Top Ten Books

[Corpsey]

Yeah it's such a quotable quote but I can't stand the thinking behind it...as if there's only one 'proper' way to write...so damn conservative, the kind of conservatism that would deny the value of Henry Miller, Joyce, Burroughs (of course)...Celine?

I agree with your general point but Joyce surely would belong to the ranks of writers who pore over every sentence and plan structure rigorously (although he said something like 'the good comes in the writing' so I don't suppose he planned TOO strictly). There's the famous anecdote about how Joyce told a friend of his that he had been working all day and had managed about three sentences, but was happy because he had got the words ordered exactly as he wanted.

Then again I suppose you might just be commenting on his formal radicalism?

 

[Guilhèm de Peitieus]

There's the famous anecdote about how Joyce told a friend of his that he had been working all day and had managed about three sentences, but was happy because he had got the words ordered exactly as he wanted.

I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?
“I have been working hard on it all day,” said Joyce.
“Does that mean that you have written a great deal?” I said.
“Two sentences,” said Joyce.
…“You have been seeking the mot juste?” I said.
“No,” said Joyce. “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it…my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians episode…My hero is going to lunch. But there is a seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king’s daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women’s silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are:

Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.

You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged.

(Frank Budgen, The Making of Ulysses (London, 1934), 20.)

 

[Buick6]

Boredom - Moravia
Ticket the Exploded - Burroughs
Collected tales of H P Lovecraft
Man in the high castle - P K Dick
Scar Lover - Harry Crews
Crime and Punishment - dostoyevsky
Super Cannes - J G Ballard
Dr. Adder - K W Jeter
Slam - Lewis Shiner
The Dead all have the same skin - Boris Vian

They're my favourtie books, anyway, not sure if they are the 'greatest'.

 

[STN]

One of my absolute favourite books is Prospero's Cell by Laurence Durrell.

 

[version]

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Frank O Hara, Complete Poems
The Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare (a cheat, I guess, as, like all scholars, I really read the Ardens...)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion
J K Huysmans, En Route
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Joseph Heller, Good as Gold

That was hard. Also, I'm surprised by the number of novels I love!

i found celine a bit dull.
i'm sure its my fault.
my list would be quite teenage becasue i suppose i am an eternal teenager.
and i still like what excited me as a teenager.
so
rimbaud-a season in hell
rilke-duino elegies
blake-can i have the complete works?
burroughs-can i have the complete works? no? ok, nova express.
eliot-selected (this is legitimate i feel. i mostly read 4 queartets and wasteland)
pound-cantos (please dont gloat craner)
dostoyevsky-notes from underground (not saying its the best, but its the first one i read and it made an impression)
nietzsche-zarathrusta (bravura!)
yeats-a vision (ive never read this all, but it has to be in my list and i love it to death)
david jones-the anathemata

maybe i don't really mean the last one... give me some time to reconsisder. novels are shit.
i suppose get more pleasure reading me than anyone else though.

Would you still run with these?

 

[pattycakes_]

That last line by luka is a sure bet

 

[luka]

More or less. Probably not the David Jones.

 

[version]

I'd assumed the poetry and Burroughs would stay, but thought the others might be up in the air.

 

[craner]

Probably not.

 

[craner]

Nomad had such a sexy book list.

 

[version]

You should do another top ten and write a bit about each one.

 

[version]

Craner's Top Ten Sexy Books.

 

[luka]

Im still a teenager craner keeps trying to grow up. I guess that's the difference.

 

[luka]

Nomad was one of those hothoused new york brats. Millions of em, all too precocious for their own good, usually start therapy before puberty.

 

[version]

I don't know them, but that's not hard to picture after reading this:

When I was 13 or so, I made a point of reading everything Eliot wrote. That was after Dickens and before Balzac (who struck me as boring even back then)...

 

[poetix]

Nomad went a bit batty (to use the technical term) - came at one point to the firm conviction that I was hacking and disabling her router, remote-controlling the volume on her computer, and putting nasty movies on her Netflix queue, amongst other nefarious acts of cyber-witchery. She sent a long message to my then-wife denouncing me for these activities, coincidentally at the moment where we were definitively separating, which did nothing to improve ex-wife's opinion of me (the telephone conversation began: "you've been accused of something. Do you know what it is?"). One of those moments in which the walls of reality seem to crumble a bit. I sometimes wonder what, in reality, I might have done to induce this sense of supernatural injury - there had been a few snippy exchanges in blog comments boxes, in one of which I'd had a go at her for bringing "vacuous, bratty sarcasm" in place of argument, but that hardly seems like the sort of deep soul-wounding blow that might disturb someone's equilibrium. Perhaps it was entirely arbitrary, as these things often are.

 

[luka]

Someone on dissensus, now long gone, accused me of similar things once. Maybe, as Craner said recently in relation to josef k, the Internet just sends people mad.

 

[luka]

Jo doesn't seem mad here, or particularly obnoxious, or even a great deal more pretentious than me and Craner.

 

[craner]

I remember this version of him. Things got a bit heated on a Deleuze thread, but I didn't expect him to turn up years later wielding Julius Evola.

The Nomad story, however, doesn't really surprise me. I wonder what became of her.

 

[Corpsey]

When I first discovered dissensus it was a mixture of intimidating and aggravating

I'd never encountered such rampant pretension and a part of me wanted to join in

I was part of (arguably instrumental in) the blandening of dissensus via dubstepforum migration

And even to this day I try to denormalise myself under the occasional tutelage of luka

This has meant purging myself of all pub banter and sitcom references