Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

Chekhov's letters are a delight
Ginsberg is a hack and a tool

Ginsberg is uneven, self-promoting etc, but can be good, esp. when pissed-off-zingy ("America") observational (all over, between and even in some bad lines), or occasionally digging into painful home truths, especially/maybe mainly in "Kaddish", the verse chronicle of his mother's struggle with mental illness (literary companion to my first and best acid trip). Now listening to the very (but not too) tight Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience, out next month. He and Burroughs and even Kerouac, in a quirkier way, hold their own as performers (maybe more than as writers, at least in terms of consistency and broader appeal).

Been waiting for the Cosey Fanny Tutti autobio and Psychedelia by Richard Morton Jack but may have been ripped off. Thought marketplace seller had high rating but now seems inverse. Crap.
Really want to read both.
Did get Harvey Kubernick 1967 arrive which looks interesting.

MR James' guide to Abbeys, Phthor, and Cthon by Piers Anthony, the first because the title made me laugh, and then both because of their weird structural/chapter organisation - I'm guessing on some sort of mystical organising principle. I hadn't heard of him before.

Arlo, son of Aton, sets himself against the mineral intelligence of his own prison-planet

They look terrible.

Wait the first sentence is confusing - MR James' guide to Abbeys is not called Phthor and Chthon.

Got refunds for the 2 books that didn't turn up so will buy them again shortly.

Now listening to the very (but not too) tight Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience, out next month. He and Burroughs and even Kerouac, in a quirkier way, hold their own as performers

Well said Dow. I once saw Ginsberg give a free performance in Covent Garden market in central London, where he accompanied himself on harmonium and 'sang' some of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, and it was utterly captivating - sincere, humane, poetic.

The Saul Bellow short story 'Him With His Foot In His Mouth' offers a surprising and wonderful tribute to Ginsberg - at one point, the narrator (a Bellow stand-in of course) uses the phrase "a screwball defense of beauty" to describe Ginsberg's poetry, which seems spot on to me.

The Gastronomical Me - MFK FIsher
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead - Chanelle Benz
Intepreter Of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Charlie Radcliffe's autobiography "Don't Start Me Talkin'": an engrossing 2 volume read for anyone interested in the the Peace Movement in the 50s, the history of situationism in the UK, London in the 60s, high level hash smuggling in the 70s, the prison system in the 80s. Lots of diversions into favourite music and books.

Read some of the Ginsberg at the weekend - parts of Howl are full of energy still, and Kaddish is quite a touching piece. There is an issue with reading poems that just sound like there would be more there in actual live readings, crowding anyone else but Ginsberg out. Doesn't make him a hack.

Willa Cather - Death comes for the archbishop
Paul Auster - Man in the dark
Jeff Perlman - Boys will be boys

laura riding: progress of stories

The Saga of Grettir the Strong. Because you can't ever have too many Icelandic sagas.

John Darnielle - Universal Harvester
Nicole Markotic - Rough Patch

Really like MFK Fisher essays. xps

Got a copy of PKD's Valis, because i haven't read it, oddly.

Hi Fizzles, really want to read that, and reminds me that my Mom's got Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, collecting and providing context for letters to her father (his replies have been lost, maybe burned by abbess of daughter's convent, being too hot to handle re his branding as heretic, though some of what he said might be inferred from her side of the conversation). Chapter One here, with link to the NYT review:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sobel-daughter.html

Oops meant as response to his post on What Are You Reading Now Spring 2017.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, as a used Penguin paperback in good condition, $4. The banality of evil seems so topical right now.

Valancourt books is currently doing a 2-for-1 deal on all their LGBTI-themed ebooks, so am going a bit berserk stocking up on them. https://www.facebook.com/valancourt/

Cosey Fanni Tutti Art Sex Magic
& Richard Morton Jack Psychedelia
now bought from Book Depository so hopefully have within the week.

Elijah Wald Escaping The Delta :Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
Cherie currie Neon Angel. Should be an interesting read at least.

I picked up a Hunkin book for 1p plus p+p from Amazon. Looks like it contains all of Rudiments of Wisdom from 73 to 87 but doesn't say so on the front cover. Just says the complete r of w from the Observer magazine on an inner page. & on the back which I don't think you see on the Amazon page.
It's called Almost Everything There Is To Know by Hunkin. It's a magazine sized paperback and 363 pages long. I'm assuming that reproduction is about the same size it originally appeared in the magazine but writing seems really small. At least it's in b+w which I heard wasn't true in the book compiled as Rudiments of Wisdom which Amazon reviews describe as badly coloured in so difficult to read.
So this seems to be the best way to get things. Do wish it had dates of first appearance listed somewhere. It's organised alphabetically so hard to tell. Probably not significant but would be nice to know.

Hours of fun for everyone.

Leith's How to Cook
The Cook Book
think I'll pick up some techniques while I can

a dollar a piece:

eleven modern short novels
büchner - plays
hardy - the trumpet-major
silone - fontamara
apollinaire - selected poems
gide - the counterfeiters
duras - the sea wall
butor - la modification
o'brien - further cuttings from cruiskeen lawn

That Eleven Novels has lots of good stuff: have never head of Abel Sanchez / Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo at all

For fifty cents each I bought two companion mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov:

Understanding Physics: Motion, Sound, and Heat
Understanding Physics: Light, Magnetism, and Electricity

I figure I'll learn some new things from them and he's a sounder-than-average science popularize who can write simply and clearly about this stuff.

popularizer was autocorrected to 'popularize'

Just finished "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" - underwhelming and unexpectedly difficult to finish (although I've had a migraine which didn't help). Too many paragraphs about housecleaning. The opening chapter is one of the best I've ever read, though.

Ordered the new Graham Harman/Manuel Delanda book, The Rise of Realism. . . . Good times.

got a message from the front desk at work that i had an amazon package, which was odd bcos i wasn't expecting anything.

turned out to be a late birthday present from a great spanish colleague, who lives in cadiz, where i spent last weekend, inc my birthday. over some sherry and jamon she mentioned a book called life is a dream by pedro calderón de la barca, which she particularly liked and which sounded great and she'd sent a dual text edition as a present!

Heard of it---please be sure to comment whenever you read that one, okay??

Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, a used trade paperback in standard condition, $1. As usual, short stories get short shrift and so may be bought cheaply.

U.S.A. Trilogy, John Dos Passos, as a like-new Library of America hardcover, with dust jacket, for fifty cents! This is cold, harsh proof of just how unfashionable Dos Passos has become.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51vnjJxo8PL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Leszek Kolakowski - Main Currents of Marxism Vol 1
Joseph Stiglitz - Whither Socialism
e.e. cummings - 100 Selected Poems

I carried on about Bowen's Collected Stories on a previous What Are You Reading (the current thread's title is derived from one of hers)---it's a bit uneven in the early 30s section, but overall very enjoyable. USA Trilogy has some arresting passages, but can come off like compulsive, insatiable, desperate and/or heedless activity too often, though he might say that's the point he's making about various (not all) characters and alarming American tendencies, How We Got This Way. But think I got that point pretty early. Mind you he pulled me along for the whole thing, even though I'm not nearly as tireless as his people (or him, god knows).

To continue the crosstalk with the rolling thread, Elizabeth Bowen was another correspondent of Eudora Welty.

xpost And some of those fave Dos Passos "passages" might be--up to 100 pages apiece--? Think so.

remaindered books i just bought cheap

Christopher Miller - American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny
Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
Mara Wilson - Where Am I Now?
Joe Sacco - Journalism
Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
John Scalzi - The Human Division
Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
VanderMeers - The Big Book of Science Fiction

Just bought cheap ebook of T.C. Boyce's latest, The Terranauts. I have always avoided him and am still worried that he will turn out to be one of those award-winning authors that leave me cold. More importantly, don't see how this book can measure up to another novel mining the same material which I continue to view as a Future ILB Favorite That So Far Only I Have Read, that being Martian Dawn, by Michael Friedman.

4 for 3 euro

Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Paul McGrath - Back from the brink
William S Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Willa Cather - My Antonia

Derek Bailey and The Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson
Northern Sun, Southern Moon by Mike Heffley

2nd hand racks for the last few weeks:

Diana Athill - Make Believe
Elizabeth Hardwick - Herman Melville
Ann Quin - Berg (read this a long time ago - weird copy, the cover is taken from the film adaptation of it, starring Richard E. Grant)
Joseph Roth - What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 (read this and lost it in a hotel, of all places)
U.R. Anantha Murthy - Bhava
U.R. Anantha Murthy - Samskara (really nice to score two titles in two weeks of 2nd hand cherry picking by this obscure-ish author I've wanted to read for a long time)
Janet Malcolm - Reading Chekhov
Herman Melville - Bartleby/Benito Cereno

I bought All Out War, the big book about Brexit, on the promise of its very readable style and some juicy gossip, but after three chapters I just got fed up of reading about arseholes and quit.

Also Roth's Ghost Writer, based on recommendation on another thread

Derek Bailey and The Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson

This is fun, good match of author & subject w the latter subverting the former. Coincidentally I just this minute picked up his art, class & cleavage for a quid at the sally ann, I'm pretty up for it. His Zappa book looks like a nightmare tho

AC&C is terrific: IMO bw's most valuable book (bcz the most openly personal)

poodleplay: i am not AT ALL a zappahead and think the adorno stuff in it is let us say a CONTENTIOUS READING of twa's face to the world… in general i think bw is much too respectful of his various chosen gurus (zappa, bailey, boulez, joyce, prynne, debord, tony cliff et al), and never really sets them free to fight one another like cats in a bagge

shamefully i haven't yet read the DB :(

(david toop is somewhat scornful in his own recent history of free improv: eg re the retelling of what the josef holbrooke trio was like, which DT sez sets FAR too much on trust in DB's retelling) (dt also admires DB a very great deal, but is better on the degree to which DB was a cranky old troll)

is better on the degree

^^ôr so i'm guessing, as i haven't actually read it :)

The DB book (I resisted talking about it as I saw it last night as its been years since I read it) is quite good and possily better for some of the grudges he takes to it - although BW might be respectful of DB he doesn't reserve that for a lot of the improv scene in general.

AC&C was great. I wonder how that would be like on a re-read. I just learnt stuff from it and everything.

BW might be respectful of DB he doesn't reserve that for a lot of the improv scene in general

this is bascially toop's problem with it = highly selective uncritical hagiography -- which does in general reflect my own issue w/BW (except where two of his gurus clash, in which instance no real indication of same)

imo this emerges from his personal negotiation of internal SWP politics (given that he was basically very much an oddity and a frustrated outlier in that benighted org)

literal conversation we once had:
bw: i wish you'd join!
ms: ben i'd be kicked out instantly!
bw: we could be kicked out together!

^^i found this exchange at once v flattering and v weird (he quit some years ago and has been its most furious critic ever since)

That's great I could never see you in the SWP.

this is bascially toop's problem with it = highly selective uncritical hagiography

His problems with the likes of AMM and what some other people get up to in that scene...to me I can some kind of method.

Then again I never got on with Zappa.

"Against Nature" was so boring. The main character was so hateful and pretentious.

I'm reading Vonnegut's "Breakfast of champions" now.

Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere (In Vivo) by Richard M. Doyle
I saw it cheap in an Oxfam so grabbed it. Not really looked at it so far.

I have to admit I really enjoyed Against Nature, but your description of the main character is spot-on

Do we have a thread about new books with cheapo, bad and blurry offprint inside?