Ann Quin and...

Alan Burns, anyone?

i still need to read all the ann quin books. the only thing stopping me is that i have to order them online in order to find copies and i've never bought a book online in my life. i can do it!

"i''ve never bought a book online in my life"

amazing!

i want to know which Selby book made James Morrison get all violent.

I've never bought a bk online, either - only libraries and 2nd hand bkshops/charity shops...

hubert selby is sooooooo much better than any beat writer who ever lived. sad that james didn't like him. The Room still might be the most harrowing book i've ever read. or the book that filled me with the most dread. beat writers just fill me with yawns.

It was 'Last Exit to Brooklyn'. Sorry, guys! Actually, on the beats, I see there's a book by William Burroughs which consists of his diaries of his dreams. A beat writer's dream diary is almost the Platonic ideal of my idea of the worst book in the world. Though having said that, I _have_ enjoyed SOME Burroughs.

i liked junkie. i can barely read anything else by him though.

maybe read some other selby and see how how you feel. his short story collection? waiting period? requiem for a dream? i swear you will find something other than bad beat bullshit in that lot.

Maybe I'll go for the short stories. You people do seem to know what you're talking about.

I abandoned Last Exit halfway. But I didn't find it that beatish. I just got annoyed nothing was as good as the bit I'd opened at random in the shop.

WHATTA YAMEAN THE SAUCES NO GOOD? THATS WHAT I SAID, THE SAUCES NO GOOD. WHATS THE MATTER, YA DONT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH? ITS NO GOOD. NO GOOD. NO GOOD. WHATTA YAKNOW ABOUT SAUCE? MEEEE, WHATTA I KNOW? I KNOW IT STINKS. NOT ENOUGH GARLIC. ITS GOT THE SAME GARLIC. JUST LIKE ALWAYS. THE SAME 8 CLOVES OF GARLIC AND YA SAY NOT ENOUGH GARLIC. YUR A FUCKIN DUMMY. ITS GOOD SAUCE. DONT TELL ME ITS NO GOOD. WHOSE A FUCKIN DUMMY? EH? WHO? I'LL GIVEYA A RAP IN THE MOUT IM A DUMMY. YA CANT EVEN MAKE A SAUCE.

I was interested to note that he credits Gilbert Sorrentino with teaching him to write.

i like burroughs fine but he wrote a LOT of books it would be easy to take cheap shots at, viz.:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/230/522296979_36f0d46fa9.jpg?v=0

Can someone give a quick rundown of beat writing? Burroughs is more like a one off surely?

I think Sorrentino provided Selby with encouragement to write - it kind of surprises me that they even knew each other. Also abandoned 'Last Exit...' halfway two years ago but picked up again after reading the short stories ('The Coat' in particular is fantastic). Just finished 'The room' tonight and its quite an achievement, put it that way.

I guess when _I_ moan about the Beats I mean ESPECIALLY Kerouac and Ginsberg, a couple of over-rated hacks, plus SOME of Burroughs, Clelland Holmes (all of whom hung around each other, encouraging their mutual literary wank-fest), and I would have said Selby Jnr, etc.

no beat ever wrote a book like The Room. not many authors of any kind have. i don't know if i could read it again, but i'm glad i read it once.

Thomp's allcaps bit reminds me of a conversation I had in the library the other day:

Some guy: Hello, JLUT?
Me: Hi, ehm, what?
SG: JLUT JLUT?
Me: Uuuuuu
SG: AYJJJLUT LETT?
Me: What?
SG: Do you speak English?
Me: Yes I suppose so
SG: JLUT?? Jlut Jlut jlut?!?
Me: Wai..... TOILET!?
SG: TOILET!
Me: Uh, I dunno where that is, probably out there
SG: :|

(Err, sorry about ruining your thread)

that's okay: no one has actually managed to post about british experimental writing from the era in question yet, apart from the thread starter.

i actually found it quite hard to refrain from posting several pages of amazon customer reviews of 'the cat inside', but i managed to hold myself back.

sorry, you are right! when i read those ann quin books i'll come back and post on topic stuff about them. i promise.

Lolz I just recalled from Oystein's library anecdote that I did get my library to buy a copy of Passages, but I read it in a morning and then forgot all about posting on this thread. Its hard to say much about it now however I enjoyed the desolate mood.

Need to re-read but who knows when..

Post those reviews!

Just started reading Berg after getting all her books for Christmas (no, I had never read any before asking for every book she wrote, but I'm a Johnson stan [in fact I think I'm now actually allowed to call myself a Johnson scholar, haha], so hey, it's got to be at least interesting to me). Very good so far, though it seems trapped in the Woolfian mode a little - free indirect discourse rather than the full-on stream-of-consciousness and metatextuality that Johnson managed to deliver so well. Also chock-full of Freudian motifs that perhaps (only perhaps) seem overplayed now... but also interesting Sartrean aspects on free will and determinism... Hmm.

pleased to see that one of the great british experimental novels is getting reissued this month:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/I-Hear-Voices-Paul-Ableman/dp/0571259049/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262708320&sr=1-1

I think Sorrentino provided Selby with encouragement to write - it kind of surprises me that they even knew each other.
I think those guys actually grew up together or went to high school together.

Anyway I bought some of her books when Dalkey Archive first put them out, but never got around to reading them.

Which is the kind of thing I post so much on this board, there might as well be an emoticon for it.

Or an acronym, like: ba;dr.

WHATTA YAMEAN THE SAUCES NO GOOD? THATS WHAT I SAID, THE SAUCES NO GOOD. WHATS THE MATTER, YA DONT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH? ITS NO GOOD. NO GOOD. NO GOOD. WHATTA YAKNOW ABOUT SAUCE? MEEEE, WHATTA I KNOW? I KNOW IT STINKS. NOT ENOUGH GARLIC. ITS GOT THE SAME GARLIC. JUST LIKE ALWAYS. THE SAME 8 CLOVES OF GARLIC AND YA SAY NOT ENOUGH GARLIC. YUR A FUCKIN DUMMY. ITS GOOD SAUCE. DONT TELL ME ITS NO GOOD. WHOSE A FUCKIN DUMMY? EH? WHO? I'LL GIVEYA A RAP IN THE MOUT IM A DUMMY. YA CANT EVEN MAKE A SAUCE.

still one of my favourite paragraphs ever written. still haven't finished that book

I'd like to see the film after seeing an ed. of the book with a shot of it on the cover.

Just finished Berg. Pretty great.

More on this thread too:

a thread for b.s. johnson, christine brooke-rose, ann quin, alan burns,

This is a nice short appreciation of Berg:

uhttp://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-berg-by-ann-quin-2063012.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-berg-by-ann-quin-2063012.html

thought i remembered he did something similar in the guardian &... who cares about ann quin?

anyone ever seen the movie btw?

I noticed when I was up over Christmas, that it was being shown on STV Glasgow. Didn't see it.

Film sounds like it would be terrible. I've already had to watch the excruciating adaptation of Christie Malry, I don't think I could stand to see Berg slaughtered.

Seems awfully familiar too, I must have seen it once, but you lose track of crap British made box office duds.

More from Ann Quin in 2018

But, um,...

Recently tried reading "Tiptricks" but I managed two pages and gave up.

And other stories are putting a collection of short stories and fragments by Quin

haven't read the new collection, but it's worth following the ann quin page on facebook. the account, which i think is run by carol burns (alan burns' ex wife), occasionally posts letters and other personal documents

For once I can say the words 'damn I wish I was on Facebook'.

https://scontent-lhr8-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/89124310_3053274391390439_5823242502458572800_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&_nc_sid=ca434c&_nc_ohc=mjQqR_3hsmwAX8WHPQf&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr8-1.xx&oh=16a432e0e53eca41eb670269ffc92829&oe=5E93B7C8

Whoa, awesome.

Yeah, saw that earlier

read "berg" recently, found it hard to get into at 1st - lot of sentences that i had to read 3 times & still didn't really know what they meant. persisted tho & overall i mostly liked it. this prompted me to check out christine brooke-rose (walk when the green man...uh shit i already forgot what it's called) but i couldn't hang w/ that at all...gave up. life's short!

read berg last year. it has the feel of a puzzle you have to solve, of something that could easily have been done slightly more explicitly and it'd have been a menacing, broadly funny caper, but the elusiveness was to a large degree the point, perhaps indicating a loss (or a scrambling) of cognition within the writing itself to mirror that of its protagonist. anyway yeah it was good

I enjoyed reviews of Claire-Louise Bennett and her story recently in The New Yorker, also see that she's talked about Quin as inspiration and wrote intro for republished Passages, mentioned in passing upthread---how is it?? I'm inclined to start there, given the Bennett connection.

Quin is a major intertext of Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, which is highly recommended (by me).