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

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

Finished The Pale King last night. Now that I have the whole (but whole only in a fragmentary way) book under my belt, I can see better how DFW really was trying to play with boredom as subject matter, but it didn't feel like he ever really got a grip on it, no matter how many approaches he tried. It's hard to imagine that he was satisfied with his results, at least in regard to his stated theme.

The book seemed to me much more to be about how thoroughly his characters were embedded into huge systems, inflexible institutions and complex technologies that originally emerged from the minds of humans to meet our needs and desires, but which now escape our ability to control, while yet exerting decisive control over us. The boredom idea, i.e. controlling one's boredom as a means of thriving in this human-built but not human-friendly environment, was never developed nearly as urgently as the idea of how human-unfriendly and crushingly overpowering our systems have become.

It was also possible in this book to isolate his techniques more completely in my attention, so I could see what effects he was getting and how he got them. For example, he had a knack for extended monologue in his authorial voice, and his characters are most compelling, too, when they are also deep in monologue. What I could not decide was the extent to which these monologues flowed from him roughly complete in a torrent, if you will, or else if they were carefully accreted bit by bit, with their many joins smoothed out by careful polishing. I suspect the latter, but it would be a measure of his achievement that he made them so closely resemble the former.

done with the Dominican Republic for now; moving laterally to Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, which has received been so lavished with praise (here and elsewhere) that I expect to be... erm... blown away..... (sorry)

Halldor Laxness: The Atom Station -- enjoyed this quite a lot, though also frequently mystified/confused. Did nothing to dispel my preconceptions of Icelanders as an odd people.

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.

it's been about 18 years but my impressions too.

aimless i sometimes think you are the only person i have ever rationally assess dfw without an axe to grind one way or the other

I finished Philip Roth's When She Was Good. Again, all the elements have always been there, but you can see that now he's hit on his thing of getting the hook in and twisting it, and twisting it, and twisting it until you're as wound up as everyone in the book.

This one had a really odd almost perspective shift in the last section, so that I found my sympathies all at odds with where they'd been hitherto. Very strange, and very neat, to make you root for someone all book and then turn the tables so deftly; I can't recall reading anything quite like it.

It was kinda odd to read a Roth with no Jewish characters. I don't feel like he really got under the skin of Catholicism though, insofar as he was using it as a substitute - all the characters seemed to feed off repression, whether catholic or not, which is fine on its own but I do feel he was partly aiming for loftier themes.

without an axe to grind one way or the other

That's the beauty of knowing one's opinions about books are purely irrelevant to the world at large.

Last night I picked up and started the History of the United States: 1801-1809 by Henry Adams, as reissued by the Library of America. It's too soon to tell if it will 'stick', but HA is definitely using Edward Gibbon as his model, even if his prose is unlikely to sustain that level of exquisiteness.

Haha -- not true. Give it about thirty pages. He WAS our Gibbon.

I spent most of last summer reading it, and part of my graduate thesis used a fair chunk of Adams' essays, and although his posing could be tedious -- he's the scion-who-never-was, the guy who wanted to be asked to lead foreign policy but was too noble to beg -- the calibrated irony is almost European in its breadth.

i have the first of those adams books but haven't cracked it yet.

i wish there were someone out there writing a gibbon-esque history of the post-1945 u.s.

So far I've only read two Adams novels, Esther and Democracy, both pretty droll. Did he write any more fiction? I'll read the history etc. someday (have read excerpts)

That's about it. "Droll" is apt.

My fave character is based on Blaine from Maine (wonder if he read it)

I bought my other half Alice Munro's Hateship, Loveship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage; she hadn't started it so I thought I'd give it a go. I wondered whether it'd stick - small-town Canada is about the most boring setting I can think of. My fears lasted about three pages. This is masterful.

haha god yes

YES

Amazon had Blanchot's Lautreamont & Sade for 9 bucks, so I ordered that + Maldoror (in the Paul Knight translation); I've taken out both from the library before and found them immensely enjoyable. looking forward to singing the praises of evil again this winter.

... ack wrong thread!

Just finished Morrissey: the pageant of his bleeding heart. If you love him and like reading academic stuff about literature, this is your book. Seriously academic, but not dull. Also read the newest Augusten Burroughs, This is how - his take on the self-help book. Very insightful essays about dealing with various emotions and truly dire problems. It was the perfect bookend to Morrissey.

So I've only just finished the first of the Munro stories, but I wanted to say to everyone on here who ever talked her up - you were so right.

This is masterful.
On the basis of this comment, I have bought HLFCM and added it to the queue.