What's a noise dude reading?

junot diaz - brief wondrous life of oscar wao (liked this a lot)
elmore leonard - gold coast

have this on deck as soon as my wife finishes it

http://media.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2007/apr/savagedetectivescover.jpg

also wld like to read that new richard price but I'll probably wait for paperback

i <3 elmore leonard

the Bolanos novel was a serious disappointment.

http://resource.tcdc.or.th/bookcover/8587/8587-fc-a.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51AW2nonbGL._SS500_.jpg

when i pay a library fine ill pick up the tao of physics and a book about the history of little magazines in america

i am reading JR by William Gaddis for the second time and i think i will do Oscar Wao next. i heard bad stuff about the second half of the Bolano so i took a pass on it.

oh i'm also reading Then We Came to The End bu Joshua Ferris. it's just ok. :/

just read:

Kingsley Amis "Lucky Jim"
Joshua Clover "The Matrix" (about da movie)
Joshua Clover "The Totality for Kids"
Edwin Schneidman "Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind"

now reading:
A. Brierre de Boismont "Hallucinationsd, or, The Rational History of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism" (crazy anthology from 1853 of case histories)
Bruce Fink's new translation of Lacan's "Ecrits"

dr. drew, tell me about kingsley amis (though ifeel weve probably all tried this before)...i've always felt he wasnt right for me, but have come across some quotes and clips that force me to wonder...wheres a good leaping point?

have you read lucky jim? i'd say that's a good leaping point but then i'm not particularly knowledgeable about ka. the collected letters are great as well. talk about a doorstop, though.

finally got around to brothers karamazov, 2/3 through

kingsely amis wrote some fucking funny letters.

Alex Ross "The Rest Is Noise"
Henri Michaux "Darkness Moves"
Mario Bois "Iannis Xenakis: The Man & His Music"
"Yeti #5"
"YES Yoko Ono"

http://www.cafes.net/ditch/family.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/419HT38K1AL._AA240_.jpg

I've only read "Lucky Jim" which I read because it's a silly academic satire novel about somebody who has just started their first real job as a professor and, er, I can relate to that. I read it on a plane in one go and it was pretty delightful. Kinda dated in a 50s sexist way but that's to be expected really. I liked it, and would compare it with recent academic satires by David Lodge, if you want a ref point. Funny and lite.

"Kinda dated in a 50s sexist way "

yeah, thats whats put me off going into him, but...i suppose i could read it with a smirk and half-closed critical eye and enjoy..i think i like his phrasing and rhythm..

thnks all

lucky jim is so good

i just bought japrocksampler but i've only leafed through it so far.

i just re-read two novels by sir kingsley:

girl, 20 -- late 60s generation gap comedy about foolish middle-aged classical conductor/fool Sir Roy Vandervane and his pursuit of ever-younger women. his wife's speculation on "when he's in his 70s his girlfriends will be under 10" and the description of Sir Roy's heavy metal symphony are priceless LOLs.

the anti-death league -- one of his odd genre exercises, a sort-of early cold war spy thriller? hard to explain but pretty easy to enjoy, but then I am a huge fan of stuff like graham greene and eric ambler.

lucky jim and the old devils are his most popular and funniest novels, also the bookends to his career. also worth checking out is the green man, one of his oddities, a supernatural mystery. i've always wanted to read the alteration, a futuristic tale that philip k dick admired!, but have never been able to find a cheap copy.

this clive james essay on amis is ace

The Noble Quran
7 steps to midnight (matheson)
humboldt's gift (bellows)
the war against cliche (amis)

Sensory and Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome - Olga Bogdashina (a little dry and academic, reading it for a story idea)
On Writing - Stephen King (not as great as I'd been led to believe, but pretty good)
Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America - Michael Dobbs (not started yet, but fully expect it to be awesome)

Dean Wareham memoir
"The Secret History of the World as Laid Down By The Secret Societies"
John Keegan - "A History of Warfare"

que and alfred pretty much otm on The Savage Detectives, if it was terrible I wouldn't have finished the 600 some pages but it really falls off after a pretty good beginning. also being so much about poetry I wished there was some poetry in it! you're left to wonder what it was the "visceral realists" were actually writing (if anything)

just started Pynchon's Against the Day

snow crash

^^good book^^

did u ever know that yr my hiro

"The Secret History of the World as Laid Down By The Secret Societies"

^^^
Returning this. Not a history of secret societies and their teachings, or a 'history' written from their perspective - dude really seems to buy into the notion.

Chandler, The Long Goodbye -- since i have queued the Altman / Gould adaptation on netflix

it seems like people either hate the first section of the savage detectives and get into the interview section or vice versa.

(i thought the bookend journal entries were aight (but great at introducing a lot of characters quickly, from the perspective of a kid who doesn't really know any of them well) and loved the interview stuff.)

skimming on a Greyhound last night:

Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans by Simon Callow

it seems like people either hate the first section of the savage detectives and get into the interview section or vice versa.

there were some good parts in the interview section but some of it really dragged

I think I was a little put off by how self-serving / self-mythologizing it was (even though there was some self-deprecation too), it seemed like there wasn't a ton of purpose to it other than trying to immortalize himself and his friends

naomi klein - the shock doctrine

i can see your point dmr, but that's not really how it read to me. at first you see them through the eyes of a teenager who thinks they're way cool, and then you spend the next 500 pgs getting a sense of how they're just normal dudes who don't really know what they're doing in life, and who may or may not be any good at writing poems.

donald barthelme - the dead father

i really want to read a book but i don't like anything

Then the Internet could be for you!

Yevgeny Zamyatin - We (liked this more than 1984 or Brave New World, the originals usually are better. closer to Dostoevsky than most clinical SF. also interesting for a book written in Russia in 1920 that it eliminates all the Cold War discussion -- a dystopia with only one Socialist government is much more terrifying) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

Fernand Ouellette - A Biography of Edgard Varese

Robert Katz - Love Is Colder Than Death, The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (Gaaaaaaahhhhh)

Modern Music - Volumes 18-22, 1940-1945 - http://www.ripm.org/journal_info.php5?ABB=MMU - hardbound annuals collecting each year's issues, duplicates from the Prelinger Library -- incredible how many of the articles & reviews are struggling to justify the energies spent on avant garde music during wartime. wish even the remotest shadow of this kind of discussion were going on today.

repost of wikipedia link to Zamyatin's WE

i don't like dystopias or science fiction or new age shit or biographies (especially autobiographies). those are the things i don't like the most.

but how is that fassbinder book because i love fassbinder and would be willing to read a biography about him if it does not suck

it's kinda dishy & very judgmental. I have no doubt about how sadistic the man treated his troupe, but it's hard to square how moralistic a tone the book takes when it's also clear how much the man was loved by his friends. but if you love Fassbinder, it's a book that breaks down the personal affairs that inspired each film, imagine if 'Beware of a Holy Whore' were 15 hours long and covered his entire career

Interzone - Burroughs collection of early stories and Tangier-related odds n ends including some relatively straight travel journalism, pretty interesting

currently trying to read The Road real fast before the movie comes out (appearance of the Now a Major Motion Picture version of the paperback spurred me to action)

anyone planning to tackle the Bolano? doubt I'm gonna try it since I barely made it through Savage Detectives (see above) and this one is even more sprawling. the section about the Ciudad Juarez murders sounds pretty interesting though.

put it on hold at the library, but i can't imagine i'd get through it in three weeks

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3f/Earth_Abides_1949_small.jpg/200px-Earth_Abides_1949_small.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4748/3392/320/limbo.jpg

http://100sf.blogspot.com/2006/10/6-limbo-1952-by-bernard-wolfe.html

Ramon Sender - Naked Close-Up (fictionalized novel about Stan Brakhage's stay at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 60's, Subotnick & Oliveros are central characters)

Ross W. Duffin - How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) - answered every last question I had about the 19th/20th century transition to ET

Tom Siegfried - The Bit and the Pendulum

'Limbo' is way over-the-top cyborg manifesto fun from 1952, and it's interesting to read a hilariously macho channeling of Freud before the 70's completely emasculated most forms of therapy. but 'Earth Abides'... I have no idea why it isn't regularly mentioned as one of the best American novels of the 20th century. (well, yes I do: most people still can't consider science-fiction as literature)

i like this thread but i never read anymore except on the bus so i can't make a contribution. this is a placeholder post :(((

in fact adam made it just for me!

i'm like 300 pages into the bolano so far, but it's the first one i've read by him so i got nothing to compare it to