sandboox: anybody reading anything?

my roomie last night gave me a great "weird fiction" anthology for my birfday.

Feb 1 through May 28
Robert Moses and the Modern City:  Remaking the Metropolis

added bonus: n00dz of dr. drew daniel

ysi

http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/0791433307.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V1056490132_.jpg

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So far, it looks great.

-- milton parker (milton.parke...), December 18th, 2006.

Pleasant?

got a copy of the neil young bio from the 'rents...another great temptation away from against the day

currently James Ellroy's "Black Dahlia"

don't, it's great. better than m&d; i read 400 pages yesterday in one sitting.

time to go home...

hmmm, need to get after Butt Book

i'm reading "getting things done" because i wish it were still 2004. also i don't seem to be "getting things done."

i just picked up "blue nights" from the library, i am both eager to read it and not eager to read it.

will be starting my first henning mankell book tomorrow

Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow

Kinda 60s/70s sci-fi mood right now. And for the past ten years.

History of Histories - John Burrow. Good, by and large. Tends to be descriptive and looks at each writer's special strengths, with some analytical power-punches saved for the end of each chapter.

Curiously flip chapter on Josephus. Fun, but just out of tone to the rest of the book, especially right at the last minute he slips in a 'Destruction of Temple' = 20th Century massacres comparison.

Reminds me slightly of a history teacher I had who would casually go through the cynical transactions of the slave trade with sardonic asides and if someone laughed, he'd turn round and say IT'S NOT FUNNY BOY THEY HAD CORKS SHOVED UP THEIR BOTTOMS TO STOP THE DIARRHOEA COMING OUT.

Which of course, despite its description of grotesque humanity, did not help.

Wangled a review copy of the new Steve Erickson. Sadly, looks like Zeroville was false dawn because this new one is really, *really* bad. Not even guest appearances from I Pop and D Bowie save it.

catch 22. it's rubbish. h8 u book club.

come & talk blue nights w/me when you're done, reddening, i read & loved & wanna discuss. read a megham daum review i sorta hated at LARB & feel like there's a lot of criticism of the book i disagree with, so would be nice to kick around. is it general reception that has you nervous to read? really was moved by it & thought it exemplary. it's like didion coined/has her own damn tense.

i finished the above and went back to inferno by eileen myles, which i'm also enjoying. she writes so nicely & it's such a breezy comfortable story to be reading, trash talk about poets, vicarious participation in being young & a poet in old new york, young when your time was 'uncommodified'. i really really wanna read i love dick, by chris kraus, next, but don't have a copy & can't really justify buying one right now bc i just bought a bunch of other books. so it might be the angel esmerelda. about which i'm also excited.

Swamplandia by Karen Russell. Kind of Katherine Dunn crossed with García Marquez in tone if not quality

Starting War & War by Krazsnahorkai, really good, again, but feel like I'm running out of Central/Eastern european steam. Might put this off.

The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake by Tony Nuttall. Enjoying this a lot. Like gnosticism often makes me sigh a bit nowadays, crops up all over, 'back here again', but I am finding Nuttall picking his odd tenative-speculative, close reading path through all that + some favourite authors to be real pleasure. Oh, criticism-wise, I've got J H Prynne's book on George Herbert's Love III sitting around too. A few pages in I was liking where it waas going but felt it might be exhausting.)

And been reading Peter Reading since his death a couple of weeks ago, which shook me a bit. Hadn't read much after the mid-90s before now.

Just finished Open Secrets by Alice Munro, and it was fantastic. My first Munro.

Now reading a book about the history of fonts, Just My Type.

Moby Dick, awesome when I need to get some slep
The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger, confusing but very cool
Art Since 1900 by Foster - Krauss - Bois - Buchloh, best book ever

Just starting Murakami's IQ84 and almost finished with Retromania, which is leaving me depressed for some reason.

Crisis Economics - Roubini
Makers - Cory Doctorow
Daemon - Daniel Suarez
Commonwealth - Hardt & Negri

Jacobsanders, how are you finding iq84? It arrived at the library, but I only have two weeks to read it before I have to return it to the queue of long request. I'm thinking of just returning it early.

I'm only 50 pages in and so far it's great. The style is his usual voice, very neat and off-handly funny. If you like his humor from the Wind-Up Bird, you'll like this it. But I love almost everything I have read by Murakami and I've been waiting for this to come out for a year now.

Codex Seraphinianus.pdf

ma gawd just finished 1Q84.
not his best, exacerbated by pretty bad translation, conflated further by the worst proofing / editing ever. shocker.
constant restating /recaps like a serialised count of monte cristo for amnesiacs.
tits, tits, and tits. women don't think about their breasts as often as dirty old huki does.
clumsy superfluous similes everywhere, like lost souls in tents protesting against capitalism.
people wear clothes.
it's always :
"he had on a woolly hat and gloves", NEVER an alternate like
"he had a woolly hat & gloves on", "he was wearing a woolly hat and gloves", "he was dressed in a woolly hat and gloves".
and the use of colloquial americanisms in a book translated from japanese was freakishly stupid "a couple dozen meters away" / "turnout". while transparent in meaning, these are too specific to american usage. more universal phrases are available, like a male spider is always available to his mate, until she eats him.
*SPOILER ALERT*
tengo ghost wrote a book.
things remain unknown to them.
ffs.

haha reamde is in the pile of stuff i want to get to eventually... it just seemed so daunting atm

Lamp idk if ur interested at all in that kind thing but I'd love to read a list of yr top books of the year

id have to think abt but i love making lists of things

started pictures @ a revolution yesterday which i think i recall lord soto & maybe others recommending -- it is really great@!

This History of Histories by John Burrow really is excellent. His summing-up of the main features of classical history, at the end of having dealt with the main classical historians in turn, is superb.

He really starts enjoying himself with the dark ages/early medieval chroniclers, becomes quite relaxed in fact, too relaxed even? But no, it's discursive, but not too discursive, and fun to read. Sometimes it feels more descriptive of what's in the histories than the introduction led me to think, but I don't particular mind this - as well as being historiography, it's a very handy prism with which to view specific case studies in history as well.

just finished A Visit From the Goon Squad (loved) and started on Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave. before that Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (didn't like it much)

**

that was an accident.

**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**
i found the scene where aomame meets The Leader in the hotel room to be supremely crepey. when he said "You could stick a needle in me and I wouldn't even feel it", i got freaked out and my heart started beating faster. probably one of the more visceral reactions i've had to literature
**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**

since there's no rolling new yorker magazine thread i'll post here that i just read Cesar Aira's fiction in last weeks issue and really liked it. if anyone who's familiar with him could recommend some of his stuff i'd appreciate it.

My Life as a Nun is super

**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**
i found the scene where aomame meets The Leader in the hotel room to be supremely crepey. when he said "You could stick a needle in me and I wouldn't even feel it", i got freaked out and my heart started beating faster. probably one of the more visceral reactions i've had to literature

i thought a lot of the stuff w/ the little people was suspensful and kinda scary, like when they appear out of the girl's mouth for the first time.
**1Q84 SPOILER ALERT**

Raoul Vaneigem "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" - fascinating Situationist call to action (or not).

reread PKD's androids/dream - excellently well written in comparison to that steaming pile of excrement that was the last murakami (& dick was pretty hacky) - it's all about mercer & isodore, couldn't give a monkey's about the robots, albeit that mercer's star turn is a ghost of Xmas past / obi wan cheesefest. also "martian time slip" which came over as a marital infidelity drama set in 1950's Australia.
currently halfway through stanley crawford's "log of the s.s the mrs unguentine" which is flipin marvelous.

enjoying ten thousand saints but it feels very familiar so far. waiting for the story to go somewhere new. seems very concerned with trying to evoke the east village through landmarks and music references, zzz

that was one of my big problems with The Fortress of Solitude :/

seems very concerned with trying to evoke the east village through landmarks and music references, zzz

tending to the graveyard of unloved books (those I'm not optimistic enough about concentrating on to justify moving out) at my folks' place, I dipped into KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS by Luc Sante, which came out a few years ago. enjoying his period New Yorkisms.

I'd like to read Ten Thousand Saints, I read Hate: a Romance when it came out maybe looking for that kinda thing.

maybe I'm wrong; maybe that's not what I hated about it, maybe I just hated the popcultural cataloguing though that was def a big part of my adolescence as well...?

Halfway through Saints and it's getting better. Going some unexpected places and keeps me turning the pages. It's a relief of sorts to kind of stop looking for some grand statement in the book, realizing it's not that kind of novel, and just enjoying the story.

brain went over christmas, read a couple of extended article type books.

in search of the perfect pub, a christmas gift. It was ok. Was dreading a jokey travelogue or nostalgic localism but it's more thoughtful than that. Too bitty, though, lacks focus.

Also and then there's this: how stories live and die in viral culture by Bill Wasik, which was fine-to-good, pleasantly anecdotal & smart first-hand amble through that stuff.

Sort of read The Compleat Angler. Fabulous prose, but skimmed when it got too fishy.

Headlong Hall. I think I've finally acknowledged to myself that I don't like Peacock.

i quite liked peacock, or at least i tried to make myself. i don't know. only read nightmare abbey.

finished the marriage plot. ending rather insipid.

been trying to make myself go back to bleak house, instead soothing a chest cold and sleep-deprivation fatigue by reading 'the complete masks of nyarlathotep: the classic call of cthulhu adventure, complete for the first time, with the lost australian chapter and four new episodes'

Fuck, now you mention it, it was nightmare abbey not headlong hall

I've had a longstanding notion that I should like him - he's spot-on for me in theory - but I always glaze over when reading him. (see also Firbank).

i was thinking about reading firbank. i found an anthology at work and put it aside. and then realised i'd put aside a near-identical anthology about fifteen months before. so i've been thinking about reading firbank for a while, i suppose.

imo they're such short books it's worth reading 1 or 2 to find out if he's your kind of fun.

firbank is p silly

Always struggled with Firbank too. Well, struggled through about half of about three or four novella-length works. People who like him admire the various refinements of his humour, a sort of fin-de-siecle plus, (or minus if that equates an ironic refinement), but I always feel as if I'm handling a recalcitrant hoover when I'm reading.

Daniel Deronda and some way into Either/Or over Christmas. It was that sort of Christmas, internally anyway, the festivities were perfectly convivial.

Daniel Deronda is a very strange book, isn't it? Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism. There are vast swaths of Victorian sentiment swaddling some her characters - there's so much work that goes on around some characters to indicate their goodness, and in general her sense of irony is too fine for this continual application of sentimental make-up to be at all convincing. If you attempt to clear off this sentimental mummy that surrounds some of the characters you find that there's hardly a single appealing character in the whole work. I've never read a novel where it's quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever - fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it's a pet theory I have that realist writers aren't interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are - Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all - it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.

And then on top of this you've got these vast tracts of hectoring Old Testament blood and thunder + Romantic Nationalism, which cure Daniel Deronda of being a sanctimonious prick at which point he buggers off into the desert sunset.

Thoroughly enjoyable, but rather nasty as well.

Enjoying Either/Or... again, well I think again. I had a copy that had Fear and Trembling as well, but I think that must have been edited highlights, because this full version is two volumes. Especially enjoying it after the rather top-down controlling of Eliot in DD. To feel the existential struggles of a Romantic individual as, by all sorts of fragmentary means, it tries to find some sort of meaning or understanding of itself in the world is exactly what I need. Maybe I shall contract a brain fever.

there was a point this term where everyone at my college was going around reading 'either/or'; that was kind of weird.

eliot is someone i feel like i would like to read more of; these things sound like the sort of things i would be glad to find of her.

i am back on beckett, for the evening

yeah D Deronda sounds great

c.j. lines' "cold mirrors" like the 666th Pan book of horror stories edited by herbert van thal except written ever so well in a slightly will selfy style ( tho less verbose ) only thing that lets it down is that in place of self's unpleasant witty denouements we get rather "garth merenghi" endings to the stories. genre bound but showing promise.
reading sherlock holmeses, now, holmes.