| Author | Message | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 6-2006 |
The sicilian novels by Andrea camilleri. There is a lot of humanity here, good ploting and an interesting look at Sicilia.Details like they don´t speak proper italian and ..the food. I don´t have time to go into details but it is pretty astounding. It is so hot and spicy that one of the characeters wonders if , if there is such a thing as extreme sex, could there be extreme cooking. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
I've just finished Andrew Hussey's "Paris: the Secret History" (which is less an occult chronicle than a well-written standard history with a few appearances from necromancers and the Situationists), and Greil Marcus's "The Shape of Things to Come," on the judgmental consciousness in US art. Mainly, it's a critical meditation on Roth, Lynch, and David Thomas - though Marcus throws out the astonishing aside that the guest at one of his recent US college classes was Springsteen, who turned up to discuss what Allen Ginsberg's work meant to him. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Dipping into Rudolf Steiner's A Road to Self Knowledge and Occult Science and the Penguin Krishnamurti Reader as part of some as yet unspecified research. I've also been lent Madame Blavatsky's Baboon by Peter Washington for similar purposes. Other than that: read The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, an early and rather charming set of SF mysteries by Jack Vance that I'd somehow never got around to before, and I found myself for the first time in years reading some of the short stories in Viriconium Knights by this promising young writer called M John Harrison. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Reading a biography off Diane Arbus - I forget the author's name, good, depressing stuff though. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
*of, not off  | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Writers tattooed with their own texts - quite a nasty, Grant Morrisonian thought ... | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
And not so easy when reading on the bus. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Especially as bits keep falling off (she died in 1971). | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
You get to expect that on buses running through Chingford. It'd probably just look like you were gazing into a nasty kebab accident. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 6-2006 |
Heresies by John Gray. Even tougth I found interesting "Straw dogs" and the book about AlQaeda, I was not that impressed. Gray seems to me more useful in those short pieces that in the longer, more rambling, books. Here he is short lean and to the point. Then again, I find that Gray, as most of us, has only a limited amount of thing to say and I am finding a fair amount of repeated ideas. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 6-2006 |
Just finished his article on torture ( I dare not call it an essay): the work of an idiot. He does not adress the main objection to torture as a legal search too :that is is fucking useless as anybody will say anything under enough pain. And he is seriously lacking in scholarship. The man is for me an utter mystery. Half genius/ half idiot. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Speaking of which: I saw this quote from Michael Frayn's new book, "The Human Touch." Frayn says he's spent 30 years constructing this philosophical anatomy, but you wouldn't believe it from either the style or the scandalous level of logic on display: >The universe is big, it's small, it's so many billion light years across and so many years old because you and I and some of our friends say it is. If we weren't here in the audience, comparing and measuring, gasping and applauding, the whole show would have gone for nothing... Here would not be here. Now would not be now. And if here is not here, nor now now, there is not there, nor then then. There would be no is, no was, no will be. If no is, no was, no will be, then no passage of time. So we are perhaps not after all such nobodies. We are not for nothing.< Yer basic anthroscopic vanity, innit? Next. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Finished Peter Washington's Madame Blavatsky's Baboon over the weekend. Very good, readable journalistic history of Theosophy and the origins of the New Age movement. I mean "journalistic" in the best sense. This is far better than any of the academic texts that I've read on this subject, most of which rehashes the same second-hand material in indigestible prose. Occasionally Washington's intertwining timelines, where he's tracking Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky across the early twentieth century are slightly confusing. And the huge cast of characters might have benefited from a dramatis personae, although the two sets of picture plates go some way to repairing this deficiency. Occasionally however in the hunt for a good story, the author's journalistic nose lets him down. After explaining that the jury is still out on the relationship between Krishnamurti and Rosalind Ragagopal, his business associate's wife, he carries on regardless and dishes the dirt on this affair and its fallout. Anyway, all good fun. Recommended. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Isn't this wonderful? "When we got to his house [the Quaker] told me he had been in the fighting against the Sinn Feiners, but had lately married an Irish girl ... Except for having his tennis court shot up now and then, he said, when he and his wife were playing in the afternoons, there was not much trouble now ... Into the sitting room, which was furnished in faded Victorian style, with pictures of lakes and vegetation on the walls and the general Irish smell of rising damp, came an elderly woman wearing a wig of black curls and with a sharp, painted face; and with her a pale little girl of twelve - I thought - one of those fey, unreal Irish children with empty blue eyes and untidy russet hair. She looked as if she had been blown down from the sky, as, in her tiny skirt, she sat bare-legged on the floor in front of the fire. She was *not* a child of twelve; she was the Quaker's wife, and very excitable. The shooting, she said, livened up the tennis and they were afraid for the strings of their rackets, because in these times you might have to send them to Dublin to be re-strung." This and much more in V.S.Pritchett's memoir, "Midnight Oil." | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
"You spent 30 years of your life on *what*???" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5358880.s tm By comparison, Joyce spent 7 years on "Ulysses," Proust took about half Tolkien's time to come up with "A La Recherche ..." and Virginia Woolf required only one year more than "The Children of Hurin" for her entire output of novels. Obvious beginners, the lot of them. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Snap! *see headline thread* | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Ezra Pound - what was the old fascist on about? "To borrow from Foucault's terminology in The Order of Things, the heterotopia that is Ezra Pound's Cantos-that compendium of archival documents and textual fragments, that sum of countless gestures toward fictive and factive images-is intended to give way to a linguistic utopia in which its real world textual referents might somehow co-exist in the non-space of language." http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3822/i s_199904/ai_n8833804 So that's sorted! Probably. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Oh certainly, but don't forget that: "As navigators of textual labyrinths, Pound's archivists are at best secondary, at worst ambivalent, epic heroes, for they are not the factive personalities-those figures who bring ideas into action-discerned in the likes of Odysseus and Sigismundo Malatesta. Pound's archivists are, rather, necessary functionaries in the movement beyond the physical embodiments of heterotopic knowledge to the transcendent, utopic light of understanding. But even such secondary status does not negate their interest for scholars, because Pound, as ah archivist/poet himself, bears a unique relationship to the keepers of material culture. That is to say, the Pound who regularly silenced his lyric voice in order to serve as an indicator of what he believed should be the "locorum communium" of twentieth-century economic, political, and artistic life, placed himself in a necessary yet secondary role as a cultural archivist. " | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
>Necessary functionaries in the movement beyond the physical embodiments of heterotopic knowledge to the transcendent - Hey, that's in our mission statement here! Odysseseus ahoy! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I used to have a utopic light of understanding, but they stopped making bulbs with heterotopic bayonet fittings. So I took it down to Oxfam. In this particular Babel I feel more like Dr Seuss than Odysseus. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Has anyone here ever read any Walker Percy? I just finished re-reading The Moviegoer last night. I think it might appeal to some of you guys. Can discuss more if anyone's interested, but here's a great passage from it: "Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire." | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Never come across him. Tell us more. Whet our appetite! | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
The thing I appreciate the most about his work is the depth and breadth of thought it displays. I suspect a lot of this was a product of Percy's personal history. Most notably, he contracted TB while in med school and was forced to spend three years in convalescence. Even though he'd been a promising young doctor, his illness caused him reconsider his faith in science. While recovering, he began reading philosophy and French & Russian Literature. He also entered psychoanalysis with one of Henry Stack Sullivan's protégés at Bellevue. By the time he had recovered, he'd decided to abandon medicine and began to write existentialist, "diagnostic" novels (as well as quite a lot of scholarly/semiotic non-fiction...some of which dealt with the reconciliation of God, Freud, and Science). As I write this, I realize that he's not very sum up-able. I do whole heartedly recommend both The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Just looked him up on Wikipedia - looks interesting. However, I notice that their list of "Other Percys" doesn't include Percy Wyndham Lewis. Is his stuff in print at the moment? | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Hey Io. I just checked Wikipedia myself. Its entry on Walker Percy is okay...better at giving the cliffs notes than my attempt anyway. The Wikipedia entry for the Moviegoer even has the same quote that I listed though, so I'm not sure what that says about me. There are so many passages in that book that are quotable though. There's one that I really like about an encounter with a self-styled "romantic" on a train that I should look up and post too...something about how he was doomed to always chase what he wanted through life while it hovers ten steps in front of them at all times. Anyway, the "Other Percys" list seems to be people from his family that were also writers, thus the absence of Lewis. I looked him up on amazon though. His stuff looks pretty scarce, all but out of print. Is he worth looking into? I don't know that I've ever heard of him. By the way, I'm not one to really care what Hollywood decides to do, but there have been rumors out there that Terrence Mallick is going to adapt and film the Moviegoer. I can't think of a more suitable source of material for Mallick. He seems perfect for the job...hope it happens. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Just discovered that the Arbus biography I mentioned above has been made into a film, "Fur", starring Nicole Kidman & Robert Downey Jr. On a screen near you soon. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
- Is he worth looking into? Extraordinary man. The paintings are amazing; the politics are dreadful. Lewis ended up blind from a brian tumour, living in a condemned London house in the '50s, writing whole novels in ballpoint by feeling way across the page, all but forgotten. Beside the biographies, there's more in Hugh Kenner's vast overview of Modernism, "The Pound Era," and Justine Hopkins's biography of Michael Ayrton - he and Lewis were good friends. And if you want the punk footnote - Lewis's magazine BLAST! gave Mark E. Smith a lot of ideas about lyric deconstruction and a general "prole art threat" awkward bastard stance. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Cool Martin. I'll have to look into him. Aside from the works about him that you mention, are any of his novels recommended? I've got some exciting things lined up for this fall now that I'm just about done with my degree: The Psychoanalytic Movement: The cunning of unreason - Ernest Gellner Realism and Social Science - Andrew Sayer Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals - P. Catton One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the end of Economic Democracy - Thomas Frank Defending Science-Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism - Haack As you can see, I rely on you guys for good fiction recomendations... Have any of you read Love's Body, Dancing in Time by Duchamp though? I hear it's good, might give it a try. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Aside from the works about him that you mention, are any of his novels recommended? Wyndham Lewis's A Human Age sequence is a good place to start: The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta. The final volume, The Trial of Man, was never completed. It's like a post Great War Divine Comedy, or something. Currently re-reading Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I'm sure Rudolf Steiner has driven me to this! | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
I feel like I was molested by a psychopath. I finished Houllebecq's The Elementary Particles last night. It made me feel icky. This is probably the single most nihilistic and unredemptive thing I've ever read - even if it was hilarious at times. The world has looked bleak all day...and probably will continue looking so for some time. Ultimately, it didn't work for me. At least I don't think it did. Maybe I'm in denial. Maybe it was a spot on diagnosis of the joke that neoliberalism, scientism and globalization are making of the human condition. Why can't I stop thinking about it? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Duchamp: haven't read Love's Body - but I thought Calvin Tompkins's biography was fascinating. Fiction: "The Weight of Numbers" by Simon Ings; almost any George Pelecanos; and this, which is a wonderfully compelling book about (I suppose) the stories we tell ourselves and what those who hear them come to think: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Loving-Monsters-James-Hami lton-Paterson/dp/1862074925 | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> "The Weight of Numbers" by Simon Ings I keep meaning to buy that. Is it good? Haven't heard from him for a while but from the trajectory of his previous novels it's gotta be pretty intriguing. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
It's a brilliant book which deserved much greater publicity: I think it may have suffered from a perception that Ings was somehow writing fantasy, when in fact it's a realist "novel of coincidence" that covers enormous (and sometimes horrific) ground. Much more here - http://www.fisheye.demon.co.uk/homepages/simonings .html - I'd recommend it unreservedly. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 6-2006 |
Dawkins "God the delusion" It covers no new ground but I enjoy Dawkins´s wit and elegant use of words. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Quick PS on WL: London society knew him as "the wrong Wyndham Lewis." In their eyes, the "right" one helped edit this book. If you don't know it, and have an ear for forced rhyme, lumpy or unsuitable rhythm, and bizarre poetic subject matter (armless children, seed drills, etc.) - then buy it today and toss your Prozac in the bin. I advise declaiming pieces aloud in your best Brian Blessed manner for the full effect - but the index alone is worth the cover price. http://www.amazon.com/Stuffed-Owl-Anthology-Review -Classics/dp/1590170385 | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>London society knew him as "the wrong Wyndham Lewis." Yes, Bridget got me a lovely old hardback of that a few years ago. Also: Ings always seems to suffer from a lack of publicity. He's alway far lower profile that he should be. I don't know if this is a personal preference or a problem with his publishers. But apparently he's big in Finland. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
I'm not sure if it's still up - but Ings posted a remarkable (and depressing) piece on constructing the book, getting agent enthusiasm, then dealing with one blinkered publisher after another who either rejected it outright, asked him to explain it, or else demanded the thing be revised out of all recognition. WoN isn't a perfect book (you can't write something this intricate and preserve in-depth character, unless you're Dickens and have both the license and the public to produce something 4 times the length)- but it has exactly the aim, range, and daring that most novels ought to display, though rarely do. I recommended it to a friend. "What's that all about, then?" Just read it. Two weeks later, I got an ecstatic e-mail: best novel in years, could *not* stop thinking about it, recommended it to everyone he knew, etc. And he's not Finnish. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Has anyone read Galactic Pot Healer by PKD? People around the world, confined to doing nothing, hanging around in their offices, each day phone each other for The Game. The Game consists in computer translations and retranslations of book titles, just as you might get using Babel Fish. The object is to guess the original title. The Game has been devised by these electronically linked up people to stave off the boredom of the dull weird world. So "Chesspiece Made Insolvent" ... or "The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed" (The Sun Also Rises) | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Also reading this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly -Scientist-Whiteside/dp/0156031795/sr=8-7/qid=1159 965834/ref=sr_1_7/026-0319299-1706001?ie=UTF8&s=bo oks - for admirers of MJH's "Light," another (true) story of a pioneering scientist who mixed space flight with magick. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
MJP, Yes. I read Galactic Pot healer and I found it oddly prescent of the altavista translator. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
arturo What I assume is that the playing of this game is entirely contemporary. That it didn't exist in Dick's time. One finds this again and again in Dick. In the end, more than the technology, he anticipates the mood of the present. Online news avatars or robot chat room hosts. electronic yapping. Blase aliens. Boredom, greyness and adland groo. The act of posting online is eerily Dickian. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Certenly. It´s not the details it´s the mood. Well, current political climate is certenly Dickian as a whole. I mean a virtual war is fougth in televisión and millions assume it to be over because the President told them so but the war is not over and slowly but steadily it creeps back into the reality of the median. Sounds like a Dick plot doesn´t it? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Dickian indeed: mass death by remote, cultural timeslips into fundamentalism, incohate urges to transcendance leading to increasingly "transgressive" behaviour on the Net or in your nearest Amish community - and we're still only beginning to touch virtual reality and the problems Dick predicted for it. For instance, if we can have astonishing sex and utter emotional rapport with an avatar tailored to our every personal quirk and fetishistic whim, who'll bother with the un-narcisstic grind of a real relationship? "But I want children!" "No worries - let's download a toddler ... and then I can get back to Diana/Cherie Blair/rubber-clad 14-year-old/sheepdog (delete as appropriate). " Cue jokes about Microsoft kids repeating words, freezing in mid-step, etc. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Dick's rational dystopias. Part of the interest that he generates is created by his lack of system; the chaos to be found around the edges of organised human life. His aliens, the vugs, want to play The Game (again). (The Game Players of Titan.) They may have taken over the planet or perhaps they have not. There are no rules to their rule playing. Dick keeps identifying that edge of uncertainty where knowledge and ignorance invert. Something similar is done with machines and the way it seems to be impossible to tell if they are actually alive. When someone kills a pesky nix ad that has crawled into his car (in The Simulacra?) the presupposition is of life ... | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
My favourite Dickian nightmare is in Ubik. A house where everything has a semi-intelligent coin slot. Not only the phone and the gas meter, but also the fridge and, of course, the front door. Naturally the protagonist is pathologically bad with money. Nice punchline, Phil! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Gosh. http://taketheaction.com/ - I love the way they say it "weakens your ability to make money," too! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I would like to read all Dick, if you will pardon the expression, and bearing in mind the site above. I have read a great deal; but recently: Counter Clock World. The Simulacra. The Game Players of Titan. Time Out of Joint. Galactic Pot Healer. Cosmic Puppets. At the end you get a badge with the legend: All Dick Dick Head. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
He's one of those writers who I forget how much I enjoy until I'm reading him. My favourites are probably late period weirdness like The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Valis and Radio Free Albemuth. But it's all good. Read Galactic Pot Healer in various bars and cafes around Prague, which really added to the sense of dislocation. Weirdly gothic Ian Miller cover on the edition I was reading. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
On the subject of game playing. Just re-read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Enjoyed it the first time, but found the three alternate lives at the end of the book made more sense on this reading and helped to humanise the rarified intellectual atmosphere of the main story. I'd be hard pressed to decide between this book and Steppenwolf. Fortunately this problem will almost certainly never arise. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Hesse I never got into; Dick - a lot, though the "revelation" novels (Valis, etc.) are extremely worrying clinical documents. Personal favourite story: "The Electric Ant." Personal vote for worse story title ever (and it was probably a pulp editor's choice, not Dick's): "Psi Man, Heal My Child!" War Rocket Ajax stylee, and no mistake. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Eek! Simple Psi Man. I'm not going to follow up this line of thinking. Eek! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
"The princess and the prince discuss/what's real and what is not." They'd have a long talk about the pitch-black ironies compounded here, then: http://www.hansonrobotics.com/project_pkd.php | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
One of Dick's most fearsome images is of burial. In Counter Clock World it is literal. But one finds it again and again: in (for example) Ubiq and again in different form in The Divine Invasion. (Where the main protagonist is buried in ice, if you like - in deep cryogenic suspension - dreaming his 'actual' life and (a favourite metaphysical joke of mine) hearing The Fiddler on the Roof ambiently in his dreaming reality because it is being played actually by a radio transmitter adjoining the cyrogenic suspension unit. Have I mentioned that before? ...) For PKD in many ways life is a strange form of death. From which of course there is no escape. I have just bought a copy of Steppenwolf. I have been meaning to re-read it for a while. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> I have just bought a copy of Steppenwolf. That book totally wigs out at the end. Again it's that thing with alternate remixes of the original theme at the end. There's also a reference to the Magic Theatre in the opening of The Glass Bead Game. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Burial ... As good cod-Freudians, we can't help but wonder if this has some unconscious link to PKD's obsession with his dead twin sister, Jane. And there's that heart-breaking story, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon." Everything falls apart. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
One can see that link, certainly. And the fact that Dick's parents had his name engraved on the gravestone at the same time as hers, so he spent his life in the knowledge that this grave awaited him. But it shades into metaphysics too. The robot made of Dick e.g. The man buried in the machine. Death is both claustrophobia and agrophobia. Counter Clock World is very unsettling in these terms. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Now that I think of it, that robot simulacra of Dick is his burial Egyptian style: a latex and steel mumification of him, with the carefully chosen tokens of the things of this world arranged around him. It merely lacks a pyramid. I find this idea attractive. In Kraftwerk too. The man buried in the machine. Death brought to the brink of life. The categorical reversal. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
I´ve re-read Galactic Pot healer over the weekend. I´ve noticed an excellent vignette with a religous program and that they do headlines of the day in the book. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The interval between the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ that this implies is, conveniently enough, currently being looked at by David Byrne. (See link.) The concept of ‘playing with feeling’ makes for a living sound; where as the music’s reduction to mechanical timing kills it. http://journal.davidbyrne.com/ "... the piano was actually a Disclavier, a piano that “records” the performance of anyone who played it and then plays it back with the keys moving exactly as they had been played. One of the lab’s projects aims to get a sense of where the emotion, the feeling, lies in a performance. To do this they had a classical pianist perform a piece expressively and with feeling — we heard part of it played (or performed) back. They then used a program to remove all the feeling from the performance. It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well." | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well. He says that like it's a bad thing! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
It's how my "playing" on a cheap synth came out, too - shortly after I found that New Order earnt millions from just six white notes and the "frog chorus" in the "Jungle" sound effects box! *Listens carefully to Ray Manzarek* *Throws up hands in despair* | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
A turn in the wheel of fortune. It's the grasshopper that jumps and lands on a leaf floating downstream, then jumps again and lands in a beautiful meadow: away from the rubbish heap where it began. Find someone who will spin the wheel of fortune for you, grasshopper, lying heavy on the sand. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
To compare books. Steppenwolf rails against the middle classes, trying to find escape from the inevitable war Hesse knows Germany is heading for (WW2). I have yet to get to the "wigged out" ending. It is a clever involving book. What Dick does however is find a way of shining a torch on the unreality of the 'real' world. He mangages somehow to capture the genuine shimmer of present day unreality. It feels a bit like having an 'unreality' torch, in fact, to read him. Where you spotlight things and find that, yes after all they are not solid but illusory; that the light passes straight through them. Again, this sometimes shades towards the discovery of death. Where the torch illuminates nothing but void, dust and barren waste. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I have just thought of something else. What I forgot to articulate in the remark just above is that Hesse's world well-formed: is depicted as solid, real, established, familiar,'permanent' . So you could say - following Byrne's piano analogy above - the played with, played without feeling study - that Hesse describes the world *with feeling*: with an appropriate modulation, with spacing, timing, detail. Dick in contrast descibes (plays) the world *without feeling*. Or this idea at least suggests something of the effect he aims at. His descriptions sound like early sequencer bubblegum style noises, on this analogy. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>I have just thought of something else. What I forgot to articulate in the remark just above is that Hesse's world well-formed: is depicted as solid, real, established, familiar,'permanent'. Ah, that's exactly what breaks up at the end. Our wolf of the steppe is caught up in the whirligig of modernity. All that is solid melts into air, as they say. >>with an appropriate modulation, with spacing, timing, detail That's actually particularly relevant to The Glass Bead Game where Bach and the fugal form are important parts of the game, but their elegant formality is also exactly what is under criticism. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Right, that means the Glass Bead Game is next on my soft time reading list. I have also got the two Dick biographies. Both seem good. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Just reading Siddartha. Poetic and sweet without being cloying. However, Hesse's view of women is questionable. The idealised sex is reductive and somewhat narrow. I would prefer more nuanced descriptions. Were I to try to write such a book myself, a picture of women that doesn't basically conceive them as whores would be nice. I had a dream about this last, a man raping a woman in front of me and getting away with it. Quite disturbing. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Yes, I'm not sure Hesse was very good with women - in a literary sense at least. There are strong female characters in both Steppenwolf and towards the end of The Glass Bead Game. But they're strong in a rather forbidding archetypal way. And of course Narziss und Goldmund is mainly full of buxom nut-brown maidens. Haven't read Siddharta for at least a decade. So that's probably overdue a re-read. I guess it's inevitably going to be a problem for a man who likes writing about monks and cloistered academics, and I think he does actually address this limitation towards the end of Steppenwolf where Mozart says that Haller can only idealise women or murder them. It's a bit of a damning self-indictment. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Hesse's self-critical awareness is very good. I am enjoying re-reading him. I never tackled the Glass Bead Game - seems too dry and long - so I am building up to it. Peter Camizend and Demian are next. A tremendous number of male writers are poor at creating female characters. Like Hesse they do no more than evoke archetypes or ideals. Hemingway obviously. But also Saint-Exupery, who I am also currently reading. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I remember enjoying Demian. There are elements of it that foreshadow both The Glass Bead Game and Steppenwolf. Never read Peter Camizend. I've only read Le Petit Prince by Saint-Expery. We've got another one of his somewhere around the flat. What's else is worth reading of his? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I read "Wind, Sand & Stars" a long time ago - and remember it as being best Gallic Floral in English translation. Haven't opened it in 20 years, though. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Wind, Sand & Stars... That's the one which is knocking around on the shelves of iotacism Towers. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Wind Sand Stars. Persist with it. The language is portentious, especially at the beginning. But it gets better and there is nothing else like it. At times he gets the language just right and achieves fine poetic effects. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
I am right now reading again Kurt Vonegut. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Does anybody here know where I can find John CLute's review of Light online? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I didn't actually know he'd reviewed it. Any idea where it was reviewed? | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
It looks like he reviewed in something called "Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction" (that perhaps I should have been aware of). It was the Autumn 2002 issue. Cheryl Morgan also reviews Light in the same issue. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
We have a couple of issues of Foundation here, but I suspect that it's neither of them. I'll check anyway. Also: started Wind, Sand & Stars. Great fun. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Cool. If you find it, please let me know how it is. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Well I saw the two of them lunching together at Eastercon earlier in the year, so the review couldn't have been all that bad! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Online I don't know about - but it's here, too: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Parietal-Games-Critical-Ha rrison-Foundation/dp/0903007053 "Imagine As That Dolphin Breathing Light," if I remember correctly. Reprinted because it was the first major review to get inside the triple helix of the plot, to underline the book's critique of immersivity and "giving life the slip," and to focus on Anna as MJH's great fictional coup: this smeared and broken woman who's none the less far stronger than Kearney's bewitched wanker or Tate, that stunned decoherent in his cage of chicken wire. It was this kind of attention which led to "Light" sharing the Tiptree award for broadening considerations of gender. Or perhaps (like me) the judges just loved a female demiurge smelling of "stale bread and wet wool." That's a wonderful idea: Arthur Machen would have adored it. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
So the Clute review is in Parietal Games, Martin? On another Light-related note, dig this bit of the NYC penal code: http://law.onecle.com/new-york/penal/PEN0165.35_16 5.35.html I just came across that today. If it hadn't been for the Circus, Ed would have been in even more trouble. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
So every tarot reader in the state is being arrested as we speak? Hmmm ... "Stark & Stark": you know where you are with that firm of lawyers. As for Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser - we're back to Groucho again, aren't we? Clute: yes, in "PG" (though I'm still a bit dubious over his remark that "Light" begins with "the typhus of the prior." Anyway - ).Besides giving you MJH's reviews/essays in one neat volume (How did anyone ever read Ann McCaffrey with a straight face after this? Come to that, how did any of the writers he took apart with tweezers and vinegar have the nerve to go on with their hack-work, regardless?), I thought the best piece in it was Graham Fraser's essay on "Course of the Heart," and its handling of absence, loss, and nostalgic displacement. My only reservations were that there was no similar piece on "Signs of Life," and that the short stories weren't given separate attention. I'd be fascinated to see what someone with a finer critical tool-kit than I possess would make of "Gifco." | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I am reading Saint-Exupery's Southern Mail. It strikes me now that he is a great writer. The book is extremely condensed, poetic, very striking. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Haven't finished Wind, Sand & Stars yet so I'll avoid premature evaluations, but I'm finding the final section in the Spanish Civil War seems significantly weaker than the rest of the book. Saint-Exupery's writing seems at its best when it deals with the relationship between the individual and nature. His treatment of political or social reality is less assured. Which, I suppose, is what you'd expect from his outsider stance. However I might still be surprised with the effect of this section as a whole. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Has anyone heard anything about Only Revolutions, the new Danielewski novel. I'm intrigued: http://www.onlyrevolutions.com/ | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
MJP: I think I wrote something on the previous incarnation of this site, or the original Empty Space, about Saint-Exupéry's "Flight to Arras". Some incredible writing, brought me the closest to death and war that I have ever been. Ultimately I found that he started repeating himself, but it was well worth it for some of the gems of wisdom gleaned along the way. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Ah, Gifco. I read that again last night on the wrong side of a few pints and found that I really can't say I understand it. anyone shed any light on the damn thing? It has a grip like a giant squid, but when you ask it questions it clams up (that's enough seafood). I mean, those polaroids - they're in the dream, then they're real, aren't they? Or has one type of reality disappeared and another taken its place at that point? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Been such a long time since I've read or re-read that one. But Hello Johnny(?) reminds me of Papa Lazarou. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Alex: I feel like that about "Gifco" on the right side of a few pints, actually. In the "previous incarnation" I drew MJH on it a little, when he gently pointed out that I hadn't noticed the time scheme: given the holiday meet-up of the two main characters, there's no way they could have had a teenage daughter, let alone buried her "safely." She doesn't exist: the whole thing's a fiction of a fiction. And it's this which makes that phrase in the very first sentence - "as we thought" - so supremely off-putting. A huge cop-out to say "it was just my imagination," though: so what is it? My way into it (like the Coeur, I'm sure there are many more) has always been that hospital dream, when the narrator has "The Spectator" pulled out his anus (ho, ho). I always read that as a nod and a wink that the narrator has swallowed the observer in this story - the reader. And 2 further post-modernist nudges come with that book in the Gifco house being CoTH - or something very like it; and the odd remark that when his wife writes reversed on the bathroom mirror, she does "so that it could read from outside." Outside the flat hardly makes sense. So does he mean, perceived in some other mirror-world like Viriconium, or simply outside the story? Given all this, I read the whole thing as a "disruptive" fantasy text, a succession of knowing feints and dead-ends to foil any "immersive" audience, built around the notion of life observed but unlived. It's another critique of existence as tourism, attacking escapism head-on because - well, we're reading about life, not doing it. And if you're baiting a reader-trap like this, you might as well shape it to accommodate any shallow genre expectations or settings you fancy, then give them teeth: a nice policeman (whatever "Colin" is, he's not just a copper), a nice sunshine break (with Allo Johnnie in the middle of it), the more peaceful London suburbs (except they have weird burial customs and extraordinary things going on if you visit their churchyards after dark), and a family tragedy - but this isn't really a family story, more the tale of the daughter that never happened. We can't "solve" any of it. Once the narrator's wife says, "it never occurs to you to hold anything back," we're lost: everything gets held back or deconstructed. You wouldn't trust this narrator (does he exist?) with a full stop, let alone an extended text. It's supernatural fiction turned inside out with the bones being tossed to us fiddle to about with and gnaw, never quite sure if we've got a precious "half inch of ivory" or a few old ribs the butcher couldn't flog. It's most likely stupid over-ingenuity on my part, but all that led me to read the title in a particular way, too: "if" (fantasy) is a "co" operative effort between author and reader, like a tug of war. Only here, as readers, we're left holding a tangled bit of rope and can't decide quite what (if anything) is on the other end. So perhaps the title really decodes as a question: "Gee - If - co?" It's a query from a writer to an audience; to that audience amongst itself. Wow - is this, like, a fantasy? Are you going to co-operate in making it a fantasy? Or is it actually something else completely? We can't "solve" any of those questions, either. You may well think I've followed "the Spectator" back up where it came from; I wouldn't argue. At any rate, MJH's notes on it in TTNH (2003) say that he was still thinking of turning it into a novel. This would be an achievement in itself: god only knows what we'd be looking at. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> So does he mean, perceived in some other mirror-world like Viriconium, or simply outside the story? Perhaps one of the things that "A Young Man's Journey to London" hints at? I'm very impressed with how much detail you can remember. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I'd be impressed, too - except I have an Oxfam copy of "Things" here! Other thoughts: maybe that "Spectator" bit is actually a lot more arch - not so much "I've swallowed the reader" but: "I'm chewing up the reader here and shitting them out! You think you're reading straight narrative, but -" And the notes explain it "was written twice" - once for a Dennis Etchison anthology. I've never seen this earlier version; has anyone else? How do they differ? | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm impressed too. I don't think I ever finished Gifco. Started on it at a time when I was reading Travel Arrangements to Gill at night, a story at a time. But it was too long for a single bed-time's read, and too confusing to pick up again the next day. We stopped reading the book at that point, and I didn't pick it up again myself until perhaps a year later, and I never returned to Gifco. Having read your explanation, I now have an idea why. I shall give it another spin tonight, as I'm feeling starved of fiction lately (for the past 6 months I've just been reading newspapers, photography books, computer manuals etc). | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
It's just blind man and elephant stuff: your interpetation'll be every bit as good. I also have a distinct impression of various lurkers laughing their heads off over the Earl Grey while they shove a few pikelets under the grill: "Pretentious git! Pass the jam. And worra wally - didn't he see that after the opening section -" But, there we are. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Well, you're doing better than all of us. And I get the feeling it may well be a key text in the wake of Nova Swing. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Haven't checked, but are you saying Gifco was written post-CoTH? 'Cos one of those polaroids is wassisname's daughter in Yaxley's incest ritual, isn't it? Or something like. Bugger, have to read it again. The thing that really bugs me about Gifco is the way it has such emotional resonance for me but I'm fucked if I can pin down why. Dreamlike, in that sense - there's dreams I've had where I wake with an image in my mind that has a powerful emotional feeling attached to it, but it doesn't make sense. A potato that makes me feel like crying, say. But then , that's why I read MJH. The other MJH thing that really floors me is the white couple in CoTH - when I read the original short that image really got to me, and hasn't left. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
A bit more - but I have to say I love how easy the text makes this look, and how hard it is to achieve without us really noticing: you can imagine a lesser writer producing nothing but stale cheese and bruised thumbs with the same idea. The story's called "Gifco"; you enter it as a reader; and in it you find a house - also called "Gifco." You enter that. The house has blind windows, and is stuffed with books. What happens inside it? Somebody dies; someone else masturbates, almost incessantly. And "a third party in the room seemed to be watching them both." Who could that be? Oh, yes. Silly me: literally. It's stories within a story, and we're actually the subject. If you're looking for a fluid nexus of signs to pin and and mock us as moribund, self-absorbed readers, you couldn't do much better. "Isn't that the house with the boarded-up windows?" the narrator asks the watching policeman who's come into his house in Peckham (we could talk about the bleak hilarity of that name, applied to these characters, too). "I wouldn't say anything about that ... After all, you've got to live round here." We find out exactly what "all" means; and the stress in the last phrase must surely be on "live" as much as "you." Don't get caught up in the half "gif"t of immersive fiction, the "co"nspiracy of fantasy, but - actually make sure that "real things are happening here"! *Ponders terminal irony of reaching this conclusion after previous x hundred words* | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>A potato that makes me feel like crying - !!! Alex, that's wonderful. >White couple - Absolutely. I remember reading that for the first time - "like a chrysalis in a hedge" - and thinking: Christ on a *bike* ... I look out of kitchen windows with very great care, even to this day. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Alex: sorry - I didn't answer your question. "Gifco" is dated 1991. MJH notes: "I love it, but I wouldn't sit next to it on a commutor train. The material was assembled in Peckham, from the same notebooks & journals I used for CoTH, to which it is a kind of opposite. There's no yearning in these people, no attempt to transcend, however failed: only a kind of fuddled acceptance." So, they never get to meet a Yaxley (or perhaps, in Johnnie, they do - they just don't quite recognise what he is) - but end up lost in their own version of "Beautiful Swimmers" (another image of that White Couple ... ) regardless. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I'm going to do my homework tonight so that I can come to the Gifco close reading class tomorrow. I have a bottle of cheap Oz red and the cat has just thrown up on the floorboards. Wish me luck! Also: "Allo Johnnie" = "Allusiony"/"Illusiony"? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin: you might have nailed it there. However, I don't agree with MJH about 'no yearning'. Surely the narrator is yearning for excitement when he lets Colin in? He seems keen to be involved in the goings-on in an Enid Blytoon 'what a jolly adventure' kind of way, and what of the couple's interraction with Allo Johnny in Tenerife: 'what have you got for us today'? And if there really isn't a dead daughter, does she not represent the longing for one? And the wife's frantic mastubation without release which is opposite to the woman on holiday's greed for more orgasms even though they don't satisfy her? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Alex: I'd agree. It's either us misreading, or (ah, the shame) slips on his part - but I wondered how someone who makes "no attempt to transcend" instantly identifies chestnut-tree candles with angels from Blake. Then again, this is before his "wife" (did they ever get married?) tells him he never keeps anything back; and that transcendant language vanishes from what he says; I don't know. I read something else last night which seems a very MJH sidelight on all this. It's from a book of interviews with people talking about Peter Cook: http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Very-Interesting-Unive rse-Surrounds/dp/1905005237 - one of whom is Robyn Hitchcock. He gives a very acute description of how the '60s unwound, and how the talent of people like Cook unwound with them, "almost as if some element had been taken out of the air and they couldn't breathe any more." Then Hitchcock says: "Later in life you might remember the big divorces and the epic pinnacles of sex or whatever, but most of your life is spent screwing up bits of paper and throwing them in a bin, or opening the fridge. Sometimes you go to the fridge, open it, then sit down and wonder if you've opened it or not. That's how banal our life is. It's there despite its banality." - I think those last two sentences could introduce a lot of MJH's work: including "Gifco." | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Marvellous, Martin. I wonder if Zen understands the banality of life and is an attempt to make it interesting. I mean, have you ever *really looked* at your hands? ;) | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
A few ideas to throw into the pot: Colin: Colin is The Spectator who is actually generated by Jack, an aspect of him if you like. Jack gives birth to him in the dream. He is a policeman but in a special sense. He watches the shores of Jack's world for Allo Johnnie. Allo Johnnie: AJ develops through different layers or avatars of his nature. In tourist spots he presents as energetic and gaudy. The only protection from the this avatar is rejection - this is something which Jeremy knows but Jack doesn't. AJ's trinkets, his serpents are transformative in some manner. In Tenerife Jill offers herself to Jack wearing AJ's gifts. In the face of nature, when Jack and Jill are climbing the hill, AJ becomes serpent like himself. And in his final incarnation he has transformed into some sort of inhuman archon. Allo Johnnie as "illusionary" becomes Maya - the illusion of a world that generates the story and in this way an unreliable demiurge. Barnes: When we are told things about Barnes, such as their funeral rites we are being told the sorts of things we might discover about a quarter of Viriconium or a world in the Perkin's Rent system. When this story tells us about Barnes it is a feint wrapped in a familiar name. Similarly anything we are told about Peckham, Tenerife, Jersey or even for instance "death" should not be understood under their normal named valences. The Daughter: whether the daughter is alive or dead is a face still forming. Like the people of Peckham, the reader cannot understand "death" in the abstract. Until we see the body and get a coroners report, the daughter is essentially a Schroedinger Cat. Also: what are we meant to understand by "daughter"? She was called Sofia. Which should tell us something. Both as the fallen final archon of Valentinus, and in a simpler sense as the death of Jack and Jill's wisdom, this offstage character can really only be read in a simbolic sense. So in all: Jack conjures a watcher, Colin, to guard Peckham from the return of Allo Johnnie. Who will, like Papa Lazarou, claim his wife. Jill is attempting, through the Gifco house to call Allo Johnnie. However her nature and her method is fiercely contradictory. She say's "Gifco we are here" but then she says "Gifco leave us alone". But when the watcher has been disarmed, and beyond the shores of Peckham, inevitably Allo Johnnie must return to claim his bride. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
"simbolic"? Urgh! Wrote all of that too quickly. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Mostly the life-line, and wonder where the hell I am on it, actually! - It's said you never see your own hands in a dream, too. I wonder. As for RH: I liked that a lot. It's a useful bit of perpsective for that maudlin moment after the second whisky ("Where is she *now*?? - Oh, christ -"). It'd make a nice line in pub bore talk, too: "Did I ever tell you about that piece of A4 in put through the shredder back in '98? Talk about a thing of beauty! Well, it was like this. I opened the pack of photocopier paper - you know how you get them? - and -" | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Schoedinger's Daughter!? Well why didn't he *say* so, then ..! I like those ideas a lot, too. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Damn gnostics! Funnily enough, I was just trying to formulate a thought about the wife's mastubation ritual, because that's what it is, isn't it? Same as Yaxley's sex rituals. When she's saying "come, come" she's not talking to herself, is she? And don't forget, what 'Allo Johnny offers is fake. PhD here we come! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Also: The Nine Stations of the ECG. These are both alluded to as some sort of surgical chakras or entrances to the heart, but in addition we can interpret them as planetary rulers or emanations of divine light or somesuch. Yes, we're deeply into Basilides system here! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Schoedinger's Daughter!? Arrgh! That's transformed into "Coalminer's Daughter" and I'm now imagining Sofia to resemble Sissy Spacek! | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
>>It's said you never see your own hands in a dream, too. I wonder. Ever read D.E. Harding? He says that the brain's lack of awareness of precisely what's *in* your body (e.g how many tendons are in that hand? How many nerve endings? Without a mirror, how would you know what your face looks like?) is proof of mind-body duality. Or, that we are a soul inhabiting a machine. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>have you ever *really looked* at your hands? ;) Only since I started getting warts on them. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
This is getting like Dr. Haends's box: more and more and more after that. Anyone any ideas about the churchyard scene, and "Adele Junck"? There's the echo of CoTH in Colin mistaking grave chippings for snow - but the rest ..? I should quote the rest of Mike's note, if you haven't seen it in the Nightshade edition of "TTNH": "Late Viriconium stories aside, this is the ugliest tempered thing I ever wrote. It's dispassionate, completely relentless and (unlike the Viriconium stories) possessed of a ferocious emotional intelligence." He adds that between the two versions of the story, "something really unacceptable crept out of the idea and into my head." Maybe, if this is a dark counterpart to CoTH, we're being shown a world of utter emptiness - Sophia is dead (or never fell into it in the first place), what were fragments of the pleromic rose in one book are now bits of cemetery slag, there's no redemptive promise, and everything is just trickery, dead ends, and meaningless stories that you tell yourself to keep utter despair at bay. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>This is getting like Dr. Haends's box... Another pedlar in shabby trinkets. "You see anything you like?" But what are we to make of the German couple eating goat? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Sometimes, a German couple eating goat is just a German couple eating goat! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Although I suspect that Jeremy's remark during that scene, "I'm psychic," is literal rather than sarcastic. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
*Thinks* : If only he'd just subtitled it 'a postmodern gnostic fable with a Shekinah who's neither wave nor particle' ... *sighs* Beyond a certain point, you just get into kicking grains of sand about on a Joycean beach, don't you? But (the notion stirs) I do wonder if "Adele Juck" carries an unconscious resonance: "a dell full of junk," which equals Jumble Wood in SoL, another image of the ruined, fallen world. I used to have a life, you know ... | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Well, in my edition (uncorrected proof Night Shade) the name is "Adele Junck" - has that been changed to "Juck" in yours? If not I think we can be fairly certain that a name like "Junck" isn't arbitrary. I was testing this passage for resonances of "Entertaining Angels Unawares". The final graveyard scene in that still won't resolve for me | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Just overheard from somewhere else in the office: "...Canary Island... come back again..." | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
The goat? It's Baphomet, of course. If you use the kabbalistic "Atbash Cipher," (where the Hebrew alphabet is laid out twice in opposite directions, each letter from the top row substituting for one on the lower) the name Baphomet yields the name Sophia. Facto! And now, I'm off to Cornwall for a week to get a life. And yes, I'm taking Travel Arrangements. Sigh. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
My typo: "Junck" it is. I have to say "EAU" doesn't do it for me. I know Mike rates this and "Science & the Arts" are his best work; but I always felt there should be a bit more to it, either in narrative or in imagery - simply going at children with a sword in a dream like Elric wasn't a nasty enough fantasy to shock me when the narrator wants to join in. And, like you, I find the last scene stops rather than intrigues or resolves. But what does anyone else think? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>The goat? It's Baphomet It was actually the Germans who were bugging me. They're not a reference to the Comte de Saint Germain, are they? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Ah! The old Atbash Cipher! *Grins. Tries to look as if knows what's going on* *Looks round nervously, wondering how we got into all this* | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
EAU is a funny old puzzle. The sword swinging dream I read as being more comical than horrific. It's kinda "Chunk! Axe in face!" But where it gets combined with the atrocities on the TV screen in his shoddy flat something else starts to happen there. Thinking about it, there's an absent daughter in that one too, isn't there? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I'll be back in a week with the definitive guide to EAU. Hope the frost hasn't killed all the magic mushrooms ;) | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Seeya Alex! Be good! If you can't be good - be *careful*! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
'ere - 'e's gorn from featurin' sick wimmin to absent dor'ers! It Must Mean Something ... Alex: have a good one! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Maybe... like... maybe all the sick women *are* the absent daughters! And like maybe... | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
... like maybe, they all wrote *to* Gifco, right, and one day - http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Nov02/0,4670,Unan sweredPrayers,00.html | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
This is quite topical. I am reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is about the end of the world. Late Beckett is at the centre of it especially (as in the trilogy beginning with Company) but it is very real, grim in the extreme. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
More of this on MJH's pages, no doubt, but first reviews of "Nova Swing" are appearing: it doesn't work for Lisa Tuttle - 923-2434518.html,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/arti cle/0,,923-2434518.html - but the TLS (not online yet, I don't think) takes the hint from the title, calls it less space opera than "space jazz," and gives it a grin. We wait and wonder. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Nova Swing: That was kind of lame, surface-y review. Disappointing. When can we wxpect some new MJH press...interviews etc.? MJP, do keep me posted on The Road. I've heard good thgings, and McCarthy's normally a great read. But always grim, yes. Have you read Blood Meridian? | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Soap noir is a bloody briliant marketing device and a whole category of niche fiction writing to happen. Come to think of it, Deseperate housewives *is* soap noir with a murder mystery - and any numbre o staples of crime ficition fitted in-and lots of ehem soap ( in the scenes with eva longoria in the bathtub) so it has already happened... | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Dave, I haven't read Blood Meridian. But I have read the Border Trilogy. Especially liked The Crossing. So far 70 pages into The Road. Curious feeling of silence in it, as if despite the printed page no words are sufficient to witness this catastrophe yet to happen. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Mm. Seriously flat review for Nova Swing. My criticism of Light (which I accept I must read again) is that it sometimes tells you that something happens rather than the thing actually happening. As when someone finds himself going through a housing block and the reader is told: 'he would always remember the strangeness of this experience'. Harrison fails to *give* the reader the experience. The same when the main character is taken on a rickshaw ride. The passenger's experience of 'strangeness' for the reader is too abbreviated. This created an unevenness that weakened the novel for me. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I don't want to say any more until everybody here finds a copy - but having bought one online a little ahead of publication, I'd be very embarrassed if I'd reviewed it in Lisa Tuttle's terms. It's a lot more philosophical than "Light," with one character offering oblique commentary on the action. A couple of sections feel a little underdone - but that's a quibble compared to what's been forked into the subtext. It's simply impossible to pick it all up at one reading. Do we get "strangeness"? Do we what, pop pickers ..! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
That's better, Martin. That cheers me up a little. One of my complaints about sf book reviews is that the reviewers often have a tendency to make them sound utterly pointless. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
*Restrains enthusiasm, with difficulty* ... But it's less "space jazz" than "space fugue" - a series of variations on questionings of remembrance, identity, and imagination. Anyway: enough coyness and pimping on my part - get a copy soon and see for yourself. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin, The "half finished" bit had my eyebrow seriously raised. If she said "overdone" or” cryptic" or” heavy with symbolism” or “too bleak” I might believe it. But half finished? MJH? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I think part of the trouble is being given a very short "sci-fi" review slot, and then finding that what you've got on your hands might look like sf, share some of the settings and tropes of sf, but only uses those as hardware to pinpoint and bring to earth far larger, ambiguous areas of concern. Imagine reviewing horror fiction and expecting splatterpunk, but CotH landed on your desk. Of course, none of this should be news after "Light": but I think some disgruntled genre reviewers professed themselves "bored" by that novel, and (sadly) that may be the case here, too. It'll be their loss. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin, G.K.Chesterton said that the worst mistake a critic can make is to disgain blue wine because it is not green cheese and even now rare is the review that accepts any book on its own term. Fie on innovation, we wan´t comfortable templates! And the other think that bothered me in the review is the comptentious use of "soap". I find it surprising a genere writer employing a diferent genere templates as a term of contempt. To put it blunty "100 years of solitude" has a lot of soap elements on it and it is a bloody masterpiece. It all depens on execution. For all I know "Nova swing" may be terrible but that review doesn´t seem to me useful as they say in amazon. The genre reviewers you metion value most of all "entertaiment" wich nowadasy have rule as ironclad as a Koan: simple lenguague, happy ending, simpatethic characters, long book but short chapters finished in cliffhangers, "feminist" characters that still need to be rescued by the, of course, male lead, a spay paint of useful info about the real world... I wonder why nobody is making the connection that the last genre author to get mainstream attention was Stephenson ten years ago and nobody has made the jump since. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Chesterton's a useful parallel: no one would describe "Father Brown" as "just" detective stories, either. "NS" I can see getting one set of reactions from genre obsessives; another from readers expecting "Light - the Sequel"; and a quite different one again from anyone who's tried to appreciate Mike's work (in however a fumbling or over-keen fashion) on its own terms. Personally, I love rich texts that shift each time I read them, and don't always offer me that nod and wink of resolution - but it's not everyone's cup of chalk, by a long mixed metaphor. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
My God Cormac McCarthy's The Road is terrifying. It's shaping up to be an American masterpiece. One of the best or worst things about it is that it is so real. McCarthy gives substance to one's worst (but most rational fears) and simply extends their logic to its natural terminus. I think his pessimism is wholly warranted. Unless we change absolutely this is the way things will end. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I dunno, I miss a few days on here and whole universes of meaning seem to have flowed past. I've not time to catch up on them right now, but I would like to just say that at the house where my Grandma used to live, in Altrincham, they had a goat called Baphomet. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Just a stream of white cats on black and grey backgrounds, Dan! | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
If you see a stream of white cats, might they *look* like a goat? I've a feeling that question is Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy inspired, though I'm not sure of the exact quote which inspired it. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
This is nothing like a goat - but it might resemble your bookshelves: http://www.literature-map.com/m+john+harrison.html | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Not a stream but two new white cats in my house. The bay-cat eats *everything* she can find on the floor. I call her goat-cat. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
On the other hand ( so the little cat won´t minble it) I am reading "here is where we met" by John Berger. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Hey Arturo, Here is Where We Meet: I have read that. Be interested to hear what you think. One of the best books I've read in a long time. I am finding the Cormac McCarthy very challenging. This also is one of the great books, very refreshing but it has rattled me, which is unusual. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
MJP, what's challenging about it? Do you mean it's too dark? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Dave, I think what I feel about it is that it directly taps into my own deep-seated pessimism about human beings and the kind of arbitrary violence that they can visit on other things and each other, a conviction deep-seated due I think partly to experience but due partly too to a fear of what is in me. Sometimes I am afraid of myself. We have the capacity to do great harm to this planet, and we are in fact doing it great harm. That is a platitude. But sometimes others in the form of books or whatever can bring it home. Then all one has to do is look say at a traffic stream on a workday morning. At the power and agressive neediness of that metal flow, suddenly one sees it and multiplies it thousands or tens of thousands of times around the planet. But on a day to day basis this is invisible. Especially if one is oneself driving. This is what makes The Road so horribly but refreshingly believable for me. I find it hard to take sometimes. I have to stop reading because of the way it shatters my natural surface optimism. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
Hmmm. So, MJP, I went out and bought The Road today. Maybe it was my Kurt Cobain/fish dream, maybe it's the fact that I think Blood Meridian is brilliant, maybe your grim hype. I don't know. We'll have to see how it works for me. I've been in an apocalyptic mood lately. I think this has something to do with my lack of surface optimism though. It just seems that pessimism is more pragmatic these days. Not to mention congruent with reality (recent elections aside). You've gotta keep that optimism tucked away, after all. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Cormack McCarthy is addictive. I should know better but I am going out to buy No Country for Old Men today. Glutton for punishment. I can't help but think these McCarthy books a response at least in part to the Bush administration. But he does provide chinks of humour and light. | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
The Road is stark and stunning so far. It's so effective, it's scary. I find it impossible to put down though...no matter how dire it is. This made me stop in my tracks: "No lists of things to be done. The day prvidential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace an beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you." No Country for Old Men was great too. But less like a fable and more like a confused snapshot of the world that lead to The Road. The Cohen Brothers are currently filming an adaptation of No Country for Old Men. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
An old Greil Marcus column on the NY Times's "Books of the Year": little has changed. "The 9 Best Books of 2001" (Dec. 2) As offered by a friend, "A Translation": "Austerlitz" by W. G. Sebald: "As so often in Sebald's fiction, direct connections are never highlighted in the vast loops and sudden knottings of his rhetoric." Translation: "You can't tell what's going on." "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen: "The important thing to know about Jonathan Franzen's novel is that you can ignore all the literary fireworks and thoroughly enjoy its people." Translation: "You have to ignore what a prick Franzen is in order to read the book." "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" by Alice Munro: "As Alice Munro gets older, the challenges faced by her characters get darker." Translation: "This is even gloomier than most Canadian fiction." "John Adams" by David McCullough: "There will always be some readers who feel that the historian's subduing of Adams's noisy feistiness in this account -- his rashness, stubbornness and sometimes bizarre behavior -- makes him a little less himself." Translation: "McCullough knew that if he was too honest he could kiss the miniseries deal goodbye." "John Henry Days" by Colson Whitehead: "The ambition of Colson Whitehead's second novel is to define the interior crisis of manhood in terms of the entire pop-mad consumer society." Translation: "Somebody on the Book Review staff is thinking about buying a red Jag to alleviate his midlife crisis." "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand: "The approach also gives his thesis a kind of theatrical excitement that no severe intellectual history could engender." Translation: "Reading this stuff bores us as much as it does you." "True History of the Kelly Gang" by Peter Carey: "That alone would make this novel the most compelling reading on the list." Translation: "We're above just reading for pleasure." "Uncle Tungsten" by Oliver Sacks: "As charming as his prose always is, Oliver Sacks cannot write for long without finding a subject outside himself." Translation: "He's a rambling old geezer." | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Less reading than listening: http://www.archive.org/details/naropa Ginsberg reads, Burroughs teaches writing (!), and much, much more. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
the true story of the kelly gang has , of all things, a very good joke. There is this guy that sells his soul to the devil. He gets tree wishes. He employs two to get a house and riches. Later on he gets married and as the years go by he becomes worried. His wife gets the secret out and he tells the man not to be silly and don´t worried. She summons Lucifer and asks him I she can´t use the tirdh wish.Only if it is beyond his power the man´s soul will be free. She asks the wish and the devil flees screaming into the night. Her husband asks her what was the wish and she answers: - To make every single lawyer in the world honest. (I am quoting from memory) | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Englands-Lost-Eden-Adventu res-Victorian/dp/0007159110 - Ignore the mealy-mouthed rating: I thought it was a wonderful book on nineteenth-century spiritualism, the Shakers, barmy achitercture, and poor John Ruskin's tortured sexuality - as well conveying such a sense of place that you want to jump on the next train to the south coast and explore the weirder nooks of the New Forest where it all happened. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Looks fantastic. I'll keep an eye out for this. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm reading a detailed explanation of Peter Greenaway's 'Drowning By Numbers'. Interesting stuff - I know all the numbers and games stuff, but I didn't know that the story of Madget trying to shag the three Cissies is nicked from the "Billy Goats gruff". | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
A good obit in yesterday's Guardian on Jack Williamson by Christopher Priest. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Also reading Ralph Steadman's HST memoir, "The Joke's Over": a better (and more bitter) book than you might imagine. Least PC moment: Thomapson selling their ring-side seats to watch Ali v. Foreman in Kinshasha, dumping his stash in the hotel pool, then diving in: "Ralph, if you think I came all this way to watch 2 n*gg*rs beat the sh*t out of each other in a rainstorm, you've got another think coming." Advice for our times: "Ralph, anyone who lives in England and doesn't put bricks through windows needs worrying about." | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I've just finished reading a novel for the first time in at least six months (I'm also still working my way through Nova Swing, somewhat slower). "A Perfect Execution" by Tim Binding, courtesy of Oxfam. I polished it off over two very depressed days when I could do little else but read, and I loved every minute of it. My literary muscles are grown feeble, so I can't say much about it other than that it's about Jeremiah Bembo, who moonlights as Solomon Straw, England's executioner, and tries to perfect the art of hanging people as painlessly as possible. Somehow it made me think of Riddley Walker, but I think that's just because it makes frequent references to Punch & Judy plus I was in a similarly depressed mood when I read it. Anyone else here familiar with it? Next I plan to read the last couple of weeks of Empty Space & KRMB. I can't keep up with you lot. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Browsing in amazon I came upon this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Obabakoak-Bernardo-Atxaga/ dp/0091751969/sr=8-32/qid=1166529142/ref=sr_1_32/0 26-8884971-3249204?ie=UTF8&s=books Bernardo Atxaga - the vasque novelist- is brilliant. Very good. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Hi arturo, I don't know whether you noticed my apologies to you for my rude posts on the Iraq thread. Anyway, I am glad to see you still coming here despite my rudeness. I have read Atxaga's The Lone Woman, which I thought very original. I have a copy of The Lone Man at home; I am planning to read it some day soon. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
Hi, MJP. I didn´t until now. Of course I accept your apologies. Merry xmas. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Cool. I'm glad this has turned out okay. Differences resolved. Apologies accepted. Almost feels like Xmas. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Hours of Jungian self-analysis fun here: http://similarminds.com/personality_tests.html I got different profiles from 3 separate tests. One notes that I "like the rain" and probably "favour the legalisation of marijuana." That's as may be. Curiously, it also said figures with this profile include Homer, "Mary, Mother of Jesus, " and E.T. I think these doctors might just be toying with us, somehow. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
I´ve finished "The road" a couple of days a go. A masterpiece. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Peter Haining, RIP http://tinyurl.com/3an8y8 | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
I photographed Ian Rankin a couple of months ago, and in preparation for meeting him I read a couple of his Rebus books. This soon turned into a bit of a crime-a-thon - I've not read many novels over the last year, and it was very easy and quite enjoyable to slip into reading detective fiction. Read several Rankins (his first Rebus book "Knots and Crosses" seems by far the best) and a bit of Ellroy. In an attempt to break this habit, I picked up something a bit more literary: André Gide's "Strait is the Gate". I'm reading it very slowly, savouring every sentence, and enjoying doing so. Have noticed what seems to be a French trait of giving detailed and immersive descriptions of bucolic country locations: there's some of this in Gide and it reminds me of similar passages in Stendahl & Flaubert. I also recently breezed through Paul Bailey's poignant novella "Old Soldiers". | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
In this neck of the woods, it's been Cornell Woodrich, Meng & Ecker comics (wot larks), and Andrew Birkin's study of JM Barrie, "The Lost Boys." I last read this is the '80s. I'd forgotten what an almsot unrelieved tragedy the tale is - and had never noticed that one of the children involved seems to have been psychic to an alarming degree. Equally, in those days I hadn't the emotional nous to pick up the cloying chill that seeps through Barrie's affection. You can sense a crevass in his character: if that skeletal revenant glimpsed in MR James's "A School Story" - 'beastly thin' - could write, the result might be very close to the sentiments Barrie voiced for the family of small boys that ended up in his care. A good book; sad reading; and it confirms me in my life-long dislike for "Peter Pan." Barrie never abused anyone - but he still comes across as all cold skin and shaky fingers. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
Meng & Ecker... that takes me back about 20 years. I don't know what happened to my Meng & Ecker comics. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Probably best not to ask! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Dan I love Strait is the Gate. Gide's The Immoralist too I remember as fantastically good. A perfect novel of its kind. I've just read Herman H.s Demian. It took me ages as there is not much of plot. It's an uneven book but ultimately impressive. I would say probably one of his best because he tries to deal so forthrightly, in symbolic terms at least, with the advent of the First World War and its wider meaning. What struck me as I was reading it was that it was a very lonely book; and that it had no real solution to the predicament of desolatiom that it describes apart from its vision of a few cardboard props. I would put it alongside that Virginia Woolf impressionistic novel whose name I can never remember, but one of her best too. Jacob's Room. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I always thought Burroughs should have done some readings of Lovecraft. That never happened (so far as I know) - but we do have this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A30267641 |