what are you reading now?

F

forclosure

Well-known member
Well i just finished The Killer inside me and while its my least favourite of the 4 Jim Thompson books ive read (Pop 1280,Savage Night and A hell of a woman being the others) i can certainly see why its his best known work i just feel that despite the same premise Pop 1280 has more of a refinement to it and feels so much smaller and claustrophobic.

As over the top as he got the fact that its all in first person is why the books dont lose much of their intensity and their energy it feels like it was written in this oddly specific alien language thats makes you pity his characters but still recognise how irredemable they are


Dude was like the Michael Gira of crime fiction(minus the rape accusations) he just had the kind of darkness that just covers the entire space
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
At the weekend I visited home and had a curious peep at the Norton Anthology of American Literature that I had as an undergraduate. Now I'm reading bits and pieces from it and enjoying being a dilettante. So far I've read 'The Swimmer' by John Cheever, stories by Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud and (atm) 'Cadillac Flambe' by Ralph Ellison.

And I'm avoiding reading the Bible. Sorry. :eek:
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just picked up a book from the shelf called Stone Junction by Jim Dodge, sounds pretty weird; an orphaned child is taken under the wings of the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws etc etc with an introduction by Pynchon which must have been why I bought it.
 
HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

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IdleRich said:
Just picked up a book from the shelf called Stone Junction by Jim Dodge, sounds pretty weird; an orphaned child is taken under the wings of the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws etc etc with an introduction by Pynchon which must have been why I bought it.
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I liked that way back when I read it. It's very analogue. Dead letter drops, escape and evasion, sexual initiations, card tricks, phreaking. It was published in 1990, so one of the last significant anarchic novels from the pre-Internet. Punk but not cyberpunk.

He also wrote another very short one called Fup about a wilful duck and an ancient rancher.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yes that is what Pynchon makes quite a big thing of, how it just pre-dated the internet when it was just about sort of possible to go off grid. Looking forward to getting stuck into it in fact but got delayed in taking the plunge by events and stuff.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Mr. Tea said:
Finished Iliad about a week ago... something that really jars is that very often a character will say several sentences to another, and then almost immediately the second character will repeat the entire speech - a whole paragraph! - to a third. Just not something you'd ever see in a novel, unless the author were aiming for a very specific effect.
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Mr. Tea said:
Now reading Catch-22 again before watching the series on Channel 4.
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Haha!

catch22.jpg
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading A Streetcar Named Desire.

Some of the best stuff is in the stage directions.

[More laughter and shouts of parting come from the men. Stanley throws the screen door of the kitchen open and comes in. He is of medium height, about five feet eight or nine, and strongly, compactly built. Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependency, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. He sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude imagesflashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them.]
BLANCHE [drawing involuntarily back from his stare]:
You must be Stanley. I'm Blanche.
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Finished Streetcar, read a Flannery O'Brien story today - "The Life You Save May Be Your Own".

From Cliffnotes.com

Drawing on the definitions laid down by the medieval interpreters of the scriptures, O'Connor noted, "The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or situation." After continuing her discussion, in which she considers two other kinds of interpretation used by the medieval commentators — the allegorical and the topological, she continues, "one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it . . . was also an attitude toward all creation, and a way of reading nature which included most possibilities, and I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of becoming a permanent part of our literatures."
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There follows a detailed symbolic/religious interpretation, I must admit none of it ever occurred to me when reading it but I really enjoyed reading it anyway.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask … Of course, for the time being, one makes do with little. At first, it can only be a matter of somehow inventing a method of verbally demonstrating this scornful attitude vis-à-vis the word. In this dissonance of instrument and usage perhaps one will already be able to sense a whispering of the end-music or of the silence underlying all.
 
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