what are you reading now?

[IdleRich]

Yeah, I didn’t mean it as a criticism, just that the book was a bit too successful in bringing that particular kind of second hand low-key misery to life.

 

[IdleRich]

Something so washed out, people going through the motions of their worn out lives in a worn out world.

 

[jenks]

Something so washed out, people going through the motions of their worn out lives in a worn out world.

That’s very similar to how I felt after read the his last one - the sea will rise again or whatever it was called. It was very good but it was all about these aimless, washed up people, drifting, failing, slowly erasing themselves. He was very good at grubby rented rooms and tawdry caffs. I was impressed at how well he described it all but I wouldn’t want to rush back into that world.

 

[IdleRich]

That’s very similar to how I felt after read the his last one - the sea will rise again or whatever it was called. It was very good but it was all about these aimless, washed up people, drifting, failing, slowly erasing themselves. He was very good at grubby rented rooms and tawdry caffs. I was impressed at how well he described it all but I wouldn’t want to rush back into that world.

It's odd that he writes "real world" based books where he really explores this, and then creates a fantasy sci-fi world with bizarre characters and invincible brain-stealing monster machines - and uses that to dig into the exact same thing. Or maybe it's not odd at all.

 

[version]

Some of his short stories are good. They don't really go anywhere, but it feels like something's happened; that you've been made aware of something you can't quite put your finger on.

 

[IdleRich]

Tempted by this... I opened a Google tab and it suggested that I would be interested in this book, a little bit worrying that they seemingly know I have a grandmother from Orkney but the book does look interesting.

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles

Find out more about Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles

www.panmacmillan.com

 

[william_kent]

One year (I was perhaps about nine) there was a side-show I longed to see. I do not know why, or what I expected. It was called “The Leopard Lady”, and I begged my mother to let me go. She gave me the twopence and stood outside while I went in. It was late afternoon, October twilight, and the tent was empty, except for a pale woman in a purple robe who was vomiting horribly on to the ground. I stood and stared. Out of the shadows came a man with waist-length black hair, a black cloak flapping like wings, a cravat, ringed fingers, piercing eyes and a short leg with an iron extension clamped to his boot.

“What do you want?” he said.

I was really frightened, but I had paid my twopence and as a good Yorkshire boy I was not going out till I had seen what I went to see.

“The Leopard Lady,” I answered.

He spoke to the woman, in a showfolk’s jargon, that I did not understand. She pulled herself together, wiped her mouth, un-fastened her robe.
I saw a lot of flesh, all marked with yellow-brown spots in roughly the form of an animal’s paw-marks. The showman said something about the woman’s mother having been frightened by a leopard. I concluded he meant something unmentionable; and also that it was not true. As a show it disappointed me greatly; as a glimpse of a life I could only darkly conjecture, it haunted me like a nightmare for years.

As soon as I had looked and been invited to touch her spotted limbs, the Leopard Lady folded her purple robe round her again and went back to the business of being sick. I hurried out of the tent and was promptly sick also.

That was my first meeting with Ironfoot Jack, whom I was to know later in Soho as a kindly and fascinating character…

The above anecdote from Hubert Nicholson is quoted in the introduction to The Surrender of Silence: The Memoirs of Ironfoot Jack, King of the Bohemians

Unfortunately it is the finest piece of prose in the whole book. Ironfoot Jack is one of those characters who appears in books by others, but did not have any literary ability of his own. He didn't even write his memoirs - he dictated them. He is sometimes described as a "raconteur" but on this evidence it is hard to see why. This could have been a really interesting insight into a world that no longer exists but he gets a bit repetitive and I had to force myself to finish it. I probably need to find the biography of him which covers his fairground years and is apparently a complete hatchet job.

 

[catalog]

I liked the Melchior - it got progressively weirder and more interesting. Kind of Firzcarraldo at its best.

I'm near the end now and it's coming together. Brando's story is particularly intense.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I picked up a very slim book - a novella really, I suppose - by Bolaño, titled By Night in Chile, in a charity shop ages ago, and started reading it yesterday. It was weird seeing such a small book by him, for a start, after the behemoth that is 2666. The style is very idiosyncratic, as it's told in the first person almost entirely in the form of reminiscence, anecdote or almost stream-of-consciousness musings. There's virtually no dialogue, and what little there is is those without quotation marks, which reminds me a lot of Sebald. It's also very hard to stop reading, as it's not broken up into chapters or even paragraphs, so there's nowhere to think "I'll leave it there for now and pick it up later."

There's a lot of the same preoccupations as with 2666 - the complicated lives and psyches of artists, especially writers (funny thing for a writer to obsess over, eh?); the relationship between Latin America and Europe; 20th century history, especially WWII.

I like it so far - will attempt to finish it this evening. Anyone else read it?

 

[william_kent]

finished the paperback of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood last night

the thing that struck me about it was the format - it's the correct size for a paperback - once upon a time all paperbacks were the same size, it made putting them on shelves easy on the eye, all the tops aligned...

but then publishers realised they could charge more if the book was bigger... but that's a nightmare for someone with a lot of books, when they are all weird sizes, and when you run out of shelves the odd sizes make stacking piles tricky..having to put the larger ones at the bottom of the pile or else you end up with wobbly stacks

 

[version]

but then publishers realised they could charge more if the book was bigger... but that's a nightmare for someone with a lot of books, when they are all weird sizes, and when you run out of shelves the odd sizes make stacking piles tricky..having to put the larger ones at the bottom of the pile or else you end up with wobbly stacks

Yeah, this irritates me too. Something like the collected k-punk book is just stupid. The thing's almost the size of a games console.

 

[william_kent]

it's like if someone decided with vinyl that 7", 10", and 12" were too uniform and fuck it, lets do a 15" or a 23" and then everyone else does stupid sizes and then the stupid shelves from Ikea are no longer any use

edit: I know there are some polyvinyl 8" dub plates out there but at least they can fit amongst the 10"s

 

[woops]

finished the paperback of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood last night

i've read this, it's ten times better than the film. much more hollywood anecdote and info gives you a much better idea of what the tarantino project is all about

 

[william_kent]

i've read this, it's ten times better than the film. much more hollywood anecdote and info gives you a much better idea of what the tarantino project is all about

I liked that the Manson stuff was over halfway through, totally incidental

also the way he slipped a critique of Kurosawa into one of the opening chapters

 

[woops]

I liked that the Manson stuff was over halfway through, totally incidental

also the way he slipped a critique of Kurosawa into one of the opening chapters

check out that eye of the beholder @william_kent you of all posters will not be disappointed

 

[william_kent]

check out that eye of the beholder @william_kent you of all posters will not be disappointed

just ordered it...

I should mention that @IdleRich once recommended a book to me, "Jesus's Son" ( Denis Johnson ), which was right up my street - spot on - I forgot to tell him that he was totally correct in thinking I would like it

also, another excellent @IdleRich recommendation was Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion" which I've been meaning to write something about but I am still pondering...

 

[IdleRich]

Ah wicked, glad to hear that - Jesus' Son is a beautiful book which surely anyone here would like, whereas to appreciate Raven... I'm not saying one actually has to be evil, but a certain sympathy for the darker corners of the psyche is a distinct advantage. Glad I wasn't wrong.

Eye of Beholder is also worth a read though never quite understood Woops' obsession with it.

 

[woops]

Eye of Beholder is also worth a read though never quite understood Woops' obsession with it.

yeah i'd say that was a fair use of the word

NB avoid the ewen mcgregor film version at all costs

 

[IdleRich]

yeah i'd say that was a fair use of the word

NB avoid the ewen mcgregor film version at all costs

It's a book about obsession of course so that's appropriate.

 

[IdleRich]

I've been struggling to read the last novel by Alain robbe-Grillet, thought I had a fairly strong stomach but page after page after page of extremely graphic, horrifically nasty, sexual torture of extremely young girls quite quickly grew both disgusting and boring.