Wednesday Is In the Heart
Aug. 7th, 2019 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Burgess thinks The Image Men is good satire. I don't know if it is or not because I ran out of patience about 2/3 of the way through. I respect his point about how critics should relax more and not scorn to appreciate big rambling hunks of entertainment with lots of characters and side-currents, but I wound up not appreciating this one. It just keeps lurching around from one episode to the next while the Image Men bilk people but-not-really, drink giant gins, and make speeches. Did you know than in an age of images, people will believe a lot of nonsense about images? It might have made a good ninety-minute movie, but instead it was a book and I got sick of it two hundred pages from the end. This proves that literature is dead, images are the unacknowledged legislators of my brain, and I owe J.B. Priestley $5.
I also finished Giles Goat-Boy, for all the good it did me. Did the entire raised-by-goats idea come about so that John Barth could have the Goat-Boy say, while devouring a valuable religious scroll in a library for important Hero's Journey reasons, that he is "only browsing"? Probably. It's that kind of book.
Cocksure is a fast-moving, rancid, reckless piss-sprinkler of a novel flinging bile-filled condoms in every direction, which made it a welcome break from both of the above. There are a lot of pieces - a Canadian WASP whose friends are all convinced he's Jewish and trying to hide it, an immortal "Star Maker" who turns out to have literally built several stars from scratch Victor Frankenstein-style, a series of publicity-minded murders, a sexually progressive elementary school that puts on a production of "Philosophy in the Bedroom," an ingenue who obeys the rules of screenwriting in all things (in a real-life emergency, she ignores several empty phone booths in favor of the more dramatic one already in use) - all abundantly nasty or eerie or both. None of the pieces ever quite merges with the others to form the coherent shambling abomination you might be hoping for.
What I'm Reading Now
The sixties may come and the sixties may go, but arguably tolerable marriages spring eternal. Kristin Lavransdatter is still fifty acres of thorns in a twenty-acre freehold. I've just finished the second volume, The Wife, and started on the third, The Cross. Kristin and Erlend have just lost their one really good friend, Simon, and are realizing how isolated they've become since Erlend's ill-advised foray into political conspiracy. Meanwhile, time keeps turning their baby boys into teenagers and there's nothing they can do about it.
In my May 1892 issue of Harpers, I found this poem by William Sharp:
The vast remote blank darkness of the skies,
Where Silence foldeth the immortal chime
Of wheeling stars in awful companies,
White whispers on the lips of ancient Time:
The hollow waste of the unfathome'd deep
Where no sound is, and light is but a gleam
Lost in dim twilight shades, where never creep
The dying rays from daytide's golden dream:
The dark, obscure, mysterious human heart,
Where fierce tides ebb and flow for evermore,
Where thoughts and dreams and hopes forever part
For ruin or haven on some unknown shore--
O vast absym, more deep than starry nigth,
More awful than the mid-sea's soundless might!
From a mathematical standpoint I'm pretty sure all of these things are technically finite (please correct me if I'm wrong), but that's beside the point.
Meanwhile, Will S. knows his sonnets are stale but you can't make him stop:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
Maybe novelty is the TRUE staleness, have you thought of that?
What I Plan to Read Next
I asked my brother to send me a few books from his giant collection of slightly musty paperbacks - all 99 novels that are coming up in the sequence, including Gravity's Rainbow and The French Lieutenant's Woman - so when I actually read those will depend on his laziness instead of mine.
Burgess thinks The Image Men is good satire. I don't know if it is or not because I ran out of patience about 2/3 of the way through. I respect his point about how critics should relax more and not scorn to appreciate big rambling hunks of entertainment with lots of characters and side-currents, but I wound up not appreciating this one. It just keeps lurching around from one episode to the next while the Image Men bilk people but-not-really, drink giant gins, and make speeches. Did you know than in an age of images, people will believe a lot of nonsense about images? It might have made a good ninety-minute movie, but instead it was a book and I got sick of it two hundred pages from the end. This proves that literature is dead, images are the unacknowledged legislators of my brain, and I owe J.B. Priestley $5.
I also finished Giles Goat-Boy, for all the good it did me. Did the entire raised-by-goats idea come about so that John Barth could have the Goat-Boy say, while devouring a valuable religious scroll in a library for important Hero's Journey reasons, that he is "only browsing"? Probably. It's that kind of book.
Cocksure is a fast-moving, rancid, reckless piss-sprinkler of a novel flinging bile-filled condoms in every direction, which made it a welcome break from both of the above. There are a lot of pieces - a Canadian WASP whose friends are all convinced he's Jewish and trying to hide it, an immortal "Star Maker" who turns out to have literally built several stars from scratch Victor Frankenstein-style, a series of publicity-minded murders, a sexually progressive elementary school that puts on a production of "Philosophy in the Bedroom," an ingenue who obeys the rules of screenwriting in all things (in a real-life emergency, she ignores several empty phone booths in favor of the more dramatic one already in use) - all abundantly nasty or eerie or both. None of the pieces ever quite merges with the others to form the coherent shambling abomination you might be hoping for.
What I'm Reading Now
The sixties may come and the sixties may go, but arguably tolerable marriages spring eternal. Kristin Lavransdatter is still fifty acres of thorns in a twenty-acre freehold. I've just finished the second volume, The Wife, and started on the third, The Cross. Kristin and Erlend have just lost their one really good friend, Simon, and are realizing how isolated they've become since Erlend's ill-advised foray into political conspiracy. Meanwhile, time keeps turning their baby boys into teenagers and there's nothing they can do about it.
In my May 1892 issue of Harpers, I found this poem by William Sharp:
The vast remote blank darkness of the skies,
Where Silence foldeth the immortal chime
Of wheeling stars in awful companies,
White whispers on the lips of ancient Time:
The hollow waste of the unfathome'd deep
Where no sound is, and light is but a gleam
Lost in dim twilight shades, where never creep
The dying rays from daytide's golden dream:
The dark, obscure, mysterious human heart,
Where fierce tides ebb and flow for evermore,
Where thoughts and dreams and hopes forever part
For ruin or haven on some unknown shore--
O vast absym, more deep than starry nigth,
More awful than the mid-sea's soundless might!
From a mathematical standpoint I'm pretty sure all of these things are technically finite (please correct me if I'm wrong), but that's beside the point.
Meanwhile, Will S. knows his sonnets are stale but you can't make him stop:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
Maybe novelty is the TRUE staleness, have you thought of that?
What I Plan to Read Next
I asked my brother to send me a few books from his giant collection of slightly musty paperbacks - all 99 novels that are coming up in the sequence, including Gravity's Rainbow and The French Lieutenant's Woman - so when I actually read those will depend on his laziness instead of mine.
