The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Stories by Will Self

 

My Idea of Fun by Will Self

Brilliantly written but a bore to read, like much of Self's work. Still he appeals to me as a thinker and a philosopher, much like JG Ballard (whom Self admires). THE BOOK OF DAVE and GREAT APES were unqualified masterpieces. The rest of it I've struggled with.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallce

 

Great funny essay on prose poems.

sex is never "bad," but it's also never casual. (from "Back in New Fire," his strange essay on sex in the aftermath of AIDS.)

He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty - a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. (from "Borges on the Couch."

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

Made the mistake of watching the delight THE THIN MAN 1934 film when I was halfway through reading this. It's been said that the film improves upon the novel, and I must agree. The book is good - the film is sublime.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

 

A little hard to follow the plotting and action sometimes, because of Hammett's heavy gangster 1920s vernacular, and the level of deviance and betrayal by the  criminals and police. But still a primal source for much of the crime fiction I love.

The phrase "blood simple" originated here apparently. 

“It's an expression he used to describe what happens to somebody psychologically once they've committed murder,” Joel Coen told Time Out. “They go 'blood simple' in the slang sense of 'simple,' meaning crazy."

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

 

Good to finally (?) read this - my printed last name across the width of the pages makes me think I've had this book since high school, but never attempted it. (notes on the fly leaf below indicate it was after h.s., as i’m paying rent, or trying to calculate if i CAN pay rent.)

 Hardy attacks marriage and love and the sexes in his brilliant way - not much of a plot besides people seeing and judging people in English village society and attacking reputations, which the main characters take with deadly serious. 

I particular like Jude's son, also sort of named Jude, but known colloquially as Father Time and Time, because he seems to wise and old and disinterested in his life as a child, from his rough life being raised in Australia by his mother (for awhile), then abandoned by her there when she returns to England, and the boy is then sent by relatives for Jude to raise.

Finally finished it - quite compelling, if dense and relatively action-free. Well, Jude and Susan's children hang themselves, so that was exciting (a little too exciting). But moving in the end, by incrementedly building up the anguish and despair of Jude and Susan as they do immoral things for moral reasons (return to loveless marriages).

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union; that of having a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable. [73]

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife [77]

"Save his own soul he hath no star" - Swinburne [79]

Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously. [203]

And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. [203]

He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing. [216]

But sometimes a woman's love of being love gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. [239]

A contented mind is a continual feast. [313]

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? [346]

Ah, dear Jude, that's because you are like a totally dead man observing people listening to music. You say, 'What are they regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is. [346]

When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me... [348]

Or is it that you're humbugging yourself, as so many women do about these things; and don't actually believe what you pretend to, and are only indulging in the luxury of the emotion raised by an affected belief? [383-384]

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Stories by Stephen Crane

 

I read the stories "A Girl of the Streets" and "The Open Boat" - both astonishing.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

 

Turgid, boring, another failed attempt to read Ballard's fiction.

Beeswing by Richard Thomspon

 

Good if perfunctory. It stays on relative high impersonal ground, although I liked RT's insights on the folk songs and styles that inspired him. You do get a good sense of the "folk music circuity" in Britain in the 1960s.

Chronopolis: The Science Fiction of J.G. Ballard

 

Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard

 

A fascinating memoir. Ballard beautifully and deeply engages with his vivid memories of his childhood in Shanghai - first idyllic and strange, then blinkered and strange in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. Reading this with pleasure at the same time I'm struggling to finish his 1975 novel HIGH-RISE (and as I have struggled over the years with his science fiction.)

As a young boy Ballard writes he constructed a large plywood frame screen with a peephole and put it at the center of the table so he would not have to look at his younger sister the whole time.

All in all, a remarkably sane, measured account of a happy life, ending with Ballard announcing he has metastized prostate cancer but is in the care of a good doctor, awaiting his death.

I suspect that it's no longer possible to stir or outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone... A psychological challenge is needed that threatens one of our dearer delusions... a bisected cow forced to endure a second death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling about the first.

As every parent knows, infancy and childhood seem to last for ever. Then adolescence arrives and promptly leaves on the next bus, and one is sharing the family home with likeable young adults who are more intelligent, better company and in many ways wiser than oneself. But childhood has gone, and in the silence one stares at the empty whisky bottles in the pantry and wonders if any number of drinks will fill the void. (220)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

 

Struggling with this. Wolfe's style is sweeping and brilliant, but I'm finding it difficult to engage with any of the characters - or the narrator. Is that what his style of journlism was all about?  A favorite of mine, BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME by Dennis Farina, has much more gravity for me: I identify with, marvel at, pull for, and end up loving the doomed narrator.

Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life by Tim Riley

 

Liking this so far - great writing and namedropping on music from the Beatles era that influenced/was influenced by them. The later biographical material itself is mostly familiar to me from my other recent readings. The early biographical material about Lennon's childhood is vivid and dramatic.

Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony

 

Promising premise falls off in second half.

More aardvark! Less Republican yuppie 2nd person address!

Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation by Philip Norman

 

okay. filling in the gaps from my previous Beatles' readings.

Up Against It by Joe Orton

 

Familiar Orton ground - the unusual nature of this treatment is that it was (allegedly) considered by Brian Epstein and the Beatles for their follow-up film to HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Would have been amazing to see - although Orton cut the main characters from four to two. The action is predicatable - damaged, violent, crime-focused young men attack - and are attacked by - a damaged, violent, criminal society.

The Likeness by Tana French

 

I love Tana French's work, find it addictive, and this one eventually worked its way under my skin. But it was way too long. The premise was cunning if farfetched - an undercover detective has her (undercover and abandoned) identity stolen by a young woman who looks exactly like her, and ends up murdered. The detective infiltrates the group home the victim lived in (with four close friends) to try to find out clues toward the identity of her murderer.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

 

Struggling to get through this. Ballard has an odd, clinical, detached narrative style that fits his futurism - but is none too pleasurable. 

A gigantic modern high-rise in Britain in an unnamed future begins to distintergrate as its 2000 inhabitants begin violently attacking each other, first by sector (bottom, middle, top) and then by floor.

Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, with Barry Miles

 

Pretty good, lots on insights, a little annoying in Miles insistence on his own place in the Beatles history, but that's a small point. The chapter on the London cultural and arts scene - when McCartney had bought a house in town, while the other three Beatles had retired to the suburban countryside - is interesting, although McCartney (as always) sound a little glib and fey when discuss art that's not pop and rock songs.

Good source of McCartney's assigning "percentages" of authorship credit to himself and Lennon. Who knows what actually went on? Their whole career was magical and creative and, I'm sure, chaotic. But they wrote 180 songs the likes of which had never been seen before - and won't be seen again.

Confidence by Denise Mina

 

Really underwhelming. A disappointment. Two podcasters on a wild goose chase. Phoned in plot, insubstantial characters.