Now reading...

[jazzbo]

[ejp626]

I ultimately didn't care for The Double and am finding The Gambler a little less compelling than I would like. While this worried me a bit (that my outlook on life has changed to the point that I don't care as much for Dostoevsky), I did like Demons a lot. I guess the acid test will be next year when I read Crime and Punishment in the new translation.

On a recent trip, I finished Morley Callaghan's More Joy in Heaven, which is a fine but slight morality play about an ex-convict who struggles to reintegrate into society when his sponsors and the public lose interest in him.

I also read Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, which seems to have a number of parallels to Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell, which I am now going to try to read pretty soon. But it is ultimately a bit more restrained, since Laurence is Canadian after all.

[niels]

Finally finished War & Peace this morning. Hard to say anything in short about such a monumental novel, but I enjoyed every minute of it. In the end I think I do rate Anna Karenina even a bit higher though, as I think his prose was even better there, and with Levin he created (for me at least) maybe the most memorable character in literature.

Because sometimes I felt I needed a little break from War & Peace I also stared reading a book with two short novels of Toergenjev (I think in English it translates as Turgenev), First Love and Spring Torrents. Both very light love stories, both no masterpieces but definitely with a nice enough prose to really enjoy them.

[John Tapscott]

[John Tapscott]

This excellent book focuses - as its title suggests - on the Kenton orchestra. As such it whets my appetite to know more about Stan the man. Any other biography recommendations?

Bill: This one if you can find it- Straight Ahead, The Story of Stan Kenton by Carol Easton

Quite different than Sparke's book (though they complement each other quite nicely). Easton tells you all you need to know (and sometimes more) about Stan the Man. Kenton hated the book and apparently refused to autograph it, but a friend of mine who knew Kenton says it is pretty much spot-on.

(I hate this cover, the original was much better, but I couldn't find an image that would fit).

Edited October 21, 2014 by John Tapscott

[ejp626]

Reading some of Tolstoy's short novels. Family Happiness wasn't bad. I really didn't like The Kruetzer Sonata at all.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It's a lot like reading American Psycho with all the oxygen in the novel taken up by this crazed, misogynistic man who got away with murder because of the backwards state of the law (it was quite legitimate to kill an unfaithful wife at the time).

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've read this, as I would have had an even stronger reaction 10-15 years ago and probably abandoned the tale in disgust.

I should get around to The Cossacks and The Death of Ivan Ilyich a bit later in the week.

[BillF]

This excellent book focuses - as its title suggests - on the Kenton orchestra. As such it whets my appetite to know more about Stan the man. Any other biography recommendations?

Bill: This one if you can find it- Straight Ahead, The Story of Stan Kenton by Carol Easton

Quite different than Sparke's book (though they complement each other quite nicely). Easton tells you all you need to know (and sometimes more) about Stan the Man. Kenton hated the book and apparently refused to autograph it, but a friend of mine who knew Kenton says it is pretty much spot-on.

(I hate this cover, the original was much better, but I couldn't find an image that would fit).

Thanks John. Have put in an order for a used a copy at 48p from an Atlanta supplier. Even with the shipping charge of £2.80, it's still peanuts!

[jazzbo]

(Richard Stark is Donald E. Westlake)

[BillF]

This excellent book focuses - as its title suggests - on the Kenton orchestra. As such it whets my appetite to know more about Stan the man. Any other biography recommendations?

Bill: This one if you can find it- Straight Ahead, The Story of Stan Kenton by Carol Easton

Quite different than Sparke's book (though they complement each other quite nicely). Easton tells you all you need to know (and sometimes more) about Stan the Man. Kenton hated the book and apparently refused to autograph it, but a friend of mine who knew Kenton says it is pretty much spot-on.

(I hate this cover, the original was much better, but I couldn't find an image that would fit).

Thanks John. Have put in an order for a used a copy at 48p from an Atlanta supplier. Even with the shipping charge of £2.80, it's still peanuts!

P.S. Atlanta supplier can't supply. Too good to be true, I suppose.

[John Tapscott]

This excellent book focuses - as its title suggests - on the Kenton orchestra. As such it whets my appetite to know more about Stan the man. Any other biography recommendations?

Bill: This one if you can find it- Straight Ahead, The Story of Stan Kenton by Carol Easton

Quite different than Sparke's book (though they complement each other quite nicely). Easton tells you all you need to know (and sometimes more) about Stan the Man. Kenton hated the book and apparently refused to autograph it, but a friend of mine who knew Kenton says it is pretty much spot-on.

(I hate this cover, the original was much better, but I couldn't find an image that would fit).

Thanks John. Have put in an order for a used a copy at 48p from an Atlanta supplier. Even with the shipping charge of £2.80, it's still peanuts!

P.S. Atlanta supplier can't supply. Too good to be true, I suppose.

Bill: I'll bet the U.K. library system has it somewhere. Kenton was quite popular in England.

Edited October 21, 2014 by John Tapscott

[jlhoots]

Relatively brief, but worthwhile.

[BillF]

This excellent book focuses - as its title suggests - on the Kenton orchestra. As such it whets my appetite to know more about Stan the man. Any other biography recommendations?

Bill: This one if you can find it- Straight Ahead, The Story of Stan Kenton by Carol Easton

Quite different than Sparke's book (though they complement each other quite nicely). Easton tells you all you need to know (and sometimes more) about Stan the Man. Kenton hated the book and apparently refused to autograph it, but a friend of mine who knew Kenton says it is pretty much spot-on.

(I hate this cover, the original was much better, but I couldn't find an image that would fit).

Thanks John. Have put in an order for a used a copy at 48p from an Atlanta supplier. Even with the shipping charge of £2.80, it's still peanuts!

P.S. Atlanta supplier can't supply. Too good to be true, I suppose.

Bill: I'll bet the U.K. library system has it somewhere. Kenton was quite popular in England.

How right you were, John. It's in the Manchester Public Libraries system. I have just reserved it online and it will be sent to a library within walking distance. That's service for you!

[johnblitweiler]

Neil Gaiman's "American Gods": great characters and dialogue, he really conveys Wisconsin like nobody I've read since Glenway Westcott. I take back the mean thoughts I once thought about Gaiman. The story is long but momentum mostly works for me; the fantasy plot is now and then a mess; the basic idea, that the ancient gods are bums in modern America, is right on.

[Jazzmoose]

Definitely Gaiman's high point so far, in my opinion.

[BillF]

Earlier this week I quit "the Waterfall" on about page 40. I lost all symnpathy with the childish heroine, she was too much like me.

That's funny! I guess in that way, the novel works. Reading Drabble's "Jerusalem the Golden," I also found it hard to be sympathetic to the heroine. The question I'm still uncertain of, is whether Drabble too found her unsympathetic, and was treating her ironically, of if she identified with the heroine, and meant for the heroine to be taken on her own terms. Maybe it's not an either/or. I have "The Waterfall" hanging about, so will eventually see if there is the shock of recognition.

Read it recently. Thanks for your thought-provoking comments. Yes, all sorts of interesting questions arise. How far is the book autobiographical is another one that occurred to me. Perhaps I'll look into that sometime.

[Leeway]

Earlier this week I quit "the Waterfall" on about page 40. I lost all symnpathy with the childish heroine, she was too much like me.

That's funny! I guess in that way, the novel works. Reading Drabble's "Jerusalem the Golden," I also found it hard to be sympathetic to the heroine. The question I'm still uncertain of, is whether Drabble too found her unsympathetic, and was treating her ironically, of if she identified with the heroine, and meant for the heroine to be taken on her own terms. Maybe it's not an either/or. I have "The Waterfall" hanging about, so will eventually see if there is the shock of recognition.

Read it recently. Thanks for your thought-provoking comments. Yes, all sorts of interesting questions arise. How far is the book autobiographical is another one that occurred to me. Perhaps I'll look into that sometime.

It could be, and it would lead one to think that the author's attitude toward her self (or younger self) was itself ambivalent. The perspective seems unresolved.

[paul secor]

Best Poems - Stevie Smith

[erwbol]

Thomas Ligotti - The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

This book inspired Nic Pizzolatto when writing detective Rust Cohle's lines for True Detective. There have been claims of plagiarism.

Edited October 23, 2014 by erwbol

[Brad]

Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevalier.

[ejp626]

Thomas Ligotti - The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

This book inspired Nic Pizzolatto when writing detective Rust Cohle's lines for True Detective. There have been claims of plagiarism.

So I went to the site and looked through the examples and I saw a lot of loose paraphrasing, which to me does not rise to the level of plagiarism, given how transformative the rest of the work is, i.e. it is only one character who shares Ligotti's world view and it is embedded in a totally different context. But like everything, I guess it will be up to the courts to decide if Ligotti or more likely his publishers decide to sue.

As I've already made clear I am in deep disagreement with the drift of today's courts which now use copyright to restrict creative endeavors (claiming that three notes or a trill and the like need to be licensed). I probably should read Neil Netanel's Copyright's Paradox, but it would just further enrage me. Very little of value from 19th Century or Modernist literature would exist under today's copyright rules, and that to me screams out that something is wrong.

For instance, when I went and read the original excerpts from Ligotti's book, I said to myself -- Hmm, a lot of this just sounds rehashed from The Kreutzer Sonata. Maybe I should go through and see if Ligotti plagiarized Tolstoy, finding specific phrases that sound remarkably similar to the other work. It shouldn't be that hard. But I don't do such things, since I don't support today's copyright rules and because I don't believe in gotcha journalism. But mostly because I have a life...

[erwbol]

I'm fifty pages in, and Ligotti leans mostly on the work of a Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe.

Tolstoy is discussed later on in a chapter titled Sick to Death:

"However, downcast readers must be on their guard. Phony retreats have lured many who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence. Too often they have settled into a book that begins as an oration on bleak experience but wraps up with the author slipping out the back door and making his way down a shining path, leaving downcast readers more rankled than they were before entering what turned out to be only a façade of ruins, a trompe l'oeil of bleakness. A Confession (1882) by Leo Tolstoy is the archetype of such a book."

[ejp626]

I'm fifty pages in, and Ligotti leans mostly on the work of a Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe.

Tolstoy is discussed later on in a chapter titled Sick to Death:

"However, downcast readers must be on their guard. Phony retreats have lured many who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence. Too often they have settled into a book that begins as an oration on bleak experience but wraps up with the author slipping out the back door and making his way down a shining path, leaving downcast readers more rankled than they were before entering what turned out to be only a façade of ruins, a trompe l'oeil of bleakness. A Confession (1882) by Leo Tolstoy is the archetype of such a book."

I didn't mean that as a shot at you, just sick of the constant claims of plagiarism out there. If I am reading that passage correctly, Ligotti is criticising Tolstoy for not following through on a bleak worldview. I think Kreutzer Sonata doesn't wimp out to the same extent as A Confession. I guess the main difference is Ligotti gives attribution to Tolstoy and Pizzolatto did not.

[Larry Kart]

John Dean's "The Nixon Defense." Lots of new and very interesting detail about the whole seamy shebang.

[jazzbo]

(Richard Stark is Donald E. Westlake)

Finished this. Wow. I can see why Max Allan Collins was so inspired by these Parker novels by Stark/Westlake. Masterfully done, so hard-boiled it's stone.

Now, starting Joe's novel

http://jadedibisproductions.com/joe-milazzo/

[jlhoots]

Dennis Lehane: Moonlight Mile