books, books, books

[mood swung]

Pophead, I'm glad you mentioned the SK book - need to get that for the husband (and myself, but not overtly) for Christmas.

List wise, Like Water for Chocolate got me back on my women writers track (and I can't believe how few women there are on said list!!). I continue that with What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt. Really wordy, but in a good way. Throws sucker punches. Is good.

[pophead2k]

I just picked that one up and will hopefully be checking it out before New Year's. Before that I've got John Irving's new one, which I hope is a return to form after the disappointing 'Until I Find You'.

[so lacklustre]

I got delayed in starting the new John Irving, but enjoyed the first 70 odd pages so far. I may not be much of a critic though, I enjoyed Until.... It had some strange strands, but I liked the ramblingness of it and it had some excellent characters (but then you expect that as a minimum with Irving I suppose).

[mood swung]

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. I seem to remember Miss Buenos Aires not much caring for it, but so far so good for me. Soooo 70's, and makes me think of Valley of the Dolls, if VotD had smarter characters.

[Who Shot Sam?]

Anyone own a Kindle? I've been thinking about getting one for the missus next year.

[pophead2k]

My girlfriend got one for Christmas from her parents. She's a librarian and a lover of physical books, so she's really on the fence about how she feels about such devices. I can see us using it for travel, but certainly can't imagine curling up on the couch with it.

[migdd]

The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham

[Who Shot Sam?]

My girlfriend got one for Christmas from her parents. She's a librarian and a lover of physical books, so she's really on the fence about how she feels about such devices. I can see us using it for travel, but certainly can't imagine curling up on the couch with it.

That's the thing. My wife travels a lot so it could make sense for her. She also has trouble reading small print (though she insists she does not need glasses). Is the font size variable?

[pophead2k]

Yes, you can adjust the font size. Also, the Kindle is not backlit, making it much easier on the eyes than staring at a computer screen or game device.

[Jack of All Parades]

Read with bouts of laughter Katie Roiphe's essay in this past Sunday's NY TImes Book Review titled "The Naked and the Conflicted". She contrasts the sex writing of the "Great White Narcissists"[as coined by David Foster Wallace], Roth, Updike, Bellow and Mailer, with the work of what she terms the new young Lions: David Eggars, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. Weighing both sides she ultimately comes out in favor of the old men and their marked ability to "bring their talent, their analytic insights, their keen writerly observation, to the most intimate, most unspeakable moments, and the exhilaration, the mischief, the crackling energy in their prose" as they wrote about sex. In David Foster Wallace's famous essay about the later Updike he quotes a friend as describing Updike as "just a penis with a thesaurus" and I was happy to see Ms. Roiphe defend Updike in the face of the new generation of narcissistic writers regarding their being "self-conscious...steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can't condone even with their sexual impulses...in short being too cool for sex".

I like her conclusion that "compared with the new purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike's notion of sex as an 'imaginative quest' has a certain vanished grandeur". I like that she shows an appreciation for Updike and his peers. As those old lions pass on I will miss their adventurous writing about sex, in particular Updike and his ability "to do poetry and whorehouse".

[pophead2k]

Sorry to say that Irving's 'Last Night in Twisted River' didn't do it for me. The beginning is very good and promised a very interesting story peopled with very interesting characters. Unfortunately, it devolved into the masturbatory self-infatuation of the last novel. I dig quirks and eccentricities, but once it devolves into self-parody, I have to take a pass.

[mood swung]

Just about to finish Fear of Flying, and yes, it did get dull. Now to decide between the new John Irving pophead just dissed, or the new Stephen King. Or I could just continue reading smut with Anais Nin's Delta of Venus. It is a list book.


edit: I went with the smut.

[dark_wine]

currently reading slaughterhouse five by kurt vonnegut

[Jack of All Parades]

Spent time recently with a thought provoking book, You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. The book is an intelligent argument by a real internet pioneer in virtual reality technology for the dangers to be found in online collectivism-like this social network site and others. What he calls 'digital Maoism' or 'cybernetic totalism' he argues are damaging our real world. I have never read a better written piece on how the web and the applications found on it are changing our dealings for the worse with one another and the way we function in the marketplace. His arguments against the "wisdom of crowds" are persuasive- the "idea that the collective is closer to the truth" is put on its head- he is fearful of the suppression of individual voices as we spend our time on social sites like Facebook. He argues convincingly against the damage being done to intellectual property by the internet. I have a best friend with whom I am always arguing about this very issue. He thinks theft of intellectual property is perfectly okay while I am appalled by it- whether it is illegally downloading music and films or not properly crediting a source. As Mr. Lanier says the internet and its purveyors "treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given away without pay to the hive mind." I love his comments re social sites-"comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock." This book has made me pause and think about my online time. I need to be be more careful about it.

[mood swung]

My season of smut continues.

Just about finished Humboldt's Gift, thanks to insomnia. Yeah, it's not real smut, but it takes detours. Reads good when things are happening, reads slow when Charlie brooods/thinks/anthroposophizes - whatever the hell that may be.

75% of the way thru Delta of Venus. Now there's a lady who knows how to tell a story.

[alexv]

More Metro-North reading. I'm a sucker for collected letters:

Isaiah Berlin-- "Letters 1928-1946"--- Berlin is someone whose stuff has interested me over the years. I really admire his take on things. From a letter he wrote to his mother (he was 18): "Remember, life is good; and always will be good however ugly it looks: for beauty and goodness are not the same thing".

Michael Ignatieff, his biographer, summarizes his pluralist creed this way:

(according to Berlin): there can never be any single, universal, final, complete demonstrable answer to the most ultimate moral question of all: How should men live?...he insists that there exists an indefinite number of competing and often irreconcilable ultimate values and ideals between which each of us often has to make a choice---a choice which, precisely because it cannot be given a conclusive rational justification, must not be forced on others...each individual , each culture, each nation, each historical period has differing goals and standards, and these cannot be combined, practically or theoretically, into a single coherent overarching system in which all ends are fully realized without loss, compromise or clashes...More equality may mean less excellence, or less liberty; justice may obstruct mercy; honesty may exclude kindness; self-knowledge may impair creativity or happiness; efficiency inhibit spontaneity...these are not temporary local difficulties: they are general, indelible and sometimes tragic features of the moral landscape.

This way of looking at the world makes more sense than any other i've encountered. The endless arguments these days between liberals and conservatives could be so much more civil if Berlin's ideas about the tradeoffs between competing aims were properly understood: You want more equality? well, more equality of course means less excellence. Should we accept the tradeoff? Well, it depends on many factors, and no matter how hard we try, we won't be able to reconcile them because folks sometimes have irreconcilable ultimate values. Is that what all the fuss is about? Precisely. But no one is happy. Who says we are supposed to be happy?

This is the first volume of his letters, published quite a few years ago. It's long, and frequently the letters deal with mundane stuff or are repetitive, but they are nevertheless spectacularly entertaining. There are gems sprinkled on just about every letter, but my favorites deal with his take on Henry James and on the United States, circa 1940. Berlin, by the way, was the kind of guy who would go on a two page riff on James in the midst of an otherwise personal letter to an attractive girl, and the girls apparently liked it.

He dislikes James because his characters don't engage in life directly, they live in twilights, whereas Berlin denies the idea he finds in James (and Proust) that "nobody lives in sunlight, that all relations are rapacious, that one must eat or be eaten, that everything is in disequilibrium and tension always, that sensitiveness and kindness are therefore the only real virtues".

Berlin's real complaint was that James and Proust just didn't like people enough: "Am i really singular in holding that one must be able to express oneself simply and copiously to someone at regular intervals, if one is to express oneself at all, and not find oneself in a private world, full of ghosts and terrors? Proust said that friends were a waste of time and the real world was a private universe into which the artist withdraws with relief. This again holds only for the bruised, the humiliated, the cripples, even when their passion is for truth alone and they are men of genius. The paranoia of mystics, poets and Proustian writers may increase their neurosis to the point of genius, but as a quality of life I can not protest against it more vehemently than I do." There's something to this: so much of modern 20th century art, it seems to me, is the product of "bruised" psyches who express their discontent through their art. Outsider art.

On Americans (he lived in the US (NYC and DC) during the war): "Remaining here in any capacity is a nightmare to me. No one...has the slightest element of the suppressed reserve of European life"; "This is a strange country. People are, in spite of all the odd modernity of life- everything laid on--light, heat, music, art, love--laid on like water. Yet the people are simple, naive, slow, uncivilized, like peasants in town, tough, sentimental, suspicious, generous at the same time". He got the generosity right.

[Jack of All Parades]

Sounds like a wonderful collection. You hit it spot on with the discussion of his take on Pluralism. Has struck me that many in Washington and our state governments could learn a lot from him. That quote voices for me the futility of our approach in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere in the world. This notion that we must force democracy around the world. It is time to respect and expect diminished expectations in all areas. I have always been so happy that I have been alive for almost half of his lifetime. His Four Essays on Liberty have always been a moral touchstone for me as I revisit them every few years. Share his aversion for James and Proust, amongst others. Twilight people, indeed. Would welcome a continued riff by you on the notion of 'bruised psyches' and tortured twentieth century writers.

I have always been curious about his friendship with the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. Great thinker and writer, great teacher, great Oxford Don, great talker, great man. For my money the seminal political thinker of the past 75 years.

[Jack of All Parades]

This one is for Otis, would that he had completed the climb. Should he one day summit have left numerous oxygen cannisters along the way at strategic base camps.

Closed the endboards the other night on the final pages of Against the Day. I am none certain I will be regularly reopening them anytime soon. Overdosed with the multitude of characters that populate the book only 6 or 7 I truly enjoyed and they were mostly Chums of Chance members. People appear and reappear hundreds of pages apart and there can be vast stretches of pages before they reappear causing you often to lose track of them and to fail to remember their previous significance in the story. The action takes place roughly between the years 1893 and 1920 or the end of the World War. The real story in the 1,085 pages is that of an anarchist named Webb Traverse who actively dynamites mining and railroad interests out in the American West. He is murdered by two assassins in the employ of an evil capitalist, Scarsdale Vibe. He has three sons, Kit, Frank and Reef who set out to avenge his death and a daughter, Lake, who takes up with one of the killers. That in essence is the only real plot in the book and it fills up a small portion of the 1,085 pages of text.

It wouldn't be a Pynchon novel without its absurdities like a man possibly turned into a jelly donut, a phantasmogoria that occurs in mayonaisse factory or any number of descriptions of the pecidillos that people can manifest. Action shifts across time and continents from the World's Columbian Expedition of 1893 to the great Tunguska Event of 1908 where a large portion of Siberian wilderness was flattened by a possible asteroid event. You have the Mexican Revolution, the Balkan uprisings and the Great War. There is an airship, The Inconvenience, which hovers around with its crew the Chums of Chance. As usual there is a plethora of great character names- Professor Heino Vanderjuice, the Reverand Lube Carnal, Alonzo Meatman- even the return of Seaman Pig Bodine. There is even an intelligent dog, Pugnax, with a particular fondness for Proust. Jokes abound, puns fall left and right and people burst into song. Just what I would expect from this author.

Unfortuantely, none of this is new. Instead it is done to excess. The same themes abound regarding the struggle between anarchism and corporations, between eros and thantos, between slaves and masters, all the typical historical view of Pynchon. As usual the good guys are the oddballs, the drifters who are just trying to avoid the always hinted at, and eminent, apocalypse. What makes this book very hard going is the science, particualarly the mathematics. I really had difficulty keeping up and keeping it straight. What is very disorienting is Pynchon's concerted effort to do the book in a myriad number of popular fiction styles that meld into one another over and over leaving you as a reader very dizzy as you turn the pages.

Mostly I had difficulty keeping interest. I loved the moments with the Chums of Chance but overall Pynchon has done this better with a more likeable cast of lead characters. I will stick with Mason & Dixon for any future rereads. What I come away with is an uneasy feeling about the leaps that have been made in technology both at the end of the 19th century and then again as mirrored in the end of the 20th century. Capitalist greed, global geo-political upheaval-sound familiar?

[Jack of All Parades]

This one might as well be for Otis, as well. Have been spending considerable time with a late work of Edward Said's, Reflections on Exile and other Essays. I first became acquainted with his stimulating work as a student many years ago at Columbia when I stumbled on his book Beginnings: Intention & Method in a used book store. It was a brightly argued theory for how works begin, particularly now when there are so many prior texts. I was never fortunate to take a class with him but over the years I kept pace with his work enjoying Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and The World the Text and the Critic. He always had an interesting spin on topics and he taught me how to leave my Western bias and be more accepting of the world culture outside my comfort zone.

Always an exceptional critic of Conrad, a perceptive writer on Naipaul[dislikes him], and a champion of world culture, I have found this collection of life writings memorable. The title essay is a vivid piece on being adrift in the world , away from one's home land and roots.. He writes of classical music, Arab modern novelists like Mahfouz, the Tarzan movies, the differences between Alexandria and Cairo, what it means to be a traveller, Moby Dick-all in a clean, fluent prose that is free of critical cant and which moves across the page dealing with cultural and political problems and ideas in a balanced voice. He has always made me ask hard questions about the outside world and he continues to make me think with this book.

[Jack of All Parades]

As my eldest daughter completed her undergraduate studies this past year she took a Shakespeare survey course. For fun and to give her some support I did my own revisit of the plays. As a guide I used the recently published Prefaces to Shakespeare by the late scholar Tony Tanner.

It has been the best guide of its kind I have encountered. It works because Tanner is not a Shakespeare scholar, just an enthusiastic reader. His ability to gently ease the reader in to both the many genres and the individual plays, themselves, is invaluable. He writes clearly in an engaging prose that makes you look at the plays as fun places to play{bad pun}. What he does is work in gracefully the latest scholarship on individual plays or the man's life and times but at the same time allows the great past thinkers like Johnson, Hazlitt, Keats, Dryden, Coleridge to enter the discussion with you, as well. It is just a flat out fun read as you go through the plays.

I do not think there will be another general introduction to the works as generous, playful and informative in the near future.

[Jack of All Parades]

Have just finished an invigorating, side-splitting and glorious time with Greil Marcus's fantastic and new study of Van Morrison, When That Rough God Goes Riding. It is utterly a good read. Probably the best writing I have ever encountered on this artist.

What he does so effectively is take individual songs or performances and make them stand for whole albums or periods in his career. There are brilliant readings of "Baby Please Don't Go", "Listen to the Lion", "Caledonia Soul Music", "Caravan" from the "The Last Waltz", "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Saint Dominic's Preview" to name a few. But what he does exceptionally is to put on paper the essence of what he feels makes Morrison the seminal singer/artist of the last fifty years- and that is what he calls the 'yarragh' in Morrison's voice or as Marcus writes "a sense of the song as a thing in itself, with its own brain, heart, lungs, tongue and ears. Its own desires, fears, will, and even ideas: the song singing you." Marcus captures in lively, vibrant prose within this book Morrison's release to the 'yarragh' thoughtout his career in individual great songs or performances.

There is a funny chapter that in essence tosses away all the work contained in the period from "Common One" thru "Tell Me Something". Why was this period of time such a fallow period for so many artists?

Very lively is his discussion of the usage of Morrison's music in the movie "Breakfast On Pluto" which made me remember how I so much liked that film and its usage of music in general.

This book is flat out stimulating and if it does not get you back to the source material , you are aurally dead.

[pophead2k]

Knocked a few more off of 'The List' and am really looking forward to summer when I can pick up the pace again. Just finished Edna O'Brien's 'In the Forest' which was beautifully written but thematically similar to the superior ,The Butcher Boy'. Also enjoyed Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' which must have been at least a little controversial when it was published during the Victorian age.

[Jack of All Parades]

Pophead-Hardy is the only great Victorian I return to on a regular basis-to sell one's wife and daughter while in a drunken stupor-how does one live with that? Hardy tries to explain. Equal in theme to Conrad's Lord Jim. Have always liked that theme of redemption, whether achieved or not. I do not know if that created a scandal as it happened with more regularity than one wants to admit in past centuries. More scandalous was the reaction to Jude the Obscure and its deep questioning of religion.

[Jack of All Parades]

This is probably only of interest to Otis[and possibly Alexv], so should he view this thread, there has been a new Pynchon sighting. Christopher Hitchens, in the new June edition of Vanity Affair, offers an excerpt from his memoirs which are to be published later this year. He recounts with gusto his friendship with Martin Amis and the poet James Fenton. It is a fun read as he recounts their soirees of the 70s and early 80s in London and around the world. Their friendship is anchored by a deep respect for Philip Larkin as an artist, not as a person, and for literature. Pynchon comes into the picture through a mutual friend, Ian McEwan, who had formed a friendship with Pynchon in the 70s. Apparantly one day he called Hitchens at the New Statesman and having convinced him he was who he said he was proceeded to urge Hitchens to advocate through his position with the magazine for the British govenment to drop its prosecution and impounding of Larry Kramer's book Faggots. Pynchon had been given Hitchen's phone number by McEwan and had been urged to call him. Pynchon was distressed by the censorship. Hitchens offered to call him back to work out a campaign but Pynchon politely refused and hung up. Needless to say Hitchens never had any other contact with him although it can be assumed McEwan must maintain a friendship.

Must be something to get a call out of the blue like that.

[Jack of All Parades]

Time out from 4th century BC Greece[the best of all worlds] to spend quality time with an exceptional new book, Kathryn Schulz's Being Wrong- Adventures in the Margin of Error. She is a local author[my hometown] and prize winning journalist who has just published her first book, an intriguing study of the benefits of erring and how humans expend so much time and energy denying those benefits.

Why do people spend so much time trying to be right and beat themselves up when they are shown to be wrong? That is the central question posed by this book. In 350 some pages she playfully and creatively explores the implications of this question. Interesting takes are made with situations like dealing with family, friends, coworkers and neighbors-from the proverbial statements "I told you so" to the ominous "mistakes were made". Ms Schultz plays with hundreds of human interaction scenarios as she judiciously peppers her examinations with situations as provided by people like Augustine, Darwin, Keats, Plato, Groucho Marx, Freud, and modern day economists like Alan Greenspan. Ultimately she determines that to be in error is to be liberated: that wrongness is a 'given and a gift" all at once. Her prose style in discussing this question is wonderfully witty and lucid- her conversational tone is engaging like a good conversation with an intelligent friend who does not talk down to you but rather takes the time to spin a tale with verve and words that come alive on the page.

To be in error is to be in the great state of creativity. When you finish the book you should find yourself continuously asking what if I'm wrong?. For as the author points out as Einstein said or at least was paraphrased "without error there would be no science". She has even given an intelligent new twist to Shakespeare discussion as she discusses error and Hamlet. I also have a new mantra with her usage of a Yeat's quote-

"Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

"The Circus Animal's Desertion"

Ms Schultz has instructed me in how to live in uncertainty; like Keats to find inspiration and possibility and wonder in the embrace of error. As she says "we get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right the next time." I like her optimism and her embrace of fallibility.