Words! Words! Words!: Autumn 2012 'What do you read, my lord?' thread

I picked up a copy of From Heaven Lake, a Vikram Seth book from the mid-eighties about hitchhiking to Tibet. Outdated, but interesting in a retrospective way. Also, short.

reading Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie, absolutely riveting. the new yorker excerpt left out crucial stuff at the beginning, surprisingly

Just finished Memento Mori by Muriel Spark and have just begun Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess (which has an amazing Bill Sanderson cover illustration). What was nice was that MM ends with reference to The Last Four Things and a short way into ToI, The Last Four Things crops up again.

I used to own Laxness' Independent People for years but never got aroiund to reading past the first couple of chapters. I still want to get back to it someday!

Yes! Independent People is such a great book. Fucking devastating.

Cosmocmics - Calvino. a delight.

Peter Terrin: The Guard -- Dutch writer, novel about two guards in the basement of a super-rich high-rise apartment building which has been suddenly evacuated for reasons unknow; they stay on and go mad. Very Ballard, in a good way

marguerite yourcenar - the abyss

edward said, humanism and democratic criticism
richard rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity

I just read a review of Laxness' Under the Glacier: that novel sounds amazing!!!

I wouldn't call it amazing, but it's definitely worth reading. I read that one first, then Independent People, and I'd say Under the Glacier was very good but not great whereas Independent People is one of the best books I've ever read.

I think its a really unique piece.

Kenzaburo Oe - Silent Cry. So is this! From '67, so it uses that energy for a look back to political upheavals in Japanese history and politics (from the post-war capitulation to Western capitalist interests to 1868 and all that!), and goes hard into the personal: using brotherly conflict as metaphor for a country that is not talking to one another, that cannot comprehend what they say with their own language -- which flows into the bits about literary translation (the main protagonists' collaborator has commited suicide; the wheels are always made to turn here!), in a country as isolated as Japan this might have been an exotic occupation.

To be read alongside films made by Nagisa Oshima in this period:a lot here about criminals as outlaws as part-revolutionaries too, and the treatment of Korean immigrants at the hand of Japanese peasants -- way too much here, and I order my thoughts badly -- but so much resonates, even if the characters and human drama might get left out a bit but that could be me not treating this as a mere novel.

You can see the comparison w/something like Fathers and Sons (halfway thru' at the moment). The relationships and romanticism, its snappy dialogue more satisfyingly handled and overall soberly alternated with 'deep' political/philosophical discussions. Perhaps a better novel but Oe's time is different altogether. Blood gusehes from the pages in both, and that's what is needed.

i read that in a day when i was 18 or 19 and thought it was just about the best thing i had ever read

i suppose i knew it was one of those instances of perfect susceptibility so i never read another oe book

"DL, have you read Mailer's St. George and the Godfather?"

Not yet dow, but I'm sure I will. Love the unedited Q&A with McGovern at the end of F&L72. I don't think I've ever read such a candid and thorough post-defeat interview talking about what went wrong - or at least what the candidate thinks went wrong. The scale of McGovern's defeat has always fascinated me. He comes across as a solid guy who's just been hit over the head by a hammer.

I just started The Long Ships, which is dry and deft and very funny so far. You wouldn't think!

I mean for being about Viking raids and killing people out of hand and raping their women.

:The scale of McGovern's defeat" yeah--I said "everybody knew what was at stake," but maybe I should have made it "everybody likely to have read Mailer's book when it first came out." Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter is about a young man whose first son is developmentally-disabled, so Daddy freaks out and runs off into urban Japan's grey shambolic fringes--"underworld doesn't quite say it, but a ready context for his own state of mind. I hadn't yet seen any 60s Japanese movies about that environment when I read the novel, which was a graphic jolt. His son's brain requires immediate attention, so this is from the father's first glimpse:
Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his feelings instantly and directed them. . . and him, the hell away from there.

I just finished The Long Ships! Rollicking! Nice and dry.

I slightly wonder how much of that is in the original Swedish and how much was the translator's good judgment? Not that it matters.

browsing in library after finishing a reasonably long chapter in the perspective of the world by braudel and before going for a walk in st james' park.

picked up The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by E Larson, about the Chicago Exhibition. Obv an interesting subject anyway, but I was also pulled in by the Pynchon/Against the Day link.

I'm a sucker for that sort of hack history style, and I was several pages in before I reluctantly had to put it back on the shelf.

See from Wikipedia that the film rights have been sold

I just read that last month. Frederick Law Olmsted was a particularly fascinating character

What's the significance of the Chicago Exhibition? It seems to come up a lot.

well it was significant in that it brought together basically every important architect in America to create an entire city in an incredibly short time. As well as that, Chicago was seen as kind of a provincial backwater at the time (despite it size) and it kind of put the city on the map culturally. Also had the first ever Ferris wheel!

I have a strange set of recollections of The Devil in the White City. The 1880s menus that included cigar, cigarette and amontillado courses. And that Olmstead shipped his Madeira round the world to let it age.

Re: Oe oh oh oh you must read Nip the buds, shoot the kids just for an "a 23-year-old wrote this?!" moment and Teach us to outgrow our madness. To read Oe alongside contemporaneous Mishima is wild, the contrast between the two

I haven't read Father and sons

the menus are great

Old hotel menus are fascinating. The things that were elevated! Celery!

Among the attendees of the fair were the following: Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Henry Adams, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Nikola Telsa, Ignace Paderewski, Philip Armour and Marshall Field

(^i don't know who all of these people are)

+ shredded wheat

(and a ferris wheel)

I'm going through a bunch of David Leavitt. The Lost Language of Cranes suffers from too many points of view and a neat ending but I teared up a couple of times, especially the scenes b/w our young protagonist and Brad. The Page Turner on the other hand suffers from the same flaws but is almost charmless.

Re: Oe oh oh oh you must read Nip the buds, shoot the kids just for an "a 23-year-old wrote this?!" moment and Teach us to outgrow our madness. To read Oe alongside contemporaneous Mishima is wild, the contrast between the two

Tx, read Nip the Buds... Most great writers have that vision (no matter how macabre or toxic) by their early 20s don't they? I also want to read A Personal Matter. It is interesting to read him alongside Mishma, who touches on the same issues but has a take that is more personal, or maybe the diff is that Mishima has read more French novels whereas Oe has read more French philosophy. Watched Oshima's The Man Who Left his Will on Film. An absurdist concept yet a real sobriety to the whole thing. Hard to describe the sensibility at work, but again its worth seeing some of his films alongside the novels.

Fathers and Sons quite different from all of this. There is room for love to be a disruptive force to whatever ideologies are being worked through, making it for a much more affeting read. The last scene is incredible. Turgenev is the man!

Henry James - In the Cage.

I finished Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe. It's a pretty interesting book, but as a memoir, it has a slight structural problem, which is that it peaks rather early. At age 26, Dyson made his most famous and influential contributions to physics and was rewarded by Robert Oppenheimer with a lifetime appointment to the Institute for Advanced Studies. This occurs about halfway through the book, and after that initial rush, the book kind of drifts for a while, unless you're interested in nuclear policy battles of the 1950s. But then it picks up again with the speculative scientific chapters of the final third.

Now I'm reading Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

I went through that Eisenberg collection two summers ago. Some real marvels.

Finally giving Gibbon - Decline and Fall a shot. Seems more manageable when you can just dl one volume at a time (for free at that). Much more fun to read than most history, so far.

I went for David Byrne overload - both his new How Music Works and also Jonathan Lethem's 33 1/3 entry on Fear of Music. Byrne's book is great so far.

He has this great anecdote about conducting auditions for some solo tour that involved choreographed dancers. They had 50 dancers in a room trying out for 3 parts. One of the audition exercises went kind of like this:

1) each of the 50 dancers, on the fly, is required to make up their own repetitive movement that lasts 8 beats
2) each dancer keeps doing that movement until they see another dancer's movement that they prefer
3) if they see another movement that's preferable, they switch to that movement
4) this process continues until everyone in the room is making the same movement in unison

he describes that as one of the most amazing dance performances he'd ever seen, the 50 strands of repetition gradually morphing into one, almost like survival of the fittest, over the course of 5 minutes.

excellent anecdote

^

Finished The Sun Also Rises on a wet and windy day in Wales yesterday. First Hemmingway I'd ever read. Found the staccato prose a pleasant change of pace after re-reading (snark) The Silmarillion. I was very much enjoying falling into those yawning great chasms between what was said and what was inferred. Don't know a huge amount about Hemmingway beyond what a cursory wikipedia sweep has given me, but crikey, this guy seems to have had some pretty serious issues. Also Brett Ashley, whatafuckingbitch

Last night I picked up The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Jan Morris. The love for Wales is obvious. The need for me to keep reading it is not yet as obvious as I'd like. I'll continue tonight and see where it takes me. If it falters, or I do, I expect I'll give The Pale King a go.

Jude the Obscure

I went through that Eisenberg collection two summers ago. Some real marvels.

It was this story in the NY Review of Books that made me want to read more of her work (don't think this is in the collection though):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/cross-and-move/

Am giving up Harlot High and Low for now: just couldn't get into it. I think it migt have to do with the translation. Anyways I plan on reading a ton of Balzac here p soon and will try again when that happens. Meanwhile, I am going to reread some Conrad novellas before finishing out the year on a huge bender of late PKD

I tossed the Wales book aside. I'm just not so in love with Wales that I needed to read a book-length love letter.

Jim Harrison: The Woman Lit by Fireflies -- 3 novellas. Only started the first one, but loving this so far, after reading a couple of dud books recently I can't even be bothered to type the full titles of

Edith Wharton again, "Souls Belated" collection. So far they're reading like a kind of history 101 of divorce becoming a socially acceptable thing. Which is fine, I mean you can easily get a similar schooling in historical social mores from Austen, say, and it's a period I hadn't really given much thought to before.

yesterday at lunch (Moe's), sitting alone reading (Les Fleurs du Mal), a guy (there with his girl, student sorts) who kept looking at me (with vaguely irritated curiosity) approached my table just before leaving to demand (with same vaguely irritated curiosity) "WHAT BOOK???" (his exact words)

I held it up so he could see it, and fullmouthedly mumbled "Baudelaire". which, now that I think about it, was not the correct answer to his question.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SoM7PE%2BTL._SS500_.jpg

Bernard Snowy, yesterday.

I'm following this manga, btw, and enjoying it. the third part (of four) is out next week in English (or maybe in England).

I'm reading "Hearing Secret Harminies", the final part of Anthomy Powell's "A Dance To The Music Of Time", which is just magnificent and I don't want it to end.

Edith Wharton again, "Souls Belated" collection. So far they're reading like a kind of history 101 of divorce becoming a socially acceptable thing. Which is fine, I mean you can easily get a similar schooling in historical social mores from Austen, say, and it's a period I hadn't really given much thought to before.

It's gonna be my mission to make people read more Wharton.

My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel. Highly entertaining discursive ramble over the great auteur's life and work - although Bunuel acknowledges the contribution of screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, the tone throughout is consistent, extremely idiosyncratic and very very Bunuelian. It's also filled with the most jaw-dropping name-dropping you'll ever come across, eg "Every Saturday, Chaplin invited out little group of Spanish refugees out for dinner. In fact, I often went to his house on the hillside to play tennis, swim, or use the sauna. Every once in a while, Eistenstein would drop by"

Cain - Saramago. it's ok. no more , no less.

'tess of the d'urbervilles' -- first hardy i've ever read. dimly remember the plot from seeing the polanski version a decade ago. first impression: great writing -- vivid and even funny.

Roth When She Was Good. It's good, very good, but I'm reading it all wrong. Twenty minutes each way on my commute means the intensity dissipates too easily. I feel I ought to sit with it for two-hour stretches - time to get a new job maybe.