Currently Reading

[jkudler]

. . . Or possibly a degree in creative nonfiction!

[surfer]

The Ground Zero photos, linked to a great range of paintings, is astonishing, almost an illustrated guide to Jung's notion of archetypes.

I read this last night, and I agree its very good (its from The Believer, iirc). What I like is that Weschler and the person he's having the conversation with, Joel Meyerowitz the photographer, dont try to force the weight of these connections on the Ground Zero subjects, they are more than willing to admit these may be nothing more than a parlor game of a art history addled brain. Sometimes its just a superficial similarity, like "oh those guys have similar moustaches". And yet, they do seem at times to reach towards a deeper truth, and say something about how these images influence how the photographer approaches his/her subject, and how they frame them, and how we as viewers contextualize these images.

This particular pairing



struck me as one of the more superificial, nevertheless, this particular firefighter's story is certainly moving. This image connection reminded of Larry Levis' great poem, "Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967"

in which he says,

I’m going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
In front of you on this page so that
You won’t mistake him for something else,
An idea, for example, of how oppressed
He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
Grapes from a row of vines. The band
On his white straw hat darkened by sweat, is,
He would remind you, just a hatband.
His hatband. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .he would remind you
That he was not put on this earth
To be an example of something else,
Johnny Dominguez, he would hasten to
Remind you, in his chaste way of saying things,
Is not to be used as an example of anything
At all, not even, he would add after
A second or so, that greatest of all
Impossibilities, that unfinishable agenda
Of the stars, that fact, Johnny Dominguez.

and that's the thing, Meyerowitz and Weschler use the word hero (rightly imo) and heroic to describe these subjects, and in these pairings they play up that aspect. But I think many of them dont view themselves that way, and chafe, probably because of modesty, but maybe because, like Johnny Dominguez, they do not want to be made into an "idea" or a "symbol" of anything other than themselves. and the way he stands, is, he would probably say, just how he happened to be standing at the time the photo was snapped, nothing more. and that he and Johnny Dominguez would have been standing there even if the photo / poem had never been taken / written. Levis teaches us that we dont need to make people into sentimental heroes or burden them with the weight of historical symbolism in order to honor them.

[surfer]

Read more of the Weschler (graduate of UC Santa Cruz I found out) last night, the Breytenbach chapter on listening to voices that come to us through the fog of history is the best thing I'v read so far, with this amazing passage:

One evening in Paris he [Breytenbach] described that wing of the Pretoria Central prison to me. “The hanging room – the actual chamber where they executed the prisoners – was, of course, the central characteristic of the place. Even though you never saw the room, you could hear it – you could hear the trapdoor opening. It would send a short of shudder through the entire building the mornings people were being hanged. And before that you hear the singing with all its different qualities. You could definitely hear when someone sang – and there’d be singing every evening – that that person was going to die in a few days, as opposed to a few weeks or months. And the interesting thing, or the touching thing, when one person sang alone like that in the middle of the night and you knew he was due to be hanged in two days’ time, was how you could actually hear the quality of the listening of the other people, because you knew that everybody else in that prison was awake, lying there with their ears cocked close to the bars or the walls, listening. You could hear the listening.”

[grisha]

[Stevo]

Lorna Siggins Once Upon A Time In The west


http://www.transworldireland.ie/book.as ... 1848270947

the history of the Corrib Gas Project/Protest. the ShellToSea campaign very good reading. most of the facts on the subject fit into a narrative structure.
A must read for anybody interested in the campaign, methinks.

[nicenick]

jkudler wrote:
also kind of slogging through lawrence weschler's "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,"

little late to this, but if you're getting sick of the beginning skip to the horse racing chapter ("playing the horses") for enticement to read the rest of it. irwin's description for some reason really stuck with me:

"But then you get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information — and it's like you run your hand over the race — I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it — you run your hand over the race. All this information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. You can't put your finger on it, but say, like in this instance, I say to myself, 'Something in this race is suspect, it doesn't feel right.' So then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this feeling I have about the thing, which is derived from information, but which is so complex and so intricate and so subtle that there's no way you can put a tag on it. But now you have to reweigh the character of your wager in the light of how you feel about it. See, what's happened now is you've come up with an added factor, a factor which has no actual solid tangibility, but now it's changing your basic equation for the race."

this is one of my favorite books, top ten easy, but then i'm a huge robert irwin fan so go figure!

[jkudler]

hm, thanks. i will pick this up again when i finally finish "freedom" (getting pretty close). i like irwin's work a lot too, but this book was just disappointing from a prose/insight perspective compared to other weschler i've read. someone else actually told my girlfriend (who bought me the book) last night that it's one of his favorite books too.

-jesse

[kandu]

I was recently reading Nichita Stanescu's first volume of poems called 'Argotice' or 'Cantece la Drumul Mare' (Songs for a Long Road). He's a Romanian poet who started writing at 22 when he was a student. One of his major influences was Tudor Arghezi, who at that time was inspired by Baudelaire's 'Fleurs du Mal'
The volume blew me away, Stanescu got this love for the romantic period and implants it in a modernist type of poem. Over 80 stunning reads in one volume, if I could find anywhere any copy of it, I'd share it immediately.

Now I'm passing through Mayakovsky's works and it gets better and better with each read. Planning to get all of his work.

[diederich]

Lost my job Friday and am celebrating by re-reading Perdido Street Station while I figure out what to do next. Still reading the Massumi as well.

[mudd]

shit dude, that's no good. sorry to hear.

m

[nicenick]

thomas bernhard's been on my reading list for a long time but i was waiting til i stumbled across this one in particular - was recommended to me a long time ago, by nirav, if i remember properly. just noticed over the weekend that it was reprinted this summer. in any case i was blown away; sat down to read and didn't move til i finished it. really impressive stuff.

he seems a hard author to switch gears from - tried picking up walser's tanners afterwards but the dark/light juxtaposition was jarring. so instead i ploughed through correction (not quite as good, i thought), and now thinking about just going for the arts trilogy: the loser, woodcutters, and old masters.

[diederich]

Nirav is responsible for me reading Concrete as well. I was similarly blown away.

And thanks, mudd. Figuring out where to go next. For now, reading a lot.

[surfer]

Sorry to hear that diederich. that's rough.

NR:




I've read a fair amount of Bernhard, and Extinction is by far my favorite, but they are all pretty worthwhile. Woodcutters is also excellent (my version is entitled Cutting Timber).

Has anyone read The Lime Works?, that's one of the few I've yet to read.

[Dohol]

Re-reading:

[Jesse]

Re-reading:

Right on. I have read everything by Harrison, some multiple times;the title novella is worth the price of admission.

[free math]

Been slowly reading The Gift by Nabokov. weirdest narrator ever, I am not sure where it will go yet though.

[surfer]

Can someone recommend me books by Antonio Tabucchi? A writer I've been meaning to read for several years.

[faster]

Been slowly reading The Gift by Nabokov. weirdest narrator ever, I am not sure where it will go yet though.

I've always loved the hilarious narrator in Pnin. I still remember the dust jacket blurb on my old copy was about a wacky professor who goes to the "party to end all parties" haha.

[free math]

Been slowly reading The Gift by Nabokov. weirdest narrator ever, I am not sure where it will go yet though.

I've always loved the hilarious narrator in Pnin. I still remember the dust jacket blurb on my old copy was about a wacky professor who goes to the "party to end all parties" haha.

Ah ha I mis-typed, I'm reading Despair. Heh. they are next to each other on the shelf at the library, and I'm just reading it at the library every couple of days without checking it out, so...

i read Pnin in spanish, so i probably didn't get much beyond the literal surface (having to look up all the words for "tortoiseshell" and "argyle" etc). the Despair guy is a pretentious wannabe writer who's enamored of his own wit. a russian emigré, obviously.

[surfer]