catalog

Well-known member
I started reading the Prose Edda (norse foundational Myth, but written hundreds of years after vikings in Iceland) a few days ago and it's pretty good. Not quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be Greek or Biblical in tone, but it's more Hindu. Wacky and out there.

Couple of bits I've copied and sent people

He was silent when he returned home. He neither slept nor drank, and no one dared to speak to him.
You are raving, Loki,
and out of your mind,
why, Loki, do you not stop?

Also contained a detail about Troy being modern day Turkey which I never knew (there's a sort of grafted on bit where they are talking about how Hector maps to Odin or Thor, and Loki maps to Ulysses.

But I've put that down now cos Claudius the God has arrived, which I'm fully committed to, it's a good un. Just the level of intrigue and high stakes, plus now with all the stuff about Herod, who comes off as someone you could do a whole telly series on.

Interested to hear that scar city didn't do a lot for you Rich. I'm gonna get it soon and see what I think. As I said in the other thread, Robert aickman is sort of more my style (read another of his short stories and it was good) but I did also really enjoy 'From blue to black' in the end.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I wouldn't necessarily take that as a criticism. I'm just saying that it depressed me in that moment... partly cos of its power to take me into another world, a dark and cold and dirty one, and partly cos I was in a shitty situation. I actually found the book pretty intriguing and I was interested to read more about Joel Lane and I will probably read more of his stuff. I do in fact have criticisms, but they are quite distinct from what I said yesterday which were more related to the context and how my situation interacted with the book, than the book itself.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Ooh, nice find, thanks. I've got the collected Calligraphy Typewriters but looks like there's a fair bit of stuff I haven't seen in there, plus an introduction by Denise Levertov who I like as well.
There's no-one quite like him, but I have to be in a certain mood to really enjoy it.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
On a day off with hundreds of care plans

While I typed this @jenks gave the answer - a different night shift distraction (yet still worthwhile) fiction recommendation. Creepy, menacing, darkness, crime, doesn’t really matter slow/fast. Just like work, embrace the shadow
 
Just finished blood meridian, last read 20 years ago. All I could remember was the gunpowder making and the terminal shithouse scene, so it was like reading for the first time.

Now reading "an immense world" by ed yong, about animal senses, it's superb so far, learned so much.

Gratuitous holiday photo

20220718_122704.jpg
 

jenks

thread death
Also got The Real and The Romantic about English Art between the wars by Frances Spalding. There’s been a renewed interest in this period, a major re-evaluation that has rescued many painters from being seen as ‘twee’ almost Betjemen like to radical, experimental and exciting. I’m enjoying her digging up some total unknown painters alongside re-evaluating some that always hog the limelight.
 

jenks

thread death
On a day off with hundreds of care plans

While I typed this @jenks gave the answer - a different night shift distraction (yet still worthwhile) fiction recommendation. Creepy, menacing, darkness, crime, doesn’t really matter slow/fast. Just like work, embrace the shadow
Creepy menacing etc makes me think of the great Gordon Burns novels like Alma Cogan and Fullalove. Also David Peace’s GB1984 and also a different dark but brutal Young Skins Colin Barrett’s short story collection.
 

jenks

thread death
I just read The Go-Between for the first time... lots of things are classics for a reason I guess.
I love the Go Between - it plays into that strain of Lit that runs through Gatsby, Grand Meulnes, JL Cart’s Month in the Country, Proust even.
the film is great too.
 
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you

Well-known member
@jenks - finally got round to Dance Moves by Erskine. She's got a wonderful knack with descriptions.

"She had a basic face, as if someone in a hurry had drawn quick features on a pebble."

Brilliant
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I love the Go Between - it plays into that strain of Lit that runs through Gatsby, Grand Meulnes, JL Cart’s Month in the Country, Proust even.
the film is great too.
Weird thing I asked my mum what she'd read lately that I might like and she said... the Go-Between... strange synchronicity. I don't think we're alike but our tastes are somehow the same.
 

you

Well-known member
The Go-Between is wonderful. The Losey film is brilliant too. It's a great heat-wave book isn't it? One long pathetic fallacy. The desire, the heat, the tragedy, the storm.

But it's also a great novel about power - looking back and acknowledging exploitation of a child, and the very adult reasons for exploitation.
 

you

Well-known member
I have probably said this before but L.P. Hartley was similar to Aickman insofar as really yearning for that nostalgic Edwardian England.

"He deplored jazz and motorcycles and swans (which impeded his boating activities) and the working class. He fought a great deal with his servants (and indeed with his publishers) and wrote many stories about relationships between masters and servants."
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Jim Bouton, "Ball Four"

Been reading a lot of sports books the last year or so for something im trying to do, & most are pretty boring, even the supposedly salacious ones tend to be written pretty flat and have large expanses of basically nothing. This one is great, though, 1969 small time Arizona baseball, a pitcher never in the side (so far), full of vitriol and a good turn of phrase. Best thing I've read in a while. Not as credible as most of this thread perhaps but it's honestly boss
 

catalog

Well-known member
Just finished "You could do something amazing with your life [you are Raoul Moat]" on the recommendation of @you and its very good. I put down claudius the god and this book about the Shaver Mystery I've got on the go in order to burn through it.

@luka theres some very good bits where it goes through his bodybuilding regime, I'll paste them in for you
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I'm reading John Waters Mr Know-It-All, and while I can't recommend it to anyone who doesn't like his films, there is a chapter that is a pretty good primer to the sicko car crash teen death records that were popular in the late 50s and early 60s..


Nervous Norvus - Transfusion

ironically gruesome warning about unsafe driving


Mark Dinning - Teen Angel

released in 1960, and I'd play it every night before going to sleep, reimagining the stupid girl in the lyrics who was crushed by an oncoming train when she rushed back to her boyfriend's car stalled on the railway tracks to get his high school ring he had given her. "SPLAT!"


Ray Peterson - Tell Laura I Love Her

When our hero's car flips over, and in his last dying breath he begs us to, well, you know, the title, I would revel in he sorrow, the adolescent grief, the unfairness of our teenage lives.


The Shangri-las - Leader Of The Pack

took the car-wreck sound-effect teen soap opera to a new level of recorded anguished histrionics.


Jimmy Cross - I Want My Baby Back

Unable to live without his "baby", he digs up her coffin, climbs in, closes the lid, and sings the final verse, "I've got my baby back' from inside [..} the only rock-and-roll hit about necrophilia to ever crack Billboard's Top 100 list.
 
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