Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Aug 19, 2023 5:38:28 GMT -5
Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt
It's lucky that Greenblatt is an incredibly light and fluent writer, able to transmute the most unpromising material into something highly readable. This is the third book of his I've read on Shakespeare, and in many ways the most challenging, though it didn't feel like it at the time.
This is a look at the grand Catholic scam that was Purgatory. For all the heathens among you, this was where salvageable sinners went to be tormented rather than Hell: for a sum, large or small, you could ease the passage of your dead relatives to Heaven. The church amassed huge wealth this way, before Protestant thinkers pointed out what a load of bollocks it was. Greenblatt's emphasis is on how literature handled it, or buttressed it, along with the adjacent topics of the dead returning as ghosts or being remembered in other ways. This all builds up, very gradually, to Shakespeare's handling of all these matters in the form of the ghost of Hamlet's father, who emerges from his purging to instruct Hamlet: 'Remember me!'
I get that it's fairly niche, but it's only 260 pages (plus another 50 of notes), and Greenblatt keeps it humming along nicely, never far away from mentioning a grisly torture or a spectral apparition. I like that in an academic.
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Aug 19, 2023 17:05:32 GMT -5
Lake Success, Gary Shtyengart (2018)
Figured out that Gary's writing hits me most like TC Boyle and Neal Stephenson. Stephenson: Elegant story tie-ins, gaps in storytelling that you get to make up your own story in, near to current events that everyone reels in. Boyle: Elegant dramatisation of current events, lived-in feel of all set pieces, mandatory, highly valued cultural currency for whatever demographic is described.
That said, Shytengart is a great writer. I laughed out loud in the last 30 pages because he's describing his own life, his own obsession with watches, and his own internal battle to become watch-repair confident. In short, I would like to be an acquaintance of Gary's, though I wager it would be someone like HipsterDBag who would be his nearest quarry for future work about being a labour and tax law attorney/partner in a post-Trump landscape. What I'm saying is that you, HipsterDBag, should seek out his company and become his new muse. My conviction about this is irrational, my intuition about such impregnable.
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Post by HipsterDBag on Aug 21, 2023 9:49:42 GMT -5
Lake Success, Gary Shtyengart (2018)
Figured out that Gary's writing hits me most like TC Boyle and Neal Stephenson. Stephenson: Elegant story tie-ins, gaps in storytelling that you get to make up your own story in, near to current events that everyone reels in. Boyle: Elegant dramatisation of current events, lived-in feel of all set pieces, mandatory, highly valued cultural currency for whatever demographic is described.
That said, Shytengart is a great writer. I laughed out loud in the last 30 pages because he's describing his own life, his own obsession with watches, and his own internal battle to become watch-repair confident. In short, I would like to be an acquaintance of Gary's, though I wager it would be someone like HipsterDBag who would be his nearest quarry for future work about being a labour and tax law attorney/partner in a post-Trump landscape. What I'm saying is that you, HipsterDBag , should seek out his company and become his new muse. My conviction about this is irrational, my intuition about such impregnable. Loving the Mike Tyson quote. I have not read any of Shtyengart's work, I'll have to give it a try.
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Aug 22, 2023 17:26:45 GMT -5
The Prone Gunman, Jean-Patrick Manchette (1980) Though this is Manchette's mid-to-late period of his most highly regarded run of works, it is a furnace of writing. Nothing extra. Everything sizzles. All words snap, hit, and punch. Like the best of 50s-60s era nihilistic crime novels: Westlake's Stark series, Thompson's Savage Night, or Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel - Manchette works through one hectic event after another, driving a story to a fiery end. That he translated many of the aforementioned authors into French gives insight that he figured out the formula, then applied his own personal history of leftist sympathies to create a new genre of fiction - néo-polar.Jean Luc de Lemur, have you seen Delon's Le Choc (1982)? Its plot basis is this short novel. Raveningly recommended for those who like films such as Mesrine, or Carlos.
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Post by repulsionist on Aug 24, 2023 16:12:33 GMT -5
The Information, Martin Amis (1995)
TMI warning: It may be a touch heretical, considering the company, but I opine that this is Amis's "dad brain" novel.
Such an opinion implies a skilled person who has natural and developed abilities but attention is pulled in many directions and what does show up as great work is done automatically without too much thinking. His boys are tweens as he's writing this.
Still, soigné turns of phrase in the first 20 pages that can be done by few and are done most interestingly by Amis. IF reading is entering another's consciousness, I easily hear and feel Amis in every utterance from the characters - based on the various interviews of his I've absorbed in the last 30 years.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Aug 27, 2023 18:20:01 GMT -5
repulsionist I have not seen or heard of Le choc but it is on the list. I am lucky Los Angeles still has a video store with a load of weird and obscure stuff to rent because it’s looking like that’s my best case for finding it.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 2, 2023 6:54:08 GMT -5
Balzac, Graham Robb
I wondered how I'd get on with this - I've only read one Balzac novel, and that was decades ago, so I wasn't sure how interested I would be. However, I've read Robb's very witty biography of Rimbaud, so I thought it was worth the risk of disappointment.
It was fine. While no Hemingway, Balzac's life was not without incident, even if most of that incident involved the running up of debt in failed printing ventures (a cool half million plus for most of his life). The appetite for indulgence was matched by that for work. His output was prodigious and rapid, with him thinking nothing of producing 12,000 words in one marathon overnight session. (He mostly worked through the night, fuelled by endless cups of coffee.) His grand work, La Comédie humaine, runs to almost 100 completed novels and short stories (and half as many unfinished pieces; some of these were also unstarted, though). He found time for love affairs, too, most notably a long one with a married Russian that provided a fair bit of torment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was worn out by his late 30s, and dead of many ailments (including heart failure and gangrene) at 51.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Sept 2, 2023 7:11:35 GMT -5
Balzac, Graham RobbI wondered how I'd get on with this - I've only read one Balzac novel, and that was decades ago, so I wasn't sure how interested I would be. However, I've read Robb's very witty biography of Rimbaud, so I thought it was worth the risk of disappointment. It was fine. While no Hemingway, Balzac's life was not without incident, even if most of that incident involved the running up of debt in failed printing ventures (a cool half million plus for most of his life). The appetite for indulgence was matched by that for work. His output was prodigious and rapid, with him thinking nothing of producing 12,000 words in one marathon overnight session. (He mostly worked through the night, fuelled by endless cups of coffee.) His grand work, La Comédie humaine, runs to almost 100 completed novels and short stories (and half as many unfinished pieces; some of these were also unstarted, though). He found time for love affairs, too, most notably a long one with a married Russian that provided a fair bit of torment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was worn out by his late 30s, and dead of many ailments (including heart failure and gangrene) at 51. Have you ever considered reading the entire Comedie Humaine or like all the Rougon-Macquart novels as one of your massive reading projects?
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 2, 2023 7:21:20 GMT -5
Balzac, Graham RobbI wondered how I'd get on with this - I've only read one Balzac novel, and that was decades ago, so I wasn't sure how interested I would be. However, I've read Robb's very witty biography of Rimbaud, so I thought it was worth the risk of disappointment. It was fine. While no Hemingway, Balzac's life was not without incident, even if most of that incident involved the running up of debt in failed printing ventures (a cool half million plus for most of his life). The appetite for indulgence was matched by that for work. His output was prodigious and rapid, with him thinking nothing of producing 12,000 words in one marathon overnight session. (He mostly worked through the night, fuelled by endless cups of coffee.) His grand work, La Comédie humaine, runs to almost 100 completed novels and short stories (and half as many unfinished pieces; some of these were also unstarted, though). He found time for love affairs, too, most notably a long one with a married Russian that provided a fair bit of torment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was worn out by his late 30s, and dead of many ailments (including heart failure and gangrene) at 51. Have you ever considered reading the entire Comedie Humaine or like all the Rougon-Macquart novels as one of your massive reading projects? No, and you can also include Proust in that, but I should tackle more Balzac. The one I've read was Pere Goriot. I should get to Cousin Bette, at least.
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Post by repulsionist on Sept 3, 2023 15:32:31 GMT -5
The Trouble With Being Born, E.M. Cioran (1973)
I strongly doubt I will warm to this clown's maundering. I have too many other things to read. I don't get through works very quickly. I'd gladly listen to this joker's rantings on a street corner for 5-10 minutes before buying him a high ABV can.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 5, 2023 10:29:53 GMT -5
The World of Christopher Marlowe, David Riggs
An apt title, this one, since it would be a thin volume indeed if it was The Life of Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare's exact contemporary left even less of an impress on the records of his day than he did. So we get a lot on what was taught at school and University in those days; a lot on the sources for his plays and the world of the burgeoning (thanks to him) Elizabethan theatre; and a lot on the political and religious intrigues he was likely swept up in.
The life can be summarised thusly: humble shoemaker's son from Canterbury gets himself to Cambridge University, and afterwards, while casting around for a way to make a living, invents blank verse for the English stage with a run of fantastic plays (which is what prompted me to read this: I finally got round to Tamburlaine The Great recently and was bowled over by it). They still didn't make him much of a living, so he had to fall back on spying in Europe, and possibly being a double agent. He also had a vast appetite for danger, forever uttering blasphemous statements and hanging out with seditionists and getting in fatal street brawls and possibly (but not necessarily) being gay. Finally, he was stabbed in the head during a brawl in a tavern, almost certainly at the behest of the authorities. He was 29, so probably the most incalculable loss to literature there is.
As with books on Shakespeare, it's difficult to gain a sense of him as a personality, as little or no record of that has survived. But it's tempting to picture him as Shakespeare might have: a boy just like him, who made his mark earlier, and lived a life of glamourous risk that he never would have. The thought of them spurring each other on through another couple of decades, though ...
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 10, 2023 3:36:34 GMT -5
Holly, Stephen KingI wasn't particularly looking forward to this one, but that's the life of a completist (especially when you can get a book half-price and delivered on the day of release). The Holly Gibney character has been in four previous novels and one novella, by my count, and she's among my least favourite King creations. Here she takes centre-stage. But the rest of the plot sounded intriguing - and it didn't turn out to be a bad read. It concerns a pair of elderly academics snatching people off the street for nefarious purposes#. Holly, aching from the fallout of her mother's death, is hired to find one of these disappeared. A dual timeline flitting between the academics and Holly, gradually dovetailing, is nicely done and allows King room for writerly tricks that I'm sure he got a kick out of. Covid is at its height, also, and there are a few digs at anti-vaxxers and Trumpers and so on. Plus there's a long, barely integrated subplot about a minor character getting a poetry career off the ground that King is clearly more interested in than the nuts and bolts of the rest of it, but this is often the way with his latter-day books: at this point he should just go all out and write something literary, forget the horror for one release. It's not likely to tank his career, after all. Overall, not too bad, and a lot better than I was fearing. I got through it in about three days. Holly was a little less annoying than she has been in the past, but still, I wish I knew what he sees in her. I think there's more of her to come, too. # They're cannibals, trying to stave off the ageing process by eating brains and smearing themselves with fat. The word 'sciatica' is used a lot in this book.
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Sept 11, 2023 15:26:28 GMT -5
Harold, Steven Wright (2023)
Got this because Wright's stand-up from the late 80s, early 90s was a "must watch" when his sets appeared on A&E, HBO, and so forth. Not finishing it because I'm 30-40 pages in, the Wright one-liners are coming frequently enough, but the story told feels as though it's only bedding for Wright's efficient conundrums.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Sept 14, 2023 20:07:08 GMT -5
Since we had recently mentioned Gary Shtyengart in this thread, here is a delightfully scathing book review from him of Walter Isaacson's new biography of Elon Musk:
In this review, Shtyengart describes Isaacson's prose as "workmanlike bordering on AI", and that is maybe one of the nicer things he has to say. Ah, I love a well-written bad review.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 21, 2023 2:47:32 GMT -5
The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
An odd and oddly disappointing book, this one, in which the esteemed Swiss thinker set out to invent a genre: the tell-all autobiography.
It was written in two parts, with the first being easily the most interesting. In detailing his childhood, his casting around for a path in life, and his taking up with various women, Rousseau doesn't spare himself. He tells of the time he was working in a mansion as a servant type and stole a ribbon. When he was caught, he said one of the maids had given it to him, so she must've stolen it. The maid responds with dignity, but is sacked, consigned to a life of God knows what in those days; Rousseau graciously admits that he thinks about her fate every day. (Slightly less pensive deliberation is given to the episode where he and a friend, despairing of ever having a stable female relationship, buy an 11 year old girl with the intention of grooming her into the perfect receptacle upon her maturity; this is foiled when the two gents develop paternal feelings for her and can't see themselves ever sporting with her in bed. This is presented as just one of those things, almost unworthy of comment.)
Things fall apart in the second half, which is a relentless streak of pissing and moaning about his friends doing him wrong and collaborating against him. These friends included the philosopher Diderot and various aristocratic relics. He will not shut up about it. He also suffers from various health problems relating to his bladder (the word 'catheter' crops up a lot), and in the way of things in those days, is mourning the derelictions of advanced old age by the time he's 41.
Despite the examples given above, the tone of the first half is amiable, and he's almost likeable, or at least interesting company. With 100 pages to go, however, I got tired of his bitching and abandoned him.
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Post by songstarliner on Sept 21, 2023 20:06:49 GMT -5
Harold, Steven Wright (2023) Got this because Wright's stand-up from the late 80s, early 90s was a "must watch" when his sets appeared on A&E, HBO, and so forth. Not finishing it because I'm 30-40 pages in, the Wright one-liners are coming frequently enough, but the story told feels as though it's only bedding for Wright's efficient conundrums. I am sad, but I trust you.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 23, 2023 11:19:34 GMT -5
The Little Red Chairs, Edna O'BrienA faith healer/sex therapist pitches up in a small Irish village, and with his white topknot and talk of chakras, sets quite a few of the women in a tizzy. But we're quickly disabused of any idea that we might be in comic territory here: he has a big old secret*, and main character Fidelma's involvement with him leads to horrific consequences for her, in a prolonged scene of terror, horror, and everything else. On her day, O'Brien is as unflinching as Cormac McCarthy when it comes to staring down the bestial in humanity. Her slightly earlier novel, In The Forest, is one of those great books that I'm in no rush to go back to. The second half of the novel opens out, takes us away from Ireland and into the ill-lit world of London immigrants scraping a living. It then becomes a hymn to all those displaced by war and other brutalities. Accordingly, it's polyphonic, jumping from voice to voice, but without losing sight of the story or slackening in pace. One of the best things I've read this year. And she was 83 when she wrote it. Goddamn. * He's a war criminal of the Bosnian stripe. While this may seem unlikely, it's based loosely on Radovan Karadzic, who did manage to live subterraneously as as a doctor before justice caught up with him. This wasn't in Ireland, but he does look a bit like a priest, so ...
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Sept 23, 2023 21:11:45 GMT -5
The World of Christopher Marlowe, David RiggsAn apt title, this one, since it would be a thin volume indeed if it was The Life of Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare's exact contemporary left even less of an impress on the records of his day than he did. So we get a lot on what was taught at school and University in those days; a lot on the sources for his plays and the world of the burgeoning (thanks to him) Elizabethan theatre; and a lot on the political and religious intrigues he was likely swept up in. The life can be summarised thusly: humble shoemaker's son from Canterbury gets himself to Cambridge University, and afterwards, while casting around for a way to make a living, invents blank verse for the English stage with a run of fantastic plays (which is what prompted me to read this: I finally got round to Tamburlaine The Great recently and was bowled over by it). They still didn't make him much of a living, so he had to fall back on spying in Europe, and possibly being a double agent. He also had a vast appetite for danger, forever uttering blasphemous statements and hanging out with seditionists and getting in fatal street brawls and possibly (but not necessarily) being gay. Finally, he was stabbed in the head during a brawl in a tavern, almost certainly at the behest of the authorities. He was 29, so probably the most incalculable loss to literature there is. As with books on Shakespeare, it's difficult to gain a sense of him as a personality, as little or no record of that has survived. But it's tempting to picture him as Shakespeare might have: a boy just like him, who made his mark earlier, and lived a life of glamourous risk that he never would have. The thought of them spurring each other on through another couple of decades, though ... Dellarigg, why is there no conspiracy theory claiming that Marlowe never wrote his plays?
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 24, 2023 11:45:33 GMT -5
The World of Christopher Marlowe, David RiggsAn apt title, this one, since it would be a thin volume indeed if it was The Life of Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare's exact contemporary left even less of an impress on the records of his day than he did. So we get a lot on what was taught at school and University in those days; a lot on the sources for his plays and the world of the burgeoning (thanks to him) Elizabethan theatre; and a lot on the political and religious intrigues he was likely swept up in. The life can be summarised thusly: humble shoemaker's son from Canterbury gets himself to Cambridge University, and afterwards, while casting around for a way to make a living, invents blank verse for the English stage with a run of fantastic plays (which is what prompted me to read this: I finally got round to Tamburlaine The Great recently and was bowled over by it). They still didn't make him much of a living, so he had to fall back on spying in Europe, and possibly being a double agent. He also had a vast appetite for danger, forever uttering blasphemous statements and hanging out with seditionists and getting in fatal street brawls and possibly (but not necessarily) being gay. Finally, he was stabbed in the head during a brawl in a tavern, almost certainly at the behest of the authorities. He was 29, so probably the most incalculable loss to literature there is. As with books on Shakespeare, it's difficult to gain a sense of him as a personality, as little or no record of that has survived. But it's tempting to picture him as Shakespeare might have: a boy just like him, who made his mark earlier, and lived a life of glamourous risk that he never would have. The thought of them spurring each other on through another couple of decades, though ... Dellarigg, why is there no conspiracy theory claiming that Marlowe never wrote his plays? Great question, Rando. I think it's just one of those eternal mysteries best left unsolved.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Sept 24, 2023 14:58:55 GMT -5
Dellarigg, why is there no conspiracy theory claiming that Marlowe never wrote his plays? Great question, Rando. I think it's just one of those eternal mysteries best left unsolved. I think it would be cool if someone started an anti-Stratfordian conspiracy, but like, for Harold Pinter. And they just did the already incorrect thing about Shakespeare about how what we know for certain about him could fit on the back of a postage stamp, but for a playwright who died in this century.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Oct 1, 2023 3:10:55 GMT -5
The Trumpet-Major, Thomas Hardy
My first Hardy in many a long year, this is one of the lesser-regarded novels, coming just before the tragic outpouring of The Mayor Of Casterbridge and so on.
I can see why it's not much talked about: it's Hardy in romantic comedy mode, and that's an uncomfortable fit. As with Far From The Madding Crowd, it's about a woman with a choice of suitors: Miller Loveday's two sons, John (the Trumpet-Major) and Bob (a sailor), plus a local blockhead there to cause complications. The backdrop is the Napoleonic Wars, with our characters all in something of a tizzy over the prospect of old Boney's fleet ramming the local harbour. That we know such an invasion didn't take place lends a gently comic ambience to the proceedings, though there are still some tense moments. The King has a walk-on part, as does our author's seafaring namesake (I suppose he couldn't resist). It's all pretty dutiful, Hardy playing to his audience and only just outstaying his welcome. He moves his characters around the board interestingly enough, but you can tell his heart's not really in it, as evidenced by a nicely acidic last page, where he almost punishes the more gooey-eyed among his readers, letting them know there'd be short shrift from then on.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Oct 2, 2023 14:13:06 GMT -5
Great kingdoms of Africa. An anthology of histories of African history centered on the idea of kingship, my engagement with each chapter depended on how much that kingship related to things outside anthropology. When largely connected to symbols and rituals of power, well, it’s just not my field. When it’s connected to broader history things get more exciting, like the big Sahelian empires or the Zulu. Again, this is based on my personal interest than anything scholarly, but nothing beat the opening chapter on Nubia for me: climate change, the divergence of Egyptian and Nubian kingdoms from a common earlier pastoral lifestyle, different forms of kingship and degrees on individual liberty based on control of agriculture (Egypt) vs. trade (Nubia)—I was really disappointed when that chapter ended.
Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz. I’d heard of this as a great collection of essays by someone with a lot of connections, but I mainly knew of her as the woman who played chess chess with Marcel Duchamp naked (Eve, not Duchamp). It wasn’t until after finishing the book and googling stuff along the lines of “is she still alive?” that I realized how connected she was (connecting to another thread she’s the person who convinced Steve Martin to wear white suits, and that’s a pretty small thing for her). The book doesn’t really go into that, and actually does go more into high culture than pop—she was Stravinsky’s goddaughter and grew up in a household full of classical music (which made her avoid it for the rest of her life) and introduced Zappa to a (aging, not in great shape and barely Anglophone) Dalí. Most of the essays are far more normal, though, about the grain growing up and living in Los Angeles (and what eventually became West Hollywood) midcentury rather than anything specific she’d done. It’s good to check in on the ground level.
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Post by repulsionist on Oct 2, 2023 16:41:25 GMT -5
Jean Luc de Lemur, I've got Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company... queuing in hold at the library. Her obits two years ago really inspired desire to read her work. The Information, Martin Amis (1995) I finished Mart's ontological tirade. He definitely broke apart his own life to-date-then to create his alters for this work. Awesomely funny that Tull writes painfully unreadable literature. Terrifically great that Barry continued his path of unearned success, even blundering into awareness of Tull's plots that proved directly impotent, indirectly life-changing to Barry and improved his "literarirness". Jarring but comprehensible that Scozzy was the primal intellect capable of accurately dissecting any quarry; saying so by estimation that this character works in purpose of Mart as misunderstood supervillain. I wonder how often ol' Mart got a hiding in his adult life; he certainly seemed to think he deserved it, given each character gets a beatdown. Damned shame I didn't try to find him in Lake Worthless 18 years ago, or accidentally bump into him on some esplanade in So-Flo. I wouldn't be surprised if I missed some oblique reference to Cerberus in this, considering his visually poetic emulation of Laocoon near the very end.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Oct 8, 2023 9:41:37 GMT -5
The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
Another instalment, after Lunar Park, of what he calls 'auto-fiction' - autobiographical, but with a hefty dose of made-up stuff. Do we need this literary development? Should other authors be trying their hand at it or is it his preserve? How long before the seam is hacked out? Questions for another day.
So here we have 17 year old Bret Ellis in the final year at his exclusive school. It's 1981; he's reading Cujo. He's part of a circle of wealthy, druggie, popular, highly-sexed friends, who spend their time partying, going to the movies (Chariots of Fire is deemed a disappointment), and listening to Blondie and Ultravox. He has a girlfriend, Debbie, whose dad is in the movie business (the kids attend a party where they mingle with Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, and Mel Gibson), but he's also exploring the gay lifestyle, all the while harbouring dreams of becoming a novelist. Lurking in the background is The Trawler - a depraved serial killer on the loose. Background quickly becomes foreground when a new youngster with a troubled past joins their school and their gang, causing untold disruption as suspicions begin to fester.
I enjoyed it a lot, but I like Ellis's prose style a great deal, and will more or less read anything he puts his name to. That said, at 600 pages, it's almost twice as long as it needs to be, and there's little more going on than 80s nostalgia and waiting to find out which of the girls (and their pets) is going to get the knife, and which switcheroo Ellis is going to pull on us.
Anyway, it's BEE - you'll know if you fancy reading this or not without my yapping.
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Post by repulsionist on Oct 8, 2023 17:14:49 GMT -5
The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, selected by Roxana Robinson (2016)
Robinson's introduction is incredibly thorough and well-written. I loved my time with Edith when I read her in the late 1990s. I rapidly consumed Age of Innocence, Ethan Fromme, and some of these short stories. I'm already stuck on "Mrs. Manstey's View". I seethe with my own accumulated lack of creative output. The last 15 years of ceaseless brow-beating in the name of social equity has me first asking why a rich lady of high social standing would need to, as a young woman, look outside of her own purview to write something, brilliantly written, that would today be pilloried as down punching. Reading this feels like I'm back in 10th Grade/Year 11 and wanting to go for a bike ride rather than pushing through this 10-page story.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Oct 13, 2023 3:40:23 GMT -5
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Novellas are funny things to get right, and sad to say I'm not quite sure this one does. It's 130 or so pages, but it feels compressed, the story not having enough room to ebb and flow. Perhaps its author knew what was coming, and reined it in, as if wanting to shrink the impact. Published in 1899, it's about a New Orleans woman in a dull marriage, with not-overflowing maternal feelings towards her kids. A brief affair kindles a new direction in life, and she sets out to follow it, leaving the family behind. Naturally, complications ensue.
It was quite the scandal when it emerged into the world, Chopin finding her career - and her social life - withering to nothing almost immediately. You can't have someone leaving her kids to get her fuck on, after all. Overall, though, it's not an amazing piece of work, with clunky prose and heavyhanded symbolism. Still, somebody had to say it.
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This is a public service announcement - with guitars
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Post by Dellarigg on Oct 16, 2023 3:51:26 GMT -5
Our Gang, Philip Roth
Emerging from the post-Portnoy flailing years, this is a 1971 collection of scripted sketches satirising Richard Nixon.
Unloved in its time, it hardly fares better now, despite my devouring its 200 pages in just over a day. Roth hits a vein of savagery now and again (were any abortions inadvertently carried out during the My Lai massacre, for instance), but lots of it is unaccountably lame (silly names) and overstretched (an extended riff on invading Denmark). Roth can't fail to write compulsive sentences, but I suppose Portnoy's Complaint was so successful that the flail would be commensurately panic-stricken and ill-judged.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Oct 17, 2023 1:06:07 GMT -5
I used to be charming, Eve Babitz
A collection of odds-and-ends of her work from the seventies until her accident (dropped a match on her dress, third-degree burns over ⅔ of her body). There are classic, reflecting on the 60s essays. We finally get the story of her photograph with Duchamp (he was an awful chess player, actually, still much better than Babitz but not at her dad’s level). First is an essay about her experiences on The Godfather Part II, including as an extra in New York. She talks about hanging out at the Troubador (someplace that’s still alive and not a nostalgia palace—I’ve been wanting to go for years but haven’t been able to find anything I really want to see), and this is where Steve Martin (“Oh, poor Steve, he just has no sense of humor”) comes in. There’s a semi-famous extended essay on Jim Morrison and the Doors (she hated the name and tried to talk him out of it). It’s sometimes referred to as hipster-ish: you get the sense that Babitz is above the Doors and that she’s a bit too harsh on Morrison. Her opinion on the band has aged well, though, and there’s a real affection and sadness for Morrison there, more honest than harsh in my reading. From there it moves on to more varied commercial writing drawn from magazines through the 80s and 90s. These range from celebrities (James Woods was always a wingnut, Nic Cage always had a cultish appeal) to sobriety to travel—it’s strange seeing stuff from the AAA magazine collected in a book, but it’s good (in the context of the her rejection of classical music in Eve’s Hollywood adds a dimension to her trip to Ojai, a reconciliation with her past).
The big highlight is her essay on her burns and recovery. It’s harrowing and uncomfortable stuff, and there’s a real sadness knowing there was no recovery for her, with it sparking a shame- and Huntington’s-based depressive reclusion. It’s the truth, though, and makes for an honest ending. The editor decided to leave for last an extended essay on an 80s Italian luxury-athleisure brand Fiorucci. It’s a strange, false note to end the collection on (she couldn’t even fit in the stuff!), but the real reason I think it was saved for the end is because it is long. I gave up on it. I just didn’t care.
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Post by liebkartoffel on Oct 19, 2023 18:17:48 GMT -5
Spent the past couple of months devouring John le Carré novels. Thus far I've read Call for the Dead (great start), A Murder of Quality (I...uh, what?*), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (the best I've read so far), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (not quite as good, but nearly), and just wrapped up The Honourable Schoolboy. Apparently this is a somewhat controversial opinion, but I thought Schoolboy was a stinker--the espionage caper at its core is compelling enough, but it's meandering and easily 200 pages too long. In the foreword le Carré talks about how he changed up his writing approach with Schoolboy--essentially writing most of it on the fly as he bipped around Southeast Asia--and it shows. Lots of vivid descriptions of exotic locales as Jerry Westerby shaggydogs his way through war-torn Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, but at the expense of murdering the pace. It doesn't help that protagonist-wise Jerry Westerby is no Alec Leamas, much less a George Smiley, and and I can't tell if his motivations are bafflingly opaque or if he really is just that much of a simpleton.
*It's pretty clear that le Carré's initial plan was to write mystery novels with a tinge of espionage, but George Smiley just wandering around pulling Miss Marple shit in the English countryside still comes across as a bizarre and thankfully brief experiment.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Oct 19, 2023 23:17:37 GMT -5
Nah, I thought it was common opinion that "Honourable Schoolboy" was the weakest one of that set. I also found it meandering, and overlong.
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