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

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.