Fiction

[madupont]

mainwaring,
                  Congrats! beppo, I've been told everyone should read Joseph Roth. But that would have something to do with having read or intending to read all of the others you mention.  He is the least inhibited of the group, whether that is class-origins or just over average general craziness in his make up.

I have read Mandelstam, of course, I took a program from the Univ. of  Wisconsin, Madison, in Russian literature when I was nineteen. Nope, I take that back, I was 24; nineteen was when I met my first exchange student from the USSR. An agronomist. He taught me how to read Mayakofsky.  There is nothing like a little irony of cross-karma that happens to involve a number of people at the same time who will have different relations in the future compared to  when and how they first met. Eugen happened to be living in a household(and the very cold attic) of Attorney Lloyd Barbee, who had come to school there from a Southern college on the G.I.Bill.   Lloyd became my lawyer, in later years.  But for the time being Eugen sat there looking like Boris Pasternak in every way, thin, narrow shoulders, long legs, blond, eyes like a wolf, as he read Mayakofsky to me.
                                                                              He wasn't the least bit Russian, of course. He was born just outside Braunau, on a railroad siding in a box-car. Then the Mongols liberated them and he was taken back with them to Russia. He didn't make a point of being Austrian; his sister,Helena, was a Pole because she was born in Poland. But she married an Austrian. Enough of that.  The Diaries of  Victor Klemperer sit here under the wall calendars,on the edge of the back corner of my desk while I write.

[barton2]

Mainwaring's CW contributions seemed very Beppo-like.  Well, that explains it.

Anyone read John Lindqvist?  Being hailed as the Swede Stephen King.  Just started "Harbour" which promises to include a pair of ghosts riding around on a moped, speaking to each other in The Smiths song quotes.  He wrote the book, Let the Right One In, which was the basis for the Swedish film (he wrote the screenplay, too).  And reportedly a big fan of The Smiths and post-Smiths Morrissey.

[mainwaring]

Hi madupont - nice to hear from you again. Yes those Klemperer diaries are a must-have for all bookshelves.

Barton - Haven't read the Lindqvist you mention but him being hailed as the swede Stephen King that's a bit of a turnip for the books no :-/ ? Also, I'm checking out posts these days occasionally from a smartphone (wooooh) and one of the plus sides (there aren't many unless the phone is an iphone which mine isn't) is that avatar images and images contained in posts can be zoomed into quite easily, so <your posts in pets> the book that displays the letters HARR my phone guesses Imperium by Robert Harris?

[madupont]

Have a Happy New Year, beppo !

[mainwaring]

Have a Happy New Year, beppo !

And to you madupont.

Currently reading Einstein. Not Albert but his lesser known cousin, Alfred. The book is 'Mozart, His Character, His Work' first printed in Germany around 1945.

Now I'm away to try and find some of the music.

[weezo]

Just got and started reading "Friday" by Michel Tournier ... supposed to be a parody on Robinson Crusoe, and starting out OK, but Friday hasn't entered the story as yet ...

[barton2]

When he does enter the story, you will cry, "thank god...."   :-(

Beppo/Main -- the photo of the cat on a book, that book was God Is Not Great, by the recently late Christopher Hitchens.  Not sure how your phone got HARR out of that.  I like Harris' book on Pompeii, if I'm thinking of the right author. 

Just finished "Harbor" and wrote this comment at a sci-fi board....

Not the "Swedish Stephen King" at all -- far better than Stephen King. Just finished his
third novel, "Harbor" and am quite blown away. Blends a paranormal thriller
with a multi-generational sketch of life on a harbor island that seems to have
an odd sort of curse -- a dark pact with the sea itself. Writing that has both a
straightforward simplicity and yet poetic nuances that simply transported me
beyond the realm of the usual. Has elements both of magical realism and of
science fiction, as it tries to convey an idea of an ocean that is a single
organic entity. Strongly recommend.

[mainwaring]

Barton - check out the image you posted and there are a couple of books to the right of the Hitchens book - there you'll see one of them with a title/author that looks like HARR. I've not read that Hitchens book but did not so long ago read Hitch-22.

Hey that Science Fiction book sounds quite good: the ocean as a single organic entity - gets you thinking. I have this memory of a potential silly thought I used to have in younger days whenever I see a plane take off from where I live. I recall that I used to watch planes as they left the airport and wondered about the handful of people who saw it land (apart from the bourgeoise passengers) and the idea that here I was and there they were, thousands of miles apart, and yet within an imaginable time-frame there we are, witnessing the same physical object. The only similar reference points were things like the sun and the moon (even the stars struggled to get in on the act.) It made the air feel like a single organic entity, a bit like the reverse of finding a message in a bottle (whatever the hell that translates as!)

[barton2]

You're right, there is a HARR book to the right....damned if I can recall what that was.  I think it was a science writer named Harrison or similar, and concerned the famous experiments at the Cavendish Laboratory that yielded the electron and its friends, but can't seem to pull it up at the moment. 

I like your off-the-thorazine ruminations on the connectedness of things....sounds either Lovelockian (in a Gaia theory kind of vein) or quantum physical.  Stars, as we know, are always trying to get in on the act.  (cough)  There is an interpretation of quantum physics that considers the possibility the moon etc. only exist when someone is observing them.  (IOW, we are being mooned?)  In a universe without consciousness, all matter is just a quantum "fog" of probabilities.

 

[bintu]

can anyone suggest me any newest fiction novel

[barton2]

A good read for you might be "Faux-Friendly Bullshit Internet Personalities Concealing Spambots," by Otis P. Dickweed.  1147 pages in the hardback edition.  Should keep you busy for a while.

[Lhoffman]

Spam?   There is nothing linked to the post and nothing in his profile.   

[madupont]

Barton and mainwaring, the ocean as one entity is something that I refer to as the Washing Machine theory of the global earth, which I and a friend observed one day in my louvered-shuttered parlor contemplating the Kalachakra and getting high. Which means it was either a friend returning from India or another returning from South America.  We were sitting on the floor with our backs against one of those plush German sofas just imaging the "World" as we know it over the Mandala that shows you the trip through the various stages of being according to your ups and downs of behavior for better or worse when the realization hit that indeed because the world apparently turns by whatever energy drives it, it probably has a sloshy washing machine effect on cleaning the planet. Therefore, one world/ one ocean and so on to the ultimate cause of all being.

Ps. mainwaring, if you get a chance and haven't already seen the movie: Amadeus      re: Mozart.  It is the movie version of the popular Broadway play with F.Murray Abraham.  I am just sorry that I never got to see the earlier performance of Oskar Werner as Mozart.

[barton2]

Spam?   There is nothing linked to the post and nothing in his profile.   

It's a strategy, common on the Net, forget the term.  You salt the website with innocuous postings, then put spam links in every third or fourth one.  That's what bintu does.  Some of his posts do have spam links, but he posts enough non-spam to maintain plausible (speaking ironically) deniability.  If you notice, the non-spams never have real content or tell us anything.  They are just automatic phrases plugged in from some kind of database.

[Lhoffman]

Interesting.   Haven't seen enough of his posts to catch that.