what are you reading now?

[Benny Bunter]

I read it loud to myself in a John Gielgud voice, brilliant fun

 

[Benny Bunter]

They're both a bit too long though. Just ordered Macbeth, heard that's a lot more streamlined

 

[luka]

What a rubbish review. Sacked.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It's true, I don't have anything interesting to add to the whole shakespeare thing that hasn't already been said. Shit question!

What do YOU like about it?

 

[version]

If you can't understand my love for this book you don't understand me I'm a Latin American romantic with a passion for salsa music I would rather die than to make my living anywhere but in the dust of the streets writing love poetry for schoolgirls

Reading books in the shower.

 

[luka]

Savage Detective.

 

[IdleRich]

when it arrived in the post the Stubbs one gave me the same feeling as I had when i bought the one about Can ( 'all gates open" ), like I CAN NOT BE ARSED

Who wrote that? I suppose the thing is, I'm not sure that I really like reading books about music and/or musicians really. Not if it's just literally a book about the music. Maybe if it's about a culture, a scene or something it is likely to be more to my taste... but really I think I would like a book about music more if it just sort of used the music(ian) as a jumping off point and the book was really about something else. But that's never going to happen if it's about a big proper rock star such as Bowie or a band that everyone loves such as Can. I mean I love 'em too but no-one is gonna write a book ostensibly about them that is about something else.

The music books that I have enjoyed are, looking back on it, few and far between. And those that I did enjoy I'm not sure that I would like that much if I were to read them again. I remember when I would go on vinylvulture which was a record collector forum and we would talk about all kinds of stuff (mainly records obviously) but when people talked about books they would all be reading some incredibly detailed biography of some legendary psych band or the some folk guy or whatever and the idea of that left me utterly cold, even if it was a band that I really liked. I wondered if there was something wrong with me...

 

[luka]

Stubbs cant be arsed. i accidentally bought his krautrock book and realised he couldn't be bothered and thats fair enough hes at drinking age not writing age

 

[luka]

music writing was for an age where you couldn hear music. it was better than music then, becasue imagined music is necessarily far better than any realised music.

 

[luka]

theres objectively no point to music writing now becasue you can just listen. write about something else. youre free.

 

[luka]

ask what writing can do in and of itself maybe. forget about gross jizz records.

 

[version]

I'm reading love in the time of cholera and I fucking love It don't care if it's a girls book. A Colombian women made me promise to read it years ago cos apparently I'm in it, but I've not got to that bit yet. I could never face it before, it seemed too obscene but now I've made the committed I'm besotted. It's the best

The Heart's Eternal Vow: Thomas Pynchon's 1988 review of Love in the Time of Cholera.

 

[luka]

pnychon reviewed it? it makes sense becasue it has the same smoke tendrils his prose does

 

[luka]

its very similar in the way the smoke turns to curlicues and wisp-dragons but of course marquez is infintely greater as an artieste

 

[version]

Never read him.

 

[luka]

its stunning how good this book is and how much smarter it is than thomas pynchon anyone who knows about writing will tell in an instant but this is a very wise review

 

[IdleRich]

The language and the characters. In other words, not really the plots (though they are really good as well).

And the sheer depth. It's not just Shakespeare's genius that's mind-blowing but also that the audiences at the time understood it. Really made me think how thick popular audiences are these days in comparison

The other day when we were in London we met up with my ex-flatmate, he (inevitably) lives on a house-boat now, but his girlfriend works at the National Theatre and she told us that a new play - Much Ado About Nothing - was just about to start and that if we rang early enough we might be able to get tickets for the opening night, which is press day. That's a good thing to do cos turns out the tickets on that night cost between ten and twenty quid, whereas on the other nights the cheapest ticket anywhere is forty-six pound (which is too much if you ask me, I honestly don't think you get forty six pounds worth of entertainment from an ancient two hour comedy play). There were only two seats left, one in the stalls and one in the circle but we got them anyway.

That day I had to go into town and buy some lego for my nieces, I got really drunk and then went to Hamleys which was a truly nightmarish experience. Then I rolled up to the National and managed to neck one more wine before the performance. I was right at the front and... I guess this is the point that responds to the quote above; I really enjoy Hamlet, Macbeth etc, death is still tragic I guess, but I don't think that Shakey's comedies stand up in the same way, there is the odd good bit, but in my experience of going to see his comedies in the theatre you get this really performative thing from certain people in the crowd who laugh really loudly at the jokes to show that they have understood them - which to me is somehow the antithesis of what BB is talking about above. Instead of an intelligent audience grasping a complex double-meaning and reference on the fly you've got some pretentious people who've studied in advance trying to convince everyone that they're doing that. And also lots of lines have been twisted to bring out innuendos which weren't there in the original (I guess to make up for ancient ones that have been lost) and you're thinking, are we really reduced to making jokes out of the word "come" that Shakespeare almost certainly didn't intend. Not his fault by the way, I'm sure that they were funnier at the time but language has moved on and humour has moved on and lots of it just doesn't really work, so extra laughs have to be eked out wherever possible.

I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy it. I did. But I'm glad I didn't pay fifty bob. I was right at the front and several seats nearby were empty, I guess some ticket holders had simply not turned up, which seems a bit unfair when it was such a scramble to get tickets and many must have been disappointed. On the other hand it was handy cos I managed to smuggle Liza down from the circle at half time to sit with me. Also at the end there was a party for the cast and our friend told us that noone was checking so we went into that and got stuck into the free booze and luxurious canapes.

It was a cool evening and everything but if it had been Lear or Othello or something I would have really loved it in a completely different way I'm sure.

 

[luka]

hes the best novelist of our time, hes so good it has the smell of sulpher about it, theres something devilish there, pynchon never has a whiff of that. a pure amatuer.

 

[IdleRich]

its stunning how good this book is and how much smarter it is than thomas pynchon anyone who knows about writing will tell in an instant but this is a very wise review

Magic realism is very easy to parody and take the piss out of... which is normally a sign of something that is good. You can't do that with something really bland and boring cos there is nothing to grab onto in the same way. It's a long time since I read LITTOC or 100YOS for that matter or even any of his other ones but I definitely loved them in the moment.

 

[version]

That bit he pulls out about the balloon trip is great,

''From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor... "