What are you reading?

[laika]

^it's extremely dark and sad, but i like his
In the country of last things, a sort of meditation on [existential] homelessness and the feeling of being untethered.

random, but i just remembered how much I loved The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt (auster's wife) and that my friend still has my copy....i hate loaning books.

[Fuuma]

I'm giving my brain a break by reading Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason

so far, so good... quite gripping

I nearly picked that up the other day, are you reading the french or english translation?

Instead a picked up the egyptologist but couldn't make it past 150 or so before throwing it away. I recently read the Jonathan Spence Mao biography and am now reading Baader-Meinhof: the inside story of the RAF by Stefan Aust.

[Fuuma]

^it's extremely dark and sad, but i like his
In the country of last things, a sort of meditation on [existential] homelessness and the feeling of being untethered.

random, but i just remembered how much I loved The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt (auster's wife) and that my friend still has my copy....i hate loaning books.

For some reason my mother prefers that book over most of Auster's own writing, never picked it up...

[red_rope]

[AKA*NYC]

does gravity's rainbow suck or is it me? reads like a tedious monty python skit. i just put it down for the umpteenth time and switched over to a newish translation of celine's fable for another time. the latter is much more to my taste.

[AKA*NYC]

fuck yeah!

[Mail-Moth]

Reading a french contemporary writer, Richard Morgiève. Humiliation, rape and sodomy with diverse tools. That's pretty hardcore. But curiously that's not silly. Only totally depressing.

So to help it pass, I'm rereading Adalbert Stifter's L'Homme sans postérité (and that is a great one), and give a serious try to Le Clézio's The Interrogation, which is not as boring as what he wrote in the following decades, but still sounds curiously unnecessary and empty.

[galia]

I nearly picked that up the other day, are you reading the french or english translation?

Instead a picked up the egyptologist but couldn't make it past 150 or so before throwing it away. I recently read the Jonathan Spence Mao biography and am now reading Baader-Meinhof: the inside story of the RAF by Stefan Aust.

I'm reading the french translation. it's not stellar, but not super annoying either. I'm already on my second, reading "Woman in Green" now. Even better then "Jar City", much darker.

Have you read "Hitler's children" by Jilian Becker? I thought it was one of the better books written on Baader-Meinhof, but I probably haven't read as many as you.

[viv1984viv]

The Blood Meridian

Not long ago I finished the blood meridian, simply an awesome book - mean ive spent so long literally sitting there re-reading certain passages in awe of the beauty and violence and nihilism and bitter sweet nature of life and man - just awesome. I only have the road and the crossing to compare it against but id say its his best by a country mile, but also stands out as an oddity amongst his oeuvre.

Read Shellys Frankenstein - OK, I think its one of those book that contains an important idea that will live forever but that idea is actually a very small part of the book and not at all its essence - like lolita, unlike 1984....

[laika]

does gravity's rainbow suck or is it me? reads like a tedious monty python skit. i just put it down for the umpteenth time and switched over to a newish translation of celine's fable for another time. the latter is much more to my taste.

it's def not just you.... to be honest, i've only ever gotten through crying of lot 49, but I assumed this was due to my own laziness.

[laika]

Nietzsche, second essay of Genealogy of Morals
such clarity, like coming home

[comedyzen]

Introduction to SEO for websites.

[reborn]

will start Flight by sherman alexie...have enjoyed his other works, hope this is as good.

[klangspiel]

Names of some good french writers of the 50's ? Julien Gracq, Jean Grenier, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Michaux, Samuel Beckett (I don't want to hear you, he was writing in french !)...

gracq, michaux, genet, cendrars, celine.
and that's really about it. yeah, otherwise the 40's/50's were kind of boring i guess. .

those are great names but i'm mildly surprised no one mentioned pierre klossowski. an exceptionally singular writer with a literary career that essentially took off in the 50s with the roberte trilogy (later compiled together as les lois de l'hospitalité). i often think of his work as the missing link between the surrealists and the nouveau roman - still dabbling with some of the subject matter and themes that fascinated surrealism (to wit, eroticism and the many vicissitudes of transgression) but executed with enough formalistic ambition and rigor that would appeal to the nouveau roman.
aside from "fictional novels", he was also responsible for penning more philosophically inclined works - probably most well-known chiefly through his readings on sade and nietzsche, but above all his nietzsche (specifically on the eternal return), that exerted an incredible influence on a generation of french philosophers from the 60s / 70s. of which the names, i'm sure, everyone is familiar with by now.

here are a few other writers from the period worth anyone's salt:

rene char - he started out much earlier in the 20s but the 50s / 60s were imo, his most interesting period. it was also the period in which he developed a very good friendship with a certain martin heidegger and the relationship was more symbiotic than some would let on.

philippe jaccottet - the intense exactitude, and equally / paradoxically oblique manner, in which he goes about relating the phenomenal world is quite unrivalled at least insofar as post-war literature is concerned. his first piece of work, l'effraie, though not completely definitive of his overall style, is a real gem in itself. dark "decaying" stuff with shadows of rilke and baudelaire looming in the background.

edmond jabes - the eternally exiled. i could read him all day.

bernat / bernard manciet - french but wrote in occitan. seemingly an old-school classicist on the surface but on closer inspection, the crevices of his writings reveal an affliction of imageries and pathos closer to a char or a celan.

yves bonnefoy, andre du bouchet and jacques dupin - all great in their own right, the latter two being personal favourites. they later went on to establish the journal, l'ephemere, in the late 60s.

henri chopin - pretty much singlehandedly founded poésie sonore or sound poetry, or at least assumed the role of its most staunch proponent. perhaps a stretch to consider him a writer (even by the most avant garde literary conventions of the day) but not anymore than he is merely an artist working with an audio-visual medium. if anything he did produce texturally based works (and the act of writing constitutively central to his work) and to judge or treat them any other way, say, as pieces of visual art, strikes me as critically counter-productive and frankly boring.

also: the other authors associated with the nouveau roman (aside from robbe-grillet and butor) - claude ollier, claude simon, nathalie sarraute, julio cortazar (ok he's argentinian and wrote in spanish but he did produce his best works during his time in france :)), robert pinget (a personal favourite - he's a swiss writer on the margins of the movement. exemplary in his severity of prose experimentation), and of course, marguerite duras (don't really care much for her writings actually :) but as a filmmaker - absolutely love her films, especially something like indian song or destroy, she said (détruire dit-elle) - she has a cinematic language and vocabulary unlike anything out there. i'd say perhaps somewhere between the nouvelle vague and the zanzibarists (early philippe garrel & co.) but maybe even better. extremely original stuff).

reading pinget now:

[AKA*NYC]

pierre klossowski was also an amazing artist although he never achieved the stature of his little brother.

an antecedent in a similar vein is pierre louys.

among the living there's pierre guyotat.

klangspiel your musical and literary erudition is always top notch.