Post-solstice thread with the mostest - what have you been reading? (2010 remix)

A new thread was suggested. A new thread has been supplied. I am too busy now getting ready for Xmas visitors to read, but I promise to get back to you all. Shall I pencil in Dec 26?

'America, Empire of Liberty' - David Reynolds

Just finished Willard Gibbs by Muriel Rukeyser. Amazing.

New England history, Henry Adams and ancestors, William James and clan, entropy, the IG Farben cartel up to WW2, Africans... Thomas Pynchon with his parallel roots read this book very early on and used it as a map, it's self-evident.

Henderson speaks now of the parts: scientists have avoided what Gibbs dared to consider, systems with many components, except when they could use the statistical treatment. In the problems, great complexity is reached immediately, for all those changing factors depend on each other as the members of a society, and secondary changes increase at breakneck speed as the number increases very slightly. "The nature of the case will be more readily appreciated by reference to another branch of biology in which our intuitions are better practiced. Consider a human society of n individuals and let n equal successively 2, 3, 10, and 20." With two or three persons, we have the short story, in which relationships are often successfully managed, Henderson continues; with ten individuals to keep alive, he doubts whether the greatest poets or novelists have done their work of description successfully; and with twenty characters, he says description is possible only if most of the figures are puppets. One thinks of Tolstoy, of Shakespeare or Balzac as masters of such equilibrium, but counting the few who have dared to consider systems of living complexity, one recognizes another possible use of Gibbs's powerful results.

Challenge accepted!

That was the pale life, whose faces were read distantly, and slipped away, whose letters were torn up, burned, anyway destroyed. The life behind that burned. Hill-slopes, scattered yellow and blue with the familiar flowers and the flowering trees, and the darker wooded hills of Germany and the light-pointed Riviera; the return forever home, to know these streets, only these few streets except for the handful of trips made to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, at which the sparks of contact with the men who could possibly find his thought were struck. But of his life there is left only a husk of legend, the cast-off and repudiated anecdotes, and the little stories theat suddenly illuminate one side of greatness. The other side is its own youth and strengthening; to that side his death was only a minor episode. That life began with the shaping of the first images; he thought in images, and as these designs and balances, the strict intricate dances of equilbrium, came through, the new sciences took root. And they grew with a jungle growth, not in the restricted avenues of commerce, but in their applications which are the applications of of any kind of truth purified...

Ladies and gentlemen, case closed.

'the financial lives of the poets' by jess walter - dug it, quick read

'future missionaries of america' by matthew vollmer - enjoying it on the whole, a little too same-y, liked the title story best

also i just ordered like $60 worth of tao lin books - i dont make wise choices w/ $

did you order them from him? if i were going to spend that much on tao lin i would order them from him and 'personalised'

i just read shoplifting. like, today. he is definitely talented but, you know, i don't know.

lol yes i think i do know...

naw i dont really want them personalized idk maybe i should have

The new Alice Munro - wow! so far - excellent Christmas gift

reading Day of the Jackal right now; was excited at first, less so after discovering it's largely fiction!

james, post here if you notice the weird name mix-up in the last story!

'the financial lives of the poets' by jess walter - dug it, quick read
is this good? i just got it from my boss for Xmas, oddly enough!

Just read Alice Munro, 'Hateship, Friendship...'
Now reading Patrick Lane, 'There Is a Season' - his memoir.

james, post here if you notice the weird name mix-up in the last story!

Now I feel dense--I did not notice this! Who/what?

last paragraph of 250, first paragraph of 251: sophia is called sonya (more than once!)

i just read shoplifting. like, today. he is definitely talented but, you know, i don't know.

There's a good interview with Tao Lin on Bookworm.

I don't know, either. I'm kind of inclined to wait and see what he writes in 10 years.

But this is amusing:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw091203tao_lin/bw091203Tao_Lin480x172.jpg

great comments thread

ricky garni · 1 week ago
Martha is right. I am 52, and I don't get Tao Lin. And I do not think of him as a modern existentialist. What comes across to me is a general laziness, lack of craft and discipline, lack of inventiveness, lack of imagination. I came across a lot of writing like Tao Lin's when I taught school, and I sincerely do not mean this as an offense, but this style of writing was most prevalent among students who were on Ritalin.

(...)

Chrys Avenue · 1 week ago
Hi Mr./Ms. Garni,
I am Tao Lin's publisher. Could you please reply here or send me an email at i✧✧✧@mhpbo✧✧✧.c✧✧. I would like to get your permission to use the following quote of yours on the back cover of Mr. Lin's next book:

"I came across a lot of writing like Tao Lin's when I taught school, and I sincerely do not mean this as an offense, but this style of writing was most prevalent among students who were on Ritalin."

Thank you in advance.

-CA

mr.bf · 1 week ago
i'm 64 years old. i look at tao's blog almost every day and shit talk him where ever i can. i used to try to write books, now i just write in the comments section of tao lin interviews. i want everyone to know tao is bad at writing and art and being a human. if you think tao lin is good, you are also probably bad.

Ritaolin · 1 week ago
I like Ritalin. It's like opening a door and then just standing there with the doorknob in your hand and not walking through the door. That's what Ritalin feels like. I am not Tao Lin. I am RiTaolin.
Reply1 reply · active 1 week ago
0
Ann · 1 week ago
I like Ritalin too. But I've never heard of this Tao Lin person.
Why does this strange comments page appear when you google "Ritalin"?

John A. Williams! Why didn't people tell me about him? (Okay, people did and I didn't listen). Since The Man Who Cried I Am is sort of about Wright, I've been reading some Wright too -- the later, nonfiction, of which an anthology was published last year, and then a book (Popular Fronts) about Wright and his circle in Chicago in the 30s-40s (although its less about wright, and I think argues that it is less "his circle" than folks think) and from there on to Willard Motley's 2nd book (his first one -- Knock On Any Door -- has to be one of the best works of straightforward social realism I've read) which I think is relatively unknown, and from there, Frank London Brown and soforth.

last paragraph of 250, first paragraph of 251: sophia is called sonya (more than once!)

Weirdly, this is not in mine--but thi is the UK edeition, printed later. Maybe someone spotted the error.

I was given the Paris Review Interviews as a gift and have racing through them. Like eating marshmallows.

The new Alice Munro - wow! so far - excellent Christmas gift

yah its r good huh - "some women" in particular, which made me kind of dizzy

that fallada translation "everyone dies alone" isnt all that great. in fact its kind of boring

A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe

finished:

Kiss Me Judas, Will Christopher Baer

started yesterday:

2666, Roberto Bolano

Waa! I loved the Fallada too! The only Michael Hofmann translation I haven't enjoyed is 'Land of Green Plums', and the problems I had were not with the translation but the original book, I suspect.

disappointing pile of holiday reading:

martin scott, thraxas at the races
geeta dayal's 33 1/3 book on eno's another green world
george r.r. martin, a storm of swords
david denby, snark
tao lin, shoplifting from american apparel
robert v.s. redick, the red wolf conspiracy
eric ambler, a passage of arms
joyce carol oates, rape: a love story

they were all ok i guess

After the excellent Leo Perutz: Master of the Day of Judgement (ace between-wars Viennese fiction about a deadly book -- OR IS IT?!?) and the very enjoyable Madison Smartt Bell: Silent Cut (1980s thriller republished by Hard Case Crime), I have hit three duds in a row.

Alison Whitelock: Poking Seaweed with a Stick and Running Away from the Smell -- turned out to be not very compeling misery memoir, written in Scots, gave up after 50 pages

Helen fitzgerald: The Devil's Staircase -- blurb made it look interesting ("Bronnie has just arrived in London from Australia. She's never had sex, taken drugs, or killed anyone. Within a month, she's done all three."), but first half was sketchily and unbelievably written, and then it turned into sadistic torture porn--gave up after 100 pages

Peter Handke: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick -- liked another book by Handke, but this one so far seems pretty spurious. Will finish it, but only becase it's under 90 pages long.

ive read quite a bunch l8ly but the best of it was p highsmith's "this sweet sickness" which had an enjoyably clammy early january quality. also:

dan choan: await your reply
sarah waters: the little stranger
fallada: everyone dies alone
durham: acaia trilogy books 1 & 2 (<-- these sucked fyi)

Not been reading much except the Paris Review Interviews - more or less finished vols 2,3,4. Also re-read Fiesta (Hemingway); rereading Mrs Dalloway very slowly; Simon Mawer's "The Glass Room" (enjoyable read, well written, crafted and researched, no particular originality or distinction of style, a bit lifestyle-magaziney, the sexual content is a bit soft-porn and doesn't ring true, but a decent choice for a long train journey or flight). Next Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood I think.

l c knights -- 'drama and society in the age of jonson'

2666, Roberto Bolano
Tender, Nigel Slater
The Happy Prince and Other Short Stories, Oscar Wilde

on the go at the moment.

Return From The Dead: Classic Mummy Stories (very mediocre entry in the Tales Of Mystery & Supernatural line - most of the book is taken up by a frankly dull Bram Stoker novella. Then there's Poe beating a far too obvious joke into the ground, and something called "The Mummy" by Jane Webb which is actually pretty awesome crazy sci-fi until you realise it's just an excerpt from a novel. Two pretty great Conan Doyle short stories rescue the package.)
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami - two volumes in, and decided to take a brief respite to read...
The Quare Fellow, Brendan Behan

Read a compilation of short pieces, mostly on the subject of theater, by Robertson Davies, Happy Alchemy, published posthumously. A modest, but pleasant book.

Now starting The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, in NYRB Classics series. (The Introduction by Terry Teachout was lousy, btw.) If I can just get used to the narrator's voice, which was a bit problematic in the first twenty pages I've read, due to some rather strained efforts at establishing her quirkiness credentials, I think the novel may prove to be at least half of what it is built up to be.

Having read alimosina's description of the Willard Gibbs upthread, now reading Muriel Rukeyser's Traces of Thomas Hariot. Very enjoyable.

My brother bought me a cheap edition of some 'Tales of Unease', as the collection has it of Conan Doyle - the first of which is one of of the mummy stories that Daniel_Rf mentions. The introduction goes quite a long way in trying to suggest this was the origination of Mummy-as-horror lit. I wouldn't like to say: there's none of the lumbering swaddling that characterises later imagery, but I certainly don't know of anything earlier. Egyptology in Victorian genre fiction anyone?

Who took the photo on the front of Dud Avocado? I've seen it before somewhere, but can't remember where, and it's bugging me.

Photo credit is given to Erwin Blumenfeld (for NYRB edition).

Working on both De Capo Best Music Writing 2009 and E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea: Gay Black Men of the South. Picked up the lateset issue of The Black Scholar, themed "The Politics of Biracialism".

i finished love is colder than death: the life & times of rainer werner fassbinder and i liked it a lot. i'm gonna start the piano teacher because it's due next week.

i just read another one of hers. it was brilliant/horrible

In 2010 so far:

Julio Cortazar - Hopscotch. I went for the reading in the 'mad' sequence instead of chapters 1-56-ignore the rest. Not sure it mattered too much.

Dave Hickey - Air guitar was a much better account of a bohemian and his thoughts, if you like, than Hoposcotch - provoked a lot more. An amazing collection and one that I'll return to over and over.

Proust - The Prisoner. He is unique as a writer in that he can be simultaneously exciting to read yet also very slow and downright AWKWARD. As for much of 2009's autumn, it goes on.

Finally getting back into reading again after a long hiatus. I picked up Viktor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf and I'm about 1/4 of the way through and thoroughly enjoying it. He goes off on these ridiculous tangents full of great analogies and then 20 pages later that old tangent is tied back into the story beautifully.
Can anyone recommend any similar contemporary writers?

I was reading a tolerably awful memoir about D&D called The Elfish Gene, but I left it in a common room and someone seems to have taken it. I'm kind of annoyed, I was assuming it was a book no one would actually find appealing enough to take

seriously? i would steal it! not to read it though

I'm finally reading Cloud Atlas, I'm ~100 pages in and just starting to get where this is going (although the different sections have been very enjoyable on their own). I'm glad I read Ghostwritten first.

man, i hope whoever took my book is actually planning to read it. it would annoy me if they just took it for the fun of it.

I recently finished The Language Of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief by Francis Collins. The subtitle is misleading, since very little, if any, of the book qualifies as scientific evidence for belief. The apologetics are borrowed mainly from C.S. Lewis, and there's no compelling reason to read Collins's retelling rather than the original in Lewis. However, where Collins shines is in his very clear and readable description of the intellectual foundations of modern biology in evolutionary theory. Actually a better subtitle would have been "A Believer Presents Evidence For Evolution", since that's what most of the book is. Collins's thesis is that faith and science are not incompatible, which is really more of a philosophical matter than a scientific one. Collins is not a particularly subtle or rigorous philosopher, but his description of his own integration of faith and science and his personal experience of faith is down-to-earth, unassuming, and tolerant - which is an attitude that is too often missing from the "God debate".

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

...both for one of my university classes, this one on the Beat generation.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman, for pleasure. Half-way through, really liking it.

finished 2666. To be hones, I kept falling in and out of love with that book...

The Virgin Suicides, Geoffrey Eugenides

cracked a bio of Federico Garcia Lorca, but about to abandon it, as I'm starting a novel soon (I hope)...

Interesting re the Collins, which I'd seen and thought about buying. I think this is where the likes of Dawkins fucks up - I'm not religious, but I can see perfectly clearly that religion and science are not incompatible, even though some particular creation myths may be devalued by scientific discoveries. In implying otherwise Dawkins overreaches and gives the believers' lobby an easy target. From your description it seems Collins has taken aim at that, while his title pretends he's doing something more interesting and ambitious. I'd feel conned if I bought a book with that title and all I got was a demonstration that a belief in evolution isn't incompatible with a belief in god (plus some added C S Lewis).

As an analogy let's say a boy says he's too scared to go to bed because there's an evil bogie man in the wardrobe. Its supernatural nature is such that it can obliterate all evidence of its existence from human beings except when it chooses otherwise. His parents naturally tell him the bogie man doesn't exist and he can go back to bed. The boy argues that his parents have no way of proving that. This is pretty much the same argument as the one that religious belief is incapable of being disproved by science. In the absence of evidence - the sort of thing that can be confirmed by science - most of us would have no difficulty in telling the boy his belief is nonsense and he can go to sleep safely. Science can't disprove the existence of the bogie man, but it doesn't follow that a belief that the bogie man exists is as legitimate as the belief that it doesn't.

Natsumi Soseki: Botchan

Chris Paling: After the Raid

John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos -- recently "rediscovered" previously unpublished book he wrote at the same time as 'Triffids'... weird, as has the style and writing quality of later Wyndham, but the plot is pure pulp like Wndham's 1930s magazine SF (Nazi clones, flying saucers, etc)

been reading a lot!!!!!!! (enthusiasm)

highsmith: the ripley pentology (not a word?) best was "ripley underground" i think but i generally loved all of these. its weird that movies of these books tend to be not v good because i kept thinking abt how visual they are

w tevis: the hustler.
marcus: age of wire and string
walbert: short history of women

not as into the rest of these and in fact havent managed to finish the walbert

collection of Poe. So far read: The Pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson, The Fall of the House of Usher, something about Raggedy Mountain or whatever. They've all been aight imo but not really been blown away. In the mood for reading some stories and it's a fairly hefty collection that will keep me occupied for some time, so will persevere.

Poe loves writing "at length" and "phantasmagoric".

i saw a copy of in praise of older women the other day at a charity shop and i think it would still be there if i look tomorrow- worth the £1?

haha cover alone

obv not a us cover, wtf

GamalielRatsey OTM. Yet, Esterhazy gave a reading in town last week and I didn't go.

I favor Ivan Mandy

worth the £1?

Vizinczey is a disciple of Stendhal. His ideal is a sort of merciless analytic clarity in the light of which everyone is hypocritical and vain.

Personally I don't like that constant unmasking and reducing. I like to keep my illusions of depth.

:-( I have yet to read Stendhal. Passed by his house though. lol.
I do like constant analysis b ut it does leave you... naked after a while.

Distant Star: a tad of a ramble in the end -- but always interesting, quite a few bits on the right-wing and the avant-garde, it'd be really interesting to read what some of this stuff might be based on.

I found quite a range of cultural name-dropping, which is why it never felt like name-dropping. Guess its called engagement.

Patricia Highsmith - Ripley's Game

Now: Ford Maddox Ford: The Good Soldier

worth the £1? Definitely! Though you won't get that sexy cover, I suspect.

Rupley's Game and The Good Soldier are both way, way, way great. I envy you reading them for the 1st time.

it wasn't there :( ended up buying madame bovary (!) instead.

I'm reading Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin. I like the idea that not every novel (or novella) has to be 900 pages long, though I do wish maybe they'd prorate the price a bit for <100 page books.

Btw- It was this very thread where I first heard of this book so shout-outs to thomp and others who wrote about this above. I finished it already. That's the nice thing about <100 page books. I thought it was overall pretty good. The beginning and end are strong - the middle is a bit patchy - but it's short enough that it doesn't get too bogged down in the patchy parts.

Agree re "The Good Soldier" and "Ripley".

I've just finished "The Childrens' Book" by A S Byatt. An odd book which I really enjoyed, although it's not hard to imagine lots of people losing patience with it. Byatt's strengths and weaknesses are pretty clear cut. Her novel is very thoroughly researched, and she doesn't wear her learning lightly. Everything, including much esoterica, is highly detailed, there is an almost ridiculous number of characters and the sheer quantity of information can be very difficult to assimilate unless you have a very good memory for detail, which I don't. She's generally more comfortable with ideas than character or dialogue. And yet she has a great feel for the intellectual and artistic life of the period (just before the First World War) - Fabianism, the suffragettes, the obsession with folktales and fairytales, and what now looks like absurd complacency about the continuation of a certain kind of civilisation that was blown out of the water in 1914.

I loved the Highsmith, especially -- but I'm not as keen on unreliable narration, I found it a tad...smug, as to how far FMF took the device. Don't know, need to think this one through a lot more.

That AS Byatt is kinda interesting, might chase that. Way keener on WWI than WWII. Like so much European fiction from the 20s to the 40s because the feel of profound changes (because of higher society complacency, amongst other things) seeps through. Might be interesting to read someone who is writing as if looking back, not in the thick of it (unlike Musil or Proust, say)

Now: David Ohle - Pisstown Chaos

Then its Carlo Emilio Gadda - Acquaintance with Grief

When I read the FMF I think the orthodox view was that he'd more or less "invented" the unreliable narrator - maybe an oversimplification but possibly the first to use it in such a sustained and controlled way?

That's a good point about Byatt. There's a (monstrous) character whose obviously based to some extent on D H Lawrence, which got me thinking about the extent to which Lawrence is obviously going to be much better at conveying how it felt to be alive at that time, but Byatt is going to be better at identifying the ways in which it will seem queer/interesting/porentous etc to us.

Aaargh, whose s/be who's. I'm no pedant but that grates.

now reading: affluence and discontent: the anatomy of consumer societies by eugene linden

(veddy interesting!)

Dipping my toe into Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, not sure if I'll be able to handle 300 pages of realistic suburban angst though.

It's really good.

Revolutionary Road has been on my list for awhile.

Ok, read Whoops by John Lanchester. It's great, informal, clear style - read it in about a day and a half. Obv it's top on all the financial mechanisms and madness, and it really is great on these.

But there are also narratives he has running in the background, like the coronation of finance over industry in the UK, not just as a sector, but as a philosophy - things like that get me almost as angry as anything else.

There was a line on another thread that said they'd be more likely to trust The Economist than the LRB. I don't really buy that for several reasons - one, Lanchester knows his stuff; two, part of the reason to read this book is to try and make good the disconnect between 'real world' stuff and high finance, so the fact it's coming from outside the traditional financial institutions and their media is a good thing, not a cause for suspicion; and three, something that Lanchester himself nails, people involved in the City still don't get it. I had it, god help me you get what you deserve, at a dinner party, where slightly but only slightly shamefully I ended up shouting down a City lawyer with the words an awful lot of people have said, 'You still don't get it, do you?' - there are whole systemic articles of faith which people are refusing to give up. It's like The Penultimate Truth by PKD or something. Everything's arse about face. Lanchester describes Economist articles in the same way - they're brilliant and interesting, but they all end up the same way, advocating the same policies that got us in the mess in the first place.

This book will give you ammo, should you wish, to pwn they asses without shouting and fist banging - perhaps more importantly it's interesting and witty and a great read.

Oh, and I was reading something today - John Smith's (Pocahontas guy) Generall Historie of Virginia - that reminded me in a tangential way of it all -

But the worst was our guilded refiners with their golden promises made all men their slaves in hope of recompences; there was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold, such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the sands least they should by there art make gold of his bones: little neede there was and lesse reason, the ship should stay, there wages run on, our victualls consume 14. weekes, that the Mariners might say, they did helpe to build such a golden Church that we can say the raine washed neere to nothing in 14. dayes. .. never any thing did more torment him, then to see all necessary busines neglected, to fraught such a drunken ship with so much guilded durt.

(Oh, WT's Sad vikings were great btw.)

Great Whoops summary. Wish I was half as articulate!

Reading 'Running Away' by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, a groovy Dalkey Archive book, and first of his I've read. Wonderful style, and I have no idea where it's going, but enjoying every moment.

Wow. Is that a book? I'd love to have a proper go at an on-the-spot account of the new world. I've tried Bernal Diaz's History of the Conquest of New Spain more than once, but just got bogged down in the olde worlde style. Someone should do a straight modern translation.

was an xp to Gamaliel

Finished "Netherlands", wasn't as blown away by the prose as some people on the 00s poll thread, somehow the voice just didn't quite appeal enough, although plenty of the sentiments of regretful passivity touched a nerve. Somewhat childishly the phrase which grabbed my attention the most was "in the taxi home [...] my wife, mooning out of the window at rainy Regent's Park". lulz.

"Netherland" singular that is

xpost Ismael

I was actually just reading it here.

It's pretty readable, I'd say, although I was just skimming through.

Really liked the Lancaster article on the LRB -- on the one hand very negative, almost relentelessly so with that in-house LRB tone, but he does analyse that. Then there's the 'I don't know have all the answers' bit, and the 'Labour will do admin slightly better than the Tories' is probably the best argument I heard going for Brown & co.

Gamaliel have you read the piece on Celine in the latest LRB?

No, I haven't. Was going to pick it up, but didn't get round to it. Is it any good?

Its excellent! Really interesting account of late Celine (the fear of being forgotten, I had no idea he was out of fashion by the 50s) and blows the recent Steiner piece on him out of the water.

When I say 'excellent' and 'interesting' I also mean necessary (having not read the biography). About time someone wrote something essay-lenght about one of the post-'Death on Credit' novels, which have all now been translated.

Yes, I saw that. Almost picked up Rigadon the other day. I did like North very much when I read it, which is a while ago now.

Got to read Whoops!. My only slight worry - & it's a bit perverse - is that he's so good at explaining stuff that it's hard to tell whether he really knows his stuff or not. Like the correction here where he's got some sums badly wrong make me worry a bit. But the LRB articles have been amazing - he's the best explainer of finance to the arts-degree classes that we've had.

I'm rereading Money while waiting for The Pregnant Widow to arrive. Finding it better than I feared I might - the metafictional 'Martin Amis - do you know his stuff?' business is the only clunky problem for me.

Also Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland.

Damn, I think I'm like 3 LRBs behind (always thus, means I end up too late for eg chat about the Hoffmann attack on Zweig), but that Celine article sounds intersting. I finally read the Steiner one - it was a bit peculiar, but I did like it - didn't actually review the book under review, yes, but thought it was right to pick at Celine as being a really unusual problem, and felt the 'it's a puzzler alright' conclusion was fair.

xpost - Ugh, that mistake's a bit ugly. Still, in the main, the explanations aren't so much mathematical (although there is a bit of this at the beginning of the book) and more how things like derivatives, options, futures and credit default swaps operate. But yes, he does carry you along rather, especially someone as financially innumerate as me.

I've never failed to enjoy Money whenever I've returned to it, apart from the metafictional end, yes. Still, with Experience, my favourite.

Its not even the 'financially inumerate', as such -- plenty of people who are comfortable with numbers on a basic-to-intermediate level, or who aren't afriad of equations, might be stumped by things like the 'bond market'. Reading about inflation will seldom be as interesting as reading Celine, I'm afraid.

I guess many suspect that bankers and the services they provide are useless, that hedge funds serve no purpose whatsoever - but its the confidence for someone who doesn't know much about it to say so to people who do know, in such a way as to subsequently demand changes to the way things are that is the problem? So someone like Lancaster could be welcome.

(I talked about the attack on Zweig on the 'World of Yesterday' thread, btw, very rock-critic like in the way Hoffmann almost mocked Zweig's suicide; also if you read that article with his piece on Hugo van Hoffmannstahl its quite interesting)

Steiner on Celine had a lot of potential - no lift-off tho'.

Revolutionary Road has been on my list for awhile.

About 60 pages in now. I like that the Frank Wheeler character is becoming less sympathetic - it makes it easier to distance myself from all the painful things that keep happening to him.

re-reading "a portrait of the artist as a young man" and at the same time reading Albert Camus "The First Man" and "Killing Pablo" by Mark Bowden.

found george saunders' essay collection and wells towers' short story collection remaindered yesterday, read the former and now halfway through the latter. which has kind of stopped affecting me, i don't know. it's worrying that it's basically ten years' work. writing seems hard.

also there's this 'my life has come unmoored ... SYMBOL' thing going on. objects of decay. a poisonous animal, tainted meat, a fungal infection. in three out of five stories so far!

a dead bird
a stomach wound

i feel like having the viking story at the end is unfair to it. like: it's more obviously 'early work', or the work of someone learning how his chops work + how to flex them -- whereas the sea cucumber story, say, seems very, very assured.

http://images.indiebound.com/876/278/9780307278876.jpg

i just read – and loved, loved, loved, tod wodicka's all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well and recommend it with all of my heart, though a bit of caution about its weirdness. it reminds me in a funny way of gunter grass or bohumil hrabal.

but I'm not as keen on unreliable narration, I found it a tad...smug, as to how far FMF took the device. Don't know, need to think this one through a lot more.

yeah I thought the left turns in The Good Soldier were really well-executed, but the ending was melodramatic far beyond any reasonable suspension of belief...which to me seemed because the narrator's plight (nor that of any of the characters) was not nearly as significant and/or interesting as Ford Madox Ford believed it to be...

the wodicka book looks like one i ought to / might like

yeah, I'm totally gonna check it out.

JG Ballard short stories got me through work today. Thanks JG.

I dread to think what your job could be

Ha ha. I was thinking the story Manhole 69 was very like where I work in fact.

Yikes.

Oh yes, and another IK books of the decade provoked read - thanks Ismael. Xpost

I just been there too long, alimosina. At least I hope that's the case and my colleagues and I are not all entering some perma-wakeful catatonic state of ego-claustrophobia.