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

the book review franzen did where he contended that male writers who wrote from the POV of female characters did so because they felt 'smallened' and less than fully male

haha, what?

i think 'this is water' is a pretty good commencement address because they requested famous author DFW and got member-of-alcoholics-anonymous DFW, sort of; the book form is gross as fuck. rivka galchen reviewing the bio in the nyt was pretty good re the desire to regard him as a moral teacher or whatever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/d-t-maxs-biography-of-david-foster-wallace.html

finished Feast of the Goat—a tough one to get thru, that. favorite bit was the chapter following the one general through the hours immediately after the assassination, but it had many highlights.

I found the pairing with Oscar Wao (which I will probably reread now, at least in part) mutually illuminating, because they have such different focuses—every protagonist in Wao is some sort of alienated outcast loner, just reacting to the external machinery of 'society' and trying not to get crushed. Feast takes the broader/more distant view of 'society' as a totality with no outside, shot thru with class divisions, conflicts of interests, and decisions—it's also a lot drier and none of the characters are very interesting or likable; but I found myself getting invested nonetheless. I think it just might come down to the way that the narrative structure separating past and present starts to break down in the last 1/2 of the book—extended flashbacks taking over the present-day sequences, the harrowing final chapter, etc etc

have also started in on Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, which is basically just "witty writer reflects on his annual vacations to Venice", v.beautiful and calmative

Goat is one of the few novels that made me shut it after absorbing some of the villainy. I knew a little about the Trujillo dictatorship but NO IDEA he was this savage.

I've discovered Armistead Maupin! The serial form and reliance on coincidences dilutes the impact of many sequences, but dialogue and pace are impeccable This is as good as popular fiction gets.

rushing it out as a little gift book w each sentence ludicrously isolated on a single page to maximize post-death profits was gross.

FYI this is what happens when the book isn't long enough to prevent having to hand-carton at the bindery. NB I do not believe we published that thing.

Just now spotted Rebecca West's The New Meaning of Treason at the thrift store. Quickly skimmed, premise looks dubious: she says Pound and Lord Haw-Haw etc. are new cos ideological, not just sell-outs. But seems like anybody branded traitor has rationalizations: a higher loyalty; the money's just for expenses. Still, random grafs look pretty good, and I'm a fan of Mailer's journalism. Should I get this?

What other books of hers should I read?

Her Yugoslavia travel book Black Lamb Grey Falcon: as rich as anything by Mann or Musil.

about halfway through Wolf Flow: it's decent pulp. Obviously the title was intriguing, and there was something about the reviews that made me think it might be the literary equivalent of some of the batshit stuff that made the ILE horror movie rollout a few months ago (along with a lot of stuff that just missed out), but besides the premise--man beat almost to death is cured by evil water--it's fairly standard, like somewhere between Te Shining and a Jim Thompson thriller...

Her Yugoslavia travel book Black Lamb Grey Falcon: as rich as anything by Mann or Musil.

― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 29 October 2012 00:34 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha that's the first thing that's made me actually want to attempt rebecca west you know

lol, well, this actually confuses me because Mann and Musil aren't that much alike.

Mann is not that good, for a start (some of the short stories aside).

well, they're part of the twentieth century tradition of the European Novel of Ideas; I'd have to develop the comparison. West's book depicts how English intellectuals responded to an alien culture in the years between the wars.

If you find Mann ponderous, Felix Krull is the cure. It's actually funny!

Walt Whitman, and CK Williams' short book On Whitman. Just kicking against my longstanding Whitman aversion; Williams is helping - very enthused but very attentive - exciting, rushing-at-it poetry crit!

i haven't read t. mann in a few years but the right translations are vital -- i tried reading h.t. lowe-porter's translation of "royal highness" and it was interminable, though it could just be the novel.

Lowe-Porter's aren't seen in a favourable light (and I recall a few posts in these parts that say this).

I would probably try Mann as translated by John E.Woods

^^^^ yes. It makes a difference.

doktor faustus, the magic mountain, buddenbrooks — all some of the greatest novels of the 20th century, if not of all time

mann and musil are pretty alike!!

i mean okay as far as german-language authors who wrote about their own personal microcosms at great length as a way to tackle from one remove the sweep of central european history, and whose main claim to modernism is in their degree of ironic remove from the structures of the 19th century realist novel, go they're pretty separate

that sentence was translated from the german

Mein Deutsche cousin Krystal just seconded that: "Jah, Woods ist gut mit der Raabe, Rabe, Grass, Archimboldi, Durrenmatt und Mann." Who knocked 'em dead at Woodstock too.

An impression from reading MwQ vs MM, say, is that Musil seems much less concerned about being state of the nation, although I know Musil had a massive ego and probably wanted to be seen that way, but he seems smarter about it?

I'd have to revisit The Magic Mountain. I do find its set up a fucking slog,. Bunch of cardboard cutouts pouring their philosophical POVs as puppetmaster Mann goes on to collect his prizes. I don't think a translator can save this. otoh, I like Death in Venice, and would always give his shorter form stuff the time of day.

xyz&c, how do you feel about thomas love peacock

i found the magic mountain a pretty rewarding slog but gave up when the ten pages in french at about the halfway point were left untranslated

yeah, that was funny; don't do French, eh H.T.? But I kept going past it, enjoyed the rest. Does Woods pull the same thing? Back to The New Meaning of Treason: revised and extended '64 edition, now incl. Philby etc., posted in its entirety here, if I ever wanna scroll that much (a few typos already) http://www.archive.org/stream/newmeaningoftrae000249mbp/newmeaningoftrae000249mbp_djvu.txt

The untranslated French was a very amusing assumption to make about its readers.

re: Peacock, must investigate.

I might even make it to reading Cancer Ward one of these days.

I knew enough schoolboy French to maneuver through it but I relied at that point on a couple critical guides.

i got pissed off and threw the book in the recycling.

I'm not calling anyone a barbarian for being unable to read some fairly simple french, let's make that clear

in that case i'm definitely not calling you a tendentious snob.

all i'm saying is that you can't expect translators to translate everything for you

why would it be translated into english if it wasn't in the original german edition

why wouldn't it be? you could throw it in at the end in an appendix or something

Guessing Woods got his French dictionary out..

I think there's an appendix in modern german editions, so he could have copied that.

(I know this because I am right this moment trying to resist falling into a rabbithole of google-translating + browsing a german language Magic Mountain reading group, just to see how they do things over there.)

ehh who would want to read a load of mitteleuropean malingerers lazing around & making ponderous challops on the internet

salman rushdie - joseph anton

first half reads like a hair-raising thriller as the fatwa bears down and various notables rally round or don't. but something funny happens midway thru as the death-threat pressure begins to ease ever so gradually; salman rushdie becomes not only a cause celebre but a weird sort of celebrity and gets his head turned around by gestures of solidarity from bill clinton and bono. then it's off to the races in terms of name-dropping, making speeches alongside susan sontag and meeting thomas pynchon turns into having lunch with steve martin and gary shandling. that's fine but the final 200 pages or so are pretty disappointing and by the time of 9/11 rushdie seems burned out on giving radical islam much thought which is understandable in human terms but disappointing to me as a reader, seems like a missed opportunity to follow up on some threads he started earlier in the book. midlife crisis starring padma lakshmi sapped all his mental energy? his appeal to her remains mysterious.

edmund white - jack holmes and his friend

this story of a lifelong friendship between two guys gay and straight starts off strong, or at least intriguing, but pretty much falls apart. white's an excellent writer imo and he gamely tries to get inside the straight character's head, so to speak, but after awhile you can tell his heart's just not in it. without being patronizing i would call this a noble failure and respect white for even attempting it.

george v higgins - cogan's trade

another talky new england crime story, not quite as funny/suspenseful as the digger's game but stronger than his uneven later novels. the car descriptions struck a nostalgic chord with my 70s teenage self, these wiseguys and thugs tool around in boat-size LTDs, 442s, de Villes etc.

cynthia carr - fire in the belly: the life and times of david wojnarowicz

this was almost too intense, no scratch that it WAS too intense to read in the end, had to skim the last 100-150 pages cause his slow death from AIDS was just too brutal to consider in such detail. sorry. but the biography is well done, carefully researched and clearly written. david must have had the worst childhood of all time, the mere fact of his survival is such a miracle let along the unique art and writing he wrought from his brief life. how much of his story he invented/exaggerated is an issue carr deals with judiciously, separating fact from myth-making when she can w/o becoming righteous or insensitive or apologetic. no surprise given all he'd been through david was a troubled guy, difficult to be around and hard on friends and foes alike. but a compelling person if not always a likable one. the portrait of the short-lived east village art scene ca 1981-85 here is definitive until somebody writes a book on that (i'll read it). beautiful color insets of his paintings, browse if you see in a book store.

richard polsky - the art prophets

brief profiles of art dealers entrepreneurs and tastemakers, this is way more interesting that it sounds. starts off slow and obvious w/pop art then moves on to less familiar (to me) territory like environmental and native american art. his realistic assessment of "outsider art" is a tonic.

gonna curl up w/nile rodgers' memoir for the rest of this stormy afternoon, "good times"

White's City Boy is his most attractive book in ages imo

woods translates the french iirc. and iirc wasn't untranslated french pretty common in older translations of the russians? (you think it's tough in mann, try reading pre-70s scholarly books where they drop into french, german, latin, and greek without so much as a hey what up.)

and the discourses of settembrini and naphtha seem to have something pretty questionable about them - moreso naphtha's - but that is arguably easy to index to hans's moral/pedagogical development. it's not as if mann wants you to think you're reading kant or something; you're reading about hans caught in the middle of grandstanding intellectual-pedagogical rivals.

i'm not sure what i want to say about 'mann as a thinker' because i haven't read him carefully enough. his artistry is obviously pretty massive, which is part of the problem; he thinks using literature, so it's not like you can just read off 'magic mountain' anything about the quality of his thought. musil codes way more easily as an essayist-investigator and doesn't immediately seem to be as constrained by self-imposed literary structures, which makes him seem smarter and more probing. but they are obviously peers. musil 4 eva but i would totally read 'magic mountain' again (and have plans to read 'faustus', 'buddenbrooks').

try reading Mann's essays! There's a sequence on Goethe that I've only dipped into because my own relationship with Faust is dilettantish at best.

Settembrini and Naphta's increasingly toxic arguments represent the decadence of certain kinds of 19th century isms, no? Positivism, elitism, etc. Fuck, it's been almost twenty years

I don't know if j or xyzzz agree, but Castorp is one of the few blank slates in lit who's actually compelling.

ehh who would want to read a load of mitteleuropean malingerers lazing around & making ponderous challops on the internet

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Monday, October 29, 2012 1:14 PM (1 hour ago)

My impression is that this is the plot for Magic Mountain, give or take an 'on the Internet'

Anyways I just got a book on Gerard de Nerval that leaves p much all the quotes in untranslated French. Looks like I'll be investing in an English-French dictionary some time in the future

One more thing: first page of Do Androids Dream? = stone-cold classic

Yes we are re-creating The Magic Mountain as the original was so unsatisfying!

I could do w/re-visiting. MM is ideally SO my kind of thing (and Doctor Faustus even more so). I'll make sure to get the later translation.

I don't know if j or xyzzz agree, but Castorp is one of the few blank slates in lit who's actually compelling.

yeah hans is a bro

Virginia Woolf fans: how does Jacob's Room fit within her body of work? I get what's going on here, but it's all so fragmented and elliptical that it leaves me with little to grasp onto.

reading musil - confusions of young törless