I must've got distracted by something else). Some of the riffs were pretty entertaining. The stuff about the judicial system is where it's best I think. It also has a recipe for (iirc) colombian-style empanadas, which could be useful.

finished off Brighton Rock a few days ago. I must admit, the 'resolution' was so silly/melodramatic that I never saw it coming, even when the book began to strongly hint at it.

after that, it was on to Death and the Archbishop—never read Cather before but I'm enjoying it so far. anything else of hers that I should check out?

oh yeah I'm also reading Christian Bök — Crystallography, from which I took my new DN

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/me4/216.jpg

Trying to read The Magnificent Ambersons for a book club, but it's pretty groany. Might just skip that meeting.

Also Yergin's "The Prize" which is very good as a history but also comes off as very pro-imperialist.

Bernard, try The Professor's House, although the Prof, once adventurous, is currently a sad sack and his womenfolk are cold, but the overall setting and backstory are powerful. Later maybe check the big mainstream best sellers, My Antonia and O Pioneers, both of which mix some maudlin themes and considerable anecdotal/historical vitality. She really digs the pioneers and explorers and regards their bourgie descendants as major buzzkill.

Suzette Mayr's Monoceros. Funny, despite dealing with the suicide of a bullied gay teen, readable, odd and messy. I'm not sure it all works, but I sure did fly through it.

beranrd, by all means read A Lost Lady. If you've read The Great Gatsby, you can see Cather's influence.

Cather's letters were finally published. NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/books/review/selected-letters-of-willa-cather.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books&_r=0

Forget Hemingway and Fitz. I got no problem thinking Cather, Wharton, and Faulkner were the best novels of the first half of the 20th century.

Currently reading Henry Handel Richardson's 'The Getting of Wisdom'.

One of my favourite Australian novels. Probably one of my favourite anything novels, tbh.

Halfway through this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0374224242.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

:which is really good so far -- about apocalypse-obsessed man who gets job as futurist predicting apocalypses to businesses so they can sort-of insure themselves against them, and who gets embroiled in an apocalypse

Sorry for not having posted in 3 months--have been having a baby. She's also reading now:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PxuP7iIwjuc/UXSF79gSKfI/AAAAAAAAMoU/U_vHhGRD12Y/s1600/IMG_0085.jpg

Wonderful!

Congratulations! Fabulous!

Just read a review of that Leskov in the LRB. Sounds interesting, had never occured to me to read Leskov before. How's Morrison junior finding it?

And good that ilb children have stayed on Russian lit. Interested to hear how Leskov compares to dusty-dusty.

Just about to start up So Big, my first foray into Ferber.

Thank you. Morrison jr finds it heavy to lift, I think.

Re So Big, this blog (http://kahnscorner.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/1924-so-big-by-edna-ferber.html) is working its way through the US bestsellers of the 20th C, and just did So Big, if that's of use

EDNA Ferber and her novel SO BIG pop up quite often in US crossword puzzles, if that's of any use.

I'm hopping around Ed Dorn's collected poems, mostly Gunslinger, though. Loving it/him.

halldor laxness - independent people, a book of mamet plays, sort of for college. jacques le coq - the moving body, completely for college.

Is that a real name?

rereading James Merrill and struggling through Le Carré's A Perfect Spy. Need I go on?

xpost halldór laxness? it really is. you should read it.

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

it's blowing my mind.

knut hamsun sock

A while since I read it, but it's stayed big in my head, Independent People. Most years there comes a point around february where i think 'british winters are shit, but i am really glad that i don't live in permanent darkness in a soil house and live off a barrel of rotten fish'.

I'm hopping around Ed Dorn's collected poems, mostly Gunslinger, though. Loving it/him.

huh, this came out?

starting "tender is the night", and after hemingway, these sentences take a minute to adjust to. but man, are some of these breathtaking

The fag jokes and Grant's tomb scene are terrible but otherwise the first third is fab

his description of nicole diver's garden...

Knotted at her throat she wore a lilac scarf that even in the achromatic sunshine cast its color up to her face and down around her moving feet in a lilac shadow. Her face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that looked from her green eyes. Her once fair hair had darkened, but she was lovelier now at twenty-four than she had been at eighteen, when her hair was brighter than she.
Following a walk marked by an intangible mist of bloom that followed the white border stones she came to a space overlooking the sea where there were lanterns asleep in the fig trees and a big table and wicker chairs and a great market umbrella from Sienna, all gathered about an enormous pine, the biggest tree in the garden. She paused there a moment, looking absently at a growth of nasturtiums and iris tangled at its foot, as though sprung from a careless handful of seeds, listening to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the house. When this died away on the summer air, she walked on, between kaleidoscopic peonies massed in pink clouds, black and brown tulips and fragile mauve-stemmed roses, transparent like sugar flowers in a confectioner’s window — until, as if the scherzo of color could reach no further intensity, it broke off suddenly in mid-air, and moist steps went down to a level five feet below.

struggling through Le Carré's A Perfect Spy. Need I go on?

havent read that one but I say no. he's crazy inconsistent, I've liked a couple by him (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold & Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and found others borderline-unreadable with large sections of gassy slack prose (A Small Town In Germany). can't remember the title of a post-2000 novel I read but it was a horrible anti-US/Bush polemic not that the politics were a problem it was just poorly conceived w/boring characters.

Philip Roth called this one the best English novel sine the war! I'm struggling with the rather hamhanded shifts in time, place, and point of view. Call me dowdy but when a novel uses the device of a character writing a memoir it can't violate the rules by including the subjective third person point of view in the present tense.

knut hamsun sock

how do you mean? never read hamsun but has been on my hitlist for a long time.

this week I've read

junot diaz, "the brief wondrous life of oscar wao"
muriel spark, "the prime of miss jean brodie"
junichiro tanizaki, "in praise of shadows"
cees nooteboom, "in the dutch mountains"

up next week

louis macniece, "autumn journal"
samuel delany, "babel-17"
john jeremiah sullivan, "blood horses"

hamsun sock

I think he was referring to my earlier comment that Independent People shared some of the same general tropes as Growth of the Soil, while presenting similar material in very different attitudes; where Hamsun's tale is optimistic and embraces the idea of progress, Laxness makes his tale somewhat horrific and his characters stubbornly inflexible.

As for my own reading, I finished Bill Bryson's grab bag Made in America, which drifted further and further from its purported theme of how American English developed, but remained true to its strategy of piling up as many peculiar and amusing anecdotes as Bryson could dredge up out of our checkered past.

Last night I dipped into Island of the Day Before, but quickly discovered I wasn't in the mood for Eco Goes For Baroque. So, I picked up Roth's Plot Against America instead. As of this instant I'm not sure I wish to have my nose stuck in a book where America's savage id is allowed free reign; our real life politics are reminder enough of how ugly our nation can be, even with one hand tied behind its back.

Richard Anderson, Bespoke. I won't read another book on this subject, so it helps that this one is well-written and funny. The best part is when he quotes his client Frederick Seidel.

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,
And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.
The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter
Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.
One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer - what a show! -
Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.
London once seemed the epitome of no regrets
And the old excellence one used to know
Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.

These lines raised a red flag with the critic William Logan, who wondered if Seidel might not be everything he seemed. After all, Huntsman was still at the same address, and wouldn't any real snob know that? But Seidel had inside information, and Anderson shares it with ordinary people. Anderson was Hall's successor at Huntsman when a group of investors bought the firm and began running it into receivership. Anderson resigned to strike out on his own, and nine staff and a lot of clients followed him.

Seidel makes a cameo appearance taking Hall and Anderson to a sybaritic lunch on the Upper West Side. Hall was dour and anhedonic and Seidel loved to tease him.

louis macniece, "autumn journal"

This has some beautiful stuff about love in it.

Models Behaving Badly by Emanuel Derman. Memoir of a jewish guy from South Africa who moved to NYC to become a 'Quant'. Combined with musings on philosophy, economics,sociokogy and metaphor.
Bought because I made a connection to descriptions of bad models being part of reason Economics is in bad state its in having been made on alternative Economics course I took recently. Very interesting so far.

Last few weeks:

Four novellas by Marguerite Duras, Mandelstam's essay on Dante and some of his poetry too. Tsvetaeva's Ratcatcher.

Laxness' Under the Glacier is p/great.

Just finished DeLillo's The Body Artist which took around a week to get through despite being only around 100 pages long. I only liked the humorous chapters (the first one and the review).

Now reading Dustydusty's Notes from Underground, another shortie that has defeated me in the past.

Marlowe's Edward II, first time since college. It's gay as hell.

body artist improved on rereading, i think.

last week during a brief furlong back to oxford i read javier marias's 'while the woman are sleeping' and half of a friend's copy of leo bersani's 'is the rectum a grave?'

what was the answer???

Did you like Marias? He has some big supporters around here and I sort of enjoyed one of his books but find him a bit long-winded

what was the answer???

basically, yes.

re: marias: i love your face tomorrow, enjoyed the other two i read (one featuring the protagonist of the trilogy, and the other the villain ...) as supplements to that experience; while the women ... sort of demonstrates that someone who can be great at 1,300 pages can't necessarily also be great at lengths of 6 to 32 pages. bits of it are interesting, good. also i think it suffers from having been written in a variety of idioms and styles over a period of 20, 30 years and then translated as a single entity?

Guy de Maupassant: Bel-Ami -- loving this, but looking around for some info online I am alarmed to discover it has recently been filmed with Twilight actor as main character. Horribly miscast, I'm sure, especially since the main character's erotically exciting moustache is important to the plot, and he hasn't got one on the movie poster.

should have cast him in 'is the rectum a grave?' instead

Horribly miscast, I'm sure, especially since the main character's erotically exciting moustache is important to the plot, and he hasn't got one on the movie poster.

you'll have to content yourself with the harry reems version from 1976 i guess

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/attachment.php?attachmentid=180234&stc=1&d=1358965808

man he died just a couple weeks ago, i did not know that

Just discovered an amazing fact and thought I would be the first to post it on ILX but I was RONG since it was already posted here by R Baez: Tell me something that's going to BLOW MY MIND!

one wonders whether that has any bearing on custardoy. i mean it's actually quite an illuminating bit of data as to the circles available to marias to move in i guess.

Finished the third policeman, found it to be a wonderful slog. Very similar of a read to crying of lot 49, mad and terrible and funny and deceptively light in the hand

Very similar of a read to crying of lot 49,
Heresy

! Discuss

Perhaps am in the minority, but to me Pynchon's got a tin ear whereas Flann O'Brien is pintpitch perfect. Lot 49 is one of TP's more readable works because it is, um, short. See also this thread: the book crying of lot 49

Flamethrowers by kusher, 5% in. Aimless but enjoyable so far

^^ I heard my name and came. Which reminds me, in Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm one of the cows is named Aimless. This immediately endeared the book to me.

Anyway, I am now definitely reading The Plot Against America, by Phillip Roth, and a bit over halfway through. What strikes me most about it at present is Roth's wisdom of having the narrator be a young child at the time the narrative takes place, but speaking as an adult looking back at the events. This allows him to slip back and forth between these two ages and perspectives at will and Roth uses this device to full advantage.

I do not find the counter-factual of a Lindbergh presidency to be very convincingly constructed, although the critics quoted in the blurbs all seem to think it was (in criticspeak) 'chillingly realistic'. However, because the novel centers on a child and a child's perspective, Roth successfully reinforces his somewhat thin fantasy-historical structure with the very solid flying buttress of a coming-of-age story, and that solidity is what has kept me reading this.

I found the image of FDR returned to Hyde Park and managing his stamp collection poignant.

What strikes me most about it at present is Roth's wisdom of having the narrator be a young child at the time the narrative takes place, but speaking as an adult looking back at the events. This allows him to slip back and forth between these two ages and perspectives at will and Roth uses this device to full advantage.

Hey, what a concidence, I just finished up So Big and am going to start up The Third Policeman tonight. So Big was memorable, and had well drawn characters, but to be honest it was pretty dull.

You can have my copy

Interested to know how long it takes you, i tried three times and the third time still took a few weeks nibbling here and there at it.

I fucking devoured the 3rd policeman & have read it a couple of times since. At Swim-Two Birds otoh took me several goes.

We'll see but I idiotically made a promise this year to read 50 books (and I told enough people about it that I can't really back off now) so nibbling around isn't really an option.

I see bringing up the bodies is now out on PB; feel like if I'm going to go through wolf hall, I'm going to have to start from the beginning to retake up the thread... already 250 pages in : /

Oddly enough I've read 3rd Policeman twice but have yet to read AS-TB once.

You've read six policemen but no swimming birds at all, as it were

haha I've finally succumbed and checked out a minor Hardy novel that I've circled for years on the library shelf: Two on a Tower.

Left a major one unfinished as a barrier to exactly that situation.

GONE GIRL -quite annoying because it is *just* interesting enough for me to keep going. But I hate it.

Glad I passed that one up

Not sure why I'm still reading the Joe Queenan book I mentioned upthread because he's clearly an utter cunt and he's not exactly thrilling to read either.

tarjei vesaas' "the ice palace" is ~intense~

I finished TPAA last night. Roth got a bit lazy with his ending, but it didn't detract from the real strengths of the book. I haven't identified my next book. Instead I browsed some poetry from Louise Gluck's recent 1962-2012 compendium. Judging from the dozen or so random poems I read, she likes to write poems that hint of pain and tragic loss without either explaining or confronting it.

Killing time with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a book I have not previously read.

xpost I have that compendium too. I've only read the poems from the first few collections so far, but I agree that they are very sad and impressionistic. I like them though, I think. She uses striking images and manages to be vague/evasive while pretty much only using concrete nouns and verbs, it seems.

read john jeremiah sullivan's "blood horses" today, while travelling cross-country for an interview. a mixed bag. very good on his father and the south, two subjects that he obviously loves. the section on dealing with his father's death is particularly moving. but very hit or miss when giving a potted survey of the history of horse literature

if you're into horses, it's a buy, I guess

The Sullivan piece that was published in one of the Best Music Writing volumes a few years back was incredible, but I've yet to read anything else by him.

was it about michael jackson or axl rose? those are his two best pieces, and the michael jackson one is extraordinary. his collection, pulphead, released last year is very good, but again a mixed bag I thought. more good than bad

It was on John Fahey and discovering old blues records. Just looked it up: its called "Unknown Bards: The blues becomes transparent about itself" and it was in the 2009 BMW volume. I also remember a slightly different version of the piece appearing in the excellent collection Heavy Rotation, in which various writers reflect on their favourite records, though the BMW version was longer/better.

Will definitely have to check out Pulphead.

dominic sandbrook's second volume on the 70s

really want armando iannucci to dramatise the health, wilson, callaghan govts. in full thick of it style

I'm about 90 pages into The Third Policeman now. Somehow, I'm starting to doubt that all this discussion of bicycles is going anywhere.

hush, my lad avic, and read what you're given to read

aimless, did you like the gluck poems or would you rather she explains or confronts the pain she hints at? i think their opacity is part of their power. again, i just know the early stuff.

One of my students adores her. She introduced me to Carl Phillips -- a fair trade.

have put Moby-Dick on ice until such a time as I am more patient. have begun instead Mason & Dixon, which is probably 50% longer, but which is already quite clearly woven together by some ageless magician who could, probably, write anything. sparkling, giddy transcendence, wry fire from every word, and an ear precision-tooled from the purest tin to adjustable robotic perfection. I'M HOME

flipside: little else seems to match up :/ have gotten my wife to read Lolita, Pale Fire and now Barth's Sot-Weed Factor, all of which she assures me are brilliant. they're next, circa november

Moby Dick much easier to read than M&D.

I'm wired wrong, ok

Moby-Dick was great, great fun for the 40 pages I read and Melville is an extremely witty observer of people but I wasn't reading it often enough and I wanted the pure fucking literary crack cocaine that is Pynchon, surely you can understand

Pynchon at his worst is like being on crack for five years whereas with Melville you can skip a few pages when bored.

Imago yr description makes me want to read M&D but I don't like Lot 49 and I gave up on Vineland so ¯\(°_o)/¯

Recently read The Poisonwood Bible, amazing. Now reading Wild Swans, boring.

skipping pages is kinda anathema to the text-as-immanent-artwork thing I want outta fiction. you're persuasive but the Dick is on low heat for a spell. entirely aware that I will need to read it and a few other things at some stage before declaiming Pynchon the Greatest American Novelist, not least as it possibly influenced him

M&D is completely different in mood to the other Pynchons I've read so far - far more breezy and laid-back than G's R but far less flippant and zany than ATD. although the tones of all 3 are necessary for the content

melville not afraid of shooting for actual reader irritation and boredom, pynchon only ever for a simulation of it

though i'm not sure that's an argument about quality either way

started reading antony beevor's "the second world war" today; very, uh, entertaining (!) so far. newsflash: the second world war was fuuuuuucked

sidebar: hate how kindle always displays the % progress bar w/no option to turn it off

The opening para is amazing:

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/9191/wwiid.jpg

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/9191/wwiid.png

aimless, did you like the gluck poems

I don't yet have any well-developed opinions on gluck's poetry. I accept that she handles her chosen poetics competantly. What I've read does activate my admiration, as someone who understands what she accomplishes and how, but it doesn't excite me.

For a while now I have recognized that very women poets connect with me, even while it's obvious that their work connects strongly with others, especially women. I will continue to read them, but I can't remedy this lack of excitement they inspire in me.

very few women poets

that opening paragraph is hackwork

sorry the formulation "in (date), an (x) did things (y) and (z). HIS NAME WAS ..." makes me see red for some reason. "in (date) an (x) named ..." dammit

whoa wait a minute. What does being a woman have to do with the quality of a poem?

and I dunno: admiration = excitement. What else do you need?

Ha xp, never even occurred to me to do anything other than 'woah'

speaking of female poets, i really dug anne carson's autobiography of red. i want to read some of her greek tragedy translations.

well now see there's a great Woman Poet.

I've read Gluck's last two (A Village Life more attentively than Averno) and I really enjoyed them. there is a lot of melancholy in her poetic world(s), but also a lot of beautiful language and psychological insights that (imo) resonate beyond some kind of straw-woman audience of likeminded readers

Gluck has always been hard-to-get for me. Not that I dislike her, just that there seem to be so many more worthy poets without the attention she gets. I think it dates back to when I was at the Iowa writer's workshop in a week-long seminar of her's just after her divorce and she seemed barely interested in poetry and talked a lot about the soap operas and mystery novels she was consuming.

Ararat's the only worthwhile volume imo.

m&d is my favorite pynchon but moby-dick is my favorite human accomplishment so

maybe tap water

kinda smdh at 'women poets.'

think I should link to Virginia Woolf re "women novelists"

Lawsy! (This was the replacement for "Good Lord!" or "Lordy!" that was prescribed by the Hays Office.) You'd think I had somehow criticized women poets, when, if you read what I wrote, I said nothing about them other than to indicate my own shortcomings in regard to appreciating them. I didn't say I name check every poet to see if they are a woman and then figure out a way to under appreciate them. I read the words, and respond to them.

Smacking my own damn head at the reaction this provoked.

My Booky Wook by Russell Brand cos I found it in a charity shop.
Pretty readable though he comes off like a sociopathic cunt for a lot of it.
So not sure why it's readable.
Did a lot of people actually read this? Seemed to be going cheap in a lot of places' sales then became a €5 book in HMV and possibly elsewhere. But never sure about correlation between sold well and widely read.

Every time I've seen that book by him remaindered, I feel happy. I loathe him and all his works.

re-reading borges in the worst conditions possible, every morning and evening on my way to and fro work, in a rickshaw on a bumpy road. so definitely not getting the most out of it but i still love it. and on a lighter note, i've just started the shining girls by lauren beukes, a lot easier to read on my way to work. only about 20pg in so nothing much to say about it, not expecting too much from it anyways, just your usual enjoyable time-traveling serial killer story

aimless i'm totally with you. i too feel gluck handles her chosen car competently. while her ability to drive activates my admiration, i still struggle with my own shortcomings in appreciating that mysterious feminine quality of using internal combustion to power a four-wheeled automobile safely and efficiently.

'notable american women'

Just revisited The Great Gatsby for the first time since college. It's good stuff y'know.

And Roth's Patrimony is a heartbreaker.

sorry aimless, it just seems peculiar to me to refer to 'women poets' as if they're some kind of genre, as if emily dickinson has anything in common with dorothy parker.

while her ability to drive activates my admiration

especially considering

oh that was the joke ignore that

i thought it was an earnest metaphor where the car was the kind of poem she wrote and the driving was the style and and

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which I might not have heard of til he died.

Now embarking upon The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

eudora welty - the golden apples

Just assigned Welty's "Listening" to my writing class.

oh, hah, i just realized TGA is part of the collected short stories, which i also own

What I'm reading. I decided it's easier to compile notes and summary observations.

finished barbara comyns' "who was changed and who was dead", queer little novella about a twee english village stricken by ergot-poisoning madness

my best friend's new roommate is a total nerd with a sick book collection, he lends me something new everytime i see him and it's always so good, i always read em right away so that i can get a new one next time i see him. currently reading thomas bernhard the loser

can you remember where I left my copy of the loser?

the loser of books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdzY49xlvdY

633 pages into Rebecca West's Black Lamb And Grey Falcon, I'm taking a break.

Gonna read either E.H. Gombrich's A Little History Of The World or Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece. Or both.

50 pgs into Tamara Faith Berger's Maidenhead. Yikes.

633 pages into Rebecca West's Black Lamb And Grey Falcon, I'm taking a break

I read a quarter of it last summer; skipped around a bit.

If you read one chapter of Black Lamb, it should be the last chapter in Macedonia, where she gets really intensely philosophical whilst observing a lamb being sacrificially slaughtered. There's also a very funny section of the Epilogue in which she gets into an argument with a woman writing her dissertation on her.

I stalled on the Middlemarch reread. Looking for something bloodier.

Casaubon hasn't died yet?

Reading Gatsby for the first time. I love the economy of language and the way descriptions are so minimal it almost feels like it's set in this strange fantasy land rather than a real place - West Egg, Great Neck, they could be places out of a Zelda game or something.

Totally off topic, but DL, I miss your contribution to the Daft Punk thread! Or can you not be bothered?

Nothing bad to say about Gatsby. My favourite author, by far. I hope will outlive and survice the DiCaprio age....

otm. the valley of ashes.

xxpost lol amusing turn of phrase abt the book reminding you of Zelda games, yknow with Fitz's wife being Zelda and all

I'm having a blast w/ BLGF - I'm not taking a break due to frustration, just need a week off; it's taken me a month to get halfway through it (West makes sure every page is properly work intensive) and I've gotten claustrophobic.

The best bit (so far) is the Franz Ferdinand/Princips/Bosnia fugue somewhee the 300 page range - West just poking and prodding at history over 30, 40 pages.

decided gatsby was my favorite novel when i reread it a couple years ago. been wanting to give it another go but it feels like something you should read in the wintertime, for some reason.

So that you don't feel the sticky summer grossness that the characters are living through?

Jordan smells most like another man if you read the novel in winter iirc

decided gatsby was my favorite novel when i reread it a couple years ago. been wanting to give it another go but it feels like something you should read in the wintertime, for some reason.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, May 13, 2013 8:15 PM (59 minutes ago)

i don't know if it's quite bleak enough to be a "wintertime" book - seems more of a fall novel to me

i think i'm just gonna crank the air conditioning, throw on some vince guaraldi, lower the lights, and huddle under a comforter with a stack of fitzgeralds.

put a big pile of shredded styrofoam in front of yr a/c vent for fake snow

when you're done reread those Basil Duke Lee stories. "The Captured Shadow" is the best story about a certain kind of foolish pride and heartbreak that only a sixteen-year-old boy can experience -- and Fitz nails it.

ooh i'm gonna get a copy of this

http://www.amazon.com/Basil-Josephine-Stories-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/0684826186

yeah i've been meaning to sit down and read all of the FSF stories for a while, but i'm a bit intimidated by how many collections there are.

i have that big bruccoli brick, which reassures me.

The Milkman in the Night by Andrey Kurkov. It's pretty good, if you like Bulgakov/Marquez/Murakami (which I do)

Those paperbacks that Scribners published in the eighties boasted lovely cover art. All my Fitz is from that period, including a complete collection of Basil and Josephine stories.

Ilike the Pat Hobby stories too. And the way The Last Tycoon ends, esp. compared to his notes on how it might end, although they're entertaining as boozy speculations (maybe he knew he was stuck, so the notes are in-jokes, like the Hobby stories are seriously, even on his and Hobby's endings) For one thing, TLT includes a drive down the Cali coast, with a timely/ prescient view of man vs. nature.

The Last Tycoon's first couple chapters are terrific! Better movie writing than Fitzgerald's scripts: crisp, terse, suggestive. After page forty or so though he remembers he's writing a novel and the thing sags.

"bulgakov / marquez / murakami" ??

I'm now reading The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark. Her command of her craft is amazing. The pace is liesurely, but still taut. The details are crsip and evocative, never superfluous. Just a pleasure to read.

not a pleasure to be muttering that bit of coleridge dribble for the next month though you'll find

reading Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon. rereading, actually—I took it out from the library ages ago and (afaik) read the whole thing; but only on p.35 did I encounter a passage that was unmistakably familiar:

There, on the sidewalk, I ate the best things I could order, and began drinking red wine — much too much of it. By the end of the meal, it was very late, but a couple arrived — a mother and song. The mother wasn't old; she was still attractive and slender, with a winning nonchalance about her. [...] Facing her was her very young, more or less untalkative son, dressed in a sumptuous grey flannel suit. I ordered coffee and started smoking. I was startled by the sound of a wild cry of pain, as prolonged as any death rattle. A cat had just leaped at another cat's throat, at the foot of the shrubs bordering the terrace — more precisely, under the table of the two diners I was watching. The young mother stood up, uttered a sharp shriek, and turned pale. She quickly realized that it was a matter of cats, not human beings, and began laughing. [...] The waitresses and the owners came out onto the sidewalk. They laughingly told us that this was a cat known for his exceptional aggressiveness. Even I laughed along with them.

I'm now reading The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark. Her command of her craft is amazing. The pace is liesurely, but still taut. The details are crsip and evocative, never superfluous. Just a pleasure to read.

I spent one Christmas break reading several novels, in large part thanks to ILX. The Driver's Seat might be my favorite.

Think The Driver's Seat must be ILB's favorite Spark.

Have just finished Iain Banks' Stonemouth, which was breezy and an entertaining read though there was no reason for it to drag over 400 pages. A bit of judicious editing wouldn't have gone amiss. I've replaced that with He Died With His Eyes Open, Derek Raymond's noirish crime thriller.

I've also just started the Smiths biography, A Light That Never Goes Out. It's reading a bit like a school textbook, so it might be a bit of a slog. To early to say.

Hey LBI, I'm trying to avoid DP hype until the official release so I've avoided the thread so far. Also my boss has been getting a bit funny about my Internet usage at work and my home laptop's being fixed so I haven't had much chance to read the thing (feels like a bit of an undertaking even at this point). Might need a 'clusterfuck' style summary at some point. Of course that hasn't stopped 'Get Lucky' from leaving my brain since I first clapped ears on it.

W/R/T Gatsby, I can only imagine it as a spring/summer book - the (literal) breeziness of those opening chapters, the long garden parties that go on all night etc. I couldn't imagine it as wintry at all, but I guess that's maybe down to personal set and setting.

I started reading Donna Tartt's A Secret History'

Whoops - posted too early. Anyway, yes, it was straight after finishing 'The Pale King' and I couldn't help finding it a bit facile, even tedious in parts. Should I continue with it? I probably didn't give it enough of a chance as I know it's well loved.

i loved a secret history but I don't remember it now ;_;

Suprise appearance about DP in this thread, DL! Missed your input abt it, but I understand your choice (wait till release) and ordeal (boss).

And I agree about Fitzgerald - in my all time top three authors. The summer is eternal in his work, imho. Can't imagine 'This Side of Paradise' in a snowy, wintery time, nor mindset.

As for 'A Secret History', I'm surprised that after 'The Pale King' you didn't read out 'History' in one go, as the latter is such a speedy novel, especially compared to 'The Pale King'. It's not a masterpiece, but I do think you should finish it, if only for the satisfactionary feeling of having finished it and having 'lived with' the story. It won't change your life, but it is worth it.

It's too long but it was a fun read! It's a Bret Easton Ellis novel written with considerably more finesse.

was laid up with strep for a few days, so i've been lying on the couch with some comfort reading: 'code of the woosters' (third read at least) and 'wind in the willows' (first time i've read since childhood).

i loved a secret history but I don't remember it now ;_;

this means you can read it again . . . for the first time

You know the mad thing about The Pale King is that I read the whole thing believing that quite a big chunk of it was real - I mean, not everything, but largely based on true events with huge scoops of artistic license as needed. It was only till I went back and re-read the editor's note that I started to question a few things i'd taken as read. And then I looked up Peoria to discover it has no tax centre at all, and then I was like, 'wait, so that whole chapter about him getting caught in a traffic jam on his first day and the hugely complex description of every floor of the building and the skin rash and the Gremlin was ALL completely made up?!' Had Wallace even worked for the IRS at all?! I felt like such a goon but I'm still questioning it. Anyway, great book. Superb book, but fucking divisive and not without its challenging parts to say the least. Took me SO LONG to read but I kind of felt like I got almost as much out of it as I put in, albeit not until I'd finished it. Doing so felt cathartic, revelatory, spiritual almost; while reading it felt more like a noble chore that could only be overcome through sheer grit and determination. And that's the genius behind it I guess.

xpost omg you're right :D

just finished:

David Albahari- Tsing
Henry Adams- Democracy
Donald Kagan- The Peloponnesian War

The IMpossible Dream the Walker Brothers story by Anthony Reynolds
interesting to get the background story on the band/Scott since I don't really know it beyond what's on the lps.
Some of the guy's writing style does seem rather too noticeable to the point of being semi intrusive. He has a habit of trying to come up with new simile/metaphors. I guess that might appeal to some though? Just do seem pretty clunky in places.
Got this at Xmas time asa 2 for £5 deal with a bio of Chris mOrris and its been lying around ever since. Now I'm reading it when I wake up

Donald Kagan does a good job of explaining the ins and outs of that very complicated war. If he stuck to his knitting and just wrote books about ancient Greek history instead of trying to propagate his shithead views on contemporary politics, I might not hate him.

It's been a while, but iirc those views infect his ancient history a bit - like he's selling Athens as idealised analogue of US as freedom-loving smallholders-with-weapons pan-hellenic/global actor - I get that realpolitik, strategic thug feeling when he talks about what Athens *had* to do, militarily. But it's flashes of that mostly, I agree he's more engaging than the run of ancient historians - I enjoyed the lecture series on Greek history available on iTunes U.

do you remember what he says about the sicilian campaign? reading the alcibiades-led debate in thucydides is uncannily like watching a rumsfeld speech so i'm interested in how "neocons" or whatever see it. i don't actually know what kagan's shithead views are tho. i read his ww2 book i think. i bet i need to be more specific there.

i'm reading piers brendon's decline and fall of the british empire. organized a little haphazardly but then so was the empire.

i read that in college, it's all kind of a blur to me now except indian rebellion.

i'm part way through Konrad's The Case Worker. it is marvelous and dark so far. i'm also reading Medvedev's It's No Good at bedtime. i wasn't convinced by the early stuff, but as i progress through the book, i'm liking his writing more and more.

"it's all kind of a blur to me now except indian rebellion" - queen victoria

most recently finished anne carson's autobiography of red (amazing) and alice munro's the love of a good woman (also great). next up is the summer book by tove jansson, i think, and then maybe i will finally finish always coming home by ursula k le guin (which i really liked at first but turned into a bit of a slog; maybe i just needed some time away from it).

oh autobiography of red is just fantastic. i'd really like to read the follow up that came out this year, though i haven't seen many good reviews of it.

i read a profile of her (the nyt one probably?) that made it sound interesting; it's only in hardcover at the moment, i think, so i won't get around to it for a while. i definitely want to read more of her, though. the glass essay is supposed to be good?

http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9781612191508_p0_v2_s260x420.JPG

Fun so far: Aregentine arsenic-hooked busybody doctor gets involved in story that is both a proper crime novel and a piss-take of Agatha Christie-style novels.

xpost i don't know the glass essay but it appears to be online: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178364
i also really enjoyed this essay of hers on Contempt (the film by Godard) and the source text by Moravia: http://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Carson-Contempts.pdf but that happens to be one of my favorite films and i love the book too.

Such a special occasion (bring your own bottle though, and pack a lunch): http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

started on Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff just as i was ending a two-day binge of watching Justified. it feels like a perfectly appropriate follow-up. have only read three or four stories so far, every single one as bleak as can be. i'm gonna hazard a guess that there are no happy stories in knockemstiff?

i reread 'bartleby the scrivener'. it is the greatest.

i am also reading 'a history of communications' (a page-turner but a little atlanticy, the author worked for the magazine early in the new millennium), poking away at dewey's 'art as experience', and i really appear to basically be rereading 'being and time' again, fully committed to leaving behind marginalia.

I'm going on a tove jansson binge I think, starting with moominland in midwinter

ive just finished alias grace by margaret atwood which is the best out of her books ive read. im starting life after god by douglas coupland now.

Two bios: FDR and the Jews and Ike's Bluff.

Nearly done with The Third Policeman now, and I'm enjoying the insanity, but I have to admit that it's really testing my patience for "here's a bunch of crazy stuff" type storytelling.

Haven't got time to read this whole thing right now, but looks promising: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/05/06/edith-wharton-writing-life?utm_content=BiblioFile&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=referral

speaking of "here's a bunch of crazy stuff", didn't mean for the post to look like that

Elizabeth Bowen: The House in Paris

Enjoying this hugely, but also depressed at realising she wrote this when she was a couple of years younger than I am, and I am nowhere near being able to approach her level of observation, sophistication and subtlety, and presumably it's all downhill from here for my brain anyway

I’m reading ‘confessions of a justified sinner’, after seeing a lot of chat about it here on ILB reminded me I’ve had a copy sat unread on my shelf for forever

it’s hilarious so far, though I’m finding it slow going due to the 200 yr old style

EL Doctorow's Ragtime. First book I've read in ages that's vaulted straight into my all-time favourites. Like John Dos Passos's USA at twice the speed. Total masterpiece imo.

just read George Saunders' <i>Pastoralia</i>. The first and last stories were the ones I enjoyed the most (Pastoralia and The Falls) but I can't say that I was totally into it. Tbh I'm having a hard time putting what I thought into words. I had this odd feeling that his stories weren't going anywhere, that even though there were good things in there, they never fully came to light. I dunno I'm kind of intrigued, I'll probably read another of his sometime soon if I happen upon one of his collections.

confessions of a justified sinner is such a great book. well done, cozen

yeah, I can't believe we don't have a s/d thread for scottish lit

I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and also starting Bolano's The Third Reich. Can't get enough nazis.

Reading Chabon's books in reverse order was a good decision, this way each one is better than the one before.

More Nazis: I just finished The End by Ian Kershaw, a study of why Germany fought 'til the bitter end, instead of capitulating when the war was unwinnable but there was still something to salvage. Short answer: Hitler wouldn't countenance it, and had organised society so there was no way to coordinate a challenge. Really fascinating, particularly for the insight into life inside Germany; in most stuff I've read it's an impenetrable North Korea of a place.

Yet more Nazis: just started Victor Klemperer's diaries. The immediate extreme tension is horrifying. I'm sighing with relief when he finally survives to April 30th- only it's about twenty pages in, and it's April 30 1933.

Speaking of Chabon, can anyone recommend Telegraph Avenue?

Speaking of Nazis, review of FDR and the Jews here.

been 30+ years since I read Ragtime, but yes it is fantastic.

Ragtime is absolutely amazing. As is the Klemperer diaries.

I'm finishing up on Inherent Vice, after that it will be book two of Man Without Qualities.

Has anybody read Irvine Welsh's Skagboys? I know, I know ... but I was leafing through it in the bookshop and, totally unexpectedly, getting the same kind of rush as when I read Trainspotting all those years ago.

How likely that the whole thing doesn't leave me wanting to scrub my brain clean?

Also speaking of Nazis, I got through the first section of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Riech." Now I'm going to take a long break to read much shorter books.

Life After God was a good read. I've read more Douglas Coupland than any other at this stage. I'm used to his tricks and style but Eleanor Rigby was the only book of his I've disliked.

Speaking of Chabon, can anyone recommend Telegraph Avenue?

I really couldn't get into this, but everyone else seems to have loved it

After finishing up The Third Policeman, now I'm going for something a bit more conventional, The Sense of an Ending. My first Julian Barnes and I'm enjoying it. I was worried I might find his writing style grating, but I'm digging it so far.

finished "justified sinner"; extraordinarily modern for a book written 200 yrs ago. the descriptions of devilry & ghostly convocations hounding wringhim near the end of the book, as he traipses from byre to byre, are especially eerie

onto egan's "good squad" now; not sure what to expect

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is such a charming, well written book. Total joy to read. I felt so sad after I finished reading it because I felt like I'd lost a few good friends.

GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday. Fantastically odd, unpredictable book - kind of a metaphysical thriller. Makes an interesting companion piece to Conrad's The Secret Agent if you're into that pre-WWI anarchist paranoia vibe.

I need to reread Kavalier and Klay. Still Chabon's best.

I finished The Mandelbaum Gate. Spark was somewhat out of her territory, but the British characters were very solid, but the arabs didn't rise much above the plausible stage. Her control over her material still impresses the hell out of me.

Picked up Dante's Vita Nuova, which shouldn't take long to finish off. I liked the Introduction by the translator, Barbara Reynolds, very much. Only just getting into the body of the book.

Musil - Man Without Qualities. As for every re-reading of any book there are new meanings, things you missed now suddenly before you. For Musil the conceptual density seems even heavier and further away at times...

Nearly done with Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking...it is okay.

James Gould Cozzens: Castway -- very odd Kafka-meets-George Romero novel from 1936--a man wakes up alone in a deserted department store which he cannot leave, convinced someone is trying to kill him; arms himself, makes a shelter in the men's changing rooms, lives off the food hall produce... Enjoyably weird so far.

I'd like to read that

It does sound great

me three

not to encourage crime in any way, but if you visit the link discussed in this post (Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)) and search cozzens castaway, you'll find it as a DJVU file (I'm only saying that because it's out of print and so there's no way to get money to the writer's estate)

I'm going through a phase when I'm struggling to finish a novel. A bit concerned I'm losing my appetite for fiction, which I assumed would be a comfort into old age. I think I've finished about 3 of the last 20 novels I've started.

I'm currently reading James Salter's Light Years, about a third of the way in, and I sense I won't be finishing that either. He's the kind of "poetic" stylist I find enthralling over 10 pages and wearying over 100. He also seems insufficiently engaged in the real world: everything is too glossy.

I did manage to finish At Last, so completing St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series. It slightly bothers me that this is the sort of thing I effortlessly enjoy, aesthetism, clarity of style, cynicism and cruelty.

You're right about Light Years.

I stuck with that, eventually got the sense of a beacon through the profusion, a dependable cycle (a sensibility somewhat at odds with itself, but) showing me how it might be to live on and on, and the way people settle into things, for a while anyway---it's proved to be real world enough. The first edition of his first novel, The Hunters, was very spare, for him anyway: a Korean War pilot taking just the necessary turns in his brittle craft, absorbed and responsive. (He later revised it, with Lord knows what results). An extensive overview of his life and work in recent New Yorker.

Having finished Vita Nuova, last night I picked up Henry Adam's History of the Administrations of Madison, the continuation of the volumes on the Jefferson Administration. Once again I was plunged into the miasma of Napoleonic era diplomacy and the turbid politics of Federalists and (old-style) Republicans (now termed Democrats).

Just as I put my bookmark in and turned my thoughts toward bed, I briefly considered the 1300+ pages that lay ahead and quickly calculated that at my slow pace I would be submerged in the book for well over a month, approaching two if I failed to read each night. I must admit the thought dismayed me far more than it bouyed me. I may set it aside again.

Madison simply isn't as interesting as Jefferson. Garry Wills' book summarizes the adventures and excerpts the best passages.

at swim-two-birds, good lord

good lord good or good lord bad?

I <3 that book but it took me a couple of runs

Haha, exactly.

I was a bit harsh on the Didion upthread, finished it on the train the other day and thoroughly enjoyed it. My MA dissertation is on American creative nonfiction so I can count as research if nothing else.

Started Delillo's Mao II...is this meant to be one of his good ones? The dialogue is already doing my nut in and I'm only 25 pages in...

It's supposed to be but I didn't think so. Libra and the short stories are the only ones I've loved.

I have Libra in my pile of upcoming things I need to read. I have heard a lot of good things

things, things

I don't know whether you're being self-deprecating or making fun of his dialogue

I love Libra only because I imagine Oliver Stone's characters in JFK saying those lines.

good lord good, tho it trickled to an ending

GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday. Fantastically odd, unpredictable book - kind of a metaphysical thriller. Makes an interesting companion piece to Conrad's The Secret Agent if you're into that pre-WWI anarchist paranoia vibe.

I need to reread Kavalier and Klay. Still Chabon's best.

I'm just finishing up Kavalier & Clay, this sounds interesting, and the Kindle version costs $0, so thank you.

hey ilb, i've been reading a bit lately. read things fall apart (excellent), teju cole's open city (enjoyed this a lot), jason goodwin's lords of the horizons (rambling, florid history of the ottomans in vignettes, w/ european bias, lots of fun) & kapuscinski's the emperor (get the feeling he took a lot of liberties but very interesting). currently enjoying bolano's nazi literature in the americas...

Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men -- great mind-blowing stuff once you get past the trudge of the first 70~ pages

Foreign policy buffs should check out Ike's Bluff, which I finished a few days ago.

marguerite duras - the ravishing of lol stein

Recently found the Image Books edition of The Man Who Was Chesterton--essays, stories, poems and other writings (abridged, but still 512 packed pages), opened at random to "A Defense of Nonsense", which, after hailing Edward Lear as the founder of a modern but right-thinking literature of nonsense, and explaining why he's way better than Lewis Carroll, goes on to make the following point several times, but pretty well; for inst: Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the "wonders" of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful as long as it remains sensible. So long as we consider a tree an obvious thing...we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason at all that we take off our hats to it...Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense...In...The Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is...."Has Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?"...This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Followed by "A Defense of Ugly Things."

I like that very much

xp I read a lot of DeLillo at university but only got to Mao II a couple of years ago and found it self-parodic. If someone told me they hated DeLillo based on that book then I couldn't argue with them whereas I'd totally stand behind White Noise, Underworld and, best of all, Libra.

At the time I read Libra someone recommended Robert Coover's The Public Burning, about Nixon and the Rosenbergs, but I never got around to it. Has anyone here read it? It looks like it could either be fantastic or maddening.

It's both, and brilliant imo. Most rewarding coover for sure

Cheers

just finished doris lessing's collection the grandmothers, which i enjoyed a lot. i'm curious about her science fiction series; does anyone recommend it?

Kingsley Amis' I Want It Now, which has laughs every other page.

I'm about 1/3 through Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time for Everything. Very enjoyable so far.

Also, something about the Chesterton quote above makes me uncomfortable. Wonder most definitely comes along with understanding. If anything is useful with the 'new atheist' movement (and that's a big if), it's the idea that science does not foreclose wonder, but that it can be a source of wonder. Maybe this makes for an actually new idea: "understanding seeking wonder," a reversal of the classical Christian "faith seeking understanding" perspective.

I may be overreacting -- I tend to have a gut anti-Chesterton reaction.

Carol Shields' Unless. A fierce feminist polemic at heart. Struck home after a recent online discussion about how men are much less likely to read female novelists than women are to read male novelists. The snobbish, condescending Great American Novel editor character is very funny. Not quite as good as The Stone Diaries though.

Kingsley Amis' I Want It Now. Nearly one of his best.

Just finished The Name of the Wind which was every bit as good as the hype would suggest. Now going after East of Eden, haven't read any Steinbeck at all other than assigned high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men

After finishing Dante I read Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels, yet another of her many books about the knock down drag out theological battles of early xtianity. It is amazing the degree to which the outcomes of these doctrinal dog fights still have real lingering effects in modern times.

Now I have launched into Ragtime, which I find more notable for its density of its historical material and the speed of the weaver's shuttle in Doctorow's hands than for any particular wit or beauty to be found in the book's first hundred pages. The pacing breakneck, almost as much so as The DaVinci Code, and it has sex aplenty, so it is easy to see why it also sold in the millions.

got a collection of stephen crane stories for my kindle and read 'the open boat' before falling asleep last night. he's pretty good! i've never read any of his stuff before.

Crane's great. quite surprisingly modern a lot of the time. See also Edmund White's very good novel about him, 'Hotel de Dream', featuring a very bitchy Henry James

Crane's Open Boat is probably his pinnacle, but Red Badge is very good, many of his short stories are good. His poetry is odd and stands in a little niche all by itself because he had no obvious predecessors and he doesn't seem to have influenced anyone else who came after him, but it is def worth reading. The closest approach I can give to his aesthetic would be if RLS wrote A Young Goth's Garden of Verses.

ooh! Thanks for the Edmund White recommendation.

about to start on elizabeth bowen's collected stories. another thank you, james, for reminding me of her.

i like stephen crane's poetry too. this one has a koan-like quality:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”

“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.

Im enjoying the good weather and reading PKD's "The Man in The High Castle"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/can-she-be-loved-on-washington-square.html

for alfred

Dipping in and out of Lydia Davis' Collected Stories...aw she's great. Any faves?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/can-she-be-loved-on-washington-square.html

for alfred

― k3vin k., Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Aw thanks. She's wrong, of course: I return to Washington Square[ because of its characters.

On I Want It Now.

Nice post. I'm a particular fan of some of the food descriptions in the Greek excursion - of the vine leaf wrapped feta: 'blotting paper wrapped up in wrapping paper' always makes me laugh. (and is this the one where he describes Greek beer as tasting like bone-handled knives? - it might be I Like It Here and Portuguese beer - or retsina as being like 'cricket-bat juice with the rubber grip thrown in').

I think in terms of execution its one of his most frequently funny books.

Things like one of the characters coming in late to a party and apparently saying 'Ah, Apollo jars. Arcane standard. Hannah More. Armageddon pier staff' (a game he and Larkin used to play in the college common room comments book).

But I feel uneasy it about it generally - the whole urbane man educating frigid girl thing is a teeth-grinding exercise. Perhaps it would be less bad if this wasn't one of Amis' fairy-story novels (I think that's his own term - was it Sleeping Beauty he suggested was the model here?) - of which Lucky Jim was the first, but something like Take A Girl Like You is a deliberate counterpoint to, with its Richardson/Fielding influence. That idealistic fairy-story side mixed with the high-grade excellence of its minute cynicism + the Simon/Ronnie power relationship means I'm never quite comfortable with it.

To that extent Girl, 20 - which I think is from the same period - feels better (and much much gloomier). The Take a Girl Like You equivalent here.

doesn't he call it "Fetid cheese" or something? lol

the Fort Charles scenes with the Southern racists was apparently transcribed verbatim from a real dinner.

God, really? That was when he was teaching down there on his second US stint, wasn't it? From what I've read of his about it he didn't enjoy it very much and if those scenes - great for when Ronnie suddenly cracks - are anything to go by, you can understand why.

According to the bio, he thought that his best revenge was to reproduce the conversation without embellishment.

have read abt 1/2 or maybe 2/5 of sean wilsey 'oh the glory of it all' - it's fine, p well written but im getting tired of it, i dont have a huge tolerance for memoirs and esp ones from the eye/pov of an adolescent

also am reading marilyn robinson 'housekeeping' - love it, making me appreciate how vivid & well done the movie adaptation is

Jacques Futrelle: The Thinking Machine -- collection of pretty good Edwardian-era Boston-set super-smart detective stories, with possibly the most annoying introduction ever written by the ever-enraging Harlan Ellison. Never really liked Ellison's stories, and here he turns in a self-congratulatory 11-page intro (containing a picture of an old telephone, in case you thought the phones mentioned in the story were mobile phones) which then features a half-page of thanks. You didn''t write the fucking book, Ellison. Shut up, Ellison! FUCK OFF, ELLISON!

The fucker will probably sue me now--he sues everybody.

ellison wrote some good stories back in the 60s and 70s (maybe one or two great ones) but his 'persona' as a critic and introduction-writer is pretty insufferable.

James, you forgot to put the @ after his name.

i don't even really like "the city at the edge of forever" all that much

Sorry I meant the ®

B-b-but don't you guys remember when he helped rescue someone from Luna on the intranetz?

the televised version is much better than ellison's original script imo.

That irritating ® is on the cover of the book, too.

I've read several of his stories that are alleged classics (Boy/Dog, No Mouth, etc), and they didn't do much for me, I have to admit. I suspect they're of the 'this was big stuff at the time, but has inspired so many people that the original now feels dated and unoriginal' variety. And his story in 'Dangerous Visions', which I read most of last year, was by far the shittiest thing in the book (except for his endless, folksy, blustery introductions).

Do you know what Ray Bradbury said about him? If not, come over to this thread: When Author X was Compared to Author Y by Author Z

Also, something about the Chesterton quote above makes me uncomfortable I hear you, Seanballat, and he can can take things a little too far, yet not far enough: for instance, when he xpost goes from considering the way true nonsense and spirtuality both elude auto-reduction, to quoting the Book of Job without mentioning the Problem of Pain ---but right before that, his imagery got me: So long as we consider a tree an obvious thing...we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason at all that we take off our hats to it...Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense
Also,his imagery can put nail an unremarkable point in an unforgettable way. in another piece, while objecting to censorship, at least for the purpose of making entertainment perfectly safe, he mentions again the way things x perception can elude etc, and claims to know a little girl who freaked out over "Little Bo Peep", because she heard "the sound of bleating" as "the sound of bleeding." Well.I'd never thought of bleeding making a sound, but now I do. Thanks, G.K. and little girl!

the classic HE story i like best is 'harlequin' -- it has the best name and somehow seems the least pretentious, and ellison's blustery narrator's voice seems less arrogant and full-of-itself than usual.

that ray bradbury quote is a real groaner, not least because bradbury himself was a better short story writer than HE.

xpost to dow: You make a great point about GKC -- sorry for grumping all over that wonderful imagery. (His glib treatment of Job that you point out is way less forgivable imo)

just finished doris lessing's collection the grandmothers, which i enjoyed a lot. i'm curious about her science fiction series; does anyone recommend it?

― 1staethyr, Sunday, 2 June 2013 02:07 (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes

'shikasta' is kind of a mess though. read 'the making of the representative ...'

i am reading young-ha kim's 'your republic is calling you'. also 'the 120 days of sodom'.

Liked, but didn't love, The Big Sleep. Remember the plot of the movie being ridiculously convoluted and the novel wasn't much easier to follow. Still love the anecdote where, when making the film, either Hawkes or Faulkner or someone called up Chandler to ask who killed the chauffeur and he confesses that he didn't know.

Will probably try more Chandler eventually.

*confessed

'shikasta' is kind of a mess miserable, misanthropic, turgid, pseudo-mystical garbage though.

The plot is the least of The Big Sleep's attractions. I loved it so much that I read nothing but Chandler for the next few weeks. The Long Goodbye's his masterpiece imo - so much sadness, confusion and futility, hardcore LA blues.

Absolutely otm. But all my memories of it have been superseded by seeing the film.

'shikasta' is kind of miserable, misanthropic, turgid, pseudo-mystical garbage though.

i think in the light of the later ones it's easier to read the narrator's sanctity as motivated by an authorial irony?? that's what i tell myself anyway

I did do some reading around at the time, contemporary reviews, interviews etc. Didn't come across anything that suggested there was anything going on other than the straightforward reading, incredible and abominable though it is.

miserable, misanthropic, turgid, pseudo-mystical garbage

The misanthropic and miserable I could live with. The rest not so much. I like my mysticism at full strength. In a shot glass.

btw, nearly done with Ragtime. I'll wait for the big finish before commenting further.

otm about The Long Goodbye, that tired tangled confusion and melancholy makes it one of my favourite novels maybe.

Wonder if anyone in the office would mind if I just spent tomorrow reading Chandler.

Just read a novella about Kafka's last days in the TB sanatorium, 'Klopstock' by Robert Cohen, which has a lovely bit about Kafka:
"To write came easily for him. It was breathing that was hard."

The Flamethrowers, overrated by the nytimes. Fizzled after first 50 pages
This is How you Lose Her, enjoyable and quick
The Rings of Saturn, not a good vacation read

'shikasta' is kind of miserable, misanthropic, turgid, pseudo-mystical garbage though.

aw from what little i know about lessing and about the series i was kind of imagining something perhaps akin to ursula k le guin: politically radical, interested in the social, influenced by eastern mysticism (altho sufism instead of taoism/buddhism). i'll look out for a copy of the making of the representative for planet 8 though, thanks

just read amy hempel's collection reasons to live, which was great; so spare and quick and funny but also kind of full of sucker punches.

politically radical, interested in the social, influenced by eastern mysticism (altho sufism instead of taoism/buddhism)

that's pretty much all true tbh (my ignorance of sufism notwithstanding). but le guin is generous, compassionate, understanding, generally positive in outlook, though not at the expense of an often unflinchingly savage realism. you feel like she has a love for humanity, despite its flaws. i found lessing to be unrelentingly grim, hating, pessimistic and defeatist, just not an enjoyable mind to spend any time in the company of. but ymmv.

yeah, i had guessed that compassion (actually probably one of the most important things about le guin) was the missing element w/ lessing

I'm just over halfway through Bolano's The Third Reich and really enjoying it. I'm into banal daily diary stuff with a rising undercurrent of dread, it reminds me of some other books but I can't think of what right now. Love the nerdy tabletop gamer as narrator.

I finished Ragtime. The ending rather drifts into space, which seems a shame after sustaining such a fast-moving pace throughout.

As an impressionistic pastiche of New York in that era (which was entirely different from, say, Nebraska, Nevada or Florida) it seems authentic enough. You could read Theodore Dreiser's auotbiography or Frank Harris's My Life and Loves and get much of the same flavor, but diluted to a more normal strength.

Doctorow did a great job of dropping various seminal figures into the book and giving them enough color to make them humanlike, instead of just empty famous names. He did this by emphasizing their eccentricities, which works for his purposes, but also distorts their portraits.

Fun book, though. A great trojan horse for those who hate to read real history.

Those who like, kinda like, or would like to like Lessing's novels might try The Four-Gated City I'm not gonna give it more of a rec, having it so long ago, but the geological-to-tidal momentum (from barely-"post"-WWII to 1997 Britain, and published in '69, after 20 years of writing) proved very persuasive, despite some themes that could seem suspect to plain rong in a different context, which she late provided pretty often. It was all about sifting through the massive accumulation of experience and information and misinformation and manipulation and the mind's inherent trickiness--trying not to be a crackpot, believe it or not. And she succeeded, at least in part; with astute observations about--and actually of!--adolescents, for inst. Compassion was also no prob: reading this led me to Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

having *read* it so long ago, that is.

Doctorow's The Life of Daniel is acerbically soulful when staying close to the Rosenbergs' lives and deaths, but he injects some some solemn, at times kinky sensationalism (cos espionage trials leading to electrocution just weren't sizzly enough) via fictitious offspring, and their wimpy, one-dimensional adoptive father is a baffling insult to actual dad Meeropol, who had already written suspect songs like "Strange Fruit" (while teaching high school, even).

Just started reading Marcus Gray's Clash bio Last Gang in Town, which i've heard some negative things about but which I've had sitting on my shelf for years. Only 60 pgs in, but its certainly...comprehensive. If you've ever wondered about Mick Jones' grandmothers romantic history, this is definitely the book for you.

The Man Without Qualities, vol II - the highlights are so many, that guy who loves shorthand...tough to keep a straight face when I was reading this on the train..

Need to read some Nietzsche as well, sure I'll uncover much more humour and irony on subsequent readings of it. Shame its such an unknown novel, a reading group could possibly be an idea.

Man Without Qualities is unknown? Is that true? I'm terrible at judging these things, but probably thought it more lit-type mittel-europe canon.

Its tough to know but...I read an article about someone who had written a guide to the classics, she had read the whole canon (er, lol) and she was told she couldn't put MwQ in it.

The whole idea just sounded incredibly stupid, just an aside really.

Thought Nietzsche's A Genealogy of Morals was pretty entertaining; don't remember the translator. At least The Man Without Qualities has his own good thread, The Man Without Qualities

I am now reading Josephus's Jewish War. It starts right out with a recap of endless internecine bloodbaths among various jewish rulers and their followers, including plenty of fratricide and other treachery. This sort of thing was so normal at the time that Josephus scarcely seems bothered by it.

still reading de sade, man i have a lot of days of sodom left to go

I like some of De sade's short stories (and Salo is quite a fkn film whichever way you look at it) and I get the boredom-in-orgies thing blah running thru Sodom however I just found this strange lack of energy to it so only managed 60 pages at the time.

WATCH OUT FOR RODENTS

That shouldn't be too... OMG!!

thort that said 'only managed 60 pages at a time.' like woo we got some real de sade reading speed going on on the reading thread

60 in toto tho is like, has he even finished the preliminaries by that point? that's like day two of actual sodom at best

could be a 7 years on the m. mountain kinda thing

always thought Sade one of those people it's probably better to read about (Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes) than to read.

Man Without Qualities is unknown? Is that true? I'm terrible at judging these things, but probably thought it more lit-type mittel-europe canon.

wasn't it translated into english relatively recently? i think i read this somewhere but can't be sure, like late 70s.

the old translation was 50s/60s.

but still think it's hard to make EuroMod canon if you come in that late.

Germanly, You're lagging badly behind eg Kafka and Mann. And Proust is occupying the 'really long book' spot.

is he the modernist giant it is hip to like

also , sodom is kind of a great book

trying to think what it is like and my brain has produced the untrustworthily soundbitey notion that it is 'halfway between rabelais and robbe grillet'

it sort of is a bit though

The only Sade I read: ecstatically torturing a guy to death while the guy's girlfriend was freaking out. Not my cup of meat.

i'm not sure that the content of sodom is or is meant to appeal to appeal to prurient interest in a way that's not meant to feel problematic, or that it's meant to appeal to prurient interest at all, or that it's meant to be interesting at all

i think the comparison i was really looking for earlier was perec

Just seemed like he was doing his hardcore chore: entertaining himself, working hard to get a buzz going past tolerance built up by frequent abuse--the needle through the scar tissue---and if he didn't mean it to be interesting at all, he was mostly successful, except for disgusting me enough to toss it (the book, not quite my cookies)

(But he might do better elsewhere; that was just the random read test)

as far as insight into the terminally hip, I did dig Against The Grain, but obv bubblegum pop vs. Sade's hardcore ritualizm.

How's Masoch?

he's fine, sends his regards