luka

Well-known member
The way he understands the world makes sense to me. I even like the way he writes about sex. He's the only writer I could say that of I think.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The way he understands the world makes sense to me. I even like the way he writes about sex. He's the only writer I could say that of I think.
Yeah, he's good at that. He makes sex sound sexy without giving you the impression that he's typing with one hand (looking at you, Thomas Pynchon!), which is probably quite tricky to do.

Also, several of the characters are gay/bi, or are described as having had gay affairs at least, and it's all described in a very matter-of-fact way that surprised me a little in a book that's nearly 100 years old.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Got stoned last night and managed to read 20 pages of Molloy. It's crushing to think there's 200-odd more pages of it to go for me to have read it – but I love it. Reading aloud helped a lot. It makes you wonder where the line is (if there is a line) between prose and poetry.

I'm quite on edge reading it because of my recent mental troubles, I feel it's charged with dark energy (although it's also very funny, often at its darkest – "For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury...") and it might pull me back under.
 

version

Well-known member
Ripping through White Jazz at the moment. The text equivalent of a stimulant.
The incest/estranged family member/murder angle is a bit played out after the fourth book running, but, other than that, thought it was top. The first person perspective with the machine gun stream of consciousness and usual newspaper and report clippings, letters etc was brilliant, Joyce's toolkit put to work on the American underbelly.

Dudley feels like an incarnation of McCarthy's Judge by the time you've heard about him strangling a baby. The fact he gets completely mangled, somehow survives and the last you hear of him he's still cracking jokes and charming people from his hospital bed sounds about right.

"He says that he will never die.”
 

forclosure

Well-known member
The incest/estranged family member/murder angle is a bit played out after the fourth book running, but, other than that, thought it was top. The first person perspective with the machine gun stream of consciousness and usual newspaper and report clippings, letters etc was brilliant, Joyce's toolkit put to work on the American underbelly.

Dudley feels like an incarnation of McCarthy's Judge by the time you've heard about him strangling a baby. The fact he gets completely mangled, somehow survives and the last you hear of him he's still cracking jokes and charming people from his hospital bed sounds about right.

"He says that he will never die.”
somebody once described Ellroy's writing style as "powerviolence" and that still sounds right to me
 

version

Well-known member
"James Ellroy's four volume treatise on family values and the integrity of the Los Angeles police department... "
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Sixty Three Closure - Anthony Frewin

Thriller by former "erstwhile personal assistant to Stanley Kubrick'", and perhaps more relevant, frequent contributor to Lobster magazine.

1993: Alcoholic art director is scouting locations in Czech Republic when he receives panicked phone call from lifelong friend who informs him that he thinks he is being followed. Art director is too pissed to take in the import of the call. Two days later friend is dead: suicide by leaping in front of train. Alcoholic returns to childhood town in Hertfordshire for funeral, mugged at train station, nothing taken, returns to London flat to find it has been broken into and thoroughly searched, again nothing taken. Someone is looking for something. On return to office at Pinewood Studios is handed a backlog of mail. One of the letters is from dead friend with instructions to "keep these SAFE", referring to three photographs enclosed in the envelope. Photos are of a "local" and a man who bears an extreme likeness to Lee Harvey Oswald. Alcoholic makes the mistake of investigating how Oswald could be pictured in a sleepy English market town when the timelines don't allow for it..

I really enjoyed this - I tore through it in a day. The protagonist is supposed to know nothing about JFK assassination, but through his investigation he advances a convincing argument that the official narrative is false. A bit of a page turner..

I then remembered that I have some other Anthony Frewin books in my "unread pile", and immediately started on "London Blues" - the "blues" refers to nudie pics. Set in the Soho of the early 1960s, an amateur photographer gets caught up in Maltese run porno production and, incidentally, the Profumo scandal. Excellent read so far...maybe a bit sleazy for sensitive souls...
 

entertainment

Well-known member
that new collection of essays by Gary Indiana is worth a read

about the town of Branson, Missouri, a sort of entertainment-vacation destination for bible belt american families, full of "music theaters" and the like:

The mystery of Branson, if there is one, is the quirky way that star worship functions in a repressive microcosm. Maybe because it's compressed into such a small area, Branson is the tightest little cultural sphincter you are likely to find in th United States. There are no shadows in Branson. No whores, no gambling, no drugs, no egregrious drinking. There are, ubiquitously, Family Restaurants serving huge portions of the worst food on the continent; "Frito Pie" is a characteristic menu time. Fried chicken, a dish you'd imagine native to the Ozarks, arrives carbonized, like a mutant pork rind.

What the Branson entertainer projects on state isn't sexiness or eccentricity or extravagance, but ordinariness. Pride in having produced children, in having stayed in the same marriage for many years, in one's own religious fervor, in being as close to some conservative norm as possible, is the acceptable form of overt egotism.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
also working my way through The Recognitions. something i hadn't seen expressed that much about it is how beautiful the writing is. strip away the erudition and network of references, a good 90% of which i don't get anyway, and what's left is some of the best prose i've ever read.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Surely you must be re-reading it, Mr Tea?

I thought as a physicist you'd have read all Feyman's books years ago?
Yeah, it's weird that I've reached my 40s without having read any, so I thought I ought to remedy that.

Funny, because one of my favourite science books of all time is The Quark and the Jaguar, by Murray Gell-Mann, who was a friend of Feynman's as well as a great rival of his - I think it bugged Feynman that he shared his Nobel with Schwinger and Tomonaga, while Gell-Mann got one all to himself. He was a sort of anti-Feynman in his personal life: immaculately dressed, a bit snobbish and fussy, immensely pedantic; sober, monogamous...
 

catalog

Well-known member
Finished I clavdivs and the 2 jarett kobeks and now back onto the Joel Lane which is actuly very good. Close description of a lot of records eg

Karl and I had this ritual when we slept together that whoever was providing the bed would play a track, and we'd listen to it before undressing. My early selections included New Order, Felt, The Jam, Nico, Marc Almond and The Jesus and Mary Chain. The opening chords of 'Happy When It Rains' are the most effective sonic foreplay I've yet discovered. Karl played me songs by Nick Cave, Scott Walker, The Pogues, My Bloody Valentine, Husker Du and Kitchens of Distinction. The latter's 'Prize' was his favourite track of all time: a song about a gay couple getting drunk and falling out. The mood escalates from sullen mistrust to bitter rage: So do I get a prize / For remembering his name? The music takes the violence of the last words and drags it down into a whirlpool, tearing at itself, finding release only in exhaustion.

Coupled with a lot of psycho geographical stuff. Not sure where its going but I'm 59 pages in and it's very readable.
 

version

Well-known member
I read most of Salvador today. It's interesting because I don't think I've ever read Didion rattled before. She's normally so cool and collected and in this she's often on edge and even admits to just not wanting to see or investigate certain things and just wanting to get out of certain situations.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I'm over 100 pages through the Joel Lane now and it's great. Very odd book in a sense, he must've been in a band I think, or known someone very close who was. The level of detail is great, got all sorts about the touring, parties, close analysis of songs as I said above. Not quite sure where it's going, there's some dark secret angle which I suppose must be it, but I don't mind at all that there's no specific story as yet. Very interesting writer. Will be getting his other books soon.
 
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catalog

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