Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 15, 2024 7:58:20 GMT -5
Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin
Not much is known about Austen, but from what we do know we can firmly state one thing: not much happened to her. How, then, to get a 300 page biography out of this scanty material? Easy: go on at great length about her brothers and sisters.
That sounds harsh, so I should quickly say that I didn't mind this book at all. It was quite an involving portrait of how unsatisfying life must've been for just about every level of society in those days, though at least the Austens didn't have to riot over the prospect of food price increases like the general populace.
She comes over thinly in most respects. There isn't even an official portrait of her, just a sketch, and accounts of her looks differ a fair bit. Her surviving letters reveal her to be not without her waspish, even callous, observations*, but that's going to happen in a life of rapidly diminishing romantic possibilities, with all the financial constraints that imposes (she may have been in love with an Irishman in her early 20s, but he wasn't the correct type; the one or two other relationships she could've had were carefully extinguished before they could start). There was a ten year gap where she stopped writing, which Tomalin helplessly puts down to the family moving to a different city against her will. Her novels were reasonably popular in their day, and gave her bits and pieces of income, but her reputation as one of the greats built slowly over a century. Now she's on our money.
Reading about a writer usually makes me want to get to their work, but my appetite for Austen stretches to one book every quarter of a century, and this hasn't encouraged me to turn to Emma or Northanger Abbey just yet.
*passing on a report of a stillbirth, she opines that the mother must've looked at the father once too often and gotten a shock. All right, she phrases it better than that, and death was all around them, but still.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jun 15, 2024 8:55:25 GMT -5
Jane Austen: A Life, Claire TomalinNot much is known about Austen, but from what we do know we can firmly state one thing: not much happened to her. How, then, to get a 300 page biography out of this scanty material? Easy: go on at great length about her brothers and sisters. That sounds harsh, so I should quickly say that I didn't mind this book at all. It was quite an involving portrait of how unsatisfying life must've been for just about every level of society in those days, though at least the Austens didn't have to riot over the prospect of food increases like the general populace. She comes over thinly in most respects. There isn't even an official portrait of her, just a sketch, and accounts of her looks differ a fair bit. Her surviving letters reveal her to be not without her waspish, even callous, observations*, but that's going to happen in a life of rapidly diminishing romantic possibilities, with all the financial constraints that imposes (she may have been in love with an Irishman in her early 20s, but he wasn't the correct type; the one or two other relationships she could've had were carefully extinguished before they could start). There was a ten year gap where she stopped writing, which Tomalin helplessly puts down to the family moving to a different city against her will. Her novels were reasonably popular in their day, and gave her bits and pieces of income, but her reputation as one of the greats built slowly over a century. Now she's on our money. Reading about a writer usually makes me want to get to their work, but my appetite for Austen stretches to one book every quarter of a century, and this hasn't encouraged me to turn to Emma or Northanger Abbey just yet. *passing on a report of a stillbirth, she opines that the mother must've looked at the father once too often and gotten a shock. All right, she phrases it better than that, and death was all around them, but still. Have you read any of the early Gothic novels that Austen was satirizing in Northanger Abbey?
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 15, 2024 9:51:28 GMT -5
Jane Austen: A Life, Claire TomalinNot much is known about Austen, but from what we do know we can firmly state one thing: not much happened to her. How, then, to get a 300 page biography out of this scanty material? Easy: go on at great length about her brothers and sisters. That sounds harsh, so I should quickly say that I didn't mind this book at all. It was quite an involving portrait of how unsatisfying life must've been for just about every level of society in those days, though at least the Austens didn't have to riot over the prospect of food increases like the general populace. She comes over thinly in most respects. There isn't even an official portrait of her, just a sketch, and accounts of her looks differ a fair bit. Her surviving letters reveal her to be not without her waspish, even callous, observations*, but that's going to happen in a life of rapidly diminishing romantic possibilities, with all the financial constraints that imposes (she may have been in love with an Irishman in her early 20s, but he wasn't the correct type; the one or two other relationships she could've had were carefully extinguished before they could start). There was a ten year gap where she stopped writing, which Tomalin helplessly puts down to the family moving to a different city against her will. Her novels were reasonably popular in their day, and gave her bits and pieces of income, but her reputation as one of the greats built slowly over a century. Now she's on our money. Reading about a writer usually makes me want to get to their work, but my appetite for Austen stretches to one book every quarter of a century, and this hasn't encouraged me to turn to Emma or Northanger Abbey just yet. *passing on a report of a stillbirth, she opines that the mother must've looked at the father once too often and gotten a shock. All right, she phrases it better than that, and death was all around them, but still. Have you read any of the early Gothic novels that Austen was satirizing in Northanger Abbey? No - I tried reading The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, but soon abandoned it. Dunno if she was satirising him in particular, of course, or if he's one of the good ones.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jun 21, 2024 0:10:44 GMT -5
Have you read any of the early Gothic novels that Austen was satirizing in Northanger Abbey? No - I tried reading The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, but soon abandoned it. Dunno if she was satirising him in particular, of course, or if he's one of the good ones. I’ve read The Castle of Otranto in its entirety. I found it a real slog in spite of its being pretty short, largely because of the fact that it was at least twice as long as it should have been, what with the dialogue being jam packed with tedious circumlocutions. People criticize Stephen King for needing an editor to trim down his books, but if he wrote like Walpole, those books would all be like 3,000 pages long. Post 18th-Century horror fans don’t know how good they’ve got it.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 23, 2024 5:01:32 GMT -5
Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King
This always struck me as the weakest of King's story collections, probably down to a too comprehensive floor-mopping exercise: a solid 250 pages of this could've been left in the vaults. I mean, there's a screenplay - there's a piece of non-fiction about Little League baseball - there's a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. That's 100 pages for a start.
Anyway, I decided to reread it all the way through, with no skipping (save for the baseball thing - couldn't make head nor tail of that). One or two of the duds were a little better than I remembered, but I still would've come down on the side of not including them. Many others could've withstood the removal of 5 to 10 pages.
There are some pretty good things, of course: Popsy, It Grows On You, Crouch End (despite the wayward Englishisms), Suffer The Children, The End of the Whole Mess, and a few more. But this was assembled around the time of Insomnia and Rose Madder, when quality control was wavering even more than usual.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 26, 2024 6:29:14 GMT -5
Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck
In which Steinbeck takes his French poodle, and his own amiable folksy intelligence, around early 60s America. He was getting on a bit and thought he'd lost his sense of what the darn country was all about. A road trip in a rigged-up mobile home named after Don Quixote's horse seemed the best way to remedy that.
While the book is a highly enjoyable read, Steinbeck being one of the good ones, it's hard to say the insights are especially penetrating. He was maybe ahead of the curve on ecology and the wastefulness of the consumer society, and while he deplores the homogenisation of, say, food, he's also sharp enough to point out that cooking standards were pretty terrible when he was a kid. But the best bits early on are when Charley is in need of a vet, and also when Steinbeck turns his prodigious observational skills on the leavings of a previous motel room occupant, divining that he was a married man meeting a sex worker.
Later, though, he hits the south. This was the time when black kids were first allowed into white schools, and he goes along to witness the crowds of whites spewing their hatred. His disgust over these and other racists he meets is great to behold. Then he gets tired of it all, realises he's stopped taking anything in, and hurries back home to pump out a 200 page book.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jun 28, 2024 4:22:27 GMT -5
The Aspern Papers, Henry James
I'd always thought of James as a piece of left-over cobwebbed Victoriana, swept aside by Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. I'd only ever read The Turn of the Screw, and while I didn't object to it, it was like Joseph Conrad - a wearying wall of words whose effects were diminished by the oversized effort you had to put in. Not sure why I felt like giving him another shot - he's too big a name to dismiss on the basis of one novella, maybe.
Anyway, I thought I'd take it easy with another novella, one of his most highly regarded works. It's about a literary biographer/collector who hears that one of his gods, the long dead poet Jeffery Aspern, had a secret affair with a still-living woman, who has a priceless tranche of his letters locked away. She lives in genteel poverty with her middle-aged niece in Venice, and our narrator decides he'll find a way of inveigling himself into their lives so he can get his hands on their 'spoils'. They, however, are not as guileless as they seem ...
Reader, I liked it. It was far more readable and waspishly amusing than I thought it would be. I might not be ready for the 400 page Portrait of a Lady, but I'll hopefully tackle some of the shorter novels before the year is out.
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Post by repulsionist on Jun 30, 2024 16:33:33 GMT -5
Compulsory Games, Robert Aickman (2018)
Finished the first two stories at a languorous pace, enjoying each set up of increasing unease. Toffee language that only rich English people can espouse in their mouths. The creepy quotidian of Dahl. The perilous undercurrent of the unknown known to me via Poe. Highly recommended for macabre fiction lovers. I haven't done all the research but feel comfortable positing that Morrissey must have read "Hand in Glove".
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 1, 2024 4:12:51 GMT -5
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
It felt churlish, after reading the autobiography, not to go back to the fiction, despite my enthusiasm being low, so here we are. Published posthumously, this is reckoned to be her first novel, though it was probably rewritten during her heyday. It's a bit of a jumble, feels like a series of patched up drafts - but nice enough, for all that.
It follows a young lass, Catherine Morland, out in the world teeming with menfolk, her brain filled with the popular gothic novels of the time. When romantic entanglements take her to the titular abode, her imagination is fuelled and she confabulates all sorts of horrors pertaining to the owner of the house and his deceased wife. Though this doesn't take up much time and is dealt with easily enough, it's my favourite part of the book.
It's the tone of Austen that I like most, having read this and Pride and Prejudice. In some ways, she feels the most modern of all the classic authors, her snarky humour a better fit for our sensibilities than Dickens's satire, even. I can only get caught up in romance so far, though. I did some skipping towards the end.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 7, 2024 5:44:12 GMT -5
The Fog, James Herbert
The only big luxury he had allowed himself to indulge in was his bed. He liked to sleep, he liked to make love; when he slept he hated to feel cramped by a partner; when he made love, he hated to feel cramped by a bed.
I can't tell you how sophisticated 12 year old me found this - here, I thought, was the adult world and no mistake. I suppose it's a sign of how potent cheap music can be that, even today, I still occasionally think of these lines. Anyway, we're back with this old hack.
This vied with The Stand as my favourite teenage book. It's about a chemical weapon escaping, forming a drifting fog, and driving people into insane acts of sex and violence, from axe murders to a husband sawing his wife's head off to a plane crashed into the Post Office tower. What I liked about it more than anything was the absolutely unhinged quality of this violence, which went further than King ever did. Revisiting it now, Herbert definitely got a bit carried away in one notorious scene*; there's a relish in the mayhem that put me in mind of American Psycho.
The writing, of course, is shockingly bad, the kind of bad that scatters semi-colons and elevated language around in an effort to convince us it's good. Herbert is slightly more adept at orchestrating the chaos, especially when the fog reaches London, and he's also better than I remembered at capturing the damp, Tuesday afternoon smallness of British life - he does some nice enough little portraits of disgruntled bank clerks, heartsick lesbians, vengeful gamekeepers, and so on. He's not on the level of Alan Bennett or Harold Pinter, of course, but he probably could've been a half-decent comic novelist if he'd put his mind to it.
Well, it was a nicely nostalgic couple of days with it, but back to the real stuff now.
*a group of public schoolboys are affected by the fog, and during a gym lesson, strip and beat their master to death, start masturbating and fucking each other, and castrate another (erect) master with garden shears. I remember an uncle of mine idly picking the book up and flicking through it. Unerringly, he landed on this scene. When I asked what he thought, he replied, 'I think it's disgusting and I wouldn't let you read it.' Perhaps strangely, me mam had also read it, and didn't seem bothered, though I wasn't allowed anywhere near The Exorcist (which she'd never seen or read).
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jul 7, 2024 6:40:04 GMT -5
The Fog, James HerbertThe only big luxury he had allowed himself to indulge in was his bed. He liked to sleep, he liked to make love; when he slept he hated to feel cramped by a partner; when he made love, he hated to feel cramped by a bed.I can't tell you how sophisticated 12 year old me found this - here, I thought, was the adult world and no mistake. I suppose it's a sign of how potent cheap music can be that, even today, I still occasionally think of these lines. Anyway, we're back with this old hack. This vied with The Stand as my favourite teenage book. It's about a chemical weapon escaping, forming a drifting fog, and driving people into insane acts of sex and violence, from axe murders to a husband sawing his wife's head off to a plane crashed into the Post Office tower. What I liked about it more than anything was the absolutely unhinged quality of this violence, which went further than King ever did. Revisiting it now, Herbert definitely got a bit carried away in one notorious scene*; there's a relish in the mayhem that put me in mind of American Psycho. The writing, of course, is shockingly bad, the kind of bad that scatters semi-colons and elevated language around in an effort to convince us it's good. Herbert is slightly more adept at orchestrating the chaos, especially when the fog reaches London, and he's also better than I remembered at capturing the damp, Tuesday afternoon smallness of British life - he does some nice enough little portraits of disgruntled bank clerks, heartsick lesbians, vengeful gamekeepers, and so on. He's not on the level of Alan Bennett or Harold Pinter, of course, but he probably could've been a half-decent comic novelist if he'd put his mind to it. Well, it was a nicely nostalgic couple of days with it, but back to the real stuff now. *a group of public schoolboys are affected by the fog, and during a gym lesson, strip and beat their master to death, start masturbating and fucking each other, and castrate another (erect) master with garden shears. I remember an uncle of mine idly picking the book up and flicking through it. Unerringly, he landed on this scene. When I asked what he thought, he replied, 'I think it's disgusting and I wouldn't let you read it.' Perhaps strangely, me mam had also read it, and didn't seem bothered, though I wasn't allowed anywhere near The Exorcist (which she'd never seen or read). What are your thoughts on The Exorcist the book?
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 7, 2024 8:51:16 GMT -5
The Fog, James HerbertThe only big luxury he had allowed himself to indulge in was his bed. He liked to sleep, he liked to make love; when he slept he hated to feel cramped by a partner; when he made love, he hated to feel cramped by a bed.I can't tell you how sophisticated 12 year old me found this - here, I thought, was the adult world and no mistake. I suppose it's a sign of how potent cheap music can be that, even today, I still occasionally think of these lines. Anyway, we're back with this old hack. This vied with The Stand as my favourite teenage book. It's about a chemical weapon escaping, forming a drifting fog, and driving people into insane acts of sex and violence, from axe murders to a husband sawing his wife's head off to a plane crashed into the Post Office tower. What I liked about it more than anything was the absolutely unhinged quality of this violence, which went further than King ever did. Revisiting it now, Herbert definitely got a bit carried away in one notorious scene*; there's a relish in the mayhem that put me in mind of American Psycho. The writing, of course, is shockingly bad, the kind of bad that scatters semi-colons and elevated language around in an effort to convince us it's good. Herbert is slightly more adept at orchestrating the chaos, especially when the fog reaches London, and he's also better than I remembered at capturing the damp, Tuesday afternoon smallness of British life - he does some nice enough little portraits of disgruntled bank clerks, heartsick lesbians, vengeful gamekeepers, and so on. He's not on the level of Alan Bennett or Harold Pinter, of course, but he probably could've been a half-decent comic novelist if he'd put his mind to it. Well, it was a nicely nostalgic couple of days with it, but back to the real stuff now. *a group of public schoolboys are affected by the fog, and during a gym lesson, strip and beat their master to death, start masturbating and fucking each other, and castrate another (erect) master with garden shears. I remember an uncle of mine idly picking the book up and flicking through it. Unerringly, he landed on this scene. When I asked what he thought, he replied, 'I think it's disgusting and I wouldn't let you read it.' Perhaps strangely, me mam had also read it, and didn't seem bothered, though I wasn't allowed anywhere near The Exorcist (which she'd never seen or read). What are your thoughts on The Exorcist the book? One of the few where the film is handily better. Again, it's mainly a question of prose style. Blatty hasn't got one.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jul 7, 2024 8:53:46 GMT -5
What are your thoughts on The Exorcist the book? One of the few where the film is handily better. Again, it's mainly a question of prose style. Blatty hasn't got one. That’s what I’ve kind of assumed. Have you seen the Blatty-directed The Exorcist III?
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 7, 2024 9:43:19 GMT -5
One of the few where the film is handily better. Again, it's mainly a question of prose style. Blatty hasn't got one. That’s what I’ve kind of assumed. Have you seen the Blatty-directed The Exorcist III? I think I saw it years ago, but can't really remember much about it. I've seen that one clip, though, and it's generally highly regarded, as far as I'm aware.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jul 7, 2024 13:35:31 GMT -5
That’s what I’ve kind of assumed. Have you seen the Blatty-directed The Exorcist III? I think I saw it years ago, but can't really remember much about it. I've seen that one clip, though, and it's generally highly regarded, as far as I'm aware. I’m seeing it soon and looking forward to it. It can hardly be worse than the second film, or the new one that was released last year.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 8, 2024 5:09:42 GMT -5
Pierre et Jean, Guy de Maupassant
A nice little novel that I manged to get through on a Sunday.
Pierre and Jean are brothers making their way in life, Pierre slightly less steadily than Jean despite being older than him. When an old friend of their parents dies, and leaves his entire fortune to Jean, it raises eyebrows as to the closeness of this friend to their mother. Pierre, already slightly jealous and resentful, takes this notion and runs with it.
Nice enough, as I said. Not a grand firework of a book, but I was pretty gripped, and the ending wasn't quite what I expected. This author has never let me down. Shame the syph got him in the end.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 12, 2024 3:40:24 GMT -5
Poor People, Dostoevsky
Fyodor's plucky first novel, which made his name in the first phase of his career. It's quite short, and epistolary in form. I wouldn't say it was immaculate - a barely introduced character at the start comes back centrally at the end, requiring me to scour the early pages again for his one appearance - but no one goes to Dostoevsky for perfection.
It's about the tentative love between an older man and a young woman. In the way of Russian novels, they are of course distantly related; also in the way of Russian novels, he works as a copying clerk (though this is a nod to Gogol's The Overcoat) and is blasted with antiquity at the age of 47. Both are steeped in poverty, with all its attendant humiliations and desperate options for survival, so the odds are firmly against them, despite their talks on literature and their pitiable efforts to help each other out. Dostoevsky handles the letters exceptionally well, placing the story firmly in the present tense, with all the tension that can be wrung from the device, and their voices are almost three dimensional. There are lots of powerful sequences, and since our boy knew a thing about being without funds, the empathy steams off the page.
This is my first Dostoevsky in a while. My first was Crime and Punishment, which I stole from what I thought was a neglected cupboard at University. Next time I passed by, the cupboard was padlocked.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 16, 2024 10:00:28 GMT -5
The Dean's December, Saul Bellow
It's rare that I get all the way through a Bellow novel, and when I do, I'm usually none the wiser. That was the way of it with this one, too.
It's about a Chicago professor, Albert Corde, in Communist Rumania with his wife as her mother declines and dies. He has recently written some controversial articles about the state of the black underclass back in the windy city, and gotten involved in a grisly murder case dealing with same currently going through the courts. He's also just been sent some intriguing scientific research looking at lead poisoning as a reason for mankind's general instability.
There are lots of conversations in this book. I was interested in these conversations up to a point, but they kept continuing far beyond that point. The structure, as I find with Bellow, seems to be kept loose enough for him to just do a mind dump every time he sits down to write. He has a Dickensian way with names, though, I'll give him that - here we meet Wolf Quitman, Silky Limpopo, Riggie Hines, Maxie Detillion, and Dewey Spangler.
All in all: I dunno.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 25, 2024 4:57:09 GMT -5
Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth
Roth's first outing, containing the titular novella and five short stories. Though he later disowned it for its 'weak writing', it set the 26 year old on the path of praise and condemnation he would follow for the next half century.
I'm not sure how much I got out of it. The ways of mid-century middle class American Jewish people are not something I have a grip on. Safe to say, he was accused of being a 'self-loathing Jew' for his presentation of certain characters as across the street adulterers, soldiers using their religions to wring concessions, lawyers prone to crack-ups, and young people hiding their diaphragms from their mothers. They all went down easily enough, but it was hard to see what was good or bad about them. As for the weakness of the writing, well, stylistically he had a way to go, is all I'll say.
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Post by repulsionist on Jul 25, 2024 15:29:09 GMT -5
Moderan, David R. Bunch (2021)
Bunch is a sci-fi writer who set up some scaffolding for New Wave Science Fiction of the late 60s and did some legwork for Cyberpunk. These series of interconnected shorts that build a poetry of angry despair revolve around a future world where the Earth has been covered in plastic, perpetual wars are waged by cyborgs governed by AI, and a few beings are sifting through past archives trying to figure out casual chains of current cataclysm. NYRB rescues another shard from the scrapheap of human culture.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 27, 2024 9:46:52 GMT -5
Washington Square, Henry James
A quick return to this fella, but also another shortish one - only 175 pages in my Penguin paperback.
Catherine is the daughter of a wealthy, respected New York doctor. Great pains are taken to establish her ordinariness in terms of looks and verve; so when a young man, who has squandered his own inheritance, comes sniffing around, the good doctor is keen to put a stop to any burgeoning relationship for fear the buck is on the make.
It's nice enough. The scenes heavy with dialogue worked the best, wringing some real painful drama out of the situation. The prose elsewhere seemed to occasionally overreach itself, which is to say there was the odd sentence I couldn't make head nor tail of. But his stuff has been the pleasant surprise of the year so far.
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Post by Dellarigg on Aug 10, 2024 9:05:58 GMT -5
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
I first read this in 1997, having joined a short-lived book club outfit called The Softback Preview. They sent out a monthly leaflet, and this caught my eye. I'm not sure if it was hyped on its publication the year before over here: I'd never heard of it, and I'm not sure it even got a hardback release. I read it over the next couple of months, stunning my flatmate of the time with running updates (the children born without skulls left him particularly aghast), and it immediately hovered near or at the top of my favourite book list, vying with Money by Martin Amis. I read it again in 2000, revisited bits of it while on the toilet countless times, and felt duty bound to winch it off the shelf once more when he died in 2008.
Now here we are again. This has been quite a year for rereads, what with Money a few months back. And as with that book ... well, some of the glow has dimmed, I have to admit. I'm older now, for one very big thing. It wasn't quite as hilarious as I remembered, and the tiresome bits back then were really tiresome now. The Gately/rehab house sections were far, far more engaging than the Hal/tennis academy sections. I even put it down after 300 pages, turning to the Roth and James books above, wondering if I could justify the time I was spending on it (I could, and went back to it). I used to hope that the 600 pages cut before publication would be reinstated, maybe as a 30th anniversary thing, but I no longer hope for that. It's still great, of course, and one of the big books of my life. Gately and Pemulis remain two of my favourite characters in all fiction. He could pull off a set piece with matchless aplomb. His dialogue is second to none, wherever he happens to be on the socioeconomic register. There was loads I'd either forgotten or never picked up on in the first place, particularly some of the glancing connections between minor characters (like how many of them were affected by the crash of two 'eye in the sky' news helicopters; also the dickied-with Blammo cigars). Wallace's voice was like the older brother's I never had, someone a lot clever and funnier than you, helping you along, expanding your mind, and I don't think I've ever mourned a 'celebrity' the way I did him: I wanted to be reading new stuff for like at least three more decades. That was a decade and a half ago. Oh well.
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Post by Dellarigg on Aug 11, 2024 5:30:09 GMT -5
It has come to my attention that some people might not know what Infinite Jest is actually about. Now, the plot is a scanty thing, but there is one. The 'Infinite Jest' of the title refers to a film so addictive that people can't stop watching it on a loop until their basic organs fail. Quebecois terrorists and the equivalent of the US govt are in a race to find and deploy the master copy of this 'entertainment'. The film was made by the now deceased James Incandenza, and much of the book follows his family, particularly his son, Hal, a gifted student at a tennis academy who is developing a bit of a dope problem. The star of the film, Joelle van Dyne, is a crack cocaine addict who pitches up at a halfway house rehab facility next door to the academy, where we meet the book's other main character, the massively built criminal-but-good-hearted recovering addict Don Gately. There are many other things going on, and many other characters, and some allusions to Hamlet, but that's the gist of it. Of course, the narrative is fractured and non-chronological, and doesn't quite have an ending - Wallace said he tried to set up converging lines of action, only they converge after the book has finished, leaving the reader to do that work themselves. The main clues as to how it ends are contained in the first chapter, so when you get to the end, you have to go back to the beginning.
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Post by Dellarigg on Aug 16, 2024 3:57:25 GMT -5
Hearts In Atlantis, Stephen King
In the late 90s and early 00s, I drifted away from King. Maybe I thought I was an Infinite Jest type guy from now on. I didn't buy the books as they came out, though I got round to most of them eventually thanks to the library. Even then, in this dark period, I would occasionally come across something by him that made me think he was pretty good after all and that I shouldn't be doing him dirty him like this.
This one is a bit of an oddity in his career, I think - two novellas and three short stories, all connected by recurring characters and themes, the main theme being the 60s and the fallout therefrom. The second story, the titular novella, was one of those pieces that made me re-evaluate him: it follows a group of students in 1966 who get addicted to playing Hearts and start blowing off their studies, with the risk of losing their Vietnam deferments. Without a hint of the supernatural, it's top tier literary King and almost completely overlooked as far as I can tell. The rest of the book isn't quite as good as that, but still not bad. The opening novella features a subplot struck from the Dark Tower books, and has one of the least sentimental portraits of childhood and family that he ever put on paper. A later story hints at another incarnation of Randall Flagg as he was initially introduced in The Stand: an agent of chaos flowering in the political unrest of the 60s. There's also stuff about the war, the effects of childhood guilt, reconciliations, and how the boomer generation threw it all away for material things. It's a bit of an amiable jumble, and occasionally heavy-handed, but probably his best 90s book, alongside Wizard and Glass and Dolores Claiborne.
Anyway, by the mid-00s I was firmly back on the train. It looks like I'll be there till the end now.
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repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
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Post by repulsionist on Aug 18, 2024 15:04:41 GMT -5
Worthy, Jada Pinkett Smith (2023)
First, hot take: Unworthy. Second, tedious anecdote that becomes insufferable the longer it goes on: Purchased as a dare, an inestimable waste of cash, this ghost-written conversation came to me in a mostly abandoned mall with a remaindered book shop in it; a book barn to be exact. I mean, I'll read some of the harrowing accounts of her tween to teen years in Baltimore. I'll remain conscious of her struggle and humanness despite her hitting the gut instinct of "unh unh, noop" 95% of the time. I'll probably skim through the Tupac section(s). I'll page flip to see if I catch a salacious group of words. However, overall, one more contradictory but encompassing segue to go now....despite enjoying the non-sequitur of empowerment exhortations coupled with self-aggrandizing "moments of doubt" - this book is exactly Jada Pinkett Smith. If you enjoy her Red Table Talk, you'd enjoy this.
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber
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Post by Dellarigg on Aug 19, 2024 3:55:39 GMT -5
Hunger, Knut Hamsun
One of those late 19th century books that is slightly trippy, and therefore feels freshly pulled out of its time and always ripe for countercultural discovery. I remember a Scottish publisher including it in its lists in the 90s - I think I had a copy, but I don't think I read it.
Anyway, it's about a starving writer. It's fairly short and fairly repetitive: he gouges out articles, occasionally has one accepted, and with the pittance earned he buys food that he pukes up instantly. Then he's back to starving and wandering round the city in a trance of hallucinations, bothering pawnbrokers, shopkeepers, and young women.
There would've been nothing much like it when it was published, but I found it a bit wearying. I think I'll avoid books about starving writers from now on.
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Aug 22, 2024 12:27:45 GMT -5
Dellarigg In no small part I think it’s because he was a very enthusiastic Hitler and Quisling supporter (Molotov, of all people, was shocked at how much the government in exile was to execute him when the war ended).
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Aug 24, 2024 9:35:24 GMT -5
Austerlitz, WG SebaldOur unnamed, and largely inactive, narrator periodically meets an acquaintance called Jacques Austerlitz. Austerlitz, an architectural historian, is a lonely and haunted misfit, and they talk (or Austerlitz monologues) about buildings and the European past: there are long - but always fascinating and, it turns out, relevant - disquisitions on old military forts, train stations, and libraries. Gradually, he also reveals his family history.* This is a hard book to do justice to, even on my second time through. Don't be put off when I say that Sebald laughs at the idea of paragraphs and only gives us a section break every 70 pages or so; the space is artfully arranged, the pages fly by (I read over 400 in a couple of days), and there are lots of photographs. The focus doesn't so much shift as drift, the tone that of a glacial foggy cool which occasionally dips into the deepest emotion you can imagine. The attempt to mimic time and memory overlapping, as a person is built from the ground up, is very successful. It's like nothing else I've read, and is one of the strongest and strangest evocations of that mid-20th century nightmare I've come across. Sadly, it was Sebald's last book. He was killed in a car accident the same year it was published. * In 1939, Austerlitz was sent to the UK from Prague by his mother on one of the Kindertransports. He was 5 at the time, and brought up in Wales by a religious minister and his wife, who didn't tell him anything of his origins. Later in life, he does what he can to piece together the fate of his parents. It's not good.
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Dellarigg
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This is a public service announcement - with guitars
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 1, 2024 9:07:58 GMT -5
Leonard Bernstein, Humphrey Barton
It reads almost like a fictional life in lots of ways. Growing up, his ill-matched parents made an affluent but emotionally stormy household. Hs father opposed his dreams of a career in music, wanting him to join his wig and hair products business. 'How was I supposed to know he'd grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?' he later magnanimously conceded. Success, for once, genuinely was overnight*, and didn't dim for the next 50 years, give or take. He had neat little conflicts: Broadway or classical music; conducting or composing; the family man who was also bisexual. His marriage was a source of sustenance but also left him feeling constrained. The wheels only slightly came off in the last decade, when he was forever chasing younger men and overworking and traversing the globe and neglecting his health: as well as the scotch and the prescription meds, he was one of the 20th Century's epic smokers. He was dead at 72, not long after conducting Beethoven's 9th on Xmas Day in East Berlin to celebrate the tearing down of the wall. He packed a lot in, but he still went down wishing he'd composed more than he had.
This is a sturdy, 500 page, but easily readable biography. While high-minded when it comes to the music, it doesn't hold its nose when it comes to the celebrity and sexual stuff. Moments herein turn up largely unaltered in the Bradley Cooper film. Perhaps the greatest claim I can make for it is that it got me interested in watching West Side Story, which I will do this evening. I won't be reviewing it, though.
*At 25, he was the assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic. One morning he got a call saying the main conductor had fallen ill and he would have to take over that afternoon's performance: it was to be broadcast nationally on the radio and there wouldn't be time for a rehearsal. He pulled it off with aplomb, making the front pages of all the papers.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Sept 1, 2024 20:58:07 GMT -5
Leonard Bernstein, Humphrey Barton*At 25, he was the assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic. One morning he got a call saying the main conductor had fallen ill and he would have to take over that afternoon's performance: it was to be broadcast nationally on the radio and there wouldn't be time for a rehearsal. He pulled it off with aplomb, making the front pages of all the papers. Technically, he got the call the previous day. He sat up until 4am doing score study. Then, on the day of, he went by Walter's home to do over an hour of prep, since Walter had already rehearsed the orchestra. So, it is still remarkable, but not as impossible as it sounds.
Realistically, the orchestra just did what Walter had rehearsed. A conductor would find it very hard to change much during a concert, with no rehearsal ahead of time. All the musicians' markings would be from the rehearsals with Walter.
This still sounds intimidating as hell to me. I don't think that would be enough time for me to prep that. I'd be buried in the score, trying to follow the markings by the main conductor. And wow, having so little time to prepare for sudden changes in the music. I am honestly shocked that the New York Phil was even run that way. It was amazing that Bernstein pulled that off and got good reviews.
In my Symphony, the Assistant attends every rehearsal and takes all the notes down, so that something that scary cannot happen.
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