| Author |
Message |
Al
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 15, 2006 - 8:10 pm: | |
It's almost April - let's be optimistic!
Yup, still very much into Charles Olson (as last post of Winter Reading) |
Dan
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 15, 2006 - 11:07 pm: | |
Pah! Siberian winds due here again tonight. Let's not be too hasty. Etc etc etc. |
Al
| | Posted on Thursday, March 16, 2006 - 10:40 am: | |
Hmm - it has gone a little colder - just rode into work through Thames-side winds that cut like razors. Nonetheless, IT'S ALMOST APRIL!!!!!!!
So I am going to remain optimistic and keep on dropping subtle hints to Mother Nature about apparently outmoded concepts like 'fresh, sunny days' and 'newly budding trees and flowers', etc. |
MJP
| | Posted on Thursday, March 16, 2006 - 5:00 pm: | |
Al, I like Olson too. Reading 'Swithering' by Robin Robertson.
Excerpt from: The Park Drunk
He opens his eyes to a hard frost
the morning's soft amnesia of snow
The thorned stems of gorse
are starred crystal; each bud
like a candied fruit, its yellow
picked out and lit
by the low pulse
of blood orange
riding in the eastern trees. |
arturo
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 9:26 am: | |
Any news from MJH? |
arturo
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 9:29 am: | |
Err...
I just checked this...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/057507027 7/qid=1143451690/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-5956609-2 370027 |
Alex
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 9:44 am: | |
Ooh! That sounds good. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 9:50 am: | |
We wait and wonder.
Reading here: Douglas Day's biography of Malcolm Lowry; Langdon Jones's "New SF"; and:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/080504365 9/qid=1143453013/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202- 0125642-7676647 |
iotar
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 11:21 am: | |
I believe that extracts of "The Swing", as no-one is calling it, will be appearing in the Eastercon 2006 programme.
Another reason to go to Eastercon! |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 12:19 pm: | |
Io: Stuff here means I won't be there - but any chance of posting the programme extracts nearer publication day? |
iotar
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 1:57 pm: | |
I'll ask Mr Harrison, as I never call him, about plans for pre-launch extracts.
Currently reading: Narziss und Goldmund. I was suffering from a bad cold last week so what I really needed was monks, Jung and nut brown maidens. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 3:40 pm: | |
> Monks ...Somehow, this started to sound more and more like a Van Morrison song as I read it.
But I'm recovering from a weekend where my friends' small daughter dressed up as Scooby Doo and kept barking in my face. That, and watching a dvd of the Hannah-Barbera cartoons, while becoming more and more convinced that Shaggy grew up and turned into Michael Stipe: it's a lot to get over. I'm still trying. |
arturo
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 5:53 pm: | |
Reading "The singing Neardenthals"( wrong spelling fer sure ..), deep in the Pyat quartet also. |
iotar
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 7:28 pm: | |
>>deep in the Pyat quartet also.
What are you making of that? I read the first one, and it was a bit of a struggle. Wasn't entirely convinced. His unreliable narrator felt too clumsily signposted - but then again, it has been a while since I read it and I'm sure it had many good points too. |
arturo
| | Posted on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 9:54 pm: | |
I like the sweeping pace and the sense of place but only in the second volume so far. More on this later. |
Martin
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - 8:33 am: | |
I found Pyat a bit of a trudge, too - whereas "King of the City" is superb (give or take those bits of the old Ladbroke Grove guitar machismo). Moorcock also strolls onstage in Emma Tennants's memoir "Burnt Diaries," along with Ballard and Sladek. Ted Hughes turns up in randy shaman mode, tells us that three chances at anything are cursed, and seems to slink back into view after his death as a silver fox in the garden. One for the Christmas stocking. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 8:57 am: | |
"The Weight of Numbers," Simon Ings: this is a simply astonishing piece of writing, with a plot-line that's as intricate and singular as a steel concertina. I read the whole thing in 24 hours and thought: why aren't there more novels like this?
Then you discover how hard it was to actually get the thing to the point where the rest of us can read it, and cringe:
http://www.fisheye.demon.co.uk/simoningsblogand.ht ml |
arturo
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 10:37 am: | |
To the reading pile it goes,yessir. |
MJP
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 10:40 am: | |
By the way, I have this book The Weight of Numbers too. You have prompted me to pick it up, Martin. Charles Sharr Murray gave it a bad review, which discouraged me. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 11:43 am: | |
Murray has a bee in his bonnet about it being science fiction, which it clearly isn't. I can sympathise with the points he makes, too: in crude terms, the book is all plot and no story - but this is surely Ings's point, that modern physics points us to a narrative of nodes and fractals, and not necessarily to a scalar model of reality that embodies those familair tropes of "progress" or "salvation."
I could be wrong, but his review reeks of a lazy sub-editor at "The Independent." You can certainly imagine the thought process: "Wonder what this one's about? Looks a bit weird. Let's lob it to the old hippy in the corner..."
As a corrective, see Chris Petit's "Guardian" review:
1727417%2C00.html,http://books.guardian.co.uk/revi ew/story/0,,1727417,00.html
As with "Light," "The Quincunx," "The School of Night," "Exquisite Corpse," and "Mother London," you simply want to applaud the skill of anyone who can put this sort of text together, animate character, history, and speculation with such aplumb, and try to tell anyone else you know to read it. |
arturo
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 11:51 am: | |
"Exquisite Corpse"?
I do think I´ve missed that one. |
iotar
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 12:23 pm: | |
Yes, Ings has been working on that book for a while. It'll be interesting to see how it came out. If the trajectory of his writing to date is anything to go by, it shd be a good read. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 1:25 pm: | |
Arturo: by Robert Irwin - set amongst a British surrealist group between the wars, with a final chapter that twists the whole book inside out at a stroke and reveals at least its every other sentence to have been ironic -
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585673862/103-60 17536-8155857?v=glance&n=283155
Io: His research must have been immense - NASA, Bay of Pigs, child soldiers in Mozambique (I read these passages and kept muttering "Christ" on account of what he describes), the mechanics of human traffic, Korzybski, anorexia, London situationists, the Blitz, predatory paedophilia (again, dreadfully accomplished), plus credible walk-ons for James Lovell, Ewan McGregor, and a tip of the hat to Jerry Cornelius. No wonder the Dan Brown court case gives him sleepless nights. I was amazed at the afterword where James Meek revealed just how much he had to read for "The People's Act of Love," which is only about half the length of "Numbers." If authors will have to credit every single piece of research or face the threat of litigation, I can't see any project on this scale appearing again very soon - and the prospect of other books as diverse as Gordon Burn's "Alma Cogan," or de Lillo's "Libra," let alone much of Pynchon, would never get past the stage of two drinks and a daydream. I'd like to think Ings's novel marked a kick up the arse for all our pale and timid English writers; it could be a last shot at goal, with no injury time. |
Dan
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 1:36 pm: | |
Exquisite Corpse is... exquisite! Here's what I wrote at the time I read it:
http://www.sumption.org/lifeless/002720.html |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 1:49 pm: | |
"Huns disguised as nuns"!
Irwin has a good line in first persons: Caspar sets some kind of altitude record for "unreliability" (through no fault of his own) and the narrator in "Satan Wants Me" is engrossing, hilarious, and utterly pathetic. Like all good writing, this is much harder than Irwin makes it look.
Actually, you can google "Satan Wants me" and find this:
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/features/columnists /59305
You wonder what happened ... |
Martin
| | Posted on Thursday, April 06, 2006 - 4:47 pm: | |
Tim Etchells is well known and respected here, and I'm probably the last person on ES to read this - but it's an inspirational book. If you haven't tracked it down, do!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/041517383 3/qid=1144341776/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-3477324-0 478861 |
Dan
| | Posted on Thursday, April 06, 2006 - 10:22 pm: | |
No Martin, not the last. I will track it down, if/when my reading ever gets back on track.
The Robert Irwin mention was a very timely reminder - I'm now toying with using his fire/water idea, somehow, in a photographic project on "the four elements" which I've been pondering for a while. |
Martin
| | Posted on Friday, April 07, 2006 - 10:50 am: | |
Sounds wonderful - post the results!
Meanwhile, those naughty gnostics have been kicking over the wheely bins, just in time for Easter:
1748968%2C00.html,http://www.guardian.co.uk/religi on/Story/0,,1748968,00.html |
Dan
| | Posted on Friday, April 07, 2006 - 11:01 am: | |
I don't think there will be any results for a long, long time: first I need to work out exactly what it is I want to do, then firm up my photography skills in order to be able to do it, then find some friendly market stall-holders to help me. Expect results in a year or two.
Suffice to say that I shall also be taking inspiration from Joachim Beuckelaer's paintings in the National Gallery: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjec ts.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/artistBiography? artistID=1183
Martin: any chance of posting the title for that Guardian piece, so I can find my way there without having to ponder Discus's URL-mangling algorithm. |
Martin
| | Posted on Friday, April 07, 2006 - 12:03 pm: | |
Dan: It's in today's issue (and front page on the "Telegraph"). "Guardian" on-line lists it as "Judas:What Really Happened."
Interesting painting, too. You won't see much like if when bird 'flu gets popular ... |
arturo
| | Posted on Saturday, April 08, 2006 - 4:19 pm: | |
On spanish papers they are talking about the judas gospell on National geographic. |
iotar
| | Posted on Saturday, April 08, 2006 - 5:02 pm: | |
>> Meanwhile, those naughty gnostics have been kicking over the wheely bins, just in time for Easter
If Pagel's theories are anything to go by, it looks like all of the major apostles had major factions in their names towards the end of the first century, and the gospels tell us as much about the infighting in the decades following the death of Christ as the story of the Messiah.
They probably just all hated Judas more than they hated Magdalen or Thomas. Which was eventually unfortunate for Jews everywhere. |
arturo
| | Posted on Saturday, April 08, 2006 - 10:37 pm: | |
Yes ... and isn´t it brilliant that Jorge Luis Borges has already written about this?
Check "Ficciones".
Then again he upped the game by claiming that Judas was the real Mesiah. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 10:13 am: | |
I was waiting for it to be his diary:
Fri: Supper - lousy as usual. Barney in the beer garden: imperialist tossers. Kebab on way home.
Sat.: Nothing much. Pub.
Sun.: Nothing much. Early morning walk. Odd bird in cemetery. Pub lunch. "Observer" : 'Moses Code Author Never Saw Tablets.'
Mon.: Feeling a bit down. Where's a Samaritan when you need one?
Tues.: Nothing much. Bought rope.
- But real Christianity is quite different, full of love, forgiveness, and irrational persecution mania:
http://www.web-church.com/why_is_god_punishing_me. htm |
Alex
| | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 10:27 am: | |
Roy Harper nailed the Judas thing back in 1969, in a song called 'Don't you Greive.'
'It was two hours gone midnight
when he called me to his side.
And he said 'Hey Jude I need you man
I need you to take a ride.
You've got to tell those guys downtown
That my time is overdue.
And wait a minute Jude - don't stick around
because no-body's gonna dig you.'
Like, cool. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 2:13 pm: | |
Meanwhile, it was 50 years ago today, etc.
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-bk-ulin9apr09 ,0,4709065.story?coll=cl-books-top-right |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 - 3:10 pm: | |
And right now:
1750678%2C00.html,http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/s tory/0,,1750678,00.html
I love that understated second paragraph, don't you?
"We got it - let's use it!"
"Mr. President - " |
Martin
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 8:53 am: | |
Btb, "The War on Terror" is now "The Long War." A nice, snappy, L. Ron Hubbard phrase for the history books: if there are any history books, of course. |
arturo
| | Posted on Friday, April 14, 2006 - 2:36 pm: | |
Read Leonardo Sciascia´s las book-actually a novella- "A simple tale". Deals with betrayal, murder and deep corruption in such an eay going way that it´s not until you´ve finished the book that you realize how nasty it really is. It all depends of the reader getting the final scene wich is not actually explained.
Brilliant. |
arturo
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 9:04 am: | |
Also read "death and the knigth" by Sicascia. A sceptical policeman investigates a murder that is supposed to be the work of a terrorist group about wich the policeman is highly sceptical. The most famous quote of the book "the devil was tired and prefered to leave his work to the more efficent man" but he also says " there is a unwritten constitucion and its fist article is that the security of the state rests in the lack of security of the individual citizen" |
Al
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 9:18 am: | |
>> Btb, "The War on Terror" is now "The Long War."
Which assumption that it is (effectively) a perpetual war with no clearly defined enemy to fight / overcome (even the vague 'on Terror' has been removed) nicely legitimises the ongoing assumption of wartime powers by the President (ie I can do whatever I want, without check, and by definition its legal) while also supporting the more general 'unitary presidency' theory. |
arturo
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 10:00 am: | |
As Sciascia points out to declare a war on terror breeds terror.
Unquestionably Ben Laden is now far better known thanks to the republican administration efforts. A number of people who would have never heard of Al Quaeda know it is ther to provide the finance and know-how. |
Martin
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 10:49 am: | |
Interestingly, I'm told that US post offices now carry large colour posters of Osama: "Have You Seen This Man?"
Almost as absurd as - well, this:
http://news.aol.com/entertainment/music/articles?i d=20060417103609990001&cid=918 |
arturo
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 10:59 am: | |
I just realized..
How many people would recongnize Osama if he shaved, got a crewcut and wore a suit and a tie? |
Dan
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 12:47 pm: | |
Back to spring reading... over the Easter break I finally read Andrew Crumey's Mobius Dick, a book which Lola picked for me on the basis of its cover. A good read, although not quite as good as I had expected from the praise on the cover and one or two reviews I'd read. Four stars rather than five.
I see postmodernism gets a look in on the other thread... plenty of that here. And quantum physics, parallel universes, characters who don't exactly write their own fictions but, well, OK one of them does, albeit the fiction of himself in a parallel universe. Which is the one we end up in, having flipped over the mobius strip and collapsed the wavefunction.
Lots of ideas which feel familiar from other bits of sci-fi, all with an interesting literary and historical spin on it. By the end of the book I felt rather inadequate: so many ideas within the book make reference to one another that I was sure I had only caught a very small percentage and was hence missing out on some greater point.
But still, a good read. Went out yesterday intending to purchase David Mitchell's new novel, but it's not in the shops yet, so I settled for DBC Pierre's second. |
Martin
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 1:33 pm: | |
Unavoidably, the papers are full of the threat from the far-right BNP in this month's council elections.
Reading "The Guardian" on the party's aims, however, a few thoughts occur:
'Along with calls for an "asylum clampdown" and the segregation of pupils whose spoken English is poor,* the BNP election manifesto also calls for the reintroduction of Christian worship in school assemblies; referenda asking parents to back a prohibition on the teaching of homosexuality;+ and a demand that local taxi firm drivers reflect the ethnic make-up of the local population.'#
*I say old bean, this might well rebound on one's own wee sprogs more than a jot or tittle, no?
+ Clearly a reference to the infamous "Pink Level" which has made so many of our finest youngsters abandon their home to follow Robbie Williams about the countryside in search of "fun." A real vote winner, guv, and no mistake.
# Perhaps truer reflection of their alleged "power base," I think. |
Alex
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 10:34 am: | |
I'be been reading The Euston Manifesto.
http://eustonmanifesto.org
Interesting - I think I like it, but I need to think about it. |
Martin
| | Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 - 4:28 pm: | |
Sometimes you hear of a book, and just have to add it to the the pile of stuff you've promised yourself to read.
And there are other occasions when - well, if you're out of Andrex ...
http://www.wndbookservice.com/products/BookPage.as p?prod_cd=c6805 |
iotar
| | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 11:38 am: | |
I think perhaps "Idiots Guide..." would have been more appropriate. |
Martin
| | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 1:15 pm: | |
Absolutely: or a "Tebbit's Guide."
Check the letters in today's "Daily Telegraph," where he asks:
**What is "extreme Right-wing" about the BNP?**
Search me, squire. Maybe it's something to do with N. Griffin addressing a group of KKK supporters in the US recently, and saying that "people are going to be killed before we de-Islamify Europe" - but I'm only guessing.
http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link= template&story=162 |
iotar
| | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 1:47 pm: | |
>> N. Griffin addressing a group of KKK supporters in the US...
Jesus Christ! Shaven-headed morons in Ben Sherman shirts meet inbred white trash in fancy western shirts. A marriage made in heaven.
Not sure what the good old boys will make of Skrewdriver though. |
Martin
| | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 2:09 pm: | |
They could well be familiar with this site, too: nice looking cake. Shame about the icing.
http://www.hitler.org/
- Ok, 50 million died, but there will be *no* name calling, *no* recriminations - get the picture?
"Yes - we see ..."
What a pack of fucking tossers. |
arturo
| | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 11:20 am: | |
A New (unlikely) bestseller?
April 27, 2006
Judge Embeds a Puzzle in ‘Da Vinci Code’ Ruling
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, April 26 — Justice Peter Smith's 71-page ruling in the recent "Da Vinci Code" copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge's occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of copyright law but also of more esoteric topics like the history of the Knights Templar.
But there is more to it than that. Embedded in the first 13˝ pages of the ruling is Justice Smith's very own secret code, one that when partly solved reveals its name: the Smithy Code.
"The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC," the judge writes in the 52nd paragraph of the ruling, alluding to his code and referring to the two works at issue in the case —"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" — by their initials. (In the United States, the book is called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail.")
On April 7 Justice Smith ruled that Random House, publisher of the megaselling "Da Vinci Code," did not violate the copyright of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," a nonfiction work published in 1982 that spins an elaborate theory about how Jesus married Mary Magdalene and how their descendants still live in southern France. Two of the book's authors contended that Dan Brown, who wrote "The Da Vinci Code," lifted the central "architecture" of their book and had thus violated their copyright. (The third author of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," Henry Lincoln, did not participate.)
The decision was a resounding slap in the face to the two plaintiffs, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. But it was also an opportunity for Justice Smith to indulge in a flight of judicial and cryptological fancy.
The first clue that a puzzle exists lies in the typeface of the ruling. Most of the document is printed in regular roman letters, the way one would expect. But some letters in the first 13˝ pages appear in boldface italics, jarringly, in the midst of all the normal words. Thus, in the first paragraph of the decision, which refers to Mr. Leigh and Mr. Baigent, the "s" in the word "claimants" is italicized and boldfaced.
If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, you find that the first 10 spell "Smithy Code," an apparent play on "Da Vinci Code." But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code.
In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, Justice Smith declined to provide a solution for a puzzled reporter. Nor would he explain how he had put the code in his ruling, or how long it took him to figure out how to do it.
"I can't discuss the judgment until after I retire," he said.
But in a series of brief and ultimately frustrating e-mail messages during the last couple of days, the judge provided a series of intriguing clues. First he said that the different ways codes are broken in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" should be considered. The idea for the italicized letters, he suggested, came from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail."
He then suggested moving on to "The Da Vinci Code" and applying one of the code-breaking methods used by its protagonists to solve the mystery of the jumbled letters. "Think mathematics," he wrote at one point. He drew attention to his own entry in Who's Who — in which he lists an interest in the history of Jackie Fisher, an admiral who modernized the British Navy, a possible reason that his e-mail address contains the word "pescator," implying fisherman — and said that the date 2006 was significant.
He even mentioned a page number in "The Da Vinci Code" by way of trying to help. But he declined to go further, saying that "anything else gives it on a plate."
It has been nearly three weeks since he handed down the ruling. Probably disappointingly for Justice Smith, nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about it when it was first released. But he alluded to the possibility that there was something more soon afterward as a throwaway line in an e-mail exchange with a reporter for The New York Times, saying, "Did you find the coded message in the judgment?"
On vacation in Florida, the judge then declined via e-mail to elaborate much further, other than to refer to anomalies in the typeface. "Start with 's' and keep looking up to Page 18 approximately when the fonts stop," he wrote.
Meanwhile, back in London, Daniel Tench, a partner at the law firm Olswang, was reading the ruling and noticed something odd about the type. "At first I thought it was a mistake," he said on Wednesday. "It's not usual practice for a High Court judge to issue a ruling in which he has hidden an encrypted message."
Not knowing if there was anything there, though, Mr. Tench mentioned it to a reporter who compiles a column about legal affairs for The Times of London. After that paper printed a small item quoting him discussing the typeface, Mr. Tench was nonplussed to receive an e-mail message from Justice Smith confirming that yes, there was indeed a code, but that Mr. Tench had missed the first letter "s."
"It is always best to start at paragraph 1!" the judge wrote.
Speaking to the Bloomberg news service late on Wednesday, Justice Smith once again declined to provide any answers. Explaining why he made up his own code, he said it was "a bit of fun." |
Martin
| | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 12:17 pm: | |
My latest reading:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060 417fa_fact
"This is not like planning to invade Quebec."
So they've considered doing that, too ... |
MJP
| | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 12:28 pm: | |
So another absurd leap into chaos misery and disaster. The irony is that the Iranian regime isn't stable enough to pose a serious threat to anyone; also, they seem to have an exaggerated idea of the state of their nuclear technology: it is mostly noise and scaremongering.
Who would believe it, the same terrible mistake over again, only this time - incredibly - worse still.
Here come truck loads of fabricated facts again ... |
arturo
| | Posted on Thursday, April 27, 2006 - 5:43 pm: | |
Incredibly I read a piece in "Time" magazine were current iranian rulers were unfavourably compared to ...current North Corea! |
Martin
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 10:32 am: | |
Meanwhile, they're discussing "The Da Vinci Code" on Yahoo! - and someone's just found the hole in the floor:
>*If the Bible is a **myth,** then on what do you base your existence??
Kinda worryin', ain't it ... |
arturo
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 11:27 am: | |
Makes you feel like one of them Lovecraft characters: the void, the void ... |
Martin
| | Posted on Thursday, May 04, 2006 - 8:27 am: | |
Tartarus Press are publishing a new edition of MP Shiel's shorter work:
http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/tartarus/paleape.h tm
Either my declining eyesight or something, but I first read the title as " ... and Other Pubes." |
Dan
| | Posted on Friday, May 05, 2006 - 3:49 pm: | |
I just started, and then just finished (stuck in a polling station for 15 hours... what else can one do (other than advise electors that the reason they can't vote BNP is because the BNP decided not to field a candidate in this ward, in if they don't like it they can take it up directly with the BNP rather than accusing me of infringing their democratic rights)). Err.. where was I?
Oh yes, just started, and then just finished, David Mitchell's new book "Black Swan Green". I'm as impressed by it as I have been by all his previous books. Which is very.
The fact that he writes as a 13 year-old in 1982 is both wonderful and infuriating for somebody who, like me, was 13 in 1982. The childish over-explanations and unnecessary introductions grate a bit after a while: "The Mary Rose was Henry VIII's flagship that sank in a storm four centuries ago", "that song by UB40 called One in Ten", "a new TV show called Blankety Blank where..." etc etc. And the historical inaccuracies niggle (it's "SCRAMBLE", not "SCRAMBLER", fergawdsake. Scramble. Scramble. Scramble. Did you never visit any real arcades when you were a kid, Mitchell?)
But that aside, it was gripping, emotional, truly wonderful stuff. "Ace", as Jason Taylor would no doubt say. And that bastard Mitchell even pinched the swan out of *my* coming-of-age novel which I'm now even more determined never to write, now that he's done it for me. |
arturo
| | Posted on Friday, May 12, 2006 - 1:04 am: | |
Just read about the spanish writers in the Hay festivals.
Rosario Tijeras is not a bestseller by any means. Cult is much more like it. Rafael Reig is fun but ligthweight.A fairly absurdist five minutes in the future farce. I doubt that the jokes will translate well.Posadas is also ligthweight. A tv personality that sells boooks But..
Carlos Fuentes is a master and has a masterwork to his name: Terranostra wich I highly recomend. |
Martin
| | Posted on Monday, May 15, 2006 - 3:20 pm: | |
Not spam at all - but 2 books that start well before falling over:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/057120424 4/202-8743223-9738255
- re-reading this after years, I'm still dissatisfied by the way it moves from sharp satire to a "what the f*ck shall I write next?" account of a freebie that goes wrong;
and:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184343193 9/qid=1147705605/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/202-8743223-9 738255
- beautifully designed cover: but this tale of an old housekeeper who reawakens the narrator's spirit dices with animal sentimentality, fumbles the betrayal at its climax, then reveals its true colours as a basic Catholic parable (those who suffer are better than those who don't) with a pinch of sermonising: not all good people go to church. First published in Hungary 20 years ago, it's only just been translated into English. I'm not sure it was worth the wait. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2007 - 5:58 pm: | |
Not yet spring but...
I am reading "Sister Pelagia and the white bulldog" by Boris Akunin. Fake nineteen century romance with tongue very deep in check. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2007 - 11:46 pm: | |
Deep in Barthes. Just scored Mythologies. And listening to the audio 'Sir Henry at Rawlinson End' album, which is rather lovely.
'It's fine to be in England
Now that England's queer
I stand inside a wheelbarrow
And pretend I'm Boadicea' |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 9:39 am: | |
"He would throw himself naked on to the lawn in a northerly direction parallel to the Earthly axis and lying on his back, with that loathsome Roman clockface tattooed around his lower and private parts, tell the time, with astounding accuracy if he thought about Jean Harlow." |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 9:57 am: | |
"So much incest in that family, even the bull-dog's got a club foot ..."
Books by the bed include:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Had-So-Good-History/ dp/0316860832
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plain-Pleasures-Penguin-Mo dern-Classics/dp/0141181699/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/026-4 924400-2348454
and Patrick Curry's study of Victorian astrology, "A Confusion of Prophets." |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 9:59 am: | |
*godlike*
'Modern marketing will ensure that anvone as emancipated in their outlook is unlikely to surface again. Today they would specialise in stand-up comedy, or Dada performance art, or mournful self-assessment, or pastiche rock'n'soul, or berserk ether-piercing monologues of the most surreal and unfettered kind. But they certainly wouldn't attempt to do all of them. And not all at the same time.
It's hard to know where to start when trying to estimate his loss. As a performer he was impossible to upstage, working his way through the rack of costume changes and hopeless home-made props, occasionally swirling between band members in the arms of a grotesque mannequin dancing partner; her feet attached to his shoes, while all around him was an ear-splitting backdrop of cherry bombs and lurching robots.'
http://www.vivarchive.org.uk/articles/articlemojo. htm |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 10:36 am: | |
Not forgetting:
http://www.gingergeezer.net/home.html
It's too much to imagine that recordings might surface of the phone conversations he had with Beefheart. But, as with Ivor Cutler, we ask: where's the BBC box set, you rotters?
The only trouble is, it would probably now come with an "appreciation" by that other great "wit" and "intelligence," Stephen Fry: which is a bit like Jonathon Miller applauding Lenny Bruce. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 11:08 am: | |
But he got a lot from this chappy, too:
http://www.drones.com/pgw.cgi |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 26, 2007 - 8:58 am: | |
I am reading now Kapuscinski last book. A momoir of his relationship with Herodotus´s writing. Deceptively simple. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, April 02, 2007 - 9:18 am: | |
Just read this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Heat-History-Britain -Swinging/dp/0316724521
- a vast cultural tour that goes at a skip and a jump, and a sober reminder of the edginess of '60s politics. High points include Foreign Secretary George Brown's increasingly crazed alcoholism; newspaper proprietor Cecil King's frenzied plotting to promote a new national leader (Private Eye': "Far be it from me, a mere lunatic, to say who that man should be. Suffice it to say, it is myself."); Gyles Brandreth tagging along behind Lord Longford on a tour of Danish sex clubs; and Enoch Powell and Mary Whitehouse emerging from behind the flowered shirts and bells to act as the Lovecraftian godparents to Margaret Thatcher.
Whitehouse's crusade to clean up tv missed nothing. "Dr. Who" was a particular bugbear, and she focussed on the prevalence of strangling on the show: "by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter."
Poor thing. Life must have been tremendously hard for her. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Monday, April 02, 2007 - 10:37 am: | |
Picked up The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong yesterday since it has finally ripened into a paperback. Got a tonne of stuff to finish reading before I get onto this but it looks like a very good survey of the history and implications of the Axial age.
Currently reading: The Masters by CP Snow. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, April 02, 2007 - 10:56 am: | |
Snow peeks into Sandford's work, too - getting an extraordinary, up-stage dismissal from F.R. Leavis over his remarks about the "two cultures."
'He's a - no, I can't say that. I was going to say 'a *novelist*, but -'
Har, har. Does anyone actually read Frankie Boy any more?
Of course, he got much more successful once he started selling the jeans ... |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - 9:25 am: | |
After a great many years, I re-read Lovecraft's "Case of Charles Dexter Ward."
Plus points: great stuff about mutants down pits and unspeakable entities "breeding in the Outer Spheres." Minuses: the narrative being an exhibition piece of idiot plotting, depending on utterly unbelievable behaviour for the story to inch its way forwards. I especially liked Charles's mum waking up in the night and spotting her son and four burly strangers carrying a sealed lead coffin into the house - but then deciding not to ask him what was going on. Also, the revelation that one character is Charles *in disguise* only comes about when his dad scribbles a beard and glasses onto his son's photo. Well I never, who'd have thought it, nice boy like that, etc.
Midway through, you start to suspect that Charles is really Groucho Marx and his mother, Margaret Dumont. "Really, Mr. Firefly, we've never had a casket in here - " "Is that so? Looking at you, I'd have rung for one sooner. Say, are you breathing or is it just a full moon tonight?"
And so on.
Actually, Lovecraft's descriptions of old buildings are so telling that you wonder why he didn't boot Cthulhu into touch and become the Pevsner of Providence. He might have made more of a living at it, too. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, April 23, 2007 - 8:53 am: | |
I've never had any great desire for grandchildren.
Just as well, really:
2063401%2C00.html,http://books.guardian.co.uk/depa rtments/scienceandnature/story/0,,2063401,00.html |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, April 23, 2007 - 8:55 am: | |
Sorry: "Guardian " url sickness strikes again. Try:
http://tinyurl.com/39etlx |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 3:07 pm: | |
I´ve read Soldiers&Ghosts by J.E.Ledon wich I found well-written but a bit on the long side and I am no quite sure if you can really understand it without previous readings. Anyhow its maint thesis-that the classics set to the ancient world and unrealistic and unarchivevable goal- is interesting.
I went of from there to read Herodotus ( still at it. Very long book) and found it surprisingly unclassical: it is full of tidbits of gore and sex.
I was meaning to read this
http://tinyurl.com/32wzc9
But i picked up a selection of his essays. Eduardo Galeano has a very good piece of travelling to the United States as a teenager and being asked if he meant to kill the president of the United States. He says that he was so humble that he had not even considered killing the president of Uruguay. Anyhow he thougth that it was a really great country one that pays homage to the gallow humor of great writers like Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce in an official paper in customs, he thougth that it was a joke and said yes. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 - 10:41 am: | |
The more contemporary stuff I read the more I wonder how they get away with it. I dipped into Pattern Recognition again before I gave it to the Red Cross, just to check. I am incredulous that it ever got published. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 - 2:00 pm: | |
Hi, MJP.
I had previously given up on Gibson but now I won´t ever consider reading it.
I am reading Galeano´s "Open veins" wichi is quite extraordinary. This is an essay, and Galeano is very good on the telling fact that carries his point home, but it is written like poetry. He referes to the economic crisis as one hundred twenty five million childrem trembling under the gale. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 08, 2007 - 1:38 pm: | |
By the way,
Luis (MJH´s current spanish publisher) told me a little while ago that Nova Swing won the Arthur C. Clarke award. Contratulations MJH! |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, May 21, 2007 - 11:54 am: | |
Judging by its length and detail, it'll take up most of your summer and autumn, too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/books/14jfk.html ?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 01, 2007 - 12:39 pm: | |
I find that certain kinds of generic writing appeal to me strongly. Earth Final Conflict, a Gene Rodenbury concept, made for an intruiging tv series (I am not sure why. I think it is because of all the moral and taxonomic ambiguities. The uncertainty who was bad or good - beyond a few stock 'holding' characters.) I liked the way that the aliens were taken for granted, mundane almost; an integrated part of a slightly futuristic earth; that sidereal perspective of the mundane. Anyway, I have all the novels written for this series; and I liked them all. Especially Legacy by Sixbury, the plot revolving around the discovery of an ancient Cherokee artifact. Looking at the industry of other franchised sf novels, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr Who, Asimov's (N.), I wonder how much talent is hidden in there. American publishing is in a bit of a state I think; probably, these sorts of franchised novels provide many aspiring novelists with the only means of making money on their work. Otherwise they would disappear without trace; which is what seems to be happening to Sixbury anyway. Legacy was remaindered immediately on publication; because of the tv series' lack of success.
But I like this kind of generic writing I think because of the degree to which it forces the author to suppress or to mould his personality. The basic underlying story-line and the stock characters, and the prospective 'tv' audience that sets certain demands or expectations on language and sense - it often channels the author's energies positively I think. They learn to write their own story *around* the series, or indirectly. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 01, 2007 - 1:58 pm: | |
http://www.amazon.com/Just-Ordinary-Day-Uncollecte d-Stories/dp/0553378333
Treats include "Home" (ghosts hitch-hiking in the rain), "Jack the Ripper" (one of the most perverse conclusions you'll ever read for a "popular" story), "On the House" (Jim Thompson and even Hemingway would have paid good money for the plot) and some chilling accounts of people losing their minds - like this:
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0497/jackson/s story.html |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 01, 2007 - 3:54 pm: | |
I find that story quite Bradbury-esque. Without the fancy footwork. Or again, it is a bit like Matheson. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, June 04, 2007 - 8:54 am: | |
I think Stephen King picked up a great many lessons from her, without ever being able to hit the disturbing left-turns she makes ( or wanting to copy the feminist insights she offers). For a much better story, see "The Tooth": not in this collection, but something you could set beside "The Door in the Wall" as an acute and worrying object lesson in what 'fantasy' can achieve when it's properly constructed.
Meanwhile:
"To save America. I don't know what from."
http://tinyurl.com/ysjrg7
"Anglia trains" ..??? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, June 04, 2007 - 12:02 pm: | |
Martin, that is the opposite end of the spectrum to generic writing. Whereas generic writing contains a host of narrative concepts and techniques and whatever that can be used for any sort of application at all Ginsberg's writing marks an end to writing: a finality - . Like The Naked Lunch. A kind of scuttling the boat. Nothing can follow from that that doesn't represent either a dilution or a some other sort of weaking of the orginal impulse. You can't scuttle the same boat twice. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, June 04, 2007 - 3:00 pm: | |
Indeed: neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs no longer had anything to lose, so simply stood up, full frontal. It's a unique and completely non-generic act. Ginsberg stripped off one more layer of skin to produce "Kaddish" - but after that, arguably, both he and Burroughs could only repeat themselves in (interesting, but) diminishing echoes. It's a variation on Fitzgerald's dictum that American lives have no second act. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 15, 2007 - 8:49 am: | |
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Faithfull-Marianne/dp/0140 246533/ref=pd_bowtega_2/026-4924400-2348454?ie=UTF 8&s=books&qid=1181896762&sr=1-2
Re-reading this after about 10 years: up-close stuff on Jagger and Dylan, unblinking addict's tales, plus details you couldn't invent - Mick scaring her with M.R. James stories in bed while she cuddled up with "The Great God Pan." |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 1:44 pm: | |
Some interesting tidbits here about the uses of landscape. From a science blog stragely enough.
http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2007/06/is_biot ech_like_nanotech_is_ka_1.php
On another note, has anyone seen the trailer for the Cohen Bros. adaptation of No Country for Old Men. It's worth a peek, especially if you've read the book. I never pictured Chigur like that - not sure how I feel about the PRince Valiant look... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 2:51 pm: | |
Dave I am not sure I can face the film. I didn't like some of their previous stuff at least not on first viewing; too arbitrarily violent. But I liked the book alot; but since it was rather strong, I think I will leave it there ... |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 3:59 pm: | |
Hi MJP!
I don't think you're alone in your opinions. A lot of McCarthy's readers are skeptical about the upcoming adaptations of his works.
Personally, I think the Cohen Bros. have done some stuff that's been knock down genius (albeit very violent, yes). I think they may prove to be just the right team to adapt No Country as long as they're making an effort at getting past some of their most recent films which have all been pretty poor. The heady days of Fargo seem long gone.
We'll see in November I guess. I'm hopefull.
Failing that John Hillcoat is directing The Road. His work on The Proposition makes me think we might be in good hands there as well.
One thing I am ceratin of is this: McCarthy's work is not going to be spoiled for me by a lackluster film. It's just too strong to be diminished by shoddy interpretations. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 4:12 pm: | |
Oy vey! I think it's Coen, not Cohen. With you on them, however they're spelt - in particular for me 'Raising Arizona' is fantastic, wonderful loopy comedy. Last one that really did it for me was 'O Brother Where Art Thou', and I had to wait until second viewing to really get into it... lovely music, tho'. |
dave
Username: dave
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 5:18 pm: | |
I stand corrected. And oy vey-ed. It is Coen, not Cohen.
I'm pretty partial to Fargo and The Big Lebowski myself.
The dude abides.
Dig it:
http://www.commeaucinema.com/bandes-annonces=76586 .html |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 7:27 pm: | |
Ah yes... Big Lebowski is rather wonderful, another one that's got better every time I've watched it. And Fargo was the first film where I ever really appreciated William H. Macy. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 10:28 am: | |
As the world waits for it all to end:
"I've got to do other things after Harry Potter so I'll just see what happens. I've still got my ice cream van if it doesn't all work out, so I'll be all right."
Indeed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/ar ts/2007/06/29/nosplit/bfpotter129.xml&DCMP=ILC-tra ffdrv07053100 |
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