what are you reading now?
IdleRich
IdleRich
I loved Tristram Shandy... it's really quite a unique book, I can't think of anything else like it. In a way it feels really (post-)modern but someone (in fact now I come to think of it it was @Mr. Tea's wife) told me that you can see it as part of a style of writing that existed at the time, it's just that through our eyes that style has certain elements that we see as post-modern and I guess we sort of interpret those in a different way and fill in gaps and ultimate misinterpret it.
Either way, I've heard most people give up at the bit about the huge fake(?) nose so press on past that and you're golden.
As for me, just about to board a flight for Belgrade and I have my book of Ballard short stories to accompany me.
Either way, I've heard most people give up at the bit about the huge fake(?) nose so press on past that and you're golden.
As for me, just about to board a flight for Belgrade and I have my book of Ballard short stories to accompany me.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I loved that book and would love to read it again. Even just the fact that it's notionally a memoir that's, what, 80% over by the time the narrator and main subject is even born is funny to me. One of very few famous humorous novels that actually makes you laugh out loud, rather than just smile occasionally, in common with Don Quixote (parts of it, at least), Flann O'Brien and Jerome K. Jerome.
'Lilliburlero' has somehow become my go-to tune to sing to my little boy to get him to sleep, or back to sleep after he's woken up because of a bad dream, and it always makes me think of Uncle Toby, his unspecified Injury and his endless bastions and revetments.
Penman's Fassbinder book and just finished Red Harvest.
The former's clobbering me over the head with references to things I'm into to the point it feels like it's been written for me. I'm about thirty pages in and he's already mentioned Thief, Sorcerer, Tangerine Dream and Gravity's Rainbow in the space of a couple pages.
Apparently he set himself some Fassbinder-esque deadline and bashed the thing out quickly. It's mostly numbered fragments where he writes about Fassbinder or things which were going on in that particular period, either generally or in his own life. It's really good. There's a footnote where he sends you forward a hundred pages to a longer fragment where he just talks about Michael Mann.
The former's clobbering me over the head with references to things I'm into to the point it feels like it's been written for me. I'm about thirty pages in and he's already mentioned Thief, Sorcerer, Tangerine Dream and Gravity's Rainbow in the space of a couple pages.
Apparently he set himself some Fassbinder-esque deadline and bashed the thing out quickly. It's mostly numbered fragments where he writes about Fassbinder or things which were going on in that particular period, either generally or in his own life. It's really good. There's a footnote where he sends you forward a hundred pages to a longer fragment where he just talks about Michael Mann.
jenks
thread death
Currently reading the Penman as well. Been reading him since the NME - I got to meet him when he was promoting his previous book - very sharp and funny but also utterly self deprecating.
This one feels like his real mission - to do Fassbinder justice - warts and all. I think the best thing is he makes you want to go back to the films. I remember Channel 4 showing Berlin Alexanderplatz late at night for what felt like months.
This Channel 4's completely alien to me. I watched a clip of Mark Kermode talking to Alex Cox the other night and had the same feeling when they mentioned Moviedrome on BBC2. It's almost unthinkable now.
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
As we're talking about drinking in the other thread, here's a relevant excerpt.
Wine initiates us into the volcanic mysteries of the soil, and its hidden mineral riches; a cup of Samos drunk at noon in the heat of the sun or, on the contrary, absorbed of a winter evening when fatigue makes the warm current be felt at once in the hollow of the diaphragm and the sure and burning dispersion spreads along our arteries, such a drink provides a sensation which is almost sacred, and is sometimes too strong for the human head.
As we're talking about drinking in the other thread, here's a relevant excerpt.
Wine initiates us into the volcanic mysteries of the soil, and its hidden mineral riches; a cup of Samos drunk at noon in the heat of the sun or, on the contrary, absorbed of a winter evening when fatigue makes the warm current be felt at once in the hollow of the diaphragm and the sure and burning dispersion spreads along our arteries, such a drink provides a sensation which is almost sacred, and is sometimes too strong for the human head.
Was hugely important to me. First saw Performance, Fat City, Man Who Fell to Earth, Rumblefish and a host of others via Alex Cox
TV as unashamedly intellectual? Idk, don't we still get the same thing with Adam Curtis and the buzz around him? Is he a complete outlier?
I don't think "unashamedly intellectual" is the right term. You mentioned seeing Mad Max 2 and Django on Moviedrome. Also Kermode and Cox said sometimes they'd show films Cox didn't really like and he'd say as much in his intro, but highlight a shot or scene that made it interesting to him rather than really trying to sell it.
Adam Curtis is a bit more interesting than most TV, but he's not even on TV these days. He's relegated to iPlayer. And I don't think one English bloke doing a series or documentary every couple of years is equivalent to a steady stream of films being shown on a mainstream channel every week.
You could counter this with streaming, but the selection on the major streaming platforms is piss poor and it's all so personal and fragmented that there isn't the same sense that someone might be exposed to something interesting they otherwise wouldn't be. There's also fuck all on Netflix or Disney+ as they're desperate for everyone to watch their recent 'content' and keep everything interesting they own stuffed away in the vault for whatever reason.
Adam Curtis is a bit more interesting than most TV, but he's not even on TV these days. He's relegated to iPlayer. And I don't think one English bloke doing a series or documentary every couple of years is equivalent to a steady stream of films being shown on a mainstream channel every week.
You could counter this with streaming, but the selection on the major streaming platforms is piss poor and it's all so personal and fragmented that there isn't the same sense that someone might be exposed to something interesting they otherwise wouldn't be. There's also fuck all on Netflix or Disney+ as they're desperate for everyone to watch their recent 'content' and keep everything interesting they own stuffed away in the vault for whatever reason.
Quite taken with this. I was expecting something a little dry and stodgy, but it really flows and I'm completely convinced by the character to the point I forget I'm reading a 20th century novel and not the actual Hadrian.
The prose is immaculate too. Clean and precise, punctuated with these gorgeous descriptions and philosophical turns.
At times there I worshipped the goddess Earth in the way that we here worship the goddess Rome; I am speaking not so much of Ceres as of a more ancient divinity, anterior even to the invention of the harvest. Our Greek and Latin lands, everywhere supported by bone-structure of rock, have the trim beauty of a male body; the heavy abundance of the Scythian earth was that of a reclining woman. The plain ended only where the sky began. My wonder never ceased in presence of the rivers: that vast empty land was but a slope and a bed for their waters. Our rivers are short; we never feel far from their sources; but the enormous flow which ended there in confused estuaries swept with it the mud of an unknown continent and the ice of uninhabitable regions. The cold of Spain's high plateaus is second to none, but this was the first time that I found myself face to face with true winter, which visits our countries but briefly. There it sets in for a long period of months; farther north it must be unchanging, without beginning and without end. The evening of my arrival in camp the Danube was one immense roadway of ice, red at first and then blue, furrowed by the inner working of currents with tracks as deep as those of chariots. We made use of furs to protect ourselves from the cold. The presence of that enemy, so impersonal as to be almost abstract, produced an indescribable exaltation, and a feeling of energy accrued. One fought to conserve body heat as elsewhere one fights to keep one's courage. There were days when the snow effaced the few differences in level on the steppes; we galloped in a world of pure space and pure atoms. The frozen coating gave transparency to the most ordinary things, and the softest objects took on a celestial rigidity. Each broken reed was a flute of crystal.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Finally started My Week Without Gerard by Ivan Boris which I bought ages ago, but which Liza sadlys seized, saying that I would have to wait until she read it - she read about two pages and then stuck it on her bookshelf where it remained until ten minutes ago when I finally extrucated it and began reading. From what I gather it tells the story of Lester Langway (a very thinly disguised versoin of Lewis Parker who actually wrote it) going to Paris in search of a Philosopher named Gerard Derenne who is great friends with another Philosopher called Jacques Dutronc - which I read as a thinly disguised version of the friendship of Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Levi, except muddied a bit by renaming the latter after the Franch pop-star and giving the former the surname of a mutual friend of ours. The book begins with the narrator meeting Dutronc in the Famous French bookshop named after an English playwright, he then shows him an article in the magazine Down and Out (a thinly disguised Vice) in which Langway attended the Young Conservatives Conference in Manchester and ruined the life of an attendee by giving him some crack to smoke and secretly photographing him for the delectation of the left-wing gutter press - a thinly disguised version of the time Lewis attended the Young Conservatives Conference and ruined the life of one of the attendees by photographing him snorting coke - supplied by one L Parker...
Anyway, I'm only a chapter or two into the book and i have to say that I am enjoying it, although much of it does seem strangely familiar... have you read it @woops or @luka ? Certainly better than the last novel I read by a (former) dissensian which was a load of meandering and pretentious tosh.
https://morbidbooks.net/shop/my-week-without-gerard/
Anyway, I'm only a chapter or two into the book and i have to say that I am enjoying it, although much of it does seem strangely familiar... have you read it @woops or @luka ? Certainly better than the last novel I read by a (former) dissensian which was a load of meandering and pretentious tosh.
https://morbidbooks.net/shop/my-week-without-gerard/
