what are you reading now?

[empty mirror]

i am curious about what is on your nightstand at the moment.

i am just starting The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. only 20 pages into it but it already seems more coherent than i was expecting. as far as her fiction goes, i've only ever read Ida before, which was amazing----but for a ~200 pg novella, it felt like a thousand pages. so i expect MoA, which is 1000 pages, to feel like... 10,000? from what i can tell, this one is about america through the prism of one family, from the generation that arrived from the old world on a boat to the present. the first chapter invokes that apollinaire quote about carrying one's father's corpse everywhere, only with a jocular zombie twist. high hopes.

on the non-fiction end, i have been pecking at The Rest Is Noise about... well, the birth and development of atonal classical music, beginning with Mahler and Strauss. i am only about 150 or so pages in... Bartok. Janacek. i have only lately been getting serious about classical music so this is serving as a kind of primer.

your turn.

 

[IdleRich]

Finally took your advice and read Mount Analogue which was indeed great. Very sad that he died before finishing it, there seemed like so much more to say. I loved it anyway, a fantastic mixture of absurd logic that sounded strangely convincing with homilies that somehow manage to not be annoying.
At the weekend I read The Conversions by Harry Matthews; very silly but very enjoyable, in fact not a million miles removed from Mount Analogue - a Pynchonesque conspiracy (that might be a hoax) involving a tribe of gypsies who have fled to Scotland to escape persecution and who may just hold the key to deciphering the meaning of the adze that the narrator won in a snail race and which entitles the holder to inherit a massive fortune.
Don't know much about Harry Matthews but I really enjoyed Tlooth and this as well, it's clearly influenced by Locus Solus by Roussel (whom Matthews translated) in its descriptions of weird and wonderful machines and the author takes great pleasure in word and music games that go right over my head.
Then I started on Against Nature by Huysmans which I'm sure everyone already knows all about but I'll just say that so far I'm enjoying it a lot more than Le Bas.

 

[zhao]

last time i was at the bookstore, with the choice between Eward Said's classic Orientalism, which i should, and have been wanting to read for some time, and some ditzy soap opera of a novel called White Teeth, i... chose the later. hey i just wanted something easy to relax to! since i'm also doing the Black Athena and a Dawkins book on evolution.

and it turned out to be just that: mildly amusing... anyone know it?

 

[IdleRich]

Zadie Smith?

 

[Mr. Tea]

It was a pretty big seller here a few years back, one of those books you always saw people reading on the tube* (if it wasn't Bridget Jones, Captain Corelli or Harry Potter). Not read it meself.



*London Underground, not toilet - though it probably got read there too.

 

[STN]

I'm still on this double-novella, The Alone to the Alone/The Dark Philosophers about Depression-era Wales. Really, really good: humane and funny. I'm actually savouring it; ordinarily I tear through books in a slightly desperate fashion.

Zhao, I didn't rate White Teeth but everyone deserves a light read every now and again; be a book popist.*

I only read one book at a time, which I think is a bit immature in a way...

*actually, I'm a massive snob, but you get my point, not every experience you have can be difficult and enriching.

 

[woops]

I'm reading Colin Wilson's Superconsciousness.

Harry Matthews is a funny one - I haven't read any of his books, but do know he was the only English member of Oulipo, wrote his first novel, Cigarettes, under Oulipian constraint, and most recently wrote My Life in CIA, a semi-autobiography about him being mistaken for a CIA agent in Paris, the plot then thickening etc.

I reckon Rich knows all this anyway.

 

[vimothy]

The Face of Battle -- John Keegan

Reassembling the Social -- Bruno Latour

Torture and Democracy -- Darius Rejali

The Fall of the Roman Empire -- Peter Heather

& a big stack of papers...

 

[IdleRich]

Well, it's a fair cop to some extent, I did know he was in Oulipo - but isn't he American? Also think he edited a magazine called Locus Solus if I remember correctly. So can someone tell me something about Raymond Roussel - why is he so influential etc? The only one of his I've read is Locus Solus and I'm afraid I found it rather hard going.
I also knew you were reading Superconsciousness.

 

[Sick Boy]

Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal

It's pretty good so far. A bit self-indulgent, but pretty good.

 

[empty mirror]

I only read one book at a time, which I think is a bit immature in a way...

*actually, I'm a massive snob, but you get my point, not every experience you have can be difficult and enriching.

same on both points. i can't multitask at all. and i can't keep things straight if i am reading two works of fiction at the same time. and yeah, it is easier for me to get through a book if i just focus on one thing at a time. my rule is to have one fiction and one non-fiction going at one time.

and yeah, i am a massive book snob. really debilitating actually. my wife tries to be more populist and i admire that quality.

Well, it's a fair cop to some extent, I did know he was in Oulipo - but isn't he American?

anyone have the Oulipo Compendium? i have had it in my wish list for a while but i have been gun shy.

Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal

It's pretty good so far. A bit self-indulgent, but pretty good.

ha! i've only read funeral rites. very self-indulgent, but delicious. genet makes me wish i was mad homo just for the extra subversive cachet.

 

[STN]

Thief's Jounal is great, but Our Lady of the Flowers is one of my favourite novels.

 

[woops]

Hmm, I could have sworn Harry Matthews was English, definitely went to live in Paris for some time - but Google knows you're right.


Raymond Roussel wrote a few things using techniques a bit similar to those the Oulipo guys proper ended up using - that's what they call 'anticipatory plagiarism' - stories where he'd find a homophonous phrase with two possible meanings and write a story to connect them, and New Impressions of Africa where as I remember the whole book is one sentence with bewildering amounts of parentheses.

He was petrified of dying and couldn't stand anyone even alluding to death when talking to him.

This is all in The Oulipo compendium, it's great great great, there's so much mind boggling stuff in there.

Are you watching me, Rich?

 

[IdleRich]

"Are you watching me, Rich?"

No, it's just that my calculations showed that you should be embarking on that book some time soon.
Cheers for info.

Just remembered, I've also just read The Other Side by Alfred Kubin - that was very good indeed, prefiguring Kafka's ridiculous bureaucracy with its dream-land ruled by an unreachable demi-urge who has personally invited every citizen and then absented himself for no clear reason. In fact nothing at all is clear in this book but getting to whatever the fuck it is that happens at the end is well worth the effort.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The Face of Battle -- John Keegan

thought you weren't a fan of Mr. Keegan tho?

myself:

just finished the Gerard Prunier book recommended in the Great Lakes thread

Zapata & the Mexican Revolution - John Womack Jr.

The Palestinian Question - Edward Said

El Laberinto de La Soledad - Octavio Paz

& ditto w/Vim on the various PDFs...

 

[vimothy]

thought you weren't a fan of Mr. Keegan tho?

Actually -- & I've pretty much finished it -- the book is totally fantastic.

 

[zhao]

damn vim is on the heavy weight tip. not surprised i suppose...

 

[vimothy]

I dunno about that. They're all pretty readable, I'd say, except for maybe Rejali, which has hundreds of pages of data on different torture techniques in different locations, and after a few chapters has an effect that is devastating and nightmarish.

 

[jenks]

I’m finding it hard to settle to anything for long, so I have about 8 things on the go – Bate’s latest on Shakespeare, the Paris Review interviews ,The Review of Contemporary novel - Perec special, Tim Parks’ translation of The Prince, Beevor’s D Day, a History of the Tour De France, Montaigne’s Essays and I’ve just bought the latest Roth and that Leviathan book. I feel like I am gnawing around at the edge of things.

 

[nomadthethird]

Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal

It's pretty good so far. A bit self-indulgent, but pretty good.

Querelle is good, so's the film. "Saint Genet"...

I just ordered Confessions of a Mask more or less on Josef K's recommendation.