It's April. What are you reading?

[QUOTE=Mr. Brown]I saw that in the bookstore in Paris that Hemingway used to frequent and where he knocked a bookshelf down when he read a bad review of one of his books.[/QUOTE]
yeah, he was a tad touchy. he let a collage student read an unpublished manuscript on some flight. the kid praised it (of course) and Hemingway came off the plane with a fat ego and chest pushed forward. then the critics got hold of it and ripped it apart, which apparently sent him into rages at public restaurants (probably after a couple) yelling, "the kid said it's good, that's all that needs to be said!"

[QUOTE=Dr.Jekyll&Mr.Hyde]yeah, he was a tad touchy. he let a collage student read an unpublished manuscript on some flight. the kid praised it (of course) and Hemingway came off the plane with a fat ego and chest pushed forward. then the critics got hold of it and ripped it apart, which apparently sent him into rages at public restaurants (probably after a couple) yelling, "the kid said it's good, that's all that needs to be said!"[/QUOTE]
As if the kid's going to say, 'This sucks Ernie, really'
Who'd mess with Hemingway? Look at his facial hair! He was probably born with it, you know.

[QUOTE=Dr.Jekyll&Mr.Hyde]yeah, he was a tad touchy. he let a collage student read an unpublished manuscript on some flight. the kid praised it (of course) and Hemingway came off the plane with a fat ego and chest pushed forward. then the critics got hold of it and ripped it apart, which apparently sent him into rages at public restaurants (probably after a couple) yelling, "the kid said it's good, that's all that needs to be said!"[/QUOTE]

He sounds like a cool guy. Love to have a drink with that muddafukka.

Here's another anecdote :
One night in 1938, Dashiell Hammett and Hemingway are sitting in the Stork Club, drunk as drunk can be, with other cosmopolitan and liberal people. Hemingway's ranting about some spanish intellectuals that need to escape Franco or the french concentration camps. He's starting to piss Hammett off, who tells him. Hemingway puts a spoon on his arm, and, bending his arm bends the spoon, and he dares Hammett to do the same. Hammett answers that he thinks the intellectuals are not the only people in the world, and asks why he doesn't go, as usual, mess with Scott Fitzgerald, who is the best american writer. Now Hemingway's really upset, once again he dares Hammet to bend the spoon. "I don't think I could, Hammett says. And when I did things like that, it was for the Pinkerton agency's money. Why don't you go to the garden play the hoop ?"

Now reading [U]True History of the Kelly Gang[/U] by Peter Carey

Fiction: [u]A Clockwork Orange[/u], Anthony Burgess
Nonfic: [u]Playing Sick? Untangling the Web of Muchausen Syndrome, Munchausen by Proxy, Malingering, and Factitious Disorder[/u], Marc D. Feldman, M.D.

finished Kiss me, Judas a few hours ago and House of Sand and Fog a few days ago. Will probably start either Master and Commander or White Noise (Delillo) tomorrow.

finally finished motherless brooklyn. it was mostly good. the last 50 pages or so dragged like fuck.

next up is nicholson baker's checkpoint. baker is an extremely gifted writer, and it's a tragedy he's not mentioned around here more often.

[QUOTE=Balthazar]
next up is nicholson baker's checkpoint. baker is an extremely gifted writer, and it's a tragedy he's not mentioned around here more often.[/QUOTE]

More details, por favor.

[QUOTE=Undertow]More details, por favor.[/QUOTE]

two men discuss the assassination of george w. bush. you may have heard of it from the amount of controversy it has generated. baker has a way with words unlike many around. the fermata is easily one of the best books i've read over the past year.

[QUOTE=Balthazar]two men discuss the assassination of george w. bush. you may have heard of it from the amount of controversy it has generated. baker has a way with words unlike many around. the fermata is easily one of the best books i've read over the past year.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that rings a bell. Cool. I'd like to check it out sometime.

Read [I]Burning bright [/I] by Steinbeck. not for me, the plot was drawn out with a ruler. I did find [I]Faraway Places [/I] by Spanbauer under a pile of cloths, so I'm glad I can finally read it--,.,.,thanks k...

I'm reading [u]It[/u], by Stephen King. Next up is [u]Plot Against America[/u] by Philip Roth.

Just started Adventures of Augie March yesterday.

Took two days and read Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Today I think I am going to start Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami.

Finished Richard Price's THE BREAKS and I fell in love with it. I finished the last ten pages in a small coffee bar, I had to have a cofee and a smoke as I finished it, and even the looney, yet sexy lady at the end of the bar couldn't take my attention away from it.

Next up, maybe DEATH WISH the original novel. Or maybe Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY.

"In the Pond" by Ha Jin

and

"Sock" by Penn Jillette

Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY was a moodsetting book for me, a different read that doesn't so much give you an immediate payoff, but a payoff nonetheless. I say read it. I like him, but that's just me.

I just finished reading "The Dead" by James Joyce, and totally loved it. I says something about the story when you can read just the first four pages, and then be the most active participant in the class discussion about it. Anyone got any words on THE DEAD? Liked it? Or not?

BTW - has anyone read Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York? Loved the movie, and wondering if maybe the book will allow me a more detailed glimpse of what those days were like.

Electroboy-a memoir of mania, by Andy Behrman. He got busted for forging Kostabi's and is now P.R. director at the Kaballa Center in L.A.

I read Five Mile House by Karen Novak. And now I'm almost done with A Prayer for the Dying - I can't remember the author

Oops, started reading that Sam Peckinpah biography from faber and faber.

[I]Fast Red Road [/I] by Stephen Graham Jones. Jones' style in this book is very much akin to Pynchon's in [I]The Crying of Lot 49[/I], except more sonically tasty.

"It's reading right, man!"

"well maybe you aren't readin [I]it[/I] right!"

just started jonathan safran foer's much ballyhooed second novel extremely loud and incredibly close. it's rather excellent so far.

I just finished a book called "Pillars of Creation" and I'm slightly pissed with it. It was a fun read until the end. In the last few pages, the main character gives some big annoying speech where suddenly everything makes profound sense after 'the truth' is revealed. The other main character kills himself by eating some flowers. The whole thing went by in a blink, after over 500 pages of lead-up.

Onto "Dark Matter" by Phillip Kerr. I wanted to start reading this earlier but I just haven't for some reason.

[QUOTE=Camo]
I just finished reading "The Dead" by James Joyce, and totally loved it. I says something about the story when you can read just the first four pages, and then be the most active participant in the class discussion about it. Anyone got any words on THE DEAD? Liked it? Or not?[/QUOTE]

did you read all of dubliners or just the dead? I skimmed through it for a screenwriting class a coupla weeks ago. Ive read it before, but it was 4 yrs ago or so.
Its a pretty good story. Lots of subtexts and things like that that take a bit of effort to really get. Personally, i like Portrait of the Artist best of his stuff, though ive yet to read finnegan's wake cuz it scares me.

For Amer. Lit we started reading [u]Beloved[/u] by Toni Morrison and it's so weird of writing that I like this book and hate this book.

I just finished John Gardner's book The Art of Fiction. And today I started - Five Mile House by Karen Novak. So far, it's really good.

I just started Hempel's "Reasons to Live"

I've been reading 'The Pugilist At Reast,' 'Beautiful Girls,' 'Animal Kingdom' and some backed up lit-mags for short fiction.

Peter Temple's 'Identity Theory,' Stephen Graham Jones' 'All The Beautiful Sinners' and Umberto Eco's 'The Island of the Day Before' on the novel front. Not sure I'll stick wtih Eco, I get the feeling a lot may be lost in translation...

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]Have any of you read any George Orwell????[/QUOTE]

'1984,' 'Animal Farm,' 'Road to Wigan Pier,' 'Down and Out in Paris and London,' 'Coming Up For Air,' and parts of 'Burmese Days.' Why do you ask?

[QUOTE=Jeebus]For Amer. Lit we started reading [u]Beloved[/u] by Toni Morrison and it's so weird of writing that I like this book and hate this book.[/QUOTE]

'Beloved' is a hard one to start off on Morrison with. I love it, but I'd read 'The Bluest Eye' as a primer. 'Sula' is a little more conventional and not as rambling.

'Paradise' and 'Beloved' both get into such dark and supernatural realms that I think I'd have been turned off to a great writer if I'd started there.

[QUOTE=Jeebus][I]Fast Red Road [/I] by Stephen Graham Jones. Jones' style in this book is very much akin to Pynchon's in [I]The Crying of Lot 49[/I], except more sonically tasty.[/QUOTE]

I'm reading the 'Glory Dog' version that Jones submitted as his dissertation, and it reminded me more of 'V.,' but I definitely got a Pynchon feeling from what I've read so far.

It's a sharp contrast from 'All The Beautiul Sinners,' which is a serial killer/FBI profiling thriller. But whether writing turgid literary fiction or genre stuff or what, the fucker can write.

[QUOTE=Chixulub]'Beloved' is a hard one to start off on Morrison with. I love it, but I'd read 'The Bluest Eye' as a primer. 'Sula' is a little more conventional and not as rambling.

'Paradise' and 'Beloved' both get into such dark and supernatural realms that I think I'd have been turned off to a great writer if I'd started there.[/QUOTE]
I disagree, [I]beloved [/I] was my first morrison and i was obsessed. I read [I]Love [/I] early in the year and loved that to. The thing with Morrison is you either love or hate her style. I'm with the former. But with her books I never really construct a solid destination, I just have random scenes floating in my head. i consider her style modern day poetic prose.

Reading:
[I]
girlfriend in a coma[/I]
[I]
The Loop[/I] (which a friend passed on to me because I love wolves. I must say that the first four chapters are so generic and clique that it's turning me off).

oh yeah, also

[I]White noise--Dellio[/I]

Betrand Russel's "Why I Am Not a Christian"
Small Stakes Holdem by a few old dirty bastards who are much better at poker than me. They probably also have a better memory because I can't remember any of their names.

It isn't April.

No, really.

You are an ass.

No, really.

[QUOTE=Parkaboy]It isn't April.

No, really.[/QUOTE]

He has one of those pin up calenders of male models so it is always April for him.

It isn't a pin up calander, it is one of the ones that you prop up on your desk.

STOP TELLING MY SECRETS!

[QUOTE=UbikRex]He has one of those pin up calenders of male models so it is always April for him.[/QUOTE]
Temporally displaced homoeroticism, sexy.

[QUOTE=Dr.Jekyll&Mr.Hyde]I disagree, [I]beloved [/I] was my first morrison and i was obsessed. I read [I]Love [/I] early in the year and loved that to. The thing with Morrison is you either love or hate her style. I'm with the former. But with her books I never really construct a solid destination, I just have random scenes floating in my head. i consider her style modern day poetic prose.
[/QUOTE]

I think of her as being a similar sort of writer to DeLillo and Pynchon. I just suggest 'The Bluest Eye' as the start for her, basically for the same reason I recommend 'The Crying of Lot 49' as a first book for newcomers to Pynchon. It's accessible, and more plot driven than a lot of her books.

She also reminds me of Faulkner at times, which seems an unlikely comparison on the face of it. But her characters and her sense of setting seems Faulknerish at times, and I don't mean that as a negative, like she's being derivative. More that she's tapping into the same insight into the souls of her characters.

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]Curiosity. Testing a thoery of mine. What'd you think?[/QUOTE]

I couldn't stick with 'Burmese Days,' I'd class it from what I got through (maybe 50 pages) as on a par with 'Aspidistra.'

'1984,' 'Animal Farm,' those are the ones everyone reads, is made to read, and for good reason. Orwell has a keen eye for the corrupting nature of power and the impossibility of systems that require individuals to act against their own interests. The thing that makes so much of his other work of interest is this didn't dissuade him from being a communist.

'Road to Wigan Pier,' 'Down and Out in Paris and London,' and 'Ode to Catalonia' all document bad conditions for specific groups (coal miners in the North, bums, particularly tramps in Depression era U.K., and republican troops in the Spanish Civil War), and are all good works of creative nonfiction. Orwell has a keen eye for who stands to gain or lose by a given scenario. He also goes to source material where he can, and tries to gather field data, and apply critical thinking, which is something that most political writing left and right lacks.

'Wigan Pier,' to me, shows the inevitable growing pains of industrialization. The exact same things are happening in places like India and China now, and as primitive as the conditions are, it's 70 years ago. And no one in England or America, even the homeless, have to put up with the shit a miner had to take in 1930s England.

'Down and Out' makes more sense of the class system than most explanations I've come across. Also, if you compare it to the modern welfare state and the bottom eschelon of the two economies, you find similarites. I've met homeless guys who are very much like Orwell's 'Bozo.' Conscientious malingerers, to use Utah Phillips' expression. It's a good reminder, too, to see that whatever abuses you can find in a state run charity system, you'll find them in a private charity too in the right circumstances. In the case of Depression era London, you have laws on the books that make it virutally impossible to get out of the sub-pauper tramp circuit, and laws that more or less criminalize being a bum. In modern America, the ACLU has won the right of people who cannot fend for themselves due to mental illness, to refuse medication and hospitalization on the basis that they pose not threat to themselves and those around them.

This is a tricky thing, because you don't want to allow a system that locks up an Ignatius Reilley who is essentially harmless but genuinely cracked. A guy like 'Bozo' who wants to be left to do his thing should be. But of the homeless guys I've met, the highly intelligent and well adjusted bum is by far the exception. Maybe a guy isn't a threat to himself in the sense of jumping off a bridge or slitting his wrists, but if he freezes to death because his paranoid delusions have included the City Union Mission flop house in the conspiracy against him, it's hard to argue that he 'died free.'

Another thing that Orwell documents is how the poor get scammed. In the Elmore Leonard type setup, the mark is always a guy with money, preferably ill-got. But as Rent-A-Center shows, if you can take the little that a lot of poor folks ahve, you can still walk away with a good pile of loot. The sale of meal tickets to ministers by dishonest restaurant owners, the chiseling of the casual ward owners, the slumlords of the Industrial North, even the pawn brokers and hoteliers of Paris all manage to chisel a good deal two pence at a shot.

'Coming Up For Air,' is more on a par with 'Aspidistra' as well, though I found it a more compelling read. Perhaps in part because the POV is close to my age and status, and the desire to reclaim youth can be surprisingly strong. It's a 'you can't go home again' story, but also deals nicely with themes of replacing good things in life with cheap, plentiful immitations.

One of Orwell's blind spots, for that matter, and this comes up in many if not all of these books, is he doesn't anticipate the prosperity of capitalism any more than he anticipates the utter poverty of socialism. Consequently, he assumes the world is headed towards a mass of identical, manufactured material existences. He sees the utopia as inevitable but not without a pang for the authenticity of the hand-made and the unique. For instance, there's a cottage industry of luthiers who make fine, hand-made guitars, one out, for people who may have plenty of Best Buy in their lives, but would like to have a really nice guitar, and get a lot of pleasure from it. Or look at the chopper scene. Guys who may have the same houses, TVs, sofas, etc., can build their bikes to be individual artistic expressions (though I do notice a certain uniformity to contemporary choppers). I don't think the possibility of this crossed Orwell's mind. I think he saw the Great Depression as a permanent shift in realities, and the only recovery as the redistribution of wealth rather than the generation of wealth.

As something of a right-anarchist, he's an interesting read overall because he was faithful to the left (if not to thugs and traiters like Stalin). And the goal of general prosperity and raising the base standard of living is the same, it's just that the command economy creates the opposite of its stated goal.

paul auster - timbuktu

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]I actually found Aspidistra and Coming up for Air much more fascinating stories than you seem to have, although I conceede that Orwell's bitter intensity and thought provoking ideas, as well as, perhaps, his unrivelled clarity in the exposition of corrupt institutions, are all sadly diminished in Burmese Days.
I also feel obliged to point out that Orwell was a Democratic Socialist rather than a Communist, a political belief which, he believed, inevitably leads to Fascism as illustrated by the Spanish Civil War. [/QUOTE]

I'm not particularly interested in splitting the hairs of Social Democrats, International Communists, National Socialists, etc. Orwell was quite right in recognizing the lineage of fascism from Marxism. It's something most of the left prefers to ignore or misrepresent, but Hitler and Stalin were not opposites. Rivals, sure, but Mussolini, Franco and Hitler all took their cue from Lenin, who took a country utterly outside Marx's formula (Russia had not yet industrialized in any meaningful way when the Russian Revolution put Lenin in charge of the first Command-and-Control economy) as his base. Fascism is just Socialism claiming to be nationalistic, though since it's almost always expansionistic as well, there's little difference in practice. And Stalin had at least as many Jews, Romanys and other minorities persecuted and killed as Hitler, so event he genocide argument falls flat if you examine the origins and practices.

The problem with some of Orwell's novels are more in the area of pacing, to me. 'Aspidistra' in particular, dwells so much on the microcosmic economics of Comstock's cigarette fund that the story gets lost.

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]I'm not sure that he anticipated the 'utter poverty' of socialism for the rather simple reason that he understood, far better than most middle class socialists, that the Wellian and More utopia would never, in fact, become reality as it was not something that the 'common' man desired. [/QUOTE]

Which brings up an excellent point about where the Left goes wrong. The thing that really makes the American revolution stand apart from most violent revolutions, imperfect as it was, is that it is pretty much the only revolution that didn't try to remake man in the image of the Revolutionary. The French Revolution was very similar to the Russian Revolution that way, and Fredrick Bastiat nails it in 'The Law.' Probably the oldest anti-Socialist text I know of (Adam Smith's mercantilism doesn't count, as he neither anticipated Marxism nor really proposed capitalism in the Mises/Hayeck tradition).

One of the contradictions of Orwell is he seemed on many levels to understand that asking people to act against their own interests wouldn't work, yet he seemed to think people could be changed by education to be, well, George Orwells. It's a common thread among socialists I've known, pacifists too. They assume their own generosity or willingness to sacrifice to avoid conflict is something that can be made true of all people. Pol Pot gives an excellent case study in how brutally you can try to remake a population int he image of the Revolutionary without succeeding. 1/7 of the population killed and the Khmer Rouge is still a failure.

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]Most people, then and now, hold the belief that any kind of socialist revolution would result in an aluminium future of shiny surfaces and robotics, where we have abortion clinics on every corner and every institution is run by the middle aged highbrow who smokes a pipe and attacks the rich whilst he himself recieves thousands upon thousands of dollars a year from his 'investments'. [/QUOTE]

This is historically been the case. Look at the infanticide and coerced abortions in China, while the Party elite get rich off trade deals with the West. If you adopt a baby out of China, one of the things you have to do is cough up a $3,000 'orphanage fee.' I only know of one agency that lets you wire this fee, it's almost always paid in cash, and they strictly want crisp $100 bills. No way is the orphanage director not skimming that.

The Alphas always manage to find the rivers of wealth and power, the question really becomes to what extent do you want them to have to do it on the basis of providing a service? America's corporations are far from perfectly merit-based, but much more so than, say, the governments of India or Sweden. Undeserving people gain power in relatively free and relatively oppressive systems, the question is to what extent there is a meritocratic basis for handing out the goods. Also, relatively free systems generate more wealth because a lower percentage of the economy is governmental. Government agencies, even when providing essential services, are pretty much entirely a net negative in economic terms. They produce no wealth, only consume and/or redistribute it. So the larger the chunk of your population that is spending their energies generating wealth, the more general prosperity you'll have.

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]After all if we did revolt these intellectuals would almost certainly become our 'leaders'. I think you've confused what he wanted to happen and what would happen.[/QUOTE]

Intellectuals of Orwell's bent certainly assumed they'd be the leaders if the Revolution came to pass, but again, see Cambodia. It's perfectly possible to have a Communist regime that specifically targets anyone with any education for extermination. And I don't confuse what he wanted to happen. He made the mistake I made in my own leftist days of assuming the problem with Socialism was 'who' is in charge, not that they are at all. He was very critical of Stalin, but failed to see that Stalin was just one flavor of what every Socialist dictator does in one way or another. It is always a system of repression, often with engineered famines and enforced poverty. Western Europe, Canada and the U.S. like to take the machine guns out of frame as much as possible, taxation is theft no matter how politely they mug you. And price controls are artificial distortions that will always come back to bite you in the ass, no matter how gently you think you're applying them.

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]Any fool in 1930's England could see how their nation was mimicking the downward spiral into Capitalism through which the U.S had so drastically and recentlly plunged.[/QUOTE]

I'm sorry, but the downward spiral into Capitalism? The downward spiral was into the Great Depression which was the direct result of the introduction of central banking and fiat currency coupled with government intervention into the market correction of a market bubble. It was inflamed by tax hikes, particularly tariff wars. Galbraith and his crowd held sway in England as well as America, but it was not a spiral into Capitalism, it was a turning away from it. Given the Depression, I'd probably come to the same conclusions as Orwell did at the time, but it doesn't mean he was right.

[QUOTE=enemyxofxaverage]It couldn't not happen except by way of a proletarian revolution and, as demonstrated by the Russian Revolution, the government which you use as your replacement is often much worse than the original. [/QUOTE]

Aside from the fact that there was no proletariate in Russia circa 1917, Lenin was the kind of guy who was going to take over or get killed trying. It was all about power for him, Communism was just a convenient costume for making himself, basically, the new Monarch.

You seem like one of the people who would say Communism looks good on paper. I have a question for people who say that: what paper are you looking at? The one that shows the death tolls of Stalin's gulags? Hitler's concentration camps? Pol Pot's emptying of Phnom Phen and the 'killing fields?' Or maybe you mean the papers showing the devastation wrought by China's Cultural Revolution. Or the papers about China's treatment of Tibet.

Or do you mean the papers that document the worker's paradises in North Korea, Vietnam, etc.?

Even the moderate versions, look at the fucking unemployment rates in places like Germany, France, the Scandanavian countries. Look at the medical systems of Canada and the U.K. that are so great people willingly travel to the U.S. to pay whatever it takes to avoid the 'free' medicine their socialist regimes offer. For that matter, look at Mexico, where various socialist schemes have led people by the millions to risk their lives to be immigrate to a country that treats them as an infection. Or Cuba, where Castro has still failed to get cancer from those damned cigars and they've resorted to ox carts after wearing out the cars that were there when the revolution 'liberated' their people.

Which is the longhand way to say, finding an acceptable socialist regime is like trying to find a safe way to die. the 'Western' flavor of socialism is like cigarette smoking or heavy boozing. The Russian, South American, African and Asian permutations are more like parachuteless skydiving or bungee jumping with extra long bungees.