Like something almost being said, it's the SPRING 2014 "WHAT ARE YOU READING" thread!

(a day early, I know; call it wishful thinking on my part)

Just started last night on Anna Balakian's biography of André Breton, Magus of Surrealism, which so far delivers the goods--I've read another book of hers on surrealism + scattered prefaces here and there, & decided to order this after stubbing my toe on Soluble Fish earlier this year (more like "unfollowable pish", am I right?!). Biggest early revelation = situating automatic writing in relation to Breton's medical education. Did I mention that my interest in him is at least half owing to the similarity in our names?

I read a Breton bio in '95 published that year, the peak of my fascination with him. Mark Polizzotti wrote it.

Oblomov -Ivan Goncharov
Farewell To The Sea - Reinaldo Arenas

Both I really enjoy.

Wow cool: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/tolkiens-88-year-old-beowulf-translation-published-spring-2/
I'm currently tripping on The Way We Live Now---thanks for recommending, Alfred.

ftr, I'm somewhat less than halfway through The Savage Detectives.

For future convenience, I offer a link to the previous WAYR thread.

balakian also authored a nifty little book on the precursors to literary surrealism, mostly following the obvious line from nerval > baudelaire > rimbaud > lautreamont & the symbolists on to the dadaists.

currently about a third of the way through gaddis' the recognitions which i'm enjoying. at times it puts me in mind of paul goodman's empire city in its portraits of the habitués of fifties new york.

yeah Literary Precursors of Surrealism was the other book I was referring to. I'm really trying to get a handle on the movement lately--what was innovative about it, its self-understanding (the manifestoes tend to be kind of misleading in this regard IMO), reception by contemporaries, all that jazz

Still wrestling with the majesty of Tsvetaeva. Drnking the words in slowly.

Also started on: Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance.

There is a 50 page essay by Frederic Jameson and its got that phenomenal range. What you'd expect. However he was also listing novels by Malraux and Solzhenitsyn (both authors I don't care much for) which is almost off-puttting but I was reading passages of it at the bookshop and it was far more exciting so we'll see.

The Complete Review really made me want to read that Weiss. I know there's a complete Swedish translation, but god knows I have enough big unread trilogies on my shelf. (Nadas, Cărtărescu, Broch, Musil. Wtf is wrong with me)

Reading The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton and The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg. Don't like the Silverberg much so far, but the Hamilton is really good -- the horrible nazi-symphatizer Mr Thwaites is hilarious.

(Nadas, Cărtărescu, Broch, Musil. Wtf is wrong with me)

Something clearly is? ;-) Nadas, Cărtărescu and -- I know the following aren't trilogies -- the likes of Foster Wallace, The Kindly Ones, any Pynchon besides GR or Vineland are all fat books to me that I'll never read (ok the latter isn't that fat).

Weiss reads (and this was from a v v brief scan) in that Germanic block paragraph vein (that I like a lot but only Bernhard can do really well) and then taking an essayistic approach to questions that I think are relevant in a 'what could be the way out/time for a different approach' (whereas Musil is like an anatomy of why everything is fucked with no way out, which is of course amazing and the thing to write while WWI was raging) (Jameson clearly looks for renewal). As a title it speaks to me, feels more inviting than A Book of Memories, which feels done over as literature or anything else: In Search of Lost time is 100 years old!

This is of course reading a book by its cover. Let you know.

I love The Slaves of Solitude. Much better than Hangover Square imo.

Cărtărescu is great, been wanting to try out Nadas some time, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Started up on Twenty One Stories by S.Y. Agnon, the only Nobel laureate in literature from Israel. Pretty excellent so far.

thank god, we're so over memories

I got Mark Harris' new book on Wyler, Capra, Huston, Ford, and Stevens and their WWII efforts.

Reading The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

Such a good book. Thwaites is the perfect Hamilton super-bore.

Reading Daniel Anselme's 'On Leave', from 1957, about 3 French soldiers fucking themselves up in Paris on leave from the Algerian "police action". Nothing super-elegant in the prose, but very good.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0141393874.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

thank god, we're so over memories

― j., Thursday, 20 March 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Over 'meditations on memory'.

20 pages in to the Weiss and I would love this to be an ILB group book.

is The Accidental Tourist any good?

yes

I like The Accidental Tourist a lot, but Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was my favorite Tyler.

The AT was promising, but got to be cute quirky date movie (on the page; may well have been an actual movie too). Maybe I was just in a bad mood about luv, but even non-Relationship elements, social observation re Baltimore, for inst, started seeming too soft-focus--anyway, at the time (many years ago) preferred Searching For Caleb and A Slipping Down Life. Haven't read Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, which back then seemed commonly considered her best.

I don't mean "commonly" in a bad way; that was the consensus among reviewers and fans, the ones I was acquainted with, at least.

love slaves of solitude.

hiatus at the moment. read kipling's dymchurch flit again. found the peasant accents slightly irritating this time round, tho their effect of fogging what's happening is so effective that I can't see how you'd do without them. made me want to go on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway again.

Ten pages in and I've spotted four too-cute-for-words moments.

Also begun: Mark Harris' Five Came Back, about the wartime efforts of Wyler, Ford, Stevens, Huston, etc.

In recent weeks:

Elizabeth Von Arnim - The Enchanted April
Julian Maclaren Ross - Of Love & Hunger (good but certainly not in Patrick Hamilton league)
Evgeny Zamyatin - We
Tony Parker - Lighthouse
Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles (slightly disappointed - too verbose for me. maybe i need to try it again)
Molly Keane - Good Behaviour (delicious - just about literary heaven for me)
Alan Johnson - This Boy (great account of growing up in 50s London)

Antoine St Exupery's 'Wind, Sand and Stars' coming up next.

i'm rereading some borges!!

he's delicious

Interested to hear what you say about that Mark Harris book, been thinking of reading it.

"The Spinning Heart" by Donal Ryan. The best Irish fiction I've read in a long time.

Man, SY Agnon's short stories are really great. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, but better.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt which managed the awful feat of being not very good but just about entertaining enough to keep me reading for the first 600 pages or so before turning rancid for the final 100 or so pages so, much of which I ended up skim reading so as not to prolong the agony. She tries to set the final sequence in the Amsterdam criminal underground and is obviously very seriously out of her depth. Avoid at all costs.

I read the first two books in Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence. The first started off slowly, then turned wonderful but by the end of the second book I felt the law of diminishing returns was kicking in. I'm have a little rest and give the third a try.

I'm reading Elizabeth Taylor's Collected Stories. I've read all the collections previously published so it will be rereading apart from those that are new to this collection.

I agree that The Slaves Of Solitude is better than Hangover Square.

raven starts taking stylistic detours in three, i think. (checks:) yeah, three is a thriller. four a boarding school novel, ish. the seventh, which is a late colonial India story, the best, if most problematic. six, eight are broadly comedies in the vein of the first two, the sixth the most successful. fifth awkwardly poised between comic modes and something else. ninth, tenth don't know what they are.

Thanks for that information. I had no idea - I assumed the other books would be in a similar style (although I did think the second book already had a distinctively different feel, the farcical elements broader, perhaps). I'm more intrigued about the 3rd one now.

I've been dimly aware of Raven for a few years because he gets mentioned in connexion with writers I enjoy (Waugh, Powell etc). But for a time his books weren't easy to find. It's only recently I was browsing in Waterstones and realised the AFO sequence had been re-published in omnibus paperback editions and picked up the first.

yeah, same, though i think i ordered them, wanted to get average price per novel down below that elusive £2.50 mark

i had this thesis about how the goldfinch was actually a sci fi novel but it only made reading it more dull tbh

Hermann Ungar: The Maimed

holy fuck this is some grim, misanthropic Austro-Hungarian 1920s stuff let me tell you

Recently read:

Lawrence Wright - Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (which was incredible)
Alfred Hayes - My Face for the World to See (which was a nice one-sitting stroll through 50s Hollywood hard drinking)

Now onto:
Dianna Athill - Stet (weirdly engrossing)
John McPhee - The John McPhee Reader

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Some old books by Lafcadio Hearn, turn-of-the-century translator/compiler of Japanese folklore, the source for the movie Kwaidan. He's a good writer, and the books themselves are interesting little curios, weird assemblages of folklore, vocabulary, entomology, miscellanea.

ha, i have those on my kobo waiting for me, downloaded after watching the film (which is one of my top 10 japanese films)

Hearn's ghost stories are well worth checking out, too.

Just got my hands on a proof copy of the new Alan Furst, not out until June, so am feeling very smug.

xp crimplebacker, would you recommend We? I've had it on my list for a while now, along with Jack London's The Iron Heel, because of the 1984 connection.

I would recommend 'We', D.L. It's a strange, swirling, hallucinatory kind of book - stylistically very different from 1984, though of course many of the same themes. I loved the writing early on, but found it more and more confusing towards the end. It did get a bit tiresome for me towards the end - not sure if that was my powers of concentration or the book. But it's funny and very idiosyncratic in a Russian kind of way.

CONVERSATIONS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM

Finished the Tsvetaeva prose collection last night - My Pushkin is an essay for the ages -- something that is never published as criticism but should be, as a mix of the personal (that title!) but then passages too. I need to read The Captain's Daughter as there is another essay on that. Another piece (My Mother and Music) is a conflicted tribute on her encouraging, smart mother.

Peter Weiss' Aesthetics of Resistance still going strong.

Doubling that w/some of Rilke's Letters (on Cezanne).

Last night I finished The Savage Detectives. I enjoyed it, but my first thought as I laid it down was that it was a shaggy dog story raised to the level of high art.

Sorry I should say it is a thorough about its discussion of passages from several of Pushkin's works.

Starting up The Man in the High Castle which, oddly enough, I've never read even though I've read a ton of other Dick books.

CONVERSATIONS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM

― the pinefox, Saturday, March 29, 2014 7:15 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Woah, didn't even know this existed. Quite pricy, though--worth it?

Loved my grad course on YA literature, but officially worn out on the genre at this point. Thankfully, next semester is mostly Canadian short fiction.

Francisco X. Stork, Marcello in the Real World (probably my favourite of the YA lot I read this semester)
Terry Spencer Hesser, Kissing Doorknobs
Brent Hartinger, The Order of the Poison Oak (quite liked this one too--gay YA fiction!)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (only non-YA thing I read this month; excellent)
R.J, Palacio, Wonder
Beth Goobie, Hello Groin (lesbian YA fiction--good until the ridiculous conclusion)
Catherine Atkins, Alt Ed (the John Hughes influence on all things YA is alive and well)

halfway through 'claudine at school' by colette. this is a really, really funny book.

I finally read Angel by Elizabeth Taylor and jesus christ what a novel, I just feel singularly struck by it. I don't think one is *supposed* to relate to Angel as much as I do - I very much get the feeling that one is supposed to veer between seeing her as a figure of fun/laugh at her, and abruptly see her as an object of pity, or feel sorry for her. And I refuse to do either; instead, I simply feel "she *is* me. (I wonder if all writers secretly fear this.)

The intense loneliness, the feeling of being *different* from the rest of the world (interpreted by others as thinking oneself "better" - no, just painfully aware of difference), the retreat to a realm of fantasy - and that retreat being won at the cost of excluding anyone who could assuage one's own loneliness and sense of isolation.

Even the intensity of her crushes, the way that she whips an hour's conversation with a beautiful man into a lifelong romance which is much, much better in her head than it is ever in reality (the disillusionment with actually attaining her desire, and discovering he's rubbish in bed - of course he couldn't ever live up to the heights of her imagination.)

Angel in the Edwardian Age wrote ~sensation novels~ - in 2014, she'd be writing fan fiction and be selling bucketloads of "50 Shades Of Angel" which would be universally disparaged by the only people she ever wanted to be understood or accepted by. Whatever she wrote, it would be judged as somehow both too much and not good enough, but I admire her for refusing to see the failing as her own. It's been a long time since I related to a character so much, and yet I'm aware, even as I think it's an extraordinary novel and an extraordinary woman, that you are not *supposed* to like her, in fact the character herself would feel contempt for you for *liking* her, as written. What an extraordinary achievement, the utterly *unlikeable* character, who is nonetheless entirely relatable.

I don't think one is *supposed* to relate to Angel as much as I do - I very much get the feeling that one is supposed to veer between seeing her as a figure of fun/laugh at her, and abruptly see her as an object of pity, or feel sorry for her. And I refuse to do either; instead, I simply feel "she *is* me.

I think Elizabeth Taylor intends this exact response - I certainly don't think she is supposed to be seen as a figure of fun or pity. I've read a few of her novels now and I don't think that's how she works (see Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont specifically). There is comedy, certainly, but it's a sort of horrifying comedy, and in fact Angel herself is in complicated ways quite frightening to contemplate, or rather the complication, yes, is in the response you have. There's an immense force to her (haven't read for a while, so recollecting from afar - and am interesting to go back and examine more closely the specifics on the back of your post, BB).

What an extraordinary achievement, the utterly *unlikeable* character, who is nonetheless entirely relatable

Yes, this exactly, for me.

I'm now reading a brief non-fiction book from 1972 by John McPhee, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, about the development of an experimental lighter-than-air aircraft. Could not be more different from The Savage Detectives.

if one is interested in Lethem then yes, the CONVERSATIONS book is well worth it.

Thanks, Fizz.

from last thread:

> also got a chekhov short story collection for cheap. i've never read him, does anyone have any favorites?

Typhus (from vol 4 of the 13 volumes of short stories. vol4 seems like step up as there were a few that i enjoyed. maybe i'm just in a better mood)

it's here, along with a bunch of others.
http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1213/

From Wall St. Journo, last fall---has anybody read any of the books referenced here? Which Trollope novel has elements of the Norton case?

The Criminal Conversation Of Mrs. Norton
By Diane Atkinson
Chicago Review, 486 pages, $29.95
review By
Alexandra Mullen
Nov. 22, 2013 3:41 p.m. ET
Was there an evil fairy at Caroline Sheridan's christening? Born in 1808 into the theatrical and political family of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she was graced with beauty, intelligence, wit and industry; her pen poured forth popular songs, poems and novels, which brought her early fame as "the female Byron." Yet all anyone pays attention to is a scandal that happened to her when she was only 27. It left her, as she wryly noted, with a reputation "something between a barn-actress and a Mary Wollstonecraft."
Diane Atkinson begins her biography of Mrs. Norton—as she was known after her marriage to George Norton—with this scandal. In 1836, the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was sued for £10,000 damages for having "criminal conversation" (adulterous sex) with the wife of an undistinguished barrister from a Tory family. Over the course of the 14-hour trial, the all-male jury and audience enjoyed the sexually suggestive testimony about the high and mighty. Norton's lawyer was disconcerted when their "explosive laughter" greeted his innocently stated fact that Lord Melbourne didn't knock at the front door of the Nortons' house: Instead he "invariably went in . . . by the passage behind."

image: An oil sketch for Daniel Maclise's 1849 mural in the House of Lords. Caroline Norton served as the model for the figure of justice; the painting hangs not far from Westminster Hall, where the trial that made her infamous took place. Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tmaki, gift of James Tannock Mackelvie, 1881.
Melbourne's lawyer cannily exploited the jury's worldly attitude to suggest that the case against the prime minister wasn't one of a cuckolded husband seeking justice, but a political enemy seeking to score a blow. In Ms. Atkinson's words, "the Honourable George Norton had been shown to be a man lacking in honour," exploiting his failed marriage for party-political maneuverings. Melbourne got off. The Whigs were thrilled, while the Tories made the best of it. As one grumbled, he "really couldn't see why Lord Melbourne should be so triumphant at the verdict given, as it had been proved that he had had more opportunities than any man ever had before, and had made no use of them."
But despite being officially proved virtuous, which perhaps she was, Mrs. Norton was now notorious. Even many years later, acid tinged her review of a book that brought up the gossip that always swirled around her famous grandfather: "Obscurity is a thicker shield than virtue."
She wrote her friend Mary Shelley after the trial: "[To count] for nothing, in a trial which decided one's fate for life, is hard." She wasn't exaggerating. Legally, as a married woman, she did count for nothing. Under the laws of coverture, a married couple was considered to be one legal person in which the wife was "covered" by the husband: She had no legal right to enter into contracts or own property, including any income she might earn.
Nor did a wife have any right to her own children. During the trial, George had spirited away the couple's three children—sons aged 7, 5 and 18 months—and forbidden Caroline to see them. Distraught and furious, but with no recourse at law, Caroline turned to her family's standby, the pen: "It is not from choice that I left poetry and pleasant themes,—for defence of the better part of life." To get back her sons, she lobbied, wrote and contrived to change the law. The Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers of good character a right to custody of children under 7—only with the Lord Chancellor's approval!—was passed in 1839.
With cruel irony, the law only applied to England and Wales—and George had taken the boys to his brother's estates in Scotland. Mrs. Norton wasn't reunited with her sons until 1842, under bittersweet circumstances. George notified Caroline too late that their youngest son was ill, and by the time she reached him he was dead. Thereafter George allowed Caroline restricted access to the two other boys. She was only freed from George's influence upon his death more than 30 years later, by which time her older, more responsible son had died of tuberculosis, and the middle son had become both financially dependent on his mother and often violent toward her.
The current fashion that "the personal is the political" was not a Victorian vogue. The reformer Harriet Martineau, for instance, sympathized with Mrs. Norton yet disapproved of her efforts because women "must be clearly seen to speak from conviction of the truth, and not from personal unhappiness." Mrs. Norton reflected some of this sentiment herself in 1855, when she wrote a public letter to the queen to support the Matrimonial Causes Act, which among other things eased procedural restrictions on divorce and began to recognize marriage as a mutual contract: "I do not consider this as my cause," she wrote of the bill that finally passed in 1857, "though it is a cause of which . . . I am an illustration. It is the cause of all women."
Some richly colored refractions of Mrs. Norton can be found in literary works lighted by her case and character. Ms. Atkinson mentions the one that appeared a year after the trial, written by a court reporter there. In "The Pickwick Papers," the young Charles Dickens replayed the case mostly for laughs, partly by switching the adultery trial to a breach-of-promise suit. William Makepeace Thackeray also clearly studied the courtroom shenanigans for "The Newcomes" (1855), while 30 years later, after the deaths of the main actors, George Meredith based the heroine of "Diana of the Crossways" on his friend Caroline and followed the background facts of her marriage very closely.
Ms. Atkinson doesn't mention Dickens's more subtly serious view of themes inspired by the Norton case: In "Hard Times" (1854), which appeared as a weekly serial while Parliament debated the first Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill, he depicted the unhappy marriages of both Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Gradgrind. Nor does Ms. Atkinson point out the shades of Caroline Norton that appear in novels by Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, and in Tennyson's long poem on women's education. Mrs. Norton even makes an appearance in John Fowles's 1969 novel, "The French Lieutenant's Woman."
To her credit, Ms. Atkinson's selections from Mrs. Norton's letters allow us to see her private side—whimsical, querulous and sometimes even whiny—but this biography represents a lost opportunity. Much of the material I've drawn from for this review comes not from Ms. Atkinson's book but from Randall Craig's excellent "The Narratives of Caroline Norton" (2009)—a book I discovered in Ms. Atkinson's bibliography. Scholarly studies aren't for everyone, but Ms. Atkinson's popular approach doesn't quite satisfy either. Like Alan Chedzoy's "A Scandalous Woman" of 20 years ago, "The Criminal Conversations of Mrs. Norton" lets the shadow of the scandal obscure the woman herself. The author of five novels and 11 books of poetry, Mrs. Norton considered herself a woman of letters; she once wrote a friend, semi-facetiously, that she hoped that "a hundred years hence," after people had read a biography of "that remarkable woman," literary tourists would be drawn to scenes from her novels.
Are her novels any good? I wish I knew. Her evil fairy must be cackling.
—Ms. Mullen writes for the Hudson
Review and Barnes & Noble Review.

I can see how The Way We Live Now's Mrs. Carbury--a beautiful novelist, wrongly accused by an abusive husband (teddibly respectible, though not very respected once the rumours started flying around) might be a "shade" of Norton, but less dimensional, without the talent or sophistication. She's a desperate underdog, somewhat dangerous as a mother, to an extent like TWWLN's ever-striving con artist, August Melmotte.

The Aesthetics of Resistance -- a 'novel' about a commie cell that have discussions on political and aesthetics questions in route to fight in the Spanish Civil War -- could have been an incredibly dour read, and no doubt it will judged as such. Human emotions don't often make it. But how many novels really express a passion for art (Picasso, Kafka and many other paintings and books that are discussed) and politics and the terrain where both might meet and then proceeds to be equal to its sources by writing: that whole Sebald/Bernhard breezy yet rigorous blocks of writing. He isn't as funny as Bernhard (who is more of a loner and likes it that way), and he has more of a point and direction than Sebald (who talks about him in one of his books). Above all is how he uses his writing to absorb history and criticism and conversation into this black hole. I didn't see a lot of advancement of ideas, just hints, he is careful, and I think that's right but I wonder if this is also a problem.

I took away a few things, thoughts around the importance of self-education in the face of the brutal way in which the world of work wants to annihilate it. The politics of this book has been in retreat for the last 25 years but at points it felt like a book for now. I hope the next two vols get a translation but it might take years for that. Man problem is it truly doesn't feel like a novel at all, yet it is expanding the palette in some way, but I doubt that arg will get a hearing.

At the end I felt like letting friends borrow it..

i'm about to start americanah, by chimamanda ngozi adichie and the flame throwers, by rachel kushner.

no idea what to expect from either one.

I enjoyed The Flamethrowers a great deal, mostly on the basis of Kushner's prose. I heard Kushner give a reading from it last month during which she somewhat disconcertingly performed a character's monologue about his amputation-fetishist friends while her very young son sat (apparently obliviously, thankfully) in the front row of the reading hall....

The reading was useful for reminding me of the novel's comic streak, at least.

Douglas Egerton's The Wars of Reconstruction and Jenny Offill's Last Things

i just mised kushner speaking about (and signing copies of) the flame throwers at our local indie bookstore. some of her writing is really descriptive and sharp; some of it, in the early pages, comes off as a little too precious. i love the descriptions i've read, about her writing being so fiery and alive.

(xp)

finished 'claudine at school' and ordered the collected volume with the other novels in the series. finishing up 'mr lincoln's army' by bruce catton.

I recently finished James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (fascinating for the way he manipulates biblical discourse while retaining his critical distance from the church), Another Country (appealingly open-ended in terms of plot, but stylistically flatter than his essays), and No Name in the Street (furious and seemingly digressive but more rhetorically controlled and formally intricate than seems usually to be granted), as well as Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (lean and desolate but not quite as intense as Good Morning, Midnight). I'm reading a few pages a day of Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, starting Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia, and wrapping up 2666 with a reading group.

I haven't read a single good Baldwin novel, and he's an essayist of genius.

I agree that his writing is much more vital in his non-fiction, but I think his first three novels (the only ones I've read so far) are flawed but good enough. Part of me wishes that he had been more willing to deal with queer relationships in his essays (apart from "Preservation of Innocence," "The Male Prison," and "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood") rather than mostly just in his fiction, but given the climate in which he wrote I can understand why he was relatively circumspect.

Ataturk by Andrew Mango to simultaneously inform my knowledge of the ottoman front in WWI and Turkish history

Made the mistake of following Outlaw Culture by bell hooks (absolutely amazing, like, even the mis-steps were incredibly rich and thought-provoking) with How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran which basically made me want to destroy everything. Basically "how to render complex topics in a clear fashion" vs "how to render complex topics in a hideous cartoon" - like, if the latter had just been sold as a memoir it would have been fine, funny and occasionally pithy. But as selling it as a ~feminist tract~ ... it's been a while since I felt so patronised (not to mention quite simply lied to, for the purposes of self aggrandisement) by a book.

Does Caitlin Moran still write a lot of stuff in BIG CAPS for EMPHASIS like she did at MM?

In her, v funny, column for The Times on Friday she does.

It would seem ironic, for ILX, the land of BIG CAPS for EMPHASIS, to dislike CM for doing the same thing.

I don't think she's a bad writer. There are many passages of the book where her style is perfect, she's both pithy and hilarious, and her mixture of personal experience and conclusions drawn is absolutely bang-on for the subject matter: her chapter on Abortion is one of the best, and most painful and honest depictions of an experience which is very hard to "get right" and she absolutely nails it. It's just frustrating that something which had so many good parts could have been so fatally flawed, for totally avoidable reasons.

I guess I am actually really glad that I read the bell hooks first, because I feel like she gave me the toolkit to actually say "well, parts of this are excellent, and parts of this are really really RONG" in a way that doesn't descend into throwing the whole thing out for "not being perfect", or worse.

That bell hooks book is fantastic because she has the range and the agility to write an essay which can say "Madonna can be great on gender, but she's terrible on race" or "It is possible to criticise Spike Lee for being bad on *class*, and criticise the concessions that he makes in order to be The One African-American Film-maker acceptable to Hollywood, without degenerating into racism or letting down the team" or "Malcolm X: great on race, terrible on gender, but if you actually read his words, his opinions shifted and became more progressive towards the end of his life, as he encountered more female Black thinkers, though that part always gets left out of the official hagiographies, gee I wonder why?" And yet can still dish out a "Camille Paglia: Universally terrible!" without descending into misogynist cliches.

She's just really, really good on capturing the tension between wanting to stick up for marginalised people, but also wanting to temper "this is the only representation we get, we can't criticise it, or we become the enemy" with "you know, there are some real problems here!" That you're allowed to have complicated feelings about things.

I've read individual essays by bell hooks, but never anything more. Would you recommend Outlaw Culture as a starting point?

I finished a couple in the last few days:

Volume 1 of part 1 of Lewisohn's extended Beatles book. This is covered amply elsewhere so I won't say much, other than it is utterly incredible and has the best ending - descriptions of a gig they played at some local council hall on 27 December 1960. It's just local kids being entertained by (admittedly exceptional) local kids, but he makes it it sound like one of those days that shook the world. Now onto volume 2.

The Rocky Road by Eamon Dunphy. Now this was a delight, the autobiography of an Irish footballer-turned-journalist. Pretty angry, resigned stuff, yet obviously motivated by love and passion, it makes for great reading as he rails against whichever overwhelming force is nearest at hand. It's got that weird aura to me of being half-understood stuff from a place that looks a lot like here, and as a result reads something like a plausible alternate universe that you're not quite sure you didn't live through. Very strange to have whole successions of public figures I've never heard of doing familiar things, when you don't know where they came from or what happened before or after.

It ends a bit oddly, with an extended chapter about his suffering pariah status during Italia 90. I'd been expecting to read about him and the country up to the present day, though I guess the title might've alerted me. Great writing at any rate, very direct and honest.

The Man in the High Castle was probably the best of the Dick novels that I've read, but I still like the short stories best.

Starting up on Omeros by Derek Walcott now in honor of my trip to St Lucia later this month.

A relative recently gave me a book by a friend of his, printed in 1979, with the title Wallowas. I'm pretty sure it was printed under a 'vanity' publisher's imprint. Obviously, I was given this book because I've spent more than a dozen weeks over the past decade hiking and camping in the Wallowa Mountains in NE Oregon, where the book is set.

Over the past few nights that was what I was reading. The nicest part was that the place names of the mountains, rivers, valleys and meadows all meant something to me and in most cases were places I'd hiked to.

I'm not sure what comes next, but I recently checked Dostovevsky's Demons out of the public library, so it has cut the queue and will probably get a look in.

Anybody read Chronicles of Bustos Domecq? Describe please. Thinking of getting the Di Giovanni translation.

fuck yeah demons! hope you enjoy aimless. my favorite dusty: the funniest, the scariest.

Anybody read /Chronicles of Bustos Domecq/? Describe please. Thinking of getting the Di Giovanni translation.

Demons is starting out nicely with a bit of a satiric takedown of the provinces in a bit of Gogol-influenced narration. Lookin' good so far.

read it last year for the first time, followed by dead souls (nice one-two punch there). one of the few of his works where i've still felt sympathy for some of the characters by the end. which edition/translation, out of interest?

nearly finished the recognitions, which is great and all but kind of ready to move onto something else...

I have the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. It reads quite well.

ah, pretty sure i read their trans. of crime & punishment. copy of devils i have is an oxford world's classic which included the stavrogin's confession chapter integrated into the text, which might have worked better as an appendix. also: the portrait of turgenev is absolutely devastating in its mercilessness.

dead souls is so fucking weird and awesome.

best thing about gogol is that his moralistic/religious agenda is not at all apparent in his actual texts. the distance between what he (seems to have) thought he was doing, and what he actually accomplished is more dramatic than any other author i know. dostoevsky is also rad but i can't really handle him. i think i threw up last time i read notes from underground, the part where he offends the prostitute he had offered to rescue by giving her money.

Arthur Schnitzler - La Ronde and a couple of other plays (Anatol is also great). Love the structure and it really captures the frenzy, the madness of love in its first stages, when all you know about someone is that you like them but don't fully trust them. The questioning of motive is as if one of them was placed on a couch. Incisive, at the same time it is two people on a street or a room, they are facing each other, trying to figure each other out and often faililng under the pressure.

Rilke - Lettes on Cezanne. Short volume and its p/great crit. You get a sense of Cezanne's achievement and how deeply Rilke looks at colour.

Now on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I've read individual essays by bell hooks, but never anything more. Would you recommend Outlaw Culture as a starting point?

― Inside Lewellyn Sinclair (cryptosicko), Thursday, April 3, 2014 3:16 PM

Sorry, I didn't see this earlier!

Nah, I probably wouldn't *start* with Outlaw Culture, because it's really mostly "bell hook vs the 90s" and you probably do need a grip of what she's about beforehand. The canonical starting point is, more likely "Ain't I a Woman".

i'm rereading dead souls now. the only writer i can think of with comparable similes is wodehouse.

Outlaw Culture sounds fantastic BB. Thanks, I hadn't heard of it before.

For those interested in post-Civil War politics and civil rights, this excellent new book is essential.

Thanks, will take a look. although I still haven't read that New Deal book you recommended

has anyone here read The Undiscovered Country by Julian Mitchell?

I finished INTERVIEWS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM. It's very interesting, very readable; anyone who likes Lethem would probably enjoy it.

I am reading THE STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK. I read 'Paycheck', about which a 2003 film was made. The story is somewhat different. It is a good concept but the end is the crassest end to a story I have ever read.

oh boy.

Finally finished Knausgaard Volume II, took a palate cleanser of Karen Solie's Selected Poems, abandoned Norman Rush's Subtle Bodies (so poor - can't believe it was written by the same guy who produced the wonderful Mating, can't think of a comparable drop in quality), then picked up Jenny Offil's Dept Of Speculation and read it in an evening. Really terrific novel - interesting contrast with Knausgaard with its microfocus on the mundanity of parenting, married life etc. Everybody's comparing it to Renata Adler's Speedboat, and formally that was my first thought too. But actually reminded me most of the Critique De La Vie Quotidienne/Bishop Barthelme stories (in fact DB makes a guest appearance in DoS)- the mordant endurance and epiphanies of city life. Now on with Knausgaard Vol III.

i'm reading knausgaard one. impressed, so far.

clever comparisons i have are frank harris and the 'i remember' guy

I'd like to read DEPT. OF SPECULATION. At first I thought Stevie might have written DEBT OF SPECULATION. Then I thought the book might be called THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECULATION. But no, it is called DEPT. OF SPECULATION.

In a review that Stevie sent me the other day the book sounded really interesting but I must have missed the fact that it was about 'parenting'. Or perhaps it is not, which would be encouraging.

I still need to read SPEEDBOAT.

I think I need to read the Bishop Barthelme Stories. I thought Stevie might mean a collaboration between Elizabeth Bishop and Donald Barthelme but that seems not plausible. I must read Barthelme again, though I have not liked him.

James Wood naturally has an essay on Norman Rush in THE FUN STUFF. I don't yet know if it talks about the unsubtlety of SUBTLE BODIES.

I don't share in the widespread desire to read Knausgaard, which is lucky for me as a slow reader.

Why are you YELLING

ALL CAPS is his cheap, easy alternative to bbcode italicization

I abandoned Subtle Bodies too, and I Also loved Dept of Speculation. Reminded me a bit of a more minimalist Lorrie Moore at the top of her game.

Still chugging along thru the Breton bio, with frequent breaking-off to immerse in the works under discussion (right now, the poems of L'air du l'eau) or refer back to precursors (Nerval, Baudelaire). But I gave it a rest this week and picked up Melville's Piazza Tales, which were pleasantly minor... magazine Melville. (Obvious exception for "Bartleby", which I previously knew by reputation alone--though I'll be damned if I know what to make of it now that I've read it.)

*L'air de l'eau
jesus now the whole world knows my knowledge of french is a ridiculous front

Nah. Maybe if you had posted on the "Worst Music Writing Ever" thread, but not this one.

almost started the next claudine book, but decided to try 'the man who was thursday' instead. this is one weird book.

Wait how many Claudine books have you read so far?

I love The Man Who Was Thursday! It is a very strange book! But deeply delightful, too.

found my copy of that last night in a suitcase i had thought was empty. i love it too. it does nothing but get weirder until it stops.

we dig deeper and we blow you higher.

one of the best in the one-crazy-night genre, too, like after hours. honestly it's so compact and action-driven and real-time and grotesquely visual idk why it's not a movie. wiki tells me welles did a radio version with the mercury.

just finished it -- loved it! suspect i'll be rereading this a year from now and loving it even more. my copy has a two-paragraph epilogue by chesterton where he irritatedly snaps that everyone missed the point of his book -- which he then declines to provide.

omg a welles version! i can't even imagine how amazing that must be.

i read 'claudine at school' a couple weeks ago and thought it was delightful. one of the pissiest and most hilarious narrators ever, maybe. wish i knew french so i could watch the non-subtitled movie version on youtube.

i am (re)reading LIPSTICK TRACES and i'm so happy to do so

S. M. Plokhy - Yalta: The Price of Peace

Shaping up to be a similar kind of book to Paris 1919. I think I'm less fond of this kind of narrative history than of (if this is the right term) analytical history, where the writer sets up a certain historical question and evaluates the possible explanations. When it's just a stream of narrative details, without a structuring argument, it can be hard to guess which details are important to keep track of. On the other hand, that kind of book wouldn't have made space for Churchill's horrendous poetry.

Finally read Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet, which is important and all, but which has nothing on Robin Wood. In fact, I dove right back into Wood's chapter on buddy films (from Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan) immediately after finishing the Russo.

read about 1/3 of that clive james book where he writes a bunch of nonsense about famous writers and artists and thinkers from history. james is a fairly entertaining writer and i learned some stuff from the borges entry and the paul valery entry but i am sick of the idea that dense philosophical prose is "utter nonsense" and this is an idea james throws around quite a bit, even introducing his chapter on walter benjamin with a tricky passage to illustrate how "impenetrable" he was. i share james' preference for transparent prose and even prefer to read secondhand accounts of philosophers' opinions to works like, say, the phenomenology of spirit but i think this is just because i am lazy. it's weird when people cloak this aesthetic prejudice in self-righteousness.*

*not to say there aren't charlatans in the academy. just that walter effing benjamin, whatever you might think about his ideas, was not one of these. neither was derrida or heidegger or sartre.

Since when is Benjamin "impenetrable"?

Just thought of one of the fake FB misattributions:

Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing
-Heidegger

since clive james decided he was george orwell xp

Wait, looks like may Nietszche actually said that, more or less. (Xp)

No, it was some other self-styled, self-published would-be philosopher, writing about those two.

once in the nyer or somewhere i read clive james go off for a paragraph or two on some subject's use of the word "diagetic", which is an eight-letter word describing a specific and technical yet nevertheless extremely commonly encountered concept for which there is no other word as precise, and which clive james had never heard and thought was a ridiculous piece of jargon that sounded like an "intestinal complaint", cuz see "dia", quiet please professional writer at work.

yeah, diagetic is an extremely useful term in discussing film. i don't really get the hairtrigger sensitivity to "jargon" that so many british people seem to have.

or britain-based writers to be more precise. james is australian originally i think

To be fair, there was a point at which it seemed liked certain US university departments simply caved-in to Continental concepts - I had a friend who was half-French who would complain : "These guys couldn't get a job in France but they come here and they are superstars!" From the Brits and their dominion we got on the one hand the kind of eye-rolling tweezer-pinching arms-length stuff you are talking about but also on-board academics like Lodge, Bradbury and of course Eagleton taking pains to try to make the new theories accessible to the common reader, interested bystander, whoever.

i think a lot of academic writing is bad and covers up shallow thinking with convoluted verbiage. i do not think that any major thinker ever built his or her career doing this, as clive james claims of sartre, derrida, and heidegger. these three bros got to where they are by being provocative and stimulating, even when they're wrong.

sartre even wrote novels where he makes the basic outlines of his philosophy as clear as possible. i don't even know what james is talking about when he lumps him in with the esoteric continental crowd. if being and nothingness is incoherent at times it was due to drugs. nothing calculated or mendacious about it.

(Responding to your prior post) I'm sure there is more good academic writing than meets the untrained eye but your point about the great men vs. their followers, disciples, or copycats is valid I think.

Some funny stuff about Derrida in here, from an analytic philosopher who is not uninterested in continental ideas: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/hrp/issues/1992/Putnam.pdf

Saw that Clive James book once and I was just thinking why skim through this when I can read a wiki entry, note some actual titles and engage with the sources instead?

I suppose I can apply a 'Televisual' type approach to his writing if he is going to do the same with philosophy he thinks is too complicated.

I thought the word was spelled 'diegetic'.

http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm

I like Clive James – he's almost as suave and witty a generalist as Gore Vidal – but he has that English-speaking aversion to metaphysical speculation or something.

I finished Lethem's DISSIDENT GARDENS. I thought it was trying to be like Pynchon.

since then I have read

Kafka, 'the burrow', 'the giant mole', 'the great wall of China', 'investigations of a dog' -- the last of these seemed less strong than the others. 'the great wall of China' delivered most effect relative to its (brief) length I think.

It made me think that Kafka was more concerned with scholarship and research, as subjects or paradigms, than I had thought or remembered.

then
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION
edited by Kingsley Amis

a story that impresses me is: 'The Tunnel under the World' by Frederik Pohl.

t Pinefox: you familiar with Kafka's novels? if so, how would you rate them against the stories you mentioned (the first three of which are among my favorites)? I ask because I've never read any of the novels, but recently have started to feel as though I should, for some reason

His novels are p. great I would rank them

The Trial
Amerika
The Castle

The Castle is actually the one I've been wanting to read... it's something to do with Blanchot, idk

The best part about the novels: you can start and stop them at will, flip ahead or backwards, it makes no difference.

The Castle is like that, but not so with the other two

snowy, I read THE TRIAL long ago, and I rate it very highly. I am sorry to say that I have not read the other two though I aspire to, especially THE CASTLE which I was thinking about starting only yesterday.

I have not yet read any of his other short fictions but I have an idea that a lot (?) exist, eg 'the next village' which I have heard about. I think these other stories should be on my list.

I think I will go back to Borges too. I don't think I found him as accessible or delightful as most people seem to, though I think I get the general idea that the paradoxical parables are charming and intriguing. There remain many of them that I have not read.

today I read
JG Ballard, 'the voices of time' - didn't really understand it but it had the Ballard flavour
Robert Sheckley, 'specialist' - strange accessible parable about cooperation, or maybe it's satire. He seems an interesting character; wrote Star Trek etc in the 1990s.
Kurt Vonnegut, 'Harrison Bergeron' - sad satire on equality
H. Beam Piper, 'he walked around the horses' - epistolary historical mystery, a bit heavy-handed
Arthur C. Clarke, 'the nine billion names of god'
Harry Harrison, 'the streets of Askelon' - puzzling title something to do with early Christianity; story quite strong on religion and science
Isaac Azimov, 'the machine that won the war' - slightly cheap parable about war, technology, humanity

OK OK – I'll read my first Chesterton.

The White People and other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen - Penguin Classics edition that omits 'The Great God Pan', which I thought was Machen's best known tale?

I read The Man Who Was Thursday last year. The first third is fast-paced and hugely entertaining. It slowly loses pace over the next third, but maintains a certain integrity and interest. In the last third it veers sharply in the direction of allegory, but the allegory makes little or no sense from any angle it is viewed. I put it down greatly impressed by Chesterton's imaginative powers, but very puzzled over what he was banging on about. Worth reading in any event.

Great writers can never pull off clean and unambiguous allegory. It always gets away from them.

"The White People" by Machen is great. Young girl writing in her diary about her visits to a strange faery-land, the ordinariness of which she takes totally for granted.

Great writers can never pull off clean and unambiguous allegory. It always gets away from them.

― très hip (Treeship),

I thought William Morris did.

finished Mallon's Watergate in a week, which is superfast for me even w/ a smooth read.

need to read some more Kafka and/or Nabokov this year

I am about to start Kafka's Diaries in a day or two. Also have the letters to Felice.

Finishing my burst of Rilke - The Notebooks... are just such a strange construction when I first read 'em years ago but now looking at letters to his wife on Cezanne and ]Letters to Benevenuta you can see how his inner world materialized on the page by this strange alchemy that isn't at all so. There is a passage in one of the letters (and I had to give the vol back) on his negation from the world and that is pretty much the jumping to point to his 'novel'.

Also had a quick scan of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's House of Desires, a Renaissance-era play. The monologues reminded of Chretien's poetry in their longing and over-dramatized suffering (w/hints of self-analysis). I need to get hold of her poetry, satisfies my curiosity for now.

clive james is a wasteman

Totally. These people get by on wit with very, very little else to back up.

xp Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was my most recent purchase (I was lucky enough to find the Dalkey edition secondhand and didn't give it a second thought); I've not read it before (tried once, a long time ago, and gave up) but I've read a great deal of Rilke's poetry & have some knowledge of his biography, so I'm curious to see how the Notebooks reflect his own personal process of development.

finished Mallon's Watergate in a week, which is superfast for me even w/ a smooth read.

His novel about DC gays cowering beneath McCarthy's gaze is good.

i reread a chunk of 'malte' just last week. for some reason i've never been able to really read it straight through, no matter the translation, though pike's does seem to be better and clearer (even if the older herder norton translation was more involving, thick?). lately malte himself is getting too annoying to bear, in exactly the twee ways that rilke is annoying in his poetry. insufferable self-importance about his superior judgments, his sensitivity. makes it harder to stay rewarded by the genuinely startling and enduring passages.

Had a holiday, read –
UNDERCOVER: The true story of Britain's secret police.
Trashy book for the plane. Wanted to be outraged, succeeded. Some comic relief in later chapters after the NPOIU come in & are much shitter at being undercover than the SDS. Their agents seem to end up with nicknames like 'Tommy the cop' in any organisation they try to infiltrate.
STONER - John WIlliams.
This was good for what it was, but not really my sort of thing.
FAME AND FAILURE 1720–1800: the unfulfilled literary life - Adam Rounce
This a friend's book, but I enjoyed it a lot - study of some also-rans from 18th century lit - Richard Savage, William Dodd, Anna Seward and Percival Stockdale. Kind of about the emergence of literary failure with the rise of the market/grub street (& adumbrations of Romantic literary failure); but really I think he just likes diggin around in these strange lives and works. (It's also sort of about Samuel Johnson, bcz he is essentially one of these people till later in his career, & they are all tangled up with him one way or another).
Also enjoying UTOPIA OR BUST, the Benjamin Kunkel collection of essays, & winding up the reread of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN I started… 2? years ago.
Thinking about reading some Smollett.

that's my tribute to pinefox done, back to erratic italicisation for me.

Did your copy of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN come with a naked leg? ;-)

I am about 30 pages away from the end of this Foucault book, and though it has been really interesting, and there have been many, many points where I've had my brain nicely rearranged and thoughts provoked, mostly I am just thinking "in 30 pages, I never have to read Foucault again, and never have to spend 20 minutes reading the same sentence wondering what the fuck that convoluted structure means." It's not jargon (I am perfectly able to look up obscure medical terms) it is that kind of precision which might lock down meaning very specifically, but just makes things incredibly hard to parse. I suppose that's the point. There is one and only one meaning which can be carried away from this sentence structure, and the structure has rendered any other meaning utterly nonsensical, but good god, you have to work for that nugget.

I am also reading A Short History of Celebrity by Fred Inglis, which I can tell already will both infuriate and delight me. (He claims he will not sneer at Celebrity or people who are interested in Celebrities, because obviously it Means Something, and he's here to tell you what. And then goes on to make comments about the "vacuity" or whatever of "reality television" which make it quite obvious that he is sneering, because Joshua Reynolds and Kitty Fisher were Proper Celebrities and ~television celebrity chefs~ aren't, but we shall see if he manages to spell out why.) Even if it infuriates me, a philosophical treatise on the meaning of Celebrity is just the sort of thing I'm glad to see is still being written.

I'm going through a period where I'm finding it hard to get absorbed in a book. Keep picking things up and abandoning them. I hope I'm not losing my appetite for fiction, it was meant to be one of the things that sustained me into old age.

My most recent experiment is The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. Not normally the kind of thing I like, a bit too self-consciously literary/arty/trendy but I'm enjoying it a lot so far (about 50pp in). She has impressive observational skills and a flair for fresh, exact prose and imagery, although she can be a bit self-indulgent. My worry with this kind of writing is that I will find it impressive over a few pages but wearisome over a few hundred. I hope not this time.

Rachel Kushner in Conversation tonight

Vaguely interested in her..

I am enjoying Omeros and it really wants to make me check out more Walcott. It was a bad choice to read leading up to a vacation there though because now I just feel bad about going there.

The Fortunate Traveler has marvelous poems. He's got a new collected/selected work out.

Thinking about reading some Smollett.

― woof, Tuesday, April 15, 2014 8:44 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Clive James book everyone is talking about here is very good for the writers he's positive about--the essays communicate well why they're worth investigating--but not much use for those he has problems with. And when he ventures into politics, like his icky defence of Australia's current "refugees can fuck off and die" policies, it's alarming.

Like I said, James' collected essays are a consistent delight, despite, ah, idiosyncrasies such as his pity for Nixon.

getting things done. i feel so cool.

Philip K. Dick, 'second variety', story from 1953

Breton, Communicating Vessels

So far, way less interesting than Nadja--not sure if this is Breton's fault or translators'. I have Mad Love on the way, though, so planning to finish out the 'trilogy' regardless. Also considering a reread of Georges Perec's La boutique obscure, for additional dream silliness.

Lethem, YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET (2007)

the main problem I have with this so far is, the 'fascinating', 'brilliant' complaint caller is not at all fascinating or brilliant.

if he were removed the book would be pretty fine.

Kafka - The Diaries. He is alert and ill -- which has an effect of just intensifying his attention. Hates what he writes, but he is critical of what he reads too. He is alone but clever enough to make this into something liveable, everyday, except when his dreams get in the way.

Etc., etc.

I think I should get Kafka's complete short stories. I only realized today it's over 400pp!

YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET I am finding somewhat problematic.

I loved YDLMY, but it came out at the height of my Lethem fanboyism, so perhaps I'm not to be trusted. Will probably read it again one day with, hopefully, a more critical eye.

Started reading (v v slowly) some Katherine Mansfield stories. Really good, though my schedule is still a bit too hectic to devote as much time to them as I'd like.

Much thanks up thread to b snowy and no lime tangier for pointing me towards Balakian's Literary Origins of Surrealism! Def want to check it out sometime; absolutely what I am looking for...

Yeah, definitely give it a look—it does a nice job covering most of the big names & a few lesser-knowns (Laforgue, in particular, is treated at some length)—just be aware that there are a numerous quotations (prose as well as poetry) left in the original.

I'm about to reach the 100-page mark with Roderick Random, and it continues to amuse ... really makes me want to read Smollett's Quixote, too

as a pitiful monoglot, the untranslated passages were kind of frustrating. same issue i had when reading starkie's rimbaud biography, guess the expected audience for these back in the forties/fifties were just expected to be familiar with french.

xposts: you've got me thinking about revisiting mansfield, who i haven't picked up since going through her collected stories in my teens. as for now: finished the recognitions, and about half way through the cofidence-man.

YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET has grown on me -- if you could take out the 'creepy' element, it would be the light comedy it's said to be. Some terrific passages of daft comic dialogue, a thing JL can do very well (cf AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE and MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN).

Read the first fifty pages of Autumn of the Patriarch (i.e. ten sentences or so...) and it's awesome. By far my favorite Garcia Marquez. Think I should read The General in his Labyrinth as well.

I've also read Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, by Alfred Jarry. Early symbolist, known for the play Pere Ubu. Fun stuff, weird travels and strange physics.

Fact-checking. Why is it that no one ever seems to do even basic "look at wikipedia" fact-checking any more, as part of the process of writing or even editing a book?

This Fred Inglis book on the history of Celebrity that I'm still reading (god knows why). Well, why, because he has these occasional glimpses of genuine insight and interesting observations on the meaning of fame and its interrelation with the rise of Industrialisation and Capital etc etc all very interesting. And then he goes and spoils it with these utterly GLARING stupid schoolboy errors.

I noticed them most egregiously in the "rock stars" section, on which he seems most shaky (and I am most knowledgeable), and I think he probably might have been a lot better on Regency London or 19th Century Paris, because his writing was less wince-worthy than on the modern stuff. But when he can't even be bothered to look up things like 1) what religion Freddie Mercury's family practised (all brown people must be Muslims, amirite?) or 2) how many strings there are on Eric Clapton's guitar, it makes me less inclined to TRUST anything that he previously asserted about Baudelaire or the Prince Regent.

Mostly, I just get the feeling that he is floundering, out of his depth in a topic he neither understands, nor particularly *likes* (if celebrity journalism is so "repellant" why are you writing about it?) - which is a shame, because an actual history on the origin and shifting fashions in celebrity was something I would dearly have liked to have read a *good* one of. But he's destroyed my confidence so thoroughly with his stupid assertions and lack of a basic ability to check facts that I'm sorry, despite every ounce of wantig to like this book (and thinking it had some good points along the way) I do think this is a terrible, terrible book.

I look at wikipedia a lot, as part of the process of writing a book, or another thing

Well, I'm glad that someone does, Pinefox!

It's just that this is the 3rd book in as many months where my confidence in the writer has been wrecked by carelessness. Surely now, it is easier than ever to do, why do so few seem to bother with it?

Yes, it is easy to do.
It is strange how many people get so many things wrong.

just finished YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET, reading on the grass in the Easter Monday sunshine.

I have come round to this book. It has some questionable elements but in the end I really quite liked it. It is definitely not my least favourite JL novel.

Bedwin's "readings" of Fritz Lang's Human Desire remain the highlight of the novel for me.

that bit is OK, yes.

I think the funny goofy dialogue is the best thing about it.

i am reading robert richardson's biography of ralph waldo emerson. it is great.

I'm reading the biography of eminent Victorian John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves.

I am now reading How Soon Is Now by Richard King, which actually appears to have been researched and fact-checked a tiny bit. Phew, what a relief.

(Take a guess how many ILX0rs have appeared in it so far.)

5ive?

I'm reading 'The Revenge For Love' by Jack White Wyndham Lewis. Pretty funny, not as difficult as I was expecting, may venture on to some of his other books. Anyone read any of his others? Are they difficult?

^still cringe when i think of the scene where the character with the newly amputated leg gets a kicking.

not sure i'd class lewis' fiction as difficult per se, 'cept maybe parts of the childermass with its joyce/stein pastiche, though the novels pre-revenge tend to be more in the high modernist mode (see the original version of tarr), all of which are worth a read. only read a couple of his post-30s novels: the vulgar streak which retreads some of the same concerns as revenge for love with less success, and self condemned which i remember as being pretty harrowing and probably about as self-reflective as lewis ever got.

I found myself struggling with the glacial pace* of Demons, so I set it aside (temporarily?) and have been breezing through Four Fish, Paul Greenberg, a non-fic that is pitched right at the level of a series of well-written magazine feature articles, thus being a quick, smooth read.

*nearly 200pp in and Stavrogin has barely surfaced in the narrative

Conversely, i've just gone thru chapter 20 of my sprawling novel (Roderick Random) and am as engrossed as ever, i.e., I still wince every time the protag gets scammed out of his money & chuckle every time Strap picks a fight with a stranger & begins to undress before giving them time to reply

xp to b snowy/nlt: I have another book on Nerval that leaves all of the excerpts in French. Sounds like I'll be toting my French/English dictionary for both of them...

Aimless Idk what your tastes run as far as novels go, but if youve alteady put 200 pages into Demons, I would at least finish out the first part (if you have not done so). There really is a palpable buildup that D lets simmer to a boil...I really loved how the novel has this 200 page novella that is obliquely related to plot and theme--its basically a remnant from the earlier, different plan for the novel-- and it p much functions mainly to set the scene for the rest of the book. One of my favorite things about the novel.

roderick random owns but i think ferdinand count fathom is the smollett masterpiece.

drugs otm abt the (admittedly glacial) society-comedy setup of demons: it creates this world and this set of concerns and preoccupations and interlinked problems so that it can set fire to them. it's also not as incongruous as it seems on first reading because stepan is secretly the book's protagonist, if it has one; nick stavrogin is almost more of a macguffin. everybody wants him for something. but i should come clean: i stalled out around page 200 on my first attempt too. (i left off during the "night" chapter, where nick pays several house calls in the rain -- ironic because this is pretty much the precise moment stuff starts happening.)

the scene where nick meeds fedka on the bridge ("steal more. kill more." "funny, sir--that's just what pyotr stepanovich tells me!") and fedka very delicately and obliquely offers his services as assassin is the scene past which (on second reading) i Could Not Put Down.

huh, i stalled w/ demons too, aimless almost had me ordering a copy since mine is in storage apparently, but i gave it a few minutes and then remembered all the other books i haven't read

emerson's wife just died in the emerson biog, shit is gonna get really real now

i started reading 'demons' one afternoon winter before last, took a break after about half an hour, and ended up slipping and suffering a pretty bad knee injury. i've felt a little superstitious about ever going back to it.

it is a badvibes book for sure

"the russian book"

I caught that allusion. (feels smug)

so I'm 200 pages into Our Mutual Friend! Any advice from Dickens vets?

Demons is my favorite Dostoevsky novel, I've read it several times and will probably be coming back to it again later this year, but right now I'm wrapped up in the abridged version of Joseph Frank's epic Dostoevsky bio, which is second only to Ellman's Joyce bio. After slogging through several long chapters describing the competing schools of socialist thought in 1840s Russia, the plot is heating up with his arrest, mock execution, and exile to Siberia. Was also introduced to the guy who was the inspiration for Stavrogin. Good stuff!

To follow up, my brother sent me The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee, a fictionalized rendering of Dostoevsky, which is supposed to be quite good.

xp
I think of it as of a piece with Bleak House and Little Dorrit in terms of how it's set up, but it never pays off to the same degree. More like Old Curiosity Shop in that the grotesquerie is what keeps it moving along. Do not expect to be fully convinced by anything. The Veneering parts all drag; the depths that open up here and there, especially a great climax, are worth getting through the rest of it (at least for me).

Finished up Omeros and it was great.

Going on a vacation tomorrow and bringing along The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 and Hamsun's Mysteries.

Finished The Diairies of Franz Kafka, an absolutely essential companion to his literature - and more.

Finishing The Green Cockatoo and a couple of other plays by Schnitzler - the title play is a bit of a counterpart to Dream Story. Yes its in part about the appearances of things but framing your options as: is this a theatre or an orgy? Who consumes who when they come in to watch (or participate?), its a piece of immersive theatre, a play within a play and set during the French revolution (the consumers are to perish soon).

I think these are more like literary games that I like and don't have as much time for (?) The next play (whose name I forget) displays his acute sense of relationships between men and women, he really does the (perhaps inevitable) break so well, and dramatises the futility of it all without any pity.

The Poems of Georg Trakl (tr.Margitt Lehbert)

xp to Greg Fanoe: lemme know how the Hamsun is! I've not read anything but Hunger, & am kind of wary of the much-praised Growth of the Soil for fear of it turning out to be reactionary Blut-und-Boden nonsense, but what I've read about that one (Mysteries) sounds interesting

More like Old Curiosity Shop in that the grotesquerie is what keeps it moving along. Do not expect to be fully convinced by anything. The Veneering parts all drag; the depths that open up here and there,

I reached Book Two. While it's finally MOVING, the Veneering and Podsnappery stuff is laid on more heavily than I've ever seen Dickens attempt.

Growth of the Soil was praised by Kafka in the diaries but I wasn't that convinced, it was just a line on it. Hamsun is really known for Hunger/Pan/Mysteries. Also vary of it, won him the Nobel Prize which had not much of a hit rate at the time.

Re-read Alistair MacLeod's wondrous No Great Mischief this week in memoriam.

great things about Thr Old Curiosity Shop:

Quilp - bit where he wakes up and thinks he's been turned into an insect. (seem to recall far from impossible Kafka had read this, but nothing specific), plus the end.

The retired circus giants tending to the retired circus dwarfs.

The character in the furnace, who learned everything he knows by staring into the fire.

add me to the list of Demons lovers, too. difficult listening hour otm about setting fire to the merciless, almost static depiction of the social mores.

OMF was my first dickens and I struggled a bit with the language. Am about to start my 8th...

(Spent a fun couple of hours last month walking from bleeding heart yard to Marshalsea and the adjacent church after reading Little Dorrit over Christmas)

Also vary of it, won him the Nobel Prize which had not much of a hit rate at the time.

The Nobel committee at the time had a habit of giving the prize to revolutionary, ground breaking authors and then specifically citing their most normal, traditional book at the reason they won the prize (see also, Thomas Mann for Buddenbrooks).

Never found Mann to be 'ground breaking' as such, he always reads as v normally to me (and I haven't read Buddenbrooks).

I've always thought Magic Mountain was considered a groundbreaking classic of modernism, but maybe I'm confused.

it is… (?) but in a very classical and conservative way?

I actually don't know. I'm not too knowledgeable on literary history, so if others say I'm wrong I'll concede the point.

all you people reading dickens and not liking the good bits confuse me

i read our mutual friend like a month ago, so much of it dragged

--i think it suits the veneering and podsnap stuff to be laid on with a trowel
--the couple of direct addresses to the reader are kind of long, though. v DO YOU SEE
--the sarcastic lawyers making quips at each other are great, kind of cop show-like
--i did like that the two potential suitors are both really objectionable people, like, the reader has reason to prefer the hipster racist over the rapey one but still
--jenny wren's weird vision on the roof of the pawn shop v good
--i kind of liked that the central mystery is resolved v early and things carry on from there. the climax sort of goes off like a balloon deflating, unfortunately, like dickens hadn't quite worked through the consequences of his structure

i really like the sound of old curiousity shop, if it's just the grotesque and energetic bits of late dickens with no dilution; i suspect like all of his books, though

also cosign on 'demons'. maybe the best novel ever. by randall jarrell's definition of a novel it's the best novel ever, at least, or at least the most novel-ish novel

I bow to the collective knowledge of ILB. Last night I resumed Demons and, as I was told, the pace immediately accelerated just past the place where I had bogged down. Stavrogin is on the scene and skullduggery is afoot.

So, in the translator's note to Mysteries, he refers to the previous translation as an "egregious betrayal of Hamsun's work".

grotesquery of old curiosity shop is v diluted, possibly more so than any of his books.

Forget your Hamsuns and Dostoyevskys, I'm taking a real trip on the literary dark side with Miss Read's 'Village School'. It's soul wrenching, nerve destroying stuff.

Thanks no lime tangier for your comments re Wyndham Lewis. The battering of poor old one-legged Percy is pretty gruesome, though the strange scene with the dwarf towards the end topped it for me. Overall I think I found his prose a bit of a chore, though may try one of his others.

PK Dick,
'the king of the elves' - Tolkienesque
'adjustment team'
etc
often marvellous ideas

nearly finished James Wood, HOW FICTION WORKS, at last

Now struggling my way through this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BmJwSSVIcAAbQPn.jpg

Can you sum up How Fiction Works for us in a paragraph or two?

Lol that looks neat Branwell! xp

I'd like to, Aimless. Maybe I will try though I think most would not value my view of it.

Please, teh pinefox, please.

As a writer I actually found a few of Wood's points useful, notably on point of view.

I almost bought his new collection last Thursday.

I bought his last collection last month!
I like the US jacket.

breaking from Roderick Random for a long-overdue reading of Iceland by Jim Krusoe, picked up on the recommendation of a fellow ilxor during one of those Dalkey Archive sales. it's a fast read (I read the first 5 of 6 parts in between work this weekend), and reminds me a little bit of Cesar Aira.

part 6 (admittedly on the shorter side) took all of 20 minutes, so you can see what I mean.
the whole thing has a sort of improvised, unstructured feel to it--not so much unreliable narrator as untidy narrator, working out his story in the telling of it. in contrast to the time compression of Aira, whose novel(la)s tend to be squeezed into an afternoon, this one stretches over years in a very casual way, while obsessively returning, in greater and greater detail, to a chance encounter that happens in the first 5 pages of the novel.

stretches over years in a very casual way = (***minor SPOILER alert***) at one point the narrator runs out of money, begins robbing convenience stores to support his girlfriend Sally's drug habit, gets caught, serves half of a 10-year sentence and gets out ("So I left prison in a hurry (who wouldn't?) and headed back to Sally's") which all takes about 5 pages

speaking of unreliable narrators: just finished machado de assis' epitaph of a small winner (posthumous memoirs of bras cubas). mindblowing that this was published in 1880! just about to start on lucio's confession by mario de sa-carneiro, then maybe finally onto the pessoa & co selected poems...

Always Astonished, a collection of prose pieces by Pessoa. All the heteronyms in dialogue(s) with one another..

Robert Walser - Berlin Stories. The most substantial looking stories about insubstantial matter, ever. Was reading a story of his around people being squeezed on public transport...while packed on the tube. One of those days. Can make you feel happy on one line, sad the next.

Finishing off Trakl's poems. Thinking of Joyce a lot - how all those word choice and the way they go (something that Treeship said on another thread) are so alien and made-up but have the look and feel and rightitude. Not that Joyce invents any of this. Words like 'guitar', 'flute', 'wine', come up time and again, the only thing holding these constructions together.

A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Richard Hamer)

i like the ones about going to cafes and looking at the food and eating a sausage or whatever

"Sausages bathed in sunshine look so splendid"

PK Dick,

'Upon the Dull Earth'
'Autofac'
'The Minority Report'

PKD, 'The Days of Perky Pat' (1963)
incredible satire, crushing bathos

recently finished:

a. b. yehoshua - a woman in jerusalem
i thought this was pretty good. i'd only ever read some short story or stories of his. none of the characters (except the titular character) have names. an interesting immigrant story.

knut hamsun - the wanderer
my first hamsun book, and i totally see his influence in hemmingway's writing. really interesting socialism in this book. given hamsun's background and the time he came of age, it makes sense he'd write with a focus on labor. i really love the way he describes things.

richard yates - revolutionary road
one of my new favorite american authors of the 20th century. this was one of the best books i've read in a while.

yes, read all the yates!

Kafka - Letters to Felice. K's writing -- in his diaries and stories -- is always hard to read. Hard in the sense that he transmits a suffocation to me, you are breathing differently. In some ways its what I want out of fiction...here its a different mode. You are skipping ahead. In his stories every sentence matters, everything rigorously placed, with a feeling you are just above water. Here there is repetition, anger - you get the sense that Felice isn't very smart. She is certainly patient to put up with this behaviour. I have a copy of Letters to Milena at a meager 150 pages, as opposed to 500 here - willing to bet this kind of thing wore thin with her.

I'll report back.

One of the letters has him complaining how he can't use the phone, feels unnatural to him - analogous to that funny scene in In Search of Lost Time.

Also making my way through Brecht's poetry and an anthology of German poetry - Gottfried Benn gets a big tick from me.

I appreciated Mysteries but just personally didn't care for the narrative style.

Starting up Life and Times of Michael K

those early benn poems are something, didn't really care for his later more classically inclined work. his prose is well worth a look too.

finished the pessoa & co selected poems: enjoyed the cendrars-lite campos stuff, probably need to give this a more thorough read than i did to really appreciate what he was doing, i guess. starting on borges' a personal anthology selection...

Oh right could you point me toward a collection of Benn's prose?

not sure how much of his work is available in translation, i just have the primal vision selection new directions put out in the early seventies, 200 pages of prose (stories, novel excerpts, criticism, post-war mea culpas) + a selection of his poetry. some really amazing stuff in there (as well as morally questionable). always wondered if he's the dr. benn george grosz mentions in his autobiography.

I know there has been a translation of some of his late poetry. It would've been good to read that vol right now. On a cracking run of reading, making lots of discoveries.

Finished SELECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK.

I have a 550-page anthology of Judith Merril - I should probably start on that soon.

Burroughs' Queer (a quick one)

(I guess I shd've read Junky first)

Junky and Queer are his best books

Being away on a brief beach vacation, I declined to pack all 3 lbs of Demons, so that I've just been breezing through Oranges by John McPhee today. I also brought My Antonia and Aiding and Abetting with me. I'll resume Demons next week.

S., the JJ Abrams/Doug Dorst found object.
2/3rds of the way through Moby Dick on my ereader. I just finished the chapter on the tail. It came after the chapter on the blowhole. I can only force myself through one of these a day.

the blackness of the blowhole

how good/bad is 's.'

the novel text is quite bad, but the gimmicks are fun. seems more 'puzzle book' than 'post-modern' (house of leaves was more of the latter).

Cees Nooteboom: The Following Story -- never read him before, wasn't quite sure what to expect, but this is really good so far

I finished Oranges, then I finished Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark. Now I am on to My Antonia. I also purchased a copy of Gilead in case I got through the Cather too quickly. I'll save that one for later.

Decided it was finally time to dive into Yukio Mishima and that I may as well start with The Sea of Fertility. So far Spring Snow is really great.

Cees Nooteboom: The Following Story -- never read him before, wasn't quite sure what to expect, but this is really good so far

A small book but a complex story, it was a gift book in Holland in 1991 during a national book week. Without any knowledge of mythology this may be a hard read. His Spain-book is very good (the majority of this work is non-fiction).

Just finished ´Woes of the true policeman´ by Bolaño, which reminded me a lot of ´Naked Lunch´ for its fragmentary style. Also reading ´Near to the wild heart´ by Clarice Lispector. Hypersensitive, which makes it so good.

rereading at the start of 'against the day' a bit

it's a good read, draws you along, but i had forgotten how derailing it can be that every single sentence has at least one thing magnificent about it, and a magnificence you don't even see coming

Brecht - Complete Poems. Went to Brecht's thread on ILE for this.

Kafka - letters to Milena. More so than Felice, here you have someone's illness and fears cut open for one person - and now the world - to see. You could never read his fiction in the same way again. I'm going to re-read The Trial again sometime over the next month.

Hans Magnus Enzenberger - Mausoleum: 37 Ballads on the History of Progress. Poetic biographies of a number of figures who contributed to European thought -- more well known ones such as Darwin or Machiavelli, to minor ones such as Piranesi.

Incredibly exciting. Just the range, poetry as passionate enquiry and thought. Fleshes out what contemporary might mean. In some ways reading this along with Brecht makes the latter appear quite disappointing. Both tackle 'progress' but in the Enzenberger there is concentration, you feel like he is zoning in on the duality of progress -- what it brings us at what cost. Brecht was a curious case: a great poet who didn't really believe in what poetry could do.

Its a shift in politics too: Mausoleum is from the mid-70s. You can't choose your time.

Also reading July's People by Nadine Gordimer which I am not digging at all.

Thomas Bernhard - Gathering Evidence. So it was his grandfather who shaped his worldview...sorta knew this from a couple of articles but here its inescapable.

Decided it was finally time to dive into Yukio Mishima and that I may as well start with The Sea of Fertility. So far Spring Snow is really great.

― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), Saturday, 10 May 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The initial section of the last part (Decay of the Angel) are the highlight imo.

A small book but a complex story, it was a gift book in Holland in 1991 during a national book week. Without any knowledge of mythology this may be a hard read.

A lot of Ovid stuff, but I'm a big ovid fan, so it worked for me!

Started Gravity's Rainbow the other night in a spasm of drunken can-doism, read 50 pages and thought this isn't so tough to follow. Now up to page 85 and bewildered.

Reading The Indian Ocean by Michael Pearson. good fun so far as a distraction from the maths revision i'm supposed to be doing.

Been reading stories from Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You. Frequently laugh out loud funny.

My summer class is in magic realism and metafiction in the short story. This week was Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" (read for the 10th or so time) and Stephen Leacock's "Ho for Happiness" (new to me). Plus some theory from Frye, Bakhtin and Said.

in the midst of too much but a few are winding down

new updike bio by adam begley
alice munro - too much happiness
zeitoun - eggers
galveston - nic pizzolatto

I've been reading more James Baldwin: Going to Meet the Man, which feels less focused for including the outtakes from Go Tell it on the Mountain and some less interesting warmups for Another Country, but which is still worth reading for "The Man Child," the title story, and "Sonny's Blues"; the play Blues for Mr Charlie, which makes interesting use of flashbacks and collective/choral speech but which is less pungent than the portrait of the racist sheriff in "Going to Meet the Man" (which might be Baldwin's most vivid attempt to deal with the scene of lynching and castration that runs through most of Baldwin's work as the key figure of racist terrorism in America); and The Devil Finds Work, which is digressive in much the same way as No Name in the Street but which has some of the most incisive writing that I've read on race in American films.

I also finished The Cantos after reading them off and on for the last several months, although I found Rock-Drill and Thrones (on a first reading, which is probably inadequate--I'll need to revisit those sections with the help of annotations sometime) less rewarding than the first 30 or the Pisan Cantos, and didactic in a less rewarding way than the Adams Cantos. There's also something about the paradisical moments in the later cantos that feels kitschily pseudo-redemptive coming after Pound's wartime commitments. Pound's gestures toward recognizing the limits of his project in the final cantos and fragments were quite moving, though.

Most recently, I finished Delany's Trouble on Triton, which was surprisingly concise and shapely after Dhalgren's drift, and which effectively demolishes the male entitlement and implicit conservatism of one kind of typical SF protagonist (but that might be an oversimplification, since I'm not that well-versed in SF), and am now starting Ann Quin's Three, which manages to build tension though omission of detail, at least in its opening pages--I'm reminded of Gaddis and Henry Green in the way Quinn handles dialogue.

haah. it never really occured to me when reading triton that it was about sf. (even though there's all the stuff in the appendices about it.)

Self-reflexivity about genre probably isn't the most important part of the novel, but it did seem to be implicit in the way Delany relegates both the interplanetary war narrative and any systematic exposition of Triton's libertarian/post-scarcity social order to the background, in favor of examining Bron's self-deception and nostalgia for the old patriarchal order. (I'm still not entirely sure what to do with the appendices myself, and I haven't read LeGuin's The Dispossessed yet, so there are probably also things going on intertexually of which I'm not fully aware.)

I've tried The Pisan Cantos several times. Recommendations on how to approach them?

Offhand, Hugh Kenner's chapter "The Cage" in The Pound Era has a good mixture of exegesis and biographical background (useful since those cantos were written under particularly desperate circumstances), and Richard Sieburth's paperback edition of The Pisan Cantos for New Directions has an excellent introduction and annotations to the text.

My problem has been an inability to enjoy the obscurity for its own sake. The thing is intermittently powerful and moving until a scrap of Greek emerges.

I have that problem too, especially when the later cantos get thick with unglossed Chinese idiograms, so Sieburth's annotations help. I tend to look at The Pisan Cantos as an elegy for Pound's modernist project and, much more disturbingly, for the promise of a stable and cohesive social order Pound had found in Mussolini's fascist state; Pound's mourning, meanwhile, intercut with the jarring material actualities of the prison camp and a wishful sense of the serene endurance of the natural order.

gotta admit I'm looking forward to reading the Van Buren love.

Of all the things which make Pound extraordinary not the least is that he is a great writer – the only one writing in English – who lived through and recorded what it felt like to be defeated in the Second World War.

- C. K. Stead

Thinking about that statement – has anyone read any Francis Stuart? Any good?

Ooh, I could grape a crush...

I've read The Pisan Cantos and didn't really get much out of them. I know people who adore them or have liked them a lot. I can't honestly share that reaction.

I am reading Judith Merril stories, when reading literature, at the moment.

started reading austerlitz yesterday and am almost done with it. don't know if i can say anything intelligent about it yet except wow. the way sebald pulls you gently along with soporific digressions about architecture until you find all of a sudden you are so absorbed in the book you don't want to do anything else but read it is a remarkable trick. i hate the words "haunting" and "powerful" but seriously, the recurring motif of the moths

Yeah, I probably prefer The Rings of Saturn, but the gradations of tone in Austerlitz leading up to the passages on Theresienstadt are just masterful. I can't remember if it's already been posted on ILX, but I feel obligated to link to Sebald's reading for Austerlitz a couple of months before his death (the reading proper begins around 4:30): http://youtu.be/ccMCGjWLlhY

for "reading for" read "reading from"

Gonna re-read a couple of his books this year but I developed a bit of an allergy toward Sebald. I don't like how Sebald seems to go nowhere as a necessity, all random walk fashion and digressions as his normal mode. Only like On the Natral History of Destruction, not fiction though.

Finished Gathering Evidence - great stuff, fascinating how Bernhard's outlook was taken from his grandfather (or so he says, not about to enirely believe him). Similar to much of his fiction where the side character parrots the main one's world view. You get insights into his hatreds toward education (his time in grammar school), western medicine (his time spent with doctors and hospitals). Then other things too like the destruction of Austria at the end of WWII, his fraught relationships with his mother and the felt absence of his father.

Now onto Wittgenstein's Nephew.

Thinking about that statement – has anyone read any Francis Stuart? Any good?

Decided to start Black List Section H to answer my own question. It's good – chilly (slightly creepy tbh) sensibility, clear style to go with it, pruriently interesting subject (essentially autobiographical, he's just marrying Iseult Gonne at the mo).

first was "every love story is a ghost story" by dt max, about david foster wallace

now it's "white noise."

next it's ?????

middlemarch

It sounds ridiculous because this isn't the way people usually talk about this book but I'm pretty sure Ulysses lifted me out of a depression and I still think it's the most important book I've ever read for reasons I'm not articulate enough to adequately explain, especially not now because I'm super drunk. But that's what you should read markers

middlemarch

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp),

oh man

Yeah that's a good one too

Finished Bernhard's Concrete as well, one of his best. I love how he hammers on -- both aggressively and comically in the same page. I keep laughing. The same themes repeat themselves over and over. You have the meeting with Paul Wittgenstein, his hatred of Vienna, of his sister. Crucially, he hates himself too. In every one of his work there will be one episode that will mark it out from the rest, in this case a trip to Spain..

Thinking of taking a break from my German reading project but I know what I'm going to read instead: Celine's Castle to Castle, the first part of his trilogy (written after he was given the pardon by the French Government).

Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been great and inspirational so far.

treesh, that's a good idea! thanks.

Finished Kavalier and Clay: loved it up until the last twenty pages. I don't feel like Chabon knew where to end it. That said, the rest was outstanding.

Now it's on to some Henry James: Roderick Hudson first...

(also started Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. Love the Altman-style approach to New York music in the 70s. A+ so far.)

Just finished The Waterworks by EL Doctorow. Damn he's good. Mordant reflections on post-Civil War New York, Boss Tweed, inequality and the price of progress wrapped in a detective story. A lot of people try to write literary page-turners but this is one of the best I've read. The third Doctorow I've read - all different, all brilliant.

Have you read The Book of Daniel? The Doctorow I got most involved with: decades ago, but remember it better than some things I read this year.

Yeah, I read Daniel just before The Waterworks and Ragtime last year. Billy Bathgate next.

Lyrical Ballads
Eden Philpotts - The Red Redmaynes
Thomas Piketty - Capital in the 21st Century (along with everyone else)
Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver
Terry Eagleton - The Ideology of the Aesthetic
Llewelyn Powys - Earth Memories (essays on nature, his tuberculosis, and a superb essay on Pieter Breughel - 'There have appeared from time to time in all countries certain artists who have discounted that whole field of religious and metaphysical experience which to many sensitive natures would alone seem to render the rudeness of life tolerable')
W Benjamin - The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism (*again*)
Walter de la Mare - Desert Islands (Also excellent - a long, discursive essay on desert islands and solitude, physical and metaphysical, and one of those books where you can read three paragraphs, and suddenly find yourself unsure of the argument that has brought you to your current point. that is because the argument proceeds by sympathies rather than syllogisms, and is that form of criticism common to the late 19th and early 20th - eviscerated New Criticism of course - which often isn't very analytical, or not obviously so, and relies on the sensitivities of the writer. Fortunately WdlM is an exceptionally sensitive, and acute too. His section on Robinson Crusoe and Defoe is very good. Also one of those likeable books where the footnotes ramble on without ever really considering that they might need to stop - the one for Drugged2 goes on for eight pages and quotes extensively from de Quincey. The footnotes as a total account for more than half the book.

The vivid and positive realization of this [that 'We mortal millions live *alone*'] may come seldom, but, when it does, it is sharp and appalling. The moment falls, unforeseen, inexplicable and, as if at the insidious wave of an enchanter's wand, the faces, the voices of the believed-in and beloved seem to be nothing but the creation of our own fantasy, and we are 'enisled'. Even the 'echoes' then, like the languageless scream of sea-bird and the drumming of wave on rock, are nothing but a mockery. We may work or play away most of our lives in evading this realization, but in the end we shall become our own Showman's boy and know that as mortals we are alone.

And though, before that end come, and in spite of the ramifications of butcher, baker, postman and tax collector, the kind of solitude one may pine for is to be found even in the England of our own day, and that of the astronomer, the bookworm, the miser, the lover and the king are not beyond imagining; of the extreme spiritual solitudes familiar to many of our fellow-creatures we can be but vaguely aware. What spectres share the small hours with a criminal hemmed in at every turn by the physical and moral forces of order - an animal rejected of its kind? The solitude of the lunatic, of the devil-haunted, the habitually drugged? One savours a taste of this world's romance indeed with the realization that the cold relics on the dissecting-tables and in the brine-tanks of our hospitals, of which there appears to be an unfailing supply, are the refuse of men and women abandoned by life to so desolate a loneliness that there is no one on earth who will spare the time or the few shillings necessary to secure them a *friendly* burial.

I finished Demons last night, without any sense of revelation as I put it down. As often before, I found myself admiring Dostoevsky's ability to imagine the psychology of characters in precarious states of mind, but tiring of how everyone in the book was mentally in extremis. I recognize that this is a hallmark of tragedy, but I prefer my tragic catharsis in somewhat smaller packages.

Dostoevsky famously drew an unflattering portrait of Turgenev in Demons, but that critique missed its mark with me. I still find Turgenev more congenial than Dostoevsky. Maybe I'm not correctly in tune with the profundities of the Russian soul.

I turned from Demons to resume where I left off in My Antonia, which may be smaller in conception, but felt much more like the world I live in and less like a madhouse.

The Turgenev thing is funny, it was motivated by pure malice really. FD owed him money or something iirc, and although t never asked for it back, fd always resented him for it. Iirc!

I'm with the big-uppers itt, I love the crescendo of torment

Zdenek Jirotka: Saturnin -- a real oddity from 1942, but lots of fun: a Czech remix of Wodehouse, basically, except that the Bertie character has brains and the Jeeves character is a compulsive liar and occasionally a violent anarchist

Hey Fizz, drink soon? + what do you think of the Eagleton + the Stephenson (I have probably complained about this before - cannot read it).

xpost: have never heard of that, but sounds very enticing. at the moment most of the way through a rereading of the good soldier svejk.

I am reading Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances, and wondering why I never read it sooner, but also vaguely fearing its pernicious influence.

Roderick Random picking up steam again around 2/3rds of the way thru, now that he's (**lite spoilers??**) back in London, moving in 'society'...

also picked up Raymond Williams The Country & the City, which I had previously set down somewhere in the early 1800s (just after the discussion of Wordsworth's 'Residence in London'), and am now three or four chapters from the end, taking my time & following up leads that look interesting (reading James Thomson for the first time has been particularly rewarding)

Roderick Hudson? Yeah, it's an amazing second novel as far as tonal and point of view control.

other stuff Williams has made me want to read: more Hardy (Tess and maybe Return of the Native?), Gissing's Demos, Tono-Bungay, Cold Comfort Farm, Richard Jefferies...

xpost: nah, Roderick Random, the zany picaresque by Smollett... but if you think the Henry James is worth reading (bearing in mind that I've yet to take on one of his novels), I'll keep an eye out for it

I second (and third) any recommendation to read Hardy.

the peculiar institution by stampp. don't remember a book affecting me quite like this one does. it's a seemingly objective narrative about the history of slavery in america but to read accounts and quotes and all in such cold language is proving pretty difficult.

love richard jefferies!!!

that gissing is one of his early ones, right? new grub street and the odd women are really great, couple of others i've read of his were marred for me by their elements of melodrama.

I second (and third) any recommendation to read Hardy.

I'm currently reading Two on a Tower by hardy having read Tess and Jude last year. Am working my way up to my o'level bete noir, far from the madding crowd.

I loved the bleakness of tess, those bits where she's pulling root vegetables out of flinty soul in winter. Jude less so. T on a T is a much slighter book than either of those so far.

Demos is from 1886, set among the socialist movement(s) of its day, which is the main draw for me; I also have a copy of New Grub Street sitting on my shelf that I've never read.

Still largely reading sewing books David Coffin Page, Alison Smith and Winifred Aldrich

also got Bedlam a history of the insane in London by Catharine Arnold which is interesting.

& Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi which is about the various birth defects etc throughout history and what causes them. Been mainly reading this on the bus when I'm not in the mood for studying clothing so reading it slowly.

I read Two in a Tower last April. There's an unbelievable twist that ruins the book.

Ellipses roll on in Celine's North...

I finished My Antonia which was a quietly pleasant book. The characters were well drawn and engaging. The overall atmosphere was nostalgic, but not so misty-eyed that you failed to notice a fair dose of realism mixed in. A nice low-key read.

I've got a dozen contenders for my next book to read and no clue yet which one will rise to the top.

I'm reading R Hudson right now. Still early but James does in fact seem like a master.

Last night I ventured into The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh, which I've been curious about, but I'm only 50 pages into it and my curiosity is more or less sated. The auditory hallucinations are in full swing, and a mild paranoia is building, but I don't feel the need to see their full development; I have the gist already. I did quite enjoy the opening, where he turns his satiric gaze upon himself in advanced middle age and dismisses himself as hardly worth the attention.

I may bounce to another book tonight.

okay now I wanna read the Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

been jumping around in Jefferies' collection of magazine writings, Hodge and His Masters, which I am very much enjoying (&) feeling educated by... anyone recommend the novels? or other collections?

Hey Fizz, drink soon? + what do you think of the Eagleton + the Stephenson (I have probably complained about this before - cannot read it).

― woof, Wednesday, 21 May 2014 08:32 (4 days ago) Bookmark

hey,

eagleton - I went specifically to it cos i wanted a quick primer on the mechanisms that transmitted the sublime to the self, or at least a run through of the romantic aesthetic model, so i was chasing through it trying to find relevant stuff. i felt in that respect it wasn't very satisfactory, then i considered, and felt in other respects, and mainly for the same reasons it wasn't really very satisfactory either.

the general tone is of a clumsy knight at a tournament, laying about him with a lance, using it any which way - club, spear, battering ram - and taking out knights, trees, grandstands, the good and the bad, with a bombastic indifference to anything but his own banging around. it's a classic example much of the time of polemic by adverb and adjective, surely we must, costs are 'dire', things are 'perilously' at odds. if you take out the various tonal adjustments, you find there's much to disagree with (you can only agree that a 'dire cost' is bad, but a simple 'cost' - well that may be good or bad, depends what you want really).

he has a habit of furious equivocation and aggressive but irrelevant generalisation: "for if sensation is characterised by a complex individuation that defeats the general concept, so is history itself" resounding! wait, what did he say? precisely nothing. he continues "both phenomena are marked by an irreducible particularity or concrete determinateness which threatens to put them beyond the bounds of abstract thought." threatens is such a pusillanimous word! does it or doesn't it! abstract thought is a pretty capable tool you know terry - this is why his argument proceeds by adverbs, his thrusts are static - he never says, *if* such and such does this *then* such and such.

the topic is not at all uninteresting tho - if someone knows a good book on the politicisation of the senses (marxist or no!) such as eagleton's almost becomes in its better moments - then let me know! I've got no objection to theoretical fusillades, with a heavy bias to proving themselves, but her the froth whips itself without much coherent analysis (and i mean that strictly - there is analysis, but it doesn't progress and it's not coherent - the realist novel can come flying in a piece of Burke before he cuts to a scene of him clubbing Hume - an better thinker and more enjoyable writer).

Some of his characterisations of the 'feminine' will raise a knowing eyebrow for anyone who heard a tittle of the tattle surrounding him in his academic career.

the Stephenson is odd - i didn't realise, or had forgotten, you didn't get on with Quicksilve (and presumably the rest of the baroque trilogy) woof. I've been reading it perfectly happily for a while now, but from fairly early on with a consciousness that it isn't really doing anything, going anywhere, and given that he's clearly happy to be fairly flippant or spurious with the period tools at his disposal, doesn't really make use of that playfulness to *really* mess with the concepts. i've never read any stephenson before, so haven't got anything to compare it to. (it's a bit odd i haven't read any before, in theory he shd be my sort of thing - i did pick up Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon back in the day, but barely stated them before getting distracted. Possibly for some of the same reasons as with QS.)

Drink wd be good. no mobile at the moment...

oh and I think North is wonderful. That late Celine style is ridiculously readable considering how much it dispenses with conventional sentence cadences. (oh, and I've remembered something else i was going to say about the stephenson - I think VS Pritchett once said that good writing (possibly it was just 'writing') is by and large a question of emphasis - i don't get any sense of that with QS. it's like it could carry on forever, there's no sense of a rhythm of concision and description, such that you can get a sense of the work's inner obsessions.

overheard. in a second-hand bookshop yesterday: 'Yeah, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is ok I guess.'

THY DAMNATION SLUMBERETH NOT.

tho Hardy is enormously complicated for my by a) not really having read any of the novels since i grabbed Far From the Madding Crowd just before jumping on a bus for a night out, and by the time I'd reached my destination was so depressed i headed straight back.
b) a girl for whom i have long had an unrequited passion having written her graduate thesis on the poetry of Hardy.

can't really go there any more.

I finished Demons last night, without any sense of revelation as I put it down. As often before, I found myself admiring Dostoevsky's ability to imagine the psychology of characters in precarious states of mind, but tiring of how everyone in the book was mentally in extremis. I recognize that this is a hallmark of tragedy, but I prefer my tragic catharsis in somewhat smaller packages.

Dostoevsky famously drew an unflattering portrait of Turgenev in Demons, but that critique missed its mark with me. I still find Turgenev more congenial than Dostoevsky. Maybe I'm not correctly in tune with the profundities of the Russian soul.

I turned from Demons to resume where I left off in My Antonia, which may be smaller in conception, but felt much more like the world I live in and less like a madhouse.

wins otm that the turgenev dig seems 100% personal and not much to do with his writing, altho i guess dusty was shocked by bazarov. (between the two of them peter and nick surpass bazarov imo, though/because fathers and sons is a much neater, less hysterical, less confused novel.) karmazinov is less like my idea of turgenev and more like the wants-to-be-down dad in fathers and sons, who did not strike me as that book's moral center. like everything around him he's more cartoonish than that character but some of his scenes are pretty lol: the one where he begs peter to tell him the date of the revolution, or just to give him a hint; getting booed for his nonsensical modernist dream-speech. of the book's more clueless characters tho i much prefer The Governor Of Our Province, devoted to his intricate paper models of perfect towns and churches, innocently telling his aghast wife he lent peter one of his collection of revolutionary tracts. "the fire isn't on the rooftops. the fire is in their minds."

otm that almost everyone in the book is in mental extremis (possessed!) and i can see how this could be exhausting. overstuffed antic tragedy may be my ideal genre tho. (hamlet.) also there is such a variety of extremis. my favorite is kirillov, contemplating suicide, whom characters are always calling on at two in the morning to find him standing in the middle of the room. "Kirillov was standing in the middle of the room." once he's playing with a ball. casts a sense of blank calm over his character that's well-exploited in his tarantino-esque (talk talk talk sweat sweat sweat talk talk talk VIOLENCE) scene with peter near the end. anyway cool that u persisted aimless.

re: jefferies, would recommend unreservedly bevis, amaryllis at the fair (unlike any other english novel of that period i've read), the amateur poacher and his "autobiography" the story of my heart. after london is interesting, particularly the imagining of a post-apocalyptic london turned swamp emanating toxic fumes, but not a great novel (the old oxford world's classics edition has an excellent introduction by john fowles). was also a major inspiration for morris' news from nowhere. there are quite a few collections of his nature writings including a penguin selection from the eighties (blanking on the title) which did a good job of tracing his increasing leftward radicalisation.

...and googling around, i've managed to find q.d. leavis' essay on jefferies which i've long wanted to read (takes umbrage at the editors of some of his collections which try to fit him into their own mostly conservative worldview)

Two On A Tower has got to the point where there's been so much coincidence, so many last minutes setbacks that i've started reading it as a farce.

Celine - North. Finished that, and yes I think it is pretty readable although he problematizes by the fragmentary manner he'll switch episodes within chapters. And then he'll switch to an current day-of-writing-this-thing episode where he is sitting at his desk, his wife is watching TV in the next room (he hates all of the culture, not that anyone ever reads books anyway!) or his secretary comes in to 'criticize' him, just a jumping off to load pity onto himself. This doesn't come across as pathetic in any major way as its a device for him to not give up, plough on and attack back. This comes across as very funny, grotesque, and very Rabelasian (and Rabelais is revered but also I think not very much 'used' in a lot of French 20th century lit I've read). You do take his points around the French establishment, it was interesting finishing that off while watching the far-right wins in the European elections (an anti-establishment euro-elite vote).

The writing here is much better than in Journey... (its great but in a different way).

In terms of writing the ratio of ellipses to exclamation marks seems to favour the former a lot more, there seems to be a lot more 'control' to the detonations than in Castle to Castle.

There was only one passing attack on Sartre - had to get my fill by reading this instead. Hoping for me like it in Rigadoon, the last volume of the trilogy - really one of the best war novels (from a POV that most war novels are wack and really the action is off screen), so here the way in which Celine makes you aware of the bombs all around Berlin and the torment that induces - on the reader more than the character; Celine is in two minds about writing this...he is 'bored' at points, but he will re-introduce bomb sounds and descriptions of rubble, bought to mind Rosselini's Germany Year Zero.

Also finished a volume of 20th Century German Poems (ed. Michael Hofmann) (been reading a few every few days for the last couple of weeks), and now onto a selection of Enzensberger's poetry.

xps,
yes It's oddly unimpressive, Ideology of the Aesthetic, given that it's in theory his Big Book. I go back to it every now and again to see if it's got much better, but I don't think it has - iirc all the 80s/90s grounding-in-the-body stuff in particular feels a bad fit (and yeah a little crepey given his rep). I feel like there's a half-the-length, quite snappy, higher-journalistic history of the category of the aesthetic in there somewhere, but I guess at that point he hadn't really found out that he wasn't a serious-serious thinker/theorist (has he now? idk, but I suspect he's closer to knowing his strengths and limits.).

It happens that I know THE IDEOLOGY OF THE AESTHETIC quite well. This is unusual (I don't know well most books people talk about here). I like it but I don't know if I can defend, or even really understand, its argument/s.

I read Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. It was good. It was funny and light-hearted or spirited - rather as though the whole thing was a jape - a lot of the time, though not all the time. I like how RC invents the giant Moose Malloy.

I just read the latest LRB review of the Knausgaard geezer. I still do not understand why people think he is good. Of course I have not read him. I think if I read him I might hate him for writing all this stuff that people think is good and I don't really.

I still do not understand why people think he is good.

vs.

Of course I have not read him.

I can sympathise with that, waterface. it feels like a judgment we make more or less usefully all the time. usually comprises the approach, what they represent, the response good or bad of the type of critic one knows, or just that certain people choose to write about him, the manner that you've picked up from quotes, interviews etc. where those interviews appear. the manner of the public presentation.

Also, pf seems to be saying (and with anyone else I we say this was an obtuse interpretation), "no one has satisfactorily presented to me why people think he is good. I sense an absense that makes me suspicious."

these things may be, held up to he light, somewhat sketchy, but if know no one who doesn't have some sort of similar handy and hopefully flexible set of judgments to enable them to manage a sense of what might and might not be worth reading for you.

what should I read after "The Alexandria Quartet"-

"The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
"The Crisis of the European Mind"
"A Death in the Family"
"The Glass Bead Game"
"Hunger"

say something about it please, if you recommend.

Hunger for sure, or the Hesse and you can tell me about it. I picked that up for a couple of quid a week ago but don't know if I want to read it, sounds like cobblers.

I just read "The Glass Bead Game" a couple months ago. It was really good.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is utterly amazing, but it is a whole world to immerse yourself in, and reading the whole magilla is a months long undertaking. I will always stan for it, but unless you're prepared for that kind of commitment to one book, you'd be better off just pecking at it a bit to get the flavor and then setting it aside until you feel ready to really chew on it.

Hunger is also pretty damned amazing and can be read in a few sittings, so it is probably a more appropriate recommendation.

I will always say Gibbon, see this thread for me + others effusing:
edward gibbon's "the decline & fall of the roman empire": C/D?
But Crisis of the European Mind is a really great book. It's still the best introduction to that early Enlightenment period imo – everything else is pretty grimly academic in one way or another. Hazard gets the mess and sprawl and interconnections of the European cultural world then, and is good at making connections & racing through stuff making it all seem quite urgent. An excellent review by David Auerbach.

otoh if you don't want to know about the early enlightenment give it a miss.

an old penguin 20th-c russian lit reader i had a copy of ages ago and lost

i am still reading middlemarch! almost to book 2.

i wonder if eliot is better when she can really have a lot of characters in the mix, different perspectives and situations. almost everything about the initial 'courtship' is stilted.

edward gibbon's "the decline & fall of the roman empire": C/D?

Really wanted to read this after watching I, Claudius last year (I know it starts after, something to fill in for the 'glory days'). Doubt I'll ever get a nice version of this on paperbackk that isn't the abridged versh.

Does remind I saw a copy of one of the vols lying around in Regent's park - me and friend were thinking of taking it with us. Just left it there, totally regret that now.

Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days. Historical pulp at its best. Also better than Philip (that interview on TV last night was boring).

My most recent book has been Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, a collection of physics lectures by Richard P. Feynman. (It is important to note that, as an author, he always come equipped with that interpolated P.) Most of the math hasn't been especially advanced, and when it has been the gist is obvious enough from the material around it. As someone who lost steam at the trigonometry level and wandered off to count my toes, I appreciate this. I'm not reading it for the proofs, but the concepts.

Sebald, Austerlitz. started reading over the Memorial Day weekend cuz it seemed appropriate (my one earlier attempt having petered out about 1/3 of the way in), finished last night. it's... yeah.

I still think I might prefer Rings of Saturn (which is the only other one of his I've read), if only for being marginally 'lighter'. then again, I'm hardly finished digesting this one.

Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days. Historical pulp at its best. Also better than Philip (that interview on TV last night was boring). The recent Philip-and-his-pals thing in the New Yorker was entertaining (sharing a laugh with the ailing curmudgeon Bellow, puzzling over the pro-Vietnam War/Nixon quirks of Updike). Reminds me, I really enojoyed Henry Roth's Call It Sleep; anybody read the ones from his very belated return? Now back to my daily dose of Gravity's Rainbow (after the great opening/set piece/set-up, not often very enjoyable, or [in these first 250 pages] half as insightful as proclaimed).

Feynman is past and done. The strength of the book is how he ties together quantum mechanical theory with much broader ideas in physics, as well as how QM adds precision to Newtonian mechanics.

I am now reading a feel-good book of sports heroics, which does not precisely fit the mold of such books. It is The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown. It tells the story of the eight-oar gold-medal winning crew from the University of Washington (in Seattle) in the 1936 Olympics, notorious in history as the Hitler Olympics. The angle is that this crew was made up of raw farm boys and logger's kids, who defeated the world's elite. The entire first half of the book recounts their childhoods, so the sports heroics are far from the main focus of the book.

Brad Gooch - City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
Ibsen - The Master Builder

haven't read that Ibsen; did read a plot summary. sounds classik

reading/rereading (can't remember if i ever finished it before) tim weiner's cia history "legacy of ashes," took weekend break to zip through thurston clarke's "jfk's last hundred days."

What'd you think? I read it in two days three weeks ago and thought it was well-wrought hackery.

finished clarence brown's old 20th-c russian reader, which is really good, actually, though kind of loses steam once you get post-kruschev

and read daniel dennett's how-to-think book that isn't really a how-to-think book

i enjoyed it, tho i doubt there was really much new in it -- looking at the sources, he relies almost entirely on other jfk books. i mostly agree with the central thesis that kennedy was going in a mostly positive direction by the time of his death, but the 'day by day' format, where you get pages upon pages about jackie's trip to greece and whether or not jfk approved of her haircut on the day she was meeting with the ambassador (etc), didn't always serve that thesis well.

and all that jazz about how he and Jackie were Growing Closer.

Currently reading "The Captive Mind" by Czeslaw Milosz. I am enjoying it, though academic non-fiction usually kinda bores me.

finished the svejk rereading and still more hilarious than not: by the end you get the impression he could have gone on forever with it (if he hadn't died)... starting on grimmelshausen's 17th century novel about the thirty year's war simplicius simplicissimus

the dennett book was weird, like, the blurb and cover set it up as being a how-to-think book but by the halfway point he's shifted directions and he's nominally using the how-to-think book format still but in the service of popularising his arguments about free will, consciousness, evolution

i read the first 20 pages of eimear mcbride's 'a girl is a half formed thing' this morning and i feel v resistant. at the start of the HULLO CYCLE OF ABUSE scene near the beginning the narrator's mother's father says something about "Half the parish doing novena's night and day." (before he has a go at their mam which results in her immediately laying her hands upon them as soon as he's out the door, because do you see.) but -- "novena's"? really? half the parish doing novena's what now? her laundry? her bidding? her correspondence course in clichés of grim irish literature?

Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days. Historical pulp at its best. Also better than Philip (that interview on TV last night was boring). The recent Philip-and-his-pals thing in the New Yorker was entertaining (sharing a laugh with the ailing curmudgeon Bellow, puzzling over the pro-Vietnam War/Nixon quirks of Updike). Reminds me, I really enojoyed Henry Roth's Call It Sleep; anybody read the ones from his very belated return? Now back to my daily dose of Gravity's Rainbow (after the great opening/set piece/set-up, not often very enjoyable, or [in these first 250 pages] half as insightful as proclaimed).

That New Yorker piece doesn't sound too appealing but I'll have a look. I just find these people not to be that good at all on the very little evidence. Like Pynchon a lot more (or maybe just GR and parts of Vineland), maybe because he doesn't talk at all.

Joseph Roth - Antichrist. This is amazing, like a series of monologes on modernity and its failures and the madness it provokes (not as pompous as that sounds) - a post WWI thing. Small and not epic so it slips through but really U+K if you like (Joseph) Roth. Love his rage at cinema - people selling thier shadows for money.

Poems by Heine.

Ingeborg Bachmann - Last Living Words. A collection of short stories and poems. I need to read Manners of Death again. Think that's amazing from the skim I gave it but I couldn't tell you why.

man I find it hard to imagine gr "unenjoyable". idk who finds it insightful, though, I mean, hippies

Assumed it could be insightful about 'the nature of paranoia' but I never read it for that or anything.

Vineland is about (if anything, because Pynchon writes about everything) how the 60s became the 80s but its been a long time since I read it.

i don't recall a recent NYer piece like that? you sure it was there?

there's a touch of that stuff in updikes new bio

It's "The Book of Laughter," by Claudia Roth Pierpont (from a forthcoming full-length bio, I think), in the 10/13/2013 issue: subscribers-only in the archive, although the first taste is free (here's most of it):
Philip Roth went through the editing of an entire book with Veronica Geng before they finally met and became fast friends—-or, as Roth recalls, before “we began to make each other laugh.” Geng was an editor at this magazine, as well as a writer of sharp-edged social satires, when she sent a letter to Roth, in the late seventies, saying how much she admired his work and asking if he had anything that The New Yorker might publish. It was more than fifteen years since he’d appeared in these pages, and the magazine had widely come to be considered Updike country; Roth says he had concluded that the powers that be just “didn’t care for my stuff.” He had no short stories to offer. But he had recently completed a novel, “The Ghost Writer,” and he sent it to Geng to read. Her reaction, she later told Roth, was to march into the office of the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, put the manuscript on his desk, and say, “We should publish the whole thing.”

Roth was living in London at the time, and he and Geng worked on the book long-distance, in sessions that sometimes lasted close to an hour. Roth has always been ruthlessly self-critical while he is writing. The natural ease and the confiding voice so familiar to his readers are a somewhat deceptive achievement, a hard-won part of the art. He habitually wrote numerous drafts of a book before he approached satisfaction, and he speaks appreciatively of editors at various publishing houses over the fifty-plus years of his career. But he reserves special praise for Geng’s ability to zero in on problems. (“Not the tiniest piece of crap eluded her” is how he puts it. “She invariably landed squarely on what was wrong and left me to face it down, if I could.”) Many readers still consider “The Ghost Writer,” the novel that introduced Nathan Zuckerman and reimagined the story of Anne Frank, to be Roth’s most perfect work. The New Yorker published it, in its entirety, in two installments, in the summer of 1979...

The source of the laughter that sealed Roth’s friendship with Geng...can be found in her writing no less than in his...Her contribution to the vogue for memoirs about affairs with famous men was a six-page essay titled “My Mao.” (“He was round, placid, smooth as a cheese.”) The wedding announcements in the Times prompted some of her most memorable lines: “The bride, an alumna of the Royal Doulton School . . . is also a descendant of Bergdorf Goodman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her previous marriage ended in pharmaceuticals.”

the books out. god who likes Philip Roth enough to write a book about him tho. god

I promise to shut up about Gravity's Rainbow 'til I finish, but having brought it up, I'll add that I did enjoy his early work: the stories collected in Slow Learner, The Crying of Lot 49 and V.. But after the first chapter, his old foibles, quirks and obsessions seem writ huge: the deadpan, in your-face/why-not meta-gags lose their timing (he doesn't have much feel or enthusiasm for his Euro enviros), his hazy musings on rubble and doom go murky, also on forever), reasons to care about the characters and the "intrigue" emerge very slowly, in between immersions in pretentious stream-of-consciousness and oracular pronouncements. Although the bit about the stages of experimental conditioning (especially the paradoxical, which can consist of salivating more when stimulated less, and, most of all the ultra-paradoxical, where you turn your back on the good stuff, then sniff, scratch and bite the vessel when it's empty)--I've been there! But so far, none of the characters have, far as I can tell. Oh well, maybe in another 250 pages or so...
He seemed like he was being too hard on his earlier work(for one thing, he eventually decided he'd gotten entrophy all wrong, or too wrong) in his charmingly rueful intro to the 90s-publishedSlow Learner, but I'm starting to agree. He (presently)resembles the hero of Bellow's stage comedy The Last Analysis: a truly gifted and thoughtful comic artist who's trying too hard to get serious and go deep. But it does pull me along, and I'll read all his others, I hope.

Aimless, if you want more writing about the Olympics, take a look at David Maraniss's Rome 1960. It's detailed, spacious, not solemn but serious, very entertaining: multidimensional as hell, with no traffic jams.

Also, I promise not to type with my thumbs anymore (sorry).

i am like 300pp into that zia haider rahman novel that james wood flipped his shit over in the new yorker the other week. in the light of what we know.

wood mentions austerlitz as an influence in his review but it's more of a wholesale ripoff imo. except twice as long and with any humor or humanity sucked right out of it. i'ma finish it b/c i sense some lurid reveal coming, surely to be couched in plodding "precise" prose and stupid, fucking, footnotes.

sounds a treat

yeah it grapples with the important issues of our time

Thanks for the warning, adam. I wondered what Wood was on about.

footnotes in novels in 2014 feel like what i imagine dubstep drops in pop songs will feel like in 2025.

dow i sort of want to insist you're reading it wrong, somehow, but i don't know if you are; the last couple times I've tried to reread it I've dropped out early for reasons perhaps not unlike those you're describing; it feels a bit like trying to hold a long conversation with a stoned acquaintance who you used to have a lot more patience for. this is perhaps an unduly obvious claim.

I do enjoy all his stage Britishers. the zone doesn't quite hit the spot the same way, tho I guess I have less material to triangulate with.

who the fuck would want to rwad a novel written by an inverstment banker anyway

talkin bout that zia novel

thank you for the recommendation, dow. I am always open to hearing about any book, on any subject whatsoever, that an ILB member finds highly meritorious.

A few library books. The Fools of Shakespeare: An Interpretation of Their Wit, Wisdom, and Personalities, by Frederick Warde, published in 1913. I was surprised on opening it to find that Warde wasn't a scholar, he was a stage and screen actor. He didn't play fools and clowns himself, but he knew and worked with the actors of his time who did. The book is very warmly written and reads like a tribute to his friends.

Also Anne Vallely's Guardians of the Transcendent: An Ethnography of a Jain Ascetic Community, about the author's experiences among Terapanthi Jain ascetics in Ladnun, India.

settling in w Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". good times.

how is that? have owned it for quite a while but have never read more than a few pages, wondering how it compares to more recent histories.

tbh I have never read much about Nazis/WWII, its such a ubiquitous, well-covered topic that I haven't bothered. I'm only 60 pages in but it's v engaging. Trying to make sense of convoluted German internal politics between the wars is sort of head-spinning, so much lunacy and betrayal and double-dealing.

one minor detail I find curious is that Shirer can't really pinpoint why Hitler adopted the hakenkreuzen as a symbol - it's been well established that it's totally ancient, but I guess Hitler doesn't directly address it in Mein Kampf and he came up with the specific Nazi design himself, which is a) an absolute stroke of design genius and b) apparently not without much immediate precedent in modern Europe at the time (altho Shirer does note that for some reason it had cropped up in Estonia and Finland prior to WWI and that the Erhardt Brigade had it painted on their steel helmets when they entered Berlin during the Kapp putsch in 1920). This appropriation has always struck me as strange.

Adolf was an art student. His identification with Aryans is glaringly obvious. The symbol shows up in early Indian art, though Hitler apparently reversed it. Kipling, who was an Anglo-Indian kid, splashed the Indian version of the symbol all over his collected works. One may not be able to trace the exact provenance, but it was not entirely a bolt from the blue.

Hitler never went to art school

(slaps self on wrist)

fixed

On the 'why would you bother with a novel by an investment banker', consider the following passage from this review

After finishing Flash Boys, I found it hard not to think about those missing oceanographers, the computer geniuses and engineers and physicists and entrepreneurs, all those brilliant minds, all that passion and energy disappearing into the black hole of money, lost to all the more productive and interesting things that we humans can do. It’s hard not to feel a sense of loss when you think of what these people would have done, if they hadn’t been sucked into the enterprise of making money out of money. If we ever get enough distance to look back with some sense of perspective on the delirium of modern finance, I think this is what will stand out clearly: that sense of human and intellectual waste.

That James Wood review also gave me the feel of 'Capital'. Immigrants (I refuse to read immigrant novels), money, elites, blah blah, with added name dropping - and yes from that review there is no sense that he has absorbed or in any way processed the supposed extra matter to other thoughts. Or at least I don't know what those might be.

New Grub Street has now sucked me in--I didn't expect it to be such a page-turner!

I'm almost exactly halfway (MINOR SPOILERS** old dude w/ money just died, not sure who inherits what now) & look forward to devouring the second half before week's end

New Grub Street is def one of the most 'readable' of all the Victorian novels, perhaps because of its literary background - it still works as a cautionary tale about the perils of the freelance life.

Finished - Tenth of December by George Saunders - he STILL hasn't topped his first collection, and I'm not sure that the new strain of sentimental realism in his writing really works, but this was still a very enjoyable read.

Now reading - A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick - previous Dick I read was Galactic Pot-Healer, written roughly in the same period, and sharing w/ it that same weird religious comedy tone that goes hand-in-hand w/ a feeling of vertiginous terror, of things - reality, human feeling, existence - slipping away forever. Sur la plage - le void.

tenth of dec was hella disappointing

wgat was Saunders when he was in the world, again? a land surveyor?

Some kind of geologist type person, I think. Slightly strangely, the UK paperback edition of 10th of Dec opens with an article from the New York Times about how great Saunders is, and which I had to Google to make sure it wasn't a satire on obsequious media puff pieces.

I am reading the noted immigrant writer sebalds the rings of Saturn. haha: "noted immigrant" is a recognised string in autocorrect

Yeah, although, as I began to read Tenth of December, I though some of stories worked individually, early on, they all involve predictable elements, incl. social/all-media stereotypes and his usually goofy way with up-to-the-minute teen slang, both symptoms of fatalistic/compassionate sensibilities working overtime, overwrought yet cartoony--though some of these might be effective as actual, caffeine-jittery animations. As it is, even the better ones seem worse in the accumulating context. Got those impression way before the Saundersized version of Updike's "The A & P."
I'm starting to enjoy Gravity's Rainbow more, now that I'm in "In The Zone." It's inspired me to think of his more engaging characters as hopping and scuttling through the cracked mass of his Serious Intentions, sometimes visible as cig-butts in the fog, signaling and reinforcing the slim chance and fleeting thrill of igniting the gassy weather of this slowly collapsing Warballoon. Dang, there's something to this metafiction after all!
Wonder if he may have improvised some of the scenes, to deliberately increase the flickers of contrast, like in progressive rock or third stream jazz? Whatevs, it's currently working, even though he ironically undercuts the chase scenes (but oh, that Significantly kinky sex---bet Burroughs and Delany snoozed right through it).

Speaking of inspiration, PKD siad he got toThe Man In The High Castle via xpost Rise and Fall of The Third Reich and the I Ching. I haven't read Tim Weiner's xpost history of the CIA, but Enemies, which starts when Teddy Roosevelt recruits a young lawyer named J. Edgar to check out threats against the new National Parks, and ends just before Snowden, gradually impressed me like a ride on and through The Russian Ark, in chapters dispensed daily by the Radio Reader.

Shirer's opinions on Nazi sexual proclivities are kind of unfortunate, but par for the course for his generation. While it's worth noting that Roehm and co. were gay, it isn't really necessary to add "unnatural" and "perverts" every time they're mentioned.

another novella that's been on my list for decades, The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

(curious to see the Sellers-Ringo adap as there's no natural movieism here)

the movie is p shitty (literally, by the end)

book is funny altho Southern is guilty of the casual mysogyny of the era iirc, maybe that comes across more in his other books though, I can't remember

this thread has prompted me to pick up demons (the pevear and volokhonsky translation as i enjoyed their tolstoy stuff) after giving up on that stupid zia haider rahman book. enjoying it so far, i think the discussion on this thread will helpful.

also rereading battle cry of freedom because it owns. has anyone read the revolutionary war entry in that series, the glorious cause?

i like that movie but it suffers from idk history

i dunno Southern seems more like a misanthrope (+) than a misogynist to me

i read "the glorious cause" for a class, it's excellent.

New grub Street is super-readable. And the whole message of "You either sell out or you fail miserably" still seems pretty apt.

I've only read two Southerns (Magic Christian and Candy), and his women aren't really what you'd call 3D. But then not a lot of the men are more than 2.5D, so what do I know?

Reading Cecil Lewis: Sagittarius Rising, his memoir of being a 17/18yo WW1 RAf fighter pilot. Very much like the book George (Hugh Laurie) in Blackadder Goes Forth might have written if he had brains (jolly good show crumpets what ho a courageous firey death for me)
http://37.media.tumblr.com/5eaa0f7278605d56379b896954c97630/tumblr_mzcqaxXDFF1qg4gido2_500.jpg

good morning midnight by jean rhys, which is kind of a bummer. also doris kearns goodwin's biography of lbj, which is kind of delightfully 70s-y in its unapologetic, unselfconscious freudianism. i keep thinking of annie hall, especially in the scenes where lbj points out how different goodwin's "harvard" manners are from his own brash texan ways. overall i think this is a very good biography. third and last thing i'm reading -- mostly during down time at work -- is sixty stories by donald barthelme. they remind me of way better versions of clever metafiction experiments i would write in college and then delete from my hard drive. i read these stories almost with a sense of deja vu.

sorry, clever should have read "clever" in the second to last sentence of that post.

Bathed in Lightning the new Colin Harper bio of John McLaughlin up to the early 70s. It's well researched and gives a lot of background on contemporary scenes much like the same author's Dazzling Stranger did with the folk scenes that book's subject Bert Jansch was involved in. Apparently there's even more in the ebook version.
I don't think he had access to Mclaughlin himself though. There are fresh interviews with several other connected people anyway.
I'm really enjoying it as I have with the other material I've read by Harper. Would like a Richard Thompson bio by him, probably other figures too.

go any further w/ the eimear mcbride, tom?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/eimear-mcbride-novel-terms-writing-consciousness

http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/

yeah I finished it earlier, fucking shite

like Donna tartt writing the sound and the fury but every single character is benjy

good morning midnight is actually a masterpiece, sorry i said it was "kind of a bummer" earlier. i had just started it. has to be one of the best depictions of depression in literature. the apocalyptic vision at the end, what happens when she finds she can no longer remain detached or detaches completely i can't tell.

ilb influencing the Amazon algorithms.

http://i.imgur.com/XMQr0ig.png

you know I've been meaning to read the early Rhys. having only read wide sargasso sea which seems like a whole other.

I think Wide Sargasso Sea is actually fairly closely related to the earlier novels in terms of its treatment of gender, although it explores race and madness more explicitly than the other novels, and the way it handles its perspectival shifts is unique (though there's some more limited play with shifting focalization in Quartet and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie). I'd agree with Treeship that Good Morning, Midnight is probably Rhys's most relentless novel: almost like a harder-edged, materialist Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in the way it handles its narrator's rending loneliness in the city. Has anyone read the short stories?

I read 'a month in the country' earlier

and, this morning, 'the planiverse', a very 80s flatland update wherein a tech dept find themselves communicating w a two dimensional world w cathode tube monitors and dot matrix printers

also yesterday the new st aubyn. for my sins

Kafka - The Trial. First time in quite a few years. Too long but so many amazing scenes and characters - the overbearing uncle, Leni the maid who falls in love and chases K. about the place - they take on this other dimension once you read the letters. But then the scene w/the priest (this is a joy to read, maybe the best thing in the book) where they discuss "Before the Law" is something that seems out of nowhere (course it isn't).

In some ways you can see why maybe Kafka didn't feel like publishing this within his lifetime (not read any biogs of his), not only because it wasn't completed - one chapter just stops, and the ending you feel Kafka wrote just to be done with. Otoh it would've been a kind of barbarity (a destruction that Kafka would've found funny no doubt) if Brod had burnt this. Not only that you feel Kafka should've carried on, crafting one more inventive scene after another, towards a trial that never arrives. I am not entirely confident of this - lets face this is somewhat analogous to Musil. The design is 'flawed', in that it couldn't engineer an ending that could satisfy, you feel it must've been fun yet frustrating to write. The ending is when the hand can't write anymore.

I read it in a translation by Douglas Scott and Chris Walker, not the Muir's I read previously. The chunky blocked paragraphs with the priest are rendered so well.

In this case, and a few others, seems like "an ending that could satisfy" would go against the book, against its sense of the web growing and hanging around because it can, because it does, regardless the justification we and the protagonist aren't allowed to see, at least at the present time.

Although if we did, said justification might seem (to little folks like me and you) as arbitrary as the ending.

Finished 'New Grub Street', started on 'Return of the Native' (my one previous attempt having stalled out during the first Book) ; 'Hunger' reread tabled for now. Might do 'Tess' next if I feel like more Hardy/more 1890...

Also dipping into 'Bending the Bow' by Robert Duncan, his last book before the hiatus. Not sure what to make of it yet—a few obvious standouts, including the title poem & the Nerval translations, but I've yet to find a way in (heh) to the "Passages" series that makes up most or the volume.

Finished this, started Far From the Madding Crowd yesterday, the only major Hardy I've skipped. It's Hardy month on ILE!

Does "major Hardy" include Woodlanders, or is that already peripheral?

It's major by most accounts. I love it.

Unexpectedly compelling presentation of the Adams bio; I'll check it out. Speaking of Monroe, have you seen that new bio by Lynn Cheney? Oh my.

Sorry, it's Madison, not Monroe! Shame, the latter seems perfect for her. Next time, maybe.

that Madison bio got a good review. Whatever else, she has a Ph.D.

Gordon S. Wood wrote the good review!

Her dissertation was entitled "Matthew Arnold's Possible Perfection: A Study of the Kantian Strain in Arnold's Poetry".

Since people usually live their lives this way, perhaps blending the significant with the trivial is justified in a narrative biography. No!

Since people usually live their lives this way, perhaps blending the significant with the trivial is justified in a narrative biography. Gordon S. Wood actually wrote this in the New York Times!!

(Even if it's true, he shouldn't encourage that kind of writing; there's shitloads already.)

treeship -- i read goodwin's LBJ book last year, i enjoyed it and agree w/ your thoughts on its stabs at psychoanalysis. in some ways i would recommend it to ppl who wanted to read an LBJ book more than i would robert caro's books, which are great in lots of ways but have never really made johnson come alive as a character for me.

Writing of the trivial is a perfectly acceptable approach to narrative writing, but only if you make a non-trivial use of it.

I started ciaran Carson's translation of the tain. it's really fucking weird.

dow - you are right. Trying to think about this. In some ways its the only ending, the only feel of it is one which is dashed off. What if Musil ended MwQ with the break out of WWI? Obvious, doesn't do justice to the imagination displayed in the preceding chapters.

Sorry that was garbled again. It feels dashed off, the last chapter comes in at only 5 pages. Looks like Kafka wanted this to be out of his system whereas a better option might've been to leave it unwritten.

Now reading: Elias Canetti - Kafka's Other Trial. An essay on his letters to Felice, a response just after their release. This is great, Canetti cross reads through stories, diaries and letters to precisely pinpoint the sources of Kafka's anguished creativity, as well as telling the story. Canetti is aware this could devolve into unconvincing psychoanalytics, its a relief he keeps it to a tight reading.

I finished The Boys in the Boat. It was entirely acceptable reading material. I am now in flux. I picked up We Sagebrush People, Annie Pike Greenwood, a pioneer memoir striving after jocularity that more often just succeeds in being peculiar. I'm not sure I can handle ~500pp of it.

Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines

Really really good.

alberto moravia - boredom

I'll check Canetti's book, thanks. He's really challenging himself with the dangers of psychobabble there.
Wonder what pressures, self-imposed and/or otherwise, Greenwood might've be under? A letter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's editor-daughter is pretty intriguing, re the stuff that got cut (for instance: sexual dangers to frontier girls? Pish, deal with it! But not in this kiddie book.) There are people on the Web claiming to have inherited such materials, sent by Laura via oorrespondence with relatives, friends, fans_discreet safety valves, perhaps.
Anyway, here's the letter from daughter Rose,pragmatic prose pro (what she says makes sense, for her purposes, and many a reader's, no doubt): http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/04/21/rose_wilder_lane_laura_ingalls_wilder_a_letter_from_their_editorial_collaboration.html

Scott Seward recommended Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.

xyzzz have you read Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by Deleuze and Guattari? It's on some of the things you've been posting about - structure & (non-)completion in the novels, connection between letters, stories and novels.

Thanks woof I've not heard of it.

Raced through Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. What a blast. More fun to read than it is to work at Marvel by the sounds of it. I know ILX has a contingent of hardcore Stan Lee-haters but compared to the corporate supervillains who followed him he comes out of it not so badly.

Back to Gravity's Rainbow

Toward a Minor Literature is pretty awesome! A bit marred by the fact that they only analyzed French translations, and acording to the notes in my Danish edition, several of the details they are focusing on only happened in translation. But still. Read that one, and then read the first chapter in Thousand Plateaus and the chapter on Nomadology, and the Minor Science they are talking about. So interesting, though I don't think the rhizomatic literature - the development of Minor Literature - is that common. Used it to analyze Gravity's Rainbow in my master, coincidentally.

Far From the Madding Crowd, the last major Hardy novel I've read. Not as compelling as TMOC or Tess, but every scene in which sheep star is a charmer, and once again he's the master of the throwaway erotic gesture: Troy -- or Boldwood? I forget already -- hiding behind a curtain on which Bathsheba leans.

thinking of minors in that minor lit: about 520 pages into GR, and the section with Polke and his daughter and/or "daughters" was riveting, unlike so much else here; the part where Slothrop fucks Bianca (child)seemed even more pointless than the other sex he's having and/or fantasizing--.either way, very lingered on (ditto the Colonel eating Katje's shit, but that's his prob) How did you analyze any of this, Slothrop/Bianca especially? Don't worry about spoilers; I never do, especially in this book (god when will it end).

Asking Frederick, but all responses are much appreciated.

Well, I didn't really focus on it at all. But there has been written quite a lot on the children in the novel, Lost Children I think I've seen them being called. SPOILER: There will be more of them, and they will be quite touching. To me, they are mainly the preteritest of the preterites, and serve to complicate the elect vs preterition distinction. Which is talked about as being a hard distinction by the characters, and has been used as such to analyze the characters, but for me it's a scale and an ongoing construction. I wanted my pHd to be called 'Do the Preterition', but I can't get funding for it. Sigh. Anyways, they are loads of things, but to me the most important thing is showing how in some cases Slothrop is the elect, just as in other cases the Colonel is more like a preterite (as is pretty much every character in the book at some point, imo)

Scott Seward recommended Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs

It's really good: gentle, perceptive, beautifully written.

Jean Rhys's short stories are well worth looking out for. I advise NOt reading her collected letters/diaries, though: it's an endless litany of 'oh poor me I have no money I cannot cope with the world" x 1000

Thanks, Frederick. I hope little Ludwig finds his pet lemming. Frieda the pig led Slothrop (in his heropig costume) and me to Pokler; good to see him again. Now with Bland and the Masons.

James, I'll check out Jewett; reminds me, the Radio Reader is now presenting The Last Runaway, about an English country Quaker girl who comes to the Ohio frontier, to which she brings some shrewd and sensuous attentions, also a way with quilting which some see as a comment on their own skills, and others as a chance for their own gain. It's by Tracy Chevailier, who wrote Girl With A Pearl Earring(haven't read it, or seen the Scarlett J. movie).
Recently, he read I Shall Be Near To You, by Erin Lindsay McCabe, about a young bride whose new husband goes off to the Civil War, and she soon joins him, disguised as a boy recruit (hubby isn't so thrilled). It's the heroine's first person account, via the rough, practical eloquence of Civil War letters and journals. Here's the link before I forget (stations and schedules of RR streams are here too, but I like his home station best, with its reading for the blind: Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, the Pawnstars bald guy's autobio, and all)
http://radioreader.net/index.html

Oh, and the afterword to I Shall Be Near... is an overview of writing by and about women who went to war disguised as men, also some who didn't have to bother, where their commanders weren't picky, and some who lived as men for the rest of their lives.

Just read 'Down the Rabbit Hole' by Juan Pablo Villalobos in one sitting. Its about a Mexican drug cartel through the eyes of a child who likes wearing hats and is fond of hippos

new rivka galchen collection of short stories -- love these

Cú Chulainn fired a little stone at the birds and brought down eight of them. Then he fired a bigger stone and got twelve more. He did this with his “ricochet-stun-shot”.
“Go you out and get the birds,” said Cú Chulainn. “If I go out to get them, this wild stag will go for you.”
“It’s no easy thing for me to get out,” said the charioteer. “The horses are so fired up I can’t get past them, and the iron rims of the chariot-wheels are too sharp for me to get over them, and I can’t get past the stag because his antlers stretch from one shaft of the chariot to the other.”
“Step out on to his antlers then,” said Cú Chulainn. “I swear by the god of Ulster, I’ll threaten him with such a head-butt, and fix my eye on him with such a look, that he’ll not even dare to nod his head at you.”
So it was done. Cú Chulainn tied the reins and the charioteer stepped out to gather up the birds. Cú Chulainn hitched the birds to the ropes and straps of the chariot. This was how he proceeded to Emain Macha: a wild stag hitched behind, a flock of swans flapping above, and three severed heads in his chariot.
They reached Emain.
“There’s a man approaching us in a chariot,” cried the look-out in Emain Macha. “He’s got the bloody heads of his enemies in his chariot, and a flock of wild birds overhead, and a wild stag hitched behind. He’ll spill the blood of every soldier in the fort unless you act quickly and send the naked women out to meet him.”
Cú Chulainn turned the left board of his chariot towards Emain to show his disrespect, and he said:
“I swear by the god of Ulster, that unless a man is sent to fight me, I’ll spill the blood of everybody in the fort.”
“Bring on the naked women!” said Conchobar.
The women of Emain came out to meet him, led by Mugain, the wife of Conchobar Mac Nessa, and they bared their breasts at him.
“These are the warriors you must take on today,” said Mugain.
He hid his face. The warriors of Emain grabbed him and threw him into a barrel of cold water. The barrel burst to bits about him. They threw him into another barrel and the water boiled up till it seemed it was boiling with fists. By the time they’d put him into a third barrel, he’d cooled down enough just to warm the water through. Then he got out and Mugain the queen wrapped him in a blue cloak with a silver brooch in it, and a hooded tunic. She brought him to sit on Conchobar’s knee, and that was where he sat from then on.

well, now i'm reading zizek instead

I've been out camping. The book I brought to read was The Golden Age, one of the series of historical novels about the American Empire by Gore Vidal. This one covers the period from 1940 to the mid-1950s. Although Gore Vidal himself appears in this book (very briefly) as a young novelist just returned from WWII, it was plain that he identified much more strongly with the elderly characters.

As for the quality of the novel, it was competent and entertaining, but lacked a center. The intended center, meant to tie the narrative together, was the character of Peter Sanford, but he served mainly as a passive bystander, ineffectual even in his romantic life. The strong characters all come and go as Vidal needs them to illustrate his personal view of history, which, thank goodness, is an entertaining one.

The modestly controversial thesis he develops as his centerpiece is that Franklin Roosevelt, swimming hard against an 80% isolationist electorate in his determination to bring the country into the war, chose a deliberate strategy of goading the Japanese into a preemptive attack, which turned out to be Pearl Harbor. An impartial examination of US-Japanese relations at the time certainly allows that interpretation and I had already come to a somewhat similar conclusion, although Vidal's portrayal is much juicier and more cynical than is strictly necessary to put that point across.

by far the weakest in the series, and the Gore Vidal section didn't work.

What's the best of his American historicals, or at least a good one to start with?
Anybody read Julian? Initially a big deal to me in high school, although I don't think I finished it, don't remember any lines, scenes etc.

i've only read 'lincoln' and 'empire,' but i highly recommend them both (in that order). 'lincoln' in particular is just extraordinary.

In this order:

Lincoln >> Burr >> Empire >>> 1876 >>> Washington DC

The Peter character only makes sense having read Washington DC.

yeah J.D. OTM: why Lincoln isn't celebrated as a great novel period is a crime.

Reading The Golden Age, I understood why the obit writers insisted on calling him an essayist who insisted on writing novels. The great ones I suggested point out the extent to which readers of fiction don't like to read good historical fiction.

Think I might start with Burr. Such knotty material, and he probably wasn't even the sketchiest guy involved in that there Empire of the West or whatever the hell it was (plus of course the rest of his life seems pretty byzantine, though prob just suitable material/case for treatment, eh GV)

Anybody read Julian?

(raises hand)

I read this in college, at a time when I was pretty heavily into Greek and Roman classics. I recall it as meriting the same description I gave of The Golden Age, "competent and entertaining". It is very sympathetic to Julian, somewhat less sympathetic to Libanius, and rather contemptuous of the Julian's christian antagonists, and the characterizations obviously skew that way. On the other hand, the historic facts on display are well-researched and accurate.

If anyone here likes Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels steer clear of Lost For Words. It's a petty, misanthropic trifle which, apart from a handful of funny or lyrical passages that belong in a better novel, reads like he recently suffered a severe head injury.

Anyone read Drabble's The Misgiving?

Ernst Juenger - On the Marble Cliffs. Steiner makes an overloaded claim for being a really great novel (century, blah blah, such a fucking hack for so much of the time I've read him) but I was unmoved to agree by the dialogue-less work. Lots of scene-setting, facile symbolism (the gangs are Nazis!) Someone like Pavese does the horror in the hills, blood amongst nature type thing better.

Gert Hofmann - half way through and its one of the best things I've read this year. So moving (the grandfather steadily shut out from the 'art' he so loves, being rendered useless by technology's march, which trumps the march of aesthetics far more), and just a great novel about the cinema. Love all the plots and movies. A must if you are any kind of film fan.

Poems by Goethe and more Heine.

Is this the Hofmann? Der Kinoerzähler,Trans. The Film Explainer?

Sorry yes The Film Explainer

Somebody, I forget who, wrote an essay about reading a few pages of Jünger and immediately wondering why he had never heard of this great writer. He read on and shortly realized why - Jünger had no sympathy for human beings, we were all ants to him to be looked down on from Harry Lime's perch on the big wheel in the Prater, without even a girlfriend's name drawn in the dust on the window.

Steiner is the worst sort of snob, as opposed to the best sort like Nabokov.

Glad to see the love for The Film Explainer, it really succeeds in bringing to life that long bygone era, name dropping all your UFA favorites, such as The White Hell of Pitz Palu and The Three From The Filling Station, to name two.

We should do a poll of literary blowhards, they mostly don't have a lot to be snobbish about. w/Nabokov -- whom I've not read a lot of, and haven't connected much with what I have...but even if I did I wouldn't listen to much of it. Its like listening to a sports pundit and their tiresome, barely coherent opinions (as I have been doing a lot of during the world cup). Just because they played the game doesn't give them the authority.

In fact you think guys like Steiner -- such slight opinions shouted at you -- would have the perfect forum now. Its called the internet.

re: Juenger - there is no attempt to form a connection to human feeling on the page and I suppose he took a life long interest in botany (which is a big part of the book). I do want to read his war diaries but at the moment you'd say its his life that is more of interest to someone like Bolano. Sorta wondered about that.

Nabokov's snobbishness about other writers and middlebrow phenomena (at least in his prefaces and written interviews) at least has a playful theatricality to it, whereas so much of Steiner's prose sinks for me under the weight of his self-regard. I get the sense that Bolano's interest in Jünger was largely part of his interest in artists' and intellectuals' complicity with authoritarian states (as in Distant Star, Nazi Literature in the Americas, or By Night in Chile, which was originally titled Storms of Shit both in allusion to its ending and as a parody of the title of Jünger's Storm of Steel).

if anything nabokov's opinions are too coherent: he has a clear and narrow definition of good fiction and it is almost always easy to guess what he will like/dislike abt something. (i kept thinking of him recently while reading book of the new sun, which he would have loved.) he's great when writing abt something he disdains but cannot dismiss (like dostoevsky), when the limitations of his aesthetics are simultaneously most visible and most stretched.

summer of unpopular Dickens: just wrapped up Hard Times, now moving on to Bleak House

Those are popular!

"Just because they played the game doesn't give them the authority."

I like this [Shearer-Nabokov] analogy Julio!! (Not sure whether the point is precisely true, though. Complicated issue.)

Unlike Julio xxyyyyzzz who manages literature and soccer at the same time, I have been prevented from reading books by the World Cup.

Though I did recently take Glenn Hoddle's autobiography SPURRED TO SUCCESS off my shelf, and last night watching Russia made me read a bit of Jonathan Wilson's BEHIND THE CURTAIN re: Eastern Block soccer.

xps I guess so? but they certainly don't have the same reputation/recognizability as Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield, or Great Expectations, or A Tale of Two Cities... not here in the States, anyway

I abandoned Our Mutual Friend two months ago, a year after abandoning Bleak House for the second time.

Never made it through Bleak House either. Three long Dickens books I made it to the end of were David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.

Dabbling in one of those Jonathan Wilson books myself right now: Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics.

Unlike Julio xxyyyyzzz who manages literature and soccer at the same time, I have been prevented from reading books by the World Cup.

there was that and test cricket and before that the giro d'italia, and basically i'm just spending my time sitting in my easy chair vacantly pressing the remote button.

have been reading the Hazard European Mind book tho, on recommendation from a few people, and enjoying that. in between the sport.

I re-read OMF a few months ago and loved it (particularly because I remembered an essay I once read arguing that the book is basically one big joke about the dust heaps being composed of human shit)

Other good unpopular one is Little Dorrit, which I found totally hilarious when (a decade ago). Only one that beat me was Martin Chuzzlewit.

Just finished The Vorrh by Brian Catling.... Alan Moore says it's the best Fantasy novel written this century. Not totally sure if I agree...

http://web.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/CRER_RC/publications/pdfs/Research%20Papers%20in%20Ethnic%20Relations/RP%20No.6.pdf

Yesterday I was at my local Friends-of-the-Library used bookstore and for $3 I bought a 1963 book entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by the academic historian Richard Hofstadter. I started reading it last night. Its pace is a bit leisurely, but Hofstadter writes well and it flows well and he has interesting things to say on an interesting (to me) subject. I'm not sure If I'll go the distance with him, but for now it is the book I'm reading.

It's an excellent book that holds up and still pisses off our friend son the right.

(psst---Aimless, you didn't hear it from me, but here's some more Hofstadter:
http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/)

Our Mutual Friend was great, at least in college.
The last TV version of Bleak House made Carey Mulligan a star.

And I'm ripping through Five Came Back by Mark Harris, a definitive Hollywood / WW2 book.

Yeah, I was pretty sure Hofstadter was also the one who brought us that classic observation on US politics.

(sure sure, but---read it again, between the between)

Pinefox and Fizzles - I am just about managing lit and footie because I've taken sometime off work to watch WC (1st phase).

Next week is Wimbledon so its gonna be hard work.

I get the sense that Bolano's interest in Jünger was largely part of his interest in artists' and intellectuals' complicity with authoritarian states (as in Distant Star, Nazi Literature in the Americas, or By Night in Chile, which was originally titled Storms of Shit both in allusion to its ending and as a parody of the title of Jünger's Storm of Steel).

― one way street, Tuesday, June 17, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure I agree. Celine was never close to anybody by contrast, but I don't quite get his concentration on Juenger. Maybe RB saw Juenger as someone who was highly thought of and yet the books seem to be quite bad (The Glass Bees was utterly forgettable). I feel like I need to read more Juenger just to try and come up with a theory but I'm only writing this to be rid of the notion of doing so. I don't want to waste my time.

I'll try and get hold of Nabokov on Dostoevsky. Sounds up my alley.

7 chapters into Bleak House so far (corresponding to the first 2 numbers of the serial); still no real plot to speak of, although we have been introduced to the titular House... I'm enjoying all the scene-setting, while also anxiously waiting for 'something to happen'

favorite character BY FAR = the entire Jellyby family

read a bit of fitzgerald's 'the crack-up', forgot what a wit he was

also seem to be starting to reread oolissayss

what fitzgerald says about that is awesome

Even the intervening generations were incredulous. In 1920 Hey-
wood Broun announced that all this hubbub was nonsense, that young
men didn’t kiss but told anyhow. But very shortly people over twenty-
five came in for an intensive education. Let me trace some of the reve-
lations vouchsafed them by reference to a dozen works written for
various types of mentality during the decade. We begin with the sug-
gestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life (Jurgen, 1919); then we learn that there’s a lot of sex around if we only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920), that adolescents lead very amorous lives
(This Side of Paradise, 1920), that there are a lot of neglected
Anglo-Saxon words (Ulysses, 1921), that older people don’t always resist sudden temptations (Cytherea, 1922), that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined (Flaming Youth, 1922), that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922), that glamorous English ladies are often pr
omiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their
time to it (The Vortex, 1926), that it’s a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928), and finally that there are abnormal variations
(The Well of Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah, 1929).

that glamorous English ladies are often promiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their
time to it (The Vortex, 1926), that it’s a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928)

lol

I'm halfway through "A Confederacy of Dunces". Very funny. I also got a book called "The Cult Film Reader"in the library which I might dip in and out of over the week.

I am reading Journey to the End of the Night. An earlier thread in this series reminded me that I wanted to read it.

My mind was wandering as I was walking back from the market this morning and I thought something perhaps novel about Celine is the way parts of the narrative expand and contract against expectation -- he moves to Detroit very fast -- so that you are never bored and notice time the way it sometimes feels. For example, when you are tired or in the morning before you've eaten breakfast, you may walk very slowly and notice things more. Or when you are nervous and anxious because you are escorting people around campus, you may not be sure what happened a few minutes ago.

Shirley

The part where Shirley reshapes Christian religion and the figure of Eve, casts Milton aside and sees the holy light through a feminine prism of nature is surely one of the most beautiful things I've read.

'I saw -- I now see -- a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from hear head to her feet, and arabesques of lighting flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear -- they are deep as lakes -- they are lifted and full of worship -- they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehova's daughter, as Adam was His son.'
'She is very vague and visionary! Come, Shirley, we ought to go into church'
'Caroline, I will not: I will stay out here with my mother Eve, in these days called Nature. I love her, undying, mighty being! Heaven may have faded from her brow when she felll in paradise, but all that is glorious on earth shines there still. She is taking me to her bosom, and showing me her heart.'

Then they go and have a political fight with an old-fashioned blockhead and throws his bible quoting sexism back at him with radical force. I was left knackered by this monumental chapter in the middle of the book. The novel's ending is a bit... just there, but I feel now C Brontë for me is the greatest of all.

I finished Anti-Intellectualism in American Life last night. The last quarter of the book was mostly concerned with a history of American secondary-school public education and its many missteps. The main interest for me was the degree to which faddism has been a big part of public educational theory for at least a century now. However, my interest did flag after Hofstadter moved past his historic review of anti-intellectualism in American religion and politics, and he started to survey the history of American education.

I'll probably spend a few days messing around in poetry or essays before I take the plunge on a book.

that actually is the essence of educational theory iirc

next thread: "I live in an immense activity, in which everything becomes morning" -- but what are YOU reading Summer 2014??

Youn - like your reading of Journey.... I think he gets more impatient and moves faster, which actually goes against what ellipses does, normally.

Does those is in his later fiction, that is.