David Markson's new novel is out

I started reading this and yeah, the same as his other books except he's a little older and more crotchety.

I found the old thread, but I had to put an apostrophe s to get search to get it: Do You Know What The Title Of David Markson's Next Book Is?

I dunno, I like the Markson novel but having read two of them I am content, you know?

Fine with me, just don't tell him that.

No, he can do what he wants. And I'll do what I want. It's all good.

david markson's library available for purchase at the strand!

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/07/26/alex-abramovich/oh-i-get-it-its-a-sci-fi-novel/

I’d heard about the haul from Jeff Severs, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. He’d heard about it from a student who’d stumbled on Markson’s copy of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. ‘my copy of white noise apparently used to belong to david markson (who i had to look up),’ the student had written.

he wrote some notes in the margin: a check mark by some passages, ‘no’ by other, ‘bullshit’ or ‘ugh get to the point’ by others. i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.

‘That’s amazing,’ Jeff had replied. ‘Did he write his name in the front or something? Did you buy it secondhand recently – as in, his family sold off his library?’

yeah he wrote his name inside the front cover and the cashiers at the strand said they have his whole collection. favorite comments: ‘oh god the pomposity, the bullshit!’, ‘oh i get it, it’s a sci-fi novel!’ and ‘big deal’.

That night, I put $262.81 on the credit card and brought three shopping bags home to my fourth-floor walk-up: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood ($7.50), Yeats’s Essays and Introductions ($15), Leslie Fiedler’s Life and Death in the American Novel ($10), Tristram Shandy ($5); 27 books in all. My new collection includes old Modern Library editions (Joyce, Kafka, Balzac, Pater, Lao-tse and Tacitus), undergraduate philosophy texts (the future novelist paid more attention to Kant and Hume than to Erasmus, Descartes and Hegel) and Joyce’s Selected Letters (with brackets around the dirty bits). Thanks to Markson, I now own Stephen Joyce’s Modern Library edition of Gogol’s Dead Souls. A gift? Did Markson borrow the book and fail return it? Or did he run across it himself on a visit to the Strand and wonder how it had ended up there?

haha. R.I.P.

it's kind of sad that it didn't go to an institution /:

RIP, though, yeah.

R.I.P. Markson

http://bigother.com/2010/06/07/wittgenstein%E2%80%99s-mistress-an-index/

does markson mention the story somewhere of how empedocles (i think?) tells alexander the great to get out of his light? i've seen that mentioned somewhere recently and i really can't think where

Diogenes, if that helps.

Huh. Has its own wiki page.

http://readingmarksonreading.tumblr.com/

RIP Stan Usual

Wow he has a thread. I read The Last Novel.

Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man’s life.

I didn't get the entire shape, perhaps it is hidden in there. The only shape I got was of a lonely unsuccesful rather bitter writer, jewish, hates arabs, appreciates the avant garde but is nevertheless artistically conservative (hates bob dylan, christo, hirst(*)). Not much else. I wondered how autofictional it was - if it is, it does its best to wring some tears out of at the end. Overall it was moderately entertaining as a collection of trivia.

I would like to reread Wittgenstein's Mistress, waiting to find a cheap copy somewhere.

(*) he's otm re: hirst.

Just clicked on that LRB link about his books at The Strand, probably for the first time since it was posted. Still works, and still delivers.