I'm going to try reading The Tale of Genji, the Tyler translation.
So far I'm finding that it's a book that must be taken slowly, 5 minutes a page if not more. So probably over 100 hours in total.
― jmm, Wednesday, 3 January 2024 13:41 (eight months ago) link
Lucas Hilderbrand - The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and AfterHarry Crews - The Gospel Singer
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 3 January 2024 13:44 (eight months ago) link
as I said re 2023 reading:
Truman Capote:The Early Stories of Truman Capote (half good, promising)Other Voices, Other Rooms (maybe half good, disappointing)
― dow, Wednesday, 3 January 2024 18:09 (eight months ago) link
sense of personal concerns as generator of characters' situations
― dow, Wednesday, 3 January 2024 18:11 (eight months ago) link
Read Atlantic Island by Tony Duvert. A friend had told me this book was actually quite an astonishing indictment of bourgeois adult values and attitudes toward children, and in fact, she was correct, tho sometimes the means by which Duvert got there— depicting sex between teenage boys— was obviously icky. Like a more French and less hallucinatory Burroughs in this way, the book held some sentences that bowled me over, such as: “When you fall into the grip of those who have the right to be virtuous at your expense, you can never get out.”Now I am reading Anne F. Garréta’s Sphinx, a pretty engaging short novel about a love affair between two characters who remain genderless and utterly ambiguous throughout the book. Digging it so far!
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Wednesday, 3 January 2024 23:36 (eight months ago) link
im seong-sun - the consultantkorean thriller about the restructuring consultant of an all pervasive company referred throughout as simply 'the company' whose job is to plan the deaths of anyone in need of 'restructuring'. v good flow and world creation but somehow slight in the end.
― oscar bravo, Friday, 5 January 2024 08:59 (eight months ago) link
I just finished Mike Davis' City of Quartz. Amazing, amazing book, I didn't want it to end.
I thought the chapter on the Catholic church was going to be boring, but it was incredible. I would be curious about the church's legacy/impact/power since 1990. I would presume it has declined due to the fallout from the church molestation scandals and as most church attendance has declined.
― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Friday, 5 January 2024 12:24 (eight months ago) link
The Urantia Book. Curious if there are other readers lurking around ilx
― calstars, Friday, 5 January 2024 17:41 (eight months ago) link
I finished the Ross Macdonald book, The Underground Man. In order to create an increasingly dense series of plot twists in the last twenty pages of the book he incrementally revealed that an improbably large number of the characters had converged at the scene of a murder that took place 15 years earlier, while at the same time most of them were unaware of each others proximity.
Surprisingly, this scarcely believable level of improbability didn't detract from the story at all for me, because the real interest wasn't generated by the mystery of whodunnit, but by the complexities of the characters as humans.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 5 January 2024 19:13 (eight months ago) link
It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Friday, 5 January 2024 19:15 (eight months ago) link
boy, Harry Crews thinks he's Flannery O'Connor, eh
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 January 2024 19:27 (eight months ago) link
I have to confess to enjoying A Feast of Snakes. It definitely sits in the guilty pleasures bin.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Friday, 5 January 2024 19:34 (eight months ago) link
I don't like to dismiss Major Novelists out of hand, so I'm picking that one up on Sunday.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 January 2024 19:37 (eight months ago) link
It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: _Chain-Gang All-Stars_, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, 5 January 2024 22:52 (eight months ago) link
I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.
― kinder, Friday, 5 January 2024 23:06 (eight months ago) link
I was really disappointed by it (it had been highly recommended to me), for roughly the reasons here: https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2023/07/02/the-fall-of-the-tower/
― toby, Saturday, 6 January 2024 07:57 (eight months ago) link
i quit it after like 100 pages
― mookieproof, Saturday, 6 January 2024 08:13 (eight months ago) link
It was like someone has tried to crowbar 2020s online discourse into the mouths of 1800s Oxford students and it felt so off even though I appreciate the actual positions of the characters. (The most minor, yet most jarring to me in some ways, was one of them declaring a dessert was supposed to be "sticky toffee pudding" which might sound like a jolly old traditional English pudding but is far more recent! like if they'd talked about Cheesecake Factory!). For a book about language, the way they spoke was bizarre. I really loved the idea of how the magic 'works' but it had hardly changed the world apart from making existing things more efficient.
― kinder, Saturday, 6 January 2024 09:13 (eight months ago) link
I should say a friend of mine who is not white found it really nailed some of his experiences of talking about nations of "Brown" people with white people.
― kinder, Saturday, 6 January 2024 09:19 (eight months ago) link
I finished *The Age of Innocence*. Obviously the word 'perfect' is overused but well, sometimes it's the only thing that will do. It left me sobbing my poor ragged heart out.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Saturday, 6 January 2024 10:31 (eight months ago) link
Oh that sounds exactly my thing. Will see if we have it
― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:02 (eight months ago) link
It's quite well done
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:03 (eight months ago) link
A model of decorum there, Alfred.
There's that feeling that you only really get with novels that you're in the presence of an intelligence so vast and refined that it's like being known.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:07 (eight months ago) link
It's 'how many 'thats' can you fit into a sentence', Saturday.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:08 (eight months ago) link
Wharton's one of my favorite novelists.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:11 (eight months ago) link
1) What should I read next? and 2) do I dare watch the Scorcese film?
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:15 (eight months ago) link
The House of Mirth. You'll feel the noose tightening around your neck.
The Scorsese film is one of his best.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:16 (eight months ago) link
I haven't tried any xxxp Harry Crews novels yet, but his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is amazingly good. Tough-minded teacher Mary Karr, in The Art of Memoir, says she's partial to it, while noting how it breaks some of her rules, and greatly prefers it to his fiction, likewise Casey Cep, in an astute New Yorker presentation. Those who do like the novels usually mention A Feast of Snakes first.
― dow, Saturday, 6 January 2024 18:44 (eight months ago) link
xp I thought the film version of The House of Mirth was quite good as well. Gillian Anderson is underappreciated as an actor.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 6 January 2024 18:51 (eight months ago) link
Yeah, I thought it was good when first released, haven't seen it since, would like to.Here's what I said about xp AC on a WAYR? thread last year:
In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the earliest memory of Harry Crews is of waking up under a tree with his excellent dog Sam, both of them in early morning sunlight: he's a sleepwalker who's hit it lucky, in and out of place. The place, into which he now centered by tobacco farming, is late 30s Bacon County, Georgia, sometimes extending across the St. Mary's River into Jacksonville, Florida's Springfield Section of tiny shotgun row houses and cigar factories, with the youngest children, like himself, left to their own devices.In Bacon and the Section, he's the mostly the audience, including that of the glossy people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, so fantastically intact, unlike almost every one else he sees, that they must have wounds under their clothes: he and his friend Willalee and Willalee's grandmother, Auntie.a self-proclaimed conjure woman and ex-slave, tell each other stories about the Sears people: the audience continuing through the creative process.Little Crews also responds and is responded and susceptible to an increasing number of people, becoming "a parade" of vistors to his bedroom, when he's confined with "infantile paralysis" (nice work, Dr. Colombo). Many of these are people he knows or recognizes---though not the faith healer from the next county---in a new context, with him more an audience than ever, but for their attentions. Scary, especially when Aunties dropping knowledge, though things were already disturbing enough, hence the sleepwalking, and now he feels in place (for one thing, he can't wake up in a dark field, because he can't get there).The second session is even better: almost boiled alive, he now qualifies for actual treatment, by drying light and soothing spray (which becomes a protective coating) while he's under a protective shell, which he compares to the top of a carriage, with his Sears Roebuck Catalog and a tablet for his detective novel, about a boy detective who carries fireworks for protection. He's also allowed to keep an attentive baby goat in there---all things for the twice-struck child---Before, in between, and after these confinements, he can disappear like a tiny Ishmael, one whose reappearances become more self-revealing, traced in and out of place, for keeps---spoiler of sorts: a mind-fuck evangelist appears, an alibi of sorts for very bad child Crews deed, but a plausible one, as far as he goes, which is pretty far, in a professional way. Even I, Boomer suburbanite, was singed by one during a brief primary school encounter, while preschool Crews and his crew get the extended treatment, as isolation's captive audience.There are what I take to be fictional outcroppings, but not much to stumble over. He learns from the stories of men (character-driven, funny) and women (action, cutting the surface)--the former told while taking a break, the latter not so much.
― dow, Saturday, 6 January 2024 18:54 (eight months ago) link
“the house of mirth” is extraordinary
“the leopard”, which I finished today, was also extraordinary
― LaMDA barry-stanners (||||||||), Saturday, 6 January 2024 19:59 (eight months ago) link
^^ otm
I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.
My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 6 January 2024 20:04 (eight months ago) link
The Leopard is amazing. Whole scenes whirl in dusty corridors of my mind.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Saturday, 6 January 2024 20:20 (eight months ago) link
I read (or, rather, listened to) Steven Price's novel about Lampedusa's writing of The Leopard, called (not surprisingly) Lampedusa. Now I have to read the source material.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 6 January 2024 20:22 (eight months ago) link
Oh, wow, interesting. The narrative framing reminded me of The Great Gatsby's, where the distance b/w us and Gatsby works in the novel's favor; it deepens his mystery.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 6 January 2024 22:32 (eight months ago) link
Here's a recent piece on Crews: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/a-childhood-is-one-of-the-finest-memoirs-ever-written
I should note that Penguin Classics has reissued some of those hard-to-find novels.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 6 January 2024 22:34 (eight months ago) link
Yeah, that's the Cep coverage I xxxposted, glad to see it's not paywalled, thanks!Late last night, wanting to be done it with it, I finished my first Portis, The Dog of the South. I can see how his deadpan, constantly active, funky panoramas suited the Coens, who declared their True Grit straight from the book, w/o bothering to watch the John Wayne version. And this might be a good movie too, though on the page it gets monotonous to me, with the same affects, especially via the motormouth monologues of self-justifying seekers, finders, who just keep a-goin', frequently on the shady side---I admit it's also a tad close to home, coming from several directions, but mainly drone-y, despite all the bumps, breakdowns and more turns ahead. Good choice of narrator,though: a determined driver and straight man for others, also naive, relatively innocent, conservative, if a bit crazed/compulsive, and can see maybe why his wife took off, somewhut starved, I will read True Grit at some point, but how does A Dog... compare to his others? Should I keep-a goin' with any of them?
― dow, Sunday, 7 January 2024 00:54 (seven months ago) link
Yes, "affects," not "effects": in this case, the way I read it and feel about it: downtempo, despite the pace of the predictably colorful, crinkled road reports.
― dow, Sunday, 7 January 2024 01:07 (seven months ago) link
The poem "To Elsie" by Wm. Carlos Williams is my touchstone for understanding the characters and stories Portis wanted to get down on paper. It's online here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46485/to-elsie
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 7 January 2024 02:11 (seven months ago) link
totally ripped off beethoven imo
― mookieproof, Sunday, 7 January 2024 02:23 (seven months ago) link
doesn't everyone sooner or later?
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 7 January 2024 02:27 (seven months ago) link
Water Closet Williams shoulda stopped after the first line, which is classick quote-bait, but after all who among us is that pure, and I don't think peasant traditions would help Portis characters, who are more decent (at least in the sense that a meal or an overcoat can be decent) than the rest of that, as are some Williams (he wrote better fiction than poetry, I now think). Portis seems closer to Sherwood Anderson (on the road, not in Winesburg, as far as they'd care to know).
― dow, Sunday, 7 January 2024 05:48 (seven months ago) link
they=Portis/Dog of the Southpeople. (I shouldn't generalize too freely, having only read the one book.)
― dow, Sunday, 7 January 2024 05:51 (seven months ago) link
Wharton musings this morning. I sometimes think of a thing Wallace Stevens said (particularly around Christmas, when I want to run and keep running), that 'life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble'. Wharton said of her move to Hyères in Provence in 1922 (two years after *The Age of Innocence* was published) 'I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last'.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Sunday, 7 January 2024 12:56 (seven months ago) link
Prepping for a new class and reworking some older syllabi, I have been flipping around a lot in Keats, Mary Ruefle’s book of lectures, Adorno, Prynne’s long book on Wordsworth, and a few other things. Amidst all that, I am in the middle of The Palestine Laboratory, which I believe I wrote about in the old thread, and am slowly moving through EDEN EDEN EDEN by Guyotat, a small section at a time. Mornings now taken up with a book by my favorite French poet currently working, Anne Portugal, whose Flirt Formula is beautiful, uncanny, and consistent in its surprises. She is truly a great, highly recommend her works.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Sunday, 7 January 2024 14:32 (seven months ago) link
Ooh. I'm quite interested in Field Notes, but, alas, neither my uni library nor the statewide catalog carries it.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 7 January 2024 14:36 (seven months ago) link
Alfred, I have a digital copy— it is a strange copy because some British guy took literal photographs of every page, so you get his awful thumbs and bits of garden in the corners, but otherwise, it is a crisp and clear PDF of the thing in its entirety. Webmail me, I will forward it along.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Sunday, 7 January 2024 14:58 (seven months ago) link
I see now I spoke too soon about A Lost Lady. It did indeed change direction almost immediately, so that the apparent romanticism of the first half now looks like a set up for a more nuanced perspective. Because I haven't finished it yet I'll reserve further comment until then.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 9 January 2024 01:35 (seven months ago) link
The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, about classical memory techniques and in particular their application in the middle ages. Way more academic than the kind of thing I usually read, I got it because it focuses on (among others) Giordano Bruno, who kept on popping up various novels.
Also decided that alongside this it would be good to start on Ulysses, wtf, make it easy on yourself why don't you.
― organ doner (ledge), Tuesday, 9 January 2024 11:47 (seven months ago) link
OK, I finished A Lost Lady last night. Honestly, I had hoped for Cather to cast some serious side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement that the wealthy aristocracy weaves around themselves, which is constructed entirely upon the labor of the poor. Instead, Cather seemed to be endorsing the idea that the first generation who brought industrial commerce into the raw plains of North America were honorable visionaries and idealists.
The 'lost lady' at the center of the book was lost in the sense that as the book begins she embodies the highest and most ideal American version of what makes a woman "a lady" and by the end she has lost that ease of perfection. Her subsequent downfall comes not through her personal failings, but because the generation of Great Men of the West, as embodied by her husband, has been overtaken by men who do not uphold the ideals and manners of those giants. Their wealth has been appropriated and their days of greatness are over.
Her fate in the book is just a reflection of theirs. Her ideal figure of 'a perfect lady' could only be sustained through her connection to the great and good Captain Forrester. When his wealth disappeared, she fell out of grace. As the book ends and she has regained wealth through a second marriage, her grace is marred because the Captain's heroic virtues were irreplaceable and she can never be the same 'perfect lady' again. Cather's wistful, even elegiac, tone over this romanticized version of western history seems undeniable to me.
Alfred will probably want to quarrel some with my conclusions, but I don't see how the text supports an alternative interpretation.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 9 January 2024 21:03 (seven months ago) link
fermat's last theorem by simon singh.
apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.
― gene besserit (ledge), Monday, 18 March 2024 14:46 (five months ago) link
I started Morning and Evening, my first Jon Fosse.
― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 March 2024 19:29 (five months ago) link
"Good Morning, Midnight" was great. Haven't read a bad Rhys yet, so will definitely keep going. Currently reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt focusing on his youth: "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough. Covers a similar time period and American upper class social stratum as the William James bio I read last year.
― o. nate, Monday, 18 March 2024 20:06 (five months ago) link
no, my copy is indeed called fermat's last theorem. enigma is the american edition. is "theorem" too scary a word for americans, like "philosopher's"?
― gene besserit (ledge), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 14:34 (five months ago) link
Enigma I associate with Turing, maybe that’s why?
― Don’t Want to Say Goodbye Jumbo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 14:52 (five months ago) link
Oh wait
― Don’t Want to Say Goodbye Jumbo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 14:54 (five months ago) link
Finished a re-read of Lyn Hejinian's Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, which is, of course, none of those things. It consists of 270 free sonnets that interweave elements of Hejinian's visits to the USSR during perestroika alongside the plot of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It's a great book, much more funny and joyous than I remember it being. That said, I first read it more than a decade ago, so my memory of it might have been a little blurry.
Hejinian is well worth reading, for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. She will be missed.
Today I need to finish my fifth or sixth re-reading of Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse to prep for my poetry workshop students tomorrow, but I also am spending stray moments with a short Michael Palmer book, First Figures, which I picked up over the weekend. Palmer is an interesting poet, for while his first five or six books are quite mesmerizing in their focus on how and why we read and place signification the way the we do, his later works veer into a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring. This is one of his final "interesting" books.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 15:41 (five months ago) link
It's officially Spring! Things have been a bit slack in the WAYR thread compared to days of yore, but maybe the pace will pick up a bit in a new thread. Either way, it's time for a new beginning.
Any takers for starting a Spring 2024 thread?
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 15:48 (five months ago) link
a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.
My grad school experience in the early 90s in a nutshell.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 16:03 (five months ago) link
lol— did you get hit with too much Lacan and Derrida?
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 16:09 (five months ago) link
As filtered through professors like Perry Meisel, yes.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 16:12 (five months ago) link
― Don’t Want to Say Goodbye Jumbo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 16:43 (five months ago) link
I gone done and made a new one: I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 17:05 (five months ago) link
I wonder if some of the French reputation for abstraction may have to do with translation difficulties. Just guessing it would be easier to make a long sentence with many abstract terms cohere in a language like French, with its wealth of inflections. I think many English translations try to keep the long sentences but without the inflections as hints they become rather frustrating to parse.
― o. nate, Tuesday, 19 March 2024 17:06 (five months ago) link
Thanks, Chinaski!
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 17:08 (five months ago) link
I mean that he utilizes a lot of abstract rather than concrete images, and this lends his poems a sort of French theoretical quality mixed with a strange messianism that I think of as rooted in “the mythic.” Part of my disinterest might be that this style is deeply dated; the other part of me believes that the poems are so hermetic that it takes a certain mindset to find a way into them. I enjoy a lot of “difficult” poetry, though— Palmer’s work simply feels like one sheer surface, whereas many of his compatriots write in multiple modes and in ways that betray surfaces of language and signification rubbing against one another. That kind of friction is ultimately absent from Palmer’s work after the mid 80s, to my mind.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, 19 March 2024 17:12 (five months ago) link