ask ilx poster difficult listening hour

have you read the possessed by elif batuman?

do you like photography?

do you like sinead o'connor's debut album, the lion and the cobra?

what are your ten favorite Pet Shop Boys songs and what are your ten favorite Ministry songs?

do you like gladiator movies?

Are you in fact an international man of mystery?

what happens when the minute hand reaches 12 - does the listening become any easier?

when you get old, will you become difficult listening fifty-nine minutes?

really difficult listening to all these display name jokes

what do you mean, hour jokes are so funny

surprised to learn that max is listening to ilx rather than reading it

difficult listening hour

my bff gave me the possessed for my birthday this year and i'm gonna read it but i've been putting it off because i'm jealous

who doesn't like photography! i am an aesthetic layman though. someday when i have a house and land and a dog i will also have a darkroom (and a spaceship)

i've never actually heard the lion and the cobra or enough ministry to render an opinion but pet shop boys: my october symphony (obv), shopping (on my occupation mix!), rent, i wouldn't normally do this kind of thing, young offender, being boring, that one with the playing-in-the-surf video alfred always sends me, others

spartacus was fun that time we watched it in 9th grade history's greece unit because the teacher thought it was about the spartans and decided to keep it on anyway even after it had become clear this was not so

on the whole these days i would probably prefer to be more mysterious but this is one of those things that's hard to go backwards on

more than sixty consecutive minutes of difficult listening should not be undertaken w/out medical advice

little known facts, max listens to ilx on a zune & posts to ilx using speech recognition software

DLH, what is your favorite cinematic representation of Hawaii?

little known max

that scene in punch-drunk love where he's calling the girl on the hawaiian telcom booth and it lights up when she answers. that scene even smells like waikiki.

how do you know alfred?

do you have a preferred translator of russian literature?

the possessed is okay, it may be more interesting to someone who has actually read a lot of russian lit

what are your three favorite russian books

would you describe yourself as youngish (20-29) oldish (30-39) or old (40+)

xp:

alfred was a writer and editor at stylus, which i started writing for when i was 18 and through which i ended up making my most important bloc of post-high-school friends; since then we have met and drunk and argued many times, although we have only slept in the same bed once

boringly enough my answer is pevear/volokhonsky but i am more relaxed about this than you might think -- currently reading a penguin translation of dostoevsky's the devils that has some weird quirks (it keeps calling people things like "mrs. stavrogin" when i am pretty certain what the original text said was "natalya fyodorovna" or whatever) but which is sweaty and funny just like dusty should be. also as far as i can tell (and should note that my russian is entry-level) the isaac babel collection translated by peter constantine can be the final word on him.

karenina, fathers and sons, dead souls, bonus shout-out to obscure 1970s novel the island of crimea which takes place in an alternate universe where the crimea is not connected to mainland russia and was therefore able to hold out as a capitalist enclave during the civil war

i'm 24

what do you think of 'oblomov'?

'dead souls' is just really fantastic but strangely i have lost every copy of it i have every owned, which is three of them

what do you think of 'oblomov'?

Seconding that; started the newish translation recently but didn't finish it yet.

oh also what do you think of krzhizhanovsky's 'memories of the future'?

admission: have not read oblomov! have you? was it good? i have much to get around to.

also haven't read memories of the future but the little krzhizhanovsky i have read (a while ago) i remember being really good

oh also i love biely's petersburg but it hasn't been translated very many times and i haven't read the most recent and supposedly good one. the old one i read was super clunky but the book was good anyway and the chapter or two i struggled through in the original was fantastic.

thank you dlh for answering my question, I ask because there are some russian photographers I would like to know more about but I can't quite remember what it is that I should remember about them

I met this other guy who is also interested in slavic studies irl and I get you and him confused in my head

also sorry to pigeonhole you as the expert on all things russian!!

i pigeonhole myself, i think, and it's dangerous, cuz i'm not

anyway you probably have already seen this but this is like my fav. photographer atm and I have his book and it is wonderful

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/showcase-15/

yeah i read 'oblomov' in high school when i first started reading lots of russian classics. loved it a lot, thought it managed to articulate s.thing really true abt life/myself that i had never really understood but always profoundly felt. curious though how its thought of particularly since the translation i read was probably not the greatest

its funny that you mention 'st.petersburg' cuz i read that in high school too cuz of nabakov ('lost russian masterpiece') but when i reread it like three years ago i was sortof '...' about it

krzhizhanovsky is the best new (well 'new') russian work ive read in at least a couple of years, not that i read that much. nyrb has another book of his coming out soon that im p excited abt

also just realized that kevin asked for books and i answered as if he'd asked for novels so let's throw in the late :( anna politkovskaya's putin's russia, as much for the romantic thrill of hearing the intense, righteous, rhetorical-question-loving Russian Dissident Voice (radischev's and dostoyevsky's and solzhenitsyn's) suddenly revived to talk about mercades s600s and silovikii as for anything else

petersburg is a genuinely Weird Book and loses you (me) every now and then and is full of the kind of naggingly pointless-seeming cryptic flights that nabokov would go nuts for, but it is so tense with agonizing jittery prerevolutionary energy (the bomb ticking through the entire book, here in 1905, year of the tragically defanged first russian revolution) that it gives me a closer sense of living in late-imperial russia than anything else except i guess war and peace

(war and peace taking place exactly a century earlier tho)

anyway you probably have already seen this but this is like my fav. photographer atm and I have his book and it is wonderful

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/showcase-15/

― 2001: a based godyssey (dayo), Friday, October 14, 2011 1:06 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thanks for this; #11 has just replaced joan jett as my desktop background

that scene in punch-drunk love where he's calling the girl on the hawaiian telcom booth and it lights up when she answers. that scene even smells like waikiki.

― the-dream in the witch house (difficult listening hour), Friday, October 14, 2011 9:43 AM (2 hours ago)

otm

there are so many parades in waikiki

dlh: have you watched any of the new Hawaii 5-0?

no! i think my dad has. is it wink-winky or just a straight-up procedural in hawaii? i'd prefer the latter even though i'm not really a cop show guy

what's your favorite witch house song and song by the-dream

i should change my DN to "the boomtown rats in the wall"

xpost

honestly i was a little let down by its lack of winky-winkyness at first but have realized that it is a little winky-winky after all, but about cop shows in general and not about hawaii

(well occasionally about hawaii-- the pilot infamously had a character, surprised to hear McGarret speaking pidgin, reply with "You speak da bird, huh, but you look haole to me," which is like the first time in the history of pidgin that someone has referred to it as "da bird") but i guess thats just lol tv writer cluelessness more than anything

either way its one of the most profitable scripted shows on TV right now so p sure it'll be around for a while

but yeah its like a procedural in hawaii but way ott procedural

omg da bird

ground zero of this sort of thing is prob rob schneider in 50 first dates, which i had the pleasure of seeing in a hawaii theatre

www.staradvertiser.com/columnists/outtakes/20100926_five_0_artistic_license_spurs_offshoots_online.html

http://www.staradvertiser.com/columnists/outtakes/20100926_five_0_artistic_license_spurs_offshoots_online.html

loled at "the home of the fighting nuts"

did this dude change his name or did we just lose him w/ the sandbox exodus or

i thought i'd seen him lately

that probably is a better ending tho

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, 24 January 2012 22:26 (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i was right

Epcot is the one park in which I feel no pressure to ride anything. You can walk with a beer and soak it in.

I guess I should ask dlh about Disney first.

Dear difficult listening hour, have you ever thought of changing to a 90 minute format?

i really should have used search function before bumping this thread.

sup dlh!!!!

heyyyyyyyyyyy

i am around! but seldom. trying to find a menial job in the wrong city for it. preparing to (eventually) stand trial for #occupy stuff. reading about lyndon johnson. replacing weed with earl grey. playing noted one-percenter pozzo in my friend's waiting for godot. working on an sf novel. getting back together with my ex-gf, except when we aren't, except when we are. who knows.

sounds like a cool life!

playing noted one-percenter pozzo in my friend's waiting for godot

I totally want to go to this assuming you're still in Portland! When is it opening?

flopson otm.

aw clay! bold of you. it won't be for a couple months -- not sure there is an exact date yet as the smallness of the show has made our whole schedule a lot looser than the one we had when we did the cherry orchard -- but i will keep you posted. this will be the difficult listening hour in waiting for godot thread.

the life is pretty good provided i stay hydrated.

the trial's been postponed? I thought it happened a couple weeks ago.

yo dlh i'm backpacking waimanu valley this july-- first time i'll ever get to do something non-work related on big island-- i'm pretty stoked!!

yeah it was moved to late february, along with nine zillion other occupy cases all being tried by the same ("relatively sympathetic") judge. also i have an actual lawyer now, which is an improvement.

jellz gr80, it is The Best Island and waimanu is gorge. camped there once in high school with a bunch of fellow ACADEMIC DECATHLETES; we were supposedly the smart kids but there were all these extra pieces left over after we set up the tent and then it collapsed on us as soon as we stepped inside and we just slept in it like that. anyway i visited my parents on the big island in december and it rained literally every day -- the interior walls of the house began to weep -- but i hear that it has since been beautiful, naturally, which will hopefully hold for you

working on an sf novel.

!!!

yeah it's about a street girl on a moon on imperial outskirts and her experiences romantic+otherwise with a revolutionary psychopath based partially on this guy, who narrates the book from isolation in a one-man space prison called an ostrakon; the idea with this is that it is everything i am into (russian history, revolutionary politics, compassion vs. isolation, psychopathy, hawaii even) but IN SPACE

there is also some stuff in there about a race of smiling machines built to handle commerce and "advise" government who are humbly but busily converting humans to a weird hyper-individualistic religion they've founded and have a quiet but intense and possibly sinister interest in some very serious technology they believe can be retrieved from alien ruins on said moon, but i'm trying not to lean hard on all that cuz it's kinda on-the-nose

i may have already asked you this before but have you read any of sigizmund krzhizhanovsky's stuff? i have the feverish need to push him on anyone i think might like him that comes across as a little crazy to ppl on the outside of it but i mean i think he might hit a lot yr buttons

oh you have mentioned him! and i looked him up and he seemed really cool and then i forgot about him. for some reason he is not in this anthology of soviet 20s stuff i have but i will totally track him down because yeah aside from all the buttons you can tell it pushes i am a big fan of the tiniest borges stuff, the "parables", that one about the leopard in particular.

oh i guess the reason he's not in this comp is that he hadn't been unearthed yet!

haha yeah! if you like borges than hes a good bet - despite the fact that theyre not really v similar in either content or technique theres a shared sense of purpose and angularity that tie them together. idk

I read "sf" as "San Francisco" and thought, At last

this was indeed right up my alley thematically and also creepily "relevant". points for the most russian description of global warming ever:

The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun's yellow whips, it whirled round like a dervish dancing his last furious dance.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15856-5/stalking-nabokov

man you get one compliment in college and suddenly your entire life is vladimir nabokov

the idea with this is that it is everything i am into but IN SPACE

I like the cut of your jib sir

whoa man now that i finished on the eve i was going to start a poll of the unread books on my dresser but since you've already answered my question i shall read fathers and sons next

are you still working on the sf novel?

oh! yes. i mean my life is always kinda one step from being a total shambles so writing's been really hard for me the past year and the novel's undergone major restructure after major restructure and thus there isn't much written at all of its current version but i'm leaving for hawaii for a month on monday and i'm not gonna do anything there except eat fish and write. you'll note that the source for the narrator is the same as the source for verkhovensky in demons, which is why i was reading it, but i think the statute of limitations has expired on ripping it off; also, SPACE.

i also totally forgot ever to say anything again about that production of waiting for godot. i'm really sorry clay! here's what it looked like. i want to direct julius caesar next year (jackboots, newsreels in latin, etc) and will remember y'all then if it happens.

should have posted this just-out-of-the-makeup-chair photo to wdyll back then, too:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v87/Inuxx/evil.jpg

anyway fathers and sons is great because it's exactly what taking a college friend home w you over vacation is still like except for the duel

lol I seriously was going to ask you if you were reading Demons as, ahem, 'research' for your novel

i'd gotten semi-obsessed w nechaev (whose catechism of a revolutionary is full of deliberately sociopathic advice like "he must hate everyone and everything in the world with an equal hatred" and "it is necessary to be guided only by the relative usefulness of these executions for the sake of revolution" and "all the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude and honor must be suppressed") before i discovered that book, and i was worried at first, but nah it's plenty different it turns out.

i'm really sorry clay!

oh man yeah this was totally actually in the back of my head the past year or so, like when is DLH gonna let me know about that dang play already!

if you do open auditions for JC let me know, i might be interested in dusting off my ol' iambics.

i sucked at advertising that play; none of my friends came except for two housemates. i think i mentioned it on facebook like twice. but we had surprisingly big audiences. no idea who they all were. there was this one kid our last night who must have been about 10 and whose father said he was a "huge waiting for godot fan"; he watched in total rapture the whole time and laughed in all the right places, so when i staggered off blind in act 2 and collapsed at the edge of the stage i made straight for him and tried to give him the impression i was going to crash into him. he looked so happy. god knows what kind of 10-year-old is a huge waiting for godot fan but he totally made our night.

will def be much louder about JC if it happens and will remember you this time! would really like to do it.

holy shit that must be an awesome 10 year old

dlh if you make it to Oahu we should get a drink

just read "First Love" for the first time since the late nineties and I got choked up all over again, so if y'all can find a copy this weekend it makes for fine holiday reading.

i'll be in THE GATHERING PLACE from i think the 18th to the 21st, staying in kaneohe w old friends, and yeah i was wondering if you'd be around gr80! if past experience is any teacher we will definitely have free time. i haven't lived on oahu since i was 11 so i have no idea where one ought to drink (altho should tell you i have a total aspirationally tacky weakness for sitting in waikiki hotel bars during happy hour and pretending i'm not poor) but that's okay cuz i like being led around cities. (by friends.) will hit u up!

WOULD GATHER WITH

awesome though, i will be here during those dates.

there are some fun events happening that week, but plenty of waikiki hotel bars too.

gr8080 @ gmail

that one with the playing-in-the-surf video alfred always sends me,

speaking of, you're due for your dose

yo i got nabokov's collected stories for christmas? which are your five favorite?

that first sentence wasn't supposed to be a question

I aint DLH but let me rep for the Vane Sisters.

There was a bit of discussion of that book on the ILB Book Club Ada thread, since hardly anybody could bring himself to read more than a few pages of the assigned text.

Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (I Love Book Club #4, starts 26 September)

belated response: "the vane sisters" and "signs and symbols", yeah; also "lance" (late), "la veneziana" (early), "cloud, castle, lake" (crushing but i don't clearly remember how). merry christmas!