[spinach]

[spinach]

[Adilegian]

This kind of straddles the fence between literature and shameless self-promotion, but the online poetry journal that I edit has just put up its latest issue.

http://www.towncreekpoetry.com

Dan Albergotti, our featured poet, kind of looks like an alternative Toups.
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[spinach]

[Adilegian]

lawl svenska.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95537900
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[Dracko]

McCarthy on Oprah:


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[adol]

Wow hey I never noticed this thread was here! This is pretty cool. Lately I have been reading Paradise Lost in my off time, it is an amazing read. However right now all I can think of what to say about it is that SMT steals from it left and right.

[CubaLibre]

Paradise Lost is awesome. Wrote my sophomore essay on it.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Dracko]

http://nakedlunch.org/

Watch this space.
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[PianoMap]

read this book, sb.
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[crispyambulance]

[PianoMap]

Three generations of Japanese-Canadian women [one born Canadian] narrate their various stories in a kind of stream-of-consciousness clusterfuck that combines oral-tradition storytelling with scrapbook memories of living on the Canadian prairies. Their family runs a mushroom farm.

It's magical realism told in layers: the grand-daughter tells her life story from her own perspective as well as her mother's and grand-mother's, recalling events as well as twisting them [and making some up to fill in the holes in her memory], to her boyfriend in-between bouts of marathon fucking.

Mainly the use of language in the writing is beautiful. Japanese onomatopoeia is used a lot [without translation]. The grand-mother's sections flow like a sound poem.
When I say life-story, it's not really a biography. Traditional Japanese folk tales pop up [though they're never identified as such. they just kinda... slip in. easy to tell though if you already know them or you look for a change in the voice] and get twisted a bit and a lot of the conversations that take place are more or less telepathic.
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[crispyambulance]

That sounds potentially interesting, I suppose. Might look into when my queue isn't such a god damn train wreck.

BY THE WAY guys I think Ulysses is pretty slick. Damn.

Also picked up Wuthering Heights today, it's been kind of hard to follow but maybe that's because I've been reading it in distracting environments? Seems like I won't be disappointed though so!

Just thought you should know!

[falsedan]

Finished reading Schild's Ladder which made visiting Szczecin more bearable.

This is the first Egan book I've read where the big ending sequence of humans transcending space and time actually turned out to be positive.
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[Dracko]

Why does The Road remind me of Watership Down so much?
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[boojiboy7]

Because McCarthy wusses out hard on the ending?

[adol]

[falsedan]

Adol there is no such thing as too Burroughs

I don't know how to expound without ruining the plot of all the Egan books I've read! Suffice it to say that Schild's Ladder doesn't end with the quiet extinguishing of post-bodily post-human consciousness in some hyper-dimensional quantum computer careening off the edge of the universe

also hot damn Egan's home page has an animation of the border
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[shrugtheironteacup]

So if anyone decides to get into Paul Auster cold they probably shouldn't do it quite like I did:

-read The Invention of Solitude on your grandmother's couch in Idaho in an afternoon and say "hey this is pretty good stuff if a little self-consciously literary some of the time"

-pick up Hand to Mouth and The New York Trilogy

-proceed to read Hand to Mouth because "hey I liked that last memoir thing"

-put aside Hand to Mouth after the first 100 pages or so, because it's covering a lot of the same ground as The Invention of Solitude, only in more detail, but with less emotional depth, and you think "shit I need some more distance between the one and the other before I pick this up again"

-move on to The New York Trilogy with the memoirs fresh in your mind, be constantly distracted by just how autobiographical some of the details are (especially in The Locked Room, where it being autobiography might be important metaphorically), to the point that when you run into a big lump of PRECISELY THIS HAPPENED TO AUSTER AND I READ ABOUT IT LAST WEEK you can barely bring yourself to read and suddenly you, who hate to skim, are skimming, and you have to set the book back down and gather yourself for another go a few hours later which usually works fine until you slam into the next lump of autobiography

..so yeah it's pretty good stuff but I did not maximize my experience of it.
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[falsedan]

shrug I am going to jump right into The New York Trilogy cold after carting it around the world and ignoring it, the most I know about Paul Auster is what you just posted; is this a good idea?

Just as soon as I finish The Russia House, which is surprisingly
"jolly good show old chap eh what" so far.
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[shrugtheironteacup]

falsedan I believe that lurching cold into The New York Trilogy is probably the best way, and wish I had done that and gotten balls-deep in memoir later.
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[Renfrew]

I'm reading Mother Night right now and finding it far more engaging than Cat's Cradle ever was.
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[evnvnv]

i just made a really long "what have i been consuming lately?" post in the movie thread and i felt like it was really theraputic, so i'm going to do the same thing here!

i think i just realized the potential of amazon dot com and in a fit of self-medication via spending money i got a ton of amazing things, coinciding with my recent rediscovery of hp lovecraft

i got:

-- a collection of algernon blackwood short stories--this will undoubtedly be amazing. i've always wanted to read this stuff but could never find it in an Actual Book Store. I'm sure I'll move on to Lord Dunsany next and I'm always looking for other writers of this style/era.

--(on that note) a collection of the best stories published in Weird Tales magazine in the year 1923 (i don't know if they did these for other years, i kind of hope not)

--Odd John and Sirius by Olaf Stapledon: a friend of mine just read these (two short novels in one book) and they sound amazing--one is about a man so smart he is to normal people what people are to animals and the other is about a super intelligent dog. or a man trapped in a dog's body or something. not too sure.

--The Flight To Lucifer by Harold Bloom: this is not only a pseudo-sequel to A Voyage To Arcturus (daniel lindsay) but also the only novel by famous smart person Harold Bloom. It's apparently a reimagining of lindsay's novel mixed with (of course) a lot of information and speculation about gnosticism and mysticism and what not. Bloom apparently disowned it immediately after it was published. But it's mine now!!!!

we'll see if i ever get around to actually reading these.

I also just got The Thing on the Stair and other Weird Stories (new penguin classics version) because the other lovecraft short stories book i had fell apart completely. Which sucks, because the cover art was incredible.

[Capt. Caveman]

In the middle of The Kite Runner, which I expected to hate because of the stupid "anything that popular can't be good" axiom lodged in my brain, and I must say it is seriously the best straight-up no bullshit novel I've read in a while.

Started reading Anathem. That book is off the chain (the chain of nerditude (this is a compliment, btw)).

[PianoMap]

Another book everyone should read. Some of the best first-person narration I've ever read. The main character is an almost-teenage boy with what is I'm thinking most likely Asperger's syndrome, and it is about family, the ups and downs of relying only on yourself [in unusual ways], and a Sherlock Holmes-inspired investigation into the murder of a neighbourhood dog.
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[!=]

[European Son]

Um... I'm just gonna keep it short and clean:

Haruki Murakami.

That is all.

Oh, yeah; Norwegian Wood.

[gambrinus]

[Felix]

[Dracko]

:(
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[Tulpa]

The only Paul Auster things I have actually read were the Book of Illusions and Auggie Wren's Christmas Story. I can say about the Book of Illusions is that it got me interested in reading Chateaubriand's memoirs.

[shrugtheironteacup]

All my further Auster readings seem to have taught me is that Auster never gets over the stuff he was chewing over with The New York Trilogy when I was a toddler.

And he seems to become a more boring stylist as he digs deeper and deeper into his own navel.
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[Dracko]

Guys, is it true that Thomas Pynchon said that sci-fi was difficult to take seriously on account of death being so ephemeral, with the concepts of cloning, immortality and such?
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[Tulpa]

I feel Auster kind of wants to make movies not books. That's the vibe I got from the Book of Illusions, anyway. He really likes talking about them and describing them and he probably wishes he had the funding to make some of the films he described in that book. It's a shame he doesn't seem to write about anything new. Was he quoting Memoires d'Outre-Tombe in the New York Trilogy?

By the way, Art Spiegelman's introduction to City of Glass: the Graphic Novel was pretentious, condescending garbage. It put me off ever taking him seriously.

[shrugtheironteacup]

[Vikram Ray]

for fans of David Foster Wallace:

Wiggle Room
Two Pages from the Manuscript of his Unfinished Novel, The Pale King
Long Essay called "The Unfinished" about said novel

Little, Brown intends to publish the unfinished manuscript some time next year.

[Adilegian]

[dark steve]

wait you're supposed to do WHAT for your thesis?

That level of self-reflexivity sounds... corrosive?

[Broseph Stalin]

[shrugtheironteacup]

[boogalooper]