| Author | Message | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Some are reading, some aint. Ho ho ho. There was an article about Michael Hoffman at the weekend. He is the same age as me; which prompted me to re-read his last collection, Approximately Nowhere. I read it straight through, one end to the other. It contains quite a number of lusty poems about his marriage to L. - now divorced from him - who it turns out is Lavinia Greenlaw. Odd connection, that. He's stopped writing poetry; and mostly translates. Possibly (one can't help wondering) because of his failed marriage. I have his selected poems on order; I have three of the collections anyway so it wont be much of bargain. But an intense remarkable writer. On the French side of things (Hoffman being half German) we have Stephen Romer's new collection Yellow Studio. Another I would say equally good poet, but daintier, and more sinuous; and even a little Gunnish at times. Hoffman succeeds at writing about London. The limitation is that he relies on cartoonish flip imagery now that I think of it which is quite like Harrison. Nothing wrong with that in itself except that it means it is 'English' - which is a tone I want to get rid of if I am to have any sort of a voice that I am happy with. I do not want the reader to know which country I am from. A classical tone, Pavese would be a good example. Which brings me straight to Dante again; who follows on more or less directly give or take a millenium, from Virgil: the impersonal voice. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Waking to the radio. Its level voices tell me something has altered, and it is like a comfort less, something in the rhythm and the pitch that sets my teeth on edge something harder and more pragmatic like a floor uncarpeted, or is it a throw back to that wall-eyed bedsit where I woke to voices like these (The beginning of Romer's 'Retour au pays') At home in neither country! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Here is a problem. A too distinctive tone - too quirky - or mannered - a voice in which the personality behind it is too easily recognised, coopts everything to itself; everything becomes it. With Dylan Thomas for example you sometimes get the feeling that a thing is never itself but it stands as an adjunct to his personality. Is this distinctively urban? A balance has to be struck. In Virgil's Eclogues: there is generally no single voice; there is instead a series of voices, a form of theatre, around a single circumstance; and in which their mode of register often changes - as in from speaking to singing. A kind of compare and contrast. Getting the register to change can in fact be the whole trick. I keep thinking that Hofmann has essentially got sick of the sound of his own voice. A voice that does nothing but co-opt the world. So he's got fed up with it and wants to find a world outside it. (He has a very definately wobbly confidence; which is very English characteristic even if he is half German.) His translations of Durs Grunbein in Ashes for Brekfast can be seen as part of that process; but on the other hand Grunbein is himself distinctively urban and writes a poetry that coopts the world to its own inwardly understood themes. In other words, a poetry in which say a tree is described - simply to be regarded - as in: as an idyll - there is no such thing; so such form of object is to be discovered in these words; or at least it seems there isn't. The feeling of being alive, and of being in a world, which can generally be regarded as the model of the idyll - comes from a kind of inversion in which (let's say) the irrevocably stained, the irremediably polluted, altered, made world itself becomes a kind of Brodskian idyll: the graffiti-defaced tree itself the object of contemplation. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Just to clarify (because I am writing these things down in snatches): my understanding of the classical model of the idyll, such as one finds in Virgil's Eclogues, or in Theocritus, or even in Plato for that matter - as in a conversation held in some sort of shaded spot on a bright sunny day - where one hears the wind in the leaves, birds singing, perhaps the tinkling of a stream - a situation that by the very nature of the circumstances acquires a kind of ideality - glorious day; a world at peace - a mood of contemplation or celebration - in this situation one could say the world stands in such a manner as to exist without any ostensible inflection; it simply is. It is not coopted for any ulterior purpose but one simply exists in it. That is part of what I see is the challenge in the context of the poetic urban voice, which so often deflect us away from such a mood. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
"Born Yesterday," by Gordon Burn. Burn grabs the UK headlines from summer 07 as they go by, adds personal encounters (Thatcher as a dog-patting bag lady with handlers in a London park; Blair's paranoid constituency house, all tall trees and no apparent entrance; Kate Middleton furtively adding Turkish Delights to her basket in Tesco) and produces something that's less a novel than New Journalism. Poetic/occult parallels abound (Brown's glass eye vs. Madeleine McCann's iris vs. the staring eye on the cover of Burn's novel "Fullalove"; Heather divorcing Paul, who first went on holiday with Linda to Praia de Luz, where Maddy disappeared). You read it in two hours, then want more. Impressions? Tony and Cherie emerge as even shallower, money-grabbing twats than you thought possible; Gordon as tormented (I didn't know his eye surgery now makes it makes it hard for him to smile and sparks a small agony whenever he gets the right nerves to work in tandem); and Thatcher as figurehead for a dead time and a dead family - Carol doesn't even have her mother's phone number. Recommended. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Must check it out - 'Fullalove' was pretty cool, a very unsettling read. On the Blairs - just been enjoying the latest on the radio, as Tony 'recent convert to Catholicism' Blair sets off to save the world through the depth of his religion. Are there no limits to that man's self regard? His sense of religion as a comforting presence when a populace and its representatives disagreed with him nearly made me throw my home radio out of the window this morning. And as for Cherie's *readings* last week on Channel 4... | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Relegate him to Rottenpockets and Cain's Ice; round about Canto 32. Him and his wife of course. They deserve no less. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
But, hey - there's still room for comic writing - yah? http://tinyurl.com/4umnj2 If McEwan's stuck for a title, "Tedious Fucking Crap" might well be a contender. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I take it you have nothing but admiration for the mighty but not so meaty McEwan. Curious how successful writers are often irritating *beyond words*. However it might be because beyond a certain professional sheen they fail to write well enough or interestingly enough to merit attention, so that having paid attention to their work - you can't forgive them for wasting your time *and* being successful. I think it's that combination. In these terms, they somehow all resemble Tony Blair. Martin Amis - another dead ringer. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
By the way I think "Tedious ... " slows down the zip too much. Too many vowel sounds to consonants. A Roman numbers thing I think. A bit crisper might be for example "Total Fucking Crap". Just my opinion of course. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
TFC - why not?  It's the lukewarm lack of any real vision or passion, buffed up into LitEventUk, that snags my knickers: books for folk at a recent party I went to, who were thrilled Paul Simon is playing Oxfordshire in July and still asking who had *really* won the elections in Zimbabwe. Really, empty writing which is supposed to show you're Well Read - but just signifies a trendy ignorance. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm. Reminds me of visiting student friends in Cambridge when I was a student - a lot of people there who were very good at being clever, but not very good at thinking. I felt like they were learning a script of the right things to say, read, etc for the rest of life. *removes chip from shoulder* Having said that, there were some seriously, intimidating talented people there too! And they were actually the most interesting people to talk to, because you felt engaged with rather than performed to. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
The same goes for Oxford, what little of it I see these days. But you learn that a lot of the "cleverness" is a bluff shell to protect them from the horrors of public school - and much of the "script" is simply networking. The world outside those college walls is just as demanding for many of them as it is for us - and in some cases, more. I interviewed an Oxbridge 2:1 English graduate for a job here. I had to keep a straight face, too: I asked her what she could tell me about the company. Big pause. "Well. It's big, isn't it?" Oh, yes. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The importance of a good title: it sets the tone, a sense of impetus, gives a push forwards .. Like Amis, and many others, McEwen reads better as a 'digested read'. So: "TFC" The lid snaps on the box The athlete's off the blocks The starter pistol's bang ... No - he's playing with his wang | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
At the moment I find myself compelled into reading Virgil and Dante, being provoked, possibly, by a sense of the inevitability of these writers: they are somehow defining. Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso - those fictional constructs seem to define life better than anything else - so much of life can be defined as Hell I think. I think what I basically believe is that those works amount to 'recollections of the actual'; memories revisted with such precision and life that something of their complete sense is intimated. Same with Virgil. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Probably why Virgil's works were used as an oracle for hundreds of years. It didn't do Charles I much good: http://whenhernameyouwriteyoublot.blogspot.com/200 6/08/et-mihi-res-non-me-rebus-subiungere.html | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Anyway, cheer up. The Prophet Ron is here: " 'Final Witness' reveals the Seven Thunders of the Book of Revelation, which the apostle John was not allowed to record!" So how do we know that what he says is actually - but never mind. I'm sure we'll all get over it. http://www.the-end.com/RonaldWeinland.asp | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
As a footnote, there's this: "There will be a small window of time where they [the unsaved] might be reached for the Kingdom of God. We have made it possible for you to send them a letter of love and a plea to receive Christ one last time. You will also be able to give them some help in living out their remaining time. In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys'. " - Please do! I'll see the rest of you in the West End - bring the champagne! http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com/index-3.html | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
What I like about the Comedia is that it is intellectually rigorous. Its intellectual foundations are very similar to those that coincidentally I have built for myself. Human beings are confined to Dante's Hell because they fail to understand that life is an infinity. They are consigned for all eternity to contemplate the finitude that they failed to rise above. They have basically violated their own natures: the Devil's role in this is that he functions as a passive moron. Our difficulties are presented very much as a debate. For example, Virgil, Dante's guide for Hell and for most of Purgatory is consigned to Limbo according to this scheme along with all the other great pagan thinkers and poets. So Aristotle and Virgil, who form two of the main pillars of Dante's intellectual grasp - they are in Hell along with all the other sinners! Needless to say, Dante himself finds this highly disturbing; but I find his consistency and logic and his preparedness to doubt and re-think and doubt again superb. In short I think the Comedia is successful not just artistically but as a philosophical text that articulates most of the basic concepts of the reality of human knowledge - in his inimitable 'vernacular'. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” < http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
The Nicholas Carr article seems spot on, although I have to admit I skim-read the second half. I find that newspapers have the same effect on me as the Internet - the more I read newspapers, the less I am able to read long texts. Even more noticeable than my loss of reading stamina, though, has been my loss of memory for telephone numbers. I used to have dozens of the things stashed away in my mind, nowadays I don't even have any idea what my wife's phone number is, and I frequently forget our home number. The fact that I've had to deal with numbers growing from the (perfect for short-term memory) 7 digits to a less manageable 9 or more probably doesn't help, but mainly it's because I now have all sorts of devices to remember numbers for me. Hopefully the memory space previously devoted to phone numbers has been freed up for something more interesting... | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
- I skimmed the second half, too! Children's author Peter Opie once made the observation that the two most ingenious inventions were the book and the tray: one enables you to store more facts than you can remember, the other to carry more things than you can fit in your hands. I think we're into similar parallels with the Net. As Frances Yates noted, there were exactly these fears when printing began: the notion that it would destroy remembrance. In fact, it deepens the process and makes it verifiable. It may well be that the Net has a similar effect, making readers of a diferent (but no less sharp) variety. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Last year I picked up a book while on holiday in Wales: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow, I am looking at it again. It is about the loves and doings of Dylan Thomas in New Quay Cardiganshire and whether or not it was from there rather than Laugharne that he took the main inspiration for Under Milk Wood. A suprisingly interesting book. I believe it forms the basis of the film The Edge of Love about a shooting in Thomas's house Majoda by an SAS friend. For me the most interesting part concerns Thomas's spell in Iran (!) filming for an oil company during the time of Mossedeq. Thomas was a very very sensitive soul, for all his blase smoking and drinking behaviour, and it affected him badly. Also, the sexual shenanigans in New Quay! Good lord. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
While on holiday in Wales a week ago, I picked up a biography of R.S. Thomas. The man is almost the platonic ideal of 'curmudgeon'. Wrote few good ditties though. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Anybody ever read John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up? The impression this novel made on me when I first read it - back in the mid-seventies I suppose - was earth shattering. Its bleak pessimism I think went a considerable way to forming my early adult view of the world - I would say partly because the novel is very imaginative for all that it is unhappy - you can live in it. That is what my memory tells me. I have read it only once, enjoyed it far more than Stand on Zanzibar which I read after it and which seemed inferior; and now suddenly I want to read this strange Sheep novel again. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Never read The Sheep Look Up, MJP. But after looking it up, I think I might. Sounds up my alley. Though, part of me winces to think that so many have found his book to such an accurate prediction of our current plight. Who was listening when it was written I wonder? Currently I'm reading The Bending Cross which is quite good. I'm curious: without looking him up, do any of you guys know who Egene Debs is? I doubt he's widely known outside of America. Certainly I didn;t learn about him in school. Feels good to fill in that gap though. His story is, for lack of a better word, inspirational. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm still halfway through far more books than I care to mention (my excuse: the Internet made me incapable of finishing books). Actually, in most cases I'm more like quarterway through, if that. But I've a feeling I may actually finish my latest starter: The Stuff of Thought - Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker. Interesting stuff: Pinker uses the syntax and semantics of language (mainly English, but calling upon a whole host of others to back up his case) to try and work out the core building blocks of human thought. He then addresses the implications of this mental structure for the way we perceive and act upon the world. Incidentally, I'm finding it much easier to read non-fiction than fiction nowadays. This feels wrong (I'm sure that, for most of my life, it's been the other way around). I'm worried it might also be related to the concentration-destroying powers of the Internet: nowadays I only seem to be interested in reading a book if I can see a way of directly mapping it onto the world out there. Of course, I *know* that reading good fiction will also enlighten me and make me a better person (right?), but I'm not quite as prepared to devote time to the fluff & puff of "stories". | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
http://seorant.ath.cx/police/ladybird.html | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I finished a book! I finished a book! The Sacred Thread by JL Brockington. An overview of the history of Hinduism. Actually, I didn't quite finish it because half of the last page was missing but I'm pretty sure that the butler did it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
In a way the Sheep Look Up is a hard hitting novel version of Soylent Green but with a more real bigger in scope canvas; very much a real-world research novel. I am proud to own the 1977 Orbit-Quartet paperback, bought new. I love the way it's written; the seventies science fiction avante guard broken surface to it, and the unmitigated pessimism. It's a little seventies semi-sexist masterpiece. I am simultaneously reading Dante, James Lovegrove and about a dozen others. Doesn't bother me except in that I never have sufficient reading time ... I put books to one side often enough but usually finish them - eventually. Like the Thomas Two Bungalows book. I got half way through Asimov's Foundation and Earth then put it to one side; will pick it up perhaps a year or so later when I feel the need for his steady universe in a nutshell style. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
My longer journey to work at the brand new Sheppard Library has given me more reading time, to the extent that I read another one: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys. Feels very much of that early 60s literate sf school along with Walter M Miller and Alfie Bester. At heart a flawed human novel dealing with memory, identity and the relationship between men and women and the self and the other. Started Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor on the bus (and tube) this morning. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I re-read Signs of Life on a train journey to and from London. I like it better than the first time I read it, but it's still not as good as Course of The Heart. That Choe needs a good slap. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
He needs a good something, right enough. But of course, never gets it. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
That's a kinda inbuilt feature with MJH. Throughout Light they're killing, hurting feelings and generally acting like shits and what goes around repeatedly doesn't come around. Other than the Shrander but his motives are deeply non-euclidean. CotH: I like reading it around Xmas. The bits where he's buying himself presents crack me up every time. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I've just re-read CotH before passing it to someone who'd never heard of MJH. She was blown away, and promptly started rethinking the whole way she writes: familiarity can make you forget how cogent and probing his prose can be. "Signs" is a quieter book, but I love the quickstep trade-off between China/Isobel's fallen affair and Choe's impossible green woman, with that flawlessly poignant observation: something loves us, but it only loves us once. The story's all dead flowers and useless objects, and you can never get the bottom of it. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Sorry, I meant SoL with regards to Xmas. What's interesting about that novel is also the way that it turns genres on a penny. Love story, pagan mystery and then a taste of thriller with all stops in between. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
That's one way of putting it. Here's another: "... less like a book than an assault, a wound, an onslaught of dream-killing mirrors, a battalion of bloodthirsty words, an epidemic of images that burrow into the readerly brain and claw their way through the murk of accumulated wistfulness and self-delusion until all that's left is the petrified carcass of desire." Indeed. http://www.sfsite.com/08b/an206.htm | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I just finished I am Alive and You are Dead, a biography of Philip K Dick that understands him quite brilliantly (Carriere's title borrows from Ubik). It is a haunting book. At the end of it I felt I could sum up Dick's life in a single sentence: "Here was a man who knew he was going to die; and then he died." Dick knew, knew to his bones, to his horror and sorrow, that the universe is hostile - that we are predated on by creatures from Alpha Centauri or somewhere: a situation horrific, unreal and comical all at the same time, whichever way up you look at it. The biography sends you back to the novels and stories. Some of my favourites are the so called minor novels, the stories in a minor key: like The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth, Our Friends from Frolix 8, The Divine Invasion; Flow My Tears the Policeman Said; Prominent Author. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
David Byrne is currently in Madrid working on a museum project in which the main exhibit is a singing robot: it sings in his voice. You can see the potential. Develope a digitally evolved 'typical' voice print - might be similar to one of Kraftwerk's or Eno's, as on an Eno/Fripp collaboration I have - or such as they have on the New Scientist web site of a 'neanderthal' voice (I think the vowels a and e have been worked out) and ally that to a convincingly articulate robot face, body, head and you have something remarkable and banal simultaneously. PKD has to be acknowledged here but Byrne fails to mention him and is a bit plodding in his thinking in these terms. It's hard not to be. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Philip K Dick viewed the ordinary common sense idea of reality as fundamentally fake or secondary (or second rate): making him the great postmodernist of modern letters (in my view) - promoting the idea that - in contrast with the modernist where the concept of originality stands as the rock on which art is to be built - nothing is original, all is secondary, even the artist himself is a kind of fake (probably). If you contrast MJH, he still has alot of the modernist in him. He is still in pursuit of the idea of originality in the sense for example that a miserablist authenticity to life is real. For Dick that is just another false mirror or metaphysical jack in the box. Obliquely connected with this perhaps, I would like to see MJH publish a collection of his poems. Those I have seen I liked. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I didn't know he wrote poems (apart from the tegeus-Cromis ones). | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
A writer I quite like: Eric Brown. An old fashioned kind of sf writer somehow. I have this new paperback Helix, neat white and the approximate size of a block of butter but with a space ship exploding on the cover; it looks ok. The ideal beach / plane read. Not that I see much of either thing at the moment. If Al ever visits these boards, Stephen Baxter rates him very highly. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
Well, it feels like Autumn here, but still officially summer for another couple of weeks. And what a good one it's been for reading. Over the last 2-3 years it feels like I've only read about a book per year, but since I started working at the BBC, and spending lots of time on buses, this has become closer to one per week. Since my last post on this thread, I've read Crusaders by Richard T Kelly, Eat your Heart Out by Felicity Lawrence (prompted by MJH's mention here of her previous book, Not on the Label), Wildwood by Roger Deakin (just wonderful!) and several others. Just started on The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin - light detective fiction from the 40s, great stuff. A little bit Graeme Green, but funnier, and quite visual - I can quite imagine this as a film, in the style of an Ealing Comedy. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Yeah, public transport is great for reading. Had a bit of strange patch a few weeks back when I read Round The Bend by Nevil Shute and Bhowani Junction by John Masters. These were followed by a bit of E Nesbit - The Phoenix and the Carpet. Things are terribly English at iotacism Towers. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
This, excellent and very moving: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guernica-Twentieth-century -Gijs-Van-Hensbergen/dp/0747568731/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U TF8&s=books&qid=1220962295&sr=8-1 This, intriguing: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Alchemist-Cagliostro- Master-Reason/dp/0060006919/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s= books&qid=1220962394&sr=1-10 - And this, which starts well (secret Saharan cities; Joujouka), only to get lost in yet more rich Americans abroad and yer general, much dated Beat bollocks: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Process-Brion-Gysin/dp/158 5677116/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220962474& sr=1-3 | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
- You want nan with that? "If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/42ea4c9a-fec3-11dc-9e04- 000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 Rushdie didn't even make the shortlist. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Continuing my theme of stuffy Englishmen's exotic fictions: Ma Wei Slope by Keith West. "A novel about the T'ang Dynasty of China" we are told. Complete and unabridged 1954 orange Penguin, rather scruffy and yellowed. Contains some very bad faux-Chinese poetry. Apparently West - a nom de plume for Kenneth Westmacott Lane - translated poetry for "periodicals in both English and American". The book jacket tells me more about Keith West than I can find on the internet. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
All together now: "Glocer jack, glocer Jack..." | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Algis Budrys: RIP http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/12/scienc efictionfantasyandhorror | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I read Suze Rotolo's recent memoir of Greenwich Village in the '60s and her time as Bob Dylan's girlfriend, "A Freewheelin' Time." Her style's engaging, but the book is hamstrung from the start. She's too discreet to reveal much of Dylan's private life. Also, as an astute artist empowered by feminism, Rotolo is in the galling position of having to sell a book on the basis of once having been some guy's "chick." I'm sure she has a great story to tell about dealing with the stupidities of fame by association, and about her own determination in the '70s to be something more than "the girl holding Dylan's arm on that album cover." But it's a tale she doesn't really detail here: even her abortion (Dylan's child) is finessed in a few lines - and it can't have been like that, either at the time or in dealing with all the emotions that must still touch her to this day. So you get some frustrating lapses of memory - uniquely, she had supper with Dylan and his parents, but can't remember much about it except the seating plan. You get some strange omissions - little or nothing on Dylan's drug use, his appalling infidelity, the widely-reported argument that ended their relationship and led to Dylan's dreadful song "Ballad in Plain D," or even much mention the man she left Dylan for and eventually married, though he shares the book's dedication. And you get nothing on her life after the Sixties, and nothing about any subsequent contact with Dylan. Is "Simple Twist of Fate" really about her? What did she feel being interviewed on camera for Dylan's documentary "No Direction Home"? How does Dylan or her own partner feel about all this ancient love and rancour being raked up for public consumption? We never find out, because those questions are never asked. There's way too much flabby prose along the lines of "the times really were a-changin'," and the book dribbles off into little more than musings from yet another Sixties' survivor who's forgotten most of what once made them so intriguing to the rest of us in the first place. You have to respect Rotolo for not doing this in a far more lurid way, years ago, for large amounts of money: and she's right, some things are far too precious to share in public. But if you set out to tell your life and times as a close friend of a major cultural figure, it should be done with better recall and much less evasion than this. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Has anyone here read Paul Auster's New York trilogy? I'm most of the way through the first book, but I'm thinking of quitting on it. It isn't very enlightening...or even very amusing. It's taking a lot of work to sludge through the wankery. Does it get better? Is it worth it? Before I started Auster, I finished a book that I had found on the subway, James Meek's The People's Act of Love. It was really quite good in its very human portrayal of the motivations and consequences of extremism and idealism. Very vivid, simple prose, almost like a fable maybe. But with a subtle, layered strucure. I liked it, though I feel like I missed some of the ,more nuanced elements and should read it again as I was pulled ahead through the plot at a rate that didn't allow for properly noticing what was really going on all the time. Next on the list is Pontypool Changes Everything which looks fantastic. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
- I got that far with the trilogy, too! I loved Meek's book (though it needed a little bit more at the climax). Present stuff: about 2/3 through T. Etchells's "The Broken World," and some Ambrose Bierce stories. Laffs - we got 'em. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Glad it's not just me Martin. The trilogy really is horrible, isn't it? Rather than take it on the subway this morning, I read Logical Chess: Move by Move. It was a far more interesting choice. Thinly fictionalized Lacan isn't my thing I guess. I wonder a bit about the ending of Act of Love too. I tend to agree with you, but I also find it satifying that all the extremism etc. fizzled out without climax. Very apporpriate. Never read Etchells. What's the verdict? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Auster's probalem is trying to be a modernist post-Beckett, and - well, it can't be done. As with Joyce, Ballard, or Burroughs, there's nothing more to be said in those areas, unless it's pastiche work. Etchells: quite a feat of ventriloquism. He slips into what appears a flawless impersonation of a US pizza clerk, writing a "walkthrough" of his favourite game, set against real-life "walkthroughs" of desertion and disappearance. I'm about 2/3 of the way in. Dude's tone of voice is addictive - but I'm starting to wonder if the book isn't too long for its own good. We'll see. Definitely rcommended, though. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I couln't get through the New York Troilogy either, but the first part was okay. It's been made into a graphic novel which is a good bit more entertaining than than the book Š but it shows that, once stripped of the wanky writing, there's not much story there. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Algis Budrys, RIP indeed. Tom Disch's view: >Ding-Dong! the witch is dead! >Which old witch? Algis Budrys! Ding-Dong indeed! He was 77. What a long wait it's been. I was certain I would beat him to the exit, but no I get to dance on his grave. He wrote a (would-be) killer review of my first novel The Genocides, which proves (1) that I am a nihilist, and (2) that I was the sedulous ape of J.G. Ballard, who may be blamed for most of my failings. For the next five or six years he bad-mouthed me at every opportunity and only laid off when he found himself lapping me [at] the Clarion workshop in Michigan at yearly intervals. At Clarion he seemed to me as obnoxious as he did in print, always being armed with old LP "comedy" records so that at the party that marked his departure/my arrival we would all have the opportunity to sit down and listen to His records. He had the instincts of a tsar and in his twilight years he did his best to turn SF into a fiefdom of Scientology with himself as Patriarch. Ding-dong, the man is dead, and as Brutus said the Good lives after, and we can just inter the crappy, larger remnant. He was a mean, envious, fat old diabetic, but there are those who might say the same of me. They can do so here, if they like. >But again I say: Ding Dong! http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/199097.html | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Hi Alex. It looks like the Empty Spacers agree on Auster. Cool story: I was reading the New York trilogy on the subway last night when the guy sitting next to me asked if I liked it. I said that I wasn't really enjoying it and he replied that he'd found reading it to be like "chewing sawdust". He then went on to suggest that I try Denis Johnson's "Angels" or Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers if I wanted to read "good modern fiction". He was an interesting guy, so I'll probably look into his suggestions. Regarding Auster, I'm beginning to think that meta anything is a inevitably a snooze fest. He's all brains, no heart. There's nothing human in the novel. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm sure I read a Paul Auster novella once, but looking at his list of books none of them sound particularly familar. The sensation of chewing sawdust, however, does. Currently reading Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski. Beautifully noir styling, and what seems like rather a good translation. I'm going through a bit of a crime-phase at the moment: recently read He Died with his Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Some passages in it reminded me stylistically of M John Harrison - there's a wonderful riff about the imagined future trajectory of a junkie's life, which I would quote here if only I hadn't already given the book away. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
There is another writer, somebody Powers, not Tim - Tim is pretty good - but I remember going to a reading of his, he was supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced American bread, but I could not believe how convoluted and pretentious the writing was, virtuoso slop ... So far I have avoided Auster, not read a word. My last but one big American novel was Philip Roth's The Plot Against America; overwritten in parts but very very good. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Derek Raymond: I recently read 'I was Dora Suarez' and I still feel mucky. Horrifyingly gripping and bleak. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I plan to get hold of 'I was Dora Suarez' soon. The most horrifying aspect of 'He Died with his Eyes Open' is the way in which it makes you complicit. It's one of those books where the full force doesn't hit you until after you've finished it, at which point you find yourself staring into your own soul and finding a void. By contrast, 'Death in Breslau' is much, much gorier, but in a faintly comic Meng & Ecker sort of way (right down to the Savoy-esque cover illustration). | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
"Dora" has provoked exchanges here before. I've never re-read it. It's a much, much darker book than "He Died": you read the opening chapter, which begins with an axe murder and leads up to a 3 page anatomical description of what happens when you shoot someone in the face, and think - christ, it can't get much worse than that. But it does. Raymond admitted the book took him up to (and over) all manner of personal edges - either his (or his inspector narrator's) homophobia being only one: among much other trampling of taboo, the second half is increasingly stained with a tabloid air of HIV panic, and Raymond's involvement (there's no other word) leads to several narrative slips. As I've posted before, it's a novel whose depiction of obsession you can admire but one that it's impossible either to love or to copy. It cetainly fulfils Raymond's aim of gutting PD James's polite notion of murder and hanging the remains on the washing line for all to see. "He Died" and "How the Dead Live" are rhapsodies by comparison. With "Dora," the void creeps in by the second paragraph, and never fades. Raymond remembered meeting one or two psychopaths in his time (working for the Krays or elsewhere), and found them terrifying, like human black holes. That impression certainly carries over into the book, and you have to wonder how much identification Raymond felt with them - I can't think of any other modern novel where the pretence of authorial distance collapses quite so completely. And I agree with you, Alex: you get the impression "Dora" rehearses some otherwise unspeakable fears and fantasies, and it has the same effect on most readers as touching cold vomit. Once is quite enough, thank you. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Yeah, Midsommer Murders is much nicer. I spent the other weekend in a village called Haddenham, near Thame, where they filmed a lot of those. Didn't see any bodies though. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Raymond also features in Iain Sinclair's Anthology "London: City of Disappearances," and his interview snippets make you wish that he'd lived long enough to find the chance - or the nerve - to write a full account of his time working in Soho for Bernie Silver. Then again, people who lacked his prudence often had a habit of going out and not coming back. Raymond simply drank himself to death. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm intrigued (and a little scared). Absolutely have to read "Dora" now. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Or you can hear Raymond read from it, sounding uncannily like a Tory minister who's just buttonholed you in between getting his call-girl another Bristol Cream and hurrying back to the House for a 3-line whip: http://www.juno.co.uk/products/313684-1.htm?utm_so urce=google_uk&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=Goo gle%2BShopping | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
Wow, he sounds like John Berger. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Upper class renegades, eh? What are they like? More Raymond here - object lessons in what happens when your publisher's budget runs out before the book jacket gets designed, and a picture guaranteed to put you off any idea of professional writing for life: it looks like a Dachau inmate pecking away at a typewriter. http://jarett.kobek.com/ "Suarez was my atonement for fifty years' indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others." | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I posted a review of the Derek Raymond simultaneously on my blog, Amazon and some Facebook app. I've only just noticed - somebody called Zoe Cook commented on my Facebook review: "Soo pleased that you liked He died with his eyes open!! My dad wrote that! Derek Raymond A.K.A Robin Cook! Thanks for your positive review! Read all the others, I think think they are even better, thanks again Dan, let me know about the the rest x" I love the way things like that happen on the Internet (although I don't imagne I'll ever again be as surprised as when one M John Harrison emailed me out of the blue 8 years ago, to thank me for my Amazon review of Viriconium Nights). Speaking of Raymond, I made a start on Dora Suarez. I didn't entirely believe Martin's comment - or rather, I believed it would be that bleak, but didn't think I'd have a problem with that. I did. I've only managed to read about 10-20 pages in, and can't yet bring myself to go any further. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I forgot to mention 2 articles on Raymond, well worth reading if you can find them - I'm not sure they're online yet. One was a piece Jonathon Meades did on him, which includes Jeffrey Bernard's pointed comment: "Cookie's a sh*t - but he's not a c*nt." In the early Sixties the two shared a house next door to Robert Helpmann, who kept asking them to keep the noise down - as Cook said, "I was living a novel a day back then." It's in Meades's collection "Peter Knows What Dick Likes." The other is Ian Penman's profile, reprinted in his book "Vital Signs." This is the source for Cook's remarks about psychopaths being human black holes, and it got me reading him in the first place. Penman also recounts how Cook met his latest wife, reproducing Cook's louche Etonian rasp: "She asked me, did I fancy a drink? Did I fancy a drink?! I should say so! Chairs!!" |