'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

that's actually a different proof, here he's workin on 'we all see the same envelope here probably fer sure'

http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/23_free_essays_stories_by_david_foster_wallace_available_on_the_web.html

lol ows bell's fawning refs to moore were what reminded me i wanted to read him

interesting that so much of that dfw stuff is around. it's funny, it used to be the offcuttish stuff that ended up in 'flesh and not' that were the easy things to find

short stories by conrad and balzac. conrad is kind of a boss. balzac feels like reading asimov in the real world.

I hope you mean the younger better Asimov, though I haven't read any short stories by B (when did he find time)

i haven't read the novels, when does one find the time

the introduction is some bullshit. when one comes to sum up the output of h de b, "short" is not the word that comes to mind!!!! yeah thx for that, wish i'd bought the reduced goncourts collection instead

Pere Goriot, director of Huis-Clos University, , thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young sans-culotte in a hot fury.

By "he," I meant Honore, not you, thomp, so you see my paren is actually brill. Has Vautrin showed up yet? Always like him, so far.

no i got that it was a feeble attempt at witticism

Just flippant, but also had never occurred to me that he wrote short stories. Now I'm seeing very mixed comments on his plays, incl. Vautrin.

i started by following this:

http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/suggested-reading-order-of-the-human-comedy/

which mixes everything together - 300 page books next to 18 page short stories.

Thanks! Looks very handy.

oh god no

This NYRB pb was probably the first thing I read from them, and I'd probably say its my go to Balzac. Like this pairing quite a bit.

Peter Handke - A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. I think there is something to the coldness and distance that Handke sets up. And jeez I am ratcheting up on the number of novels/books about suicide.

Peter Stamm - Seven Years.

Ya Unknown Masterpiece is great

I recently started Bouvard & Pecuchet (the edition from ILB's other favorite publishing house, Dalkey Archive) & it is seriously just the most charming thing ever

What I am NOT reading, having attempted the muysteriously much-praised Gone Girl. What an awfully-written thing it is. This is the hero waking up in chapter 1:

"My eyes flipped open at exactly six A.M. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless. At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks..."

How fucking padded can you get? It's the John Lanchester's Capital school of writing.

I'm always grateful for comments like this, because it makes me feel like less of an asshole for having zero interest in the latest airport-novel trend.

Don't think of it as the author's padding, but the character's: look out, here comes the Unreliable Narrator As Self-Obsessed Asshole (sure are a lot of those). May never make it though the book, esp. after coming across Mary Gaitskill's autopsy report:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_03/12173 Mind you, a usually reliable source who is a great fan of Gaitskill and the novel told me that she thinks this review is bonkers (and friends who got MG to read it were "baffled" by her reaction, she says here).

I have to agree with Gaitskill, though i didn't make it far into the book. "That the emotional violence is rendered in smarty-pants chirping makes it more grating than painful." is spot-on to me--the two main character voices were intensely irritating.

The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton’s words, a “fable of modern art.”

Obv knew that History of the Thirteen is threaded through Out One, but didn't realise - until I looked it up, just now - that La Belle Noiseuse is derived from this short story. And Celine and Julie was partly inspired by an early James story - hey, everything's connected, just as Out One suggests.

Oh yes when I first read I had already watched the film and was thinking 'er is this the plot for...'

So was reading Seven years and Peter Stamm is someone I need to read more of. One thing he does in this chamber drama is take anything in life that is common to us: a wedding, a party or xmas party, family gathering, a meet of your gfs parents for the first time, and from all that zone in on moments of awkwardness, alienation, conflict. Still have half of it left, but nothing that was worthwhile was every told.

In turn this provides a very convincing portrayal of: (1) his ultimately hollow desire for a woman that looks the part on paper, and who seems to love him, and also (2) his actual love (a feeling he does not name) for the unattractive uneducated catholic Polish girl who crucially loves him unconditionally, who does and tells him by the end of the first day they meet.

Just posted, all categories:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/10/14/national-book-award-finalists-announced/17267937/

Wuthering Heights, I am embarrassed to admit, for the first time.

On a similar note, ambitiously starting up Tess of the D'Ubervilles to tonight.

Ernst Weiss: Jarmila

Travelling businessman in 1930s Bohemia is annoyed by shitty cheap-arse watch, gets talking to local clockwork toy/watch-maker, learns of his violent and complicated love life - 85 pages, very good, author committed suicide in 1940 when Nazis invaded Paris

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

ok it seems i am really reading the critique of pure reason (first ed.)

there should be support groups for getting through books like that.

i've been reading 'the twenty-five years of philosophy' with some ole grad school people, this has somehow stimulated me to go back to the sources - THE source

strangely, intensive reading of the tractatus this year has made all kinds of fascinating things light up in the critique that i really would have had to muddle through before

those moments are what make reading philosophy so deeply pleasurable--not least because it's often won with such difficulty!

thanks for mentioning the Forster, btw. Gonna check that out!

yeah it's helped too, the leading note of his reading is very effective at brushing aside any obscuring overemphasis on the prolegomena that might wrongfoot your reading of the critique

i wouldn't say… deeply pleasurable—i mean, it's still kant. it's funny, being and time is hella not readable, at least prior to the months of perplexity and obscurity you have to put up with, but it's a very -elegant- book, by comparison. i feel bad for kant now, he's just obviously trying so hard, but as a thing to be read, the book is just this inelegant monstrosity (i think i finally understand the table of contents now too, ha). and even though i'm ok on the jargon, it still makes me anxious to read, because it's like every other sentence re-raises the risk of your losing track of what every single made-up word means.

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Friday, 17 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this country Weiss is vaguely known for Marat/Sade. Its an English disease for a writer to be known way more for his plays than for this novels. Whatever sells/puts bums on seats I suppose.

This wasn't a bad article about H!tler's state of mind/whether he was clinically sane.

Yeah, there are sentences in the CRP and TLP that could almost be interchanged. "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." Similar sense that cognition on the one hand and language on the other are characterized by a kind of tragic necessity to always be going beyond their established limits.

The Critique of Judgment and Philosophical Investigations make another interesting pairing. I've seen papers that discuss the rule-following paradox by talking about free play of imagination and understanding.

I've started William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino. It reads a bit like a textbook, but it's also pretty informative, so I don't mind too much.

He comes up as a sinister figure in climate ethics literature, the guy who advocates for a high discount rate on future losses due to climate change compared with Stern's more virtuous percentage.

Yeah, I kind of like his strenuously even-handed approach, but I'm sure it can rub true believers the wrong way.

Peter Stamm - We're Flying. Raced through these short stories. Stamm captures the mundane to a point where it never looks like being that extraordinary (as the cliche goes) (there is no exclamation mark anywhere), he lets it be - there is something about it that keeps you making turn pages but in the short format you can't spend that long with a character. What makes Seven Years the substantial work it is, is to spend time with Alexander in his actions and thoughts and in the predicament he finds himself in.

Ingeborg Bachmann/Paul Celan - Correspondence. A relationship shot dead at its birth. I'd say anyone who is interested in her novel Malina ought to read this first (I need my own copy of it) as much of it is about this specific relationship (as the commentary somewhat exhaustively details).

Stamm captures the mundane to a point where it never looks like being that extraordinaryKeepin it mundane/real

Even when something happens such as a pregnancy, a death, a suicide, a marriage, a divorce, or whether someone depressed or loving or hating or happy or sad it just doesn't matter. Its like someone switching on a TV to a different channel and watching those events and emotions unfold in a drama or comedy.

Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

Veena Das - Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

About violence in India during the Partition and after Indira Gandhi's death, which was actually thirty years ago next week. She asks questions like: What is the significance of the silence (avoidance) that she sees hovering over these incidents? How does violence of this kind disturb our criteria for humanity and for being alive (like, is it still easy to see a person committing an act like this as human in this moment? as alive (versus as an automaton of some kind)?)? Lots of other questions too. I feel like my reactions so far have been superficial, probably because I'm coming to it with a bit of knowledge of the philosophy she's using, but absolutely no knowledge of contemporary India.

Yeah, for an event of such terrible violence it seems strange how little Partition is talked about in UK/American circles. I don't know enough about contemporary India either, but Saadat Hasan Manto's short stories from the 1950s about Partition are unforgettable--vivid and bitter and terse, like the stories of Isaac Babel.

I feel like I should have more reference points, though, so I'd like to get to Das's book eventually.

I might have picked the wrong book as an introduction to her research. Something more focused on detailed ethnographic description would have been better, whereas I feel like this book, published in 2006, is somewhat of a retrospective rethinking of her own past work, presuming prior familiarity with her ethnographic stuff as well as some of the concepts she's using from Cavell and Wittgenstein - she doesn't always clearly indicate where she's using a technical term from one of them.

Hmm. I suspect Critical Events might take less for granted, but this is just google-abetted idle speculation, since I haven't read Das before.

While Structure and Cognition sounds much more granular and focused more on Hinduism than contemporary Indian politics.

Nigel Hamilton - The Mantle of Leadership. About FDR calling Churchill's shit and leading the war in 1941-1942.

Scott Fitzgerald - The Price was High. Uncollected stories. Rereading it. Most are trash but readable.

I have this odd relation to Fitzgerald where I love his truly throwaway notebook entries in The Crack-Up but much of his magazine writing just feels flimsy--maybe because I know he's capable of something like "May Day."