DannyL

Wild Horses
Isn't it? I decided to read after watching The Passenger by Andreej Munk, It really shook me and I wanted to deepen that rather than just forget about it. I didn't do anything else for the couple of days when I was reading it, it was as if I just had to just get the horror over with. I've got a big interest in body psychotherapies and I found her descriptions of how his physicality changed when she struck a nerve absolutely incredible. Reminds me of Syria on some level, of course.
 

droid

Well-known member
Her no-nonsense moral incisiveness is very illuminating, and also her emphasis on structural issues in the church.

Its funny, when i first read about Stangl it was in a biography of Simon Wiesenthal where he was used as a cautionary tale of how anyone could be sucked inch by inch into the machinery of evil. Sereny casts serious doubt on his story, but I still couldnt help taking that lesson from her book.

Also, Barry the St. Bernard. :confused:
 

john eden

male pale and stale
That is some impressive reading John. That looks like the list of a man with a commute. What do you make of Bolo Bolo at this remove from its writing? I read that in the 90s and I think recently got read of my copy, when I sadly realised they weren't going to come into existence very soon.

Well it's 15 minutes on the train in the morning but I do also use books as a way of getting away from screens in the evenings/weekends...

I really liked Bolo Bolo - it's kinda timeless in the way that utopian writing can be. The playfulness of it is very compelling and the lack of a rigid moralism is quite pragmatic.

PM was a member of the autonomist marxist Midnight Notes collective and I have been reading a bunch of their stuff.

He's implemented (some of) the ideas in Bolo Bolo in actual living spaces in Zurich with this: http://o500.org/ which I also like.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I'm on "the book of chocolate saints" by Jeet Thayil. I read Narcopolis, his first novel, which is really good, so thought I'd go in on the 2nd.

Strong starter but I'm halfway now and losing interest a little. It's very reminiscent of Roberto Bolano, who i really like, sort of like Bolano but set in and amongst Indian people, rather than latin-american people. Thayil also started out as a poet and you can even tell he's read Bolano cos he blatantly copies some of the framing techniques from "Savage Detectives". And the general theme of lost poets and literary gossip is also very bolanoey.

It's good but not sure it can sustain 500 pages cos stakes aren't getting high enough, although there's been a few eye-popping sections. I keep thinking that if I was on holiday for two weeks it would be perfect.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I finished Wendy Pearlman's We Crossed A Bridge And It Trembled: Voices from Syria yesterday. Absolutely mandatory, essential reading on the Syrian uprising. She interviewed around 300 Syrians for the book, all in the post-war diaspora, ranging from those resettled in the US and Europe to those still in refugee camps in Lebanon and Turkey. It consists of a series of short vignettes and is structured chronologically - first the rule of Assad Senior, then Bashar, then revolution and the chaos and counter-revoution that followed, the heartbreak of leaving, resettlement and the experience of exile. It's incredibly powerful. The explosion of energy and joy that followed 40 years of oppression has to be read to be believed. It matches the video footage I've seen. There's something incredible about the sheer force of the joy that's pouring forth.

One side-effect is that it's made me (even more) conscious of, and angry about, the absolute racism that's in operation to discount these voices. In a context where so many people have become overnight experts on the country, peddling conspiratorial bullshit, without having read have read a fucking single word written by a Syrian, it's essential.

(If anyone fancies a loan, holla at me and we'll see what we can do).
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Pursuit of the Millennium - Norman Cohn
greatest book ever written about millenialism, or my favorite at least

Cohn is awesome. I also recommend Warrant For Genocide, essential for anyone wanting to understand how the myth of Jewish conspiracy developed + spread.

haven't read Europe's Inner Demons but it's on my long list.

on a related note I'm currently reading The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen, solid one-volume summary of a complicated + largely forgotten piece of history.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
After wondering if it was going to be a bit too dry to be enjoyable, I've really got into Culture & Imperialism. It's obviously immaculately researched and has made me want to read a whole load of other stuff (from Kipling to Camus to Fanon, as contradictory as that may sound). His erudition is pretty imposing but if you put the effort in it's actually not at all unapproachable.

Yesterday I picked up a very small and cheap sampler of M. R. James stories titled simply Ghosts, on the basis that it was high time I got some MRJ exposure. I don't know if any of them 'scared' me as such, but they are beautifully written, and reminded of someone here (Slothrop?) describing James as being a sort of anti-Loveraft, in that his stories aren't overwritten or hysterical and have no overarching 'mythos', but are just effective, self-contained supernatural tales. What did surprise me was the quite effective touches of humour here and there - in particular, two of the stories have a bit that goes something like "The two friends then talked about golf for an hour. (Readers who golf may imagine for themselves the topics touched on; I will spare non-golfers the pain of having to read about their conversation.)"

I also bought a volume of ghost stories by Henry James (what is it about supernatural fiction and being called 'James'?) and of course went straight for The Turn Of The Screw. Pros: highly atmospheric, builds the tension excruciatingly slowly, as any story of this sort should. Cons: AAAAARGH, the prose! HJ writes in the most convoluted, torturous and contrived sentences I've ever encountered, often to the point of rendering the text literally meaningless. I mean, consider:

This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that to throw myself into it was to throw myself out of my trouble.

It's complete gibberish! And rendered all the more ridiculous by supposedly being the hand-written deposition of the main character.

Shame, because the bits that aren't like that are pretty good. I suspect that if Thomas Ligotti were to do a kind of cover version of this story, it would be as close as you could get to the perfect ghost story.
 

you

Well-known member
I really liked The Turn of The Screw. The prose is a bit convoluted and meandering at times granted but I found it gripping, quite a page turner. Its influence cannot be understated. The supernatural reversal (or ambiguity) is a trick still in use today. The Sixth Sense, for example. But Tea, isn't it a bit rich for a fan of HPL to whinge about lengthy and convoluted prose? At least James has the excuse of it being a 1st person narration - whereas HPL is just googling synonyms for 'scary' screaming 'this is terrifying, horrific, unthinkably, unfathomably horrid, dear reader'.

I read Miss Julie by Strindberg yesterday, only because I'm looking forward to seeing it's adaptation at the theatre soon.

Tea - I recommend Aickmann. I've been really into him recently. Very unnerving shorts.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But Tea, isn't it a bit rich for a fan of HPL to whinge about lengthy and convoluted prose?

Nah, it's a different thing. The (generally justified) charges against HPL are stylistic, but once you get past the baroque vocabulary he's usually not saying anything massively more complex than "the cave smelled super gross" or "I was well bricking it" or "think of the biggest thing you can think of, and it was like that but bigger". Whereas what I'm finding with James is that there are sentences where you have to read them several times to understand what is actually meant, due to their extreme syntantic complexity. And in some cases I've just had to give up. Can you tell me what he actually means in the example lines I quoted above? (It's a young woman, a governess, talking about the orphaned siblings she's being paid to educate, for the benefit of anyone who's not read it and would like to have a go.)
 

luka

Well-known member
thought it was just saying the kids take her out of her toubles? not that im suggesting it's a model of clarity and i may well be wrong.
but this is the whole point of James. it's his raison d'être

"The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me."
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I've not read any James before, so I dunno if it's his usual style - although my girlfriend has read a fair bit and says it's pretty typical.

Don't get me wrong, it's not preventing me from enjoying the story, it's just a bit frustrating from time to time.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've tried to read Turn of the Screw a few times and always lost interest fairly quickly. Not sure why, perhaps because the narrator is so unlikeable?

The Aspern Papers by James is brilliant. I think I must have read some other stories by him in Uni but I can't really recall them now. I started reading Portrait of a Lady. It was exhaustingly brilliant, I'd say. So precise, so full of observational acuity. Felt exhausting to have to read 500 pages of that.

That's one of the reasons I'm favouring poetry these days. It's compressed. You can hold it all in your mind at once.
 

luka

Well-known member
i read TOFTS last night prompted by this thread and really enjoyed it. you cant let yourself get impatient
although the temptation is there and there's a constant running commentary on this very struggle
interspersed throughout the story itself, this knowing allusion to his own lesuirely pacing and the toll it takes etc
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's what puts me off Proust - not that it will be long and boring but that it will be long and interesting
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Started reading Oedipus Rex on my lunch break. Didn't expect to enjoy it after the Odyssey debacle but actually much prefer it. You can actually relate to the characters and things make some sort of sense. I suppose it's written in the context of rationalism and democracy as opposed to religiosity and superstition, explaining how much easier it is to get to grips with for the modern mind.

Also spoiler alert but he only shagged his own mum lolll
 
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