what are you reading now?

[william kent]

Anyone read Joseph McElroy?

 

[Corpsey.]

Anyone read Joseph McElroy?

I worked a one off gig for a woman who dated him. She asked not to have me back.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Plato's Symposium, it's convivial. Aristophanes gets hiccups.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

I left my kindle downstairs, so checking througj my wife's classics shelf. Also picked out Mimesis by Erich Auerbach. Looks significant. The representation of reality in western literature. ok Erich, what you got?

 

[IdleRich]

I worked a one off gig for a woman who dated him. She asked not to have me back.

What specifically? Do you mean she never requested you again or she actually said "never send me Linebaugh again"?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I love the vagueness of "one-off gig", which I assume to be an oblique reference to the @Linebaugh's short-lived career as a gigolo..

 

[luka]

The Occult Symbolism of the Vatican’s 2020 Nativity Scene

The Vatican's 2020 Nativity scene is a bizarre collection of ugly pieces that include an astronaut and an executioner wearing a horned mask. Furthermore, the entire thing is replete with occult symbolism. Here's a look at this puzzling display.

vigilantcitizen.com

 

[john eden]

2020. Best ones are highlighted.

Simon Morris - Watching The Wheels
Dickhead Bidge - Bakunin Brand Vodka: Anarchism In Early Punk 1976-1980
Mark Hayes - The Trouble With National Action
Daniel Sonabend - We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain
Nanni Balestrini - We Want Everything: The novel of Italy’s hot autumn
Bill Drummond and Mark Manning - Bad Wisdom
Ian Glasper - The Day The Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984
Franklin Rosemont - Joe Hill: The IWW & The Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture
Emmanuel Litvinoff - A Death Out Of Season: A Novel Of The Siege Of Sidney Street
Mark Leier - Bakunin: The Creative Passion
Andrea Dworkin - Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
Michael “Bommi” Baumann - How It All Began: The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla
Steve Lake - Zounds Demystified
Johanna Fateman & Amy Scholder - Last Days At Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin
Angry Workers Of The World - Class Power On Zero Hours
Aaron Cometbus - Add Toner: A Cometbus Collection
Dhanveer Singh Brar - Beefy's Tune: Dean Blunt Edit
John Stoltenberg - Refusing To Be A Man: Essays on Sex and Justice
Spitzenprodukte - CHUBZ: The Demonisation of My Working Arse
Ted Curtis - The Darkening Light
Endnotes #5 - The Passions and the Interests
D Hunter - Chav Solidarity
Sam Selvon - The Lonely Londoners
The Rio Tape Slide Archive: Radical Community Photography in Hackney in the 80s
Fred Vermorel - Dead Fashion Girl: A Situationist Detective Story
James Curran, Ivor Gaber and Julian Petley - Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left The Left = the Labour Party.
Joy White - Terraformed: Young Black Lives In The Inner City
Nigel Todd - In Excited Times: The People Against The Blackshirts

 

[Corpsey]

Reading "1606 The Year of Lear" after Jenks shouted at me. It's really good. It also reminds me of the Beckett biography I read, in that any quotation from Shakespeare sticks out a mile from the surrounding prose and therefore functions as a prompt to make you go and read the original stuff.

Been struggling reading this week, even though I'm on holiday and there's nothing else to do. Considering Moby Dick, now considering Shakespeare.

 

[luka]

Read The Prelude.

 

[luka]

That's what I'm reading. I'll do a thread when I stop lying on the sofa listening to music

 

[Corpsey]

You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

 

[craner]

I'm still working you bastards.

 

[jenks]

Reading "1606 The Year of Lear" after Jenks shouted at me. It's really good. It also reminds me of the Beckett biography I read, in that any quotation from Shakespeare sticks out a mile from the surrounding prose and therefore functions as a prompt to make you go and read the original stuff.

Been struggling reading this week, even though I'm on holiday and there's nothing else to do. Considering Moby Dick, now considering Shakespeare.

He’s really good - there’s a lot of mileage to be got out of the new historicism approach. Great stuff on equivocation, priest holes, and all that religious stuff. Lucky to meet him in once, he was genuinely funny and very generous with his time.

 

[IdleRich]

Found Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars on the shelf and realised I'd started reading it a few years back but got interrupted. Dunno why cos it's an interesting book... as I remember it's kinda like Maldoror in that it's early 20th century French literature written under a pseudonym and that the protagonist is a crazed madman. Although the writing style is far less... florid.
Moravagine is the last of his line of some European nobility and has been locked in a lunatic asylum for most of his life. The narrator springs him from jail - whence he immediately murders a small child - and then they set off round Europe on a spree of international crimes and murder.

Actually now I'm reading this again properly I dunno why I said it was less florid, it's completely over the top, if precise in its way at the same time.

 

[IdleRich]

It's like being button-holed by an extremely intense maniac who shouts in your face a load of incredibly verbose but actually surprisingly interesting stuff.

 

[Corpsey]

Not the Prelude.

 

[Corpsey]

 

[luka]

Not the Prelude.

A Jeremy Clarkson autobiography from WH Smiths

 

[Corpsey]

It's the laziness, that's my flaw, a flaw too lazy to even be tragic.