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

lolling so hard @ this comment on Rev's redstate link

_Yet more evidence that we have been living in fantasyland for too long now. I don't want to hear that this is all Romney's fault, or all the campaign's fault. The simple fact is that in the run-up to this election, we were fed a steady diet of lies, from all our "loyal" sources. We need to hold not only the Romney campaign accountable, but also the conservative press (specifically the Murdoch press - Fox was the worst of the bunch), and the establishment talking heads like Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan. We need to get clear about something: these people are selling us a product. They have been taking our money and telling us bedtime stories. We complain about the MSM, but can we honestly say that the conservative press has been more honest?

How do we expect to win elections if we can't even get straight facts about the electorate? But maybe it's our own fault. There was practically a revolt around here when Erik said he didn't think the polls were false. And yet he was right, and they were right. Have we become allergic to the truth?_

Re-reading "To The Lighthouse" for class at the moment. Also read this recently...http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Social-Realism-Documentary-Short/dp/1903364418

are you on the same course i was on or are these just the books on every literature MA ever

reading Cousin Bette, my first Balzac, in a good modern Oxford translation by Sylvia Raphael. a tremendously enjoyable mishmash of outrageous opinion/authorial sermonising, gossipy prurience, social/political conflict, and intricate melodrama - can see why Balzac was v. important to Henry James.

a lot of the judgements on characters, races, countries, classes etc seem jaw-droppingly...broadbrush...at times; just today this brutal little paragraph made me laugh:
Madame Crevel, rather an ugly woman, very common and stupid, who died none too soon, had given her husband no joys other than those of paternity.

also it is slightly comic to read abt these aristo frenchmen rushing round frantically collecting mistresses even when it costs them their name, reputation, fortune, good lady wife etc

im doing new media and english, thomp. 'to the lighthouse' is on my literary modernism module. other books are 'howards end', 'women in love' some katherine mansfield short stories, a bit of 'ulysses' and 'good morning midnight'

I expect I will be buried in the Thomas Jefferson administration for the foreseeable future. Only 1050 pp yet to read!

thoughts so far?

A few. This book requires a def committment of time; it is slow-paced, but it is very readable. I expect that by the end I will have a very thorough understanding of the political forces of the time and how they all were resolved. Because the country was so young and the whole democratic experiment was so new in the world, these formative years should be pretty fascinating.

Jordan: "black people fanfic"?

Like, scenes where an ex-NFL millionaire, his bodyguard, and everyone else in the room are casually referencing 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' and Isaac Asimov deep cuts. But maybe everyone in Oakland/Berklee is way into the Jewish sci-fi canon and talks about Tarantino constantly.

I don't mean to be too hard on it because I am enjoying it, but I can't help raising an eyebrow from time to time.

thomp: english and comparative literature at Goldsmiths?

hated oscar wao

what for?? explain yrself!

thomp: english and comparative literature at Goldsmiths?

― Blue Collar Retail Assistant (Dwight Yorke), Sunday, 11 November 2012 23:40 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha that wasn't me either. so basically yeah, they all use the same books! that is unsurprising and depressing

i didn't like oscar wao either, oops

i know mine is a minority opinion bc it seems well-liked by a lot of ppl w/ more clout than me, but i thought it exhibited some of the worst aspects of valueless cultural relativism of the "graphic novels are just as good as thomas mann" kind, blatant homophobia (whether diaz is simply mirroring a tendency of dominican culture or not, it's unappealing), a style that seems to try too hard to be "postmodern", and a general philosophical impoverishment of its characters. in his interviews he seems to make a sort of spurious differentiation between the "whiteboy" literature like e.g. david foster wallace and post-colonial "brown folks" literature, which is basically an external criticism that stems from a mindset that rejects the possibility of a useful sort of dynamic synthesis (which is ironic as the novel seems to be all about an attempt to synthesize disparate cultural influences, even if it is actually only heterogeneous).

Finally read Pere Goriot, which sets my headorama (boarding house in-joke) spinning, but still perfectly focused (albeit laughing x crying O SHIT),I assure you. At present, am brrracing self to encounter motormouth M. Vautrin elsewhere in The Human Comedy!

clouds that is a v good summation of how i feel about it, much better than i could have managed, i would have just been like "unnnh shut about jack kirby, GOD"

+up

For the Wao-haters out there, have you read Drown? May raise the same set of problematics but it's less dependent on pop culture references to define everyone and everything in it. (am about to begin an essay on the notion of passing in relation to Oscar's failed attempts at cultural assimilation in both the US and the DR in comparison with the 'successful' passing of Coleman Silk in Roth's Human Stain)

Thomp: Yeah, I've not read anything jawdroppingly great on any of the courses on the MA (did a primer on american lit last year that took us from Thoreau to Auster, a postmodernist fiction course that, Pale Fire aside, was largely dull (and was essentially a course in which the novel in question was a conduit for another boring conversation about the nature of reality etc) this term I'm doing 21st

...century American fiction, next term it'll be Literature and Philosophy.

I normally try and writer about off-course texts anyway, so ended up doing my essays last year on Clement Greenberg's art criticism in conjunction with beat writing (linking action painting with 'action writing' etc) and postmodern architecture and the urban imagination.

Prompted by posts above and wanting to see if John E Woods' translations are as engaging as people say, rereading The Magic Mountain (or rather 'rereading' - I read it when I was about 15 or 16 and v ambitious or pretentious, so obviously have next to no memory of what happens in it except that there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens), and although I've thought H T Lowe-Porter has a bad rap and is perfectly readable if a little stiff (I went through the first 20 pages of hers too, for the sake of science), this is obviously a better or more present version - readable, precise, feels like there's more tonal subtlety.

there are some debates about time or something

ha

i might join you. but then i always say i will do this on these threads. and then i don't.

dwight i bought 'drown', diaz seemed fundamentally talented enough i didn't want to write him off. but then i haven't read it because, you know, effort. also i like him in interviews.

If you only ever read one other thing by Diaz make it 'Aurora' from that collection - a genuine masterpiece of a short story IMO.

I'll stop going on about him now. Just picked up my first issue of Bookforum...should I expect good things?

there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens

the #1 thing i was looking for when i read MM was the same thing that's telegraphed so much at the beginning, the experience of seven years of time passing, put into novel/narrative form, and for a long time i was expecting to be disappointed, and then somewhere way through the book, i was like, hey, hans has been here forever, or is it really only five years? etc.

Drown is full of wonderful stories but yeah, Aurora might be the best (if it's the one I'm thinking of - the junkie girlfriend one?). Is his collected work available online or anywhere? I don't fancy Oscar Wao for some reason, but I read an SF story in the NYer about an epidemic in Haiti which was terrific.

that was an excerpt from his novel-in-progress (apparently he's been trying to write a sci-fi book for years). He has a new story collection out now though

hi ILB! I have started reading again after a long uninentional hiatus brought about by procrastination :)

am currently reading:
Laurence Bergreen - Over The Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.
Only a little ways in but really enjoying it.

also aquired from the library:
River of Doubt, the book about Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon
Collapse - Jared Diamond.
dunno, was kidn of in and adventure/exploration/ancient civilizations mood, lol.

just recently finished Anthony Flacco's Road Out Of Hell abt the Wineville murders. So the adventure stuff is kind of a palate cleanser

National Book Award winners and others, anybody read 'em?
http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/11/14/national-book-awards-2012-winners/

Reading Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods', which is really good, and oddly like a Donald Westlake comedy in style

The War: A Memoir - Marguerite Duras.

pretty horrifying

just finished Maldoror, still working on the Blanchot essay. may post reflections, later, somewhere

Following Pere Goriot w The Idiot (Penguin Classic, David Magarshack translation). Halfway through, and the women are amazing (it's all amazing, but didn't know D. had such female characters in him, most don't)

The Idiot was the toughest going for me of Dostoevsky's Big Four; I've never actually finished it. I'm wondering if the Magarshack translation would suit me better; I think it was his translation of C&P that I was reading when I decided it was my favorite novel ever.

Portnoy's complaint. such a great first paragraph, (the rest is very funny too )

Reading Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods', which is really good, and oddly like a Donald Westlake comedy in style

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 15 November 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So gonna nominate this for the next ILX book club :)

NO REPEAT AUTHORS

OR NATIONALITIES, RACES, GENDERS

Jeffrey Toobin's The Oath and Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means (a surprising disappointment considering how much I love her).

Drugs, if you loved C&P via Margarshack, def check his translation of The Idiot--got hooked at first skim Tuesday, and it's become a way of life. I am able to do other things in between reading sessions, honest. Although at the moment, it's off to the park, and back on the train for a while--bye!

Almost finished with Brothers Karamozov which is my first Dostoevsky.

Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means (a surprising disappointment considering how much I love her).

O no! THis is one of my fav Sparkses!

It was...I dunno, more amorphous than usual? She's the master of abbreviated narrative, but this novel ended just as it was getting started.

I guess that's true, actually. I just really liked the vibe she set up, of all this not-well-suppressed sexual excitement due to the unexploded bomb.

I wasn't a big fan of it either – felt like she wasn't quite holding her tone at points. Admired its frame or structure though - bluntly placing evil-martyrdom-grace around a club-of-types-of-girls story (the kind of story she'd already taken to bits in Jean Brodie). Climax works, I think.

Ha now I'm sort of convincing myself to reread it, but I've had the Mandelbaum Gate sitting around for years, so maybe that next time I'm going Spark.

actually, make that a question: how's The Mandelbaum Gate? For some reason (length? It looks too long for a Spark book) I've never much fancied it.

Finished The Idiot Friday, been walking around in the reverberations ever since (well, they keep coming back, fairly often). Reminds me of what PKD seemed to be going for with Valis, though more literally there: the novelist vs. and in tandem with the spiritual crackpot side of his brain, seeking a balance, and a struggle. Also, having almost been executed, and always being watched, despite/because of becoming so extremely conservative, he puts his radical testifying in the mouth of the Idiot--whose condition, though it includes D.'s own very real and here indelibly described epilepsy. can also seem like brilliant literary devide--then again, Ippolit's "Confession" includes a manifesto, just about, of the chronically afflicted: his response to society's response to his surprisingly persistent condition and very existence. Also, his illness-related frustrations, his insights and fevered detours intensify his inclinations to shit-stirring. He's among the many Russians who strenuously adapt to the Black Swans, to the Idiot orphan who returns to claim his inheritance--his fortune and his dream homeland--and to Natasha, former child concubine on the loose, or the lam, at any rate. Eight versions of this were attempted. and I like how he lets characters foregrounded in earlier plotlines slide into place here, where they all do their telling bit (in some cases when I'd come to assume they were gone for good). Also, he knows when to examine their interiors, and when just to describe what they did, in whatever elaborate or concise detail. Local rumors and gossip--incl. distortions and canny surmises--appear, when we need a break/set-up for the next suckerpunch.

"brilliant literary *device*", I meant.

i prefer what came immediately before slender means to slender means. peckham rye, bachelors, brodie.

i need to do a spark re-read project. so many of them i read 20+ years ago. then spent the next 20 years filling in gaps as i found stuff that i had missed (or as she wrote them).

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
Memento Mori (1959)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Public Image (1968) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
The Driver's Seat (1970)

there are two of these i haven't read which is all that is keeping me from applauding this as a fucking impeccable run

my phone seems to have eaten my earlier post about the mandelbaum gate. i said that i. it seemed like spark had graham greene in the back of her head when she wrote it, maybe, but that ii. about 40% of what i can remember is that the protagonist has coleridge's rhyming crib on metrical feet stuck in his head throughout and keeps betting people they can't spell 'mississippi'. since then i have remembered that iii. it seems to make a point of avoiding giving you the narrative in a very schematic way.

i liked it, though, though this is probably not the week to read it, what