The Woodlanders rather
― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 5 December 2018 22:49 (five years ago) link
Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, well yeah, but he wants you to suffer with Jude The Obscure, Jude The Obscene, Obs The June Moon---sorry, that Thurber piece keeps coming back---or anyway keep your head down (and keep reading) and don't show any interest (just keep reading)---wheras Eliot is cute with it, even when it's a sick sad world scene, maybe nudge-nudge invitation to take it as send-up of Victorian conventions, or at least exploitation, because a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
― dow, Thursday, 6 December 2018 02:00 (five years ago) link
When Ford Madox Ford moved to the country, he wrote about meeting a grocer who found Hardy's books crucial for understanding or at least standing his life out there.
― dow, Thursday, 6 December 2018 03:01 (five years ago) link
Thos Hardy anecdotes:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DttKs6GU4AAwuS3.jpg
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Thursday, 6 December 2018 04:13 (five years ago) link
Iirc Two on a Tower is nothing but plot twists - was released as a serial first and has almost laughable cliff hangers ever few chapters.
― koogs, Thursday, 6 December 2018 05:05 (five years ago) link
There’s a literal cliffhanger in a pair of blue eyes!
― Pierrot with a thousand farces (wins), Thursday, 6 December 2018 07:55 (five years ago) link
My high school English teacher was friend's with Thomas Hardy's gardener (!), who - spoiler alert - said that Hardy was a miserable bastard.
― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 6 December 2018 11:00 (five years ago) link
There's a story I read somewhere of a younger writer going to visit Hardy and the entire time being spent on an extended tour of the local countryside, having the locations of various pets' deaths pointed out.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Thursday, 6 December 2018 12:02 (five years ago) link
Virginia Woolf records in her diary a charming visit to the old man (who kept writing exemplary poetry into his late eighties).
― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 6 December 2018 12:22 (five years ago) link
When, in the summer of 1923, the Price of Wales (later and after his abdication the Duke of Windsor) was about to pay his annual visit to the Duchy of Cornwall, someone at Court suggested to him that he should, on his way, visit Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, his home in Dorchester...A Luncheon (by Max Beerbohm)Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,Albeit to see you I'm ungladAnd your face is fraught with a deathly shynessBleaching what pink it may have had.Come in, come in, Your Royal Highness.Beautiful weather? -- Sir, that's true,Though the farmers are casting rueful looksAt tilth's and pasture's dearth of spryness. --Yes, Sir, I've read several books. --A little more chicken, Your Royal Highness?Lift latch, step out, your car is there,To bear you hence from this antient vale.We are both of us aged by our strange brief nighness,But each of us lives to tell the tale.Farewell, farewell, your Royal Highness.
A Luncheon (by Max Beerbohm)
Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,Albeit to see you I'm ungladAnd your face is fraught with a deathly shynessBleaching what pink it may have had.Come in, come in, Your Royal Highness.
Beautiful weather? -- Sir, that's true,Though the farmers are casting rueful looksAt tilth's and pasture's dearth of spryness. --Yes, Sir, I've read several books. --A little more chicken, Your Royal Highness?
Lift latch, step out, your car is there,To bear you hence from this antient vale.We are both of us aged by our strange brief nighness,But each of us lives to tell the tale.Farewell, farewell, your Royal Highness.
-- Jacobus Gerhardus Riewald
― alimosina, Thursday, 6 December 2018 18:49 (five years ago) link
Yes. and the dour Male presence, though not omnipresent (thank Christ for V. Woolf and others, also for Molly Bloom etc), is a hallmark of modernism, which is one reason I think of him as proto (also I was taught to think that way, in a 70s course, Modern British Fiction).
― dow, Thursday, 6 December 2018 20:25 (five years ago) link
Today I learned that if you talk about Fanny Burney on Twitter, a bot comes along and gently chides you, asking you to refer to her as Frances.
Am reading Wolfgang Hilbig's THE FEMALES, which is as jolly and calm as you'd expect.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Thursday, 6 December 2018 22:34 (five years ago) link
So many good songs and good performances
― What is Blecchism ? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 6 December 2018 23:09 (five years ago) link
Ha, sorry, meant that for the Pete Shelley thread
Hardy wrote tons of good lyrics imo
― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 6 December 2018 23:19 (five years ago) link
Ha, exactly
― What is Blecchism ? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 6 December 2018 23:20 (five years ago) link
Here's the Hardy/pets anecdote: it was EM Forster:
"T. H. showed me the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on the head stones. Such a dolorous muddle. ‘This is Snowbell––she was run over by a train. . . . this is Pella, the same thing happened to her. . . . this is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two––’ ‘How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, Mr Hardy? Is the railway near?’––‘Not at all near, not at all near––I don’t know how it is. But of course we have only buried here those pets whose bodies were recovered. Many were never seen again.’ I could scarcely keep grave––it was so like a caricature of his own novels or poems."
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 7 December 2018 00:44 (five years ago) link
Too bad I changed my screen name moments ago, you just gave me another one.
― What Do I Blecch? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 7 December 2018 00:48 (five years ago) link
Reading a few bits of stuff with proper words and sentences as I am mostly reading a technical book these days:
Violette Leduc - La Batarde. Her memoir, points to a lot of the autofiction you see bandied about.
Sir Thomas Wyatt - Complete
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 8 December 2018 14:13 (five years ago) link
Lewis Hyde, COMMON AS AIR
― the pinefox, Sunday, 9 December 2018 13:03 (five years ago) link
Still on Anna Karenina lol Also: Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of HistoryMaggie Nelson, The Argonauts (which just by happenstance made reference to the next on the list)Allen Ginsberg, KaddishTed Hughes, Crow
― ryan, Sunday, 9 December 2018 16:34 (five years ago) link
I'm still reading The Golden Bough. If there was an even more abbreviated edition, I would probably go for that. If there's any more contemporary author it reminds me a bit of, it would be William Vollmann, in the exhaustive piling up of facts to suggest the faint outlines of a numinous pattern.
― o. nate, Monday, 10 December 2018 01:45 (five years ago) link
I finished Excellent Women, Barbara Pym, last night. It is a beautifully observed and well-formed book. It legitimately rates as a comic novel, but only because the narrator maintains a slightly sardonic view of herself and those she becomes involved with. There is the hint of a smile in most of what is related, but it is tempered by her barely acknowledged distress at living a self-consciously narrow, faintly absurd life.
Now I am reading The Saga of the Volsungs in the Penguin edition translated by Jesse Byock. Reading at least one Icelandic saga each year seems to have become a tradition with me. This may be my second one of 2018. I may have read Sagas of the Warrior Poets already in 2018. I'd have to check.
― A is for (Aimless), Monday, 10 December 2018 23:16 (five years ago) link
Excellent Women was by far the best Pym novel I read last summer, most of which had diminishing returns. I agree with that review.
― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 10 December 2018 23:32 (five years ago) link
I enjoy Pym, but sometimes I want to scream that I really do not care what the new vicar is up to.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Tuesday, 11 December 2018 00:19 (five years ago) link
blimey
― mookieproof, Tuesday, 11 December 2018 00:22 (five years ago) link
I have never not cared what the new vicar is up to. What could be more important?
― sacral intercourse conducive to vegetal luxuriance (askance johnson), Tuesday, 11 December 2018 02:16 (five years ago) link
I do care what the vicar is up to, but Wodehouse and Fitzgerald did it better.
― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 11 December 2018 03:58 (five years ago) link
Finished Sodom and Gomorrah (re-read) and will take a break from Proust.
Also Noonday (Pat Barker), the London-in-the-Blitz set conclusion to her artists-and-war Life Class trilogy. I suspect if this had been a first novel Barker would have been advised to go away and substantially rework it. Repetition, unnecessary little gobbets of not-quite-there fine writing, poor technical control. And yet I found it enjoyable. It's the 7th or 8th of hers I've read so she obviously has something that keeps me coming back, although I'm not sure I could easily describe what it is.
Now reading Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker which has started well.
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 12 December 2018 12:53 (five years ago) link
I finished Saga of the Volsungs. Its main interest for me were the most primitive parts of it, which were a dim reflection of some very old Teutonic myths, retold in an era that barely recalled and no longer understood them.
Afterward, I picked up Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and read about the first 25 pages. Compared to the terseness of the Volsung saga, Krull is baroquely elaborate. I'll probably stick with it, but it is early days, and I've never managed to be on good terms with Herr Mann in the past.
― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, 12 December 2018 17:16 (five years ago) link
I enjoyed an earlier book in that Barker trilofy, can't remember which one, but was annoyed by one anachronism: people in WW1 using the word "robot", which wasn't coined by Karel Capek until 1920. I am aware this is a very niche complaint.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 12 December 2018 22:29 (five years ago) link
― A is for (Aimless)
You made the best choice. A decidedly un-pompous book.
― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 12 December 2018 22:31 (five years ago) link
Flex Krull! The bit with the military service panel is wonderful, like the whole thing. There's also a German TV adaptation kicking around with a really great lead actor and a stapled-on ending where he flies away in a hot air balloon triumphally.
― Brand Slipper, Thursday, 13 December 2018 10:56 (five years ago) link
Weststruckness/Gharbzadegi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad
― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Thursday, 13 December 2018 18:50 (five years ago) link
I've been re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's WAY more overt in its religiosity than I remember (duh), but is still, at a sentence level, one of the most gorgeous books I've ever read - in the sense of it feeling like something you imbibe. It's one of those books that, for a time at least, changes how you see. I can think of no better recommendation.
Now reading Walter Kirn's Blood Will Out which is a car crash of narcissism and doubt - at both subject and autobiographical levels.
― Have the Rams stopped screaming yet, Lloris? (Chinaski), Thursday, 13 December 2018 18:54 (five years ago) link
Final verdict on Bréton's Anthology Of Black Humour: some good selections, but on the whole it's a bit too Vice Magazine: The Early Years. A rather representative extract, by Jacques Rigaut: "I have never taken much of anything seriously. As a child, I poked my tongue out at the women who approached my mother in the street to beg for alms, and I secretly pinched their brats who were crying from the cold". Uhhh congrats dude?
On some level it seems obvious that all the nihilism and sociopathy in the book's aesthetic has to have had something to do with the trauma of two world wars (in what Bréton chose to highlight, I mean - the authors go back as far as Swift), and he does do a good job of introducing writers, even though he leans on Freud just a bit too heavily. Overall not something I'd recommend.
Now moving on to the first volume of Elena Ferrante's Naples novels.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 14 December 2018 10:26 (five years ago) link
picked up a copy of Charles Webb's novel The Graduate which the book is taken from. prose is pretty sublime so far.Not sure to what extent the film changed things. & now realising i can't remember the film as thoroughly as i thought I knew it.THink this was something i meant to read the novel of for a while and then i just found it for 25c so thunk I'd take the plunge.
― Stevolende, Friday, 14 December 2018 13:34 (five years ago) link
Speaking of Ferrante I finally started the fourth one last night, after being too cranky to read for a week and a half
― I have measured out my life in coffee shop loyalty cards (silby), Friday, 14 December 2018 16:44 (five years ago) link
Terry Eagleton, RADICAL SACRIFICE - still
― the pinefox, Saturday, 15 December 2018 19:40 (five years ago) link
Picked up T F Powys' Unclay at the library - had never heard of it, enjoying it 50 pages in with no idea of exactly what he's going for.
― JoeStork, Saturday, 15 December 2018 19:41 (five years ago) link
on foot of various related/unrelated waffling last night but specifically discussion of solar bones -from which much spinoff- i read fizzles last few posts about it while he was reading it and im resolved to finishing it, but also ive been almost homesick and certainly nostalgic even from the snippets quoted so i guess thats a testament to the strength of the voice of the author
― gabbnebulous (darraghmac), Sunday, 16 December 2018 01:11 (five years ago) link
On one level the Ferrante book is exactly what I'd expect from an account of growing up in Napoli in the 50's. But it's also so accurate in its portrayal of the psychology of children, I've found myself numerous times remembering things from my childhood that I hadn't thought about for ages. Definitley think I'll stick with the series.
In other news, I'm getting married next Summer and since it's a non-religious ceremony, I have to find good readings. Turns out all my favourite writings about love are about it ending, or not working out, or otherwise inappropriate. My fiancee has also struggled, so we've decided to widen the scope to writings about friendship or companionship. Now I'm going through all the Moomin books trying to find something. Didn't remember them to have as many echoes of the Bible - great floods, plagues of locusts - or the Jules Verne influence in The Exploits Of Moominpappa. I did remember the bohemian vibe inherent to Moomin family life, but it struck me more this time too - like in Exploits Moominpappa just casually drops that Snuffkin and Sniff have fathers whom they've never met, and then they show up at the end of the book! And next book no Sniff, and the Snork Maiden's brother has disappeared too, with no explanation.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 19 December 2018 10:40 (five years ago) link
Congrats Daniel!
I am stil reading my technical book, although I took a break to read about 200 pages of Josep Pla's The Gray Noebook which is a diary Pla kept as a law student (for about 18 months in from March 1918) and then revised decades later (once he had indeed become a published author). Its a mixture of impressions, conversations with friends, a record of his readings and various critiques. It reminds me a bit of The Book of Disquiet, in that sense - form-wise its loose yet ambling along somewhere.
Also started on some Agaha Christie's The Secret Adversary.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 19 December 2018 10:53 (five years ago) link
Congrats!
PG Wodehouse very good for wedding readings--we made use of him at ours.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 19 December 2018 23:30 (five years ago) link
I mean, they're not HELPFUL readings, but the guests will enjoy themselves.
Thanks, guys!
Wodehouse might be an interesting avenue to explore. I'm trying to walk that tightrope between not being too solemn but also not giving the impression that I'm treating the whole thing like a joke.
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 20 December 2018 10:32 (five years ago) link
I'm pulling up to the 'end' of Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. The scare quotes are because Mann apparently projected this as the first book of a trilogy he didn't live to finish. My enjoyment of it has been mixed. It did coax audible laughter out of me several times when I read a particularly witty and well-formed phrase. Several of the set pieces, like the Krull's military induction medical exam were engaging and entertaining. That's very much on the plus side of the ledger.
On the minus side, the book (and perhaps the author) began to run out of steam in the latter third of the book. Felix, as the narrator, is allowed to chatter on about costumery, drapery, aristocracy, heraldry, paleontology, cosmology and love, all in a very ornate and oratorical style. All this does is establish him as a very tiresome popinjay. Under the guise of expanding his hero's education in the world, Mann just succeeds in making him shallower and more voluble, to the point where now I just want him to shut up and go away. Luckily, he will in another 20 pages.
When I close this book and set it down I won't regret having read it, but I won't pine for the two further books that were never written.
― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, 20 December 2018 20:19 (five years ago) link
I'm now reading Fair Play, Tove Jansson, a very short book (100 pp.) consisting of many short vignettes, held together by the fact that all of the vignettes feature the same two women characters. Both are artists, but strangely money seems not to be an issue for either of them. The author is Swedish and everything so far seems very Scandinavian. All the emotional content of their lives is sublimated into a kind of amorphous, highly aestheticized approach to life. The prose is attenuated to the point of near-disappearance.
This book could hardly be further from Felix Krull, even though that wasn't my intent when I chose this book. It caught my eye at the public library because it is a NYRB reissue and those are usually worth investigating.
― A is for (Aimless), Friday, 21 December 2018 20:11 (five years ago) link
I love that book and will brook no criticism of it. Fwiw it's autobiographical, they were lovers, and money was no issue because Jansson was author of the hugely internationally successful Moomin books.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Saturday, 22 December 2018 00:20 (five years ago) link
Then I shall be careful not to criticize it. However, I may describe it in terms that do not match your own perceptions, which are those of a lover and therefore nothing is likely to satisfy you short of an effusion I may be unable to supply. Be assured my intent is not hurtful.
― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, 22 December 2018 01:03 (five years ago) link