There should be an ILB "Introduce Yourselves"!

The tussle in my head between the values I sum up as 'the textual' and 'the textural' is probably something to do with my being so inherently bookish (degree in Eng Lit, worked in bookshops before my music career began, etc). At the moment the textural is winning.

I think this is because, when I really wanted to be a writer, I was deep into the 'literature of exhaustion' -- Beckett, Celan, Gombrowicz... perhaps you could add Goytisolo and add to 'exhaustion', with its imagery of getting to the end of langage and being done with the whole thing once and for all, the parallel style of 'endless, pointless, baroque elaboration' -- what Dostoyevsky calls, in Notes From Underground, 'babble':

But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

I opted to babble in pop records, which didn't seem exhausted when I started making them (I might have a different feeling if I were 20 today). Pop records seemed to balance the textual and the textural rather well.

A BB page like the one we're on right now looks a bit like a printed, published page, doesn't it? But even more like a sieve. Can't you hear the gurgling sound as your writing simultaneously gets set in type and swept down the drain?

i am griffin doome (not my real name). i write. i've had two short stories published and write music journalism on a semi-regular basis for two magazines. i am working on my unpublishable opus at the moment and short stories as they come. i fear that i may turn to writing a shallow rip-off of my experiences in the music scene strictly for cash.

i love pretty words.

my tastes are pretty conventional: jd salinger, rick moody, denis johnson, flannery o'connor, william faulkner, philip k dick.

i am from london though i choose not to be from london. ha ha.

I did a BA in English list and an MA in writing. I do book reviews but sadly not for a living, instead I work as an editor. I tend to turn off the mad editing skeelz in email/online forums so don't hold me to stupid spelling mistakes et al.

I do some writing myself and therefore am bitter, cynical, and hate everyone. Especially you. Aaaaaaaaand YOU.

I read fiction / travel mostly. Since I was 20 I've set myself a target of 100 books a year. I'm 34 and my eyes hurt.

Office job, but with travel writing aspirations. Two pieces published. I also ran a university magazine for a year and I'm truely sorry.

I'm Upper Clapton end, by the Lea. Which area of the rural oasis do you inhabit?

Griffin, what journals have you been published in?

same town as Jordan
might move but now I might not
one wife and two kids

four cats and five books
that I've published (four are "real,"
one's Internetted)

also done Slam stuff,
competed nationally,
and I write reviews

My favorite author right now is Brian O'Nolan in any of his modes (Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, etc.), but have also thought Cortazar, Barth, Barthelme, Tutuola, Shakespeare, Perec, Saroyan, Atwood, Murakami, Delany, W.C. Williams, LeGuin, Baldwin, Borges, Austen, Twain, Dostoievsky, Garcia Marquez, and Kawabata my favorites at one point or another. Jordan we must get together and discuss books over many beers at the Great Dane or something, our tastes are too similar not to, Mingus is the century's great neglected author yes I said yes I mean yes.

My favourite fiction authors include Jeff Noon, Banana Yoshimoto, Ursula LeGuin, Evelyn Waugh and Hilary Mantel. I'm also very fond of Latin poets from the late Republic/early Empire, more of the Catullus/Propertius tendency than the Virgil, but tend to sulk if I can't find a bilingual translation (ie: most of the time). I also get stroppy when people insist on linking a poet's work to their life story.

I try and write, but I'm lazy and seemingly incapable of going beyond a few paragraphs of very dense prose. A play of mine was performed at the Edinburgh festival; unfortunately, it was pretentious twaddle.

I don't write beyond my technical writing stuff. But I'd like to write a non-fiction book about termites some day.

Dallas (for now), 30, English teacher.

Wish I had time to read more. Am trying to correct this. Hate Pynchon. Never read Roth.

Fave books: His Dark Materials, Bastard Out of Carolina, Jane Eyre

Have written two novels which I'm retooling. Have published various non-fiction, journalistic bits but nothing since becoming a teacher. Along with trying to read more and am trying to revive my creative writing talents.

Last book read: Cane River by . . .uh, Tadiemy. forget the first name. Historical fiction .Not bad.

Currently reading: Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby.

As a reader, I am eclectic. 40 or 50 books a year, veering about aimlessly in both fiction and non-fiction, whatever I find interesting and readable. I'm not well-versed in modern fiction; I'm more of an ignoramus in that part of the literary world and so I shall be lurking more than contributing on threads devoted to recent novels.

I have a lot of knowlege about poetry, up to about 1950. After that the main channel of poetry seems to spread out into a broad but shallow alluvial fan and I get lost. I could also blame my age for this, but it would be wrong. It is more that I am backward-looking and out of sympathy with modern life.

I also have a fairly broad knowlege of and interest in the classics, by which I mean everything up to about 1600 AD, whether European or not - although outside European literature the availability of texts where I live (and therefore my knowlege of them) drops off considerably. I am no scholar. I don't have the temperment for it. I am the silly amatuer through and through.

I doubt very much whether either my poetic or classical interests will ever come into much play here on ILB, but there they are. I plan to toss in wherever it seems to me I have something of value to say.

As for My Favo(u)rite Authors, I'll make a senseless stab at it: Flann O'Brien, John Donne, Mark Twain, Stephen J. Gould, Rabelais, Wallace Stevens, Walter Mosley, and To Be Announced.

Oh yes, I am from Oregon.

(i liked yr stance on the ILE larkin thread, btw.)

i have now posted in this thread about a half dozen times without actually introducing myself, which seems wrong.

I'm also married to Jaq, the blonde Frenchman who posts here a lot. I'm from western Washington (Olympia, Seattle), but we temporarily live in eastern Washington, in Richland, where life as we know it ceased to exist many eons ago.

Favorite authors of late: J.M. Coetzee, George Saunders, Milan Kundera, Nelson Algren, Herman Hesse

Not since I became mod!

currently i'm in devon. in the last year i have lived in beds., staffs., bristol, and reykjavik, which is probably the source of my being behind a year in my degree, actually, spending a semester killing time in reykjavik rather than staying in england and sorting out why i was falling behind so in my studies. but hey, reykjavik.

(xpost: piuma secretly deletes all the fiction threads. it's kind of annoying, actually.)

i forgot to add where i live. i live in rochester. also i hate science fiction, magic realism, futuristic mumbo jumbo, fantasy. i don't know why. what does everybody else hate?

thanks, though I'm not sure what this means

I was the other one some of the time, when I wasn't busy downloading music and comics instead. (I'm not sure anymore if I started reading in the spring or fall of 2003. My first post to ILE is in November 2003, and I remember mostly ignoring ILE for months after I discovered ILM. It's all Simon Reynolds's fault, anyway.)

Nice to meet you all.

I am reading the first volume of Proust very slowly, inasmuch as I haven't picked it up in ten years.

Sigh.

Welcome Betsy.

Ha. Well, actually i am required to come into the office & sit at my desk all day, but if no one here has any work for me (i edit non-native-English papers for a research institute), then I kind of just...sit here.

I'm a librarian in Queens, the portal of QL that they call Central. Being shipped back after a halcyon 18 months in the branches. I like many things. Above all, feeling very much at home after 13 years in New York. And there's music. The Fall. The Fall! And also the Jam. Other things as well, but have to work to update my listening. I like writing and photography, museums, beaches, and books. Because I like to think about art.

nice to meet you!

howdy.

Welcome. ILB can always use a queenly librarian who loves books. And art, too, but that is ancillary to books around this neck of the woods.

We regulars of ILB are few in numbers compared to the myriads who bustle about ILX.com exchanging views on all matters under the sun, but we make up in good grammar what we lack in ceaseless hubbub.

Amen. We're also much more civilised, too. I can't remember an ILB clusterfuck.

...but we make up in good grammar what we lack in good taste

hey, sc. <-- all I can manage right now, woken up far too early, but good to have you on board.

Thanks everyone - nice to be a part of a civilized group.

hi silvercigarette -- i am a faithful queens lib user!

and hi everyone else, i snuck onto the board without politely introducing myself a while ago.

Wow, a QL user!

Silvercigarette, do you know Virginia Plain?

Sorry haven't logged in in few days, so I just saw this. Yes, I do know Virginia Plain.

Hi: I've been lurking for a while, and I've been enjoying reading this board so much that I'd like to join in. I live in F@rgo, ND, USA. I probably read more broadly than deeply, though favorites have been Dick, David Mitchell, Lispector (and, in younger days, DFW). I also like ancient lit., philosophy, economics, the very occasional book of history. Fiction usually more than non-fiction. Two books I read recently that I loved are Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers and Yoko Ogawa's Revenge. Anyway, hello!

hi!

welcome!

"(oh yeah, I'm 35)"

jeeeeezus now i feel way old. gonna be 45 this year...

but anyway hi seanballat! welcome!

and hey stick around. where did all these people go? where did silvercigarette go that was only 8 months ago...

Thanks for the welcome, folks!