Holiday Reading

You're taking stuffed animals on holiday?

Anything by James Robert baker should take care of the fiction; anything by Joyhn Pilger oughta cover yr ass on the side on non.

non-fiction: edward platt's leadville

fiction: donald antrim's the verificationist, or victor pelevin's babylon

If I were going on 'holiday' soon I might take these books. I think you might like some of them. (?)

Daniil Kharms' (sometimes Charms) writing, which if you can find it is probably in a collection covering everything he wrote. He was a Russian absurdist/experimental writer who lived in the first half of the century, dying of mistreatment in a mental hospital after he was finally arrested on trumped-up charges and "declared" insane (which he may have pretended to be to avoid worse treatment in jail). He earned his money writing children's stories and poems, which often slyly resembled his "grown-up" writings with their grim oddity and absurd plots. Those writings made him popular in avant-garde circles - he was part of an "extreme left" group that sort of did guerrilla readings, etc. - but the government gave him trouble for them. Most of his "grown-up" writing is short fiction, often as small as a paragraph or two, though he also wrote a few philosophical tracts, biographical sketches, odes to girls with the booty, and a classic absurdist Russian drama, "Elizaveta Bam". He also made fun of Doestoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy a lot. Ace.

Haruki Murakami's book on the Tokyo subway gas attacks by the Aum cult - Underground. I'll proobably finish this today or tomorrow, so I could better tell you how it turns out - the English version is actually two books together, the first being primarily victims' stories, and the second with more reflection on Murakami's part, and interviews with cult members and the like. The victims' interviews get a little slow and samey because of the similarity of most of their stories, but a few gems pop up and that part's worth reading anyway. I suspect it will become a little more engrossing as I move on - only a couple of victim interviews left before I start reading Murakami's own essay.

The Adorno Reader. I have fun holidays.

Anthologys.

Vintage have done ones on Amenisa and one on Utopia both are very good . Alberto Manguel has edited brillant anthologys as well. (two straight erotica, two specultive fiction , one on adventure fiction, one on queer fiction .)
And of course their is the loyal Nortons on every conceviable subject avaible for between 5 and 15 dollars at thrifts.
In fact i brought Contempary short fiction on my recent sojourn to the coast .
They are whitmans samplers, easy to pick up and put down

In that vein i also read my favorite authors non fiction collections ( I have read Anthony Burgess, Robertson Davies and Martin Amis this summmer)

I also read populist social history. They have titles like The History of... or just the object of the topic
On my bedside table i have ones on shit, swearing, soap and celibacy .
Alberto Manguel has done this as well , including a really fascanting history of reading and a dictionary of imaginary places .

And of couse you can catch up on magazines and newspapers

Best non-fiction I've read in past five years was/is John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion. Stands up to rereading, plus good for dipping (ie. doesn't have to be read front-to-back; not used to flavour crisps).

I just read Michael Bracewell's PERFECT TENSE, which was really surprisingly good. I can't be sure you'd agree, Tom E, but I think it has enough of your kind of stuff (?), apart from chart pop records, in it to keep you interested.

Also just finished Jonathan Coe's THE ROTTERS' CLUB, but that's probably too big for the luggae you describe.

Magnus Mills' THREE TO SEE THE KING is OK but you'll have finished it by the time you get to the airport. All his novels are easy reads and quite fun.

Read GATSBY for the first time recently, and was blown away as so many others have been. But I imagine you know it too well already.

Does your destination count? Maybe you could tailor the books to that.

The Rotter's Club was great, apart from a plug for the sequel at the very end of the book. Infuriated me, that. You've probably read that Dave Egger's book, so that's out. Hmmmm. I just finished 'Blue Angel' by Francine Prose and that was really good.

How about some Wodehouse? 'Code of the Woosters' is hilarious. As for non-fiction, I strongly recommend 'Them' by Jon Ronson. Not good if you're easily pulled into conspiracy theories though.

This thread is taking an interesting (to me) turn, i.e. what books do you think I have read? I've not read the Eggers book or Gatsby, though I continually intend to read the latter.

Is the Bracewell fiction or non?

Best non-fiction I've read in years was The End Of Science by John Horgan. A great philosophical discussion on whether science is actually reaching the limits of what we could possibly discover, or more importantly experimentally verify. Not only is it a good state of science primer it also exposes a large number of philosophical flaws in in world views of many working scientists out there now. Its highly opinionated, controversial in places but if you haven't read any science for a fair bit it is both accessible and humanising (Horgan is particularly good at pithy thumbnail sketches of the scientists he interviews). Also he disses Roger Penrose, a mathematical enemy of mine, and its long enough to read with goats.

Bracewell: fiction. If you haven't read Gatsby, you might as well take it on holiday - it's easy and pretty gorgeous. Old sport.

i have to agree with the pinefox. gatsby is easy, it is an ideal holiday book really...

"Reflections on a Marine Venus", Lawrence Durrell's Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes.

I would like to agree with Strange about Coe's latest. But I can't, quite. WHAT A CARVE UP! is so magnificent, so complex and fully achieved - whereas TRC has so many loose ends (sequel fodder, sure, but it doesn't help with This Particular Book?), and a lot of writing that feels rather slack. I am really sorry to have to say this, cos I would like to think that Coe was the key man in UK fiction. Anyone else?

'Moby Dick' - best book evah!

'East Riders, Raging Bulls' by Peter Biskind. Not just the best expose ever written about Hollywood and it's major players, but one of the sharpest, most hilarious, most scurrilous books you'll read on any subject.

Me, I always take a 'Flashman' book or two. Or Wodehouse.

'Moby Dick' - best book evah!

you're having a laugh. like i really wanted to read 600 pages of descriptions of whaling implements.

Re: Coe - whatever happened to his biog of our old pal B.S. Johnson?

_Things Fall Apart_. It's short, it's easy to read, and it's awesome.

Only 25 pages are on whaling implements and 50 on whale biology.
Billy Budd was so good, one of my favorite books of all time and only 120 pages, bring that. And i am serious about the Alberto Manguel, i am willing to send you some .

AL: you're right. But I think that the biog is still on the way.

What I actually bought:

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow (so I can be as clever as Josh)

Victor Pelevin - Babylon (cause Gareth is so persuasive)

Murakami - Underground (after Kate (not Masonic Boom Kate) went on about how good it was)

Where ther fuck is Alberto Manguel .
Thats it i am sending him .

Only had 5 mins because we had to meet someone, so just buzzed the ground-floor fiction stuff (Murakama filed as fiction - result!) and didnt go down into the basement non-fiction alas.

GravRain = nearly my favourite book BUT first ten pages = hard going and better in retrospect

You're right about first few pages of GR, mark. I started the book 5 times before I eventually cracked it - I always used to run up against THE WALL that is the Giant Adenoid episode. Eventually I just started with Slothrop at the Casino au Hermann Goerring read the whole thing from there, and then went back to the beginning.

i too found the first 10 pages of gravity's rainbow very difficult. unfortunately, i found the following 750 pages just as difficult. i shall reread this book at some time, but i didn't understand any of it.

Sheesh Tom, I thought you were going on Holiday. Mind you I would bring something like that on holiday, but people probably wouldn't like my holidays.

I slogged through the first 70 pages or so of GR one summer, couldn't go on, dropped it, started over the next summer and made it through under duress. Section 2 is sooo much easier than section 1, you just have to stick with it. Probably rereading sections between the square marks before you go on helps, though I hardly ever did (doh).

How long are you going to be gone, anyway, Tom? A month? You're not going to want to be reading Pynchon when we start Benjamin. ;)

But Stevie - how did you know which bit was easy, till you'd read it? (Um, [mildly apt] Catch-22 situation?)

Tom E a bit bonkers to take it on holiday, unless it's a round-the- world cruise or something.

I'm glad everyone else finds the start hard. I picked up my copy yet again recently. The book does not do much for me. I wouldn't have bothered with it at all without 5 years of plugs from Troussé. I'm not convinced that I'm going to find the rest of it any better (take Gareth's point), but that's just what Lloyd would call Negative Attitude.

Other thing about finally reading GR, recently remarked to Stevie in sundazzled Greenwich Park: it maybe almost gives me a reminder of what Ulysses feels like for most people, and will never feel like again for me.

For me, Ulysses had harder hard parts but was easier overall to read - less trying. Pynchon pushes the narratorial shifts (i.e. jumping between characters' heads) harder, I think, and for some reason I found that more disorientating than the stylistic pastiches etc. later on in U. Plus the story in U is a lot more coherent, and spans less time and space, so it's a bit more digestible.

I read it on holiday: admittedly a holiday on my own, that I hadn't wanted to go on (don't ask) and would have hated (all that sun and sea air, golden greek beach bunnies — blech). It wasn't the only thing I had to read (I pack three books when I'm taking a bus from Hackney to Angel), but it was the thing that trapped me and kept me. I said ten pages: but the hard hard bit is more like just four. Soon as you get to Pirate Prentice you're home free: the banana scene is one of the book's great set-pieces.

Coherent, Josh? I don't think there's anything incoherent in GR: obviously you have to concentrate sometimes, but — aside from five or seven climactic events in which what exactly happened is left very deliberately unsaid — there's nothing in the story which can't be placed, timewise and geographically, and locked into everything else. Quite unsettling to discover how LIKE U it is, actually, in terms of scholarly tie-in with real-world events, and what happened on what day-date in real-actual history (cf the Weisenburger GR companion — WHICH DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE READ GR three or four times, cuz you will certainly spoil it).

― mark s, Thursday, 5 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

OK, coherent = not right word. It's certainly coherent. There's just a whole lot more going on, woven together pretty complexly. I suppose there's a lot that goes on in U too, and more complexly I wouldn't doubt, but the main stuff that happens to Bloom and Stephen and Molly seems a lot more straightforward to me. Probably has to do with their relative importance in the book compared to the characters in GR - there you can pick out characters as being more important than others but there are a lot more who get more focus than the additional characters in U. Which makes sense as U's main characters are sooper-excellently realized, whereas GR's are not really (at least not in psychological-realist terms).

Out of curiosity I looked in my copy of GR to see what was at all the places I have marked right now.

- Pointsman, Mexico, and Jessica doghunting on p. 45, encounter talking dog
- p. 82, not sure why, maybe for Rosie's speech. or the start of the discussion of Slothrop's conditioning
- p. 222, for the whole damn scene probably
- p. 238, no idea why. maybe I wanted to check the equation against something?
- p. 351, maybe because when I hosted the p-list's GRGR my section was about Tchitcherine
- p. 683, mom Slothrop's letter to Kennedy and "on the phrase 'ass backwards'"

Apparently I need to go through and put more bookmarks in pp. 400 - 700 to even things out. Special unrelated note: one of the bookmarks has stuff about Foucault, Adorno, and (unrelated) the American Analog Set scrawled on it. Just knowing that I wrote that down in the past makes me feel cleverer.

I would look at tem mself, but my copy is currently in a baggie, having encountered major entropy over the years (final 20 odd pages becoming completely dissassembled, as per many a Pynchonian hero!!)

I liked the last version of that joke better.

:_<

Well, I thought the last one was GRATE. ;)

D'you have, like, a bedtime, Josh?

First thing I officially have to be at = noon tutoring session. Anyway it's only 20 til 4 here. It doesn't get REALLY LATE until like 6.

1. Joke? 'Versions'?

2. If (Stevie's fave too) banana bit (c.5pp in) is really one of the REALLY GOOD bits, then... uh-oh.

My 5 Fave GR moments:

116-118: Mrs Quoad's Konfectionary Kabinet ("the Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp")

127-136: Roger and Jessica and the War's Evensong. This is my favourite passage in any book, anywhere.

440-441: Saure and Gustav discuss Rossini and Webern.

549-551: "it is a great frontierless streaming out here" Some of the greatest Lists in literature.

647-655: The Story of Byron the Bulb.

The confectionary stuff is... OK. The Evensong stuff is better - I quite like those lines about toothpaste, and the analysis of the fragmenting, labour-dividing (rather than communal and unifying) process of WWII. Haven't read the other bits yet.

On limited acquaintance with the book - struggling desperately through to have, um, only 600pp to go: so far the relevant comparison is with Finnegans Wake, not Ulysses. That relentless voice which will always find itself more to say about something - about anything - about *everything*...

I love the English Candy Drill but if I'm not in the right frame of mind it can be less funny.

The number of positive comparisons (as in, not "yeah, I thought they were both unreadable crap") between FW and GR as opposed to U and GR probably depends a lot on the relatively much smaller number of people to read FW. ;)

Hmm, I seem to have begun rereading GR. Dammit I don't have TIME for this right now. Oh well.

Nor do I. And the bad bit is that unlike you, I haven't already read it 3 times.

GR is one of the hardest-to-read works of fiction I've ever attempted. It's up there with Proust's long sentences and FW's general wash of incomprehensibility.

Technically I have time. Nobody's making me read all this other stuff I have waiting, except me. But I have a lot of stuff to read before I start school again and am reading Walter Benjamin in August, so now is kind of an awkward time to start GR again (only making the third time). I was planning on doing it over my Christmas break this year.

Ulp. And I was hoping to get to Proust in the next year or two, too. FW will have to wait until I'm rich enough to buy liquor in bulk.

Reading Continental philosophy helps (I'm sure you get a bit of the same in certain lit crit writing?) assuage some of the difficulty. In sort of a look-how-much-worse-it-could-be-so-don't-complain-or-I'll-make-you-read-Of-Grammatology sense.

Well -

1. It's always good, I think, to read fiction and non-fiction concurrently - somehow works to make them both more interesting - they reflect on each other - the generic categories blur a little.

2. Does reading theory help with reading tough fiction? Not cos it explains it - I don't think that's what you were implying - but cos it makes it look easy by compariosn (I think that was your implication)? Yes, I think so - mainly cos the rules of engagement are different with fiction - they're slacker: you don't have to understand every proposition before moving on.

3. FW / Proust / GR: very hard. But still nowhere near as hard, for me, as Heidegger (esp. B&T) and Hegel (esp. the PofS). Both those books I find close to unreadable. Of Grammatology I feel a bit differently about - it's actually my favourite Derrida (I'm not a fan, generally) because it's more elegantly written than later work (OK, I only know the translation), and has a building sense of DRAMA as JD unveils a millennia-long plot. I am still not crazy about the book, though, and find it terribly slow to read. But it is easy next to MH and GFWH.

Heidegger: I have owned B&T for 20 years (John MacQuarrie translation, nice blue spine). I have never made it to the bottom of the first page. OG = my favourite Derrida also, because full of nice little stories. Hegel I have drawn a blank on, but when a recent piece in LRB said that until he was about 40, he simply sat about the house surrounded by piles of newspapers, writing nothing — but amazing his mates down the pub with his erudition and strange interesting take on things. Some of said mates then got him a book deal and job teaching "the history of philosophy" (= whatever he felt like talking abt). "Hello," I thought...

Jonathan Rée: 'Old Man Sinker'.

Yes, pinefox, I just meant that it would make the fiction seem easier, and yes, because the reading modes are different (of course, I think reading some philosophy like lit is a great help).

The worst part is that I expect there will be a lot of rubbish in Hegel e.g. but I've gotta ("gotta") read him anyway eventually due to importance for later thought that I'm much more interested in.

Prof of mine said he read Hegel as an undergrad, but "Logic," rather than PoS - apparently it made quite a difference. "Logic" is still pretty obscure but it sort of sets the basis for whole huge chunks of what he does later. Also makes connection to Kant and other predecessors much clearer (apparently).

I just read Walter Benjamins huge anthology of readings with commentaries. He is tough to read.

'Illuminations,' Anthony? Gonna read the Arcades Project.

It was the Arcades Project. Not being on my bookshelves at this moment i forgot quicky.

Hmm, yes, I have read a bit of it before and am expecting it to be a little tough. I've been reading a bit on B and also Adorno (who dug B's theory of knowledge) beforehand tho.

Art Theroy is really hard to slog thru because it rarely talks about art itself.

1st 10 pp of GR = magic. 1st page of GR, makes me scream in pleasure. 1st 2 sentences of GR, so good. so very very good. I love how Holiday Reading has trailed into hard to read philosophers. I've cracked Hegel a few times, but never got very far. Am famil with some of the modern pomoish dudes, but for the most part have (confession time) skated by on journal articles and critical glosses by others, and intent quizzing of more knowledgable friends. GR, tho, is magnificent. Favorite part: description of Slothrop & Geli fucking, and invocation of all symbolic motifs in book therof. Also the brilliant segue (almost mixtapelike) from Kekule and the snake thru the world thru chemistry thru the insane bus driver. Also Weissman's Tarot reading. Also slothrop recving the "magic feather" also "it is not the first time two brothers have passed each other in the night, unnoticed" or however that sentence reads. Also... also... also...

Journal articles and critical glosses = much more prudent way to go about things. I read more of that stuff for out-of-class learnin; stuck with some original texts just cuz they're in-class (and I guess I should read them eventually, erg).

Slothrop and Geli fucking = classic, but Slothrop and Katje fucking = classic too.

Reading Duino Elegies for GR connection = trying, but there's a pretty line or two at least. (Flipping thru them right now, spurred on by Blicero ca. p 100.)

On holiday at the beach? WHy read at all when you can surf and fuck!

I'm sorry abotu that, I really shouldn't have posted that. I am drunk. Sorry. Have fun with Teddy and Melvile.

Everyone at birth should have a copies of Billy Budd. That si the most incredible book. So much better then Moby but not as good as his poetry. I love Melville.

So, the question is - Ewing: are you ahead of me in Gravity's Rainbow yet?

Hahaha, see the "Goat" thread - he finished it. In like 4 days too he tells me. Blimey.

In that case I'm never talking to him again.

Its fun to read languages you cant speak.

Did Tom ever explain the stuffed animals thing? I'm too lazy to scroll back and read.

th e last word is min e again

Uh. Elgies important, is my understanding, for their general thematic resonance which requires historical situating. Idea of german romanticism as conveyed by elgies, verymuch in keeping with Blicero's way of thinking. Thus Pynchon's quotes from them are inverted in line with the inverted grail quest of the entire work. (Or so my professor said, as I recall)

I like stuffed animals - what's to explain?

It all comes down to the bloody grail quest, doesn't it.

It just makes me laugh to take stuffed animals on holiday to a beach :)

Only one of them went to a beach, and it was a very small one.

Without my stuffed kogepan I feel rather lonely.

The beach or the toy?

My badger used to go to the Dordogne with me.

From The White Deer: Seek Grailo, quicker than the True Grail!!

Didn't the other toys feel left out though?

No, they are idler by nature and less adventurous.

My badger goes most places with me. He might even accompany me to the ILEFJPITS.

I wouldn't take any cute toys with me on holiday, in case they got left behind and were all lonely and sad.

Sterl - yes. And not just Blicero. Loads of the narratorial passages sound a lot like the Elegies. Bad part = Elegies are so damned hard to make sense out of in the first place. You can be reading along fine, and then suddenly - wtf does this big run of abstract stuff actually mean?

DO you ever find that when you brin g home a new stuffed animal the others dont like it, dont accept it? WHat do you do ?

so Tom, did you ever read Babylon?

Gareth: not yet. There is a very very big book I have promised to read and have not read. So my rather shit solution to this burden of guilt is not to read anything. Babylon is now really dog-eared anyway having been in my bag for weeks 'just in case'. I'll let you know.

Cockfarmer.

This thread became about Pynchon. So I'm going to use it to ask: what is the Tristero stuff in lot 49 all about?

1) OK, I know the book is about indeterminacy, solipsism, hermeneutic overload, uncertainty, etc;

2) OK, Pynchon is a counter-culture kind of guy;

but the political meaning of the postal stuff seems to be hard to pin down, and the political atmosphere of the book seems to me ill-served by critics who only talk about 1) above. So

- Why is TP interested in European postal history - is this part of a wide-reaching history of USA?

- Is there truth in the Tristero aspect of the history (as against the T&T stuff, which is vast on the www)?

- Were there real Californian sources for W.A.S.T.E.?

- What is the political meaning of the Tristero - who are at times the 'underground' (WASTE is associated with the disenfranchised) but also have a history of counter-revolutionary activity? I don't quite get it. I feel that this may be the best thing Pynchon ever came up with, but I would like more specification.

Haven't read CL49 for two or three years, so a bit rusty as to which side is which, but history of US Politics = history of limits of role of the federal govt (vs states rights/vs individual rights). State postal service monopoly = potential metaphor for unitary control of information circulation, and thus of society. Private postals systems = manifestations of resistance? Resistance in US to govt = generally liberatarian >>> free-market >>> populist right-wing private army gun-nut.

Heroes of resistance to Lincoln's establishment of Federal Unity in priority over state rights to secede = Ku Klux Klan, freedom fighters against wider idea of govt, but also terrorist enforcers of local tyranny.

So is it Robin Hood vs King John. Or ObL vs Universal Liberal Justice and Peace. Or Tweedledum vs Tweedledee?

Or is the resistance a fantasy projected by Oedepa to cope with the rightist implications of her escape fantasy?

Rightist implications?

Mark S - yes, quite: that makes sense. So there would be an uneasy (or unconscious) alliance of 'left' and 'right' anti-federalism? ('federalism' here meaning 'central govt-ism'.)

But is that what TP was getting at? I'd still like to know more about what he was drawing on: does it help? (ie: actual counter-posts c. early 1960s; Euro-background.)

Have discovered quite a good essay (?) - by Pierre-Yves Petillon - who seems to historicize more than most commentators do.

pinefox, could you post a link to that, or failing that, email me a copy?

Given the INCREDIBLY close fit of GR to actual historical events, headlines in newspapers Slothrop reads etc, really existing connections between the chemical industries and politics, etc, (and ditto for M&D) I'd be surprised if Pynchon, when he goes postal in CL49, is just making stuff up, instead of using research into things he's found in a book or books. But I've never chased it up.

Gareth, don't tease the pinefox! "Post a link" indeed!

As far as I know, the counter-posts were an invention -- tho cf. recent book by former Weather Underground dude for how covert societies/communication rilly worked back then. Also, I think the Pony Express stuff was made up. Also, the play was a clever joke on revenge plays, except the refs. to that history are also I think false, recalling what criticism I've read. Like GR was historically right on, but the "counter-history" inscribed over [under?] the official one was pure invention. Cf. introduction to Slow Learner for explanation of Pynchon's historo-fantastical method of writing.

right, so i beat tom by spead-reading my way through GR in three days. if it weren't for the 200 other books by the side of my bed clamouring for my attention i'd sit down and work through it again now (more slowly). i suspect i'm going to end up reading it quite a few times - so many wonderful set-pieces (bryan the bulb springs to mind), and i'm sure i missed a million things (such as an overall grasp of the plot at this moment, i have to confess).

anyway, having read v and lot 49 the previous week i feel like i should give pynchon a rest. on the other hand i'm kinda in the mood for it - will i find vineland and mason + dixon disappointing in comparison, or should i leap on them next?

i like em both: they share a melancholy

vineland you are possibly more likely to be disappointed by? (i always assume that, tho i wasn't)