Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

p. sure Dylan, early Eno toklasing some Stein experiments too.

afaics, Stein was constantly experimenting with methods of transposing voice into text, but in my view most of her experiments were overly artificial, self-conscious and theory-driven failures.

3 Lives was her earliest serious attempt at something new and much less theory-driven. Decades later, in Autobiography of Alice B Toklas she finally relaxed her urge toward artifice and used a much more natural voice, one that also reflected many lessons she'd absorbed from several million words of brow-knitting experimentation. imo, her Wars I Have Seen is quite worthwhile, too.

xpost: wyndham lewis wrote an interesting attack piece on stein's influence on hemingway: 'the dumb ox'. could also add beckett to that list maybe... remember a very steinian passage in watt, though might have been parody?

am planning on rereading her detective novel again soon. despite giving myself a massive migraine trying to parse her portrait of isadora duncan once, i have plenty of time for stein & prefer the *artifice* to the *natural* when it comes to her work (though the autobiography is great)... found a copy of toklas' (non-stein written) autobiography awhile ago.

maybe one day i'll even make it through the making of americans

How was Toklas by Toklas? The once-famous brownie recipe was in her cookbook, right?

have not read yet. & yes, recipe c/o either paul bowles or brion gysin i think.

afaics, Stein was constantly experimenting with methods of transposing voice into text, but in my view most of her experiments were overly artificial, self-conscious and theory-driven failures.

I'd never guess you'd think this Aimless!

Janet Malcolm's fabulous little book on Stein and Toklas got me to purchase Making of Americans, which of course now sits on the shelf unread. Some of the excerpts of Stein's writing that Malcolm quotes are surprisingly funny.

I've read Janet's book, love the bit where iirc she slashes Making of Americans in three parts using a knife to get herself through it.

These items @ Waterstones Gower st where they are giving away quite a few from NYRB classics for half price:

Vasily Grossman - Everything Flows (just an incredible bk - so happy to have a copy)
Adolfo Bioy Casares - Asleep in the Sun

Elsewhere: Yves Bonnefoy - Rue Traversiere
Duras - L'Amour (this is a xmas present but I am reading first :-))
Mishima - Sun and Steel (possibly my favourite, happy to have my own copy)

Ulysses, Hugh Kenner. Bought on the recommendation of the pinefox, some years ago. New trade paperback. When you factor in the shipping & handling, $8.

Hit up an Amnesty International bookshop in Bristol yesterday, very pleased with my haul - £25 the lot!!

- a complete three volume edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson in hardback from 1900
- - odd copies of Little Women, The Corrections and The Name of the Rose, The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis and the complete short stories of Kafka
- an old, comprehensive but potentially kinda dry-looking history of English Literature by Arthur Compton-Rickett
- a very worn old copy of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise
- Penguin Classics versions of The Canterbury Tales, Herodotus' Histories and Fielding's Tom Jones
- John Donne: Life, Mind and Art by John Carey
- an Oxford World Classics collection of Ibsen's plays
- a nice little hardback copy of the Bhagavad-Gita

I very rarely buy books anymore, but with Xmas presents as well this little lot ought to see me right for the next year or more (I'm quite a slow reader)

That's a nice haul indeed, although The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis is a very bad book

More xmas book buying:

Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet
Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics)

got

JR
The New Jim Crow

in the mail today

$2 each:

Lynn Coady, Hellgoing
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (which I just noticed I already own *sigh*)

Got a 2nd hand library copy of From A To Biba heading to me. Memoir of the shop's manager

picked up 4 books in the Expert series for gardeners for €1.50 each. Think they're things I'm going to want to know even if I'm not going to have room to grow a few types.

bought a selection of leibniz texts published by continuum but it arrived in hardcover which defeated my whole purpose in buying the kewl continuum volume : (

Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, since I lent it out about a decade ago and never got it back. Immediately re-read the Billy Joel essay.

^^^
I tend to re-read the Real World, Vanilla Sky, and Saved By the Bell! essays in that one a bit too often

Bought The Familiar, Vol 2 by Mark Danieleski last eek

Penguin Classics Edwin Drood. I have all the other PC Dickens with the b&w covers but didn't know this one even existed.

Finishing the yr on a high:

Octavio Paz - Complete Poems
Joseph Roth - Complete Shorter Fiction
Thomas Bernhard - The Loser (this was a gift)

Wow

the loser rocks

Yes as does most Bernhard.

was given a copy of isaac bashevis singer's satan in goray: his first novel published not long before he left europe for america in the mid-thirties. don't think i've read any of his fiction before, but this looks interesting.

gifting the loser sounds like that scene in the ice storm with the idiot

http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-Shot-2013-07-23-at-10.05.22-AM.png

Haven't seen it but its from a friend who know what I'm like (and what I like) :-)

Anna Brownell Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada
William Kirby, The Golden Dog
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Antonine Maillet, Pelagie
Howard O'Hagen, Tay John
Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada

Bought a few 2 for £5 books from Fopp.
One Three One by Julian Cope, a bio of 4AD records, one on the Kinks and a thing about the Chelsea Hotel.

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolome de Las Casas, a used Penguin Classics paperback in standard condition, $3. I can't ever recall seeing a copy of this one before now, although I've read references to it. A fiercely indignant expose of the brutal mistreatment of Native Americans by the conquering Spaniards, written by a Spanish priest in 1542.

had a $100 bookstore gift-voucher from last xmas that I hadn't gotten around to using, didn't use all the value of the voucher and got six books. my new year's resolution is to only read books written by women (after I finish with knausgaard):

elena ferrante - neapolitan trilogy.
muriel spark - prime of miss jean brodie and the mandelbaum gate.
elfriede jelinek - the piano teacher

Just plunked down about $300 for the required texts for the current semester:

Gabriella Ambrosio, Before We Say Goodbye
Amnesty International, Freedom: Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Anita Rau Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Dionne Brand, What We All Long For
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice
Eli Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues
Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes
Ghassan Kanafani, Palestine's Children
Thomas King, Truth and Bright Water
Jim Lynch, Border Songs
Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life
Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line
Guillermo Verdecchia, Frontreras Americanas
Richard Wright, Black Boy
Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala

Canadian Lit and ?

Youth and Human Rights.

i $$ merwin's translation/selection of chamfort

In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses From the Pāli Canon
The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Three Hundred Koans

I'm a few chapters into the first and discovering that Pāli suttas are extremely repetitious.

Love Chamfort - had never seen that Merwin selection.

is there another good way to get some in english?? i had been looking for that for a long time, seemed to be overpriced and nothing else around for non-french-speakers

Today I bought the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. Peter McDonald, as a new (remaindered) hardcover for $22.

not many options - there's a douglas parmee selection, which goes cheap - iirc it's fine, but doesn't read that brilliantly. The Arnaud biography was worth reading too. I can't remember now how I got drawn into him - maybe Auden's Faber book of Aphorisms? I've just found a cheap kindle collection that I haven't seen before, will read over the next day or two.

ooh i never went looking since i got a kindle, score. there's some cheap VAUVENARGUES too. i should be hella wise in no time

Sold a bunch for:

Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (my copy was stamped as being from Whitechapel Hospital Libraries, or something, so that was an additional reason to get it)
Nerval - Chimeras
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano (the old Picador cover, in good condition)

Iris Murdoch - The Bell (this was another gift)

Bought: Josef Winkler - When the Time Comes (wiki says he is similar to Handke at times but far better than any Handke I've read, good to see a few translations coming out)

The Life photobook of Robert Whittaker Beatles photos which I've been meaning to buy for a while.

Ugly Things #40 which is almost a book but not quite. Should be for the price, damn it not turning up in time for me to buy it over the counter at Rough Trade.
Flashback! has just gone to preprint layout apparently so that's coming very soon too.

MIssed getting into the charity shop that i buy the most books from since it had gone 5pm and the place had closed.

Got given 33 1/3 Revolutions per Minute, the book on protest songs for my birthday by my brother before we went to the theatre on Tuesday. Went & saw Hapgood which was very funny.

Love Chamfort - had never seen that Merwin selection.

yeah he's great, i've been reading a cheapo kindle ed. that i assume is from 1860 or whenever, and it lacks a little sharpness but is fine. it's kind of like reading a nietzsche who cares about society and equal human dignity and stuff

Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Half of this is great, half of it is a pain in the hole BUT I am very, very over psychogeographical wibblings in general

I was never that into this psychogeography in the first place. I like Sinclair's fic/poetry (at least up to Downriver) and his film writing. Read this a few years ago so I'll look forward to seeing how this stands up.

I loooooved all the book-scout stuff, but was annoyed by the stuff that wasn't that. I think sinclair iust isn't for me.

New Science, Giambattista Vico, used Penguin classic paperback, $4. It's a curiosity, but the book was cheap and I was curious.

I saw a used copy of The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart, and owing to recent discussion about it on ILB, I bought it for $2. thx ILB.