Washington Square's my first go with him and I have to say I'm loving it so far. He seems to have a very definite style which I can imagine divides people but I'm totally into it. Good way to start the new year. Will probably try The Portrait of a Lady after this one.

on the one hand i don't want to intervene in your perma-wars, but on the other hand i have to ask-- you're just trolling him, right?


i haven't, but i might. you?


he's a bit like a gossipy neighbor, and i can see how that might not be the most compelling point of view, but his prose was really excellent and his observations sharp as fuck

Late James is notoriously difficult stuff. I'm not sure I've finished any of them, but I often find myself picking them up and reading a few pages at a random spot.

I've probably started more James than I've finished. He is an incredibly frustrating writer in that he's a genius who is often very boring. The good stuff is great, the slow stuff is torture.

But it's easy to figure out which book belongs to which category. If after five pages you're not sure who is doing what for what reason, move on. Chapter two will not go down easier.

But without James and Conrad, I find it difficult to imagine 20th century literary modernism happening. For a number of important reasons, no serious student of literature can avoid him.

As far as actually liking him, I'm not sure. Sometimes yes, often no. And if someone is not interested in history of lit (no reason why anyone should feel compelled to be interested), and if the style and themes of James aren't of interest, I think skipping him altogether is not a bad idea.

explain?

His writing really is something else. Some lines are laugh out loud good. I wouldn't say he's gossipy though, not like say Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde, more that the people he writes about tend to be. I'm just psyched that I've finally discovered him and now can't wait to read more. A great way to start a new year.

Off the top of my sleepy head:

The depth of psychological investigation, the focused POV (sometimes coming very close to stream-of-consciousness), the intense interest in manipulating language to get it to do new things.

i meant gossipy neighbor in the sense that james is concerned with the nuances of social relations rather than "big ideas," which seems to be what rob likes.


i was taking a brief peek at "the ambassadors" on the gutemberg project website and i can see what you say-- reads kinda like virginia woolf-- but his earlier stuff is pretty straightforward XIX century prose. interesting evolution.

you fuckers (all of you) are getting me back to want to read again, for which i'm very grateful.

You'll almost certainly like PORTRAIT and probably most of the early works. Those were actually meant to be enjoyed, a goal he eventually abandoned in pursuit of other things. I think you might also enjoy one of his short story collections. Penguin's "Selected Tales" is a good one.

I love Conrad but I've never really understood his supposed link with Modernism. Not saying there isn't one (have never really studied literature in a serious, academic way) but it seems any quality writer or artist working towards the end of the 19th C ends up being called a forefather of modernism at some point.

I'm not sure. Hardy next to Conrad seems like a crusty joke, for example.

The books on my 'to read next' shelf are Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, the new James Ellroy and Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County but I'm seriously thinking about getting Portrait next and leaving those till after.

maybe a faint connection but i'm reminded that tears eliot used "mistah kurtz--he dead" as an epigraph for the wasteland.

Put like that, you're obviously right.

Pun-tastic!

i'd like to steal the credit but it was e.e. cummings who called him that in one of his notebooks and i can't call him anything else now

Nothing wrong with plagiarism. Reminds me of an infamous exchange between George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Shaw had said something outrageously witty and Wilde told him "I wish I'd said that," to which Shaw replied, "You will, Oscar, you will."

bhaaaa haaa haaaaa haaa!!!

You know, I feel like such a fraud. I haven't read anything in months. I think literacy has plasticity and I'm in a lull, nowhere near peak performance. I can't believe I'm the same person who could once knock off 200 pages in a day. I haven't read more than one page since October, I think.

And for the past few years it was nothing but short stories. Before that, a very long Updike binge (21 novels, way over 100 stories).

I'd like to return to literature. Learn how to read again. It's the schoolboy in me. I'm inspired to read a James I haven't yet. Then Conrad's Under Western Eyes, which I've wanted to read for, well, years. (And I own a fucking copy! What's wrong with me? Did I really have to watch those stupid SNL episodes?) A Flaubert. Trollop for laughs. Maybe give Woolf's heretofore unreadable The Waves another go. Take a few days to read all of Euripides. Then I'll switch it up and turn to Kafka, Becket, Borges, Nabokov for new flavors. But nothing past 1950.

(That list: the cracker patriarchy really was a bad motherfucker, wasn't he?)

Hm. The more I think of it: is this tempting or would it be tedious? I might be a little unsure.

I have been reading accounts of harrowing experiences. I am 3/4 of the way through Hillenbrand's UNBROKEN, which is now a supposedly shit movie by Angelina Jolie.

The book is an amazing story though.

I am also reading Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible and I am about 3/4 of the way through the Old Testament. Awesome stuff, and I wish Sunday School was more like it than the brainwashing sessions of simplified theology that sunday school normally is.

Don't worry it happens. I'm coming out of my non-reading phase after months of not reading. One day the books you couldn't imagine reading a few weeks back suddenly look like the best idea you could do.

Seeing as I never contribute to this thread I'll add my current reading-



Brilliant so far. I've read a fair few books about film/films, but this one has to rank as one of the best out there. He manages to make each film he talks about the next one you want to watch.

I finished this last week and you guys should totally check it out-



A comic book that really is something else. There's no general narrative, there's no heroes, there's no major characters. Basically it focuses on one corner of a room in a house, and follows that corner through the decades. Mcquire zooms from 2030 all the way back thousands of years ago and the people there at the time. From a bison who sat in the very spot before the house was ever built, to a child simply playing with a toy. It may seem like you wouldn't be able to a handle on the characters that appear (sometimes for one page, sometimes spreading over many pages), but each person you find out yourself trying to figure a story to them. Here's a shot of a page to give you an example.



Brilliant. Done by the bassist in Liquid Liquid oddly enough.

Or 'minimally talented spoiled brat', according to the leaked Sony emails.

yeah, those e mails were great! Larry Ellison's daughter is a bipolar lunatic.

@ evollove - don't sweat it. i got burned out on reading through forced page-count athleticism. best to focus on quality anyway. follow your appetite and fuck off to all else.

@h8kurdt - amazing-looking comic! i love the idea of no heroes (comic book heroes are for children anyway). and could you mention some of the key movies described in your book? (maybe i've missed some).

The chapter I'm on he's been talking about Ingrid Bergman and all the films she did with Rossellini. I haven't seen many of her films, or Rosselini for that matter so I'm gonna check some out.

The other films he talks about are generally the bigger films (they're big for a reason so it'd be daft to not talk about them). There was a great chapter about Triumph of the Will and Leni Riefenstahl generally. Another one about Renoir (it forced to FINALLY watch Rules of the Game. For shame I know) which added a whole new appreciation for the guy. Either way I'd recommend it, especially to you fellow movie geeks on here.

Ah, well, fuck you all.

oh damn, same here

leni riefenstahl was a FANTASTIC innovator but triumph of the will is *so fucking boring* because of its subject matter-- a bunch of nazis on parade. renoir was great and please watch grand illusion when you can.


???

Of the Rossellini/Bergman films, Voyage to Italy is my fave but it does have an ending that really divides people. His earlier stuff without her is more overtly political. Rome Open City, Germany Year Zero, Paisa. Very raw and massively influential. If you like Bicycle Thieves you'd love it.

New reviews are up http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/

I am going to read this next.

Finished Salinger's Nine Stories. Plodding along in Cheever's big Stories book. I think Cheever's overall point is that life can or cannot amount to something but that, even when it doesn't amount to much of anything that gives meaning, our purpose should be to observe as carefully and deeply as possible. I don't know. That's a pretty piss poor analysis from an English minor.

So I finally finished reading Infinite Jest last night.

Thought I would post back my thoughts here since it sparked such a ruckus last time.

Basically...... I don't think the book is a big 'joke's on you' emperor's new clothes affair. BUT I think it is a bit smarmy as it invites you to think that the whole way through. The 'deeper' pomo aspects of the book I think were partly lost on me since I don't tend to read in that way and also I don't really care about those kind of things haha.

I did really enjoy it. I see a lot of people complaining about the characters being 2d but I really liked the POV type stuff and the kinda oddball characterisation. I mean, you couldn't really imagine these people in real life but I don't think it's meant to be that kind of book.

I think as some kind of scholarly exercise the book is really good, it's very technical and almost like a study of something. The story isn't amazing but I did really enjoy reading it. This sounds contradictory but I feel like the book is greater than the sum of its parts. Like individually the story, characters, plot, language etc are not special but it works together and is really truly like nothing else I have read (although I will be the first to admit I am not very well read at all).

It kinda reminded me in that way of Siddartha. Like I read this book at the end of a really intense period of reading loads of Hesse books, and to me it distills perfectly all these grandiose themes of Hesse into a really condensed, efficient story. But the story itself is not what makes it good to me, it's the execution of something so precise. Obviously Infinite Jest is like the opposite of that haha! But it's trying to do something very different.

I don't know, I can't articulate my thoughts very well but I did really really enjoy the book and part of me wants to read it again right away since it was so long ago that I read the beginning. But I'm not that much of a maschist haha (no, I'm only reading Gravity's Rainbow next.....)

Now I'm going to read a bunch of people's reactions and theories online to see if they match up with mine. I have been desperate to read about the book all along but I didn't want to spoil it.

tl;dr: Infinite Jest - it should be shit but it's not

oh also i really liked all the weird tennis details

neither tl nor dr!-- it was a nice, fresh, non-pretentious review. i won't say it makes me want to read it but it helps tilt me in favor of doing that.

and now for some pretentious thoughts (sorry i can't help myself):

1) ulysses also works that way. for nabokov it was just a story of a man being cuckolded. it's true the story is not that much viewed like that, but nabokov was probably jealous (or didn't care). still, the details make it come alive in such a massive way it's no way just about that.

2) did you ever read the glass bead game? back in prehistoric times i was enthralled by hesse (demian + steppenwolf + other witings like his essays & beneath the wheel).but the glass bead game didn't work for me so i dropped it a quarter of the way in. i'm asking because i'm curious and at this point i wouldn't mind spoilers ha ha.

1. I haven't read Ulysses or in fact any Joyce though I am intrigued... for Nabokov I suppose it must be like the absolute opposite of what he is trying to do (and by extension what he liked!). Nabokov is so concise. But I agree, so little of my enjoyment of literature (especially novels!) comes from the story (i look to short stories if i am looking for plot).

2. I did read the glass bead game, it's probably my favourite Hesse!! I would really urge you to try again with it. It's a little sludgy at times but it all comes together beautifully in the last 10% or so. You must also read his 'lives' at the end - vvv. important. The final pages of the story are so poignant too i will never forget the precise moments of reading them down to the quality of light in my room, how i was feeling everything. that is quite schmaltzy i guess but it had a reall effect on me.

I actually resisted the urge to compare Infinite Jest to the glass bead game in my 'review'. But I can't resist now since you brought it up. What I was going to say is that in both cases the world is very much like our own but not quite. Not far enough different to be truly classed as sci fi or fantasy (or at least the book doesn't focus or rely enough on the differences for it to be genred in this way) or even really an 'alternate universe' but just enough that it is unfamiliar and makes you consider the elements of the story/writing a little more closely.

Also the timelessness of the novels (in that they are not anchored certainly in time - both being an unspecified time in the future) and the fact that specificity of time is not important to the aims of the novel is nother parallel.

Just my take on things. I think DFW owes a lot to Herman Hesse.

damn, that was convincing. i will look it up. it's buried in one of those boxes i haven't opened in ages, a spanish translation, probably all yellow now.

once i got into an argument with an ex-friend who kept saying hesse was for teenagers. maybe, but if you never went through it then it's not too late. the fucker was so miserable i gifted him a steppenwolf-- he was just like steppenwolf with his razor blade, all serious and boohoo and getting old and on prozac. but he thought he was above all that, in his overly intellectual posture. god damn margaritas ante porcos. no magic theatre for him.

Hesse I always found boring. I read fiction to be shown a world that I never experienced before. Hesse's fiction is like a boring lecture that you need to sit through because the information is quality, but the person delivering it is a monotone bore.

(but maybe bad translations...?)

maybe.

so... i went and looked at an updated translation of the glass bead game (by some dude with a russian last name). and in the preface the translator was explaining how previous translators had missed the humor and irony in that book (which is something had already been recognized by thomas mann when hesse sent him a draft).

so then i kept reading and the translator kept going into ideas behind the book and he started taling about the influence of nietzsche and jacob burckhardt and how some characters were modeled after them... so...

then i ended up looking up burckhardt on wikipedia (the inventor of cultural history!) and seeing his bibliography and i ended up finding one of his books... "the civilization of the renaissance in italy" (he's got another about the ancient greeks).

now i think i might just end up reading burckhardt first ha ha ha ha

These are the next books lined up on my list...

Masks of God: Occidental Mythology – Joseph Campbell (1958)
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics – Alfred Korzybski (1933)
Masks of God: Creative Mythology – Joseph Campbell (1968)
Instead of a Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism – Benjamin R. Tucker (1893)