what are you reading now?

[IdleRich]

The Devils Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce.

At my film night last week I showed the film An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge which is of course based on the short story of the same name by Bierce. I introduced it with the famous quote from Vonnegut

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce.

I did that entirely to insult my audience in a childish way cos I knew full well that there isn't a single person in Lisbon who has read it.

I also emailed a number of interested people who couldn't attend to inform them of what they had missed so that if they so desired they could maybe catch up and seek out the films they'd not seen that appealed to them. In such emails I made sure to include the quote and laughed pettily as they invariably replied "I guess I'm a twerp then". Tiny things please tiny minds as they say... one girl did actually read it straight away which impressed me though.

 

[IdleRich]

It's a great film by the way, I strongly recommend it. It's exactly the same story, I mean it's a very faithful adaptation, but it maybe gives you a different feeling from the one the story itself does (as I remember it), the music gives it a somewhat sinister and psychedelic edge.

Edit: I wonder how much used the word 'psychedelic' was in the 50s when the film was made. I suppose it existed but I'm thinking that it didn't have these instant shared resonance that it does now. I'm trying to say that if someone described something as psychedelic then surely people would understand something by it, but now it's a short hand which leads everyone to roughly the same place with minimal effort.

 

[Corpsey]

Also dipping into Glitz by Elmore Leonard- great - and Journeyman by Ben Smith which is basically a big Undr The Cosh with less stories about Neil Warnock rubbing sudocrem on his piles

Elmore Leonard is an amazing writer

Much better than Don Delillo, for example

 

[luka]

better than de lillo not as good as george v higgins

 

[wg-]

I haven't read everything by DeLillo but i often find there are massive passages that are great followed by 100 pages of turgid shite. Underworld and whatever the JFK one is, especially

Leonard just has a vibe about things

Never read Higgins. Any recommendations?

 

[luka]

cogans trade
friends of eddie coyle
trust

 

[version]

I haven't read everything by DeLillo but i often find there are huge great chunks that are great followed by 100 pages of turgid shite. Underworld and whatever the JFK one is, especially

My favourites of his (Cosmopolis, Point Omega) are on the shorter side. I don't think his style lends itself to length. I've put off Underworld for years because the thought of 800 pages of that voice seems like too much.

 

[IdleRich]

Still slowly forcing my way through Le Fanu, looking it up on Wikipedia was surprised to see this, may interest @luka @Mr. Tea etc

The House by the Churchyard (1863) is a novel by Sheridan Le Fanu that combines elements of the mystery novel and the historical novel. Aside from its own merits, the novel is important as a key source for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Surprised it deals with female ejaculation too...

 

[Mr. Tea]

A writer a century ahead of his time, Le Fanu. He invented lesbian vampires, for one thing.

 

[Corpsey]

Finished 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'. I was surprised at how little actual descriptions of visions/hallucinations there are in it, quite disappointing really, but an interesting read because De Quincey was clearly a strange man (five feet tall, patronised by his hero Wordsworth, wanted—like Coleridge—to be a Kant-style philosopher but never completed any major work, constantly on the run from debtors, eight children, totally addicted to laudanum throughout his long-for-those-days life, in spite of claiming to have kicked the habit in his 'Confessions') and it really comes across in his writing, it's a bit like meeting him.

And what's he like? He's vain; he's pompous; he's compassionate; he's funny; he's tortured... &c

Good piece on him in the LRB, particularly interesting on his importance as a prose stylist (which presumably is why Joyce parodies him in 'Oxen', which is why I read the 'confessions' in the first place)

Nicholas Spice · The Animalcule: Little Mr De Quincey

How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how,...

www.lrb.co.uk

Prose style arises out of an accommodation between the competing claims of brevity and ornament. Everything we write tends either to the epigrammatic or to the periphrastic, the terse or the expansive, the lapidary or florid, stone or flowers. De Quincey was on the side of the flowers. Stone had reached its consummation in Johnsonian apophthegm. Amplified and projected onto the world by Boswell, it would exert its influence for decades after Johnson’s death. De Quincey grew up in the Johnsonian force field, but resisted it, developing a style that took its sustenance from pre-Augustan writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne. It was as if he had struck water from the Johnsonian rock, liberating the spirit of loquacity from the inert and massy block in which it had been imprisoned. Humour is integral to this radical and insurgent turn and, if we want to place De Quincey in a tradition, he flows with the current that streamed from Sterne to Dickens and onward to Joyce.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

I'm reading an illustrated history of airships that I bought in an antiques shop in Lewes. It's great, there's a foldout cutaway of the Hindenburg. It were fucking massive. How I yearn for the days of intercontinental rigid dirigibles, but filled with nonflammable gas.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

The designer of the Hindenburg, Eckener, was a fervent anti nazi, by the way. He was pissed off about the swastikas, but what could he do?

 

[Corpsey]

How airships could return to our crowded skies

Airships lost out to conventional aircraft after a series of disastrous crashes. But now safer technology could be the key to their return.

www.bbc.com

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Thanks, I've been meaning to catch up on the latest developments, that article is a very decent summary.

 

[IdleRich]

Finished 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'. I was surprised at how little actual descriptions of visions/hallucinations there are in it, quite disappointing really, but an interesting read because De Quincey was clearly a strange man (five feet tall, patronised by his hero Wordsworth, wanted—like Coleridge—to be a Kant-style philosopher but never completed any major work, constantly on the run from debtors, eight children, totally addicted to laudanum throughout his long-for-those-days life, in spite of claiming to have kicked the habit in his 'Confessions') and it really comes across in his writing, it's a bit like meeting him.

And what's he like? He's vain; he's pompous; he's compassionate; he's funny; he's tortured... &c

Good piece on him in the LRB, particularly interesting on his importance as a prose stylist (which presumably is why Joyce parodies him in 'Oxen', which is why I read the 'confessions' in the first place)

Nicholas Spice · The Animalcule: Little Mr De Quincey

How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how,...

www.lrb.co.uk

I enjoyed his writing a lot in that novel. Also, I thought there were quite a lot of fairly trippy descriptions of hallucinations etc in there. I guess "a lot" is relative cos I didn't particularly find them that interesting and wished there were fewer.

That said, I think there are two different versions of the book, he rewrote it somewhat and then put it out again. I hate when that happens cos you always wonder if you read the wrong one, or worse, with the Kinski one, they both have apparently have several good bits the other doesn't, so you gonna have to read them both for max enjoyment.

 

[jenks]

Finally finished the Sebald biog Speak Silence (@you )- I'm glad i had gone on a deep dive into him beforehand, it really made the whole experience much more interesting. The book is quite odd - she can't quite make up her mind what kind of biog she wants to write - a hagiography, a takedown, a literary analysis so ends up doing a bit of everything - i quite liked the fact it was a mass of contradictions but the unevenness of tone is a little offputting at times. Sebald's reputation seems to be in the balance - undoubtedly brilliant in many ways, he had a ruthless streak for taking others stories and repurposing them without acknowledging them. On top of that i know some jewish writers are unhappy with a german writer taking on voices of the holocaust. However, as a witness to history he's pretty unflinching, brutal really.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I've finally opened the copy of House of Leaves that I got a couple of Christmasses ago. Really enjoying it so far. It reminds me a bit of Bolaño's 2666 in that you get a sense of supernatural dread without anything (yet) that's explicitly and unequivocally supernatural happening - I love the line by the young boy in the family that's moved from a big city to the middle of nowhere, and having grown up with constant traffic noise, he finds the silence creepy - "Like something is waiting." I also like the nested narrative structure, and the footnotes with excerpts from books and academic papers about the characters reminds me of the notes by on De Selby by his biographers Hatchjaw, Bassett and others, in The Third Policeman.

 

[linebaugh]

Luka found this on page 83 and laughed at it

Did you finish?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Did you finish?

Ever the considerate lover.

 

[jenks]

On a bit of a Willa Cather splurge - I’d only read My Antonia but I think The Professor’s House is amazing - a story of the mid west with a fascinating story about a Native American settlement in New Mexico. Got Death Cones for the Archbishop lined up after finishing Alexander’s Bridge and a Lost Lady this week.

Painter’s two volume biog of Proust - quite old school, usually these have an angle or an axe to grind. This instead is much more like a grand narrative.

Finishing off Alms For Oblivion re-read, also a slim book from a Mauritian writer Priya Hein and I’m listening to Craner’s favourite Flaubert Salamboo which I’ve not read for 20+ years.