what are you reading now?

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I recently finished W. G. Hoskins's The Making of the English Landscape. Wonderful book - incredibly scholarly but written with a real sense of poetry too - in fact he quotes an awful lot of poetry. It ends with a heartfelt sort of paeon to how much of the landscape has been ruined, and was in the process of being ruined, when the first edition came out in the 1950s. In those days this was largely down to heavy industry and the takeover of much of rural England by the military because of the Cold War. Today most of the heavy industry is gone and the military presence greatly reduced, but the despoilation continues apace through road construction, low-density housing sprawl and commercial developments. Anyway it made me want to poke around the remains of the iron-age village at Chysauster in Cornwall and wander around Devon (which he pays particular attention to, having grown up here), trying to guess whether each ancient bank and hedge is the remains of mediaeval enclosures, the boundaries of a Saxon abbey or the estate of a wealthy Romano-British farmer. Intoxicating stuff.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
sounds alright, although i would never read that sort of book. but anything to inspire you to get out on road is a good one. i 'm suspicious of all the 'dont spoil nature' brigade, cos my favourite thing at the moment are pavements. but there you go.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
catalog said:
sounds alright, although i would never read that sort of book. but anything to inspire you to get out on road is a good one. i 'm suspicious of all the 'dont spoil nature' brigade, cos my favourite thing at the moment are pavements. but there you go.
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Oh but "don't spoil nature" isn't the point at all, because the whole thesis of the book is that the landscape is the product of thousands of years of human activity. It's more like "don't use megalithic monuments on Dartmoor as target practice for tank shells and grub up ancient hedgerows because one vast field is easier to plough than twenty smaller ones".

And he's not anti-town/city at all, just anti shit ugly ones.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
i somehow seem to be coming to the same conclusions regarding pavements, i favour these very particular ones now, rather than tarmac with loads of random going over. but im sure if i had different eyes i'd see some beauty in the tarmac too.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm reading Chris petit 'robinson' atm, cos it sounded good from a panel he was on with those as n Sinclair. And it is ok, but I just can't get into it. Partly I think cos I'm reading on phone0
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Years ago my friend organised a Q&A thing at Dalston Rio with Chris Petit, he showed a kind of psychogeographical short film, I have a feeling it may have been a new one but I could be wrong. Radio On is an interesting film - maybe not quite a good one - if you haven't seen it. I do lump him in with Sinclair and Patrick Keiller I guess, possibly cos of the name Robinson though apparently there is no connection... or is there?
This is what wikipedia says

Robinson (1993) is a novel about a man initially working in London's Soho in a job vaguely connected with the film industry, who meets the enigmatic title character and becomes involved in alcoholic excess and pornographic film production. It was Petit's first novel coming from his earlier career as a filmmaker. Nicholas Lezard compares it to JG Ballard and Patrick Hamilton. Merlin Coverley notes that the character Cookie indicates a debt to London low-life writer Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond). There is some confusion over the lead character's name, which appears to relate to a mysterious figure in Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, inspired by Robinson Crusoe; it was released around the same time as the first film of Patrick Keiller's Robinson trilogy, which Keiller claimed took the name from Kafka's Amerika but others, such as Iain Sinclair, have related to Céline and indirectly to Petit
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If I'm reading that correctly there is a suggestion that both Keiller and Petit were inspired by Celine - I have read Journey to the End of the Night but I don't remember that character that was obviously so important to both of them...
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
so there you go, that's the story of tiresias.
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There is a film based (loosely) on this about a Brazilian (I think) blind, transexual (transgender?) prostitute. I remember seeing it a few years back... what's it called now?
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Oh, that didn't take long to find

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362246/

Tiresia is at the same time woman and man, according to Greek Mythology. Here, Tiresia is a Brazilian transexual living with her brother in the outskirts of Paris. Terranova, an admirer of aesthetics, is a dreamer. His obsession with Tiresia leads him to kidnapping her. However, without her regular dose of hormones, Tiresia gradually starts to change back to a male. Displeased, Terranova blinds Tiresia and abandons her in the countryside. There, Anna takes charge of Tiresia, helping her recover.
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C

catalog

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
Years ago my friend organised a Q&A thing at Dalston Rio with Chris Petit, he showed a kind of psychogeographical short film, I have a feeling it may have been a new one but I could be wrong. Radio On is an interesting film - maybe not quite a good one - if you haven't seen it.
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ive not seen radio on, cos ive heard from a few different friends that its shit, and dont wanna disappoint myself. same sort of reasons as not seen field in england.

maybe the recording ive got which inspired me to investigate petit more is from that same thing organised by your friend. is it schtincter/purge guy?

IdleRich said:
I do lump him in with Sinclair and Patrick Keiller I guess, possibly cos of the name Robinson though apparently there is no connection... or is there?
This is what wikipedia says


If I'm reading that correctly there is a suggestion that both Keiller and Petit were inspired by Celine - I have read Journey to the End of the Night but I don't remember that character that was obviously so important to both of them...
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theres a quote at the very beginning of the robinson novel that may help here:

'Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall'

Weldon Kees, 'Aspects of Robinson'

but ive not followed it up yet. in the recordin give got, im sure petit talks about this confusion, and says that despite the connection with keiller, its a different robinson inspiration.

so robinson in this case is something in the air for both of them, but slightly different nonetheless. theres other examples of this happening, of things being in the air, sort of related, but actually different, but i cant think of any just now. i mean it happens with samples in music and stuff.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
so robinson in this case is something in the air for both of them
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Robinson in Space you could say.

maybe the recording ive got which inspired me to investigate petit more is from that same thing organised by your friend. is it schtincter/purge guy?
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I dunno what that is so probably not. It was a girl and the art charity she was connected with I reckon, there may have been more people involved in fact so possibly actually.

ive not seen radio on, cos ive heard from a few different friends that its shit
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Well I'm not gonna defend it. It's got some strong scenes and very good use of music at times. On the other hand it's also got Sting in it...
One thing I read about it somewhere that I thought was interesting (although I don't know if it is true) is that there is this bit where people react to the main character and, I think, kick him out of somewhere or something, and you're supposed to understand it's cos of his bright orange hair. Except there is no way you can know this cos the film is in black and white.
How many other British road movies are there though? You can tick off a whole genre in eighty minutes or whatever, what have you got to lose?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've been distracted from my worthy reading by Nick Kent - a book of his articles and now an autobiography. You can tell he's a bit of a twat, that he'd be annoying Irl, but I like his writing quite a bit and it's one of those books where I'm looking songs up on Spotify while I read and discovering stuff.

It makes really easy reading, in part cos it's all surface level, but also because it's about being passionate about music, which is basically the passion I've always had which I've never had to work at. Painting and literature involve a fair bit of brow furrowing. (though perhaps that's the legacy of having studied literature at university, condemned ever after to mentally annotate lines)The life enhancing properties of music have always seemed obvious to me. I have taken it for granted as a result.
 
version

version

Well-known member
I'm reading The Rush for Second Place atm. It's a collection of Gaddis' essays and critical writings. There's a good one on the player piano where he uses it to discuss erasing failure/the human element from the arts via technology.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Agapē Agape // The Secret History of the Player Piano

PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE
PIANIST
HE IS DOING HIS BEST

Posted in a Leadville saloon, this appeal caught the passing eye of Art in its ripe procession of one through the new frontier of the eighties, where the frail human element still abounded even in the arts themselves. "The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous," Oscar Wilde observed: was it the 'doing his best' that rankled? redolent of chance and the very immanence of human failure that that century of progress was consecrated to wiping out once and for all; for if, as another mother-country throwback had it, all art does constantly aspire toward the condition of music, there in a Colorado mining-town saloon all art's essential predicament threatened to be laid bare with the clap of a pistol shot just as deliverance was at hand, born of the beast with two backs called Arts and Sciences whose rambunctious coupling came crashing the jealous enclosures of class, taste, and talent, to open the arts to Americans for democratic action and leave history to bunk.

[...]

Roused by the steam whistle, democracy's claims devoured technology's promise, banishing failure to inherent vice where in painting it remains today, and America sprang full in the face of that dead philosopher's reproach "to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls." By the nineties the arts had already begun their retirement at Hull House, where they were introduced as therapy; while in the streets the discovery of Spencer's "immutable law" drove Jack London howling "Give me the fact, man! The irrefragable fact!"
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
version said:
How far through are you?
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Finished it. Haven't read a book that fast in a long time.

It was definitely worth a read but it often falls prey to that tendency autobiographies have towards "needless to say, I had the last laugh" Partridge-isms.

Like I said, "The Dark Stuff" is better. Definitely a fan of his now though.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Thinking about it, now, he also has a similar chip on his shoulder about not being university educated to the one Partridge has in his "autobiography".
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
I think he did a bio of Abel Ferrara that I read a while ago,, but can't remember much of it. Apart from one bit where he was talking about Ferrara's use of colour, blues and reds, can't remember what they were supposed to symbolise tho
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Does anyone else get an email every time this thread is updated? I suddenly started getting them a week or two back... anyone know how I turn that off?
 
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