the preceding volume of that i remember being pretty great
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, 29 August 2015 12:44 (eight years ago) link
i am reading gene wolfe, oyy, and working through the library of america james baldwin
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, 29 August 2015 12:45 (eight years ago) link
Yeah - have a 'classic' 70s penguin paperbk of both.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 29 August 2015 13:45 (eight years ago) link
reading this. 2nd book in a trilogy. 3rd book hasn't come out yet. i like it. about a weird fussy race of space conquerors. they really love tea, so you know they are evil.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/vxkfj6hqbqknpmwt7ur9.jpg
― scott seward, Saturday, 29 August 2015 14:08 (eight years ago) link
The Tailor of Panama and Edmund White's States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 29 August 2015 14:25 (eight years ago) link
in the 80's i remember chickening out and not buying states of desire when i saw it in a bookstore after totally loving a boy's own story and the beautiful room is empty. i would read it now!
― scott seward, Saturday, 29 August 2015 15:27 (eight years ago) link
I've been reading Chris Kraus's Torpor, which is just brutal, the last book in Kraus's "failing marriage to Sylvere Lotringer" trilogy, not as manic and colorful as "I Love Dick" but impressive in its ability to balance the playful flexibility of the narrative voice with the crushing sadness of the subject matter. Also going slowly through Brandon Stosuy's anthology of New York Downtown writing in the seventies and eighties, Up is Up But So is Down, and starting Cynthia Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly.
― one way street, Saturday, 29 August 2015 18:52 (eight years ago) link
― scott seward
As a unknowing time capsule of an era decimated in a couple of years, it's poignant.
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 29 August 2015 19:10 (eight years ago) link
yeah, that's one of the reasons i'd be interested in reading it now. forgotten worlds appeal to me.
― scott seward, Saturday, 29 August 2015 19:14 (eight years ago) link
It's also (iirc) p hot, and I'm p much straight, so that's kinda cool. Reading Daphne du Maurier's The Parasites and up to The Auroras of Autumn in Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems.
― It empowers them, he jokes (albvivertine), Sunday, 30 August 2015 00:14 (eight years ago) link
finished Kafka, AMERIKA - less sinister and dark than the other novels but can still be distressing the way the innocent hero is abused by others.
odd how it finishes with such a separate chapter which introduces a brand new character (Fanny) we're supposed to have met before but whose previous appearance must not have made the cut at least in the version I have.
then finished another PKD novel.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 30 August 2015 09:09 (eight years ago) link
Also going slowly through Brandon Stosuy's anthology of New York Downtown writing in the seventies and eighties, Up is Up But So is Down
I just spent some time w/this too, researching my own memoir-ish project. Ended up skimming, frankly. Didn't get Kathy Acker then, don't now. Miguel Pinero's poem "scatter my ashes on the lower east side" >>>>> everything else in the book put together, in my not so humble. Cynthia Carr's David Wojnarowicz bio was fascinating if a little overlong and ultimately shattering, tragic. Gives a sharp, detailed inside view of the 80s EV art scene.
― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Sunday, 30 August 2015 12:11 (eight years ago) link
Pinero's thing is called A Lower East Side Poem.
― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Sunday, 30 August 2015 12:14 (eight years ago) link
That sounds good! I would like to read that poem.
I am going to read Franco Moretti a bit.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 30 August 2015 13:49 (eight years ago) link
A Lower East Side Poem by Miguel Pinero
Just once before I dieI want to climb up on atenement skyto dream my lungs out tillI crythen scatter my ashes thruthe Lower East Side.
So let me sing my song tonightlet me feel out of sightand let all eyes be drywhen they scatter my ashes thruthe Lower East Side.
From Houston to 14th Streetfrom Second Avenue to the mighty Dhere the hustlers & suckers meetthe faggots & freaks will all gethighon the ashes that have been scatteredthru the Lower East Side.
There's no other place for me to bethere's no other place that I can seethere's no other town around thatbrings you up or keeps you downno food little heat sweeps byfancy cars & pimps' bars & juke saloons& greasy spoons make my spirits flywith my ashes scattered thru theLower East Side . . .
A thief, a junkie I've beencommitted every known sinJews and Gentiles . . . Bums & Menof style . . . run away childpolice shooting wild . . .mother's futile wails . . . pushersmaking sales . . . dope wheelers& cocaine dealers . . . smoking potstreets are hot & feed off those who bleed to death . . .
all that's trueall that's trueall that is truebut this ain't no liewhen I ask that my ashes be scattered thruthe Lower East Side.
So here I am, look at meI stand proud as you can seepleased to be from the Lower Easta street fighting mana problem of this landI am the Philosopher of the Criminal Minda dweller of prison timea cancer of Rockefeller's ghettocidethis concrete tomb is my hometo belong to survive you gotta be strongyou can't be shy less without requestsomeone will scatter your ashes thruthe Lower East Side.
I don't wanna be buried in Puerto RicoI don't wanna rest in Long Island CemeteryI wanna be near the stabbing shootinggambling fighting & unnatural dying& new birth cryingso please when I die . . .don't take me far awaykeep me near bytake my ashes and scatter them thru outthe Lower East Side . . .
― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Sunday, 30 August 2015 15:37 (eight years ago) link
Although it doesn't remotely fit I can't help but read that to the tune of The Magnetic Fields 'I'm The Luckiest Guy on The Lower East Side'.
― ledge, Sunday, 30 August 2015 15:41 (eight years ago) link
"A thief, a junkie I've beencommitted every known sinJews and Gentiles . . . Bums & Menof style . . . run away childpolice shooting wild . . .mother's futile wails . . . pushersmaking sales . . . dope wheelers& cocaine dealers . . . smoking potstreets are hot & feed off those who bleed to death . . ."
would have loved for Sinatra to tackle this...
― scott seward, Sunday, 30 August 2015 15:43 (eight years ago) link
Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 30 August 2015 19:56 (eight years ago) link
Imagery and cadence reminds me of at least one Dave Van Ronk song--which comes from a different perspective, and I prefer its original performance on No Dirty Names (available on spotify and iTunes), but still the voice of experience:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao
― dow, Sunday, 30 August 2015 22:48 (eight years ago) link
Good old Flash--if this doesn't show, it's "Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again," on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao
― dow, Sunday, 30 August 2015 23:01 (eight years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao
― dow, Sunday, 30 August 2015 23:04 (eight years ago) link
Sorry! The latest Firefox---no, it's my fault.
― dow, Sunday, 30 August 2015 23:12 (eight years ago) link
Speaking of books about lost worlds, I've always loved Geoffrey Stokes' Star Making Machinery, about a time, when emerging mass bohemia x discretionary income, in the wake of Janis Joplin's farewell vision of "Me and Bobby McGhee"---discreetly changed from "Bobbie"; all things were not yet possible---but still a time when conservatives and hippies could come together and make superstars of Commmander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, with a little help from their friends in the studio, the press-publicity meld, their warped label, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers---o it got heavy, but Stokes' humane, lucid, unsentimental sense of justice and absurdity never slips into Behind The Music soap opera.And the press junkets! For sub-Grub Streeters, making maybe 10 bucks for 1000 words, in some cases (and 10 bucks for 1000 words was still 10 bucks for 1000 words, even way back then, lemmetellya). From Flushing to Frisco, even. "And hey, doesn't your sister live out there? If you wanna stay a few days into next week, that'd be cool too."
― dow, Monday, 31 August 2015 01:42 (eight years ago) link
(Spoiler: making superstars of Cody's crew seemed possible, to some...)
― dow, Monday, 31 August 2015 01:43 (eight years ago) link
Wuthering Heights
(first time)
― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 August 2015 01:46 (eight years ago) link
i read wuthering heights for the first time over a three-month period as part of my english lit a level and still have not recovered
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 31 August 2015 01:50 (eight years ago) link
It's been a good summer for getting grounded in the Archaean and Proterozoic:
Robert M. Hazen - The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (2014)Paul G. Falkowski - Life’s Engines: How Microbes made Earth Habitable (2015)Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (2015)
The Hazen is the most readable, I've learned most from the first 4 chapters of the Lane. Up next is: Gerard Russell - Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (2014). I feel I haven't paid proper reverence to Ahura Mazda and Abatur of late.
― statisticians the world over rejoice (Sanpaku), Monday, 31 August 2015 02:11 (eight years ago) link
I finished Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God. It takes up an interesting problem, but it seems a bit unsure about what level to pitch itself at. It seems perhaps like someone trying to write for a more generalist audience than they're used to, and not sure how to be less technical without dumbing things down. Also I didn't always feel comfortable with the way Lilla paraphrased the arguments & ideas of the authors he wrote about. I could understand how they fit into the story he was trying to tell, but I wasn't sure that I understood what they would have understood themselves to be saying. Also, I think I just see the interplay of theology and politics a bit differently than he does. His sweeping talk about the "Great Separation" annoyed me as much as it annoyed some people on the Immanent Frame blog. I'm tempted to say the discussion of the book there is better than the book itself.
― o. nate, Monday, 31 August 2015 02:23 (eight years ago) link
reading eileen gunn's first collection. she is a hoot. i need her 2014 collection. might have to buy that online.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41y13CJKkML._SX303_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
― scott seward, Monday, 31 August 2015 12:50 (eight years ago) link
some of the 2nd collection is readable online:
http://questionablepractices.net/stories/
her steampunk parodies are fun: http://www.tor.com/2010/11/01/the-perdido-street-project/
― scott seward, Monday, 31 August 2015 12:53 (eight years ago) link
I'm most of the way through Roumeli now. The book's biggest fault is his overreaching prose, which seems to equate an exceptional style with an excellent style, but the substance of the book is well worth it. The events, places and people he describes are pretty awesome to read about.
― Aimless, Monday, 31 August 2015 17:00 (eight years ago) link
noted this on facebook: in eileen gunn's 1991 story Fellow Americans, about an alternate history Richard Nixon, she totally uses the word "futurama".
― scott seward, Monday, 31 August 2015 17:08 (eight years ago) link
Futurama was a ride at the 1939 World's Fair.
― Sanpaku, Monday, 31 August 2015 17:13 (eight years ago) link
AHA! in this story there is a 1990 world's fair. that governor of new york bobby kennedy visits...
― scott seward, Monday, 31 August 2015 17:52 (eight years ago) link
huh I remember reading that Gunn book when it came out - it's okay, I think I got rid of it...?
― Οὖτις, Monday, 31 August 2015 18:00 (eight years ago) link
i like it. her.
― scott seward, Monday, 31 August 2015 18:11 (eight years ago) link
reading Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona and enjoying it a lot. her first book and it's considered a children's book, but i can't imagine any child reading it here. i did have Rufus read the first chapter aloud this morning though. just to hear how it sounded coming from a child.
now i want to find some more of her books. she wrote 25 books after this one! she was in her 40's when she wrote Verona. let's hear it for the late bloomers. (lots of story collections too. i definitely want to find those. probably not that easy. don't think she has really made a name for herself here.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Gardam
"Gardam gave up work to raise three children—Tim, Kitty, and Tom—in what she has called a “monster of a beat-up house” in the London suburb of Wimbledon. She channelled her creativity into becoming the ideal mother. “I gave myself to my children,” she said, pouring white wine. “It happens to some women.” She invited the neighborhood busybodies to tea. She fed the hordes. “I did all the right things, because I wanted my children to have friends,” she said. The day that Tom went to school, she marched upstairs, sat down at her desk, and began to write. “I ought to tell you at the beginning,” the opening line of her first novel reads, “that I am not quite normal.”
― scott seward, Tuesday, 1 September 2015 14:19 (eight years ago) link
pieces on her in the NYT and the New Yorker last year, so, maybe her time will come in the states. at the age of 85.
― scott seward, Tuesday, 1 September 2015 14:20 (eight years ago) link
I'm finishing Up is Up But So is Down, which I mentioned upthread. For the most part, it's been filling in my sense of the downtown scene (through its breadth of contributors, but also through Stosuy's inclusion of downtown fliers and zine art, which give a vivid idea of the connections between the writing scene and the artworld) rather than radically revising it: I was probably most struck by the texts by Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, and David Wojnarowicz, but I already loved their work. The main discoveries of the anthology for me were probably Tim Dlugos's long AIDS elegy "G-9" and, to a lesser extent, Patrick McGrath's Wilde/Huysmans riff "The Angel", and the anthology reminds me to look more closely at Cookie Mueller and Penny Arcade's writing in particular. I also got the sense that I probably don't need to engage much further with Joe Maynard (who seems to have fallen off the map, anyway), Nick Zedd, or Richard Prince, at least as prose writers, since they don't have much more to offer here than ~edgy~ misogyny and a kind of abstract stab at transgression. I also have to say that the anthology makes the downtown writing scene, aside from the Nuyorican Poets' contributions, seem pretty white-centered: I'm curious to know to what extent that reflects the historical dynamics of the scene and to what extent that impression arises from the anthology's editorial choices.
― one way street, Tuesday, 1 September 2015 18:46 (eight years ago) link
All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:07 (eight years ago) link
Ursula K Le Guin: The Wind's Twelve Quarters -- early story collection. not everything in here is doing it for me, but the ones that do are amazing (esp. the one about Winter, later setting of Left Hand of Darkness)
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:08 (eight years ago) link
Started The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, put it down 60 pages in - didn't get appeal of superhero don juan main character, not sure what parts of the plot are not terribly cliche, prose seemed p old school too, didn't enjoy random poetry references (actually I rarely enjoy main characters who think about literature all the time, it gets a bit meta icky for me - like, it's not very believable that all these main characters care so much for lit, writer is just projecting stuff)
Now reading The edge of Europe by Pentti Saarikoski which is a g r e a t read so far, strong poetic energy, lots of non sequituring stream of consciousness thoughts from cats to Stalin, I dunno what to say, unlike most stuff I've ever come across - reading a Danish translation
― niels, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 10:26 (eight years ago) link
xxxpost
I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.
― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Wednesday, 2 September 2015 10:44 (eight years ago) link
It's been a while,mbut i remember keith haring's autobiography being good in that vein. Never liked his art at all, but he lived in an interesting time and place and mileu
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Wednesday, 2 September 2015 11:36 (eight years ago) link
"All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though"
i naturally thought of you as the person here who had probably read her stuff. maybe the recent u.s. press will get some sort of stateside reissue series going.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:31 (eight years ago) link
(and her publisher is little, brown in the u.k. so it wouldn't be hard for them to reprint stuff for the u.s.)
― scott seward, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:36 (eight years ago) link
enjoying calvin trillin 'travels w/ alice' rn, its v charming
― johnny crunch, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:59 (eight years ago) link
I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Wednesday, September 2, 2015 5:44 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I'll look at Gooch's memoir sometime, m coleman: I like his piece in Up is Up, "TV," and I remember his O'Hara biography as being solid, but I don't think I've read anything by him that sounds as intense as that.
― one way street, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 17:34 (eight years ago) link
Got three xpost Gardams from the library shop: Old Filth, The People On Privilege Hill, and The Queen of The Tambourine---read any of those, James M? They're trade PBs, from Europa Editions, Ferrante's US publisher. Gave Old Filth to my aunt, haven't heard back about it. Haven't read any yet myself.
― dow, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 17:36 (eight years ago) link
I haven't read those, though everyone who has seems to think the Old Filth books are the culmination of her career, for what it's worth. All the ones I've read are tatty old second-hand Abacus paperbacks from the 1980s I got when I worked next door to a used bookshop.
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Thursday, 3 September 2015 00:20 (eight years ago) link