What are you reading now?

[hackneyvi]

wallace stevens - yay!!!

Call the roller of big cigars ...

... and again,

The Virgin Carrying a Lantern

I was greatly struck by a Wallace Stevens poem, Earthy Anecdote, a week or so ago. Simple, clear and funny, it seems ...

But a little reflection inflects even this poem with ambiguity and with the ambiguity comes the potential, if unlikely, removal of the humour. What are the 'bucks'? I had thought them young men driving an automobile. But are they 'splendid chaps'? Or, more likely, simple wagons? Or, possibly, animals? Or, uneasily, black people? Or, native Americans?

Earthy Anecdote

Everywhere the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering.
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.


Simple though it is, and though I've read it a dozen times, it's still taken me 2 hours to memorize correctly.

This afternoon, I took down some of the anthologies from Waterstones' shelves and looked at what other people liked. 'Call the roller of big cigars ...' was among the various volumes but not 'The Virgin carrying the lantern'. I made some sense of the former but needed help to come close to completing the sense of 'The Virgin' poem. I wonder now if it hinges on 'bear' meaning 'a coarse man'? And that is the thing 'false and wrong'? She's mistaken about the holder of the lamp - but, even if that unlikely so is right, why write a poem about it?

Lovely music and the clear ambiguity in his poems can make Wallace Stevens' poems marvellous. But, personally ..?

Going to try learning The Snow Man next.

[Sparafucile]

Hi,
I'm two-thirds of the way through The Woman in White at the moment, and just about to start a non-fiction tome on John Florio by Frances Yates, first published in 1934 and, I was amazed to discover, still in print!

[Chris Newman]

Carravagio by Andrew Graham-Dixon

[hackneyvi]

Post Office by Charles Bukowski (a novel) which was an impulse buy from a discount bookshop after reading some of his wonderful, horrible narrative poems.

[DracoM]

Our Kind of Traitor / Le Carre.

[Richard Tarleton]

Our Kind of Traitor / Le Carre.

Le Carré is still firing on all cylinders, I've enjoyed all of his recent novels. I love his "set pieces", interrogations and interviews, and his ear for different voices.

[Mandryka]

Post Office by Charles Bukowski (a novel) which was an impulse buy from a discount bookshop after reading some of his wonderful, horrible narrative poems.

I remember reading this (and several other Bukowskis) during my first few months living in a decidedly dodgy housing co-operative in Deptford.....I was lent the books by the bloke who lived directly above me, who became a good (though now lost) friend. Something about Bukowski's style resonated with my frame of mind at the time and the circumstances in which I was living. The edition I read had a most unlikely puff by Bernard Levin on the back cover.....

[kernelbogey]

Just finished Edward St Aubyn Some Hope, a trilogy about Patrick Melrose. Beautiful writing, some agonising descriptions of intravenous drug use, excoriating portraits of the landed aristocracy. A prose style reminiscent of Anthony Powell.

[hackneyvi]

Bernard Levin on the back cover.....

Also, (though now lost) ...

Reading Bukowski's narrative poems, I hadn't appreciated before that for the first 10 years of his recording career, Tom Waits was more or less a Bukowski tribute act. I can see a line of narrators in American crime fiction that Bukowski himself stands in the middle of but Waits now seems something more than influenced by Bukowski; he seems indebted to him.

Has anyone, by the way, read any of the four Hoke Moseley novels of Charles Willeford? By gum, they're good!

[Richard Tarleton]

Having recently abandoned "Never let me go" midstream (see above), I now find myself reading something disturbingly similar which I picked up by chance and on spec from the same 3 for 2 table - Waterstone's little joke perhaps - Margaret Attwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". People kept for a purpose in some grim future. I've only read 1 of Attwood's before. Is it worth pressing on with? I find myself objecting to being toyed with - the first person narrator gradually revealing what's going on. The Oxfam pile beckons...

[hackneyvi]

Just finished A Midsummer Night's Dream ... and I have noted for future use a magnificent piece of abuse by Lysander after he is bewitched out of love with Hermia. He completes his rejection of her by insults of her stature, saying:

Get you gone, you dwarf,
You minimus of hindering knot-grass made,
You bead, you acorn.

The next time someone really annoys me, 'you bead, you acorn' will be the substance of my disdainful rebuff.

I had my chance and I blew it! Had a dreadful night at the NFT where I protested aloud - very aloud and for quite some time - about the pre-film talks that are becoming increasingly common and lengthy.

Outside, a group of women attending the Torchwood premier were blocking the entrance to the toilets. One tiny one - a hindering minimus of knot-grass made - was leaning negligently in the doorway texting. Monday at the NFT was a night of almost theatrical rudeness (by myself and many others).

Having recently abandoned "Never let me go" midstream (see above), I now find myself reading something disturbingly similar which I picked up by chance and on spec from the same 3 for 2 table - Waterstone's little joke perhaps - Margaret Attwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". People kept for a purpose in some grim future. I've only read 1 of Attwood's before. Is it worth pressing on with? I find myself objecting to being toyed with - the first person narrator gradually revealing what's going on. The Oxfam pile beckons...

Never Let Me Go is the same 'stream' at the end that it is at the beginning. Forever and ever. Amen. It's a long, sobby funeral hymn.

Boo-hoo.

Only read one Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman. Somehow, I've never read another but it made an impression on me which has lasted. I know Handmaid's Tale is long. If it fell on you out of the sky, it would do you some damage. However, I suspect it's worth reading for the impressiveness of Atwood's perspective. Unfortunate to come to it after the Ishiguro.

I've had it mind to read Handmaid's Tale for years.

PS: I'm not sure why, but the idea that thick volumes of fiction might one day rain down on us disturbs me. Would anyone with a few bob be willing to endow a monastery or seminary with funds to say a special mass of protection against this?

Something similar was done in Portugal several centuries ago to protect the country from earthquakes, I think. For me, that's money well spent.

[amateur51]

Having recently abandoned "Never let me go" midstream (see above), I now find myself reading something disturbingly similar which I picked up by chance and on spec from the same 3 for 2 table - Waterstone's little joke perhaps - Margaret Attwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". People kept for a purpose in some grim future. I've only read 1 of Attwood's before. Is it worth pressing on with? I find myself objecting to being toyed with - the first person narrator gradually revealing what's going on. The Oxfam pile beckons...

I greatly enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale as the novel but not as the opera by Poul Ruders where I found the high tessitura meant that the all-important words got lost. Keep going, Richard!

[hackneyvi]

I read Hamlet and The Outsider (Camus) at the weekend and wouldn't advise anyone else unwittingly to do the same. I can see there may be more than gloom to each but they left me gloomy.

Hamlet has some magnificent speeches but the plot's all over the shop. What on Earth did himself think he was playing at? I couldn't really grasp why he murdered Polonius who seemed to be a harmless soul. Was this to demonstrate hypocrisy in Hamlet? He later professes deep love for Ophelia and Laertes but murders their dad, ultimately because he was angry that his own dad had been done in.

Didn't care for him much.

[vinteuil]

I read Hamlet ... at the weekend and wouldn't advise anyone else unwittingly to do the same. I can see there may be more than gloom to each but they left me gloomy. Hamlet has some magnificent speeches but the plot's all over the shop.
Didn't care for him much.

Various people have approached Hamlet as if it were an Agatha Christie: one thinks of John Dover Wilson What Happens in Hamlet?
It is not always the most fruitful approach.

But I do like Alethea Hayter -

https://ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/download/678/665

[hackneyvi]

Various people have approached Hamlet as if it were an Agatha Christie

Great slabs of poetry rising from an unfathomable sea of vomity plot. I can see why the likeness is made.

[Or, is't 'vomitty'?]