Victoria > Recent Status Updates

An essay rather than a real book, it appealed to me in the light of my intense pleasure at others of his works, A House for Mr. Biswas and In a Free State especially. However I really don't care what he or any other author thinks of him/herself and his/her writing: the purchase and reading was more driven by general respect and curiosity than expected pleasure.

Written, Mizumura says, as tribute to the Japanese serial novel and first serially published in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, the chapters are short and often end with teasers. Mizumura's The Fall of Language in the Age of English drew my attention with its provocative title, and I decided to read some of her fiction before her commentary. Surprisingly it reads a bit bumpily -- more later on this.

The contents of this book seem to pretty much duplicate what's in the collection of essays edited by Michael Sorkin titled Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, which I not long ago read and reviewed.

But: will the GR system let me indicate that I'm not in fact going to read it, and move it to another shelf? perhaps Not-to-Read rather than To-Read?

Maybe I should just skip the Picasso chapter, which is keeping me from reading further, it seems...

In fact I never actually did start Tippy Locklin, and look forward to picking it up again...

To read quickly through this scholar's delight of a work was a nice idea, but the experience became unpleasant, the language deformed and ugly, unredeemed by the very very few lyric passages, apparently a faint echo of the author's past writing. So -- abandoned.

The first pages describe an event of the Academic Credit Union, the fully privatized and profit-making French public education system, where science and most especially commerce rule and whose stock turns a nice profit. O his prophetic soul! -- posted from New York City in the 21st Century

Along with some others who are posting comments at Twitter #ofLentils, I started this on July 10th; our schedule calls for 10 pp./day till it's over...

Lars Iyer's American tour schedule begins next week: details here...http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/

This is, quite obviously, a book to savor, though I'm nearing the end, being in Notebook K with only one after this, though more selections come from these two last volumes and they're longer and more complicated. With Gert Hoffmann's Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl as background, it's even more fun.

Gabriel Josipovici cites this work in his wonderful What Ever Happened to Modernism? and it looks so far to be eccentric and erudite enough to make disagreements not matter. I do wish it didn't have substantive footnotes, though; I don't like reading so much from the back of the book in a 5-point font.

In the first dozen or so pages are what I consider either superficial or just wrong understandings of indirect discourse. So what looked like fun and enlightening reading now looks like a constant mental argument...we'll see how long it seems worth it.

This was a mistake: it's entirely too narrow-minded and battering in its arguments, which is to cover up the lack of subtlety such a subject requires. I should have known...

My second complete reading of this was started with the group organized by the LA Review of Books. I would have given it five stars before, but this time around it's so much better that I won't know what to do...

This has to go on the To Read shelf until I decide which version to choose; this one may eventually be it, but perhaps there are older but better ones.

The edition I'm reading is translated by Elizabeth Mayer & Louise Bogan, with intro by W.H. Auden.

Lars Iyer was on a US book tour last month; Dogma arrived two days before he did, so actually I began reading it on February 23rd.

Not very far into this, I have reservations about the translation, as well as concerns about intrusive interpretive footnotes. Probably I will alternate reading this edition with several others on hand.

It seems I'm not reading this anymore, not because of anything in it, but because other things have taken my fancy more firmly...

Why is the new much-praised translation by Edith Grossman among the choices? that's what I'm reading, and it's very very good: http://goo.gl/Y8ZND and, without reading the introduction (of course) I'm now on chapter 2. It does seem to be all its cracked up to be...

Reading an early paperback edition from when it was standard school fare.

Somehow it never registered on me that this is a collection of fictions and not a novel...in the famous phrase, that changes everything, and makes it a great deal more enjoyable, though still not the kind of reading one is driven through.

The edition I'm reading isn't available at GoodReads: its CB Editions, here: http://www.cbeditions.com/hofmann.html.

This update from mid-August somehow got attached to Doctor Faustus rather than Bruno Schulz's book, so I'm moving it here... Am I actually reading this book, or have I abandoned it? It has such a dilatory air that I'm not drawn forward and have been reading it with other things...at least, if I get back to it, that's what's happening.

This, along with Doctor Faustus, came from rereading Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? Whether I'll ever read it through I don't know, but in glancing through it I saw she discusses The Success and Failure of Picasso, read decades ago and enjoyed very much, though it's not the sort of book I would have read had it not been by John Berger, whom I adored at the time and still like a lot.