hebdomeros, giorgio de chirico - i liked this, a surrealist novel in the sense that it’s clear and lucid moment to moment but then after a while you’re like wait how did i get here? and when you try to retrace your steps it turns out to be a maze of throwaway impressions and digressions silently expanding until they totally absorb the main thread of what’s happening, and then resolving into a totally different location than the one before. after a while your eyes glaze over but whenever i picked it up afresh at the place i left off i was surprised and pleased by the tendency of every train of thought to swerve off in an odd direction midway through.
The glory of the past, the vanity of human heroism, and those pyramids that the fear of oblivion compelled the directors of human affairs to have built by indifferent employees who even when constructing them thought of other things
some of his essays are included in the english edition as well:
To live in the world as if it were an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-sided toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.
in plain sight: the life and lies of jimmy savile, dan davies - why did i read this? i guess curiosity, not so much about what he did but about how many other people really knew. the answer: a lot! including a david peace quadrilogy’s worth of skeevy policemen and civic notables going back to his place after hours, although sometimes his efforts to court them seems redundant: one of the cops talks about frequently seeing notably young girls while hanging out at the flat but explains that it never came up because “nobody knew what paedophilia was back then”. motherfucker, weren’t you curious. do you pull over people’s cars and go “huh, i wonder what that screaming sound is from the trunk. oh well. none of MY business.” (i mean, probably.)
an interesting thread in the book is that his ability to get away with it all corresponds directly to the return of “charity” as an ultimate good in public life. savile jumps from increasingly irrelevent celebrity creep to untouchable beloved national institution by becoming the public face of the thatcher govt’s push for hospital infrastructure to be funded through private charity instead of public funds. cue Captain Tom-like bunting orgies and celebrity love-ins and Bung A Bob To Big Ben’s Bong and totally unaccountable donor-patrons getting to carve out their own gruesome little fiefdoms where they can do just what they like for as long as their hands are on the money tap. freedom of choice.
kzradock the onion man, louis levy - still reading, good so far, feels sorta like how you hope an old pulp novel will be but rarely is, just this tangle of knives and dreams and weird changes of identity and conspiracies run by mysterious women who hypnotize dithering little guys with the strength of their all-powerful will, like bruno schulz getting a shot at writing one of the les vampires serials.
I’m finally reading the Cyberiad (in translation, because despite finding Polish slightly intelligible with my atrophied ukrainian skills, reading is beyond me)
for some reason I never fathomed that it would be exactly as wonderful as all those who praised it said it was. Just astoundingly pleasing, clever comic stories that feel like an ad absurdum satire of asimov’s robot stories (one early story features a giant thinking machine going on a rampage because it refuses to acknowledge 2 + 2 equals anything but seven, the constructor of this machine is henceforth credited as the creator of the stupidest machine)
I encountered one of those rare books that touch you in a really rare way, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald. It is a poetry book where the author stripped all the plot from the original epic and focused entirely on the deaths. It begins, almost like the original, with an unending list of names of every character who dies. This comes across as meaningless, and it goes on forever. But as you read the book, every one of these names becomes a person, attention is paid to the story of their death and what lead to it. But even more moving is the other gimmick of this book, which is that every single death is accompanied by a eulogy that is twice repeated. We get to read the graphic, and often sad death of someone who thought they were heroic followed by a eulogy which relates their life story or their death or who they were through a poetic analogy about so many different things. I love the way that the deaths are so visceral and almost completely without metaphor but the eulogies always place such a great poetic distance between themselves and the literal thing. Out of the middle is where I think a lot of the moving work of imagining how someone’s life
EUCHENOR a kind of suicide
Carried the darkness inside him of a dud choice
Either he could die at home of sickness
Or at Troy of a spearwound
His mother was in tears
His father was in tears but
Cold as a coin he took the second option
Seeing as otherwise he’d have had to pay a fine
It was no surprise when an arrow pierced his neck
He recognized that prick of darkness
…is…
Like a stallion tugging at a rope breaks loose at last
And his gallop is a drumbeat shaking the valley
There he goes heading straight for the river
Longing to wash in that clattering rush of cold
When he holds his head high and runs like a king
under the wind-blown banner of his mane
Then he knows his knees are going to lift him forever
And a grassy cloth has been spread on the fields for his pleasure
Like a stallion tugging at a rope breaks loose at last
And his gallop is a drumbeat shaking the valley
There he goes heading straight for the river
Longing to wash in that clattering rush of cold
When he holds his head high and runs like a king
under the wind-blown banner of his mane
Then he knows his knees are going to lift him forever
And a grassy cloth has been spread on the fields for his pleasure
But what really fucks me up, frequently made me have to pause and hold back some tears, was imagining –someone— for whom these dead soldiers meant so much and in such specific ways… fuck
Edit: I am currently failing to hold back the tears
I read that last year! I signed up a seminar on translations of the Iliad and this was in the reading list along with several other offbeat takes (this one was by far the best of those). I unfortunately didn’t end up attending the seminar because I found I just couldn’t tolerate more Zoom calls in my life at that point, but I was glad it helped me discover that book.
The ending is truly incredible. I posted my favorite excerpt in the poetry thread at the time:
It’s so good!! I am in a translation class right now and it got mentioned, but it wasn’t part of the curriculum, I just read it on my own and have had no one to talk to about it. Glad someone here has read it.
And I don’t know if you remember how awesome the introduction is too. There is a line by Oswald, explaining “this version, trying to retrieve the poem’s ‘enargeia’, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.” Such a wildly powerful book.
That’s interesting, I didn’t remember that line. Much as I liked the result, it makes me want to argue a bit (probably an intended effect of the metaphor chosen – Oswald well knows churches have beautiful painted roofs for a reason). I think the more straightforward translations also retrieve its enargeia quite well, and in them I also adore all the heroic bluster and the great narrative arcs of battle (which never feel quite like meaningless butchery nor like a fully foreordained outcome).
Post-World Wars we have necessarily tended to privilege the Odyssey and taken a relatively ambivalent attitude toward the Iliad. Memorial attempts to rescue it by polishing and developing only the parts that seem to communicate an All Quiet On The Western Front-style viewpoint on war.
Remarkably, the result still feels like a true version of the Iliad rather than a bowdlerization of it. I wonder if a polar-opposite approach, which emphasized the heroism and only allowed the briefest glimpses of the sadness of it all to be read between the lines, might not also feel like a true version of the Iliad.
People really love it, but I am not a fan of Christopher Logue’s Gulf War-ening of The Iliad. Have you read any of those books? He didn’t finish the project, but he managed to do a lot of the Iliad.
Have been reading this too and cannot recommend enough. The absurd side of it reminds me of Douglas Adams at times. Love how implicitly horrific some of the stories are despite all the whimsical wordplay and simple structure of the problems they face.
There’s a story towards the end that allegedly inspired Sim City and it’s pretty grim. One of my favourites involves a machine that can deliver all the information in the world using the probabie state of air molecules. I also love how the main characters are just casually omnipotent.
I thought I was signing up for a biting parody when I started reading Into the Hills but it turned into a surprisingly wholesome story about people being kind to each other during times of hardship. The protagonist adamantly refuses to learn screamingly obvious lessons about being present for others, but I can’t help but come away feeling that some small part of him internalized them anyway. His behavior never actually matches the coldness of his ideas, and everyone around him senses that and keeps giving him another chance.
The novel ends on an ambiguous note. In my headcanon his future might go two ways:
Member of some kind of transhumanist/biohacking cult who devotes himself to bringing on the Singularity. Dies at age 36 of a postoperative brain infection
Middle-class guy with a loving marriage and several close friends. Continues to post screeds on the Elder Scrolls forums on weekends
Chapters of The Hobbit read like a list of achievements for a Xbox 360 game. It’s just missing “The bigger they are…” followed by “…the harder they fall.”
I am just on Chapter 6. It’s really fun so far. I find it shocking how Tolkien in this first book, heck, by the first encounter with the trolls, just completely developed the fantasy of adventuring that RPGs have been emulating forever. It’s like the whole picture is present in just that second chapter.
