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

Muriel Spark's Complete Short Stories: this is the stuff
Yes, yes it is. "And still, like Squackle-wackle, she was quite an interesting person. It was only in my more vibrant moments that I deplored them."

It opens with 'The Go-Away Bird', which is really a short Spark-style novel in itself. "THe Ormolu Clock' isn't in it. Fuck this "complete" bullshit!

School officially done now as of today. Can read stuff of my own choosing again!

(for the next three weeks or so, that is)

"Late Coetzee >> Early Coetzee imo

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 3 December 2012 12:14 (1 week ago) Permalink

gonna read Summertime soon, we'll see

― nostormo, Monday, 3 December 2012 18:56 (1 week ago) Permalink"

finished Summertime - tend to agree.
very good book.

Erick Kastner: Going to the Dogs - a NYRB book I'd never heard of before, but it's great; written and set in ~1930 Berlin, everything's falling apart, very funny

Went to a guest lecture/reading by Howard Jacobson at Goldsmiths last night...fantastic stuff. He discussed the complete disappointment that haunts you as a writer forever (and this was a lecture hall filled mainly with MA/PhD Creative Writing students), how reading, rather than the novel, is dead, the pointlessness and awfulness of genre fiction and other stuff all with a great deal of charm and humour. Read a bit from his new novel too which sounded interesting....might actually pick up The Finkler Question over xmas and give it a go, it's sat on my shelf for a while.

Highlight was a very elderly woman asking Jacobson whether he used comedy as a way of working out/in more serious topics and then trying to flesh out her question by referencing Borat ("Have you seen hat wonderful male wrestling scene?"). Cue a ten minute chat about the merits of Borat lol

how reading, rather than the novel, is dead, the pointlessness and awfulness of genre fiction

was this all tongue in cheek or is he an actual douche

jacobson is def a literary snob and a cultural conservative, cld well be actual irl douche too.

Certainly comes across that way in the one or two interviews I've been 'luky' enough to see..

He was being serious as far as I could tell.

Re: genre fiction - the majority of his ire was directed at thrillers and it stems from a complete disinterest in plot (plus he said he finds thrillers impossible to understand/his brain doesn't work in that way and he loses track instantly).

lol@ my keyboard.

Reading Pavese's short stories - quite a dose of misogyny scattered throughout these (one of the stories is called that) and a bitterness toward life in general, contrast w/the usually brill descriptions of the Italian countryside. xp

Erich Kastner wrote a marvellous kids' book, Emil and the Detectives, that I loved when I was eight or whatever, and have a copy ready & waiting for my own nipper (about seven years early, ha!). His were among the books burnt by the Nazis in 1933.

Parent Trap is also based on one of his - I did not know that.

Big Emil fan here.

lol Naipaul from his New Republic interview:

I can't read Wodehouse. The thought of, shall we say, facing thee or four months of nothing but Wodehouse novels fills me with horror.

His wife:

Oh God, everybody hates Jane Austen. They don't have the balls to say it. Believe me. Who did we meet the other day,that famous academic who said Jane Austen was rubbish? And I said, "Why don't you stand up and say it." And he said, "Am I mad?" They have all reassessed her, but they just don't want to say it.

Believe her.

That they don't have the balls to say it, or that she really is rubbish? The former seems more likely.

she sounds like a Corner-ite.

Also, who's asking N. to read three or four months of nothing but Wodehouse? Might be a good punishment though.

The only thing better than three months of Wodehouse is sharing an island with no one but Jake Gyllenhaal.

How bout Howie Mandel?

(unless Jake is cool; Howie not so much)

I paused after Burr's conspiracy in Jefferson's 2nd term to read an early novella (1961) by John LeCarre, Call for the Dead. It showed that his strengths were there right from the beginning.

That section of Adams' narrative is gnarled stuff! And I'm still not convinced he committed treason.

If the USA had been more closely analogous to a Great Britain, Burr's activities would have been unambiguously treasonous. But the USA was a country recently formed out of a revolution and founded on a stringent insistence on self-determination, while Burr was operating in the western territories and Louisiana, whose legal status was rather nebulous vis a vis the federal government, so his activities do partake of some of that nebulosity.

However, if Adams's sources are credible, Burr's conspiracy once included a plan to kidnap the president, vice president and pro tem leader of the Senate, which, if true, plainly shows Burr had no scruples about actual treason. He really didn't care a tuppence about treason or no treason, so long as he profited by it.

Vidal's novel makes clear that Burr and Wilkinson conspired to do, well, something or other in the western territories to detach them from the federal government, but, as you point out, their plans shifted as new laws (and states) sprouted around them. \

Burr's Senate trial btw, over which Jeffferson's hated John Marshall presided, is hilarious in both Adams and Vidal.

Wilkinson's treason was much plainer, in that he was an active duty army officer whose sworn duties and alliegance were directly to the USA. Burr's oaths of office had expired with his vice-presidency.

Naipaul is such a dick these days, but I still enjoy his earliest novels. They seem too funny to be the work of the curmudgeonly self-regarding old turd that he's become. One of the best bits in Diana Athill's memoirs is where she describes one of the best parts of retiring from publishing being no longer having to work with Naipaul.

I wish SHIVA Naipaul had lived longer and written more books. He was brilliant.

if i were stuck in a library with only one writer to read it'd probably be wodehouse. i'd be cool with tove jansson or joan didion too. it sure as fuck wouldn't be naipaul.

I wish SHIVA Naipaul had lived longer and written more books. He was brilliant.

i feel like he's the great lost writer of the 70s even though he only wrote what? 3 novels and 2 travel books, collected non-fiction? speaking of shiva i recently found a h/b copy of love & death in a hit country, his last novel and the only book of his i haven't read. looking forward to it.

in a HOT country, natch

ha! i mentioned wodehouse as a candidate on that other thread and i didn't even know that thread came about because of the naipaul quote! funny. i could never read that guy. tried a couple of times. naipaul that is.

oh but anyway i'm reading *A Story That Ends With A Scream* a weird short story collection by James Leo Herlihy. he wrote the novel Midnight Cowboy. which i've never read. all stories from the 60's. published in 1970.

900 pp into Jefferson, but last night I switched over and read half of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, just because I needed some freshening up.

Just finished Mr Nice by Howard Marks this morning, been meaning to for ages. Enjoyed it. Must read the Dope Stories. But would expect most people read those both years ago.

Also very close to end of Leroi Jones Blues People which is very interesting. Really should have got it signed when he came and talked at the local University a few months back. Though might have meant that the book got nicked from the library when I returned it.

Bought a load of books a few days ago several from charity shops and 2nd hand ones, not got names down though.
One that looks really good on the US war on drugs going way back before that got capitalised. Strength of the Wolf, another one I've been looking at for ages and meaning to get, since it was on the shelves in the local 2nd hand bookshop for ages, several copies of it.

This is obviously smug beyond measure but do you actually believe this guy? Less than three days per book when the books include Moby-Dick, Gaddis x2, etc. Does anyone read that fast, that relentlessly?

http://www.vice.com/read/all-the-books-i-read-in-2012

yeah, can believe it - there's some fairly slim poetry volumes in there too, some shortish conceptual/experimental fiction too - I'd say that some board members (ok, naming names - James Morrison, Lamp, Thomp) did or do the same sort of numbers

didn't know about the dennis cooper list that guy mentions. joy williams and ivy compton-burnett, dennis is my kinda guy.

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2008/01/dead-blog-reprints-1-my-50-favorite.html?zx=c1f5895f01ac44b5

DC should have a grove press tattoo.

taking 3 whole days to read a book? the dude's lightweight!
[/smug]

I've been wanting to get into Claude Simon for a while and that Triptych book sounds amazing

john paul ricco - the logic of the lure
clarice lispector - agua viva, a breath of life
ursule molinaro - demons and divas

that guy is reading the wrong steve erickson

almost finished with atul gawande's first book, complications
on to my next turgenev, started fathers and sons last night

A couple hundred pages to go in H.W. Brands' Grant bio (superb), a few stories into Alice Munro's Dear Life, and will start Applebaum's Iron Curtain book in a couple days.

Nabokov's Glory - a few pages in.

getting that grant bio for xmas. can't wait. just started "lolita."

now savoring shiva naipaul's love in a hot country, next oliver sacks' hallucinations

argh love and death in a hot country - like his other books he treats the same themes as his big brother w/more humanity and humor. not that vs naipaul is devoid of empathy and laughs (in his books not his life) but shiva is warmer, less idea-driven & political than vidia's later novels

finished PKD's Maze of Death before break: liked it more than I thought it would, though still a step down from the Androids/Ubik/Pot Healer run. Probably the most distinctive part of it was the made-up religion, much of which pointed ahead to Divine Invasion. I won't comment too much on the all-too-common device that appears towards the end, except to say that to its credit, it is usually not deployed in order to make things bleaker...

While waiting for interlibrary loan to deliver my next PKD book (Our Friends from Frolix 8) I have been a reading a few other things:

- The New Novel: From Queneau to Pinget, by Vivian Mercer. An English-language survey of the roman nouveau movement in France ca 1970

- Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience, by R.A. Durr. Haven't started this yet, but I'm guessing it's a post-beatnik attempt to trace precursors for 60s countercultural fixations to Romantic poetry.

- issue No. 50 of Anime Insider, which has a list of the 50 greatest anime (caveat: only those translated to English). Several favorites of mine placed high, including FLCL, Utena, Evangelion, and so on

Dipping here and there into a couple of poetry collections I got for Christmas, one modernist and one anti-modernist. So far I think I prefer the anti-modernist. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.

Keith Waldrop - Transcendental Studies
Les Murray - Learning Human

finished PKD's Maze of Death before break: liked it more than I thought it would, though still a step down from the Androids/Ubik/Pot Healer run. Probably the most distinctive part of it was the made-up religion, much of which pointed ahead to Divine Invasion. I won't comment too much on the all-too-common device that appears towards the end, except to say that to its credit, it is usually not deployed in order to make things bleaker...

heh i'd never looked at it that way

this is way later than the androids/ubik/pot-healer run i thought?