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

(a day early, I know; call it wishful thinking on my part)

Just started last night on Anna Balakian's biography of André Breton, Magus of Surrealism, which so far delivers the goods--I've read another book of hers on surrealism + scattered prefaces here and there, & decided to order this after stubbing my toe on Soluble Fish earlier this year (more like "unfollowable pish", am I right?!). Biggest early revelation = situating automatic writing in relation to Breton's medical education. Did I mention that my interest in him is at least half owing to the similarity in our names?

I read a Breton bio in '95 published that year, the peak of my fascination with him. Mark Polizzotti wrote it.

Oblomov -Ivan Goncharov
Farewell To The Sea - Reinaldo Arenas

Both I really enjoy.

Wow cool: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/tolkiens-88-year-old-beowulf-translation-published-spring-2/
I'm currently tripping on The Way We Live Now---thanks for recommending, Alfred.

ftr, I'm somewhat less than halfway through The Savage Detectives.

For future convenience, I offer a link to the previous WAYR thread.

balakian also authored a nifty little book on the precursors to literary surrealism, mostly following the obvious line from nerval > baudelaire > rimbaud > lautreamont & the symbolists on to the dadaists.

currently about a third of the way through gaddis' the recognitions which i'm enjoying. at times it puts me in mind of paul goodman's empire city in its portraits of the habitués of fifties new york.

yeah Literary Precursors of Surrealism was the other book I was referring to. I'm really trying to get a handle on the movement lately--what was innovative about it, its self-understanding (the manifestoes tend to be kind of misleading in this regard IMO), reception by contemporaries, all that jazz

Still wrestling with the majesty of Tsvetaeva. Drnking the words in slowly.

Also started on: Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance.

There is a 50 page essay by Frederic Jameson and its got that phenomenal range. What you'd expect. However he was also listing novels by Malraux and Solzhenitsyn (both authors I don't care much for) which is almost off-puttting but I was reading passages of it at the bookshop and it was far more exciting so we'll see.

The Complete Review really made me want to read that Weiss. I know there's a complete Swedish translation, but god knows I have enough big unread trilogies on my shelf. (Nadas, Cărtărescu, Broch, Musil. Wtf is wrong with me)

Reading The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton and The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg. Don't like the Silverberg much so far, but the Hamilton is really good -- the horrible nazi-symphatizer Mr Thwaites is hilarious.

(Nadas, Cărtărescu, Broch, Musil. Wtf is wrong with me)

Something clearly is? ;-) Nadas, Cărtărescu and -- I know the following aren't trilogies -- the likes of Foster Wallace, The Kindly Ones, any Pynchon besides GR or Vineland are all fat books to me that I'll never read (ok the latter isn't that fat).

Weiss reads (and this was from a v v brief scan) in that Germanic block paragraph vein (that I like a lot but only Bernhard can do really well) and then taking an essayistic approach to questions that I think are relevant in a 'what could be the way out/time for a different approach' (whereas Musil is like an anatomy of why everything is fucked with no way out, which is of course amazing and the thing to write while WWI was raging) (Jameson clearly looks for renewal). As a title it speaks to me, feels more inviting than A Book of Memories, which feels done over as literature or anything else: In Search of Lost time is 100 years old!

This is of course reading a book by its cover. Let you know.

I love The Slaves of Solitude. Much better than Hangover Square imo.

Cărtărescu is great, been wanting to try out Nadas some time, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Started up on Twenty One Stories by S.Y. Agnon, the only Nobel laureate in literature from Israel. Pretty excellent so far.

thank god, we're so over memories

I got Mark Harris' new book on Wyler, Capra, Huston, Ford, and Stevens and their WWII efforts.

Reading The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

Such a good book. Thwaites is the perfect Hamilton super-bore.

Reading Daniel Anselme's 'On Leave', from 1957, about 3 French soldiers fucking themselves up in Paris on leave from the Algerian "police action". Nothing super-elegant in the prose, but very good.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0141393874.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

thank god, we're so over memories

― j., Thursday, 20 March 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Over 'meditations on memory'.

20 pages in to the Weiss and I would love this to be an ILB group book.

is The Accidental Tourist any good?

yes

I like The Accidental Tourist a lot, but Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was my favorite Tyler.

The AT was promising, but got to be cute quirky date movie (on the page; may well have been an actual movie too). Maybe I was just in a bad mood about luv, but even non-Relationship elements, social observation re Baltimore, for inst, started seeming too soft-focus--anyway, at the time (many years ago) preferred Searching For Caleb and A Slipping Down Life. Haven't read Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, which back then seemed commonly considered her best.

I don't mean "commonly" in a bad way; that was the consensus among reviewers and fans, the ones I was acquainted with, at least.

love slaves of solitude.

hiatus at the moment. read kipling's dymchurch flit again. found the peasant accents slightly irritating this time round, tho their effect of fogging what's happening is so effective that I can't see how you'd do without them. made me want to go on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway again.

Ten pages in and I've spotted four too-cute-for-words moments.

Also begun: Mark Harris' Five Came Back, about the wartime efforts of Wyler, Ford, Stevens, Huston, etc.

In recent weeks:

Elizabeth Von Arnim - The Enchanted April
Julian Maclaren Ross - Of Love & Hunger (good but certainly not in Patrick Hamilton league)
Evgeny Zamyatin - We
Tony Parker - Lighthouse
Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles (slightly disappointed - too verbose for me. maybe i need to try it again)
Molly Keane - Good Behaviour (delicious - just about literary heaven for me)
Alan Johnson - This Boy (great account of growing up in 50s London)

Antoine St Exupery's 'Wind, Sand and Stars' coming up next.

i'm rereading some borges!!

he's delicious

Interested to hear what you say about that Mark Harris book, been thinking of reading it.

"The Spinning Heart" by Donal Ryan. The best Irish fiction I've read in a long time.

Man, SY Agnon's short stories are really great. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, but better.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt which managed the awful feat of being not very good but just about entertaining enough to keep me reading for the first 600 pages or so before turning rancid for the final 100 or so pages so, much of which I ended up skim reading so as not to prolong the agony. She tries to set the final sequence in the Amsterdam criminal underground and is obviously very seriously out of her depth. Avoid at all costs.

I read the first two books in Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence. The first started off slowly, then turned wonderful but by the end of the second book I felt the law of diminishing returns was kicking in. I'm have a little rest and give the third a try.

I'm reading Elizabeth Taylor's Collected Stories. I've read all the collections previously published so it will be rereading apart from those that are new to this collection.

I agree that The Slaves Of Solitude is better than Hangover Square.

raven starts taking stylistic detours in three, i think. (checks:) yeah, three is a thriller. four a boarding school novel, ish. the seventh, which is a late colonial India story, the best, if most problematic. six, eight are broadly comedies in the vein of the first two, the sixth the most successful. fifth awkwardly poised between comic modes and something else. ninth, tenth don't know what they are.

Thanks for that information. I had no idea - I assumed the other books would be in a similar style (although I did think the second book already had a distinctively different feel, the farcical elements broader, perhaps). I'm more intrigued about the 3rd one now.

I've been dimly aware of Raven for a few years because he gets mentioned in connexion with writers I enjoy (Waugh, Powell etc). But for a time his books weren't easy to find. It's only recently I was browsing in Waterstones and realised the AFO sequence had been re-published in omnibus paperback editions and picked up the first.

yeah, same, though i think i ordered them, wanted to get average price per novel down below that elusive £2.50 mark

i had this thesis about how the goldfinch was actually a sci fi novel but it only made reading it more dull tbh

Hermann Ungar: The Maimed

holy fuck this is some grim, misanthropic Austro-Hungarian 1920s stuff let me tell you

Recently read:

Lawrence Wright - Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (which was incredible)
Alfred Hayes - My Face for the World to See (which was a nice one-sitting stroll through 50s Hollywood hard drinking)

Now onto:
Dianna Athill - Stet (weirdly engrossing)
John McPhee - The John McPhee Reader

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/t1.0-9/1395872_10152944186217137_411098977_n.jpg

Some old books by Lafcadio Hearn, turn-of-the-century translator/compiler of Japanese folklore, the source for the movie Kwaidan. He's a good writer, and the books themselves are interesting little curios, weird assemblages of folklore, vocabulary, entomology, miscellanea.

ha, i have those on my kobo waiting for me, downloaded after watching the film (which is one of my top 10 japanese films)

Hearn's ghost stories are well worth checking out, too.

Just got my hands on a proof copy of the new Alan Furst, not out until June, so am feeling very smug.

xp crimplebacker, would you recommend We? I've had it on my list for a while now, along with Jack London's The Iron Heel, because of the 1984 connection.

I would recommend 'We', D.L. It's a strange, swirling, hallucinatory kind of book - stylistically very different from 1984, though of course many of the same themes. I loved the writing early on, but found it more and more confusing towards the end. It did get a bit tiresome for me towards the end - not sure if that was my powers of concentration or the book. But it's funny and very idiosyncratic in a Russian kind of way.

CONVERSATIONS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM

Finished the Tsvetaeva prose collection last night - My Pushkin is an essay for the ages -- something that is never published as criticism but should be, as a mix of the personal (that title!) but then passages too. I need to read The Captain's Daughter as there is another essay on that. Another piece (My Mother and Music) is a conflicted tribute on her encouraging, smart mother.

Peter Weiss' Aesthetics of Resistance still going strong.

Doubling that w/some of Rilke's Letters (on Cezanne).

Last night I finished The Savage Detectives. I enjoyed it, but my first thought as I laid it down was that it was a shaggy dog story raised to the level of high art.

Sorry I should say it is a thorough about its discussion of passages from several of Pushkin's works.

Starting up The Man in the High Castle which, oddly enough, I've never read even though I've read a ton of other Dick books.

CONVERSATIONS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM

― the pinefox, Saturday, March 29, 2014 7:15 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Woah, didn't even know this existed. Quite pricy, though--worth it?

Loved my grad course on YA literature, but officially worn out on the genre at this point. Thankfully, next semester is mostly Canadian short fiction.

Francisco X. Stork, Marcello in the Real World (probably my favourite of the YA lot I read this semester)
Terry Spencer Hesser, Kissing Doorknobs
Brent Hartinger, The Order of the Poison Oak (quite liked this one too--gay YA fiction!)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (only non-YA thing I read this month; excellent)
R.J, Palacio, Wonder
Beth Goobie, Hello Groin (lesbian YA fiction--good until the ridiculous conclusion)
Catherine Atkins, Alt Ed (the John Hughes influence on all things YA is alive and well)

halfway through 'claudine at school' by colette. this is a really, really funny book.

I finally read Angel by Elizabeth Taylor and jesus christ what a novel, I just feel singularly struck by it. I don't think one is *supposed* to relate to Angel as much as I do - I very much get the feeling that one is supposed to veer between seeing her as a figure of fun/laugh at her, and abruptly see her as an object of pity, or feel sorry for her. And I refuse to do either; instead, I simply feel "she *is* me. (I wonder if all writers secretly fear this.)

The intense loneliness, the feeling of being *different* from the rest of the world (interpreted by others as thinking oneself "better" - no, just painfully aware of difference), the retreat to a realm of fantasy - and that retreat being won at the cost of excluding anyone who could assuage one's own loneliness and sense of isolation.

Even the intensity of her crushes, the way that she whips an hour's conversation with a beautiful man into a lifelong romance which is much, much better in her head than it is ever in reality (the disillusionment with actually attaining her desire, and discovering he's rubbish in bed - of course he couldn't ever live up to the heights of her imagination.)

Angel in the Edwardian Age wrote ~sensation novels~ - in 2014, she'd be writing fan fiction and be selling bucketloads of "50 Shades Of Angel" which would be universally disparaged by the only people she ever wanted to be understood or accepted by. Whatever she wrote, it would be judged as somehow both too much and not good enough, but I admire her for refusing to see the failing as her own. It's been a long time since I related to a character so much, and yet I'm aware, even as I think it's an extraordinary novel and an extraordinary woman, that you are not *supposed* to like her, in fact the character herself would feel contempt for you for *liking* her, as written. What an extraordinary achievement, the utterly *unlikeable* character, who is nonetheless entirely relatable.

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...

http://web.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/CRER_RC/publications/pdfs/Research%20Papers%20in%20Ethnic%20Relations/RP%20No.6.pdf

Yesterday I was at my local Friends-of-the-Library used bookstore and for $3 I bought a 1963 book entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by the academic historian Richard Hofstadter. I started reading it last night. Its pace is a bit leisurely, but Hofstadter writes well and it flows well and he has interesting things to say on an interesting (to me) subject. I'm not sure If I'll go the distance with him, but for now it is the book I'm reading.

It's an excellent book that holds up and still pisses off our friend son the right.

(psst---Aimless, you didn't hear it from me, but here's some more Hofstadter:
http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/)

Our Mutual Friend was great, at least in college.
The last TV version of Bleak House made Carey Mulligan a star.

And I'm ripping through Five Came Back by Mark Harris, a definitive Hollywood / WW2 book.

Yeah, I was pretty sure Hofstadter was also the one who brought us that classic observation on US politics.

(sure sure, but---read it again, between the between)

Pinefox and Fizzles - I am just about managing lit and footie because I've taken sometime off work to watch WC (1st phase).

Next week is Wimbledon so its gonna be hard work.

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).

― one way street, Tuesday, June 17, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure I agree. Celine was never close to anybody by contrast, but I don't quite get his concentration on Juenger. Maybe RB saw Juenger as someone who was highly thought of and yet the books seem to be quite bad (The Glass Bees was utterly forgettable). I feel like I need to read more Juenger just to try and come up with a theory but I'm only writing this to be rid of the notion of doing so. I don't want to waste my time.

I'll try and get hold of Nabokov on Dostoevsky. Sounds up my alley.

7 chapters into Bleak House so far (corresponding to the first 2 numbers of the serial); still no real plot to speak of, although we have been introduced to the titular House... I'm enjoying all the scene-setting, while also anxiously waiting for 'something to happen'

favorite character BY FAR = the entire Jellyby family

read a bit of fitzgerald's 'the crack-up', forgot what a wit he was

also seem to be starting to reread oolissayss

what fitzgerald says about that is awesome

Even the intervening generations were incredulous. In 1920 Hey-
wood Broun announced that all this hubbub was nonsense, that young
men didn’t kiss but told anyhow. But very shortly people over twenty-
five came in for an intensive education. Let me trace some of the reve-
lations vouchsafed them by reference to a dozen works written for
various types of mentality during the decade. We begin with the sug-
gestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life (Jurgen, 1919); then we learn that there’s a lot of sex around if we only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920), that adolescents lead very amorous lives
(This Side of Paradise, 1920), that there are a lot of neglected
Anglo-Saxon words (Ulysses, 1921), that older people don’t always resist sudden temptations (Cytherea, 1922), that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined (Flaming Youth, 1922), that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922), that glamorous English ladies are often pr
omiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their
time to it (The Vortex, 1926), that it’s a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928), and finally that there are abnormal variations
(The Well of Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah, 1929).

that glamorous English ladies are often promiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their
time to it (The Vortex, 1926), that it’s a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928)

lol

I'm halfway through "A Confederacy of Dunces". Very funny. I also got a book called "The Cult Film Reader"in the library which I might dip in and out of over the week.

I am reading Journey to the End of the Night. An earlier thread in this series reminded me that I wanted to read it.

My mind was wandering as I was walking back from the market this morning and I thought something perhaps novel about Celine is the way parts of the narrative expand and contract against expectation -- he moves to Detroit very fast -- so that you are never bored and notice time the way it sometimes feels. For example, when you are tired or in the morning before you've eaten breakfast, you may walk very slowly and notice things more. Or when you are nervous and anxious because you are escorting people around campus, you may not be sure what happened a few minutes ago.

Shirley

The part where Shirley reshapes Christian religion and the figure of Eve, casts Milton aside and sees the holy light through a feminine prism of nature is surely one of the most beautiful things I've read.

'I saw -- I now see -- a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from hear head to her feet, and arabesques of lighting flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear -- they are deep as lakes -- they are lifted and full of worship -- they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehova's daughter, as Adam was His son.'
'She is very vague and visionary! Come, Shirley, we ought to go into church'
'Caroline, I will not: I will stay out here with my mother Eve, in these days called Nature. I love her, undying, mighty being! Heaven may have faded from her brow when she felll in paradise, but all that is glorious on earth shines there still. She is taking me to her bosom, and showing me her heart.'

Then they go and have a political fight with an old-fashioned blockhead and throws his bible quoting sexism back at him with radical force. I was left knackered by this monumental chapter in the middle of the book. The novel's ending is a bit... just there, but I feel now C Brontë for me is the greatest of all.

I finished Anti-Intellectualism in American Life last night. The last quarter of the book was mostly concerned with a history of American secondary-school public education and its many missteps. The main interest for me was the degree to which faddism has been a big part of public educational theory for at least a century now. However, my interest did flag after Hofstadter moved past his historic review of anti-intellectualism in American religion and politics, and he started to survey the history of American education.

I'll probably spend a few days messing around in poetry or essays before I take the plunge on a book.

that actually is the essence of educational theory iirc

next thread: "I live in an immense activity, in which everything becomes morning" -- but what are YOU reading Summer 2014??

Youn - like your reading of Journey.... I think he gets more impatient and moves faster, which actually goes against what ellipses does, normally.

Does those is in his later fiction, that is.