Currently Reading

[frozen reeds]

http://www.lovely.com/titles/bk010feldm ... lburg.html

This is great stuff for those who have already devoured all the available essays and lectures. It kicks off with a bizarre encounter with Misha Mengelberg in which the latter makes a dogmatic sales pitch for improv and Derek Bailey's name comes up. Feldman is a lot more candid here than in his writings, which stands to reason as some of his comments would constitute an all-out attack if published in some new music journal...

[Stevo]

8 Miles High by Richie Unterberger, been meaning to read this for years. Finally got it last week & am about 1/2 way through. Currently on the British scene and all the way through I've been stacking up d/ld lps from Demonoid from what he's been discussing.

Also Unterberger's VU timeline book which I'd got up to the Maclise version of the VU playing out in. Interesting book.

Red Riding 1974 been in my bag for the last few months with me only getting 1/2 way through so far. Well written & I think I'm going to want to read the other 3 books in the series afterwards.

picked up a stack of popular science type books for 99c a piece from local chain newsagents
some interesting stuff like Stiff -the lives of Cadavers (which I'd already read) & Mutants.
actually, think it was all interesting just not sure when I'm going to get through all of them.
Did fill a shelf on new bookshelves though

[jon abbey]

http://www.lovely.com/titles/bk010feldm ... lburg.html

$100!

[RFKorp]

http://www.lovely.com/titles/bk010feldm ... lburg.html

$100!

I wonder if there'll ever be a half price version in only english.....

[frozen reeds]

http://www.lovely.com/titles/bk010feldm ... lburg.html

$100!

I wonder if there'll ever be a half price version in only english.....

It's been published in a baffling fashion. You pay for two volumes. Each volume contains pages on the left in English, and on the right in German. Perhaps this is the standard in wacky bilingual academic circles but not in this house! The same people also published the superb (but little known) Feldman/Cage Radio Happenings, which is a lot easier on the wallet. Those conversations can also be heard online here:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query ... Feldman%22

[hatta]

Their Christian Wolff book (Cues) is in the same bilingual edition. Its too bad due to the increased cost, but I'm just glad they are putting this stuff out. Cues is essential reading IMO.

[jon abbey]

yeah, I have the Wolff one, but from memory, that was more in the $50-$60 range.

[hatta]

Yeah it was a lot cheaper. I'd like to get this one, it sounds interesting. But I have yet to read though Morton Feldman Says, so I can hold off for a bit.

[diederich]

I finished Infinite Jest.

That's all.

[snailed]

I've always held off on buying Morton Feldman Says because I've read so many of those lectures online. Aren't most of them available on the site of the author? I might be mistaken here.

That new one has me interested, even with the hefty price tag. Would rather buy that than Amplified Gesture, I think, if we're talking big ticket items.

Edit: And to contribute to the thread, I'm currently reading Harry Partch's Bitter Music, and Bob Gilmore's Partch biography. After reading Genesis of a Music too many times, I figured it was time to look elsewhere.

[Herb Levy]

I certainly don't mean that $100 isn't a lot for MusikTexte's Feldman collection, but looked at in context, it makes some sense.

For better or worse, the pricing of books like this is based on the economic scale of the academic library, not the economic scale of an individual reader. (There's a recent book about Lorca's reception by and influence on writers in the US that I really want to read, but I'll be damned if I pay $45 for it. & Strand doesn't have it at half price.)

The Lucier, Wolff & Rzewski collections that MusikTexte published which are now $50 via Lovely Music were all somewhere between 5-600 pages. The Feldman is a little more than 900 pages. So the overall price per page isn't too much different.

While I've got a few books with more than a thousand pages in one volume that seem to be pretty sturdy, the decision to go to two volumes for a text this long probably makes as much sense as not, especially with libraries rather than single owners as the target market. Unfortunately, the cost of the additional binding for the second volume probably makes up ( at the wholesale end) a big part of the difference between the per page price of the earlier single volume books and this one.

Similarly, the decision to release the books in bilingual editions doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense to monolingual readers fluent in either language, but the cost & hassle of making and distributing two distinct editions in each language would probably be greater for the publisher, which is a pretty small press rather than a large university or commercial press with lots of staff and big budgets.

[mudd]

is there already a thread about feldman's writing i can merge that stuff to? for now i'll leave it here, but it belongs self-sufficient.

anyway i read inherent vice this week. i enjoyed it, though i do have a few complaints.

m

[jon abbey]

anyway i read inherent vice this week. i enjoyed it, though i do have a few complaints.

man, I found it worthless to the point of irritation by the end, superficial, not especially interestingly written, really a waste of my time. I'd be curious to hear more specifics on your opinion if you have a chance...

[Dohol]

anyway i read inherent vice this week. i enjoyed it, though i do have a few complaints.

man, I found it worthless to the point of irritation by the end, superficial, not especially interestingly written, really a waste of my time. I'd be curious to hear more specifics on your opinion if you have a chance...

Kakatani compared Pynchon to Brautigan in her review of that book...

[mudd]

anyway i read inherent vice this week. i enjoyed it, though i do have a few complaints.

man, I found it worthless to the point of irritation by the end, superficial, not especially interestingly written, really a waste of my time. I'd be curious to hear more specifics on your opinion if you have a chance...

well it's somewhat hard to defend what is probably a moderately shallow pleasure. but i can give it a try. i'll try not to say anything too spoilerish, but anyone already working on the book might want to bypass this post. it's too long, anyway.

first of all, the stumbling momentum of the book is something i really enjoy about pynchon. the way his characters are just sure enough about what they're trying to do to let the time and place step into the story like a character. in fact this time i think that los angeles in 1970 was the second most important character of the book. the best writing in pynchon (to me, anyway) are the fade-outs, as he takes a step back away from the characters and lets them disappear into the scenery.

i also thought the plot was pretty entertaining. it had the right build to it, with herrings just pink enough to keep the pot from cooling down. the secondary characters might have been mostly parodies and porn cliches, but their screen time was just right to keep them funny. in fact if anything i think the 'big story' was a little too resolved, and the only scene that really fell flat was the 'big climax'. and i don't think that was accidental. i've always liked the way that people never quite manage to become convincing villains in a pynchon telling. they can be bad, sure, but real evil is something else entirely.

and at heart this wasn't really a noir story. it wasn't a parody of a noir, even. it was more an unraveling, as if all the pieces were in place and then the carpet was yanked out from beneath them in slow motion. the hippy degeneracy isn't up to the heroics of the generation before them, and only vaguely aware that the previous round might not have been all that heroic after all.

there were mis-steps, of course. the ARPAnet schtick was indefensible. the gradual escalation of porn appeal from all the female characters was definitely overdone and unfunny. the detective epiphanies, though thankfully rare, are dull and disappointing. and the third most important character, the police officer, didn't ever resolve to me as a character. a little too developed for the comic cut-outs that filled out the rest of the cast, but not solid enough to understand or feel for or against.

is it pynchon's least accomplished novel? probably. it might be a third try at 'crying of lot 49', though certainly the author's perspective has changed (lots of references to the wisdom of old age, for a 30 year old character...). still i had a good time with it overall.

m

[jon abbey]

thanks for that, Mark. I was definitely too excited for it and I think a bit misled by the little I read about it beforehand. as you say "and at heart this wasn't really a noir story. it wasn't a parody of a noir, even", and this kind of false front within an area I love and respect so much coupled with my inability to find much else of redeeming value gradually irritated me more and more.

and I know the names are part of his thing, but I'm mostly not a fan, the comedic appeal rarely overcomes the unnecessary (IMO) jarring factor. I thought this would be a Pynchon book up my alley (this is only the fourth I've read, the first two and Vineland, embarrassingly still no Gravity's Rainbow), but it wasn't.

[grant]

Semiotext(e)

[walto]

[Dan Warburton]

anyway i read inherent vice this week. i enjoyed it, though i do have a few complaints.

man, I found it worthless to the point of irritation by the end, superficial, not especially interestingly written, really a waste of my time. I'd be curious to hear more specifics on your opinion if you have a chance...

well it's somewhat hard to defend what is probably a moderately shallow pleasure. but i can give it a try. i'll try not to say anything too spoilerish, but anyone already working on the book might want to bypass this post. it's too long, anyway.

first of all, the stumbling momentum of the book is something i really enjoy about pynchon. the way his characters are just sure enough about what they're trying to do to let the time and place step into the story like a character. in fact this time i think that los angeles in 1970 was the second most important character of the book. the best writing in pynchon (to me, anyway) are the fade-outs, as he takes a step back away from the characters and lets them disappear into the scenery.

i also thought the plot was pretty entertaining. it had the right build to it, with herrings just pink enough to keep the pot from cooling down. the secondary characters might have been mostly parodies and porn cliches, but their screen time was just right to keep them funny. in fact if anything i think the 'big story' was a little too resolved, and the only scene that really fell flat was the 'big climax'. and i don't think that was accidental. i've always liked the way that people never quite manage to become convincing villains in a pynchon telling. they can be bad, sure, but real evil is something else entirely.

and at heart this wasn't really a noir story. it wasn't a parody of a noir, even. it was more an unraveling, as if all the pieces were in place and then the carpet was yanked out from beneath them in slow motion. the hippy degeneracy isn't up to the heroics of the generation before them, and only vaguely aware that the previous round might not have been all that heroic after all.

there were mis-steps, of course. the ARPAnet schtick was indefensible. the gradual escalation of porn appeal from all the female characters was definitely overdone and unfunny. the detective epiphanies, though thankfully rare, are dull and disappointing. and the third most important character, the police officer, didn't ever resolve to me as a character. a little too developed for the comic cut-outs that filled out the rest of the cast, but not solid enough to understand or feel for or against.

is it pynchon's least accomplished novel? probably. it might be a third try at 'crying of lot 49', though certainly the author's perspective has changed (lots of references to the wisdom of old age, for a 30 year old character...). still i had a good time with it overall.

m

Wow, just learned about this book from this thread. Must hunt it down (despite your reservations). And I was just thinking about giving Against The Day another go, after visiting Colorado mining country a couple of weeks ago.

[cheerios]

everything by william s. burroughs

starting with the soft machine