What BOOK are you reading right now?

dys, i thought <reservation blues> was cool. like to know what you make of it when you've finished.

ossie wrote-



That's a perfect description of me.

Yesterday I came across this in Burgess talking about drudgery.

".......fagging on, like Fra Lippi Lippo, at flesh."

I regret not have kept a record myself. I can remember quite a few though.

But the best authors have loads of them.

You should try Acronyms Ossie. Practice a bit.

"Down the street the dogs are barkin'
And the day is a-gettin' dark.
As the night comes in a-fallin',
The dogs 'll lose their bark.
An' the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind,
For I'm one too many mornings
And a thousand miles behind."

Bob Dylan One Too Many Mornings.

Do you think your subjectivity is the judge of what creates your idea of a "felicitous string of words" or something ineffable like the beauty of a flower or a dawn. Or my subjectivity for me.

Have you tried Proust or Flaubert. The latter did collect them. Proust just allowed his mind to wander a bit.

"Aroint thee! Thou rump-fed ronyon."

I liked that.

I haven't read Proust, have read Flaubert, but long ago.

Acronyms, like on a2k? Part of why my post count is so high is that I was was once a near constant poster on the word/trivia threads.

On subjectivity, hmm. Certainly I think some people may appreciate bits of what I think of as felicitous, for much the same reasons, and many won't. Did the author write and then retain the word sequence for the same reasons?
Sometimes reason would be the wrong word, as sound may come first, afore even thought.

Dunno, I'm no scholar, and not expert on what is subjective or objective.

I should have added that besides finding felicities in reading a word string, I also can get pleasure from the choice of one word.

I see reading as an experience involving many senses.. and different parts of my mind. I guess then I'd say it's subjective.

I think it is as well, in the last analysis.

Finnegan's Wake might be an attempt at stripping out subjectivity but not an altogether succesful one because not all sense of humours appreciate it.

Even road direction signs can contain subjectivity. Ossobuctoo 5 Miles say.

I started John Irving's new book in Florida, but I haven't had time since to read it. It's good though, if you like John Irving, which I do. I have forgotten the title right now.......

What a great book!

Wonderfully put. I feel the same way.

Spendius-What about this? I consider it to be one of the premier poetic statements and a epitaph for those who struggled to be understood:

"And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmelade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say, I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"-

If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it at all"

Of course, one of the early sublime pieces by TS Eliot,

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Recently finished reading these, no book reports by me just yet, though will give Amazon or other links if I find them.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143036394/sr=1-1/qid=1154218336/ref=sr_1_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8&s=books

Birth Marks by Sarah Dunant
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743270215/sr=1-1/qid=1154218458/ref=sr_1_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8&s=books

Purple Dots by Jim Lehrer
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586480324/sr=1-1/qid=1154218607/ref=sr_1_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8&s=books

Now You See It by Lynn Allison
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743250265/sr=1-1/qid=1154218532/ref=sr_1_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8&s=books

Memory of Running by Ron McLarty
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EUKQYQ/sr=1-1/qid=1154191496/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8&s=books

The Expendibles by Antonya Nelson
short stories
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684846853/sr=1-1/qid=1154191098/ref=sr_1_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8&s=books

Blue Spruce by David Long
short stories
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684815893/104-6515539-9443964?v=glance&n=283155





About to start -

The Empire of Dreams by Dianne Highbridge
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1569471908/ref=sr_11_1/104-6515539-9443964?ie=UTF8

ennit?

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families by Steven R. Covey

On Sherman Alexie, I've read Indian Killer and The Toughest Indian in the World. Started but dropped Reservation Blues, for no good reason except it got lost in the pile. (It might be my copy that Dys has, then again it might not be. I'm sort of book mad.) I like his writing a lot. I've learned through it, but not felt being taught; really get into the stories.

Bernard wrote-



I have been browsing through the chapter mentioned on and off since your post wondering how to answer it.

I think that I am unable to give an answer that improves upon the chapter itself and to try to do so does a disservice to the memory of the author.

I have a feeling that one is not supposed to "understand" Spengler so much as wallow in his poetry. It is not a book that can even be scratched by reading from first to last line as one might any old book. It's a daily occurence for me, as it is for some Bible readers, to be reading a section of a chosen at random page in Book 11, follow a footnote into Book 1,read until another footnote appears, follow that and so on until something distracts my attention.

This is very confusing for a while but gradually a shape is discerned in the fog and it's a shape I happen to like. I don't know why though.

I would suggest you ask my analyst about that but he is currently in a straight-jacket in a sound proof padded cell.

It's a theory of mine that Bob Dylan likes that shape as well. And that Henry Miller did.

I don't know that "forsee" is a word I would use. I think "manage" is better. But it's early days yet.

In the 1962 Song to Woody there's this- talking about the "funny ol' world that's a-coming along."

"It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born."

Only looks like it's dying. Like people who have cholera look like they're dying so you can do something about it and they don't.

There's no looks like with the "hardly been born". That's stated as a fact.

I don't see the point in reading books where there's no fog and thus no shape that I like emerging slowly from it. The only shape then is one I can see from a long way off and I already know about that.

Osso, I read this a few years back...

Mostly I remember thinking "please god, don't let it be this way..." and kind of despairing because I believed it might be a true reflection for most of us...for me...

Yes, I know what you mean, JoeBlow. It was uncannily too close to me... for comfort.

Spendius- Thank you for your response. When I began to read Spengler, I thought he might read like Toynbee. I did elicit the "challenge and response" concept from reading Toynebee and that concept, for better or worse, has informed a good deal of my other reading on Civilizations and their rise and fall.

But Spengler has proven to be a real challenge for me.
Thanks for your feedback.

Could Spengler's opacity be due to the fact that he is a German? After all, Kant and Hegel are really largely indecipherable and they are both Teutons!!!

Bernard wrote-



To the extent that Spengler is "opaque" I'm inclined to think it is due to the difficulty of his poetic vision rather than his being German. In this, of course, European nationality is the critical factor. The Faustian vision is unknown elsewhere. In fact it would have been incomprehensible to all other cultures in the same way that those cultures are incomprehensible in essence to us despite many of us flattering ourselves in thinking otherwise.

Another difficulty, perhaps the main one, is the effort required to attempt to comprehend his fabulous vision and the insitutionalised resistance to it (see-Science and Mathematics- ID Science or Religion P633 Post 2176225)

What it has given me is a much deeper understanding of art and the society I am living in.

Dylan's lines from Visions of Johanna-

"Inside the museums infinity goes up on trial
Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles."

is crystal clear now in its meaning which it never was before. And it is a very complex meaning leading close to the mystical if not plunging head first into it.

If you were to read those sections of the chapter relating to the idea that time is not the same thing as our notion of time, time itself being inexplicable and the notion of time being a product of Faustian (Gothic) thinking, and where he deals with the tension between space and time, with Dylan's lines in mind you might get a spark which you could then blow on to create a fire. Infinity being a time bound notion and the infinite a space bound one immediately obvious to perception.

Another way might be to study all the index references to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. As a kick start I mean.

There's a problem though-it is that communicating with Ancient Greeks becomes a bit trying at first but quite amusing if you once get over the shock. Spengler, it seems to me now, had a sense of humour so droll that it is only detectable after close scrutiny.

Do you think modern woman smiles a highway blues smile.

"Ghosts of 'lectricity howl in the bones of her face."

When I used "manage" earlier it struck me afterwards that "willed" might be better.

Do you know Alphaville?

Ossobucco, Gargamel and Spendius -- I have to add to your notions about word jewels. One of the reasons why I did the master's degree in English (begun in 1969) was that I found then contemporary books too 'brittle' in their language.