version

Well-known member
I haven't read Crime & Punishment yet but I have a bunch of different translations of some of his other stuff (The Idiot, Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov) and there's some dispute over which is the best. Apparently the Pevear & Volokhonsky stuff is really good but a bunch of people have criticised it too, saying it's translated very literally so it's more accurate but reads awkwardly.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
Steve Hanley's "The Big Midweek" – which has the best passage I've ever read about the Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall:

Marc and I only stay for the first couple of songs by the headlining act. The lead singer's enigmatic, I'll give him that. But the band as a whole are making a pub-band racket, so we head off for a bag of chips

Brilliant :D
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Got my Flann O'Brien anthology back from a mate the other day, after a long absence, so I've really had no choice but to read The Third Policeman again. Every bit as batshit and beautifully written as I remember it from years ago.
 

version

Well-known member
I'm enjoying the book, but yeah, sometimes he'll just say how beautiful something was or how happy he was when it went well and that's it. He either doesn't have much insight into some of the stuff he does or he acts as though he doesn't so he doesn't run the risk of pulling back the curtain.
 

version

Well-known member
I remember talking to a film theorist/lecturer at the time of the film's release. Over the years she had done a lot of work on psychoanalysis and film, and her response to Blue Velvet was, 'The film-makers are doing it for themselves!' In other words, the movie had almost made her redundant. It didn't have a subtext. It was all on the surface, in plain sight.

It's all right there, yeah! [Laughs.]
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I'm enjoying the book, but yeah, sometimes he'll just say how beautiful something was or how happy he was when it went well and that's it. He either doesn't have much insight into some of the stuff he does or he acts as though he doesn't so he doesn't run the risk of pulling back the curtain.

Lynch hates imposed meaning. He's anti-concept. Language can't capture the feeling anyway.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Just finished Preparations for the Next Life. Good writing, first novel for the guy, felt fresh. Cried at the last bit.

“She came by way of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.

“They picked her up on the highway by a plain white shed, a sign for army-navy, tires in the trees. A Caravan pulled up with a Monkey King on the dash and she got in. The men took her to a Motel 8 and put her in a room with half a dozen other women from Fookien and a liter of orange soda. She listened to trucks coming in all night and the AC running.”
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Evocative... tell me more.
I just started reading something called I Love Dick, I picked it up in a charity shop in London a while back and the other day one of our friends was round and saw it on the shelf - she gave it a weird review saying it was kinda awful but unputdownable and it intrigued me to pick it up myself. So far I see what she means, certainly the first bit, it has this awful smug over-analysis thing that buries feelings under layer after layer of ironic detachment. So far it hasn't managed that DFW trick of doing that and yet still touching you... but it's early days yet so let's see where it goes.
 

catalog

Well-known member
the chris kraus book? I really liked it and recommended it to a friend who hated it. i've tried a few of her other books but none of them quite worked. i think it works cos in this one the stakes are so high. there's one chapter in particular i thought was really good, about halfway through, where there's a few things going on at once and it's all written over the course of a car trip.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah that's it. To be honest I have only had time to read a few pages thus far so jury is still out. It reminds me of Herzog by Saul Bellow or lots of Woody Allen films in that mention of - I dunno - Rohmer or Bataille or whoever is used to let you know that these people are intellectuals - but at the same time you're not being asked to really deal with any of this stuff. I find that kind of annoying in a way, but maybe that's not fair, I'm sure that it is a genuine representation of what these people talk about and how they do it. I suppose my issue is more with people who watch a Woody Allen film and then think they are an intellectual cos the characters go and watch a Fellini film - I guess that's really a problem with the fans not the people who make the work.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I mean, it probably is quite pretentious, but I found it pretty funny cos it's kind of a send up as well. There's a chapter where she does a very thorough dissection of a particular painting (can't remember the artist, someone post-war, Jewish I think) and it's kind of interesting but mostly I preferred the confessional tone of the other bits, where she's being (I think) quite honest about her obsession for dick. It's just really funny and quite odd, unusual writing.

I've been dipping into her bio of Kathy acker, which is ok but nowhere near as good as 'i love dick', but it's on the back burner for the moment cos I'm trying to finish 'chaos' by Tom O'Neill, about the Manson killingzs (bit boring, very procedural, getting lost in all the technical details of conspiracy, reminds me of the cosey book where it all gets a bit complex to follow at the end where she's talking about how bad GPO was when they were reforming).
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I mean, it probably is quite pretentious, but I found it pretty funny cos it's kind of a send up as well. There's a chapter where she does a very thorough dissection of a particular painting (can't remember the artist, someone post-war, Jewish I think) and it's kind of interesting but mostly I preferred the confessional tone of the other bits, where she's being (I think) quite honest about her obsession for dick. It's just really funny and quite odd, unusual writing.

I've been dipping into her bio of Kathy acker, which is ok but nowhere near as good as 'i love dick', but it's on the back burner for the moment cos I'm trying to finish 'chaos' by Tom O'Neill, about the Manson killingzs (bit boring, very procedural, getting lost in all the technical details of conspiracy, reminds me of the cosey book where it all gets a bit complex to follow at the end where she's talking about how bad GPO was when they were reforming).
I have read some Kathy Acker but years ago now. Didn't know she (Krauss) did her bio... in fact that's not surprising cos I know nothing about her and had never heard of her before I bought I Love Dick. I need to make time to read it properly, been rushing about a lot this last few days so when I saw it on my bedroom floor today I was disappointed to see how near the beginning it was bent open...
 

version

Well-known member
Lynch, like virtually all visual artists, is completely inarticulate.

I just read a bit where he says the reason he doesn't like talking about his work is that the only people who can talk and make things bigger are poets, everyone else makes things smaller by talking about them.
 

luka

Well-known member
Maybe that's true. Sometimes cafe oto force the musicians to do an question and answer session before they play and you just want to slit your wrists it's so painful
 

version

Well-known member
It's definitely a notable occasion when someone actually has something interesting or entertaining to say about their own tunes or films, e.g. Liam Gallagher.
 
Top