What are you currently reading?

[Mandryka]

William Faulkner - The Town



The second volume in the Snopes Trilogy.  The Hamlet was written nearly 20 years before the last two books, and there is some stylistic differences.  And although I feel the first book is far superior to the latter two, I always read them together, one after the other, since I wish to give Faulkner his due concerning the larger story arc.

I enjoyed Hamlet and Town - Hamlet especially -  but Mansion defeated me. All that prison intrigue. I didn't know there was such a gap between the first and the other two.

[Number Six]

I recently started listening to Watership Down, read by Peter Capaldi.

I don't know if I have ever read the book. Maybe once decades ago. I have seen the film plenty of times, being well scarred by it as a child.

Capaldi is a delight, as expected.

[Ganondorf]

Decided to for a change read something that is more critical towards Wagner. Adorno uses much acerbic wit while discussing Wagner's shortcomings as a person and as an artist which is sometimes even humorous despite his stance basically being that Wagner's work anticipates totalitarian governments of the 19th century such as Nazi Germany (Adorno happened to be Jewish himself and spent several years in exile). I don't agree with nearly everything that he writes about Wagner and his work but to be honest: I wish more Wagner research published at the time was like this. Adorno's exasperatedness over Wagner's shortcomings are in some ways way more interesting reading than Newman's accusing of Minna overreacting because Wagner cheated on her.

[foxandpeng]

The Rattle Bag
(Ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)

[Papy Oli]

Cormac McCarthy - The Road



Harrowing, bleak, damp, grey, ashen throughout.

Spent 5 hours reading this with knots in the stomach, just about clinging to that last slither of hope all the way through.

Damn.

What a book.


Started: Dr Fischer of Geneva by Graham Greene

[Mandryka]

Time to tackle a biggie

[SimonNZ]

Started:

[Mandryka]

Time to tackle a biggie

This has led me to Rilke's 10th elegy - is there an adequate translation and/or commentary in English or French?

Alone, he starts his climb
up the peak of Primal Pain.
Not once do his footsteps echo
from this soundless path of fate.
Were the endlessly dead
to awaken some symbol,
within us, to indicate
themselves, they might
point to the catkins
dangling from the leafless
branches of the Hazel trees.
Or speak in drops of rain
falling to dark earth
in early spring.

[ritter]

Read George Bataille's short and very personal --it was not intended for publication-- Le Surréalisme au jour le jour ("Surrealism Day to Day"), which has some very acute (and at times very scathing) descriptions of major figures of the movement (Breton, Leiris, Aragon, Artaud), based on Bataille's first-hand experiences.

[Papy Oli]

Started: Dr Fischer of Geneva by Graham Greene

That was a quick but interesting and weird read. Much darker than my previous encounter with Mr Greene. Definitely a novelist I will go back to though (possibly Power & Glory or A Quiet American).

Possibly next from the KEPUB pile: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (John Le Carré).

[Papy Oli]

Time to tackle a biggie

Upon building a post-1950 (and 21st Century) e-book library and wish list (or at least to get somewhat familiar with names of that period), I often came across this title, here and on various "great" lists. I bought it for dead cheap on Kobo. Didn't realise it was that long though (not sure I can face such a volume yet. Saying that I also bought Infinite Jest in the same bundle for identical reasons      ).

[Mandryka]

Upon building a post-1950 (and 21st Century) e-book library and wish list (or at least to get somewhat familiar with names of that period), I often came across this title, here and on various "great" lists. I bought it for dead cheap on Kobo. Didn't realise it was that long though (not sure I can face such a volume yet. Saying that I also bought Infinite Jest in the same bundle for identical reasons      ).

Here's the sort of thing you're letting yourself in for

But every true god must be both organizer and destroyer. Brought up into a Christian ambience, this was difficult for him to see until his journey to Südwest: until his own African conquest. Among the abrading fires of the Kalahari, under the broadly-sheeted coastal sky,  fire and water, he learned. The Herero boy, long tormented by missionaries into a fear of Christian sins, jackal-ghosts, potent European strand-wolves, pursuing him, seeking to feed on his soul, the precious worm that lived along his backbone, now tried to cage his old gods, snare them in words, give them away, savage, paralyzed, to this scholarly white who seemed so in love with language. Carrying in his kit a copy of the Duino Elegies, just off the presses when he embarked for Südwest, a gift from Mother at the boat, the odor of new ink dizzying his nights as the old freighter plunged tropic after tropic . . . until the constellations, like the new stars of Pain-land, had become all unfamiliar and the earth's seasons reversed . . . and he came ashore in a highprowed wooden boat that had 20 years earlier brought blue-trousered troops in from the iron roadstead to crush the great Herero Rising. To find, back in the hinterland, up in an outstretch of broken mountains between the Namib and the Kalahari, his own faithful native, his night-flower.

An impassable waste of rock blasted at by the sun . . . miles of canyons twisting nowhere, drifted at the bottoms with white sand turning a cold, queenly blue as the afternoons lengthened. . . . We make Ndjambi Karunga now, omuhona . . . a whisper, across the burning thorn branches where the German conjures away energies present outside the firelight with his slender book. He looks up in alarm. The boy wants to fuck, but he is using the Herero name of God. An extraordinary chill comes over the white man. He believes, like the Rhenish Missionary Society who corrupted this boy, in blasphemy. Especially out here in the desert, where dangers he can't bring himself to name even in cities, even in daylight, gather about, wings folded, buttocks touching the cold sand, waiting. . . . Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for. The peril of buggering the boy under the resonance of the sacred Name fills him insanely with lust, lust in the face—the mask— of instant talion from outside the fire . . . but to the boy Ndjambi Karunga is what happens when they couple, that's all: God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female . . . and he becomes, in his innocence, Ndjambi Karunga's child (as are all his preterite clan, relentlessly, beyond their own history) here underneath the European's sweat, ribs, gut-muscles, cock (the boy's own muscles staying fiercely tight for what seems hours, as if he intends to kill, but not a word, only the long, clonic, thick slices of night that pass over their bodies).

What did I make of him? Captain Blicero knows that the African at this moment is halfway across Germany, deep in the Harz, and that, should the Oven this winter close behind him, why they have already said auf Wiedersehen for the last time. He sits, stomach crawling, glands stuffed with malaise, bowed over the console, inside the swarm-painted launch-control car. The sergeants at motor and steering panels are out taking a cigarette break—he's alone at the controls. Outside, through the dirty periscope, gnarled fog unloosens from the bright zone of frost that belly-bands the reared and shadowy rocket, where the liquid-oxygen tank's being topped off. Trees press close: overhead you see barely enough sky for the rocket's ascent. The Bodenplatte—concrete plate laid over strips of steel—is set inside a space defined by three trees, blazed so as to triangulate the exact bearing, 260°, to London. The symbol used is a rude mandala, a red circle with a thick black cross inside, recognizable as the ancient sun-wheel from which tradition says the swastika was broken by the early Christians, to disguise their outlaw symbol. Two nails are driven into the tree at the center of the cross. Next to one of the painted blaze-marks, the most westerly, someone has scratched in the bark with the point of a bayonet the words in HOC SIGNO VINGES. No one in the battery will admit to this act. Perhaps it is the work of the Underground. But it has not been ordered removed. Pale yellow stump-tops wink around the Bodenplatte, fresh chips and sawdust mix with older fallen leaves. The smell, childlike, deep, is confused by petrol and alcohol. Rain threatens, perhaps, today, snow. The crews move nervously graygreen. Shiny black India-rubber cables snake away into the forest to connect the ground equipment with the Dutch grid's 380 volts. Erwartung. . . . For some reason he finds it harder these days to remember. What is framed, dirt-blurry, in the prisms, the ritual, the daily iteration inside these newly cleared triangles in the forests, has taken over what used to be memory's random walk, its innocent image-gathering. His time away, with Katje and Gottfried, has become shorter and more precious as the tempo of firings quickens. Though the boy is in Blicero's unit, the captain hardly sees him when they're on duty—a flash of gold helping the surveyors chain the kilometers out to the transmitting station, the guttering brightness of his hair in the wind, vanishing among trees. . . . How strangely opposite to the African—a color-negative, yellow and blue. The Captain, in some sentimental overflow, some precognition, gave his African boy the name "Enzian," after Rilke's mountainside gentian of Nordic colors, brought down like a pure word to the valleys:

Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange des Bergrands

nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins Tal, die alle unsägliche, sondern ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben und blaun

Enzian.

"Omuhona. . . . Look at me. I'm red, and brown . . . black, omuhona. . . ."

"Liebchen, this is the other half of the earth. In Germany you would be yellow and blue." Mirror-metaphysics. Self-enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish symmetries.

[JBS]

Perhaps build up your Pynchon muscles by training them on The Crying of Lot 49 before dealing with the heavyweight stuff.

[Mandryka]

Perhaps build up your Pynchon muscles by training them on The Crying of Lot 49 before dealing with the heavyweight stuff.

It's good to find an English author from the past half century who is so uncompromising and so poetic.

[Papy Oli]

Gosh, I should have read the preview first   

Perhaps build up your Pynchon muscles by training them on The Crying of Lot 49 before dealing with the heavyweight stuff.

Noted, thank you Jeffrey!

[Valentino]

I'm reading Jens Malthe Fischer's Mahler biography.
It's a very different read to Lebrecht's Why Mahler?.

[Artem]

Reading this during lunch breaks at work. Well written, but nothing special so far.

[Papy Oli]

Settled on Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes as my ongoing read.

[ritter]

Settled on Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes as my ongoing read.

I'm thinking of starting it soon (got a copy of the Pléiade edition for a song).



Right now, though, enjoying this:



Paule Thévenin (1918 - 1993) met Antonin Artaud shortly after the latter was released from the Rodez asylum in 1946, and collaborated closely with him until his death in 1948 (she was, along with María Casarès, one of the female voices in the recording of Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu). She then went on to edit his complete works for Gallimard, an enterprise that kept expanding and reached 26 volumes, keeping her occupied for the remainder of her life (and included severe clashes with Artaud's relatives).  She meticulously transcribed the notebooks Artaud filled over many years, as well as letters, articles, interviews, etc.). A remarkable achievement for a person who was not a literary scholar (she had been trained as a psychiatrist but never finished her studies).

This book includes essays, letters, etc. about her relationship with Artaud (the man and his work).

EDIT: I knew the name of Paule Thévenin meant something to me beyond her association with Artaud. It was she who edited the texts of Pierre Boulez's Relevés d'apprenti (Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship) and Le pays fertile (The Fertile Land, his book on Paul Klee).

[Papy Oli]

I'm thinking of starting it soon (got a copy of the Pléiade edition for a song).

Nearly a quarter in myself. It has a nice flow to it.