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I also kept telling myself this would be the summer I'd really finish In Search of Lost Time
lol
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Jul 1, 2021 11:12
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Nov 17, 2025 13:01
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I'm reading translations of haiku/senryu, a lot of them are bawdy which is a nice enrichment of the typically orientalist philosophical-seasonal framework they're placed in
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Jul 1, 2021 11:18
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quote:
It is not at all clear that a correct understanding of how the world works is basic to a successful manipulation of the world
iirc isn't this a point that francis bacon made that then like hundreds of years of "empiricists" went on to misunderstand? difference between what works and why it works.
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Jul 3, 2021 07:57
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rip richard lewontin, the guy i learned about from this thread
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Jul 12, 2021 16:01
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war and peace ruled and then i read primeval and other times by olga tokarczuk which is s multi generational magical realist novel that felt a lot like polish 100 years of solitude but its much shorter which i think made it work less well bc the pace was too fast for there to be much gravity
now im reading the rings of saturn by w g sebald and its great
drat dude you've been reading so many stone cold classic works of genius over the past few years. what's it feel like? can you actually feel your soul expanding?
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Aug 19, 2021 03:13
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i’m on a reread of Ulysses
after that I’m either gonna hit Trieste by Dasa Drndic or Journey by moonlight bu Antal Szerb
i forget if i already posted about this but an unabridged audiobook of Finnegan's Wake was recently released. it's the first unabridged audio version and it's really good... it's still garbeldy barbeldy of course but it's wonderful to listen to even if you lose track of what's going on
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Aug 19, 2021 03:16
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i'm reading "a commonwealth of thieves" which is about the early british settlement of australia and it's good brisk reading, very enjoyable
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Aug 19, 2021 03:17
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hero poo poo, i think you're first person i've ever heard of who's actually read the whole thing, i'm pretty sure even marx never read it all
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Aug 19, 2021 12:07
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Glenn Ganges in: The River At Night, a graphic novel about time and having a hard time getting to sleep at night. Very relatable.
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Aug 25, 2021 18:38
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huh, interesting. that article identifies exactly what i hate so much about salinger; the creepy sentimentalizing of childhood as a time of supposed "innocence," the obsession with memorializing that "lost" innocence. to make children his avatars of innocence he denies them any kind of personhood. i don't like it!
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Aug 26, 2021 13:46
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No that happens in every translation I imagine and in the original, I can't really put my finger on why I disliked the Montcrieff translation, it just felt stilted and... I guess cautious to me. As far as I know it's not an inaccurate translation so I guess it comes down to preference.
Incidentally the poet Anne Carson has a long weird essay about Albertine that ran in the London Review of Books in 2014 that I like a lot, you can see it here.
i fkin love anne carson, and i love her "essays" more than i love her "poems." her essays are imo her most genuinely original contribution to poetry
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Aug 26, 2021 13:54
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Me too. I always kind of lump her in with Susan Howe in that her essays mean a lot more to me than her poems.
yes absolutely, they are two of a kind and i love them, although with howe i would have a harder time choosing between the poems and the essays...carson's work runs on a real continuum such that the line between essay and poem gets blurred, like "the glass essay" is "actually" a poem, whereas howe's stuff is more discontinuous.
another one who's sort of verging on that territory is alice oswald. do you know her? she's a classicist like carson. some of her poems are indescribably beautiful.
A little while ago one of my friends bought that little box set of chapbooks and pamphlets she put out because he said he didn't like it and was probably never going to take it off the shelf again, but I never got around to reading it, maybe I'll do that this weekend.
I also really liked that weird Catullus themed box set she did about a decade ago, I remember I was living in an apartment with a long corridor leading to a set of stairs and one night my little poetry group came over and we just unfurled the entire thing down the hallway. I wonder if I have that kicking around somewhere too or if it got lost in the half dozen moves between now and then.
Nox, yeah, it's good, also way overwhelming
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Aug 26, 2021 18:28
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Only Memorial and Nobody both of which I love a lot. What's another good one to read? Also on that note do you know Caroline Bergvall's stuff?
dart is wonderful especially if you have a couple of hours to set aside and read the whole thing out loud cover to cover. it's not long. i mean, it's long for a poem but it's not long for a book. falling awake is good too, there's a poem about tithonus called "46 minutes in the life of the dawn" at the end that's both an unbelievably gorgeously precise description of dawn arriving and a headily philosophical musing about death and desire and all those good poetry things and it has a neat gimmick which is that it has hash marks down the side each side which represent a second each so if you read and pause as indicated by the hash marks then it will take 46 minutes, and if you do it starting at 4:17 am on the summer solstice it will coincide precisely with the actual sunrise. both of those poems i mentioned i would call "murmury"...she's really great at murmurs.
Also on that note do you know Caroline Bergvall's stuff?
no! checking her out right now.
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Aug 27, 2021 18:18
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picked my flannery o'connor collected stories back up to go through again. forgot about one of my favorites, dipshit and the gorilla...i may have the title a little wrong. its about a dipshit and a gorilla.
she's a great writer
lol she never would have used the word "dipshit," she was way too much of a lady, but that's a better title for it than "enoch and the gorilla." have you read wise blood? it's got a reworked version of that story in it
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Aug 27, 2021 18:19
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its so wild that he was like 5 or 6 of the greatest modernist writers of all time
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Aug 27, 2021 18:21
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and he did it all while being a professional failure and an alcoholic shut in who never had sex. life goals.
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Aug 27, 2021 18:22
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i'm reading the moviegoer and it's super good, i would've given it a national book award too
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Sep 19, 2021 02:22
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i'm also reading wake: the hidden history of women-led slave revolts, which sounds like an academic or pop-history book but which is actually a nonfiction graphic memoir about/by a historian telling the story of them researching their diss on the issue. i am not a big fan of the art style but the story is very compelling. it's hard to make scholarship into a story, particularly an emotionally affecting one, but she does a really good job imo.
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Sep 19, 2021 16:19
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I have this and I want to read it
but I'm looking at the upcoming week and I'm probably not going to read anything that's not an undergrad paper or a comic book.
at first i thought each of those people had one weird claw but now i see it's the bird that has the claws
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Sep 19, 2021 16:20
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here's my problem with proust, he's not funny enough to write long books. if you write long books they either have to be super exciting like the count of monte cristo or they have to be funny like moby dick. a long solemn book is a slog. i like my solemnity quick and to the point. give me a nice solemn poem and i'm doing fine
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Sep 21, 2021 01:51
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I disagree that Proust isn’t funny, pretty much every volume has scenes that I’ve laughed loudly at 
post one! this is not a challenge or anything, i would just love to be proven wrong and i like to laugh
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Sep 22, 2021 16:11
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"funny scenes from proust" would be a good resource thread
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Sep 22, 2021 16:12
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here’s an example from the latter 2/3rds of Swann’s Way
lol you're right that is straight up funny. maybe i need to have a better attitude
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Sep 22, 2021 17:44
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Finally finished Delilo's Underworld and I was underwhelmed.
it's got a great opening scene and then immediately becomes pretty darn bad imo. it's no white noise. not even a mao II.
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Sep 28, 2021 13:30
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he should of called it underwhelmed instead of underworld
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Sep 28, 2021 13:31
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i was reading some of this beat collection put together with a preface by ginsberg (ew) but i read the burroughs parts which were funny and the amiri baraka and joanne kyger parts which were cool. anyone an expert on beat stuff lol? if there are any names recced i will check out what they have to say, in this book
i liked how nakedly honest joannes stuff was, it was harder to relate to barakas stuff since reasons i dont rly need to say. burroughs was funny when he was liek drat with these techniques.... infinite rimbaud lmao
i know a fair amount about the beats but what's your objection to ginsberg?
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Nov 20, 2021 13:20
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i guess i don't need to know the ginsberg thing to make recs because the poets i would rec aren't like ginsberg anyway. people usually sleep on the west coast beats which is a real shame. i like them better. imo the east coast writers were useful for getting you to the new york school which owns but they were mostly loving around not fully formed while the west coasters were solid, having had robinson jeffers as a precursor so
gary snyder (the most important imo)
philip whalen
lew welch
(rexroth already been mentioned)
lawrence ferlinghetti
kenneth patchen was maybe more beat-adjacent than strictly beat and bicoastal but he has some real good poems, and i have a soft spot for anti-war poets
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Nov 20, 2021 13:41
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its the nambla thing lol. his texts are fine that just feels really sketch
ill check those guys out been really aiming to move past burroughs* and kerouac so i can stop being a basic baby
*i know hes problematic too
yeah the reason i was asking was because i was thinking "i guess i should tell him not to read any biographies of burroughs..." lol
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Nov 20, 2021 21:21
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oh yeah I really do like Gary Snyder. I haven't read him in years because I gifted all of my Snyder books to a younger relative but he was mega important to me in college. bad guy, do you have any thoughts on the Berkeley Renaissance crew? I feel like I've become slightly less well-disposed towards the beats because I spent so much time over the past few years really immersing myself in people who considered themselves like... diametrically opposed to the beats, although I guess I really don't see that much air between them once you get outside of the immediate orbit of Spicer and Duncan.
i think they were very Serious about poetry, which is both an indictment and praise -- even when the tone is light they can't escape the awareness that they're doing something important with language, which makes it a heavy kind of lightness vs. say the kind of (seems to me) genuine light touch of o'hara for instance who was able to bring a lightness even to heavy things. there's a kind of antic disposition they can adopt which is incredibly grim -- stevens had that quality too. a lot of the high modernists did, and the berkeley guys are i think more directly in that lineage of the high modernists than the beats were even if pound and williams provided somewhat of a bridge to the beats. they were aiming for something self consciously within the established ambit of poetry, something which provided definition and strength to the core 20th c. poetry rather than extended its scope. this all sounds rather negative but i don't feel negatively about them; there's a tendency to deprecate people who are maintaining and reimagining the parts of the house that have already been built but without them the whole thing falls apart and you have nowhere to sit when it rains. to be clear i am not suggesting that they made no technical innovations -- i'd actually class them along with the black mountain school in terms of their formal flexibility and inventiveness, but all this stuff i'm saying about them i'd say about the black mountain school too. because they were formally experimental and technically innovative it's not normally acknowledged how conservative they were in that they were attempting to carry forward an idea of who a poet is and what a poem does which could be traced in an unbroken line all the way back to the romantics. whereas what the beats were doing was kind of manifesting an occasional spirit which skips along history like a flat stone on a pond, so it maybe stretches way farther back but it's got all kinds of holes in it, no density and only superficial continuity. the forms may be the same but the contexts are entirely different. you can see why the berkeley guys did not like what the beats were doing. but i think you're right that in retrospect there's less distance there than there might have seemed since the difference was less in the language than it was in a certain conception of the poet's role in public life. now that they're all dead and times are different, what we really have left is the language and language trends towards a rapprochement over time. the farther away you get from two objects, the closer they appear to each other.
idk i've never met a style of poetry i didn't like although there are individual poets i hate. the one thing i really don't like is when poets get bitchy with each other. this is of course something they do all the time and something other people take genuine and meaningful pleasure from so i realize it's my problem
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Nov 20, 2021 22:06
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i agree with everything you wrote. even ginsberg knew the great majority of his poems were pretty bad...iirc somewhere he said he was just "whittling" a lot of the time. it's also true that he was a good performer, much much better than most modern poets, and a lot of his worse poems were probably still pretty good to actually hear. and there's mountains of evidence that he was a pretty skeevy dude especially in his later years.
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Nov 22, 2021 16:10
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I saw John Ashbery drop a shrimp on the floor at a thing and he didn't think anybody was watching and he just swooped down and picked it up and ate it.
loo ol
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Nov 22, 2021 16:51
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this thread brought me back to robert duncan and he's good, poets are good
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Nov 22, 2021 16:57
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after so many failed attempts throughout life, I finally properly read A Void by Georges Perec last week and very much enjoyed how dumb but also fun it is.
Yeah man it's such a good book, the part with all the rewrites of all the famous poems is one of my favorite things + unless you read it in French it's also the most insane act of translation that has ever been accomplished
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Jan 28, 2022 22:18
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im reading lincoln in the bardo by george saunders and enjoying it quite a bit
it's very good
before that i read my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh i thought it was very good
been meaning to read this
before that i read blackshirts and reds by michael parenti. i didnt think it was very good.
agreed he sucks + is a dumb rear end
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Jan 28, 2022 22:21
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I read Peter Pan on a whim because I wanted something light and fun. It was really quite horrifying and sad. Peter comes across as some kind of narcissistic imp who parasitically haunts the female bloodline of this one specific British family, luring away each generation of girls and then discarding them when they're used up. He also turns the boys into killers (yes, even John and Michael have blood on their hands), and they keep a running bodycount like they're playing some sort of FPS game. Sure, Captain Hook is also a merciless killer, but at least he comes across as satire. Also, the father goes mad with grief when his kids disappear and spends months or possibly years living like a dog, going around on hands and knees and sleeping in a cage.
yeah man, peter and wendy is a really disturbing book
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Apr 23, 2022 23:53
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*in a bo pepper voice* wool
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Apr 29, 2022 01:48
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bo pepper will be pleased...
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Apr 29, 2022 08:48
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i read The Fifth Season and hated it, i do not understand why people think it's so great. if it did not have such good reviews i would have been like meh, but there's nothing as annoying as reading a book that people act like it's a work of genius and it's just ok beach reading
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Apr 30, 2022 15:40
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Have you never read them before?
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May 2, 2022 15:33
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Nov 17, 2025 13:01
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Never. I'm super excited. I saw the movie with that same friend and it was so good. Can't wait to finish this so I can get started on the "trilogy" lol
Listen to the original BBC radio series first IMO
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May 4, 2022 16:34
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Jul 1, 2021 11:12
