Ellen Willis - Out of the Vinyl Deeps
Nicholas Thompson - The Hawk and the Dove, a readable but facile study of George Kennan and Paul Nitze that, thanks to John Lewis Gaddis' new Kennan bio, is now obsolete.
Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves!
― lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 12 January 2012 02:52 (twelve years ago) link
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.
filthy? i really liked this and im... surprised, i guess, by this reaction?
― 404 (Lamp), Thursday, 12 January 2012 06:54 (twelve years ago) link
Lem - Solaris (2011 Johnston translation)
Finally a non-audio version and they fuck it up by leaving out a bunch of spaces in the Kindle copy. I read the Polish->French->English translation last year but I couldn't tell you what the differences are, apart from the character names being changed. Turns out that the original, lousy translation got the gist across.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Thursday, 12 January 2012 18:55 (twelve years ago) link
i liked it too lamp, i just mean the world he creates is so grime-encrusted, everyone is in destitute circumstances, lots of gross scenes involving small animals. not saying it was gratuitous, just that i don't know if i'd want to spend 500 pages in that world.
― the third kind of dubstep (Jordan), Thursday, 12 January 2012 18:59 (twelve years ago) link
oh, is that in print or just e-text? xp.
― thomp, Thursday, 12 January 2012 19:00 (twelve years ago) link
Teenage by John Savage. Bought it when I was in London 2 Xmases back. was overweight for flying so it got left there til a few weeks ago when I started reading it again. Am now 4/5s of way through it. Very interesting.
Lemmy White Line Fever picked up very cheaply in an HMV recently. Makes interesting light reading while I'm on the bus etc. Not really followed too much of Motorhead's career. Have been aware of some of the earlier & more popular stuff though. Plus I love Hawkwind + Sam Gopal are pretty decent.Guess this is the memoirs of a guy who's lived through a lot.
Also Patti Smith Just Kids again very interesting memoir this time of her early days with Robert Mapplethorpe. Will finish this finally when I get through the above 2.
No Go the Bogeyman by Marina WArner. Have this out the local library, started it before Xmas and it was too heavy to carry. Found what I read of it so far pretty fascinating. Mainly got this cos I couldn't afford to buy From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers when it appeared in the local 2nd hand/remaindered bookshop before Xmas.Wanted to check out her writing though. Will hopefully get that in the future though.
One reason I couldn't afford to get another book was having pickled up Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian in the same bookshop. Found it on the recently arrived shelf and it seemed to call out to me. just the kind of book that needed to be in my possession. Seems really reminiscent of the time it came out, back in '71. Not that I'd be completely conscious of the time having been a toddler but having gone through things like the psychedelic revival and having been aware of music & alternative culture of the time in hindsight it seems very resonant.
Was back in the shop today browsing, trying to make sure i didn't miss anything else neccessary but I'm really broke after Xmas. I'm also aware that I have a lot of other stuff I've picked up in there over the years that I've yet to read.
― Stevolende, Thursday, 12 January 2012 19:17 (twelve years ago) link
I took two bags' worth to the charity shop today. It's barely made a dent in my library.
― Ismael Klata, Thursday, 12 January 2012 19:57 (twelve years ago) link
went to the library, got whatever NYRB Classics they had that looked interesting, ended up with "Fatale" by Jean-Patrick Manchette (really quick read, wasn't super-impressed) and "The Ice Trilogy" by Alexander Sorokin, which I'm enjoying so far.
― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, 12 January 2012 20:00 (twelve years ago) link
sorry, Vladimir Sorokin
just finished munro's /too much happiness/
wasn't as blown away by it as i was with /open secrets/ but still...sentences like this one make it worthwhile
She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.
Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
― rayuela, Friday, 13 January 2012 18:25 (twelve years ago) link
or this
The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books–even those who were hungover, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending–should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.
― rayuela, Friday, 13 January 2012 18:32 (twelve years ago) link
yeah its not her best collection but a couple of stories, particularly the one about girls at a camp and 'deep-holes', which was grinding to read but powerful, have stayed with me
― 404 (Lamp), Friday, 13 January 2012 18:33 (twelve years ago) link
yeah, the camp one is child's play -- very very good. i also liked wenlock edge (the one with the weird old man who has girls read to him in the nude)
― rayuela, Friday, 13 January 2012 18:46 (twelve years ago) link
Finished Short Orders. Romney is terrific really, ws interesting to read about things I started digging at the time in naivety, like the terrific Vietnamese film Scent of Green Papaya or La Haine which at the time I liked but had no idea where it was coming from. Those first touches with diff mode of filmmaking that took root then and grew and now are stored in categories like 'neo realism' or 'new asian cinema' and so on, just names that are useful journalistically but have a potential to stop you thinking about their content.
There is a dense essay on CGI at the end. Those discussion - ws tackling a similarly dense essay on 3D in relation to dance films such as PIna - and outcomes are all up for grabs.
Now I'm reading a couple of short books from the BFI classics - one on Ichikawa's Actor's Revenge, the ohter on Ford's Stagecoach.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 13 January 2012 21:27 (twelve years ago) link
I'm reading 'Let the Great World Spin' which I'm liking very much. I think he's a good writer. The stuff about the greiving Vietnam mothers was particularly well done.
― franny glass, Saturday, 14 January 2012 00:05 (twelve years ago) link
Some recent reading:
Charlotte Bronte - Jane EyrePalinurus - The Unquiet GraveRobert Gittings - John KeatsOscar Wilde - De Profundis
All of which I thoroughly enjoyed. My rather limited French somewhat hampered my reading of The Unquiet Grave, but I still thought it was marvellous. I also tried reading 'A Tale of Two Cities', which I found pretty unbearable. A big fan of 'Great Expectations' too.
― Zuleika, Saturday, 14 January 2012 11:15 (twelve years ago) link
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Before that Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Next up The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.
― youn, Sunday, 15 January 2012 00:40 (twelve years ago) link
Another Muriel Spark novel, this time Memento Mori, which I am enjoying very much. I'm about 2/3 through it and I think it very clever of her to borrow a few tropes from Agatha Christie to tart up what is really a very un-Christie-like novel about old age and approaching death.
With my off hand I am also reading Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fu (Penguin Classics edition). It's a sketchy memoir written by a Chinese 'legal secretary' circa 1809. It is highly stylized by western standards, but by the Chinese literary standards of his time, it is unusually informal.
I took a brief run at Oblamov, but it felt like a too-heavy cake, so I'll try again later.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 18 January 2012 19:41 (twelve years ago) link
talented mr. ripleyripley underground
― rocognise gnome (remy bean), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 19:45 (twelve years ago) link
Londoners was really good. Slightly too many of the folk interviewed were zany characters, anticapitalists and conspiracy theorists and so forth, and slightly not-enough were regular folk in mundane but essential jobs (no civil servants at all, from memory; and every financial type was balanced out by an antibanker, which annoyed me a little as they had interesting stories whereas the protectors appeared not to know very much about anything). But that's small complaint, it was an excellent read, and I raced through because the style was so conversational. Laetitia Sadier was one of the interviewees and hence has her own three or four pages, which would please some folks round here.
Now The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, which has had some hype. I bought on a whim after finishing the other book while out yesterday. No discount or anything, but it paid off, I'm enjoying it very much thus far. It's one of those generous, ever-so-slightly flabby American novels, like Franzen maybe, rather than the DeLillo it was trailed as in Waterstone's. It reminds me most of Bonfire of the Vanities, in that I feel they both needed one more edit before going out - there are a few clichés here & there, the odd groanworthy gag, and passages where nothing much happens and nothing needed to. But that's minor fare when you've got a good story, and thus far I'm hooked.
― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 18 January 2012 20:09 (twelve years ago) link
munro book club discussion is tonight!
finished hateship...liked it better than _too much happiness_, but after reading these two I'm starting to wonder if anything else of hers will top Open Secrets. Maybe it's just cuz the first story in open secrets was so freaking good that these other two books just haven't compared? Or was it b/c it was my first Munro? It would be sad to think that Munro will never be as great to me as when I read that first one...
― rayuela, Wednesday, 18 January 2012 21:59 (twelve years ago) link
Read 'Ripley Under Water'!
― Do you know what the secret of comity is? (Michael White), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 22:06 (twelve years ago) link
I'm going sequentially. They're really great fun.
― rocognise gnome (remy bean), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 22:09 (twelve years ago) link
about 3/4 through stone arabia now. it's weird how the writing is very straight-forward and unadorned for the most part, when it's supposed to be the sister character's written journal. but when she's talking in front of a camera, out come the florid metaphors, which would be fine except they're totally unbelievable as speech. then again, it's her written account of the interview and the main theme of the book is revisionism and unreliable narration, so...
― the third kind of dubstep (Jordan), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 22:38 (twelve years ago) link
Esther Leslie and her bk on Walt Disney. And Walter Benjamin, of course, can't forget him.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 18 January 2012 22:57 (twelve years ago) link
The KCRW/Bookworm interview with Eugenidies leaves me wanting to read The Marriage Plot.
― do you not like slouching? (Eazy), Thursday, 19 January 2012 00:36 (twelve years ago) link
Good interview? I'll have to google it, be curious to hear him talk abt it...
― rayuela, Thursday, 19 January 2012 00:44 (twelve years ago) link
3 to kill - jean-patrick manchette (brutal stuff, a swift read, would make a hell of a melville film if he was still around to make them.)death of the adversary - hans keilson (second keilson i've read, contains probably the most devastating single chapter i've read in a novel in a very long time, and said chapter ends on a singularly emotionally brutal note.)hell at the breech - tom franklin (well-written and vv good with the exception of a character i can only describe as a "francis wolcott in deadwood" equivalent, who seems to have zero purposes except to cause chaos, which is fine i suppose but he seems utterly out of place. otherwise good.)he died with his eyes open - derek raymond (working through this one now. so far, so good.)
― omar little, Thursday, 19 January 2012 05:19 (twelve years ago) link
A Mirror for England - Raymond Durgnat
― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 19 January 2012 09:12 (twelve years ago) link
Finishing Martin Chuzzlewit. Dipping into Selected Journalism 1850-1870, also by Charles Dickens.Starting Ackroyd's Dickens biography. God this thing is huge.
I was just trying to ignore the Dickens bicentenary, and not to let it make me too contrary (and I was saving my reading energies for the Browning bicentenary in May, Camberwell represent), but then a friend commissioned a brief urgent bit of hackwork on him, and I have been sucked in. I forget how much I love him; I basically am a sucker for that London-visionary Dickens, and though god knows he has his faults, none of the other nineteenth century sorts move me or excite me as he does - strange tableaux, titanic descriptive passages of universe where everything seems alive, caricatures going sideways to truth. idk in a few months I'll maybe be back to thinking that he should have written less, but right now I am even delighting in jolly filler episodes and thinking I should hole up and read nothing but for 6 months.
― you don't exist in the database (woof), Thursday, 19 January 2012 13:47 (twelve years ago) link
Cyril Connolly's mildly amusing The Rock Pool and Kenneth Ackerman's uproarious Boss Tweed.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 19 January 2012 13:49 (twelve years ago) link
hans keilson -- those two books of his are wonderfully written, and spectacularly dark. pity he hasn't written more fiction. as far as I know he's still alive, over 100, but has only written the 2 short novels (and lots of psychology publications)
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Thursday, 19 January 2012 22:42 (twelve years ago) link
doing some catching up on some classics:
halfway through lolita - i adore thisread "the lagoon" and about to start heart of darknessstarted a portrait of the artist as a young manattn alfred: trying to finish savage's takeover
― tebow gotti (k3vin k.), Friday, 20 January 2012 06:48 (twelve years ago) link
After almost a year I finally finished Middlemarch! Feel quite bereft. Is Daniel Deronda worth attempting, does ILB think?
Over Christmas I read Alain Robbe-Grillet's Why I Love Barthes - not so much a slim volume, more an anorexic pamphlet - and JJ Sullivan's Pulphead, which I enjoyed parts of, but... I don't really get all the fuss.
Delphi have been putting out some thorough Complete Works ebooks of various authors fresh out of copyright. Have been browsing through the Virginia Woolf. Lots of essays I'd never seen before, most of them sensational.
Have been reading Paul Mason ahead of his new book. Live Working or Die Fighting - great, punchy history of worker's movements from Peterloo, through the Paris Commune up to Gramsci etc in the Italian car industry. Didn't know all the stuff about the Knights of Labor. And Meltdown, which made me think I almost understood the world financial fiasco. Also had a gander at a collection of David Graeber essays, including a pretty funny piece on Buffy.
― Stevie T, Friday, 20 January 2012 13:08 (twelve years ago) link
Are you enjoying the Durgnat, Ward? Read one of his collections last year and want to chase some more down.
Really want a decent papk of Woolf's essays.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 20 January 2012 23:52 (twelve years ago) link
I really enjoyed Daniel Deronda. I think I wrote on the sandbox -
Daniel Deronda is a very strange book. Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism .. I’ve never read a novel where it’s quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever – fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it’s a pet theory I have that realist writers aren’t interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are – Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious [wrong word] heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all – it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.
What's unusual about it I guess is the strong strain of mysticism competing and overwhelming what is otherwise an intensely cynical novel.
I really like that she writes a lot of her own chapter epigraphs:
Aspern. Pardon, my lord—I speak for Sigismund.Fronsberg. For him? Oh, ay—for him I always holdA pardon safe in bank, sure he will drawSooner or later on me. What his need?Mad project broken? fine mechanic wingsThat would not fly? durance, assault on watch,Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat?Aspern. Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escapedFrom Circe’s herd, and seeks to win the loveOf your fair ward Cecilia: but would winFirst your consent. You frown.Fronsberg. Distinguish words.I said I held a pardon, not consent.
Love Sigismund!
But if you've just finished Middlemarch, you'll probably want a break. Eliot has such a tight leash on her characters' psychologies that I needed something a little breezier after.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 21 January 2012 09:38 (twelve years ago) link
Torrents of Spring - Ivan Turgenev
― nostormo, Saturday, 21 January 2012 12:59 (twelve years ago) link
Interesting about the quotidian - the Pinefox should post up somewhere the essay he wrote about Sylvia Plath and food. (The missus is always horribly frustrated in films or tv [though oddly not fiction] where characters are obviously eating but you can't see what...)
Funnily enough, one of the things that most impressed me about Middlemarch was what I felt was Eliot's negative capability, how she did have some feel for the everyday, despite her obvious investment in Dorothea's high-mindedness - how a child plays with its cat, the way a lot of the time you can see Celia's point about Dodo's terrible seriousness, and at the end when the teasing relationship between Mary and Fred seems to be the truest of all the marriages, the real heart of the novel in a way.
― Stevie T, Saturday, 21 January 2012 13:25 (twelve years ago) link
I reread Daniel Deronda last May and was still impressed.
Not one of his best known essays, but one of his most penetrating.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 21 January 2012 14:22 (twelve years ago) link
Very impressed by Stevie's, as we used to call it ... book-learning.
I could possibly try to dig out that essay from the ghost of a draft of Papercuts 5, but not sure that anyone would make anything of it now, though it was the best I could do with Plath in 2000 and I could surely not do any better on that topic in this lifetime.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 22 January 2012 01:32 (twelve years ago) link
i think they eat in 'adam bede'!
― j., Sunday, 22 January 2012 05:18 (twelve years ago) link
austen -- emma (a writer i've never gotten with, but am enjoying this one. funny, exasperating.)the presidency of james buchanan -- elbert smith (christ, what an awful president.)
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, 22 January 2012 21:35 (twelve years ago) link
just finished reading Positively George Street by Matthew Bannister. I liked it; I've wanted to read something about the Flying Nun 'Dunedin sound' scene for a while, and this--the slender memoir of the guitarist from the Sneaky Feelings--wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Sneaky Feelings is probably the one band that I was least interested in, but he had some interesting ground-zero insights in the whole NZ scene and though his pissy putdowns of the more punk/noise elements of the scene certainly grated, dude had an engagingly honest and cheerful voice. The exact opposite of vainglory. I can't imagine another rock autobiography where the writer talks about accidentally pissing on an electric fence, at least without turning it into some wild anecdote of endless, crazed partying (as opposed to showing it as the stoned and stupid mistake that Bannister sheepishly admits that it was).
― uncle acid and the absquatulators (Drugs A. Money), Monday, 23 January 2012 04:40 (twelve years ago) link
well, stone arabia certainly petered to a halt. need something new now.
― the third kind of dubstep (Jordan), Monday, 23 January 2012 17:54 (twelve years ago) link
hey julio, the Durgnat is extremely entertaining, as you might expect, and makes you want to see a load of Boulting Brothers movies double-quick. The book is VERY scattershot, and of course some of Britain's political/historical circumstances have changed since it was written, but it's surprising how often he's clear-eyed and accurate about class, society, and so on. I'd like to know more about the class composition and sympathies of the people who actually made these films - was filmmaking in Britain really the utterly middle class and rigidly bound profession it seems in hindsight? - but that's probably the work of a different book, or books.
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 24 January 2012 09:30 (twelve years ago) link
*checkes wiki* oh ok, Brighton Rock! I didn't know it was a (twin) brotherly team that made these.
Everyone claimed the remake shamed it but I wasn't fussed either way.
Thx for the comments - sounds like the book for me. I think I finally (finally!) made a breakthrough w/British film last year and so need to carry that on.
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 24 January 2012 19:37 (twelve years ago) link
Juan Pablo Villalobos: Down the Rabbit Hole -- as good as everyone said it was (70-page novella told from the point of view of a spoiled, isolated kid living in his Mexican drug kingpin dad's compound)
Satyajit Ray: Indigo (Selected Stories) -- some good ones, but weirdly a lot like a collection of MOR Edwardian pulp/genre fiction (amateur detectives, giant carnivorous plants, time displacement in dreams, etc)
A D Miller: Snowdrops -- not bad, but plot hinges on main character not asking a really obvious question, and continuing to not ask over a period of time, in order for the plot to actually work (ie idiot/'Lost' plotting); given its Booker nom last year, I see what they mean about the nominations being very middlebrow
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Tuesday, 24 January 2012 23:11 (twelve years ago) link
have to leave 'middlemarch' aside. reading 'the great gatsby' for class now. last time i read it was 17 years ago!
― Michael B Higgins (Michael B), Wednesday, 25 January 2012 00:28 (twelve years ago) link
Joseph O'Neil's Neverland. At last.
J.D., how's the Buchanan bio?
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 25 January 2012 00:32 (twelve years ago) link
marjorie perloff's memoir is the first thing i've finished since the beckett binge
― junior dada (thomp), Wednesday, 25 January 2012 00:37 (twelve years ago) link