Welcome

Any suggestions for other writers to add to the group description?

This is my kinda group.

Sign me up...and then just TRY to hold me back.

I'm an elitist, I'm arrogant, pompous, semi-intelligent, snarky, vitriolic and thoroughly well read.

I think I'll fit in.

Please, folks, no thin-skinned, sensitive types need apply. Milquetoasts beware. Politically correct: flee for your lives.

Sales, you've done it again.

Goody! Literary snobbery. You always lure me into agreeing with you by dangling the Fowles carrot.

Though he might stick out in your list of relative recents, I'd suggest that Marcel Proust belongs there. Literary snobbery indeed. I wouldn't sneeze at Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, or Orhan Pamuk, either.

Lovely, lovely roster thus far.

Other additions: Cormac McCarthy (especially the early work, lately he's been writing stuff to plump up his kids' college fund), Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, J.G. Ballard, James Crumley, James Joyce, Slammin' Sam Beckett, Robert Stone, Jack O'Connell, Paul Auster, Ian McEwan, Colson Whitehead, David Mitchell, Will Self...

Ah, God, I gotta stop and take a shower: I've broken into a cold sweat of joy...

One of this group's rules will be: not every book by a good writer is good. Because, let's face it, McEwan's books have been getting very samey since Amsterdam, and Ballard's fiction is a bit hit and miss.

#3 I have the new translations of À la recherche du temps perdu. In fact, I've had them for a few years. Not got round to reading them yet, though.

#4 Not tried some of those you've mentioned.

Here's a few more: Olivia Manning, Angela Carter, Sebastian Faulks, David Lodge, Lawrence Norfolk.

Genre writers of note: Paul Park, John Crowley, Gwyneth Jones, David Herter, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner.

Sweet mercy, I forgot Angela Carter. And I do love her so. I've read a bit of Lodge's Changing Places. (With my love of academic satire, it's silly that I haven't read more yet. All in due time, though.)

I browsed through the different translations of Proust before deciding on the Penguin translations (I'll probably pick up the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright eventually, too). I'm into the third volume now, and Grieve's translation of the second volume is striking me as a bit more difficult to follow and less musical than the Davis or the Treharne. My French is not good enough, though, to compare to the original.

You Brits must have good eyes, or better optometrists--I had to buy the last two volumes from the UK due to the copyright issues here, and the font is ever so tiny.

Lodge's How Far Can You Go? is one of my favourite novels. And I'm not even a left-footer...

I agree, not every book by a good/great author works and McEwan hasn't achieved anything close to BLACK DOGS in his recent offerings.

I'm not an unabashed fan of ANY author, nor will I forgive a fine scribbler a misstep, especially if there were, ah, commercial considerations...

I'm not a fan of any author, either. They have to wow me each time.

Actually, they don't have to wow me since I'm an addict and will read just about anything, but no one I have ever read is good across the board. And, I hate to admit it in a group of self-proclaimed literary snobs, but the story has to be paramount. Good writing by itself is nothing without a story behind it.

"Everything in service to the story", eh, Pat?

I'm with ya, kid...

One of my favorite authors and a good candidate for bashing by the literary snobbery (Mark Twain once famously tore him a new one in a review) is James Fenimore Cooper.

Another, as I mentioned in the SF/Poetry thread is Robert W. Service. He gets low marks from the literary snobs, but he sets my imagination a flyin'. BTW, his most popular poems, Cremation of Sam Magee and Shooting of Dan McGrew, are probably his weakest.

Speaking of literary snobbery, did anyone beside me (and I'm sure many must) make the connection between Forrest Gump (the movie, I haven't read the book) and Stephane Mallarme?

Finally, I would like to thank Cliff for inviting me. I look forward to learning, the thing I like best about LT.

Wait...wait...I gotta know...Forrest Gump and Mallarme? Don't leave me hanging like that, Gene!

Haven't read Cooper--Twain's assassination still resounds over the years.

I haven't read anything else by Service except the two you mentioned--one of those guys you were forced to memorize in school and, as a result, you detest them evermore.

Wait a minute ... literary snobs ... and you're reading contemporary "works"....

How about some (long) dead people in that description? And I mean physically, not just literally.

I'd suggest Charles Lamb, strictly on the basis of his introduction to Last Essays of Elia. For the noninitiate, I reproduce the first lines:

"This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature. '

'To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. '

'I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you -- a sort of unlicked, incondite things -- villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former Essay (to save many instances) -- where under the first person (his favorite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections -- in direct opposition to his own early history. "

He is, of course, writing about his own writing. What greater literary snob could there be?

Very good. This snob confesses he has little interest in pre-1900 literature, at least at this point in his life. There are exceptions: Fagles' translations of THE ILIAD and ODYSSEY and that fat Edith Grossman translation of DON QUIXOTE always seems to lurk near the top of the to-be-read pile.

Not, therefore, a true snob, but a thoroughly contemporary, superficial one. And therefore liable to be twice as prickly and defensive about my posturing, furious when someone corrects my pronunciation or questions one of my manufactured quotes...

umm..w/out bothering to look charles lamb up...wasn't he guilty of perpetrating the half baked tales from Shakespeare that i had as a kid? yuck. Maybe i'm blaming the wrong lamb.

#14: Dead White Guys in the hizzouse, y'all!

I love reading stuff other people either hate or consider woefully overrated. Getting through all 7 volumes of Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollmann It's coming up on 3 years. Then again, I read it very sporadically.

When I told a sci fi writing group I'm in that I read Robert Graves, everyone geeked. They mentioned I should some person by the name of Steven Saylor Sorry, I'll stick with the good stuff.

I enjoy the usual cast of misfits: Vollmann, Pynchon, Sade, William Gibson, Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Vachss, Beckett, Burroughs, Waugh, Pound and Burgess.

i'll put in for, to name a few: SPB Mais, Robert Lynd, Alice Meynell, Arthur Bingham Walkley, Gwyn Thomas. Mervyn Peake, Logan Piersall Smith, Russell Greenan, A S Byatt, R S Thomas. THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE by Robert Lynd is a pleasure to read. Is it pfunny that most of these were not "snobs?" Maybe someone could enlighten me.

Are you saying snobbery is a BAD thing?

Nay, nay, Poorious, as I've said before: "snob" is an honorific, muchachos. This is the place to come to when you want to flay the proles, the burger-flipping arseholes who inflate the sales figures of twats like James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Stephanie (ack! ack!) Meyer...

isn't almost as much fun to have frisk with one another, whoops! no amusement in highhatting over dean koontz, whoever he might be. i've tried my antics with others but so far i have evoked nothing but snoozing. maybe one day i'll get the hang of this LT thing- who knows? i think maybe i'm more mocker than anything like snob. do you see any difference? the only BAD thing, is NOTHING.
cheers,
pgt

Now you're putting down MOCKING? Mocking, is a good thing...and, really, don't you find that certain works inspire in you nothing but contempt? How DARE the author waste your time (and a hillside of trees) with a godawful novel that takes up valuable shelf space that rightly belongs to true artists.

Lay the lumber to the fuckers, I say...

Better uses for Twilight:

*Wrapping for fish and chips.
*To line a birdcage.
*Kindling.

Mockery is good, so long as it well-written. The same goes for rants and tirades. If you want a group hug experience, best look elsewhere. Not that we're all negativity and snark, since we laud and magnify the authors who deserve it. The others will whacked and stacked like cord wood.

what, noh hugs?

Nah, shit, I'll hug ANYBODY.

Making me laugh is one of the few prerequisites for being a pal o' mine. Don't have to agree with any of my lofty assertions, just wind me up and put me down with wit and intellectual vigor...

I'd like to hug Stephanie Meyer, right around her neck ;) Just like the big lug in Of Mice and Men

Another differentiation: Snobs are not fanboys. Fanboys are uncritical fanatics who go for Angelina Jolie's chest area, CGI, and lots of 'splosions. Why else would Thomas Harris keep churning out Hannibal Lecter-related shameless cash-ins? Red Dragon was great; Silence of the Lambs was excellent; the rest is dross.

Fanboys are the engines that create useless sequels, empty action movies, and make the cult of lowered expectations a reality.

NB: I'm using the term "fanboy" in a gender-neutral context.

A fan-boy is a moron, regardless of their gender (and sometimes it's hard to tell because of the acne, XXXXL t-shirts and wide-ass sweatpants)...

whoshallscapewhipping?

Nonethatdeserveit...

i think Arbusto should feel the whip before the writer of TWILIGHT does.

We'll leave that up to a grand jury.

I DREAM of the day I see that fucker Cheney in the dock. Of course, when a guy goes fishing and hunting with supreme court justices and knows all the secret handshakes, the chances are remote but, Jesus, the man makes Spiro Agnew look like Albert fucking Schweitzer.

cheney is a shitbird who deserves to roast in the deepest hellpit. the perpetrator of Twilight is pure as the driven snow by comparison. don't get me wrong, i'd burn all the extent copies of 'Shitlight' but my several nieces wd. had me tarred and feathered.

Does Cheney remind you, Cliff, of Albert Schweitzer? I was thinking more like Albert Flasher.

...or Albert DeSalvo...

Jesus, Gene, all these Guess Who references. I think you're a closet Canuck...

Well, these things usually come in threes so what's next?

I guess you start quoting Rush or, even better, Neil Young. Actually, I'd prefer that 'cause I was never a fan of Guess Who or BTO. And if you've ever heard Randy Bachman's dreadful show on CBC Radio (old Canadian icons never die, they get a show on the Mother Corp.), you'd know why. And Burton Cummings is a notorious prick of the first order...

good old Bachman Turner Overweight...a band i was in, sadly, covered "working overtime" - but then we also covered Wild Child from LReed's 1st(?) solo lp.

Bachman's radio show is a self-indulgent embarrassment. Supposedly he's playing favorite songs by influential artists but a good portion of the time the fat bastard tells stories about himself.

Sickening.

Can't stand Rush. I think it's the lead singer's voice.

There are some good Canadian bands - Augury, Cryptopsy, Into Eternity, Quo Vadis...

Don't forget Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot ;)

Ugh, bad childhood memories. No wonder I like punk and the Rolling Stones.

Another "classic" Canadian band, Anvil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_(band)

Arcade Fire would be one of my faves right now.

And, yeah, Geddy Lee's (Rush) voice can be a trial.

i still have an lp (i don't think it's been released on cd yet?) by a very peculiar and, i think, good Canadian duo from the early 70s, Fraser and DeBolt. I did download a set of mp3s from the album, but someone had clearly dubbed them off an album as they came complete w/ scratches and pops.

Hmmm...Fraser & Debolt. Doesn't ring any bells...

"I hope to serve you well, i'm a runaway lover, running from hell"
??
Fraser and Debolt were folk-punk way before that became cool (the holy modal rounders excepted)

Good line...

Folk-punk? What would you shorten that to? Er, funk? polka? Or fonk? maybe pulk?

well..i'd hate to shorten it to "polka" but one of my favorite obscurities is a cd by an ad hoc group called "the accordion tribe" - quite beautiful and amazing stuff. And, of course, all on the squeeze boxes

The accordion is right down there with bag pipes as the most onerous, noise-making musical contrivance...

Bagpipes...Jesus, now I can't stop giggling. I'm recalling that old Bugs Bunny cartoon when Bugs spots the kilted Scotsman playing the bagpipes and cries "Look at that monster attacking that old lady", and then beats the mortal shit out of the pipes.

I can barely see to type...

One of my favorite sixties/seventies bands that I saw everytime I possibly could was 4/5ths Canadian. They had quite a string of hits beginning with "Music from Big Pink" and on as well as a close and productive working relationship with Bob Dylan. The Band.

Cliff, you'll be glad to know that Anvil have had a documentary made about them - Anvil! The Story of Anvil. It is supposed to be brilliant (I'm not joking - the reviews have been great).

I've heard of it, kind of a Canadian "This is Spinal Tap". Unfortunately, Keanu Reeves is one of its boosters...

Sorry, Gene, I detest the Band and flayed them in a short essay I wrote for a German book devoted to the Most Over-Rated Bands of All Time (NEVER MIND THE HYPE). I don't normally take on such assignments--that's why I'm so broke--but that particular hatchet job was a pleasure...

It will have to go a long way to top Some Kind of Monster, the documentary about Metallica recording St. Anger. I still laugh when I think of the therapist they hired to work through their issues - when they sack him he is so upset, he doesn't want to leave.

When I think of bagpipes I see a misty, foggy early morning in a clearing in the woods, the sun just rising against a circle of sharpened stakes set at an outward angle in and behind a deep trench. Inside this defensive position men are just beginning to stir, water is being set to boil, the guard is being changed, and the position is at its most vulnerable.

Suddenly, from the least well defended part of the camp a blood curdling scream pierces the calm of the bottomland followed immediately by the skirl of pipes shrieking from the unseen, curdling the blood of those inside the camp and sending them into a flurry of activity, then a rush of men in blue paint and skins brandishing spears, pikes, swords, and sending arrows flying into the camp comes charging across the narrow band of cleared land from the woods, the pipes egging them on with their otherworldly sounds.

That's what I think of when I think of bagpipes. That and that hackneyed, overused, trite, tiresome, boring rendition of "Amazing Grace". I like the first image better.

Er, I don't think the Picts had bagpipes.

When I think of bagpipes, I think of the Dubai Police Band mangling 'God Save the Queen' at the opening of the Jumeirah English Speaking School's new purpose-built campus back in the late 1970s...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdb-ijWq8r0
well..this is by no means my favorite bit by the Accordion Tribe, but a rough idea.

Ian, they may not have, but keep in mind this is an imaginary scene which as an act of imagination need not adhere to reality.

I have a copy of the Metallica docu but have avoided watching it. I used to LOVE those guys, the first four albums are so good and it's heart-breaking to see the disintegration. The new one, "Death Magnetic" is o-kay but it just doesn't have the edge and intensity. It's Metallica trying to recapture their glory days except now they're fat, blow-dried and filthy rich.

Bob, I'm clicking on that accordion link, but only because I'm fond of you...

...okay, that wasn't so horrible. The song is only two and half minutes long, trailing off into 4 minutes of nothing (John Cage influence?).

I could take it. Bob, you live to link again...

i'll have to rip their version of a Hovhaness piece and send it your way. It really is hypnotically beautiful.

Well, I love to work to all kinds of strange, instrumental music.

When we were at my in-laws' place a few years back, we had one of those amateur entertainment nights--singing, stories--and near the end I turned to my wife and loudly said: "Now it's time for your topless accordian act. Er...just make sure we have band-aids on hand afterward."

Brought the room down.

Yeah, my in-laws get my odd sense of humour. Bless them...

The Orb has some nice, hypnotic stuff. Back when raves were cool ;)

Check out wmse.org. Great shows with some fine, fine instrumental stuff. Beats Working and Space Age Old School are great. I listen to them on the Internets. It's a nice connection to Milwaukee, since I now live in Rochester. I discovered The Cramps, The Hives, and Velvet Acid Christ through them.

Incidentally, Rotting Christ will be in Minneapolis this Saturday. Unfortunately, I have another engagement :(

I've got four Orb albums. Sometimes they get too techno for me; I like long, layered cuts of space music. Just let it play on and tap away...

Then I strongly suggest "Beats Working" on WMSE. They got the shows archived. And all shows are a standard 3 hours, so you'll get an hour of uninterrupted music, before a public service announcement about asthma or something ;)

I love the music of David Holmes. He did the stuff for Traffic and Oceans Eleven The soundtrack to Narc is also really good. Atmospheric and bleak, just like the movie.

LOVED "Narc", terrific film. Fuckin' intense.

The problem with listening to something on the internet is my office computer is upstairs and very old, too old for a hookup so I have to use the one downstairs for research or, alternately, chatting with folks here, there and everywhere. Maybe if I could figure out a way to burn the programs onto MP3 or CD's and then play them on my office stereo.

But I'll try to tune in to at least give the show a listen.

Apropos to nothing:

http://creebobby.com/timestable.html

All hail the Ninja Robot Platypus Astronaut Vampire!