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

Got Sean O'Brien's Collected for Christmas. read some yesterday on a journey to work - travelling through dawn, big city, the river - felt a fit.

Seemed a bit stretched to me, A Maze of Death. Would agree it's not near the top, but memorable things in it.

Androids w 1966 p 1968
Pot-Healer w 1968 p 1969
Maze ... w 1968 p 1970

According to Sutin. I'd mentally filed 'Maze of Death' as later because I guess that's basically where the divide is, in my head, between Dick as being competent and capable of writing v good SF thrillers -- whatever other level they work on -- and of Dick as having lost that ability, lost in his own head. So I guess that divide is (heh) sometime in mid-1968?

I wouldn't be surprised if it were a desk novel. Similarities to one of the earlier ones. Eye in the Sky?

Also, I'd forgotten that Sutin refers to him as 'Phil' throughout. How annoying.

Maybe I should reread the collected works of Philip K Dick.

I had a sudden yearning to do just this before Christmas, happily succumbed (with Autofac) and see no reason not to continue in the New Year, tho having idly picked up Bleak House for the first time in years am now some way enjoyably into that.

Kinda wondering about this author--anybody read him?---reviewed by Randy Fox in Nashville Scene:
Swords from the Sea, by Harold Lamb
During the first and second decades of the past century, Harold Lamb was one of the top historical adventure writers in the U.S. His carefully researched tales of adventure combined history, humor, realistic violence and occasionally even a hint of fantasy. Forgotten for many years, Lamb’s work has recently been re-discovered by such luminaries as Michael Chabon, whose novel Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure is a direct tribute. This collection focuses on Lamb’s tales of sea-going adventures with Vikings, pirates and even the Revolutionary war naval hero John Paul Jones in service to the Russian navy. It’s entertaining and intelligent reading that makes you want to crack open the history books and dig out the Errol Flynn movies. —RF

reading in a book of samuel delaney interviews (which is a fascinating book) and he says if you agree with liberal humanist politics you will find PKD comforting. a preaching to the converted thing. well, he said it better than that, but it was something like that. also said that dick wrote so much and often badly but it doesn't matter to fans because they agree with his whole political vision.

he might have actually said "liberal/jewish".

I have never read any Harold Lamb, but every era has its top historical fiction writers, and they are rarely better than workmanlike novelists reflecting the conventional thinking of their day. iirc, Lamb thrived mainly in the post WWII era, which was somewhat self-conciously 'serious' and self-improving, so its surprising to see humor liste as a main attraction. He sounds worth a try, but that blurb probably oversells him.

Shakespeare’s Puck, and his folkslore: illustrated from the superstitions of all nations, but more especially from the earliest religion and rites of northern Europe and the Wends by William Bell. One of those books you pick up at a library, when you're at the beginning of trying to chase down a subject, and casting your net fairly wide, which has almost nothing at all pertinent to your cause in it, but which somehow detains you by provoking a sort of whimsical curiosity. Being mid-19th C this was of course in III volumes. And it also exhibited what I suspect to be an admirable Victorian trait, or perhaps a post-Enlightenment pre-21st C trait, where the author expends a vast amount of time researching something that might perhaps (by lesser minds) be considered minor. This can cause, upon consideration of time expended v point of expenditure, a terrifyingly vertiginous sense of mortality, a paralysis of will that sends you scurrying for the elliptic precis of Borges or Bernhard. I love the bravery of their insane tottering intellectual structures - dust, after all, is also death, just less spectacular than the battlefield, and bound between calf skins on a hidden shelf in a dark corners of bookish buildings in sequestered squares. I don't think William Bell was immune to these fears, as, having spent most of Vols I & II going in massive detail through Puck's northern European provenance, he then ups the ante substantially by saying in effect, 'of course, for everything I've been writing about to have any meaning, I need to prove Shakespeare spent a lot of of time in Germany'. So that's what he does. I only flicked through this bit, as I'd spent overlong reading about the mischievous habit of elves tying hair into elf-locks causing plica polonica (which association of evil with 'locks' Bell avers is where we get 'Warlock' from). Still, I saw lots of 'must's/'impossible for him not to's/'can only mean's, and I'm eager to go back and snout out his findings. Borges was great at showing how these sorts of minutely worked, obsessively researched theories and systems are worlds unto themselves. (I always liked that aspect of Pynchon's Against the Day, a pertinent novel for all this stuff).

Oh, I also read a lot of The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. Great topography & mythos but the narrator really f'ed me off and I put it down half read. Happy to be convinced otherwise.

Plus, Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon (Gunn felt a bit ponderous being read in the context of Muldoon's melodious celerity of association, but will come back).

Joseph Andrews, <3 Fielding.

Lightning Rods - Helen DeWitt. Excellent - doing something I'm v interested in, which is using the language of office life in a literary way (Stevie T pointed me to George Saunders' Institutional Monologues a while ago). Lightning Rods a v successful example of this. (Feel My Work Is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti fits here as well).

Incidentally, Lightning Rods among an interesting-looking list of books at Asylum. Quite fancy My Elvis Blackout.

gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

thanks, mp - good thread! pringles and f pohl has a blog. important knowledge I didn't previously have.

with Lamp here, I think:

i am going to reread these i think, i want to talk about books but i read these like three maybe four summers ago and found them kinda obscurantist and gross, like there were a lot of words but not very many ideas. and the ideas he does have are the same ugly ones lots of these books have about the solitary male

I got sick of being in the narrator's head, and the treatment of women in it got me... well, I was going to say angry, but I don't think that's true, it was too silly for that, I just found it tiring. I will read f'ing anything tho, so there's no ruling out me picking it up again.

The post-AIDS Gunn poems are among my favorite late 20th century poetry.

Thanks, Alfred - will check out post-haste.

Still Life

I shall not soon forget
The greyish-yellow skin
To which the face had set:
Lids tights: nothing of his,
No tremor from within,
Played on the surfaces.

He still found breath, and yet
It was an obscure knack.
I shall not soon forget
The angle of his head,
Arrested and reared back
On the crisp field of bed,

Back from what he could neither
Accept, as one opposed,
Nor, as a life-long breather,
Consentingly let go,
The tube his mouth enclosed
In an astonished O.

Hmm, thanks, leaving aside the accumulated weight of the final verse, that 'obscure knack' gives a particularly horrible kick.

oh, and to gloss 'felt a bit ponderous' from upthread - that was more a mood thing than criticism. Even at the time I knew there would be occasions where Muldoon would feel frivolous and Gunn would have heft. False opposition - I just happened to have them both to hand at the same time.

a couple weeks back I picked up Spoon River Anthology, as part of my ongoing exploration into the history of 'free verse'... man, what a book! general consensus seems to be that Masters never wrote anything else even half as good, but I don't think it matters, cuz Spoon River is like the American Decameron

Yeah, I never have read the whole thing, think I'll do that--ditto Paterson---only read The Portable William Carlos Williams (also incl excerpt of his novel White Mule)---a trip. Can see how he appealed to Ginsberg and maybe Dylan).

I've been reading the short story collection The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro. After the first three stories I can see I'm not responding well to her stuff. I'll probably go to a thread where she's the main subject if I want to explain further what I think is going on there.

at first glance she looks...aimless

I'm thinking it has more to do with her persistent use of omniscient narration and her giving undue weight and signifigance to every detail of every sentence, which makes them seem portentious when they are not. For example, in the story Jakarta an unnamed strange man who has been dancing erotically with the new mother at a bohemian party suddenly drops down and kisses her crotch through her cotton pants. Then they part forever.

The fact that the pants were cotton is thrown in there just to make them more tactile and believable, but due to her style, this 'fact' is given an annoying amount of weight that grates on me. Despite all her contrivance that she, as the author, is nowhere to be seen and the voice you hear is coming friom the empty air, my brain refuses to grant her that privilege. I know she is there and I watch what she is doing and I see her pulling the little levers to make things happen.

The result is that I don't respond as I ought to, as rather as she wants me to - and the connection fails. Her characters begin to look too much like marionettes and their actions seem herky-jerky and unconvincing. Her effects depend on tricking you into entering what she tells you, as if it were a whole, rounded, complete reality. With me, that trick falls flat. That doesn't mean it isn't a good trick or she isn't a good writer, but only that I am a poor audience for her type of story.

That's the case with her failed stories. Another flaw: since her style is accretive it sometimes takes two or three dozen pages for the reader to figure out why that section at the beginning set in a train station has significance, therefore when the reader figures out what she's up to the whole story looks like a Mannerist exercise.

From what I remember the keeper in that volume is "Save The Reaper."

How's that different from any other author though? Other than those who let themselves go on a wander. It seems like you're criticising poor choice of detail, or addition of unnecessary detail, rather than style as such.

she has definitely been criticized for highlighting things that don't need to be highlighted. or putting emphasis on things that don't turn out to be important. or adding details that are extraneous. never bothered me.

Enjoyed this quite a bit: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/joy/

Yeah, I never have read the whole thing, think I'll do that--ditto Paterson---only read The Portable William Carlos Williams (also incl excerpt of his novel White Mule)---a trip.

also: starting new year off on right note by finally reading Day of the Locust. what took me so long??? this is amazing! dude beat Pynchon to significant aspects of his postmodern steeze by like 30 years

Nathanael West is so rad. Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million are great too

ya I have the new directions volume that includes Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts; thinking I'll read the latter immediately if not soon

I'm sadly struggling with Lolita. Just finished the first section and I'm thinking about putting it down for a time when I'm more up for its tone. Does all Nabokov have this sort of light, jokey feel? There's some gorgeous sentences here but it's just not getting its claws in me. Think spring or summer would be a better fit for this.

Lolita is very jokey. P.S. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Annabel_Lee

i tried to read lolita more than once. maybe three times. could never do it.

i'll try again when i'm older. i've had more luck with early nabokov.

How does Pale Fire compare? I was thinking about checking that one out.

I'd say try Pnin before the others.

i mean if it helps the narrator's light jokeyness is a ploy to ingratiate himself with you despite being a child rapist so if it's rubbing you the wrong way it's prob working (for vn's purposes not hh's)

pale fire is if anything jokier, actually; half of it "takes place" (prob pointless to work out whether this phrase applies to most of pale fire) in a campy pantomime monarchy and the "narrator" (again) keeps talking about his "powerful automobile". pnin is gentler, more dignified, probably, even tho its protagonist is a befuddled-professor type.

I'm reading The Defense right now and it is pretty great. A few very funny scenes scattered throughout, but not really jokey. Probably not a bad place to start (note that I don't really like Pnin but love Ada so maybe not the best source of advice re Nabokov).

way too much I think. Or at least try to. Took too many books to London with me so had to leave Billie's Blues behind without reading it. Billie Holiday bio which looked like it should be very interesting.

Read Black Ajax by George McDonald Fraser which I'd taken over on a previous trip and hadn't read. Enjoyable as a lot of the writer's material is, this one was about a black bare knuckle boxer in the early 19th century stranded in the UK. Could be construed as a bit racist, not sure about Fraser's own politics so could just be conveying what people of the time's responses would be.
Read this and the Chris Morris biography Disgusting Bliss while laid up in bed with a swollen knee. So probably could have got some way into the Billie Holiday book.

Did allow me to start the White Goddess which i've been meaning to read for years, even before I ordered it online a couple years back and still haven't got very far with.
& now I've just picked up Dark Star the Jerry Garcia oral history which I had several years back but got nicked in a box that a mentally challenged co-resident of a house i lived in took as I moved out. I'd left the box in the hallway with several others waiting for a taxi that never showed & I later found one box upside down and it looking like there was a gap. Also had 2 signed copies of Bad Seed the Nick Cave bio in among some other stuff I'm still not 100% exactly what. So glad to slowly be replacing the books from it I've missed ever since.
slightly annoying.

both lo and PF are very funny, i think: one of the endearing things about VN is that he isn't above the dopiest forms of humor -- puns, slapstick, silly names. he loved the scene in the kubrick film where humbert is struggling to get the hotel cot open, with three stooges-esque results. i was put off reading PF for years because i expected it to be some dull esoteric thing, but a lot of it is just hilarious.

the good thing about PF is it reminds you that Edmund Wilson had a point about Volodya's versifying.

Also love Pnin. The character and tone fit perfectly, there's a pathos to the Pnin's jokiness, which isn't quite Nabokov's - tho maybe in a refracted way it is, as it's a kind-hearted, earnest desire to fit in and be liked, which contains a strain of well-described quixotic romanticism. One way of looking at that is as a more human version of Nabokov's 'knight's move' narrative structures. There's a sense of tilting at a parallel world windmill, and that being at the centre of the narrator's 'real' world, hence the awkward and humorous estrangement that is consistent across a lot of Nabokov's writing, English and Russian. America, after all, was not V's first place of exile. Tricky bugger, mainly because he enjoys being so tricky. Enjoyable tho. Haven't read Lolita for years. My favourite is probably The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

xp

I must admit I find the dopey humour irritating rather than enjoyable, but that I'm v prepared to admit is a failure in me. It is less persistent in the Russian novels I think, so might be a reasonable way of judging which Nabokov a new reader, or an old unsuccessful reader, might want to go to first.

i actually really love the poem in PF, but i've never been able to decide how seriously we're meant to take it, or whether it's even supposed to be good or not. but there's lots of beautiful lines in there.

it does duplicate the flatness of a translation, I must admit.

Yeah I think the issue is that I wasn't at all prepared for it and not really in the mood for it. The Lolita character is pretty incredible... It's like the realist 12 yr old ever. And some sentences are just pure beautiful.

'Let The Great World Spin' - Colum McCann

Going through transcribing old notebooks - this made me laugh/think of ilx:

(of Rupert of Deutz)

This led him into arguments from which he emerged - successfully as he thought - in what his enemies regarded as a cloud of verbiage issuing from a word-drunk writer multiplying allegorical interpretations of Scripture which were already too numerous, and rashly engaging in dialectical arguments for which he had no competence.

(not sure where this is from or indeed who RoD is. might be Apes and Ape Lore or some history of scholasticism I was reading. )

So, Rupert of Deutz was a viking at rash dialectical arguments?

lolita is my favorite novel. when i read it i read an annotated version they had at my library, i wouldn't say it's necessary obviously but it's obviously a very densely allusive and playful novel and i'm not sure i would have gotten as much out of it without the annotations. the guy did a great job (the annotations themselves are probably 120+ pages) and it also includes some great scholarly criticism by the guy who was something of a nabokov obsessive

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/07appel.html?_r=0

seemed like a cool guy