Booth # 2: Bookworms Corner

[samplestiltskin]

It either sullies the memory of Curtis and makes you realise he was a controlling, mentally abusive, self-absorbed twat, or it's the tale of an embittered wife who was left for a younger woman and decided to avenge herself.[/i]

Well. That sucks. Guess I've always got Thurber to fall back on.

[mellie]

The last book I read was by David Pelsner... originally three books, but he combined it into one. VERY good. A biography of sorts.

I read it in australia on my beach.

[JACkory]

Still plodding through War And Peace.
I am about 300 pages into it, and it is picking up a bit of steam. About 1150 pages to go...

Have also been spending a lot of time in the book of Daniel and the letters to the Galatians and Ephesians.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

JACkory said:

Have also been spending a lot of time in the book of Daniel and the letters to the Galatians and Ephesians.

Are there any decent action scenes?

[Rit]

Jesus, i read that Deborah Curtis biog of Ian quite a fwe times.. mostly because of the paucity of much Joy Division books out there.

I think she had a point, Ian curtis was abusive.. i don't buy into the myth the Ian was a holy saint all of the time.. he was a manchester toughie in the end, who was as yet capable of poetic feeling. I think he would likely have been quite the joker on tour, when he was not busy being depressed over his oncoming epilepsy and his own huge expectations for himself.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

I suspect you're right on all counts there Rit. Always hard to find your idols have feet of clay though, innit?

[Rit]

and especialy hard when that idol happens to be ian curtis.. i mean, just watching him perform "Transmission" or "Shadowplay" on the few vids i've ever seen of him drives home how special he was (whether by accident or not).

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Have you seen 24 Hour Party People yet?

A bit of an ego-stroke for Tony Wilson, admittedly, and to be taken with a pinch of salt. But some of the recreated Joy Div footage was excellent, especially Martin Hannet's character. Hannet was a pretty fundamental part of Unknown Pleasures.

I especially enjoyed the portrayal of Peter Hook as a heartless bastard who robbed cigarettes off a prone Curtis whilst he was having an epileptic fit.

[Rit]

yeah, that was a good movie. i didn't quite like all the wasted footage on the Happy Mondays, but the first half was great. Tony Wilson is portrayed as quite the impressario..

[Meursault]

Well I bought James Joyce's Ulyesses and Exiles. I also have a book of some of his poetry i picked up a while ago which i quite like. Any thoughts?

[Rit]

Reading Ulyssess was a tough slog for me when i tried it two years ago. I used to take it to work to try and work through it on lunch breaks.. My manager told me to stick with it.

but i gave up halfway

[Thorngrub]

[glow=yellow,2,300]Well I bought James Joyce's... Any thoughts? [/glow]


As I ream through the memorycoil lanterwise upon my trail, I deem to think it through and then to drink a slew of pennywhens. To you! (I do, and din't it ever?) See the names as crystaldense as foggeries trace through the fence. I'd felt as such were it through talk that terror's tiny dinner platter felt a winsome tearful winding way about the gridlock ironplay. In short, I feel as rhythms do when interchoked twixt me and you: a brightest eyeful in a ware of rippling mirror centerpulled in wayward waters of the feare who crippled nannies in the rude. 'twasn't our progenitors who pappy-danced in wuthering depths, but only our fields of heat and yield who so proper felled the mustard tree (whose seeds hath winded on the sail and rooted deep in you and me). Hence I say 'tis a proper leaning to a tree if wherewithall and rent you say to dip a learned eye'n the way. A valued essence pressed from without may allocate a droplet about thine duct's crusty passageway into the mines of all yore's chitterings amidst the pines (and the wind might chisel in your name among the passageways of the dead and maimed). So yes it's best to be prepared and delve into the hammerstare of a cilia-ridden occupation's ordinary literal fare. Take care! and sleep under thou vacuum room, but don't take precaution as your proof. Any halls ye memorize shall haunt your children's bright demise. One must assure oneself it is best undertaken whilst striving to recollect your own grave's thinking.

[Mary]

I actually really disliked 24 Hour Party People - I hated its smug self-reflexive irony. That tone just doesn't sit well with me at all. I didn't feel like I really learned anything about Manchester or the kind of social context which produced this scene. I did enjoy some of the Joy Division scenes but that's just cause I'm such a JD nut. I loved the scene when they're driving home from the recording sessions listening to Disorder on the car stereo and it sounds so fucking beautiful... I guess the other problem is that I find the Happy Mondays utterly insufferable, so having so much of the movie devoted to them was just torture for me. I'd rather have learned about a less well-known but more interesting band, like A Certain Ratio...

Oh, yeah, books. OK. So as usual I'm in the middle of like a dozen books at the same time (although I did finally finish The Indiscrete Jewels) but I'd like to recommend one amazing non-fiction book that I blew through 150 pages of in one sitting cause it was so fascinating:

Mike Davis - City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

So for those who don't know, Mike Davis is kind of everywhere these days - he's probably the world's most famous urban theorist, and he just writes absolutely brilliant stuff about cities that brings together political history, art history, social theory, urban theory, architecture, literary analysis... it's just virtuoso stuff. The book on Los Angeles is totally eye-opening and totally depressing on top of it, as it outlines all the reasons why L.A. is the total fucking mess that it is and reveals all the fucked up politics behind L.A.'s ghastly suburban sprawl. At the same time he digs up all the forgotten rebel movements in L.A.'s history, the Black and Chicano Arts movements and the avant-garde street theater movement and the German-Jewish emigres who fled Hitler and settled in L.A. in the 1930s, etc etc. For someone like me who knows nothing whatsoever about city planning, the book is totally revelatory, and I've learned a ton about classic theories of urbanity. Not to mention the endless layers of corruption that gave birth to Los Angeles as we know it today.

I should say that Davis is a far far lefty and it shows in the way he mixes his critique of capitalism with his critique of LA. But he's so unbelievably erudite, even if you don't particularly care for the politics, if you have any interest at all in cities, you should learn a ton from the book...

NP: R.E.M. - Document (song: Exhuming McCarthy)

Cheers,
M

[Thorngrub]

[glow=yellow,2,300]if you have any interest at all in cities,[/glow]

That does sound interesting. I'll have to keep my eye out & fingers crossed for this "Mike Davis" you write of. Novels about cities:

DHALGREN, by Samuel R. Delany
His famous 1974 anti-novel (of sorts) starts like this:
"to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind"

Thus begins a sprawling, 700+pg surrealistic odyssey depicting one man's journey into a city cut off from the rest of the world by an undisclosed "reality storm" that has isolated major cities from each other, and disrupted the very fabric of time + space, so that at certain times, certain streets in Bellona (the fictional city which is, at heart, the protagonist of the book as much as The Kid is) shift and change, are no longer named the same, turn in different directions, and become otherwise non-negotiable and dangerous to walk about upon.
What makes Delany's novel so compelling is that the author brings us along with our protagonist (who can't remember his name, and hence is only known as "The Kid") on his journey of self-discovery as he gets to know the inhabitants of the city of Bellona. As he discovers his penchant for writing poetry, we are taken along on a painstaking (and yes, "Joycean") tour-de-force examining the most close-up details of his experience, down to how and why he chooses certain words over others in the composition of his poetry. It is a sort of decomposition that reflects the inherent chaotic nature of the raging elemental, molecular storm going on that no one has the least clue as to its properties or significanse. A massive disaster novel whose intimate setting is the human heart and the communicative process -- DHALGREN has changed generations of readers who were unwittingly hooked in from page one, and dragged through a splintering, visionary excursion into an inner, violent world of self-realization. It is the novel that exposed me to the virus of Samuel Delany -- perhaps our most learned (and certainly amongst our most talented) man of letters. To read Delany is to take the ultimate challenge in confrontational, symbolic meaning in fiction. He razes contemporary structures of language & reconstructs them into pristine, crystal clear passages of prose that may perplex at first glance, but if merely concentrated upon, will unfurl within the mind's eye devastatingly focused ideas.
But as William Gibson suggested in his introduction to the new oversize edition of Dhalgren, "I distrust few things more deeply than acts of literary explication". So in the end, it is only up to you, dear reader, to take that brave first step into the leaf-swirled surrounds of the city of Bellona. If and when you do -- remember that you are not going in alone.

[Thorngrub]

I'm currently reading Chuck Palahniuk's DIARY. Talk about one helluva depressing read. But somehow Chucky has got his hooks in me and is dragging me moaning through the coals. I just have to know how it all turns out. Bastard.