What are you reading?

[plasmoplas]

musicophilia: tales of music and the brain

I just finished reading Oliver Sacks' book Musicophelia, which I highly recommend as a very thoughtful, readable, and entertaining (layman) discussion about music-related brain/body disorders. More than a series of anectodes, Sacks delves into the neurological basis of music-related symptoms from his many years as a physician and neurologist.

For those who wish to save $10 and three hours, there are a couple videos up here:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=musicophilia

[Enaml]

I did a research project on music and the brain for a behavioral neuroscience course I took last semester and we used Musicophelia a bit for it. Just about everything I've read by Sacks is fascinating.

[Faust]

Has anyone read Super Sad True Love Story yet?

[michael_kard]

I've been reading quite a few stuff on rawhide tanning processes for an assignment (I compared my AD leather with an A-2 jacket from WWII)...

Other recent book purchases include the Stephen Sprouse book, and some Heiner Muller (Best author)

[proxious]

"confederacy of duncess" one of the best books

[galia]

Heiner Muller

my favourite is Medeamaterial

[Fuuma]

Thank you Sigmund. Not at all, I was way more insecure when I pretended to like it because I felt I had to, because if I didn't it meant I wasn't smart enought to "get it". Now I feel secure in knowing that I get it and still find the guy annoying.

I understand that he is a great writer and everything, and I admire the craft (which is about the only thing I enjoy in his books tbh)... I just really don't like him

You need to hear what A's father says about Nabokov (whom he translated in french). The later insisted he spoke perfect french and would make up words at some points and argue with the former that they should be used. If you know A's father I'm sure you can see how that went (they stopped speaking to each other and would write letters signed by their wives/gfs).

[galia]

I am imagining that right now and laughing

I'm sure he was good fun, in an extremely annoying way

[Acéphale]

« From the earliest days of man there has endured the conviction that there is an order of existence which is entirely strange to him. It does indeed seem that the strict order of the visible world is only a semblance, one providing certain gross materials which become the basis for subtle improvisations of invisible powers. Hence, it may appear to some that a leafless tree is not a tree but a signpost to another realm; that an old house is not a house but a thing possessing a will of its own; that the dead may throw off that heavy blanket of earth to walk in their sleep, and in ours. And these are merely a few of the infinite variations on the themes of the natural order as it is usually conceived.

But is there really a strange world? Of course. Are there, then, two worlds? Not at all. There is only our own world and it alone is alien to us, intrinsically so by virtue of its lack of mysteries. If only it actually were deranged by invisible powers, if only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us, and less like an empty room filled with the echoes of this dreadful improvising. To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited to our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange! »

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Chin P'ing Mei
Volume One: The Gathering(1993)

Translated by David Tod Roy

Hopefully when I get to volume three, he would atleast
have finished translating volume four, but I doubt it ...

[Acéphale]

« She could not speak, and yet she was speaking. Her tongue vibrated in such a way that she seemed to express the meanings of words without the words themselves. Then, suddenly, she let herself be carried away by a rush of words which she pronounced almost beneath her breath, with varied inflections, as if she wanted only to amuse herself with sounds and bursts of syllables. She gave the impression that, speaking a language whose infantile character prevented it from being taken for a language, she was making the meaningless words seem like incomprehensible ones. She said nothing, but to say nothing was for her an all too meaningful mode of expression, beneath which she succeeded in saying still less. She withdrew indefinitely from her babbling to enter into yet another, less serious babbling, which she nevertheless rejected as too serious, preparing herself by an endless retreat beyond all seriousness for repose in absolute puerility, until her vocabulary, through its nullity, took on the appearance of a sleep which was the very voice of seriousness. Then, as if in the depths she had suddenly felt herself under the surveillance of an implacable consciousness, she leaped back, cried out, opened terribly clairvoyant eyes and, halting her tale an instant: "No," she said, "it's not that. What you really are..." »

[een]

^Beautiful. Along with The Step Not Beyond, my favorite of Blanchot's fiction.

[deius]

Rene Char - where to begin? I have only seen his name referenced.

"confederacy of duncess" one of the best books

dunces* and yes, it really is brilliant. The supporting characters are hilarious.

Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Part way through, it is worth picking up, and its reviews in the English press are not exaggerated. At first you are frustrated by the long, rambling, philosophical digressions that interrupt the narrative, but soon you realise that the narrative is less significant than the ideas themselves, and the voice works its way into your mind until the flow becomes natural.

[MJRH]

corsair sanglot recommended Justine a few months back, and I just finished the Alexandria Quartet. Fine stuff, if you don't mind density!

Here is an excerpt from Monsieur, the first book of Durrell's Avignon Quintet, which I just began. Fitting, given the thread.

Language is all very fine and we cannot do without it but it is at the same time the worst invention of man, corrupting silence, tearing petals off the whole mind.

[Fade to Black]

gave up on Lolita after 60 or so pages. I liked Pale Fire, but feel I can only stomach one of Nabokov's, and that's it for me.

2/3ds through Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer after starting it yesterday. Good stuff, some epic flights of poetic pontification and i like how he mixes the messy stuff into it seamlessly. The writing feels very real, very natural - he's a writer.