Like something almost being said, it's the SPRING 2014 "WHAT ARE YOU READING" thread!

I started ciaran Carson's translation of the tain. it's really fucking weird.

dow - you are right. Trying to think about this. In some ways its the only ending, the only feel of it is one which is dashed off. What if Musil ended MwQ with the break out of WWI? Obvious, doesn't do justice to the imagination displayed in the preceding chapters.

Sorry that was garbled again. It feels dashed off, the last chapter comes in at only 5 pages. Looks like Kafka wanted this to be out of his system whereas a better option might've been to leave it unwritten.

Now reading: Elias Canetti - Kafka's Other Trial. An essay on his letters to Felice, a response just after their release. This is great, Canetti cross reads through stories, diaries and letters to precisely pinpoint the sources of Kafka's anguished creativity, as well as telling the story. Canetti is aware this could devolve into unconvincing psychoanalytics, its a relief he keeps it to a tight reading.

I finished The Boys in the Boat. It was entirely acceptable reading material. I am now in flux. I picked up We Sagebrush People, Annie Pike Greenwood, a pioneer memoir striving after jocularity that more often just succeeds in being peculiar. I'm not sure I can handle ~500pp of it.

Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines

Really really good.

alberto moravia - boredom

I'll check Canetti's book, thanks. He's really challenging himself with the dangers of psychobabble there.
Wonder what pressures, self-imposed and/or otherwise, Greenwood might've be under? A letter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's editor-daughter is pretty intriguing, re the stuff that got cut (for instance: sexual dangers to frontier girls? Pish, deal with it! But not in this kiddie book.) There are people on the Web claiming to have inherited such materials, sent by Laura via oorrespondence with relatives, friends, fans_discreet safety valves, perhaps.
Anyway, here's the letter from daughter Rose,pragmatic prose pro (what she says makes sense, for her purposes, and many a reader's, no doubt): http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/04/21/rose_wilder_lane_laura_ingalls_wilder_a_letter_from_their_editorial_collaboration.html

Scott Seward recommended Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.

xyzzz have you read Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by Deleuze and Guattari? It's on some of the things you've been posting about - structure & (non-)completion in the novels, connection between letters, stories and novels.

Thanks woof I've not heard of it.

Raced through Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. What a blast. More fun to read than it is to work at Marvel by the sounds of it. I know ILX has a contingent of hardcore Stan Lee-haters but compared to the corporate supervillains who followed him he comes out of it not so badly.

Back to Gravity's Rainbow

Toward a Minor Literature is pretty awesome! A bit marred by the fact that they only analyzed French translations, and acording to the notes in my Danish edition, several of the details they are focusing on only happened in translation. But still. Read that one, and then read the first chapter in Thousand Plateaus and the chapter on Nomadology, and the Minor Science they are talking about. So interesting, though I don't think the rhizomatic literature - the development of Minor Literature - is that common. Used it to analyze Gravity's Rainbow in my master, coincidentally.

Far From the Madding Crowd, the last major Hardy novel I've read. Not as compelling as TMOC or Tess, but every scene in which sheep star is a charmer, and once again he's the master of the throwaway erotic gesture: Troy -- or Boldwood? I forget already -- hiding behind a curtain on which Bathsheba leans.

thinking of minors in that minor lit: about 520 pages into GR, and the section with Polke and his daughter and/or "daughters" was riveting, unlike so much else here; the part where Slothrop fucks Bianca (child)seemed even more pointless than the other sex he's having and/or fantasizing--.either way, very lingered on (ditto the Colonel eating Katje's shit, but that's his prob) How did you analyze any of this, Slothrop/Bianca especially? Don't worry about spoilers; I never do, especially in this book (god when will it end).

Asking Frederick, but all responses are much appreciated.

Well, I didn't really focus on it at all. But there has been written quite a lot on the children in the novel, Lost Children I think I've seen them being called. SPOILER: There will be more of them, and they will be quite touching. To me, they are mainly the preteritest of the preterites, and serve to complicate the elect vs preterition distinction. Which is talked about as being a hard distinction by the characters, and has been used as such to analyze the characters, but for me it's a scale and an ongoing construction. I wanted my pHd to be called 'Do the Preterition', but I can't get funding for it. Sigh. Anyways, they are loads of things, but to me the most important thing is showing how in some cases Slothrop is the elect, just as in other cases the Colonel is more like a preterite (as is pretty much every character in the book at some point, imo)

Scott Seward recommended Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs

It's really good: gentle, perceptive, beautifully written.

Jean Rhys's short stories are well worth looking out for. I advise NOt reading her collected letters/diaries, though: it's an endless litany of 'oh poor me I have no money I cannot cope with the world" x 1000

Thanks, Frederick. I hope little Ludwig finds his pet lemming. Frieda the pig led Slothrop (in his heropig costume) and me to Pokler; good to see him again. Now with Bland and the Masons.

James, I'll check out Jewett; reminds me, the Radio Reader is now presenting The Last Runaway, about an English country Quaker girl who comes to the Ohio frontier, to which she brings some shrewd and sensuous attentions, also a way with quilting which some see as a comment on their own skills, and others as a chance for their own gain. It's by Tracy Chevailier, who wrote Girl With A Pearl Earring(haven't read it, or seen the Scarlett J. movie).
Recently, he read I Shall Be Near To You, by Erin Lindsay McCabe, about a young bride whose new husband goes off to the Civil War, and she soon joins him, disguised as a boy recruit (hubby isn't so thrilled). It's the heroine's first person account, via the rough, practical eloquence of Civil War letters and journals. Here's the link before I forget (stations and schedules of RR streams are here too, but I like his home station best, with its reading for the blind: Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, the Pawnstars bald guy's autobio, and all)
http://radioreader.net/index.html

Oh, and the afterword to I Shall Be Near... is an overview of writing by and about women who went to war disguised as men, also some who didn't have to bother, where their commanders weren't picky, and some who lived as men for the rest of their lives.

Just read 'Down the Rabbit Hole' by Juan Pablo Villalobos in one sitting. Its about a Mexican drug cartel through the eyes of a child who likes wearing hats and is fond of hippos

new rivka galchen collection of short stories -- love these

Cú Chulainn fired a little stone at the birds and brought down eight of them. Then he fired a bigger stone and got twelve more. He did this with his “ricochet-stun-shot”.
“Go you out and get the birds,” said Cú Chulainn. “If I go out to get them, this wild stag will go for you.”
“It’s no easy thing for me to get out,” said the charioteer. “The horses are so fired up I can’t get past them, and the iron rims of the chariot-wheels are too sharp for me to get over them, and I can’t get past the stag because his antlers stretch from one shaft of the chariot to the other.”
“Step out on to his antlers then,” said Cú Chulainn. “I swear by the god of Ulster, I’ll threaten him with such a head-butt, and fix my eye on him with such a look, that he’ll not even dare to nod his head at you.”
So it was done. Cú Chulainn tied the reins and the charioteer stepped out to gather up the birds. Cú Chulainn hitched the birds to the ropes and straps of the chariot. This was how he proceeded to Emain Macha: a wild stag hitched behind, a flock of swans flapping above, and three severed heads in his chariot.
They reached Emain.
“There’s a man approaching us in a chariot,” cried the look-out in Emain Macha. “He’s got the bloody heads of his enemies in his chariot, and a flock of wild birds overhead, and a wild stag hitched behind. He’ll spill the blood of every soldier in the fort unless you act quickly and send the naked women out to meet him.”
Cú Chulainn turned the left board of his chariot towards Emain to show his disrespect, and he said:
“I swear by the god of Ulster, that unless a man is sent to fight me, I’ll spill the blood of everybody in the fort.”
“Bring on the naked women!” said Conchobar.
The women of Emain came out to meet him, led by Mugain, the wife of Conchobar Mac Nessa, and they bared their breasts at him.
“These are the warriors you must take on today,” said Mugain.
He hid his face. The warriors of Emain grabbed him and threw him into a barrel of cold water. The barrel burst to bits about him. They threw him into another barrel and the water boiled up till it seemed it was boiling with fists. By the time they’d put him into a third barrel, he’d cooled down enough just to warm the water through. Then he got out and Mugain the queen wrapped him in a blue cloak with a silver brooch in it, and a hooded tunic. She brought him to sit on Conchobar’s knee, and that was where he sat from then on.

well, now i'm reading zizek instead

I've been out camping. The book I brought to read was The Golden Age, one of the series of historical novels about the American Empire by Gore Vidal. This one covers the period from 1940 to the mid-1950s. Although Gore Vidal himself appears in this book (very briefly) as a young novelist just returned from WWII, it was plain that he identified much more strongly with the elderly characters.

As for the quality of the novel, it was competent and entertaining, but lacked a center. The intended center, meant to tie the narrative together, was the character of Peter Sanford, but he served mainly as a passive bystander, ineffectual even in his romantic life. The strong characters all come and go as Vidal needs them to illustrate his personal view of history, which, thank goodness, is an entertaining one.

The modestly controversial thesis he develops as his centerpiece is that Franklin Roosevelt, swimming hard against an 80% isolationist electorate in his determination to bring the country into the war, chose a deliberate strategy of goading the Japanese into a preemptive attack, which turned out to be Pearl Harbor. An impartial examination of US-Japanese relations at the time certainly allows that interpretation and I had already come to a somewhat similar conclusion, although Vidal's portrayal is much juicier and more cynical than is strictly necessary to put that point across.

by far the weakest in the series, and the Gore Vidal section didn't work.

What's the best of his American historicals, or at least a good one to start with?
Anybody read Julian? Initially a big deal to me in high school, although I don't think I finished it, don't remember any lines, scenes etc.

i've only read 'lincoln' and 'empire,' but i highly recommend them both (in that order). 'lincoln' in particular is just extraordinary.

In this order:

Lincoln >> Burr >> Empire >>> 1876 >>> Washington DC

The Peter character only makes sense having read Washington DC.

yeah J.D. OTM: why Lincoln isn't celebrated as a great novel period is a crime.

Reading The Golden Age, I understood why the obit writers insisted on calling him an essayist who insisted on writing novels. The great ones I suggested point out the extent to which readers of fiction don't like to read good historical fiction.

Think I might start with Burr. Such knotty material, and he probably wasn't even the sketchiest guy involved in that there Empire of the West or whatever the hell it was (plus of course the rest of his life seems pretty byzantine, though prob just suitable material/case for treatment, eh GV)

Anybody read Julian?

(raises hand)

I read this in college, at a time when I was pretty heavily into Greek and Roman classics. I recall it as meriting the same description I gave of The Golden Age, "competent and entertaining". It is very sympathetic to Julian, somewhat less sympathetic to Libanius, and rather contemptuous of the Julian's christian antagonists, and the characterizations obviously skew that way. On the other hand, the historic facts on display are well-researched and accurate.

If anyone here likes Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels steer clear of Lost For Words. It's a petty, misanthropic trifle which, apart from a handful of funny or lyrical passages that belong in a better novel, reads like he recently suffered a severe head injury.

Anyone read Drabble's The Misgiving?

Ernst Juenger - On the Marble Cliffs. Steiner makes an overloaded claim for being a really great novel (century, blah blah, such a fucking hack for so much of the time I've read him) but I was unmoved to agree by the dialogue-less work. Lots of scene-setting, facile symbolism (the gangs are Nazis!) Someone like Pavese does the horror in the hills, blood amongst nature type thing better.

Gert Hofmann - half way through and its one of the best things I've read this year. So moving (the grandfather steadily shut out from the 'art' he so loves, being rendered useless by technology's march, which trumps the march of aesthetics far more), and just a great novel about the cinema. Love all the plots and movies. A must if you are any kind of film fan.

Poems by Goethe and more Heine.

Is this the Hofmann? Der Kinoerzähler,Trans. The Film Explainer?

Sorry yes The Film Explainer

Somebody, I forget who, wrote an essay about reading a few pages of Jünger and immediately wondering why he had never heard of this great writer. He read on and shortly realized why - Jünger had no sympathy for human beings, we were all ants to him to be looked down on from Harry Lime's perch on the big wheel in the Prater, without even a girlfriend's name drawn in the dust on the window.

Steiner is the worst sort of snob, as opposed to the best sort like Nabokov.

Glad to see the love for The Film Explainer, it really succeeds in bringing to life that long bygone era, name dropping all your UFA favorites, such as The White Hell of Pitz Palu and The Three From The Filling Station, to name two.

We should do a poll of literary blowhards, they mostly don't have a lot to be snobbish about. w/Nabokov -- whom I've not read a lot of, and haven't connected much with what I have...but even if I did I wouldn't listen to much of it. Its like listening to a sports pundit and their tiresome, barely coherent opinions (as I have been doing a lot of during the world cup). Just because they played the game doesn't give them the authority.

In fact you think guys like Steiner -- such slight opinions shouted at you -- would have the perfect forum now. Its called the internet.

re: Juenger - there is no attempt to form a connection to human feeling on the page and I suppose he took a life long interest in botany (which is a big part of the book). I do want to read his war diaries but at the moment you'd say its his life that is more of interest to someone like Bolano. Sorta wondered about that.

Nabokov's snobbishness about other writers and middlebrow phenomena (at least in his prefaces and written interviews) at least has a playful theatricality to it, whereas so much of Steiner's prose sinks for me under the weight of his self-regard. I get the sense that Bolano's interest in Jünger was largely part of his interest in artists' and intellectuals' complicity with authoritarian states (as in Distant Star, Nazi Literature in the Americas, or By Night in Chile, which was originally titled Storms of Shit both in allusion to its ending and as a parody of the title of Jünger's Storm of Steel).

if anything nabokov's opinions are too coherent: he has a clear and narrow definition of good fiction and it is almost always easy to guess what he will like/dislike abt something. (i kept thinking of him recently while reading book of the new sun, which he would have loved.) he's great when writing abt something he disdains but cannot dismiss (like dostoevsky), when the limitations of his aesthetics are simultaneously most visible and most stretched.

summer of unpopular Dickens: just wrapped up Hard Times, now moving on to Bleak House

Those are popular!

"Just because they played the game doesn't give them the authority."

I like this [Shearer-Nabokov] analogy Julio!! (Not sure whether the point is precisely true, though. Complicated issue.)

Unlike Julio xxyyyyzzz who manages literature and soccer at the same time, I have been prevented from reading books by the World Cup.

Though I did recently take Glenn Hoddle's autobiography SPURRED TO SUCCESS off my shelf, and last night watching Russia made me read a bit of Jonathan Wilson's BEHIND THE CURTAIN re: Eastern Block soccer.

xps I guess so? but they certainly don't have the same reputation/recognizability as Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield, or Great Expectations, or A Tale of Two Cities... not here in the States, anyway

I abandoned Our Mutual Friend two months ago, a year after abandoning Bleak House for the second time.

Never made it through Bleak House either. Three long Dickens books I made it to the end of were David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.

Dabbling in one of those Jonathan Wilson books myself right now: Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics.

Unlike Julio xxyyyyzzz who manages literature and soccer at the same time, I have been prevented from reading books by the World Cup.

there was that and test cricket and before that the giro d'italia, and basically i'm just spending my time sitting in my easy chair vacantly pressing the remote button.

have been reading the Hazard European Mind book tho, on recommendation from a few people, and enjoying that. in between the sport.

I re-read OMF a few months ago and loved it (particularly because I remembered an essay I once read arguing that the book is basically one big joke about the dust heaps being composed of human shit)

Other good unpopular one is Little Dorrit, which I found totally hilarious when (a decade ago). Only one that beat me was Martin Chuzzlewit.

Just finished The Vorrh by Brian Catling.... Alan Moore says it's the best Fantasy novel written this century. Not totally sure if I agree...