As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

I finished the biography half of Kevin Avery's Paul Nelson book. Towards the end, it has to be the bleakest thing I've read related to pop music since Peter Guralnick's Charlie Rich chapters in Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway. This made me smile, though (Nelson's friend, Michael Seidenberg): "He couldn't stand later Scorsese films. I think it just comes down to Leonardo DiCaprio. It was like the end of life to him that Scorsese had chosen a new alter ego that was so unsuitable for Paul."

i'm like a quarter of the way into ten thousand saints and it's really good btw

I finished Pale Fire last night and I spent a bit of time thinking about its strengths and weaknesses. The greatest strength I could find was the virtuosity of its language. The biggest weakness was that, taken by itself, it made no coherent sense at all.

The narrator was worse than 'unreliable'. He was a pastiche of absurdities masquerading as a human being - and by that I do not mean that he was an absurd human being, but rather that he was an effigy set up by the author with so little internal consistency that under scrutiny he falls apart like wet tissue.

While I was showering this morning I lit on an image that captures this book for me - it is like my mother's button box when I was young. That item was a red tin box with scalloped edges on which was pasted a decal with an ornate wintery scene with a sleigh and a forest - no doubt its origins had to do with Christmas. Inside were several hundred buttons, from plain to fancy, of many shapes, sizes and colors, with few matching. They made an impressive display when you poured them out on a table. I spent many hours on rainy days sorting them into little piles.

They were fun. They abounded in textures and colors. They didn't have to make sense or meaning so long as they compelled attention. And they inspired daydreaming, so that to some extent they fished up some sort of sense out of whatever material lay dormant in one's mind. But they didn't embody any structure or sense of their own.

Don't mean to cross threads, but (based on one viewing many months ago) your last paragraph is a perfect description of The Tree of Life for me.

i don't understand people who assume some major piece of art has a huge flaw that no one else ever noticed before instead of just assuming that maybe they didn't totally get it

Me? I wasn't making any assumptions at all, for me or for anyone else. I was expressing (borrowing, actually) a reaction to something, and went out of my way ("one viewing," "for me") to make it non-contentious.

no, aimless specifically

xp

n/a, from its position in this thread, I'll assume that comment was directed at my critique of Pale Fire. Except I make no claim to have discovered "a huge flaw that no one else ever noticed before", so that comment makes little sense to me. I only record how it struck me, which seems like the purpose of this thread.

I suppose I could elaborate at much greater length on exactly why I thought the narrator failed as an instrument through which to convey anything greater than the author's fluency and playful sense of language, but this isn't a college course, and I'm paid to be a book critic, so the exercise would be more than I care to make without some assurance it would have some purpose.

Further, I don't say there could not be some magical key that unlocks a whole world of coherent meaning in that book, but if there is one, and you know what it is, it seems churlish of you not to share it. I did notice all manner of playful tidbits based around character's names, shoes and their reversals, misapprehensions, buried meanings and whatnot, but this apparatus, however clever and playful it was, was never strong enough to carry much weight of meaning and if it was intended to, then, yeah, I missed it. So, shoot me.

ahem, not paid to be a book critic

okie-dokie. I went to Wikipedia and it contained this quote from V. Nabokov:

"...the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman."

That is pretty straightforward and plain enough for anyone to understand.

Seeing how this is the idea the author had in mind, I must say that Nabokov has created a completely nonsensical version of madness that has no connection to madness as real humans experience it, which is as a very sordid, muddled, and ugly state of mind. Instead, he has created a fairy-tale-castle version of madness, where madmen are capable of a gorgeous literary style such as few sane men are capable of encompassing. The same extremeties of cleverness he exhibits throughout the novel totally undermine its credibility as anything but a silly curio, a bauble, a fragile blown-glass toy.

Which is not to say that the whole thing is worthless. There are a great many ideas expressed or suggested there, but they don't cohere within the story. They are, as I already said, like buttons in an ornate button box.

i'm sorry for my tone above, it was kneejerk and ruder than intended. however, i don't know if i would believe nabokov on this topic either - he wasn't big on giving out explanations so i think that was probably a red herring.

your criticisms are pretty common for nabokov - all games and trickery and wordplay, no "heart" or depth. i have trouble believing these criticisms - i'm not saying i always understand what he's up to but having read most of his books and a lot of his letters and a lot about his life, i think there's usually something deeper going on under the surface of most of his books. however, the nabokov for people who get irritated by his tricks is "pnin" - it's a lot more straightforward and the compassion is more projected - it's also really funny.

the last bit sounds condescending but it really isn't - "pnin" is one of my favorites and probably his most underrated book

is 'pnin' really that underrated? i guess its not considered first tier but its v well regarded isnt it? its definitely a very good book

i do think 'incoherent' is not a... great criticism of 'pale fire' but i do agree thats its malleable and can be reassembled like that collection of buttons into a number of interesting patterns

i mean i think you could argue that a big part of the 'meaning' of 'pale fire' is the search for meaning

n/a: Sorry, misunderstood.

I liked Aimless's analogy to his mother's button box a lot (why I jumped in with the Malick comment). I haven't read Pale Fire, just Lolita, which I loved, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which I don't remember. I bought The Defense a while back, and hope to get to that. (Not sure if not being a chess player makes that a dubious venture.) Pale Fire always looked too daunting. If anything, Aimless's reaction made me more inclined to give it a try one day.

Fwiw I think Aimless's button box is an excellent analogy and perhaps not one that Nabokov would have disagreed with (particularly w/r/t the winter scene). As for Pale Fire more generally, again, I think I probably agree generally with Aimless with the only difference being the last time I read it, I enjoyed the things that he dislikes. It's been a while tho, and my feeling now is that personally I prefer the games being subsumed in traditional narrative. (Why should it be necessary to say 'personally I'? Because 'I prefer' might mistaken as a general critical judgment. I wanted to stress the personal preference without any critical recommendation).

xp

I used 'Search' (silly goose is me) and found a lengthy 150+ post thread on Pale Fire, from which I shall quote pinefox, who appears near the end of it to say:

I think we can leave aside RR's idea that we do take Kinbote at face value for long.

That is, we can assume that we soon realize he's a very wacky kind of character who claims to be a king. And I don't believe that we ever know for sure whether his claim is true or false.

I think it's true, then, that realizing that he thinks he's the king can't, as such, be the point. It must be a stage on the way to, or a part of, the whole experience of the book.

What does that whole experience include?

The sheer metatextual fun of having these massive notes that dwarf the poem; a play upon the idea of commentating, of misreading, of taking an object and misappropriating it - but then also the ambiguity that the misappropriation might be making a more interesting object than the poem was in the first place, so misreading could be a good thing

the parody of academia, of the age of the institutionalization of modernism (and the portrait of the university and the academics)

The artistry, the intricacy of the design: the thought that VN wrote that whole poem, which works straight-faced, and engineered it so that it could also work as prompt for the notes; the pleasure of the poem itself; the intricacy of the Index

VN's marvellous rendition of post-war USA as I suggested above

pure style, VN's nigh matchless gift with lean unlovely English

camp: daft dashing fun, a sort of gay Indiana Jones or John Buchan or Prisoner of Zembla, with people in drag parachuting out of flying boats - well, not quite that, but that sort of register

the ethical and affective dimension around Hazel: the pathos of her, and of her parents' well-meaning but perhaps (as Wood says) bad attitude here, and then of Kinbote's blindness to it, which Rorty thinks is the great moral rhetoric of the book.

I would more or less subscribe to all these comments, although sometimes less rather than more. But to me, all these various elements add up to something that doesn't affect me beyond a certain bemusement; it makes for me a whole that is less than the sum of its parts. As for the book having a "great moral rhetoric", I would call that wishful thinking.

As for "intricacy of design", I agree it is there, but that is also true of the machine for creating Twinkies, and oftentimes the parts of the book do not fit snugly, but rather grind against one another. To commend the book by saying that one is held in suspense whether any interpretation of the book is true, because all of them seem false in some light, is to make a virtue of something that has no value.

I wouldn't make such a fuss, except this novel is held up as a Great Book, a Wonder of the Age, a Marvel of Literature, and I was rather disppointed in it.

that is a good pinefox post

As for the book having a "great moral rhetoric", I would call that wishful thinking.

why? i mean i can see finding the 'moral rhetoric' subsumed by the narrative/metatextual trickery but rorty's argument abt hazel's invisibility and the book's moral dimension seems p valid and its of a piece with much of nabokov's work. the idea that we minimize others, make them invisible in order to use and mistreat them is a p impt idea in a bunch of his books imo

But Hazel is far from invisible to her parents, the only characters in the book to whom her existance is important. She plays a leading role in the long poem her father wrote and to the degree we understand her at all, we understand her through her father's ability to address her personhood.

Moreover, her visibility within the novel, such as it is, is fully under the control of the author, so that it would be disingenuous of him to plunge her out of sight and then blame any other person for this fact, as if he were revealing a moral shortcoming anywhere but in his own conception of the story he wrote that included her.

Shit. This crud is obv enough to me. If she was "minimized", who did that if not N?

Bernard Cornwell - great! An author mentioned in passing in one of Nick Baker's books that I have finally gotten around to reading.

so that it would be disingenuous of him

I think this is a thing with Nabokov, perhaps by a more circuitous route than the word is usually used, and the extent to which you mind can affect your enjoyment of him, perhaps.

i quickly read Gil Scott Heron's murder mystery novel, The Vulture
http://www.amazon.com/Vulture-Gil-Scott-Heron/dp/1847678831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325964620&sr=8-1

When ilx went down I was reading James Franco's Palo Alto, which I liked. It's a collection of short stories where fairly well-off, bored teenagers do teenagey things, to varying degrees of unpleasantness and occasional horror. He writes well, there's a pleasing immediacy to his stuff.

Then I read Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, which was marvellous. The characters are great, very entertaining, and the portrayal of Berliners as largely passive subjects for whatever political fate decreed for them I found very interesting.

Then Fat City by Leonard Gardner, a story of midranking and below boxing folk from Stockton, California. Really gritty and accomplished, without going out looking for grand drama, just examining the everyday failures, mostly, and compromises in people's lives.

Then Nile Rodgers' autobiography, Le Freak, which is super-charming. Nile clearly doesn't see himself as a big star, because Chic is a relatively small part of the book, whereas he really gets gushing instead when he gets onto working with Diana Ross, David Bowie and Madonna. Loads of amusing anecdotes and interesting insights into the music. The pre-fame section is something else though, all this crazy stuff about his part-terrifying-part-amazing childhood and the ridiculous characters in it. He just comes across as the best guy ever, basically.

Now I'm reading Londoners by Craig Taylor, which is a collection of interviews with people about their Londons. Normally these quasi-journalistic things can be cliched and unrewarding through trying to cover too much ground, but this has mostly an unusual cast so far and is showing promise.

Just started Imperial by William Vollmann. One chapter in and it's pretty interesting so far, but I'd put my chances of finishing it at 50/50.

Jonathan Romney - Short Orders. Compilation of the S&S/Indy and various etc reviews of films, mostly from the 90s, most of which I've seen. Come across him on S&S when he is often reviewing something which happens to be all Brechtian and Marxist and auterist, and often from that period from the mid-60s to mid-70s so coming to this and seeing him review a lot of bullshit from the 90s like Reservoir Dogs and Schindler's List and actually coming out with the goods is great. Rare to find someone who cares. I guess he had little known gems like Quince Tree Sun to watch too (probably the best film about painting, which sounds gd until the moment you say its a 2hr flick about a man drawing a tree).

i like jonathan romney. think you can read him & kent jones discussing bresson in sync w/the current retro, somewhere online. you make quince tree sun sound good! i would put greenaway's edward munch up against it tho

& then there's that one of picasso, painting

& my kid could paint that

You mean Watkins' Edward Munch? That's great as well, yeah.

Guess when I said that about Quince Tree Sun I imagined talking about it ramdomly to someone. Making it sound more exciting might be a challenge.

that's what i meant yeah
no for sure ikwym. there's a funny lede in a sight & sound article about theo angelopoulos this week, about some joke people used to tell at festivals, that they said you start watching one of his movies at six o'clock and then three hours later you look at your watch and it's five past six

love Fat City so much

there's a funny lede in a sight & sound article about theo angelopoulos this week, about some joke people used to tell at festivals, that they said you start watching one of his movies at six o'clock and then three hours later you look at your watch and it's five past six

Poor, misunderstood Theo :-)

Read The Sisters Brothers, and was quite surprised and pleased to see it was as good as everyone had been saying

Now reading a collection of Arthur Machen novellas and short stories (currently on 'animals arise and destroy us' tale The Terror), while avoiding the introduction from super-hack Guillermo del Toro

Coriolanus
Griftopia

Anybody read Thomas Mallon? He specializes in Washington novels. I finished the pretty good Fellow Travelers, about two male lifetime civil servants who start a romance at the height of Senator McCarthy's power.

I like Mallon quite a lot, though I've only read a few of his novels ('Dewey defeats Truman' and 'Aurora 7' were especially good. His book on plagiarism, 'Stolen Words', is pretty great.

starting Babs Gonzalez's autobio

going to read steven levy's in the plex next

'murphy'

Recently read:

China Mieville, Kraken - Fun, but way more uneven and scattershot than the other two of his I've read (Embassytown and The City & the City. Which is exactly what I expected based on reviews, but those two were so focused and great I had to know for myself.

Ben Ehrenreich, Ether - Very quick, read it in two sittings, which was good because I felt pretty filthy after each one. Not sure if I could recommend to friends but I'm glad I read it.

Now reading Stone Arabia, love it so far.

Love Murphy.

but way more uneven and scattershot than the other two of his I've read

That has me reaching for the whisky with shaking hands.

i am reading kerr's 'a philosophical investigation'. and stephen mulhall's book on 'wittgenstein's private language'. and some rousseau. and rilke. i think next i will reread 'berlin noir' before reading kerr's next three bernie gunther books. i'm also reading nietzsche. still. again.

that one of mulhall's made a lot of the diehard philosophy-student types in the class very uneasy. to be fair i never finished it myself so maybe they were right. i meant to read his other book on the investigations first.

i mean, the sections on same in 'inheritance and originality', not that he has a whole other book. (maybe he has a whole other book i don't know about, i wouldn't know.)

Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods. Enjoyed it a great deal, while marveling at each chapter that anyone would write a book like this. Perverse in many, many ways.

Currently reading PKD's The Divine Invasion, kinda love that much of it is set in Chevy Chase, of all places.

yes, t, it is a whole other (short) book - explicitly continuing the reading of 'inheritance' into the 'private language argument' sections of the 'investigations'. so far i don't see that it's anything unexpected for people familiar with his other stuff (or with cavell on other minds, which it's engaged with), but it is extremely good. o, the energy i've wasted trying to write my own versions of some of these paragraphs...

The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell

no j i meant a whole other other book

i should proofread my ilx posts more better