May, 2012--readings and critiques

A big swack of inter-library loans arrived today...including at least three books by Walter Benjamin. Gawd. My to-be-read pile can only be approached with climbing gear and oxygen tanks...

I am still on Barthes Mythologies and enjoying it very much. Am almost done with Titus Alone, the third book in the Gormenghast trilogy.

1: Wait until you tackle The Arcades Project

Since it's May, I should probably get back to finally finishing Das Kapital, Volume 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Djuna Barnes is wonderful. From farcical tales of aristocrats to a small Chekhovian story. Her range and concision is astonishing.

Have just started The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna. Enjoying it so far.

I did briefly dally with Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, but found it lacking as both fiction and as non-fiction. Not sure I think very highly of this "narrative non-fiction" (unless it's In Cold Blood). If it was fiction, it was poorly written. If it was non-fiction, there was no reason given for me to believe what she wrote so it came across as badly researched. I'm not sure that non-fiction should stray into people's thoughts/feelings/emotions unless it's clear how these thoughts/feelings/emotions are conveyed to the author. Interviews? Diaries? Extrapolation from behaviour? At any rate, definitely far too much telling, not enough showing.

20 pages into The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. I loved the first five pages, but it loses shape after that.

About 100 pages into Accidental City, a history of New Orleans up to 1812. Who knew there was already white flight here in the 1730s. . . .

Read through The Theban Plays quite astonished by how good they were. I've always rather presumed Greek Tragedy to have lost some of its power but the saga of Oedipus was profoundly affecting. What is perhaps most odd about it is that these plays hold up so well despite how obviously primitive they are - everything happens in one scene while the characters who move offstage are clearly just waiting in the wings for their next part...and yet I had no trouble suspending my disbelief at any point. Antigone was the weakest of the bunch, probably due to its being the earliest of them, and Oedipus at Colonus perhaps the finest, but all had a great deal of power and dignity. Wonderful stuff.

But my god, old Penguins (circa 1975) do NOT hold up well. I'll need to get a new copy; my reading of it pretty much totaled the book out and Sophocles is certainly worth re-visiting. Actually, though I'd been thinking of reading Hamlet next, I think I'll just progress to Sophocles II.

Might have to follow it up with a Jeeves novel though....

I won Behind the Beautiful Forevers as an ER book. Had some of the same questions -- where is the writer? Where am I? How do I know this stuff? I think narrative non-fiction works better if the presence of the writer is acknowledged, though its a tricky area.
I have been reading News from the Empire but it's turned into a struggle. It would be a good book at about half it's length, as it is I know way too much now about the royal families of Europe, mid-19th century international politics, Benito Juarez, etc. Some good stuff gleams through but there's a lot of repetition. Anyway, I think it's been hijacked because I went to the library yesterday and found an unexpected bio of Ian and Sylvia (who knew such a book even existed?) I don't normally read much in the way of music biographies but I've been listening to a lot of folk music lately so I was interested in the scene.

Sadly my reading has been lacking as of late... I blame this whole "buying my first home" thing. And the wedding I plan to have a few months after that. Stupid major life milestones getting in the way of good reading.

I've been picking my way slowly through Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio which is wonderful. Considering rereading another old favorite - can't decide whether to pick East of Eden or Sirens of Titan. Can't go wrong with either my favorite Steinbeck or my favorite Vonnegut.

Finally finished The Magic Mountain, after months of fits and starts. I'm also perusing A companion to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain.

And, because I'm a total masochist, I've started The Tin Drum.

#8 Best wishes with the new home and pending nuptials. Remember: this is supposed to be a HAPPY time for you.

I'm enjoying David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As an anthropologist writing about economics he is able to make an interesting and unconventional move. Where economists too often base their models on imaginary societies, situations and (rational) actors, anthropologists look at actual societies, situations and (often not terribly rational) actors. When Graeber does this he finds that—surprise ,surprise!—human beings tend not to follow the scripts economists might like to write for them.

I'm less than half-way through and am looking forward to the rest.

11: I have been meaning to read that; glad you're enjoying it!

Nibbling on United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal. Just read a couple essays on Henry Miller that were hilarious.

Vidal is, in our time, the great wit of anglophone letters. For a moment it looked like Christopher Hitchens would be a worthy successor, but then Hitchens went off, became a neocon, and died. Now? I can't think of anyone else worthy to take up his rapier.

Any suggestions?

Hitchens complained that Vidal was becoming a parody of himself in old age, but you could tell that he wrote as an admirer of Vidal's earlier work.

Read book four of Paradise Lost, meaning I'm a third of the way through it. Adam and Eve were introduced and they're an insipid couple - not surprising given that they're not human yet and haven't suffered a day in their lives. Doubtless they'll garner sympathy later in the narrative.

A few problems on a theological level, paradoxes that have caught my attention. One of which is this: God is good and just, all that comes from God is good and just, God created Satan, therefore Satan is not evil. And of course I find him the most sympathetic character because his behaviour comes closest to that of humans and because his speeches are astonishingly multi-faceted. His view of God as a tyrant seems accurate according to all God's actions - demanding perpetual adoration from his subjects and doling out eternal punishment to those that defy him. If Milton was attempting to justify the ways of God to man, why did he make Satan the most compelling figure?

Paradise Lost is an amazing poem, verbally and visually stunning and I am awed by it, but on a theological level all it is doing is giving me a dozen more reasons why I am not a Christian. That is part of its brilliance, of course; if it is the greatest poem in the English language, it is because of how much thought is garnered from reading it. Milton was a genius.

I wrote this whole thing about how interesting I found the most recent book of Paradise Lost and LT appears to have eaten it. Damn!

Reading Daniel Pinchbeck's BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD. Lots of exotic travels and even more exotic hallucinogenic drugs. Lovin' it so far...

16: I agree with Blake who famously said that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it" or something to that effect. I had a similar reaction to Paradise Lost (amazing poem, powerful, makes me feel like Christianity makes no sense and that God is vindictive and Satan is understandable) when I read it a couple of years ago.

17: Looks like it appeared above!

Weird.....

19: Glad to see you agree with me. I'll have to check out Blake, see what all he had to say about it. Actually, I'm probably going to be digging into more stuff about Milton in general. I need to track down a good biography and already have some lit crit lined up for later perusal.

19: I agree. Christianity doesn't make any sense. 1+1+1=1. Then again, the present version in this nation is nothing more than a means to deliver Republican talking points to uncritical becloseted lower-income hatemongers.

Masters of the Planet by Ian Tattersall is great. Fascinating book about paleoanthropology that integrates the latest discoveries and makes human evolution far more complex than the linear progressive narrative we've all encountered in museums, textbooks, and t-shirts.

Almost done with Act I of The Antiphon, Djuna Barnes's verse play.

Reading Ajax. Sophocles seemed preoccupied with suicide, or maybe that was just the Greeks' way. Never read The Iliad so this story is new to me and doesn't quite make sense because I don't know the backstory with Achilles and so on. Old Chicago University Press publications don't seem to hold up any better than Penguins - my reading's going to finish this copy off. Serves me right picking up a box of free plays.

Otherwise, just an entry on Stravinsky in Greene's Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers, a magnificent resource for all my classical needs, sadly forgotten and out of print. Books like that make me wish I were a publisher - hey, somebody, bring em' back!

Philip Kerr's latest just arrived, courtesy my local library. PRAGUE FATALE looks like another worthy installment in his "Bernie Gunther" detective series.

You read this one, didn't you, Ian? What did you think?

Finished Olive Kitteridge which I enjoyed. It is not a novel but a collection of 13 short stories in which the eponymous character is central or incidental to the narrative. In two of the stories I felt the character was added just to continue the theme. Several of the stories were published elsewhere and as a result there are repetitions of plot points in a couple of the stories. As I said I enjoyed it but I was surprised it won (there again I haven't read the other two nominees) and felt it was not up to the caliber of Tinkers or A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Finished PRAGUE FATALE this morning--it was smashing. Fans of middlebrow, noirish mysteries should take note of the "Bernie Gunther" series--it's smart and entertaining, consistently enjoyable...

26: For someone who vehemently attacks populist pop culture items (with some justification, I might add), why is the term "middlebrow" being used positively? This makes Philip Kerr sound like the JJ Abrams of mystery writers. Just seems shorthand for: "Let's make this safe, boring, and white, to appeal to a larger audience unafraid to venture forth in things not family-friendly." Just curious on the terminology is all.

The Duke Don't Dance by Richard Sharp is spectacular so far. The first chapter is a lacerating indictment of Greatest Generation overconfidence and Boomer entitlement. Like Evelyn Waugh with a clawhammer. Imagine The Big Chill but with the tedious Boomer self-righteousness amputated and cauterized; then add vulgar jokes and comedic observations as cutting as they are comedic. That's a close approximation.

Is there such a thing as "highbrow mystery"? Not sure about that--maybe Robbe-Grillet's THE ERASERS or something completely fucked like that.

Nope, I think middlebrow is the highest status genre writing can achieve. Anything beyond that is pure literary...

Finished Amsterdam now onto Lord of Misrule.

28: Don't forget lowbrow and hilobrow genre writing like Dorothy Sayers, Andrew Vachss, and James Ellroy Time to bust the middlebrow glass ceiling and use the glass shards as weapons.

Polished off two books I've had "in progress" for awhile:

FROM STONE ORCHARD: A COLLECTION OF MEMORIES (Timothy Findley)
ZOMBIE SPACESHIP WASTELAND (Patton Oswalt)

As for the former, I heard Tiff's voice in every line, which made it a kind of melancholy read. One of the true gents of Canadian literature; still sorely missed.

Oswalt is roughly a contemporary of mine and we have similar cultural touchstones. So I found many of his essays spot on and hilarious.

Women of Trachis. It is now my personal opinion, not provable in any way, that Sophocles' main audience were suicide fetishists.

My next novel to read shall be D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow.

It looks like the USPS has lost my book of Orwell's essays that should have been here ten days ago.

Almost done with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and have really mixed feelings about it. Some parts are remarkably well rendered, others border on embarrassing. It feels very much of its time (and not only in its portrayal of black dialect).

Don't give up hope yet, Geoff. Er, although you might want to slip into a church and offer up a prayer, just in case.

Our library has a three volume edition of Orwell's collected letters and I keep hoping I'll see them on the book sale table one year. No such luck...

Finished The Antiphon by Djuna Barnes. Beautiful, strange, delicious. Putting Nightwood by on the TBR pile. Too many other books to read for review at this point.

Just got Arming the Luftwaffe by Daniel Uziel, an Early Reviewer book (finally!). Will probably read that after I'm done with Masters of the Planet, which is an engaging quick read.

Working on The Lost Estate by Alain Fournier. Very interesting. Episodic. Elliptical. No wonder they kept mentioning it on Black Swan Green.

Finally got a book I can dig into - Jonathan Evison's West of Here. It's a look at a town in Washington, both when it was being settled (1890 or so) and present-day. The characters are vivid, the writing ain't bad, and overall I'm enjoying it. I'm still stressed, but this seems to help.

Stress can, literally, be the death of you. So kick back and, yup, a good book is the perfect prescription.

Masters of the Planet is great. A good overall look at human origins and it even altered my perception of evolution, especially since the new archaeological discoveries, coupled with advances in genetics research, redraw the common notion that human evolution was a linear progressive enterprise. Hominid evolution was more arborescent, with many branches existing concurrently. The information on genetics was also really cool. There is DNA that regulates other DNA, resulting in radical changes in anatomy and physiology. In other words, the non-existence of "missing links" may be because they simply don't exist, with species changing drastically from one type to the other.

Citizens by Simon Schama continues to be wonderful. Mirabeau died and Louis XVI makes an effort to flee France.

4 stars for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Some parts are dreadful, but many more parts are stunningly well rendered. Well worth the time I spent with it.

That's frustrating, innit? I found exactly that fault with Denis Johnson's TREE OF SMOKE. Some great bits and then sections where it dragged like an elephant carcass.

Cliff-

i,too, liked Prague Fatale- received it as an early review- my first Phil Kerr/Bernie Gunther book- was able to jump right in and enjoy.

A page-tuner, wasn't it? Now go back and read that first trilogy, it's something...

I'm reading Frank Conroy's STOP TIME, which is turning out to be even better than I'd imagined. I'm not a huge fan of memoirs but in STOP TIME the writing is so good, the descriptions so vivid, I've been completely won over.

I just got an early reviewer book, the Sadness of the Samurai.

Three chapters into The Rainbow. Lawrence wrote the best landscape descriptions I have ever come across but it is the most emotionally draining book I've read in years. This may possibly be my mood, as I've had a pretty miserable week in any case. However, regardless of its depressionary quality, I love it. Lawrence can write so well and his psychological depictions are superbly well rendered. If it keeps on its current track, this one is gonna stay with me. Beautiful, heavy stuff.

And I finished off my Sophocles set. None of his surviving non-Oedipus plays are as good, except possibly Electra, but every one of them contains at least one extraordinarily moving monologue.

My copy of the plays now lies in a heap of loose pages. I shall have to replace it sometime. Plus, I'm an idiot. I've been reading the man's name as "Richard Lattimore" when apparantly he's actually called "Richmond." Richmond? Oy vey.

Well, I finished off Gunfighter Nation. Highly recommended (Cliff) for those with an interest in cultural history and the Western, though it will be a big help to come equipped with a good knowledge of the history of Western movies.

Now reading Guns and Violence: the English Experience, by Joyce Lee Malcolm, which I would characterize as a work of pretend scholarship that opens with a straw man ("guns cause violence") and proceeds to knock it down by exhaustively proving such insights as "the Middle Ages were violent, yet they had no guns." A good answer to this would be Steven Pinker's recent The Better Angels of our Nature, which explores the complex causes of the decline in violence since the Middle Ages.

GUNFIGHTER NATION looks like my kinda book, all right.

Read and reviewed a collection of Gwyneth Jones stories, The Universe of Things. Review is here. Daughters of Prometheus, incidentally, is a sister site to SF Mistressworks and deals with twenty-first science fiction by women writers.

I'm about 50 pages into Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones and feel like evangelising. it's the inner monologue of John Cromer, gay and bedridden, growing up in fifties England. It puts me in mind of Denton Welch in that it's enthralling despite the limits placed on his protagonist to instigate plot. Beautifully written too.
I've also just read The Outward Urge which John Wyndham cowrote with himself. Not up there with The Chrysalids but a dose of his voice was exactly what i was wanting. Has anyone written any serious studies of Wyndham's work? I can't seem to find any.

Anything that's reminiscent of Denton Welch is all right with me--I love the man's writing.

Can't believe there are no serious critical studies of Wyndham's work--the man is practically an institution.

About to finish The Lost Estate. It started as moody but restrained. I was loving it. Then it devolved into bad melodrama. Fournier really let himself go. A sad spectacle.

>52 CliffBurns: I don't want to say too much about Pilcrow with >400 pages to go, but I'm so impressed by its beginning. I'll keep the group posted.
I think the absense of critical work on Wyndham may be to do with -whisper it - snobbishness, an acceptance of Aldiss's disdainful 'cosy catastrophe' label. His satire is sharper and his writing better than many give hm credit for, and his evocations offifties England are neccesarily comfortable in order to smuggle in the unheimlich. So there.

>53 mejix: The opening section is wonderful, isn't it? It being a short book, that was enough to carry me across to the end. (I dispatched it in a couple of days last summer.) For me, it never truly lost it, but the first half is definitely the better one.

Reading Frederick Exley's A FAN'S NOTES, another superb (and harrowing) memoir. Here's a piece on the book from THE GUARDIAN:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/sep/21/afansnotesfansnotes

>53 mejix: bencritchley

Yes! The first half is brilliant.

I was reading the introduction by Adam Gopnik last night and he makes an argument for the novel based on the poetic imagery instead of the plot. A gallant effort.

By the way it is a good thing that I didn't read the introduction before reading the novel. The guy just gives away everything.

Finished The Duke Don't Dance by Richard Sharp. Excellent stuff. A highly polished literary epic by a self-published author.

Started The Redemption of George Baxter Henry by Conor Bowman. Very Celine-ian with a cantankerous unlikeable curmudgeon narrator and his dysfunctional family.

So after exploring the American Frontier Myth as reflected in their cultural products via Gunfighter Nation, my task is to detect Canadian attitudes towards the frontier in our cultural products (such as, for example, maple syrup...) which led me to commit a grave mistake.

I re-read Margaret Atwood's Survival: a Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. God, what an annoying book. She does, indeed, cover her notion of the Canadian frontier (something she insists does not actually exist), but one ends up wondering how, if the Canadian experience and the wider Canadian culture is so at odds with the themes of Canadian literature, Canada could be said to have a valid national literature at all. (The answer to that one is obvious....)

I am annoyed that this book is still taught in schools. It belongs in museums.

Anyway, with that off my chest, it's time for Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War.

'Still trying to finish The Tin Drum, in all it's droning, sprawling, redundant splendor.

Finished A FAN'S NOTES.

Brilliant.

Nuff said.

Finally sat down for another bit of Spengler. I'm still on the Meaning of Numbers because I'm practically not reading the thing. He'll be airing his views on the European attempt to mimic the Greeks or on the language of mathematics for one or two fascinating, wonderful paragraphs before returning to his central subject: which is absolutely incomprehensible and the technicalities mute his bombast, which makes it worse.

Also read a Carlos Fuentes recently. Aura, a horror story told in second-person. Very well-written and beautifully macabre. I reviewed it on my blog, if any are curious: http://pseudointellectualreviews.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/aura-carlos-fuentes/

Also read a couple by Gogol, The Overcoat and The Nose. I don't get his appeal.

The library somehow managed to secure me a copy of THE PEYOTE DANCE by Antonin Artaud. A mighty rare tome.

In the mid-1930's, Artaud went to Mexico and took part in a peyote ceremony. THE PEYOTE DANCE is his account of that experience. Excellent as a travelog alone but toss in drugs and exotic cultures and, whoopie, you're in Burns country...

62: Damn, that sounds good. Adds another book to my list....

It's an expensive pickup here in Canada (on Amazon), far cheaper in the U.S.

Here's a bit more background on the book:

http://psypressuk.com/2011/10/12/literary-review-the-peyote-dance-by-antonin-art...

64: Sounds good. Added to my list of "writers on drugs," (which includes Huxley, Burroughs, Cocteau and De Quincey...and maybe some others I'm forgetting right now). Thanks for the link.

I'm about halfway through THE PEYOTE DANCE--it's odd, no question, but well worth seeking out.

Sounds like we have parallel interests. I have a couple of shelves devoted to psychedelica--blame it on Hunter S. Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. That book blew my mind...in more ways than one.

Sorry, I'm not Ian. But I would like to know what you think of that book because I am reading it, too. I've never read this author before, and so far I'm not impressed. But, to be fair, right after I started it, my aunt died, so my family has been busy with funeral home and funeral. So I'll keep reading and see if it gets better. But please tell me what you think. Thanks.

66: I've been interested in drug writings pretty much since last summer's reading of the Beats. The Yage Letters in particular - I dream of getting a copy of that.

Don't know much about Hunter S. Thompson. He's one of those guys I'll probably investigate post-Naked Lunch (if I actually like that book - no guarantees there).

THE YAGE LETTERS is a good read and should be cheap to acquire.

One guy I've been reading lately who might be of interest to you is Daniel Pinchbeck. I thought BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD was really eye-opening and I have a library copy of a tome by Pinchbeck discussing the whole 2012-end-of-the-world-thingee. Don't always agree with him and some of his notions are really far out but if you read him with an open mind you'll come away with some interesting new ideas, I'll tell ya that.

Apropos of The Peyote Dance, one of my friends on another LibraryThing list is a memoirist and wrote a book about his experience in 1967, I think, therefore who am I? followed by a sequel called Digging Deeper, both of which I recommend to anyone who likes to read about those kinds of experiences.

Don't forget The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the works of Herbert Huncke

Started reading Arming the Luftwaffe by Daniel Uziel.

I'll check your pal out, Anna. Thanks.

All this talk of drugs... I feel like reading Junky next.

Nietzsche in Turin is going very nicely. A close examination of 1888, making an effort to humanize him. The guy had a rough time of it. He seems to have been of a prickly and idiosyncratic nature and while Lesley Chamberlain clearly admires and sympathizes with him, she doesn't offer him any pity. It's a nicely balanced read, idyllic scenes of Turin's streets and the Swiss Alps juxtaposed against Nietzsche's endless ailments. The only problem is a certain vagueness to the writing, not helped by the grammatical errors I keep noticing. Slipshod editing. Shame on Picador.

And The Rainbow is continuing to be excellent. It may in fact be the best novel I've read this year. Hypnotic, full of minute details and yet also a sweeping family saga. Reading Lawrence and then walking down a country road is like seeing the world for the first time. Really, an amazing work.

I got two Elizabeth Bowen novels for Mother's Day, The Last September and The House in Paris. Just finished the latter and am still thinking about the ending. It's very Jamesian. At her best Bowen brings you into a world of intense, if very quiet, emotional relationships between people and The House in Paris is one of her best. The Last September, which is set in Ireland just before the Civil War, is a little more opaque.

Finished MAPS TO ANYWHERE by Bernard Cooper; short prose pieces, most very personal and autobiographical. Well written and lyrical, a very different approach to memoir and I found myself reading compulsively, especially the segments where he writes about the death of his older brother. If you're a fan of prose poems, Mr. Cooper is a chap to seek out. He has, as they say, the right stuff.

As far as I can tell, the fact that it's Dickens' bi-centennary seems to have gone unnoticed among the snobs. In honour of it, however, I am doing something new: listening to an audiobook, Frank Muller's Great Expectations. An AMAZING work. I'm not a Dickens fan - I started it more for the sadly missed Muller, a wonderfully vivid and dramatic narrator who almost transcends the material. His voice-acting is marvelous; it's less a book being read than a one-man theatrical performance.

The novel itself is far from predictable and to my great surprise it is crammed with gothic and sinister elements (what with the convicts, crazy ladies and Jagger's housekeeper). There is very little of the famed Dickensian sentiment and the coincidences are worked into the plot so nicely that it reeks more of conspiracy than improbability. Halfway through (been listening just about once a week) and I love it. Never expected to say that about Dickens.

The Durrell Centenary is much more our thing :-)

78: Figures. Supporting the underdog....

Getting on toward June. If I'm going to honour Durrell this year I'd better get started soon. Probably after I'm done with Lawrence.

I had to think twice to understand those last two sentences :-)

80: That was intentional!

"If I like Lawrence, will I like Durrell?"

And so on.... The combinations could be endless.

77 - Early Dickens tends to be more sentimental, late Dickens more fantastic. My own favorite is Dombey and Son.

#77, nymith, I've been meaning to make this a year of returning to Dickens because of the bicentenary. There was a lot of fuss about it at The Guardian (both in the books section as well as their podcast) - enough to get me going. Given that we're almost halfway through the year, and my to-be-read pile keeps growing, I'm not sure I'll achieve this goal. Agree with #82, Lcanon, regarding his later works being much better. I like Bleak House and Tale of Two Cities as well.

(PS on the Lawrence and Durrell thing - I had an interesting journey to discovering Durrell and it started with Lawrence, when I was reading a lot by and about him. Anais Nin wrote a study on DHL, which took me to her diaries and other works, which then took me to Henry Miller, given their strong, um, connection.... which then brought me to Durrell..... talk about degrees of separation. :))

Have started what seems like a very snob-worthy book: Journey to the End of the Night, Celine. Funny as hell--haven't laughed out loud (at least this loud) to a book in a long time.

You're a lucky man, Geoff. Discovering that book for the first time is pure joy. I'm with you: I howled...

84: Celine, despite being an Anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizing thug, could really spin a darkly comic yarn.

On the same note, I recently finished The Redemption of George Baxter Henry by Conor Bowman. A short little book with a foul-mouthed cantankerous lawyer, his cokehead son, and his space cadet daughter. Add the lawyer's adultery and a trip to France with his battle-axe mother-in-law equals hilarity and farce. Good times.

Reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and finding it remarkably weak.

Postman succeeds in taking something that is demonstrably true -- the moronic state of public discourse in the age of television -- and proposing an incoherent explanation for it, thus accidentally proving, by demonstration, his thesis that television makes us dumb.

A.J., something always made me suspect the Postman book was bullshit. Glad to have my baseless assumptions confirmed.

I always thought television was dumb because it's based around popular entertainment, literally giving the people what they want. T.V. is the inevitable result of mob rule.

#86 Celine was also a Maoist. When challenged to explain the inconsistency in his ideological stance he said he was for whatever ideology killed the most people.

90: OMG.

Finished Nietzsche in Turin. Ended with a very affecting account of his descent into madness - first megalomania and incoherence, ending in a vegetative state. Wiped out my good mood in record time. It was a useful, idiosyncratic biography undermined only by Picador's shameful editing hackjob, as I mentioned earlier. Certainly I'd buy a revised edition if such came out, though it probably won't happen.

Finished BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK today. A solid novel but, despite the cover blurb, not even close to being "the Catch 22 of the Iraq War".

90: Hey, that's my basic ideological stance, too. Then again, I've had my fill of the Tea Party and prolifers. Not that mass death would solve anything, but at least it would slightly more amusing than The Jersey Shore and whatever the US Senate is pretending to do at the moment. With that ideology in mind, I have to say that I admire Celine even more. He's like HP Lovecraft but with jokes.

I'm really enjoying Venice Noir Lots of good dark tales about suckers and evildoers who meet bad ends in twilit Venetian locales. And the editor, Maxim Jakubowski has peppered the anthology with a mix of straightforward noir tales and more avant garde stories. Hats off to him. He really knows how to throw a short story collection together.

Liked the concept so much, I picked up Chicago Noir at Hudson Books in the Metra Train Station.

I'm in my graphic novel period. Just finished Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco a couple of days ago. Began The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb yesterday. If I had to write about Crumb I would describe his drawing style as tubercular.

Gave up on Amusing Ourselves to Death, although I almost dragged myself to its tedious finish line.

Postman's argument is best summed up as, "GET OFF MY LAWN YOU CRAZY KIDS AND TURN DOWN THAT AWFUL ROCK MUSIC." Although he pays lip service to the idea that entertainment is harmless, and that it is only problematic when political discourse becomes entertainment, it soon becomes clear that he considers dry and humourless exposition to be the only valid form of discourse -- as when he complains that music is played on the radio, which might otherwise be used for endless verbal debate.

The argument is thinly sourced -- his bibliography includes only those works he quotes directly -- and consequently, the book begins to read as a personal rant. If there is sound research to back up his claims, he does not share it.

Worst of all, we find in his rant certain unsupported assertions that have been disproved by research. He suggests, for example, that television news is fashioned as entertainment, and presented in a way that makes it appear to be fictional. As a result, people are not frightened or alarmed by what they see on the news, any more than they would be frightened by a stage play. But as Barry Glassner points out in The Culture of Fear, research -- which, unlike Postman, he cites -- has consistently shown that people who watch television news are actually more fearful of the imaginary threats it portrays. So Postman is full of shit.

It is true that reading longer and more complex books is more cognitively demanding than watching TV, and it is true that the brain responds to exercise; it is true, also, that our public discourse is in the shitcan. It is not clear, however, that Postman's wobbly house of cards explains the reasons.

Just downloaded Novelties and Souvenirs, a short story collection by John Crowley.

I have a nice trade paperback of that book. Sigh. Somewhere on the TBR pile. With a lot of other wonderful books.

I admire Crowley.

P.S. Hey, everybody, last day of May--last chance to report what you've been reading this month. C'mon, go for it...

Hmmmm. Been lounging about and reading very little (too busy listening to Henry Miller over on Ubuweb). Short stories for the past few days - R.K. Narayan, Joyce Carol Oates. And a little bit more Spengler.

Your saying "I admire Crowley" alarmed me for a second. Just for a second.

Bringing Crowley's Little, Big on a trip to Michigan this weekend. I loved it a few years ago.

Finished Brave New World today - entertaining and bizarre. Looking forward to reading Brave New World Revisited later on.

#99 Ol' Aleister had his good points too. Particularly when he spoke of the importance of WILL.

Reading Dennis Lehane's GONE BABY GONE. A fast read but not a dumb one. So far, so good.

One of these days I'll have to read the final book of the Ægypt Quartet, Endless Things*. But that would mean rereading the preceding three books first...

(* I have the signed limited edition of it, of course)

#100 - Little, Big is one of my all-time favorites. It is the one book, in recent times, that gave me the sense of returning to my childhood days of reading fairy-tales and how I would get totally absorbed in those fantastical worlds - to the extent that when I would raise my head and look around me, the world I physically inhabited seemed to be the unreal one. You know what I mean? It takes a lot for a book to take me completely in like that. So, I hope you enjoy it just as much.

96: Since reading him as an undergraduate, I always thought Neil Postman was full of shit.