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

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.

> 'tess of the d'urbervilles'
> first impression: great writing -- vivid and even funny.

give it a hundred pages...

There's a hilarious scene involving Tess and her baby. A real knee slapper.

well even at this point the plot isn't exactly funny, but there's something kind of arch and knowing about hardy's tone as a narrator that clashes a bit with what i remember of the story.

i just finished it last sunday and it was good but it gets quite grim even though i didn't immediately understand what had happened in the forest. seemed a very small world towards the end as well, with lots of people from first half popping up in second half. impressed by the postal service of the time though 8)

Hardy often and correctly gets his knuckles rapped for generic nature descriptions with an overlay of cynical wink-winking, written in carpentered prose; but the scene at the dairy farm is one of the simplest and most lyrical I've ever read.

I was surprised when i first read Hardy how much humour there was. Some of it pretty black, but still, didn't match up with my preconceptions.

Joseph Roth: Tarabas -- I've been rationing out my last few J Roths, and only have 2 more left after this one. Damn these fuckers who die young.

Whatever James Wood's sins I owe him for introducing me to Roth.

weird someone else reading Hardy, I just finished Jude the Obscure (my first of his, tho I started Return of the Native once)—found it a very enjoyable read. also the old paperback I 'borrowed' from my dad's shelf has this hilarious cover:

http://static.issyvoo.com/cover/jude-the-obscure/show_edca58c655fcceae3110d8b5fe86f01d.jpg

the Egdon Heath intro of The Return of the Native is exactly what I had in mind about Hardy's ponderousness.

But the guy's one of my four or five favorite novelists. And those love lyrics from 1912 destroy me.

ya I really enjoyed the poetry of his I read!

The intro to Return of the Native was lovely. I fell asleep immediately after finishing... but it was lovely, too.

(after finishing that chapter, I mean)

I forgot to mention that I recently read The Periodic Kingdom, P.W. Atkins, a survey of chemistry mainly focussed on the periodic table of the elements and the modern understanding of their atomic structure. It had a few slips into the style of Mr. Science Explains It All And Makes It Fun, but 95% of it was just a readable synopsis and a nice change from fiction.

I'm now reading The Pale King. Its unfinished nature is hard to miss, but it has some good writing and it shows where DFW's approach was headed after IJ.

"weird someone else reading Hardy, I just finished Jude the Obscure"

doubleweird..i just started Jude the Obscure!

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.

http://s12.postimage.org/ctbg5fmpn/Rochester_detail.jpg

i started jude on a long plane ride some 3 years ago and have neglected it since. it was christmastime and i'd just gotten some wire and buffy DVDs i should really get around to finishing it

finished hamlet (also on a plane ride! i'm really not about the jet life, i swear) last week. think i'm going to start turgenev's on the eve tonight on alfred's recommendation (and because it's short). loved loved loved first love

whoops

...buffy DVDs, and i got lost in those.

I got your back.

Dumas - The Three Musketeers. Just started.

just read

Pohl - The Gateway Trip (which isn't very good, being mostly a low-reading-grade-level recap of the series, also repeating themes that were done just fine in the first book, the only one i had read)
King - Night Shift (which is great)
Carr - The Blind Barber (above average mystery, not locked room as Carr was known for)

now reading

Chabon - Telegraph Avenue
Lethem - Fear of Music

went mental on donald barthelme but stalled on "teachings of don.b" which seemed to consist of "shooting fish in a barrel"level-satire, and stuff which didn't make the cut. hyperbolic foreword by my arch nemesis pyncho helped none. ditched "vineland" 40 pages from the end, could not have cared less how it might end.
just done david ohle's "the devil in kansas", which was an easy breeze of a read, if not really ohle at all until the last 20 pages. read like a compendium of barry gifford screenplays, nowhere near the level of rug pulling dream-weirdness i expected. feel shortchanged.

I've been bumbling around among public domain adventure stories from 1900-1920-ish and was v pleased with The Man on the Box by Harold McGrath, more so than the general run of little New York City-centric mystery & dramas I've been finding. The narration was a little more knowing and confiding in the reader? (Although it's super cool to read about people catching hansom cabs to places in NY or reference to the 2nd Ave El or whatever. which is half of why I read these.)

The Incomplete Amorist by Edith Nesbit was also an odd gem, I think? I never realized she'd written other than children's books.

Just bought Wolf Flow by K.W. Jeter: gonna see if I can read thru that before Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? arrives via interlibrary loan