What are you reading?

[Faust]

I will definitely read The Corrections this year. It is supposed to be one of the best American novels.

P.S. What I meant was that he was a close friend of Wallace, and there is a lot of reflection on his life and death there (coupled with the history of the novel, Robinson Crusoe, the ills of contemporary life and a failed attempt at an adventure on a deserted island).

[Clopek]

I haven't yet read Corrections, but Freedom was interesting (if a little heavy-handed), and really enjoyable.

[Acéphale]

█ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, A Memory of Beautiful Days

«
It was a slumber and continually a new waking, merging into new dreams, a possessing and losing. I beheld my childhood afar, like a deep mountain lake, and walked into it as into a house. It was a self-possessing and a self-not-possessing, a having-all and having-nought. Morning air of childhood mingling with premonition of being dead, the globe of the world floated past in a blue fixed light, while a dead man sank deeper and deeper into the dark, and then it was a fruit that rolled towards me, but my hand was too cold and rigid to seize it: now I myself as a child leapt from under the bed on which I had lain with cold rigid hands, and tried to snatch it. From each dream vision sprang forth harmonies as from an Aeolian harp, a reflection of flames fell on the white quilt, and the early sea wind rose and moved the white paper on the little table. Gone was the slumber, gaily the naked feet touched the stone floor, and from the water pitcher leapt forth water of its own will like a living nymph. The night had poured its power into everything, everything looked more knowing, nowhere was there any dream but everywhere Love and the Present. The white pages gleamed in full morning light, they were asking to be covered with words, they wanted my secret in order to give me back a thousand secrets in return. Close to them lay the beautiful big orange that I had put there the evening before; I peeled it and hastily ate it. It seemed as though a ship were weighing its anchors and I had to leave in a hurry for a foreign world. A magic formula pressed and quivered in me, but I could not remember the first word. I possessed nothing but the transparent colorful shadows of my dreams and half-dreams. When, filled with impatience, I tried to pull them towards me, they retreated, and it seemed as though the walls and the peculiarly shaped old-fashioned furniture of the inn’s room had absorbed them. The whole room still looked knowing, but mocking and void. Yet the moment the shadows reappeared there, and while my heart pressed against them and I let my wish --which was directed towards fidelity and infidelity, towards departure and remaining, towards here and there-- play against them like a magic wand, I felt how I could draw forth from the naked floor real characters, and how they shone and cast physical shadows, how my wish moved them against one another, how they were actually there for my sake and still took notice only of one another, how my wish had formed for them youth and age and all masks and fulfilled itself in them, and how they were yet detached from me and lusted one for the other and each for itself. I could move away from them, could let a curtain fall in front of their existence and raise it again. Yet all the time, as the slanting rays of the sun beyond a voluptuous thundercloud fall on a livid-green garden landscape, I saw how the splendor of the air, of the water and the fire, streamed into them as it were from above in slanting, spectral rays, so that they were, for my mysteriously favored eye, simultaneously human beings and sparkling incarnations of the elements.
»

[nekroterrorist]

Currently reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Everyone claims he's an arrogant twat, but he definitely does not come off like that in his written work.

[widmerpool]

Currently reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Everyone claims he's an arrogant twat, but he definitely does not come off like that in his written work.

His books are OK, his newspaper articles can be really arrogant.

Anyone have any recommendations for books on Turkish or Arab classical music?

[galia]

Lately, mainly Antoine Volodine and his heteronyms. I am getting more and more obsessed with the man's universe - something between chamanic narratives and espionnage novels gone wrong beyond mesure. Everything here is paperthin and frail - identities, memories, the body, mankind itself. And nothing decisive can ever be accomplished, since every attempt to do anything - executing a traitor, guiding a dead soul in the afterlife, killing the last capitalist - seems bound to fail ridiculously. The only thing left to be done in this neverending aftermath is to tell things, again and again - until the light finally dims.

To many titles to recommend, but only one english translation - Minor angels.

YESYESYESYESYESYESYES

I love this guy. My favourite is Dondog I think. It's amazing

[Mail-Moth]

Yes, the more I read him and the more I think that this guy is one of the most important writers of the past decades. Did you give a try to his last one, Ecrivains ? It's an amazing work - Volodine's obsessions seen through the lens of the experience of writing. And what a voice he has. It is so rare to read someone whose style does not sound as an annoying pose but as something that has emerged from a much deeper place.

And you have to read the heteronyms too - Lutz Bassmann's Haikus de prison - an incredible narrative where the story is told only using haikus. And Eli Kronauer's rewriting of russian epic ballads in a postapocalyptic landscape. And so much more.

Bardo or not Bardo was great also. I still have to read Dondog though.

[happyfresh]

just read Susan Sontag's On Photography. The writing when read now feels either obvious or obsolete, and there is something annoyingly authoritative about the tone I feel. It's the only Sontag I've ever read; definitely hasn't aged well.

it's pretty terrible.

[Clopek]

cross post from that other forum i post on, but this is really worth reading. really funny, insightful as always.

http://www.harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf

[Fade to Black]

yeah that one is good, damn good.

from the collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" that also has that essay is the single best essay on sport I've ever read (the one about tennis)

[shah]

[Classique]

Recommendation

MARIO BENEDETTI - LA TREGUA


Herman Dehesa

A wise journalist; And relatively unknown modern intellectual (Different from my humble platitudes - He was profoundly wise)

Within, the final days of his life alleged...

"Benedetti emerged from Uruguay; A place of limited literary figures. But, the figures that were created, were of the elite level; Horacio Quiroga, Juan Carlos Onetti [Who, I consider the finest novelists of 20th Century; Hispanic-American, literature] And...

Mario Benedetti [Born, 1920]

Pertained, to a bourgeois urban life. But, Uruguay has a peculiar middle class, better; Illustrated, educated... Than - USA | Mexico, for example.

[There are no: Gaucho, comical adaptations off Prince Hamlet's "To be or not to be," soliloquy]

That is a reflection within their characters. An understated: Elegance and humility from common folk. Encompassed, from a universe of culture and fine education.

That typical Mexican and American [USA] culture, may hope to attain, within 15 reincarnations... Why? We have very bad; Basic, ethical education.

Any way, Benedetti was a writer of an ample registry. So polyphasic, there is practically no genre he did not cultivate with constant success: Poet, novelist, journalist, lyricist...

But, his milieu was poetry; He retained tremendous fidelity to that philosophy, throughout his prolonged and prosperous career.

He was an earnest and lighthearted man; An exotic trait within great intellectual minds. For counterpoint, the trend is unfortunately; Intelligent figures are unpre-sentable beings: Ungovernable, betrayers, cheaters...

- Always willing / ready to dismiss [so-and-so]

- Always prepared, to feed their ego with: Truths, Half | Truths & Lies.

Benedetti has died; But, for me, will always live through 'La Tregua.' Specifically, through the character 'Avellaneda,' one of world literatures' truly great women.

Get acquainted with Benedetti; He is a worthwhile friend. :) "

*All, a personalized, contextual translation from Spanish*

[jogu]

my favorite books are closed ones

[semper]

I just finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.

Not as good as Cloud Atlas, one of the best books I've read in years if not the best, but still very interesting. Like Cloud Atlas, I saw it as a study of relative power, and a story about civilisation which is defined by setting boundaries to the exploitation that is the result of the unequal distribution of power.
The strength of his narrative lies in the fact that he tells fairly traditional stories about individuals, but the setting broadens the perspective. In Cloud Atlas, it's the seemingly unrelated long sequence of short stories, and here it's the confusion that arises from the juxtaposition of Dutch merchants and Japanese courtesans and scientists.
Because of this technique, form and content become one.

I read it in Dutch - since the main characters speak either Dutch or Japanese, I wonder how he uses Dutch terms in the English original.

[Clopek]

^^ sounds like something worth looking into.

In keeping with my plan to read all of the "classics" I never read in high school, I just finished Of Mice and Men, which was a nice little morsel to break up stretches of the Pale King (which is progressing slowly).

I'm also reading the RZA's "Tao of Wu" on the advice of a good friend. As it turns out, this good friend smokes way too much weed. I'm not sure I'm reading this book in the right frame of mind :(