To cite the appropriate exchange from Act II, Scene 2:
LORD POLONIUS What do you read, my lord? HAMLET Words, words, words. LORD POLONIUS What is the matter, my lord? HAMLET Between who? LORD POLONIUS I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
---
Thus.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 17:15 (twelve years ago) link
why did you name the reading thread after evony ads?
― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 17:23 (twelve years ago) link
evony? evony? i know nothing of this evony of which you speak.
xp
Last night I finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is enough of a miracle that it merits notice, because I thought it was very badly written at almost every level. After I finished it, I thought for a while about why it was bad, and what there was about it that was good, and those thoughts are not yet wholly ordered or complete.
I'll return at some point today and enlarge on this, because it puzzles me and seems worth disentangling.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 17:26 (twelve years ago) link
going through the Partisan Review crowd's memoirs 'n' things:
Mary McCarthy - Intellectual MemoirsAlfred Kazin - Writing Was EverythingJean Stafford - Boston Adventures
― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 17:36 (twelve years ago) link
Some Donald Westlake. The Comedy is Finished is a weirdly serendipitous title for his final novel.
Stories by James Tiptree Jr. I love "The Girl Who Was Plugged In."
― jim, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 18:01 (twelve years ago) link
Almost done with Wolf Hall and then I don't know what, probably the DFW bio.
― have a sandwich or ice cream sandwich (Jordan), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 18:05 (twelve years ago) link
just started "a naked singularity" by sergio de pava yesterday and am really enjoying it so far. a long dense legal novel that was originally self-published, picked up some glowing praise, and was reprinted by university of chicago press
― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 18:08 (twelve years ago) link
tbh I kinda feel like PKD shd be more controversial than he really is (xpost to Aimless)
― remtrollison (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 18:25 (twelve years ago) link
"a naked singularity" by sergio de pava
This is a cool book. I'm curious about his other Xlibris title on Amazon, Personae... anyone read it?
― jim, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 18:32 (twelve years ago) link
I just finished Running Dog by DeLillo. It was excellent.
― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 18:53 (twelve years ago) link
still reading this
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312045410l/77936.jpg
― scott seward, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 19:40 (twelve years ago) link
really enjoyed the last two books i read; 'howards end' and amos oz's 'panther in the basement'
― Michael B Higgins (Michael B), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 22:04 (twelve years ago) link
Mentioned this in another thread but The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson is a hearty meal of a book. I'm currently 2/5ths through its 500 page length.
― Flaneurs and looky-loos got quotas to keep. (R Baez), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 23:01 (twelve years ago) link
i am actually reading hamlet! i mean kind of, a little at a time when i have time
― la goonies (k3vin k.), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 23:09 (twelve years ago) link
spinoza's ethicsleibniz's discourse on metaphysicsgeorge herbert - poetrya book on the international language movement
― clouds, Thursday, 4 October 2012 00:31 (twelve years ago) link
A stack of books about pro cycling, which I won't talk about (too niche)Graham Joyce's The Silent Land, which I won't talk about until I've finished itA first draft of a friend's novel, struggling a bit with reading on the laptop, but its a good read (always a relief.)
So... feckin useful contribution to the thread there, Zo.
― Confused Turtle (Zora), Thursday, 4 October 2012 00:40 (twelve years ago) link
Haven't posted recent reading for a while:
* Julia Strachey: An Integrated Man - started this on the bus this morning; it's like 'Lucky Jim' crossed with Ivy Comptin-Burnett, if you can imagine such a thing
* John Varley: Slow Apocalypse - good, involving but fairly plainly written SF; enjoyed it but not much else to say
* Jakob Wassermann: My First Wife - great stuff, a novel about the world's worst marriage to the world's most hopeless ninny, entered into by the world's most passive loser
* Kevin powers: The Yellow Birds - pretty good Iraq war novel, but not the Remarque-style masterpiece everyone seems to be calling it
― computers are the new "cool tool" (James Morrison), Thursday, 4 October 2012 01:09 (twelve years ago) link
I should probably just go ahead and jot down my thoughts about PKD's Palmer Eldritch, even though I'm tired and out of sorts.
Among the glaring weaknesses of this book were:
- the characters. they were weakly drawn, paper thin and scarcely resembled flesh and blood humans in any respect. each was a heap of bits, conjured to meet the exigencies of the plot. they barely rose above the level of hand puppets.
- the dialogue. it succeeded in keeping the plot moving forward, by including the bare bones of information about the thoughts and intentions of the characters, but only rarely succeeded in sounding like anything a real person might have said in those circumstances. it was irredeemably cartoonish.
- the plot. it works ok at the level of single incidents and events, because those events each have a certain amount of interest as they unfold. dick also succeeds in passing the reader from one incident to the next, successively. where it all falls apart is when dick tries near the end of the book to pull it all together and impose a coherent thread running through all the events, an explanation of why they happened as they did. His explanations are incoherent and consequently the plot in total is inchoate and inexplicable.
- the theme. this is tricky because the overt theme dick offers the reader during his grand summation at the close of the book is all bollocks, the real theme of the book is buried and I haven't yet figured out what it was. I do know that it is what made the book tick and what overcomes its many horrible flaws.
Mainly, I can't condemn a book just because its plot is senseless or its characters are silly and its dialogue is highly artificial. All these apply in spades to At Swim-Two-Birds or The Third Policeman, two books I love. So, if you love Palmer Eldritch, none of these criticisms will touch your love and admiration, either.
I did admire the overall sense of play that Dick brought to the book. I swear, to all appearances he had no idea where he would go when he started the first chapter. The only thing that connects the end to the start is that abiding sense of play and his fresh interest in fiddling with ideas and knocking his characters to and fro to see what they did.
My ultimate beef is that, after watching him play with those characters and ideas for a couple hundred pages, I did not feel one inch differently about those ideas than I did before, and for all the sense of potential that hangs about it like a heavy mist, there was no payoff, no achievement, no satisfaction at the conclusion. He'd spent his imagination and taken me nowhere. He'd implied a swim in untold depths and left me sitting in a muddy puddle.
That's alright for pulp. His reputation is bigger than pulp. No sale.
― Aimless, Thursday, 4 October 2012 03:52 (twelve years ago) link
I kind of feel like there should be a separate thread for this
― remtrollison (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 4 October 2012 05:22 (twelve years ago) link
oh wait here we go:
'Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'
― remtrollison (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 4 October 2012 05:23 (twelve years ago) link
It only needs a separate thread if others feel a need to comment on my comments to any large extent.
I will only add to what I wrote above that, having poked around in my mind for the lasting impressions from the book, I would describe its true theme as "Trust nothing. Trust no one. Do not even trust yourself. Delusion and betrayal are knit into the very fabric of reality. You can't win. There is no winning."
― Aimless, Thursday, 4 October 2012 19:11 (twelve years ago) link
theme is something more to do with eucharist and capitalism iirc
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Thursday, 4 October 2012 19:53 (twelve years ago) link
i can't remember what the one 'offered the reader at the end' is
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Thursday, 4 October 2012 19:54 (twelve years ago) link
Thanks for the warning, Aimless. I've been working through PKD a book a year, I'll avoid that one.
There's a negative passage re: Nabokov in Houellebecq's unpleasant "The possibility of an island" which I read when it came out and liked and re-read and hated. I decided to reread Nabokov out of spite for Michel. I'm first re-reading the books I've read (Lolita, Pnin, Blue Fire, Ada) and then gonna follow with the books I haven't read. Any to seek? Avoid?
― flamboyant goon tie included, Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:06 (twelve years ago) link
Sorry for all the rēd / rėd / rē-rēd / rē-rėd / re: in that last post
― flamboyant goon tie included, Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:07 (twelve years ago) link
"the gift" was like the one nabakov i tried to read and couldn't finish, i think it requires a pretty deep knowledge of russian lit to get what he's doing
― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:10 (twelve years ago) link
haha just looked up that houellebecq quote -- what a douche.
'laughter in the dark' is a favorite.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:10 (twelve years ago) link
flambouyant, if you have an established affinity for PKD novels, then don't let me dissuade you. you might agree with the assessment of cherry (soda) in the prior WAYR thread that it's "one of the good ones". Certainly that seems to be the consensus among PKD fans.
― Aimless, Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:14 (twelve years ago) link
― flamboyant goon tie included, Thursday, October 4, 2012 1:06 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
ha, i checked out possibility of an island based on someone's recommendation in one of these threads. read the first page, rolled my d.e. picked it up again a week later, got kinda into the magazine stuff, then onto the dogs are unconditional love stuff, then put it down and felt ok about it because misanthropy should be less boring.
― THEE-AH-TER (Matt P), Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:29 (twelve years ago) link
the nabokov quote was like ok, whatever.
― THEE-AH-TER (Matt P), Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:30 (twelve years ago) link
i would not skip reading stigmata, and i have read basically all of them, and that is one i have read three times
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:45 (twelve years ago) link
i have trouble with nabokov. i like the early books okay because they are easier to read. the later ones i can never finish. i've tried to read lolita a bunch of times. he reads so strange to me. his sentences. i don't think my brain works that way. i have problems with math.
― scott seward, Thursday, 4 October 2012 20:45 (twelve years ago) link
Is it this quote that we're talking about?
“Yes,” she said. “Nabokov was five years off. What most men like is not the moment that precedes puberty, but the one immediately after. Anyway, he wasn’t a very good writer…”I too had never been able to bear that mediocre and mannered pseudo-poet, that clumsy imitator of Joyce, who had never been lucky enough to posses the energy that sometimes enabled the insane Irishman to rise above his ponderous prose.A collapsed pastry, that was what Nabokov’s style had always made me think of.
I too had never been able to bear that mediocre and mannered pseudo-poet, that clumsy imitator of Joyce, who had never been lucky enough to posses the energy that sometimes enabled the insane Irishman to rise above his ponderous prose.
A collapsed pastry, that was what Nabokov’s style had always made me think of.
Yeah, that is weak.
I don't much like Nabokov but there's a story "Signs and Symbols" that I like. It compresses an amazing amount of feeling into just a few pages.
― jim, Thursday, 4 October 2012 21:03 (twelve years ago) link
is his prose as bad in the french
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Thursday, 4 October 2012 21:09 (twelve years ago) link
His takedown of Larry Clark in same book is hilarious in its insistence, I'll admit. It's not a Bad Book, I think I was just too caught up in the plotting the first time around
― flamboyant goon tie included, Thursday, 4 October 2012 21:25 (twelve years ago) link
Ooh scott I'm sad you don't like late Nabokov, his prose reads great to me, every sentence is like the easiest and most pleasing cryptic crossword clue (not for everybody I'm sure)
― flamboyant goon tie included, Thursday, 4 October 2012 21:27 (twelve years ago) link
i wld def place palmer eldritch in the v upper tier of dick novs, and think of it as the first in a VERY loose trilogy w/ ubik and scanner darkly of drug PANIC bks - that vertiginous acid phear that 'reality' can never be recovered because nothing ever was, anyway. palmer eldritch is one of the funniest dick novs, and one of the scariest, and again, the two bleed into one, continually; dick is such a master of escalating hysteria; laughter in the dark, and in the light.
― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 4 October 2012 21:52 (twelve years ago) link
i have been reading The End by Ian Kershaw, a history of the final eight months or so of Nazi Germany and an attempt to understand why the germans refused to surrender well past the point that the second world war was lost to them. it's not the kind of thing i wld normally read for pleasure (my dad passed it on to me), and at times i've longed for a slightly more subjective and culturalist way of telling; however kershaw's restrained prose style and typical academic caution actually makes the slow careful account of atrocity and endgames even more revolting and disturbing.
― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 4 October 2012 22:02 (twelve years ago) link
That Wasserman novel sounds right up my alley...
I read one of the best novels I've ever encountered this summer: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING (1958) by Alan Sillitoe. Check that is out. Seriously.
― Tyler Burns (burns46824@yahoo.com), Thursday, 4 October 2012 22:34 (twelve years ago) link
ish*
Read Nabokov's The Defense in high school, feeling like I finally caught all the worldly brainwaves broadcast from a first-rate example of Modern Lit. It's the story of a very sheltered Russian chess prodigy, gliding gently down the drain. I think I associated it with late 50s/early 60s Alfred Hitchcock, incl the weekly anthology series he hosted--when it was still 20-something shrewd minutes per episode; The Defense was also concise. Don't know how it would seem now. And I liked another late shortie, Transparent Things.
― dow, Thursday, 4 October 2012 23:50 (twelve years ago) link
I moved on from P.K. Dick to reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Like night and day. From thin cartoon characters created only to illustrate with abstract ideas to a novel where observing character is the entirety and every sentence and every detail is crafted in beautiful bas relief.
― Aimless, Friday, 5 October 2012 00:52 (twelve years ago) link
It's a terrific novel. Thanks for reminding me -- it's been 20 years since I read it. Her last two religio-mystic novels are good too.
― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 October 2012 00:54 (twelve years ago) link
bought her latest book of essays and its slow going for me. like reading the bible. or something biblical. i feel like i need to go to college when i read stuff like that. its plainspeak. like plainsong. but really dense for all its plain-ness. i swear i know how to read books. housekeeping one of my favorite novels of all time. i struggled with what came after.
― scott seward, Friday, 5 October 2012 01:06 (twelve years ago) link
she's some kind of neo-Calvinist, isn't she -- the kind who reveres the density of intelligent 17th century sermons, no?
― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 October 2012 01:07 (twelve years ago) link
those nu-calvinists. you gotta watch out for them.
― scott seward, Friday, 5 October 2012 01:21 (twelve years ago) link
they're trouble.
start another America and burn witches
― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 October 2012 01:23 (twelve years ago) link
MOBY DICK (for the first time)
― Romeo Jones, Friday, 5 October 2012 04:03 (twelve years ago) link
Her last two religio-mystic novels are good too.
You mean Gilead and Home? I loved the former almost despite its religious trappings. The main character was amazing, one of the most generous and generously written I've ever come across, full of sympathy for those around him despite their apparent failings, and constantly trying to do the Right Thing. And although ostensibly he was on the hot line to God to help him do so I could read that just as his way of carefully and considerately thinking over the problem at hand. Home was less overtly religious but also less compelling in terms of character, the two leads much more inward, mired in their own world views, failing to properly connect with others.
I really need to get Housekeeping. I wouldn't touch her essays with a barge pole.
― I got the Boyzone, I got the remedy (ledge), Friday, 5 October 2012 08:15 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Aimless, Saturday, 29 December 2012 19:00 (eleven years ago) link
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).
― Fizzles, Monday, 31 December 2012 00:03 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Monday, 31 December 2012 00:18 (eleven years ago) link
gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club
― mookieproof, Monday, 31 December 2012 00:20 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Monday, 31 December 2012 00:30 (eleven years ago) link
The post-AIDS Gunn poems are among my favorite late 20th century poetry.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 December 2012 00:32 (eleven years ago) link
Thanks, Alfred - will check out post-haste.
― Fizzles, Monday, 31 December 2012 00:36 (eleven years ago) link
Still Life
I shall not soon forgetThe greyish-yellow skinTo which the face had set:Lids tights: nothing of his,No tremor from within,Played on the surfaces.
He still found breath, and yetIt was an obscure knack.I shall not soon forgetThe angle of his head,Arrested and reared backOn the crisp field of bed,
Back from what he could neitherAccept, as one opposed,Nor, as a life-long breather,Consentingly let go,The tube his mouth enclosedIn an astonished O.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 December 2012 00:45 (eleven years ago) link
Hmm, thanks, leaving aside the accumulated weight of the final verse, that 'obscure knack' gives a particularly horrible kick.
― Fizzles, Monday, 31 December 2012 00:57 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Monday, 31 December 2012 01:00 (eleven years ago) link
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
― bernard snowy, Monday, 31 December 2012 17:38 (eleven years ago) link
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).
― dow, Monday, 31 December 2012 19:19 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Aimless, Monday, 31 December 2012 19:26 (eleven years ago) link
at first glance she looks...aimless
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 December 2012 19:28 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Aimless, Monday, 31 December 2012 19:48 (eleven years ago) link
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."
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 December 2012 19:51 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Ismael Klata, Monday, 31 December 2012 20:02 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― scott seward, Monday, 31 December 2012 20:39 (eleven years ago) link
Enjoyed this quite a bit: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/joy/
― dow, Monday, 31 December 2012 22:15 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― bernard snowy, Tuesday, 1 January 2013 22:15 (eleven years ago) link
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
― bernard snowy, Tuesday, 1 January 2013 22:17 (eleven years ago) link
Nathanael West is so rad. Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million are great too
― x-gau, uncut gau, The Bomb! (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 2 January 2013 01:57 (eleven years ago) link
ya I have the new directions volume that includes Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts; thinking I'll read the latter immediately if not soon
― bernard snowy, Wednesday, 2 January 2013 10:19 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Moreno, Friday, 4 January 2013 19:25 (eleven years ago) link
Lolita is very jokey. P.S. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Annabel_Lee
― abanana, Friday, 4 January 2013 20:59 (eleven years ago) link
i tried to read lolita more than once. maybe three times. could never do it.
― scott seward, Friday, 4 January 2013 21:16 (eleven years ago) link
i'll try again when i'm older. i've had more luck with early nabokov.
― scott seward, Friday, 4 January 2013 21:18 (eleven years ago) link
How does Pale Fire compare? I was thinking about checking that one out.
― Moreno, Friday, 4 January 2013 21:43 (eleven years ago) link
I'd say try Pnin before the others.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 4 January 2013 21:46 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 4 January 2013 21:52 (eleven years ago) link
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).
― xanthanguar (cwkiii), Friday, 4 January 2013 21:54 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Stevolende, Friday, 4 January 2013 22:00 (eleven years ago) link
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 Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, 4 January 2013 22:05 (eleven years ago) link
the good thing about PF is it reminds you that Edmund Wilson had a point about Volodya's versifying.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 4 January 2013 22:09 (eleven years ago) link
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.
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.
― Fizzles, Friday, 4 January 2013 22:11 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, 4 January 2013 22:14 (eleven years ago) link
it does duplicate the flatness of a translation, I must admit.
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 4 January 2013 22:15 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Moreno, Friday, 4 January 2013 22:16 (eleven years ago) link
'Let The Great World Spin' - Colum McCann
― Canaille help you (Michael White), Friday, 4 January 2013 22:23 (eleven years ago) link
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. )
― Fizzles, Saturday, 5 January 2013 15:26 (eleven years ago) link
So, Rupert of Deutz was a viking at rash dialectical arguments?
― Aimless, Saturday, 5 January 2013 19:01 (eleven years ago) link
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
― fiscal cliff paul (k3vin k.), Saturday, 5 January 2013 19:20 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/07appel.html?_r=0
seemed like a cool guy
― fiscal cliff paul (k3vin k.), Saturday, 5 January 2013 19:42 (eleven years ago) link
Recently:
Frank - a bio of Frank Sinatra by James Kaplan. I don't read a lot of biographies but often pick up one or two around Christmas. This is decent, throughly researched, generally fair minded and reasonably well written. Long (800 pages only takes us up to the late 50s with a second volume to come sometime). Downsides are a fair bit of novelistic "filling in" of unknowable detail and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude to Sinatra's horndog exploits that verges on the grubby.
Bruce - a bio of Springsteen by Peter Ames Carlin. This was a Christmas present and not something I'd have bought for myself. I was a keen Springsteen fan for around a year or so back in the day but now I can't understand how I could every have enjoyed his music very much. The lyrics and persona are fine but the music is rhythmically and texturally leaden. He's had an interesting life though and this bio, well-researched and sympathetic without being adulatory, is very good of its type.
How It All Began - Penelope Lively. The only Lively I'd read before was Moon Tiger which I thought was terrific. HIAB represents a vertiginous drop in quality from that. Barely a notch above an Aga saga and the basic intellectual concept (the book is supposed to be a kind of illustration of the butterfly effect) isn't explored in an interesting way. But it was an easy and reasonably enjoyable read, so I followed it with
According to Mark - Penelope Lively. This much earlier novel was substantially better while still having too many flaws for me to want to make any great claims for it. An enjoyable escapist read though.
Jerusalem The Golden - Margaret Drabble. First Drabble I've read and I loved it. I had somehow got it into my head that Drabble would be a bit worthy and dry, but this wasn't in the least. Unfortunately skimming through some reviews I get the impression that this won't be typical of her work.
― frankiemachine, Monday, 7 January 2013 15:14 (eleven years ago) link
it's pretty cold for autumn now
― nostormo, Monday, 7 January 2013 21:50 (eleven years ago) link
anybody read Stevenson's Master of Ballentrae?
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 7 January 2013 23:03 (eleven years ago) link
Autumn shall reign perpetual, until somebody starts a 2013 WAYR thread.
― Aimless, Tuesday, 8 January 2013 00:15 (eleven years ago) link
it's the best season; might as well extend it
― mookieproof, Tuesday, 8 January 2013 00:16 (eleven years ago) link
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 7 January 2013 23:03 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Started reading it at the end of a long Stevenson kick, and decided at that point it was time to end my long Stevenson kick. Found it hard-ish going. That's a 'no', btw.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 8 January 2013 13:50 (eleven years ago) link
fwiw, the new 2013 wayr thread has begun.
― Aimless, Tuesday, 8 January 2013 18:45 (eleven years ago) link