Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

i read parts of them at fifteen like "woah this is weeeeirrrd", always been meaning to get back to them

u shd get his cats book tho

burroughs weeping over the thought of his cats being annihilated in a nuclear holocaust has always stayed with me

yes - I associate them (tho' they're before my time -I had my 15-and-loving-the-SEXHORRORDRUG burst of burroughs in 89/90 or so) with a kind of lit establishment/broadsheet-reviews respectability coming to him in the UK - a Picador writer, not a Calder one.

just wikied, didn't realise how big the gap was since he'd done something long-form - Wild Boys 71, Port of Saints 73, then Cities of the Red Night 81.

I'd assumed he'd written a shit ton of unreadable experimental novels that I hadn't really heard of.

did he finally give up the heroin in the early 80s?

Wiki sez no

Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug.

a Picador writer, not a Calder one.

Yeah that's why I think he was slept on - it was much more of a narrative, much more 'literary', put off the ppl who liked Naked Lunch.

I read 'em at 20 or so.

being a drug dealer on burroughs's doorstep must have been a cushy job

The 2013 affordable edition of Ronald Johnson's Ark. Hasn't arrived yet.

Recently picked up:

Karel Capek - War with the Newts
Mircea Cartarescu - Blinding
Primo Levi - If This Is a Man/The Truce
Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun
Lewis Thomas - Lives of a Cell

The Capek, Levi and Wolfe are all great.

Reading Autobiography of a Corpse, latest NYRB collection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky stories. Very good, though the longest and weakest works are put first in the book, a bit unwisely.

What's the point of working all the time if you can't throw money at big books you don't have time to read & can't carry around?

― woof, Saturday, August 10, 2013 12:53 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Welcome to my flat, Zibaldone

What furniture did you have to give away to make room for it?

treating it as a very firm mattress. just need a super-king duvet.

I recently was called to jury duty. A few days ago a compensatory check arrived in the mail for the sum of $13.60. Today I spent $14 on the following books:

Early Novels and Stories, James Baldwin, used hardcover from Library of America in very good condition for $4. This volume contains Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Going to Meet the Man. I've never really delved into Baldwin and this seemed like a great opportunity.

So What: New & Collected Poems 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali, a used trade paperback from Copper Canyon Press in excellent condition, for $4.

Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class, Nelson W. Aldritch IV, used trade paperback for $3. The author is the grandson of a US Senator and is himself from "old money'. First published in 1988, before the ascendancy of the rich really soared to stratospheric heights.

We Sagebrush Folks, Annie Pike Greenwood, used trade paperback from U. of Idaho Press, for $3. This is a reissue of a very literate memoir first published in 1938 that looks quite interesting. The author was the daughter of the director of the Idaho insane asylum, but I don't think that is a focus of the book.

yesterday picked up a couple of recent editions of some of knut hamsun's later novels: the ring is closed & the wanderer (compiles under the autumn star/a wanderer plays on muted strings) as well as gaddis' the recognitions which i'm currently about ten pages into...

I'm really happy to see that Hamsun has made his bones among booklovers beyond the century mark. His books deserve to live. Wanderers was one of his better ones, imo.

absolutely. the same publisher has also put out some of his other work i'd never even heard of, including a collection of his short stories that looks well worth investigating (hope to one day find a translation of the book about his american experiences)

always been slightly confused by the similarities of some of his translated titles: wanderer, wanderers, wayfarers and so on

Hamsun is a Nobel winner, so he'll never completely disappear. Though in fairness many early Nobel winners are currently out of print in English.

The early translations of Hamsun were heavily bowdlerized and should never be read. Be warned, these are the translations they have on a Project Gutenberg.

Welcome to my flat, Zibaldone

― woof, Wednesday, 19 February 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You need to write a report on this and deliver it at the ILB conference.

I've bought a couple of paperbacks by Henry Green, Ruskin's Stones of Venice (abridged), Montaigne's Essays, Delany's Fall of the Towers trilogy.

Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors cause its about time I owned it, and about time I read the newer essay.

The early translations of Hamsun were heavily bowdlerized and should never be read. Be warned, these are the translations they have on a Project Gutenberg.

The chap who translates Hamsum for Penguin Classics usually includes lengthy outraged screeds about the shittiness of earlier translations in his introductions.

Lately:

Wislawa Szymborska - View with a Grain of Sand (Selected Poems)
Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods
Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope against Hope
Hazlitt - On Theatre

No way, I just bought View With a Grain of Sand myself. Go figure.

Also:
Charles Yu - How to Lie Safely In a Science Fictional Universe
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Italo Calvino - t zero & Cosmicomics
Robert Walser - Jakob von Gunten
JM Coetzee - Life & Times of Michael K
Anne Applebaum - Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
John McPhee - Levels of the Game
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1: 1929-1964
Raymond E. Brown - The Death of the Messiah
Thomas Mann - Magic Mountain
Albert Camus - The Plague

Mostly cheap used books on Amazon or local used bookstores, also some collectibles for my Nobel Prize collection.

Sold quite a bit too

Pushkin - Eugene Onegin (tr. Charles Johnston)
Bohumil Hrabal - The Little Town where Time Stood Still
Ovid - Heroides
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
Selected Poems by Brodsky an Hans Magnus Enzenberger (the Penguin European Modern Poets series)
Herman Melville - Confidence Man (on Dalkey)

Bought shit 1st hand for the first time in years:

Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance

And then at the LRB 10% discount night:

Celine - North
Georg Trakl - Poems (tr. Margitt Lehbert)

Emily Dickenson - Complete Poems (ed. Thomas Johnson)
Whitman - Selected Poems
Heine - Selected Poems
The BFI book on In the Realm of the Senses
Eugenio Montale - Poet in Our Time

The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems (ed Michael Hofmann)

Interested to know what that's like--Hofmann's tastes as a translator are usually pretty reliable

The are several copies of this at Judd books, 4 quid.

Read Hofmann's intro and it isn't bad as it goes.

Similar collection for Italian but not Spanish.

Had a Judd run the other day, picked up:
Poems for the Millennium volume 3: didn't know about this - more recent volume of the v 90s avant garde/internationalist anthology, this one dedicated to the 19th century.
Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson. I am thinking/hoping that the meat of this will be better than the old-school Marxist introduction, which follows charming antique tradition of laying out FIRST THING what Marx and/or Engels had to say about your topic, because that is your starting ground for discussion and thought. I suppose that's just what books were like in 1974. All books.

marxist books are still like that, but they start doing it in chapter 3 or so after their cool anarcho-spinozistic alternative has been introduced

Earlier today I remarked to my wife about how I'd like to read a short novel for a change, because it seems lately like everything I pick up is 700 to 900 pages long. Therefore I just came home from the local charity shop with a couple of Muriel Spark novels for $1 each: The Comforters (1957 - her first novel) and Aiding and Abetting (2000 - her penultimate novel). The first is 225 pages, the second 165 pages, god bless her.

Das Nibelungenlied (tr. Burton Raffel)
Franz Kafka - The Trial (tr. by Douglas Scott and Chris Walker and lol @ "adheres specifically to the tone and the style of the original German" - but yes I do get people dislike the Muir translations)
Hubert Selby - Last Exit to Brooklyn (don't know why the fuck I sold this in the first place). Have plans to do a run on all of Selby's books.

LRB shop 10% off night:

Petrarch - Songs and Sonnets (tr. Nicholas Kilmer)
Celine - Castle to Castle

just ordered jonathan meades' autobiography which is out tomorrow

^ Excited! Soured a bit on the guy after all the reactionary stuff in his France show and the whiny "architects should be allowed to do whatever" tone of the brutalism thing, but he's an interesting dude.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, in a used trade paperback in readable condition, for $7. I enjoyed Housekeeping and several ILBers have said Gilead is as good or better.

I love Gilead so much

Osip Mandelstam - The Noise of Time (so happy I scored this, really wanting to read this esp after post- discovery of Tsvetaeva's prose this year)

Celine - Death on Credit (another great score, can't wait to re-read but it'll probably be a late this year)

Hesse - Glass Bead Game

Collections of poems by:

Neruda (the classic multi-translator effort from the 70s, which I borrowed from the library last year, its nice to have this selection - even if its reduced).

Verlaine (tr. Joanna Richardson)
Milosz (tr. by Milosz and Lillian Vallee)
Baudelaire - Flowers of Evil (tr. Richard Howard)

LRB 10% off night for July:

Goethe - Roman Elegies (tr. Michael Hamburger)
Celine - Rigadoon (the last of his trilogy)

More cheap finds:

Gert Hofmann - The Film Explainer
Ernst Junger (spelt Juenger on the cover lol) - On the Marble Cliffs

Believe it has an umlaut in German, Jünger, which is why they would have put an 'e' after the 'u' in English.

Liked The Film Explainer, interested to see what you think. Translated by his son, you-know-who.

Thanks for clarifying - they spell it Jünger in the bio within (I couldn't be arsed to recall which Alt + is that again when spelling it here).

Film Explainer looks really good - get to that next week sometime.

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th ed. but first for me)

Looking up Film Explainer, it sounds really good-0I must get a copy of this

Gyula Krudy - Sunflower
The Journals of Denton Welch (great one to score, can't wait to re-read)
Osip Mandeshtam - Selected Poems (tr. James Greene, with about 50 extra poems from the Clarence Brown edition)

The expanded edition of Carl Wilson's Lets Talk About Love.

Ooh! What are the expansions?