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

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

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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.

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 think Elizabeth Taylor intends this exact response - I certainly don't think she is supposed to be seen as a figure of fun or pity. I've read a few of her novels now and I don't think that's how she works (see Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont specifically). There is comedy, certainly, but it's a sort of horrifying comedy, and in fact Angel herself is in complicated ways quite frightening to contemplate, or rather the complication, yes, is in the response you have. There's an immense force to her (haven't read for a while, so recollecting from afar - and am interesting to go back and examine more closely the specifics on the back of your post, BB).

What an extraordinary achievement, the utterly *unlikeable* character, who is nonetheless entirely relatable

Yes, this exactly, for me.

I'm now reading a brief non-fiction book from 1972 by John McPhee, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, about the development of an experimental lighter-than-air aircraft. Could not be more different from The Savage Detectives.

if one is interested in Lethem then yes, the CONVERSATIONS book is well worth it.

Thanks, Fizz.

from last thread:

> also got a chekhov short story collection for cheap. i've never read him, does anyone have any favorites?

Typhus (from vol 4 of the 13 volumes of short stories. vol4 seems like step up as there were a few that i enjoyed. maybe i'm just in a better mood)

it's here, along with a bunch of others.
http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1213/

From Wall St. Journo, last fall---has anybody read any of the books referenced here? Which Trollope novel has elements of the Norton case?

The Criminal Conversation Of Mrs. Norton
By Diane Atkinson
Chicago Review, 486 pages, $29.95
review By
Alexandra Mullen
Nov. 22, 2013 3:41 p.m. ET
Was there an evil fairy at Caroline Sheridan's christening? Born in 1808 into the theatrical and political family of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she was graced with beauty, intelligence, wit and industry; her pen poured forth popular songs, poems and novels, which brought her early fame as "the female Byron." Yet all anyone pays attention to is a scandal that happened to her when she was only 27. It left her, as she wryly noted, with a reputation "something between a barn-actress and a Mary Wollstonecraft."
Diane Atkinson begins her biography of Mrs. Norton—as she was known after her marriage to George Norton—with this scandal. In 1836, the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was sued for £10,000 damages for having "criminal conversation" (adulterous sex) with the wife of an undistinguished barrister from a Tory family. Over the course of the 14-hour trial, the all-male jury and audience enjoyed the sexually suggestive testimony about the high and mighty. Norton's lawyer was disconcerted when their "explosive laughter" greeted his innocently stated fact that Lord Melbourne didn't knock at the front door of the Nortons' house: Instead he "invariably went in . . . by the passage behind."

image: An oil sketch for Daniel Maclise's 1849 mural in the House of Lords. Caroline Norton served as the model for the figure of justice; the painting hangs not far from Westminster Hall, where the trial that made her infamous took place. Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tmaki, gift of James Tannock Mackelvie, 1881.
Melbourne's lawyer cannily exploited the jury's worldly attitude to suggest that the case against the prime minister wasn't one of a cuckolded husband seeking justice, but a political enemy seeking to score a blow. In Ms. Atkinson's words, "the Honourable George Norton had been shown to be a man lacking in honour," exploiting his failed marriage for party-political maneuverings. Melbourne got off. The Whigs were thrilled, while the Tories made the best of it. As one grumbled, he "really couldn't see why Lord Melbourne should be so triumphant at the verdict given, as it had been proved that he had had more opportunities than any man ever had before, and had made no use of them."
But despite being officially proved virtuous, which perhaps she was, Mrs. Norton was now notorious. Even many years later, acid tinged her review of a book that brought up the gossip that always swirled around her famous grandfather: "Obscurity is a thicker shield than virtue."
She wrote her friend Mary Shelley after the trial: "[To count] for nothing, in a trial which decided one's fate for life, is hard." She wasn't exaggerating. Legally, as a married woman, she did count for nothing. Under the laws of coverture, a married couple was considered to be one legal person in which the wife was "covered" by the husband: She had no legal right to enter into contracts or own property, including any income she might earn.
Nor did a wife have any right to her own children. During the trial, George had spirited away the couple's three children—sons aged 7, 5 and 18 months—and forbidden Caroline to see them. Distraught and furious, but with no recourse at law, Caroline turned to her family's standby, the pen: "It is not from choice that I left poetry and pleasant themes,—for defence of the better part of life." To get back her sons, she lobbied, wrote and contrived to change the law. The Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers of good character a right to custody of children under 7—only with the Lord Chancellor's approval!—was passed in 1839.
With cruel irony, the law only applied to England and Wales—and George had taken the boys to his brother's estates in Scotland. Mrs. Norton wasn't reunited with her sons until 1842, under bittersweet circumstances. George notified Caroline too late that their youngest son was ill, and by the time she reached him he was dead. Thereafter George allowed Caroline restricted access to the two other boys. She was only freed from George's influence upon his death more than 30 years later, by which time her older, more responsible son had died of tuberculosis, and the middle son had become both financially dependent on his mother and often violent toward her.
The current fashion that "the personal is the political" was not a Victorian vogue. The reformer Harriet Martineau, for instance, sympathized with Mrs. Norton yet disapproved of her efforts because women "must be clearly seen to speak from conviction of the truth, and not from personal unhappiness." Mrs. Norton reflected some of this sentiment herself in 1855, when she wrote a public letter to the queen to support the Matrimonial Causes Act, which among other things eased procedural restrictions on divorce and began to recognize marriage as a mutual contract: "I do not consider this as my cause," she wrote of the bill that finally passed in 1857, "though it is a cause of which . . . I am an illustration. It is the cause of all women."
Some richly colored refractions of Mrs. Norton can be found in literary works lighted by her case and character. Ms. Atkinson mentions the one that appeared a year after the trial, written by a court reporter there. In "The Pickwick Papers," the young Charles Dickens replayed the case mostly for laughs, partly by switching the adultery trial to a breach-of-promise suit. William Makepeace Thackeray also clearly studied the courtroom shenanigans for "The Newcomes" (1855), while 30 years later, after the deaths of the main actors, George Meredith based the heroine of "Diana of the Crossways" on his friend Caroline and followed the background facts of her marriage very closely.
Ms. Atkinson doesn't mention Dickens's more subtly serious view of themes inspired by the Norton case: In "Hard Times" (1854), which appeared as a weekly serial while Parliament debated the first Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill, he depicted the unhappy marriages of both Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Gradgrind. Nor does Ms. Atkinson point out the shades of Caroline Norton that appear in novels by Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, and in Tennyson's long poem on women's education. Mrs. Norton even makes an appearance in John Fowles's 1969 novel, "The French Lieutenant's Woman."
To her credit, Ms. Atkinson's selections from Mrs. Norton's letters allow us to see her private side—whimsical, querulous and sometimes even whiny—but this biography represents a lost opportunity. Much of the material I've drawn from for this review comes not from Ms. Atkinson's book but from Randall Craig's excellent "The Narratives of Caroline Norton" (2009)—a book I discovered in Ms. Atkinson's bibliography. Scholarly studies aren't for everyone, but Ms. Atkinson's popular approach doesn't quite satisfy either. Like Alan Chedzoy's "A Scandalous Woman" of 20 years ago, "The Criminal Conversations of Mrs. Norton" lets the shadow of the scandal obscure the woman herself. The author of five novels and 11 books of poetry, Mrs. Norton considered herself a woman of letters; she once wrote a friend, semi-facetiously, that she hoped that "a hundred years hence," after people had read a biography of "that remarkable woman," literary tourists would be drawn to scenes from her novels.
Are her novels any good? I wish I knew. Her evil fairy must be cackling.
—Ms. Mullen writes for the Hudson
Review and Barnes & Noble Review.

I can see how The Way We Live Now's Mrs. Carbury--a beautiful novelist, wrongly accused by an abusive husband (teddibly respectible, though not very respected once the rumours started flying around) might be a "shade" of Norton, but less dimensional, without the talent or sophistication. She's a desperate underdog, somewhat dangerous as a mother, to an extent like TWWLN's ever-striving con artist, August Melmotte.

The Aesthetics of Resistance -- a 'novel' about a commie cell that have discussions on political and aesthetics questions in route to fight in the Spanish Civil War -- could have been an incredibly dour read, and no doubt it will judged as such. Human emotions don't often make it. But how many novels really express a passion for art (Picasso, Kafka and many other paintings and books that are discussed) and politics and the terrain where both might meet and then proceeds to be equal to its sources by writing: that whole Sebald/Bernhard breezy yet rigorous blocks of writing. He isn't as funny as Bernhard (who is more of a loner and likes it that way), and he has more of a point and direction than Sebald (who talks about him in one of his books). Above all is how he uses his writing to absorb history and criticism and conversation into this black hole. I didn't see a lot of advancement of ideas, just hints, he is careful, and I think that's right but I wonder if this is also a problem.

I took away a few things, thoughts around the importance of self-education in the face of the brutal way in which the world of work wants to annihilate it. The politics of this book has been in retreat for the last 25 years but at points it felt like a book for now. I hope the next two vols get a translation but it might take years for that. Man problem is it truly doesn't feel like a novel at all, yet it is expanding the palette in some way, but I doubt that arg will get a hearing.

At the end I felt like letting friends borrow it..

i'm about to start americanah, by chimamanda ngozi adichie and the flame throwers, by rachel kushner.

no idea what to expect from either one.

I enjoyed The Flamethrowers a great deal, mostly on the basis of Kushner's prose. I heard Kushner give a reading from it last month during which she somewhat disconcertingly performed a character's monologue about his amputation-fetishist friends while her very young son sat (apparently obliviously, thankfully) in the front row of the reading hall....

The reading was useful for reminding me of the novel's comic streak, at least.

Douglas Egerton's The Wars of Reconstruction and Jenny Offill's Last Things

i just mised kushner speaking about (and signing copies of) the flame throwers at our local indie bookstore. some of her writing is really descriptive and sharp; some of it, in the early pages, comes off as a little too precious. i love the descriptions i've read, about her writing being so fiery and alive.

(xp)

finished 'claudine at school' and ordered the collected volume with the other novels in the series. finishing up 'mr lincoln's army' by bruce catton.

I recently finished James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (fascinating for the way he manipulates biblical discourse while retaining his critical distance from the church), Another Country (appealingly open-ended in terms of plot, but stylistically flatter than his essays), and No Name in the Street (furious and seemingly digressive but more rhetorically controlled and formally intricate than seems usually to be granted), as well as Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (lean and desolate but not quite as intense as Good Morning, Midnight). I'm reading a few pages a day of Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, starting Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia, and wrapping up 2666 with a reading group.

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.