| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, October 26, 2007 - 12:33 pm: | |
I associate certain foods with certain books. For example:
Honey: Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco
Mayonnaise: Star Trek the movie (the one about saving the whale)
Eggs: H G Wells, War of the Worlds / Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs
I wonder if anyone else is the same. It is not all the time, usually just when I am at the supermarket. Like a form of fictional synaesthesia. |
dan
Username: dan
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 - 1:45 pm: | |
Wow! I don't know what else to say. I associate lots of things with lots of other things, but... food & books? No, not really (except perhaps cookbooks). |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 1:20 pm: | |
It is also possible to do this with roads:
A E Van Vogt: sand and gravel (any sand and gravel)
M Johh Harrison: tar (specifically, Light)
Marguerite Duras: (roadside) ferns
CP Snow: (not snow but) hedges
TS Eliot: (I am getting a centipede for some reason)
Geoffrey Hill: welsh cobblestones
See? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, November 01, 2007 - 12:29 pm: | |
Except for Dan everyone seems either to have died or has adopted a policy of refusing to comment on anything more than current headlines.
Here is a story. I strolled along the underground concourse of Bond St tube yesterday, rounded the corner and stopped to get some money out of the cash machine. A woman was already there so I waited at a discreet distance. A second or so afterwards a man about my age rounded the corner from the opposite direction and paused somewhat nearer to the woman. I pointed that there was already a queue but he ignored me - as he had already done deliberately when he first stopped. Without thinking, I got immediately angry. He wasn't having it and carried on as he was. So I stepped directly in front of him, inches away, and told him what I thought of him. He said he would call security. I ignored him, turned around and got my money out anyway. I was determined that he not succeed in pushing in. This is what happens when I am taken by surprise. I have a trigger temper and do things I don't expect or feel slightly odd about afterwards. I recently inadvertently split the glass of our local Boots 'knocking' on the door because they refused to open because the pharmacist was ill. Now that worried me. They knew who I was and I expected a bill for that; but it didn't arrive. |
dan
Username: dan
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, November 02, 2007 - 12:35 pm: | |
And I was only popping on here for some self-promotion. Have to say though, I'm fascinated by this books & bread idea, and I don't think ES/KRMB will work on Facebook, personally I liked it best when it was just one big long page of multi-layered accretions.
I have a similar temper to yours MJP: small and sometimes meaningless (except to me) events set me off, and I have little regard for my own safety once I get going. I once nearly started a fight with about 100 people who were squeezing to get onto a bus, another time my patience with a friend of mine, who was cycling alongside me, snapped, and I stuck my foot in the wheel of his bike - took all of his spokes out and sent him flying, my foot was strangely protected by my adrenalin levels or something. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, November 02, 2007 - 1:13 pm: | |
"I hate people when they're not polite" - always a worrying lyric, wasn't it?
But everyone's much the same. We try to be zen placid and well-mannered; then something happens, and we lose it -
" *Right,* you useless twat - "
Still: happy days, eh? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, November 02, 2007 - 2:52 pm: | |
I have promised myself to be good mannered I don't know how many times. About a month ago I found myself shouting the ticket office down in London Bridge because I went in to pay a totally unfair 'fine', for not having the full fair, found they couldn't take switch, and then was told by the young chap behind the counter that I had been 'caught' without a ticket by the ticket inspector at Bromley station. The thing was that since I have an oyster card I simply forgot that I was getting off at a different station to usual - went up to the ticket inspector and was issued with a 'fine'. The man at the ticket place at London Bridge desk made two mistakes: not making it simple to pay the fine and then accusing me of being caught. I bellowed at him for about five minutes until a very worried bloodless looking manager came out - and decided to agree with me immediately. That practice of fining is a form of robbery. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, November 05, 2007 - 10:04 am: | |
Another one:
Peter Handke: mushrooms. (Read One Dark Night I left My Silent House and it's obvious) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, November 05, 2007 - 4:28 pm: | |
What would be more warrior-like. Anger or Calm - ? To hit out at random, even if only verbally, at anything that annoys one is essentially an act of self-indulgence. What would be idiotic would be to then think that one has a reputation to defend. I get my anger from my father. However, he is more effective at being angry than I am by several orders of magnitude. He takes pride in it. I tend to let go quite quickly and forget about it. I think the essence of it is that my father has a moral authority that I lack: a capacity to be absolutely irremediably emotionally opposed to something. I can always be persuaded. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, November 05, 2007 - 5:00 pm: | |
A good warrior can be either, depending on the situation. But it's wise to remember the last instruction samurai were taught: when all else fails, walk away. Some opponents will always be too strong, too cunning, or too intractable for any sensible opponent to engage. Put your energies to good use! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, November 06, 2007 - 2:38 pm: | |
Martin, I agree. Anger is a threat response. Something is threatened in one. One defends it, or tries to defend it. But that sense of threat needs surmounting. The need to defend oneself! The temptation to judgement! It needs dealing with. That is, if it knocks one off course, which it can do.
Disengage is good advice. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, November 09, 2007 - 9:02 am: | |
I finally got my mass market copy of Nova Swing. I dislike trade paperbacks. They always feel like a proof copies; and they look self-important and disproportionate. Too bulky. But I find mass market paperbacks charming. The book itself is quite charming, to my surprise. It starts out a bit woodenly; could have done with some editorial cuts to make it less lugubrious; but I am on page 37 and I am charmed. Definitely strawberries. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, November 09, 2007 - 1:55 pm: | |
The middle section is astonishing. I still don't know why it leans so heavily on Tarkovsky/Strugatsky - but you find a body of imagery tucked away in it that's unprecedented in his work. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, November 10, 2007 - 3:56 pm: | |
Hi, All.
The spanish edition of nova swing is coming out next week. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - 11:12 am: | |
I have been reading and unexpectedly enjoying Nova Swing. I thought the first two thirds of it highly original. It is a far more graceful and interesting performance than Light. I am not convinced by how MJH tries to resolve his story however. I am on the last 30 or so pages and I get the impression that actually he isn't interested *at all* in resolving things but wants to throw in a few bits and pieces of nonsense because like a loaf of sliced bread it still has crusts at the beginning and end. I just want more slices of the same not the 'legal totality' that publishers might demand. Leave off the crusts. It seems to me that he reverts to the self-indulgent tone of Light towards the end to show that this story *does* have an end; but where the plot lines are resolved by someone vomiting, or being pathetically shot, the vomit or the shooting (it makes no difference which) seeming to mark an emotional break-off point - and so forth. I find myself wincing with embarassment. I get bored! Why bother! What puzzles me is this. Why doesn't MJH just *drop* all this, the mechanics of 'resolution' and the blah blah. That really is just Hollywood, James Bond, Steven Spielberg, Dean Koontz: it fits there but it doesn't fit here. The whole text dies. Why doesn't he just carry on doing what he is doing, why doesn't he just carry on creating the images, and the cartoonish behaviour, and so on, in lurid succession - whatever makes him happy - until it just drifts off somewhere ... instead of all the 'wastedness'? *I* would be far happier, anyway. MJH is really a poet and as a poet he should recognise he has his own validity, that the marginal nature of poetry can form a centre too, so that he has a poet's priviledges, so that he can be confident that these idioms exist in their own terms, independently of rational necessity. As soon as people start vomiting you know you have to get out the editorial scissors. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - 11:30 am: | |
"Fuck me while I look at it," one character murmurs.
But it may turn out that, as you're look, you may well fuck it.
Up, that is.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/e arth/2007/11/21/scicosmos121.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewe dbox |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - 1:00 pm: | |
I tend not to sympathise with this sort of finding. Less and less. It supposes that the universe is answerable to human rationality, which, it seems - to me - is just a throwback to the kind of religious conviction that believes humanity to be God's chosen species. That is a primitive forshortened view of the unknown. The measure only measures the measure. A recent medical finding is that the more materialist and consumerist someone is, the more that they tend to suffer from stress and illness: ie the more they are enslaved. There is no balance in the attitudes that the forshortened view produces: just a kind of television moronosphere: "everything means nothing to me" because it is just a box of tricks: "if you pull the plug out the picture disappears into a dot on the screen". It is pathological to believe that infinity is containable in a box of tricks. Man is an imaginary being. The only route he has out of himself is to grasp the sublime. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - 3:54 pm: | |
You could find much worse writing.
Like this:
"That's when the core of my soul spasms and snaps, spilling out its filthy pips."
Well, exactly. More here (including the great Ali Smith, caught at a bad moment):
http://tinyurl.com/ypzv3n |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - 2:16 pm: | |
Oh my goodness.
That is something I much admire in MJH. The way he doesn't fall flat on his arse over sex as so many other writers do.
DH Lawrence would be proud of him (as I am sure MJH would be delighted to hear). |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - 2:41 pm: | |
Mailer won:
"The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!"
Mogadon, anyone?
http://tinyurl.com/2ousrm |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, November 29, 2007 - 1:18 pm: | |
Cumulatively I found those very very funny. I fell off my chair laughing.
Found a train book today. Ie looks ideal for the train. The Name of the World by Denis Johnson. Also purchased Iggy Pop, Beat Em Up. Unbeatable. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, December 03, 2007 - 1:29 pm: | |
Finished Nova Swing finally. (Slow reader, obviously.) A fine original book. Glad it won its prize. |