It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

lovin it all, feelin goth

Sheridan Le Fanu- In a Glass Darkly
some P. Shelley collection
the Nunnally trans. of H.C. Andersen

Finishing Way by Swann's and it is AWESOMES: like a cross between Ruskin and Denton Welch, and I am very glad I saw Akermann's Proust film, it really gets the that will to possess and how pathetic a character like Swann comes across.

Also some unexpected funnies in this. Weirldy enough I am glad I got to see a couple of episodes of Jeeves and Wooster while I was ill last week, that got me into a mindset for this...

Will be moving on to the next part.

Pfaff's, yes Pfaff's, biography of MR James - focuses more on James the scholar than Michael Cox's biography, which is sort of the way I wanted to go.

Eton and Kings by MR James.

James' ghost stories are some of my favourite writing, but I'm not much of a reader of biographies :(

I'm pretty much in the same boat, and it's rather dry. But he's long been one of my favourite writers and so I felt it was time I paid my dues.

almost finished with The Things They Carried by tim o'brien. usually try to avoid war-centred stories, as they make me feel weirdly squeamish, but this one was great - very simple in terms of style and language, but really very moving.

just beginning
Yonder by siri hustvedt
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Oh, that name's familiar - I think I have a Vietnam book by him in a box somewhere. He's good then?

v v good. the only other novel of his i've read is July, July, which i don't really remember too well, except that it was weird, something about a school reunion, and i really enjoyed it.

Yeah, Tim O'Brien's (usually) excellent: start with 'The Things They Carried', 'July, July' or 'If I Die in a Combat Zone...'

Reading William Hazlitt's 'Liber Amoris', interspersed with the huge new 2-vol Library of America 'American Fantastic Tales' -- both excellent in VERY different ways

still working on memoirs of an anti-semite (lol slow) but i like it very much
last night i started joyce carol oates - because it is bitter.... it seems good. do people like her? it seems like she writes so so much.

Been reading Dhalgren in piecemeal, just started (as in 30 pages in) Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima, which will be the first anything I've read by him. These might be some of the last few novels I read for a while before I start burying my head in technical junk about electronics.

Who is Joyce Carol Oates? I was eyeballing something or another by her at the used book store a couple days ago because the name rang a bell but just couldn't pinpoint it. (If she's somebody totally obvious I wouldn't be one to know, i am a rub3)

she's notorious for being so prolific. pretty hit and miss from what i hear, but i've only read a few of her novels. We Were The Mulvaneys is good if like family drama and tragedy, but she uses way too many explanation points in the narration.

what is an explanation point?

i have been vaguely busy, so not reading much. i read about the first third of 'diary of a nobody' this morning, though.

oh i'm a retard - ~exclamation~ point is what i meant

Pagoda, Skull & Samurai, Koda Rohan

i read the other two-thirds of 'diary of a nobody'. it's kind of funny. the funniest moments are when people other than the narrator are being ludicrous. i was surprised how many times it had been adapted to film: seems a bit beside the point somehow.

And The Best of Bijou Funnies and The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, in one volume. Which were okay, although I don't understand why anyone would ever find the fabulous furry freak brothers funny, I guess.

Straw Dogs - John Gray.

Immensely amusing. Vigorously and persistently pessimistic, plenty of lolz per page - 'In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury - or else a disability', 'We look at the world through eyes of ancient mud' 'Without this absurd Tertullian-like faith, the Enlightenment is a gospel of despair'.

I'm immensely sympathetic to his point of view, although I imagine like most people I depart from him here and there - he's rather cavalier in his use of science for instance, and I generally favour the pursuit of knowledge embodied in the Enlightenment as a worthwhile endeavour, for which I'm willing to accept the implicit eschatology. I mean, you could sort of sum up his argument, it's all shit, we're a murrain on the universe, we're all going to hell in a handcart and everything's f'ing pointless, it's self-deceiving and vain to think in any other way, and all programmes of self-improvement are corrupted from the beginning by their very aim. And I agree, I do, but, y'know, steady the buffs, have a mug of cocoa, John, there, there.

Anyway it's all extremely stimulating, dashing and witty - like a swashbuckling sailor defending a philosophy of Ballardian apocalypse against hordes of all-comers. Very readable as well.

finished dave eggers' zeitoun, starting that new dan chaon novel and re-reading some madeleine l'engle books for a book club.

the JCO book is very good and i read like 100 pages on saturday...then i became scared of what would happen and didn't want to read any further. this never happens to me! it's just a book! i'll finish it in the next couple days though, probably

Let's see if this works

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Hjalmar Soderbergh - Doctor Glas
Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

I found "Straw Dogs" utterly unbearable and cast it aside with disgust no more than a couple of dozen pages in. I'll admit I'm not particularly sympathetic to Gray's beliefs but I honestly think that had very little to do with it. I'm happy to read a well-constructed polemic that challenges my thinking, but Gray has no idea how to construct a logical argument. There were obvious and infuriating non-sequiturs on every page. If I can find my copy I may come back to illustrate.

Weirdly failing to learn from my mistake I was later seduced by a combination of good reviews and impulse to buy "Black Mass", which I read even less of before I decided it wasn't for me.

Picked up Jenny Uglow's new biographical-historical thing on Charles II since it was lying around an office I was in. Wasn't intending to read it especially, but started and finding it enjoyable - rolls along, nothing troubling. She's good at popular history/biography: overcomes some ascetic-masochist part of me that believes if I want to know about the past, I should read a) primary sources and b) impenetrable histories that don't explain who anyone is and are full of comparative grain harvest charts. It also fits with my current long-18th-century reading jag.

Starting Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco.

Gamaliel OTM about John Gray imo: I thought Straw Dogs was a hoot & that his lunatic, absolute gloom was great fun. I mean as say a history of ideas book, it's overcompressed, elliptical, not too hard to pick apart; but as an essay in aphoristic pessimism, it's a cracker. Suspect that finding his beliefs sympathetic in the first place does help.

Black Mass I thought was a lot shakier: quite bitty, dull when dealing with contemporary politics, and iffy on pre-Enlightment apocalyptic trads. But he's someone I'm glad is in the reason/religion arguments: has some style and is willing to be the donnish jerk who just keeps saying 'no, religion's a bit more complicated than that', 'no, the Enightenment's a bit more complicated than that'.

1066: The Year of the Conquest, David Howarth. I've been reading this on successive Mondays when I have some dead time on my school bus. Just finished it.

Excellent treatment of the subject. He presented it in very human and understandable terms. I liked, too, that the author discussed his sources and his methods in very matter-of-fact, practical terms, letting you in on how he sifted and sorted the contradictions between or within them, or why he rejected some parts of the narrative and kept others.

Straw Dogs sounds like something I might find interesting. It seems like a much shorter and bleaker version of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, which I found pretty interesting. I guess for anyone who's not convinced by Gray's assertion that secular humanism is basically a continuation of Christianity by other means, Taylor does a lot of the historical heavy-lifting to substantiate the claim. Although whereas that analysis leads Taylor to a defense of religion against humanism and the Nietzchean anti-humanist alternative, it seems to lead Gray to a modern revival of animism and Taoism via the Gaia hypothesis.

An essay by Gray in which he lays out his own highly condensed but readable genealogy of secularism:

"The myth of secularism"

http://www.newstatesman.com/200212160045

i just reread (less than a month after reading for the first time...) stephen millhauser's 2008 collection: dangerous laughter. i adored every single damn story in that book, except for 'the tower.' how good is millhauser? I say at least a 50 or 60 of good.

Hjalmar Soderbergh - Doctor Glas
Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

Wow--all great books

Doctor Glas was a bit more special, out of that batch - an arresting, at times frightening discussion of eugenics and euthanasia (the latter of course very much in the agenda), from the same mind that also tries to rationalize murder later on. Much pain and confusion.

Onto the next volume of Proust - Within a Budding grove

Another piece by John Gray:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/15/society

From the bits that Gamiliel quotes I'm thinking he could work up some cracking fiction, although I imagine its a field that's already been fairly well covered.

I'm through half of Parade's End - is The Last Post going to ruin everything, as Graham Greene says?

Can't lay my hands on my copy of Straw Dogs but I'll illustrate my problem with Gray by one very small example.

Gray argues that since the genetic distinction between man and other higher primates is minute, the distinctions we make between man and the higher primates (and by extension other animals) in terms of rights, value etc are artificial. He doesn't address the very obvious counterargument -- that it is precisely in this distinction, however small from a physical perspective, that the important difference lies. Human beings, from a slightly wider perspective, are structurally much the same kind of stuff as cabbages or, since we are largely made up of water some biological matter mixed in, duckponds. Should we extend human rights to cabbages or ponds?

Coal is structurally almost identical to diamonds, and any old nonsense written in iambic pentameter is structurally the same thing as the the best line in Shakespeare. Yet when we come across coal and diamonds, different lines of iambic pentameter, men and chimpanzees, we find them to be different things and may value them differently. There's no reason why some inherent similarity of structure should determine value.

If this were a one-off it wouldn't be a major problem, but it is typical. There are examples of this kind of non-sequitur, sometimes several, on almost every page.

I'm not here objecting to Gray's views per se (although I happen to disagree with them) and I don't doubt much of what he believes could be defended in a more intellectually respectable way. I'm objecting to the lack of intellectual rigour in a book that is described on the cover as philosophy. And I he can't hide behind the "reason is overrated" argument because the book is absolutely presented as a reasoned argument, or at least an interlocking series of reasoned arguments, in favour of his beliefs.

Just finished: Love is Like Park Avenue by Alvin Levin
Had to read for work: The Scarecrow by John Connelly
Halfway through: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Skimming: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

That's fair enough on Straw Dogs. I suppose I don't really see it as philosophy proper, more as a polemical essay. Part of the fun of it for me is that style of bare assertion after bare assertion: I don't think it's seriously persuasive, but it is provocative.

I mean day-job Gray isn't a philosopher exactly: he's in that political theory/history/history of ideas world, where you argue about Mill and Free Trade and Victorian legislation & sometimes how it relates to current politics. With that hat on, he can put together clear explicit arguments w/ footnotes and evidence. Straw Dogs draws on that a bit, but it's like after False Dawn he had a breakdown (or decided that pessimism sells) and just went for a pared-down jeremiad.

I think it's self-consciously written in a tradition of informal thought & argument - Montaigne, Hume & Schopenhauer's essays, Cioran. If I use those standards, I can start to reel off his shortcomings - his pessimism is cloistered, bookish and shallow, he's melodramatic, he's slippery on various notions (progress in particular), looks weak when arguing for, not against, something, etc (also support for Thatcher then New Labour not exactly warming me to him). But I still really like SD (I also suspect it's a one-off).

Another Gray link: in conversation with Mike Skinner.

Oh, and on-topic, vol ii of the new collected Beanworld turned up yesterday. That went down very quickly.

Gray in that discussion with Skinner - 'The proof will be in the pudding'?

Reminds me of one of my pet hates, when people say in an offhand manner, of something that differs from their expectations or argument - 'the exception proves the rule'. As if that something deviating from their argument somehow proves it, and by saying that the exception proves the rule they have somehow reinforced their argument.

'NO! you smug, complacent arse,' I want to shout, 'prove' here has its old meaning of 'test' - the exception that is being cited tests your rule - the onus is on you to work out why it is an exception and why, if at all, your rule still holds despite this apparent exception. It's not a way of dismissing any example which doesn't fit into your theory or world view.' But I rarely do.

Same meaning as the proof of the pudding is in the eating - that is the true test of the pudding.

It just gets my goat is all, he concluded lamely.

What am I reading? A bloody instruction manual for this piece of shit programme that I'm supposed to be testing. When I have done this, I will pass my findings on to the most obstructive man in the universe. Which is why I'm on I Love Books instead.

Oh, I did have a very dozy day in an armchair the other day reading MR James' recollections of Eton and Kings. As pleasantly soporific as you might imagine, but readable, and witty. He was, apparently, an excellent mimic, which comes through in a couple of places.

But the afternoon was just lovely. Warm and cosy inside, turning the heavy, creamy, coarse pages, reading about a cloistered, productive bachelor existence as the rain pelted down outside.

Isn't it rather that you can't have an exception to a rule unless there's a rule, so the existence of an exception demonstrates the existence of the rule?

I'm going to say no. But I'm going to say no in the knowledge that my head is currently absolutely incapable of thought, so the correct answer might be yes. Also - that would be a slightly odd argument?

No, I don't think it is. If Joe always passes my window at 4.10 on his way home from work, that becomes a loose "rule". One day he doesn't. That's the exception. That Joe not passing my window at 4.10 has the status of an "exception" proves the rule.

But it doesn't prove (in the modern sense) the rule, does it? It shows that there is the existence of the rule, but it also goes some way to loosening it as a rule.

"It's the exception that proves that the rule is not in fact a rule but an observable tendency."

It proves the rule, in this sense: that if the observation can legitimately be termed an exception, it must be an exception to something. The "something" it falls outside of can always be stated in the form: "as a rule, x is true".

Not necessarily, although I suspect that's close to how most people use it - as if the exception simultaneously proves the existence of the rule and demonstrates that it doesn't invariably apply. But the rule here isn't that Joe invariably passes my window at 4.10, just that he normally does, except when he doesn't (eg on Sundays). Joe not passing my window at 4.10 on a Sunday would be an exception that proved the rule that he does on other days of the week.

Reply to Gamalie - 2 x posts

Fair enough.

I'm sticking with mine - that it's prove in the older sense of test, as in the proof of the pudding etc. (He said, jutting his chin out).

Mainly because the other interpretation is used by annoying people who like to use exceptions as somehow reinforcing their 'rule'. When they don't.

So, what's everybody reading?

'm sticking with mine - that it's prove in the older sense of test, as in the proof of the pudding etc. (He said, jutting his chin out).

Fowler (Modern English Usage) gives this example:

'Special leave is given for men to be out of barracks tonight till 11.00 p.m.'; 'The exception proves the rule' means that this special leave implies a rule requiring men, except when an exception is made, to be in earlier.

Schneider and Fein, The Rules
Jungersen, The Exception
Velleman, How to Prove It

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Ronan Bennett: The Second Prison

Both excellent, though completely different. Only halfway through the Rilke, and only just realised the narrator is Danish. Duh! The Bennett is gripping psychological crime/IRA stuff though was faintly confused by the end.

xpost frankiemachine - thanks for the Fowler citation - I've stopped jutting my chin now.

I finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga this morning. It was really good, an Augie March style yarn of a servant boy's rise, except that the setting is contemporary India and this boy's got a nasty streak in him (though not that nasty, considering he's a murderer and all). Good story, lots of amusing detail, nice lines in people's little cruelties to one another.

One thing that displeased me was stylistic - the whole thing is in form of a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, supposedly about to pay a state visit to India, the conceit being that the narrator is explaining India's real ways to him. It makes a degree of sense given that the main theme is new, nasty India rising by trampling over poor, old India - and being screwed over in return - but it's not a device I ever like, and it's rather clunky here particularly as China make no other appearance and (unless I missed it) the visit has no particular significance. I think I'd've got it anyway.