[rabite gets whacked!]

I'm so down with a book club!

I picked up Gene Wolfe's New Sun tetralogy today, after forgetting his name and the title, trying and failing to read this thread for it on my girlfriend's phone in the bookstore, then remembering "Long sun" and having them search for that.

I'm currently reading Michael Ondaatje's new one, Divisadero, which I'm not quite certain of. It's a little lifeless, honestly, with characters feeling a little too written, but I need to give it more time, cause there's certainly no lack of skill here.

I'm not sure I've ever gotten a book (or movie) I've loaned out back. Currently circulating are True History of the Kelly Gang, The Little Friend (that one's gone; she up and moved back to Michigan), Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Yojimbo (though that was a traded loan for The Memoirs of Elias Cannetti, which I still have (haven't finished) and think I got the better deal on) and Volver.
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[slipstream]

I finished Infinite Jest. I'm not sure if I can recommend it or not. I can't even imagine what the original 2,000 page draft would have been like.
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[zak]

[rf]

[rabite gets whacked!]

[Dracko]

Salman Rushdie receives a knighthood, Iran protests and claims Britain is insulting Islam.

Trying to save face over the stupidest of things.
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[boojiboy7]

[shrugtheironteacup]

Now that I can't distract myself with being inane in the axe I am trying my hand at something resembling content. Note that I am currently on prescription pain killers and haven't slept in 26 hours.

Please stop running.

Recently I read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. I thought it was a pretty good story told reasonably effectively, but that Matheson isn't, or wasn't, the best stylist (I write, in the most pedestrian and stilted manner possible.) I had a pretty good grasp of the primary character's isolation, but little sense of the environment outside the walls of his home even when he sojourned outside of them.

I felt the book lacked mood.

Apocalyptic fiction, to me, is all about mood, man's observations of his environment and its effect on his psyche. If faced with a man journeying through speculative and/or far future whatever I'd really like to have an idea of his place in the environment.

Of course if Matheson looked too closely at the environment his ending might not be so much a suprise. Perhaps that's part of the point, or the intent. Matheson's vampire apocalypse was less an end than a transition.

But!

I followed a line from Smith's Zothique to Vance's Dying Earth to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, only backwards, and for me these works that inspired works that inspired works are something of a benchmark. They convey a remarkable, alien sense of place while discussing the very earth we walk on, etc. etc.

Well.

I wrote a book (of sorts) some time ago that carries an obvious, heavy Smith and Wolfe influence despite my not holding them clearly in mind when I wrote it. I've come to work on revising it, recently, and found the task far more daunting than the original writing. See, I'm trying to run the tight-rope between homage to certain tropes etc. and just being, well, boring.

Also, trying to describe a plausible environment in enough detail to evoke the right mood, etc.

SO I COME TO MY TRUE SUBJECT:

-The Trouble With Apocalyptic Fiction That Is Not Horribly Derivative

I mean, really, how much can you do with an END OF THE/A WORLD SCENARIO?

Does anyone here share my fascination with the sub-genre or whatever?

If so: any favoured examples?

THIS WAS PROBABLY ENTIRELY BORING AND UNPRODUCTIVE.

I AM GOING TO BED NOW THANKS.
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[rabite gets whacked!]

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke.

That is all.
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[shrugtheironteacup]

[shrugtheironteacup]

[rf]

I didn't like Childhood's End. The subject of the second part was kinda cool, but the third part ruined it.
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[Renfrew]

I just finished Kafka on the Shore during my trip to Disney World. I enjoyed reading about Nakata and Oshima the most. I really wish that there had been some kind of stronger resolution for Oshima or even more character development. The scene Between Oshima and the two women in the library was fantastic.
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[rf]

Yeah, Oshima was fun, and kind of the book's saving grace. I went out of the book largely hating it for its slowness and the wishy-washy fake Oedipus plot, but wishing the library existed so I could hang out there. (Speaking of the fake Oedipus plot, there was this one interview where Murakami was asked "so, tell us more about how this a modern Oedipus story" and he was like "uhh, I thought it'd be kinda cool to do something like Oedipus, so I made the kid look for his dad and like that woman who's kinda like his mom, but I just made shit up from there and it's not Oedipus-like in any deep way." Classy.)
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[shrugtheironteacup]

Well at least he's honest.
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[Renfrew]

I think he relyed too heavily on stuff from Hardboiled and Wind up Bird.
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[wpham]

Put Kafka on the Shore away and read After Dark!
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last.fm

[Renfrew]

I want to read After Dark, but I've got a stack! Right now I am reading a Confederacy of Dunces and The Arabian Nights. After that, I've got Something Happened and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. After that, Milton, Pratchett, Chekov, Powers, and some more Heller and Murakami have been waiting for my attention for a while.
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[Adilegian]

HAVE LATELY FINISHED:

The Garden of Cyrus by Thomas Browne. Weird 17th century gardening book that digresses into its main topic: the mystical, natural, and spatial recurrences of the number five, particularly in the shape of an X. Fascinating.

Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, some essays and several poems by P. B. Shelley. The dude can't write a play worth shit. Poems can be too jingly at times, but he's more aware of his craft than he sometimes appears. Overall likable, despite an urbanity that can slip into triviality.

AM READING:

The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Richard Burton. Lots of fun! The overtly sexual passages are particularly funny, if by accident, because of the substitution of late 19th century euphemisms for the Arabic euphemisms. Also the Arabic euphemisms are kind of clever as far as the wit goes. There's one scene in particular where three women (engaged in sexual play with one man) make him answer riddles about what they call their vaginas.

Call and response from woman #1:

[1]: "O my lord, O my love, what callest thou this article?" pointing to her slit, her solution of continuity.

[2] At last he turned upon them asking, "And what do you women call this article?" Whereto the damsel made answer, "The basil of the bridges."

Call and response from woman #2:

[1] She came out of the water and throwing her naked form on the Porter's lap pointed to her machine and said, "O light of mine eyes, do tell me what is the name of this concern?"

[2] Thereupon he cried, "O my sisters, what is its name?" and they replied, "What sayest thou to the husked sesame seed?"

Call and response from woman #3:

[1] Seating herself upon his lap and knees, pointing to her genitory and said, "O my lordling, what be the name of this?"

[2] She replied, "It is entitled the Khan of Abu Mansur."

The Khan of Anu Mansur was a particularly well-known stable.

So the guy finally gets around to turning attention to his penis.

[1] Then he came out and threw himself into the first lady's lap and rested his arms upon the lap of the portress, and reposed his legs in the lap of the cateress and pointed to his prickle and said, "O my mistresses, what is the name of this article?"

[2] "Thy pintle, thy prickle, thy pizzle!"

[3] "Its veritable name," said he, "is mule Burst-all, which browseth on the basil of the bridges, and muncheth the husked sesame, and nighteth in the Khan of Abu Mansur."

ZING.
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[parkbench]

Right now I'm reading War with the Newts by Karel Capek. It's very enjoyable, I'm almost halfway done and I just barely started.

It's surprisingly prescient. Everything it says and sardonically observes about humanity is stunningly accurate and human. It's as if it were written yesterday, but it was actually written in 1936.

I highly recommend it. It has turned me into an instant aficionado of Capek's.
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[Adilegian]

[chriservin22]

I'm MONTHS late on getting onto this thread. It took Toups about a month to authorize me for these forums. But my two cents on the issues raised so far:

#1.) Murakami's appeal is totally lost on me; I feel like he is always trying to write magic realism style, but he always seems to forget to include the magic and the realism. Like the Jonathan S. Foer's & Dave Eggers' & Salman Rushdie's of the world (although "Midnight's Children," was very good), Murakami is praised because there are so few living, young(ish) authors writing true, honest, and great novels today. Or the truly great novels just aren't getting enough publicity. I dunno.

#2.) The poetry talk over the past few months has been pleasantly learned and enlightening -- my one term of Romantic poetry in college was taught by an elderly college professor who couldn't understand the difference between a terzanelle & a villanelle. The music analogy was perfect; a great poem can be understood by almost anyone, but knowing something about language, meter, &c can increase what one gains from a poem.

#3.) I have a recording of Ezra Pound reading a few stanzas from a poem I have never seen published anywhere before. It was recorded way back in 1912. Periodically, Pound will stop reading and just start wailing away on a bunch of kitchen utensils. It's pretty Dada, I guess; also, it is entirely unexpected and jarring, and if the evidence were not so overwhelming already, I imagine this recording will make it obvious that Pound was, on top of everything else, a jackass.

#4.) Re: Joyce -- my old IC username was "finnagain," in reference to "Finnegans Wake." I was going though a Joyce thing at the time. That was the first contact I ever had with High Modernism. Reading "Ulysses" was like a revelation at the time, partly because my knowledge of Latin finally proved valuable, and partly because Joyce really did what Pound commanded everyone to do: he made it new.

I'm older today and realize now that Joyce could have been something a lot more interesting had he followed more closely to the style of Ibsen or even Flaubert.

#5.) I actually won the $1,000 dollar "Ayn Rand Institute" scholarship in 2002! I had not read "Atlas Shrugged" at the time, but I was a more thoughtful and coherent writer when I was eighteen than I am now.

The trick is, write exactly what you think an Objectivist would want to hear.

I did later read all of "Atlas Shrugged," and... wow. Where does one even begin tackling the myriad issues in that book? Why does a remarkably simple story require a 30,000 word monologue towards the end of it? Who could have missed the point after 1,100 pages of archetypal (or, more accurately, boring) Adonis-like figures fighting straw men?

And the prose... urgh.

#7) I got on the forums just as the "Notes from Underground" book club started, and started my own. I believe I am the only one engaging in it. The literature of Russia the 19th century is so, so, so good.

#8) I haven't actually analyzed anything in this post, sadly. I have a conference call right now -- after it's done I hope to discuss Thomas Mann for a while.

[sync-swim]

On Murakami, my first and favorite read from him was Wind-Up Bird, with declining interest in each of the next of his novels I picked up. His books are almost a sort of pastoralism for the city-- the mundane actions and interactions between characters tend to suggest a realist's touch, but when those lengthy tension-building stretches of the mundane loose into the violent, as they invariably do (or in the worst cases, don't; see: Dance, Dance, Dance), the violence is cartoon-y, embellished, diminished or otherwise made "magical" and robbed of the moral/ethical impact that serves as the grounding "real" portion of Surreal. I'd say that's what separates him, makes his stuff "poppier," than that of other East Asian postmodern authors, such as Can Xue, who also practice automatic writing. Can Xue can write a children's dodgeball game to feel like an atrocity exhibition.

Of course, there are exceptions to everything-- Wind-Up Bird has that one scene of ultraviolence that most people remember.

Wind-Up Bird reads like a remake of Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (the plots are almost identical), which I prefer over the former since late 80s Istanbul is a much more interesting backdrop than mid-90s Tokyo. It also helps that Pamuk is firmly in the camp of adjective-abusing, not-a-little-meandering hardcore descriptive postmodernists with an eye for luxuriant prose that I love. There may be even less forward motion in Black Book than Wind-Up, but I never find myself particularly caring because Pamuk packs every overblown noir paragraph with minutae about the city, its nooks and its residents that are just terribly great to me. Wind-Up Bird lacked that insider's eye and self-indulgent love of the city in comparison.

Speaking of meandering self-indulgent neo-postmodernists, Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a fantastic pulpy adventure novel. The whole thing is like a dream-blend of Journey to the West with George R.R. Martin-style realist fantasy in the period just before the British Raj. The worst portions are the slice-of-life chapters about an Indian college student on an 80s U.S. college campus, but those are standard fair for young Asian-American authors and are thankfully few and far in between.

[chriservin22]

I haven't read any of Pamuk's more experimental writing, yet, but even the Nobel Prize winning authors are not above ripping off the plots of other books wholesale -- Pamuk's "Cebdet Bey and Sons," is "Buddenbrooks," in Turkey, pretty much.

The remarkable thing about both those books is this sense of objectivity. No doubt Pamuk and Mann loved these fictional characters; I can't imagine writing a family saga without at least some affection for the people I'm writing about -- but, in Buddenbrooks in particular, we are told a gripping story about a very slow decline of a wealthy German family -- told with both affection and scorn, in equal measure. And no fiction author writes about music the way Mann writes about music.

I think he published that book when he was 24 or 25. Sigh.

[parkbench]

I just finished War with the Newts. I am instantly a bigger fan of Čapek than I ever was of Vonnegut.

Also: While I have/can read Dostoevsky with some amount of success, I am not a prodigy or a savant or brilliant or what have you so I do feel that I am missing a lot of the point of what's going on in the novel by "teaching it to myself." After all, one thing is picking up a dime novel, and another is reading Dostoevsky, something which I feel needs to be taught, really. Historical context, personal bio, etc etc.

I can do this myself, of course--but this is obviously involved and thus puts it on a lower rung of priority than other stuff. Though I really, really do want to read his stuff (I mean I got through like 100 pages of Karamazov and I was doing okay, so).
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[internisus]

[kzkb1]

I finished reading "The Most Gorgeous Situation in Korea" sometime last week, and I really enjoyed it. It sort of reminded me of "The Catcher in the Rye" and Wong Kar Wai's films. I think there might be something there about the struggle for, or fear of, or fear of the inability to communicate, truth in a world of anonymous internet publishing, by way of blogging etc.. Or maybe not. Either way, it's a pretty good tale of modern loneliness.

[Felix]

i've only ever gotten about a fifth of the way into "most gorgeous situation" two (three?) times now. i swear i'll get through it when next semester starts up and i'm working in a call center with nothing to do again.

i'm working on banana yoshimoto's amrita at the moment. had to go somewhere with japanese literature after finally having imported and burned through hear the wind sing.

edit: a hundred and sixtyish pages in, i gave up on amrita because it wasn't going anywhere and i'm not really the type to stick with a looonnngg book through thick or thin like that (my girlfriend made me read both anna karenina and i know this much is true, last semester, and there's a reason that i didn't want to put up with etrian odyssey after fenrir). lizard wasn't bad, but i'm no closer to making any sort of comparison to murakami. should i just read kitchen like everybody says?

in the meantime i've picked up little children after really wanting to like the movie no matter how violently book-compromised it seemed to be, and after a few chapters i can safely say this stuff is hornby-easy. him i've got no use for beyond high fidelity, though the whole effortless insight-confession thing is pretty dependent on subject matter. yes, it's obvious as anything, but i'm hardly too good for it, so for as long as i can stop imagining kate winslet as the narrator (there is no good reason not to do this) we should be okay!

[parkbench]

So I definitely need some help with Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. For the fist 100 pages or so, it was brilliant--I found in it a writing style I had never quite seen before, which deftly intertwined stream of consciousness into sinuously winding paragraphs, infinitely long sentences, full of nouns and nouns and adjectives. It was great.

Then, somewhere along the line, it started getting confusing.

I just don't know what's going on sometimes, now. The plot itself is confusing me in some ways, and then sometimes I just read a chapter and have no idea what happened. Celal's columns used to be insightful and relevant, and now I have no idea what they're talking about.

But I don't think this is the book's fault, I think it's mine. I just don't quite understand. Would anyone with any knowledge of the book be willing to field some specific questions for me? Thx!
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[Renfrew]

I am chipping away at Something Happened. It is a tough nut to crack.
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[internisus]

I read The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe. Both books. I did it between Saturday and Wednesday morning. I don't think I really did anything else in that whole time. I loved them hugely. I don't know what to say.

[Renfrew]

I just started reading Sputnik Sweetheart. How does it compare to other Murakami novels?
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[108]

[Renfrew]

Hmm.

I haven't read Pinball,1973 yet, even though I have it, mainly for the same reason I haven't read your novel, Tim. I have a hard time getting into long PDF's.

I deeply connected with South of the Border, and really enjoyed Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland. So I guess can agree with you (so far) on your top picks. Do you not like his short stories? I have really liked most of his short stories that I have read.

Are you writing The Most Gorgeous Situation in 2048?
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[parkbench]

Yeah I thought I was the only one who departed from the "norm" by thoroughly enjoying South of the Border. Perfect length, great read. Made me horny as hell, too.
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[Felix]

i love south of the border, very much. sputnik was the first one i read; for as many proto-murakamis as there might as well be at this point, to call that one a proto-murakami (and a really nice one at that) doesn't seem to be missing the point too badly.

for it's worth, i think my favorites are south of the border, hear the wind sing, hardboiled wonderland, and dance dance dance. yeah, i know.

[108]

[Dracko]

I am just done reading Vladimir Nabokov's Mary. It's a peculiar novella, to me, in light of its solemn tone. But Nabokov manages to deal with matters of obsession and nostalgia without falling into melancholy. It's almost sobering.
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[Baron Patsy]

[Kipple]

I just finished A Good And Happy Child, by Justin Evans. It was pretty good! It's an interesting meditation on the intersection between religion and psychology, or, to be clearer, between demon possession and mental illness. The action, especially in the second half, could have stood to be a little less blatant, but it has a nice, deep, layered subtext beneath that.

[Adilegian]

I've been reading through William James's Essays on Pragmatism. Bought this book just before I threw the lot of them into storage, and I'm glad to have it accessible again. Really liking this.
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