Ersatz TLS discussion
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Weekly TLS
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What are we reading? 25th October 2021
Bill wrote: "I know that The Love Machine is the alias given to a flesh-and-blood male, very possibly, since this is Susann, meant to suggest a pseudonymous real-life celebrity (Arnold Stang?).At some point, though, I did pick up a more obscure SF novel which may fit your description: The Climacticon..."
The Susann, then, is bound to be a let-down...
The review on GR of The Climacticon, however, makes it sound like great fun - not that I am likely to read it. Some quotes:
The cover proclaims: "THE MACHINE ANY RED-BLOODED MALE WOULD PAWN HIS WIFE TO GET."
I expected the machine to be something that triggers orgasms. It's not. Instead, it seems more like a parody of Scientology's e-meter - one that doesn't require physical contact w/ the human under scrutiny...
The main character, a person of dubious & self-serving character who works in advertising, tries out the Climacticon...
"I had talked Richard Richards into lending me the Climacticon (Richard was the last of the big beer drinkers; with three Tuborgs in him, he would agree to anything), so what started as a bleak week end turned into a satyr's dream...."
The bosses in the novel are presented as bullying unscrupulous blustering men who succeed mainly w/ a bulldozer style. One of them is "T.R.":
"T.R. claimed that too much time was wasted on the indefinite article, and he believed perfect speech was that used in newspaper headlines. He had charts and figures proving that over a normal life-span you lost two years and three months of your life by punctuating your speech with the indefinite article."
I do like that!
My thanks to https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho...
whose review I have abridged.
scarletnoir wrote: "Georg wrote: "Kurt Tucholsky had the same feelings I have; around 90 years ago..."Nostalgia isn't what it used to be!"
True. To quote Wolfgang Ambros, an Austrian singer-songwriter:
"Heit is ois scheiße, friar wor ois leiwand" (nowadays everything is shite, in the olden days everything was great (literally: leiwand (lebend)=alive/living) ;-)
Some very interesting sections of the collection of shorter non-fiction by Joseph Roth The Hotel YearsRoth recalls his presence at the funeral of the Emperor Franz-Jozef in 1916, he was clad in military uniform, to be deployed to the frontlines of the Great War. He remembers trips to Schonbrunn Palace in the summer to see the old Emperor depart for his summer holidays. (memories of the palace in Vienna for me, where i stood in the room where the Emperor recieved delegations and petitions from his subjects, a bright, hot July sun burned through the small windows and i pictured the venerable regent in his chair)
Also, Roth travels down the Volga, taking in Astrakhan, Kazan and Baku. He wonderfully re-creates the world of packed steamers, the different races and the new youth of communism beating in peoples hearts. The muscular "Burlaki", the barge haulers, are an interesting grou still man hauling kit and equipment and barges in 1926
AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "On a mundane trip in clear and cold temperatures, to pick up some toilet roll, i passed by the local hospice charity shop and spotted a collection of small books on the cath..."Oh, dear, no Wells. Nostalgia from Yahoo. I was able to pull up the itinerary of a 'Library' tour I was on in 2011. We got to see and peruse very old books in its library. What a treat. Google 'wells library picture'.
MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "On a mundane trip in clear and cold temperatures, to pick up some toilet roll, i passed by the local hospice charity shop and spotted a collection of small book..."my mistak, that list is for the 36 volume edition, in my 43 volume edition Wells is there!
Awesome library MK, if blasted covid is fading by next spring, i have a long list of visits to make to cathedrals and libraries!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202..."The most recent installment of The Books of [their] Life.
The book I could never read again
[...] I have little desire to reread On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Although I used to like his maverick spirit and critical mind, I find his inflated masculine ego highly troubling.
If I had a penny for every time I read this inanity...
Make it new, Elif! Don't relay other peoples' cliched opinions and read On the Road again instead; you'll be surprised.
AB76 wrote: "Apparently the novel is compared to "Voss" and some people say influenced by "Voss""Incidentally, I wouldn't recommend Voss, which I don't think would be very much like To the Islands. White has several better novels.
Why do the "climactic final scenes of Vanity Fair" have to take place in "the essential impermanence of a hotel, a foreign one at that"?Here's Jonathan Keates's reasoning in The Portable Paradise - an enjoyable and nicely crafted little book that was recommended here by Mach a while ago.
Spoiler warning for the ending of Thackeray's novel.
(Pages 92-93. Sorry for the bad quality of the photos, I am knackered tonight and thought I'd better stop fiddling, not wanting to make it even worse!
Here are direct links to the photographs, which might making zooming easier:
https://images.gr-assets.com/photos/1...
https://images.gr-assets.com/photos/1...)
Reading up on this week's discussions continues to be great fun.
SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Apparently the novel is compared to "Voss" and some people say influenced by "Voss""Incidentally, I wouldn't recommend Voss, which I don't think would be very much like To the Island..."
I have always been very lukewarm on White, as i found him so dissapointing as my first aussie reads about 22 years ago. He seemed totally overrated and i am still not keen to read much of his work BUT, his first novel "Happy Valley" set in the snowy Monaro of NSW was superb and really suprised me when i read it in 2020
Machenbach wrote: "Dunno. Blondie were a pretty big band with catchy tunes and a hot lead singer so I don't think I was all that unusual 'though it's true that most of my friends weren't yet into music at all so perhaps I was un peu precocious...?"Clairement. Maybe the D&D and ginger hair got a bit in the way of being cool, but your taste in music definitely was. I mean, at 10, in primary school, I can't remember anybody who would have liked Blondie (or the equivalent band in 1989).
My parents' taste in music really didn't help growing up (my dad bel canto and Elvis, my mum classical, both of them the mainly godawful French Yé-yé with the odd exception, such as Nat King Cole, the sublime Mahalia Jackson, Gershwin, Fitzgerald or Armstrong - oh, and Astrud Gilberto, and the soundtrack to Orfeu Negro too!...), always listening to a very safe, middle of the road radio (Europe 1). So my first musical forays were dictated by the local mediatheque, where I'd borrow CDs without really knowing the content. And so I liked and eventually bought for myself Phil Collins' album, George Michael's Faith and Sinead O'Connor's I don't want what I haven't got.
I remember these cheap cover CDs, we had them too in France! I was about to say that £1.25 sounds like quite a lot of money, but maybe you're not that old! [Saw the other day an interesting BBC4 documentary on the Boomtown Rats - had never connected them to Geldof (completely unknown on the other side of the channel). There was also a really good one a bit earlier this year on The Undertones.] I had the red and blue albums (not thanks to my parents, whose entire musical knowledge of the 60s was French), and brought them with me on my summer linguistic trip to Chester. And I did pore over the lyrics too, in my little pastel salmon and turquoise bedroom that I was sharing with a very nice Spanish girl, although there were only a handful of songs I really liked from each "side". Fool on the Hill and Girl at the top I think... I like the older woman in that suburban Chester house in particular, we'd watch the late films together while her husband slept upstairs (Play Misty For Me was a bit much for my 12 y.o. self though!). Good memories all round.
Grease was fun growing up (far less so now), but of course I couldn't understand what was past its 'use by' date in that car (the condom) and why Ritzo was so upset, but never mind, I liked the songs, esp. the opening one (Frankie Valli)...
PS: I think I'd have liked to listen to some jazz orchestration on some of the Beatles songs actually!
('Is Superman Circumcised?')
Maybe, maybe not... but it is the front-runner to win this year's 'oddest book title of the year award'.
Other titles which may give rise to a giggle or a snigger are described in this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
@HP and @Mach - you younger people don't know you were born, as far as access to music is concerned.Us codgers had to make do with only the BBC as kids - and no radio 1! You'd get Saturday request programmes - 'Children's Favourites' hosted by Uncle Mac - playing such memorable ditties as "How much is that doggie in the window?" At some point, rather more 'exciting' fare began to be played, such as 'Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat' (I kid you not):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDYpr...
The BBC had begun 'Pick of the Pops', with the top 20, late in the 1950s - David Jacobs hosted, and also chaired Juke Box Jury on TV from 1959... this gave some of us our first regular experience of pop music.
The move to secondary school led to the discovery of Radio Luxembourg - with a lot of often American pop, and adverts (!). Unlike the BBC, this played more or less non-stop pop music at that time... and then came the Beatles in 1963, Radio Caroline in 1964 ('our' ship broadcast from near the Isle of Man) and the world was never the same again, forcing the BBC to fight back belatedly with the creation of Radio 1 in 1967.
At home, my father was very keen on music, listening to classical orchestral music, opera and Welsh male voice choirs... he was also keen on jazz and would visit Ronnie Scott's on visits to London, though oddly I don't recall hearing much at home, except Billie Holiday maybe. The first classical piece I remember liking was Handel's Water Music. We also used to attend local amateur concerts, from time to time. School, of course, was very much focused on music - I have the strong impression that good music teachers in Welsh primaries were more valued than good academic teachers back then - and maybe it's still the case!
So, a very mixed bag of musical influences growing up, though my talents stop at the passive - I can't play an instrument or sing (well), but can often identify pieces from the opening bars quite easily. Now, it's a piece of cake to rapidly track down a song or a symphony with the help of Google, YouTube etc. It's too easy, really!
There was no pop music in the first half of the fifties, no charts as I remember. there were recordings of various American crooners, sentimental songs on the radio. Johnny Ray was very popularThe main entertainment for teenagers in the mid fifties was to go to a dance hall where these songs formed the basis od the music played. I used to go there on Thursdays and sometimes Saturdays, they closed at 10.30 pm I think so one could catch the bus home. Always packed, no drugs, hardly any alcohol - no one had much money but they were great fun.
Weekends would find me in the jazz clubs of the West End. The coffee bars with their frothy coffee became very popular and it was there that the rock and roll groups really learned their trade. No room to dance but all would sit around and hand jive to the music.
The Beatles and pop really passed me by for by that time I had three small children.....
Mod
I now realise why I associated Wilmet from The Glass of Blessings with hotels and reluctance to stay in "a place that actually claims to have a bright Christian atmosphere" - in No Fond Return of Love, the two ladies staying in the Taviscombe hotel encounter Wilmet while visiting the castle.
CCCubbon wrote: "There was no pop music in the first half of the fifties, no charts as I remember. there were recordings of various American crooners, sentimental songs on the radio. Johnny Ray was very popularThe..."
Kevin Rowlands namechecked Jonny Ray in "Come on Eileen", an 80s classic
The office girls, including myself, went to see him at the London Palladium. The only such concert that I ever attended. The theatre was overflowing with screaming teenagers especially when he sang ‘Cry’. Jazz and opera were more my scene, what a noise that day! I think Ray was deaf.
Mod
Johnnie Ray was a bit before my time, and I don't remember ever hearing any of his music. Familiar with him as an Oregonian, though - born in Dallas, OR on my birthday, as it turns out.
Machenbach wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "@HP and @Mach - you younger people don't know you were born, as far as access to music is concerned.Us codgers had to make do with only the BBC as kids - and no radio 1! You'd ..."
Even if I had the app on my phone I think the only result from my humming to it would be "not recognised!"
Lljones wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "The office girls, including myself, went to see him at the London Palladium. The only such concert that I ever attended. The theatre was overflowing with screaming teenagers especi..."His other big hit that I remember was one called ‘ Just walking in the Rain’. He wasn’t really a very good singer but had a big following mainly because he was different I believe. He didn’t last all that long in popularity and was swamped and out of it by the time skiffle and rock n roll really took off.
One thing about those oldie crooners you could hear every word when they sang, I cannot make out today’s but that’s probably my ears!
Machenbach wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "@HP and @Mach - you younger people don't know you were born, as far as access to music is concerned.Us codgers had to make do with only the BBC as kids - and no radio 1! You'd ..."
i avoid all music streaming, i have been a music fan all my life, stacks of CDs with a strong indie theme but also the greats of the 60s and 70s and a love for punk. I would summarise my tastes as alternative with some mainstream content but i just cant abide the spotify idea.....i'm clearly getting old
About to start Nadine Gordimers 1963 apartheid era classic Occasion for Loving at it reminds me what a solid canon of great literature South Africa has produced.From the Schreiner, Rooke and Bosman era, which encompassed the first years of the Union and the Smuts UP era, where apartheid was absent in name only, onwards to the writers of the apartheid era(La Guma, Gordimer,Paton,Fugard and others) and then the 1980s-90s styles of Coetzee,Brink, Galgut, Mda and others. Brink in some ways overlaps both era's into the modern.
I am suprised that Afrikaner language literature hasnt been translated more, the modern novel "Triomf" and works by Breytenbach are all i can think off but where the white population was mostly bi-lingual, i guess Afrikaners chose to write in English. Brink wrote in both languages.
Black south african writers are also present throughout the century, with Zulu novels like "Shaka"by Mofolo and the great Sol Plaatje. I have already mentioned the best modern black south african author, Zakes Mda.
Word should be given to the influential Jewish minority in South Africa, of which Gordimer was part and which produced political activists like Ruth First, and Joe Slovo, plus photographer David Goldblatt and actor Anthony Sher
Machenbach wrote: "AB76 wrote: "i just cant abide the spotify idea.....i'm clearly getting old."We're probably pretty similar. I did try Spotify but I actually found it overwhelming - the fact that I was able to ch..."
hahaha!
i still have an old but excellent denon hifi from 2004, no wifi, no adapter for my mobile which i rarely use, so unless i burn MP3s onto cd...i'm living in the past. at some point when the cd player packs up...i have a decision to make...(agghhhh).
Lljones wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "The office girls, including myself, went to see him at the London Palladium. The only such concert that I ever attended. The theatre was overflowing with screaming teenagers especi..."i googled him and misread it as Dallas,TX! I also got confused with Vancouver,WA when i was reading a novel set in Oregon/Washington.
Lovely chats about music....I'm usually the last person to try (or buy) anything new, books notwithstanding of course! I'm increasingly sounding like the older generation these days....modern music is rubbish and seem to be stuck in the 1990's, with the odd bit of '70's and '80's thrown in plus some stuff from the naughties (mostly alternative).
A friend of mine sounded surprised when I told her I still use an I-Pod. It's still working, so why get rid of it...although the battery isn't holding it's charge as well, so it might not last much longer.
I do use YouTube for music too, but it seems to be the same 'suggested' music that reappears so I do end up listening to the same stuff.
I still have CD's and DVD's, although I dread the day when there will no longer be the means to play them.
Mach wroteWent to see Bauhaus last weekend in Ally Pally.
Is the ice skating rink still there?
Mod
An officemate introduced me to Pandora a decade or more ago; he told me at the time that "the more you use it (add songs, artists, etc.), the better it gets at identifying your tastes and interests." And it's true...my full range of music interests are represented when I 'shuffle' my playlists. I subsequently burned all my cd's and albums to an external hard-drive and sold all of them. Lightening my storage load, at least.
But...I managed to bring back to Portland about 500 LPs from my brother's house. Mostly 60's-80's jazz, as my sis-in-law worked for a jazz club for many years. Now I have to figure out what to do with them.
When I first got interested in pop music, I had 'inherited' an enormous so-called 'portable' radio in cream plastic - it weighed a ton - the battery was about the size and shape of a loaf! This was used to listen to Radio Luxembourg (and, for a laugh, Radio Sofia)...Later, I spent 18 months saving to buy a Bush Monarch record player (it may still be in the attic)...
First LP was, I think, 'The Shadows' Greatest Hits'. The second - a better choice - was 'Please Please Me'.
Edit: the radio I had was an Ever Ready C All-Dry Portable, as shown here:
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/ever_c....
Mod
My brother's son (and favorite nephew) is a musician and owned a record store for years. He went through the several thousand LPs in the house, and pulled those 500 out as being rare, collectible, and in good or better condition. He didn't want them though (has his own very sizeable collection), so I took them, intending to sell them. They're all in my second storage unit for the moment.
Haven't looked very hard yet, but I'm trying to find some sort of LibraryThing thingy that catalogs record collections. Any suggestions?
Mod
Lucy Mangan writes about creating a library in the house she and her husband bought in Norfolk.
Mind you, I more or less live in a library as I have bookshelves/-cases in every room and the corridor of my flat.
Tam wrote: "...A trip to Coventry Cathedral. I wasn't too enamoured to begin with. The old bombed-out church space has a poignant feel to it..."
Lovely post. You might be interested to take a look at "The Facts of Life" by Graham Joyce, a vivid novel with surreal elements set in Coventry and covering the 1940 raid. I saw it recommended on the old TLS and really enjoyed it. Lady Godiva appears.
I was taken to see the new Coventry Cathedral shortly after it was consecrated. There was a long line to get in. It left me with a strong impression of modernity and hope.
But being from Lincolnshire, Lincoln Cathedral will always be tops for me.
There's a remarkable thing about GJ's family. Each of his mother, his grandmother and his great-grandmother were their mother's seventh daughter.
Lovely post. You might be interested to take a look at "The Facts of Life" by Graham Joyce, a vivid novel with surreal elements set in Coventry and covering the 1940 raid. I saw it recommended on the old TLS and really enjoyed it. Lady Godiva appears.
I was taken to see the new Coventry Cathedral shortly after it was consecrated. There was a long line to get in. It left me with a strong impression of modernity and hope.
But being from Lincolnshire, Lincoln Cathedral will always be tops for me.
There's a remarkable thing about GJ's family. Each of his mother, his grandmother and his great-grandmother were their mother's seventh daughter.
Machenbach wrote: "AB76 wrote: "i still have an old but excellent denon hifi from 2004, no wifi, no adapter for my mobile which i rarely use, so unless i burn MP3s onto cd...i'm living in the past. at some point when..."cant beat some Bauhaus on Halloween!
someday i will have to rip all the CDs onto pc, i know its coming...
Russell wrote: "Tam wrote: "...A trip to Coventry Cathedral. I wasn't too enamoured to begin with. The old bombed-out church space has a poignant feel to it..."Lovely post. You might be interested to take a look..."
Thanks for that recommendation. It sounds right up my street. A book with Lady Godiva as a plot element is irresistible to me!... I have always had a strong attraction for very historic but jaded, lived-in places. I adored Trieste for example, whilst the rest of the family were not so impressed. It has an amazing steel furnace, I think, at the back end of town which belches out flames like some vast beached dragon. Marseille is on my list for a place I really want to go to. I have only got as far as the train station there, twice, (which has a fantastic view of the city) and it seemed unbearable that I didn't have the time to wander off down into the city port.
Lincoln is a very fine cathedral but is very much hemmed in at the front side so its hard to take in from that angle. I very much enjoyed the annual engineering festival that is held there. I have my own take on 'bare naked ladies' on my blog this month, so I really enjoyed the happenstance of running across a statue of Lady Godiva in the streets of Coventry. If you happen to be interested, 'Hope and the Gates of Dawn' https://jediperson.wordpress.com/2021...
Fuzzywuzz wrote: "A friend of mine sounded surprised when I told her I still use an I-Pod. It's still working, so why get rid of it...although the battery isn't holding it's charge as well, so it might not last much longer."Assuming you paid for these via the Apple store, you should be able to transfer them onto a new(er) device for free - worth checking out with Apple, before it dies completely!
As for streaming - I find it useful, for several reasons - first of all, my wife, although she likes music, is rarely in the mood to listen to the same music at the same time as myself (apart from concerts)... this allows both of us to use headphones connected to a suitable device (laptop, tablet, phone) to listen when we like to what we like.
Secondly, I often mess about trying to track down some half-remembered song, perhaps played on some TV drama - Google, YouTube etc. are helpful for that (I have not attempted 'identification by humming', though I have used Shazam on rare occasions - not sure if humming is possible with that).
Thirdly - as I have a very poor memory (probably not due to senility, yet, but who knows), at times I like to save songs and performances on Spotify so that I may easily find them again, if required - in various files and folders. Spotify also allows me to compare and contrast different performances of the same songs, so that, for example, although Chuck Berry's original Johnny B. Goode is the class of the field, Judas Priest's heavy metal version is also great fun in its own way.
I’ve been glancing through the music posts – not in any depth as I recognize few of the names and of those few can conjure up an aural image only for The Beatles. A recent email from Barnes & Nobel tells me that Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present is “The Publishing Event of the Season!”I don’t believe that any books were mentioned in these posts. Does your taste in music influence your reading at all? Or vice-versa? I ask this as someone who’s read primarily books on music (and comic books) for the past month and whose present reading is made up exclusively of books on music – the one work of fiction I have on deck is Paul Griffith’s Mr Beethoven.
AB76 wrote: "cant beat some Bauhaus on Halloween!"Never been a huge Bauhaus fan but 'Bela Lugosi's dead' is one hell of a tune, and still sounds amazingly modern forty years after its release!
Fuzzywuzz wrote: "Lovely chats about music....I'm usually the last person to try (or buy) anything new, books notwithstanding of course! I'm increasingly sounding like the older generation these days....modern mus..."
RE your I-pod, I have several SanDisk MP3 players which I use to store library books I download. (This way I can read them at my leisure because no one grabs them back after 3 weeks.)
I have had the same odd noise when I say I've just bought another - "what do they still make those?" I keep a new one on the shelf just to keep in reserve.
By the way, I just downloaded a favorite -
- is case it warms up enough today to rake MORE leaves.
Bill wrote: "I’ve been glancing through the music posts – not in any depth as I recognize few of the names and of those few can conjure up an aural image only for The Beatles. A recent email from Barnes & Nobel..."Bill - have you checked out https://www.fantagraphics.com/ They have a fantastic couple of days sale before Xmas.
Bill wrote: "Does your taste in music influence your reading at all? Or vice-versa?"It's a good question, and I suspect answers will vary... in my case, the answer is 'not really', though at times I may become interested in a book reference to a piece of music, and track it down online. Most often I don't bother - for example, I like Ian Rankin's 'Rebus' series - and our man often listens to obscure Scottish bands - but I don't recall following up on those.
On the other hand, some familiarity with Louis Armstrong did enhance my enjoyment of Ray Celestin's City Blues series, though I would not want to overstate the case.
I just looked at my weekly (always insightful) newsletter from the Garden Museum. It has a nice explanation of the pineapple, including an experiment for the younger set - https://dyvdnmp0itmzz.cloudfront.net/...This reminded me that I need to get cracking on
before I have to return it to the library.
Tam wrote: "Russell wrote: "Tam wrote: "...A trip to Coventry Cathedral. I wasn't too enamoured to begin with. The old bombed-out church space has a poignant feel to it..."Lovely post. You might be intereste..."
I have some bare naked lady plants growing in the garden ( amaryllis belladonna) but I find them to be very floppy and they generally fall flat on their pretty faces. As the plants are quite poisonous they are mixed in with other plants, don’t want the animal trying them.
Sure I read a book once where those plants were used to dispose of someone in a crime book but I cannot remember which book it was that I read.
'fraid my week of confusion isn't over yet - but giving it a try anyway. Bear with me, I hope this won't be nonsensical.Cabbie, so glad you liked that Angela Carter passage too - also enjoyed the photo of the impressive rococo fountain, Robert. The thanks is due to Andy, though, his review of Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories brought me to this rewarding reread. I have been meaning to reread Nights at the Circus for a while, but I think the short stories might appeal more. Which are your favourites, Cabbie?
Bill wrote:
I don’t believe that any books were mentioned in these posts. Does your taste in music influence your reading at all? Or vice-versa?That's a good question, Bill, will have to think about this one. Off the cuff: How Music Works by David Byrne I read out of interest both for the subject and Byrne's points of view, liking his music. I enjoyed reading Dierich Diederichsen's Sexbeat on a specific time in pop, and am girding my loins for tackling Über Pop-Musik, his big book on the topic, which I have here, but which is a bit daunting just now due to its sheer size.
I liked selecting "fitting" music to listen to as a frame to reading Jackie Kay's Trumpet, same with Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin, in both cases you hear the music in the narrative, it's musical narrative... sorry, don't know how to phrase it better. The Lonely Londoners is another case in point.
Now I think of it, I also try and listen to many of the specific pieces mentioned in the books I read, especially when I take them to carry additional layers of meaning (as with the passage in Vanity Fair mentioned in one of the photos above). The House of Sleep or The Rotters' Club, both by Jonathan Coe, come to mind as well here. He writes well about music. (Film, too, but sticking to music, for now.)
AB76 wrote:
can't beat some Bauhaus on Halloween!Agreed, AB. The mere idea makes an old sort-of Goth's heart beat faster. Sounds like a great evening indeed, Mach!
I was introduced to Bauhaus, as to a lot of other (in this time and place) unusual bands, by a partner of my older brother - she was great. Anglophile, too.
Definitely feeling old as well (apart from Siesta-ish just now), as I have never tried Spotify or any of the usual suspect (?) apps. I have some music in digitalized form, but no comparable amount to Mr B's numerous external drives. There's also a fully functional record player in our living room, though it's not often in use. Mostly playing CDs, still, and I listen to the radio selectively to learn new music.
@ Tam: Lovely excursion report to Coventry, thank you! I was there some time ago, remember Lady Godiva in all places and shapes very vividly and would love to swap experiences soon. Siesta for now, though...
Mod
Certainly it influences my non-fiction reading. But I can't think of any case where my musical taste influenced my fiction reading. I have read a number of books of fiction written by musicians, though. Partial list includes Willy Vlautin, John Darnielle, Dylan, Cohen, Colin Meloy's sister Maile .... (I've never listened to Vlautin or Darnielle, so can't say whether they jibe with my musical tastes.)
MK wrote: "Bill - have you checked out https://www.fantagraphics.com/ They have a fantastic couple of days sale before Xmas."Thanks – I have a few Fantagraphics titles on my shelves, but tend to buy them sparingly. As with all sorts of books, I tend to accumulate them much faster than I read them, but with comics collections the acquisition rate tends to be slower, both because of the price and the size of the books colliding with my limited shelf space.
A few years ago I was interested in their Popeye series, but put off buying any volumes; now I see they’re mostly out-of-print, which is probably a good thing for me. With long-running daily comic strips, as a buyer I’m really looking for something like a “greatest hits” collection rather than the completist approach most Fantagraphics editions take, but that doesn’t seem to be very widely practiced anymore.
Lljones wrote: "Certainly it influences my non-fiction reading. But I can't think of any case where my musical taste influenced my fiction reading. I have read a number of books of fiction written by musicians, though. Partial list includes Willy Vlautin, John Darnielle, Dylan, Cohen, Colin Meloy's sister Maile .... (I've never listened to Vlautin or Darnielle, so can't say whether they jibe with my musical tastes.)"By non-fiction, do you mean only books about music and musicians or does it go further than that? For instance, reading about Stonehenge because you liked the Spinal Tap song (there are probably better examples, but my knowledge of non-classical music is pretty limited).
I’m probably the opposite: though I read a lot of books about music and musician biographies, I can’t think of a more general non-fiction interest that has been inspired by music. On the other hand, I’ve read quite a bit of fiction either about musicians or that I was led to through music, either as the source for an opera or merely a titular allusion. I’m also curious to hear music by writers I’ve liked (Anthony Burgess, Nietzsche). In the case of E. T. A. Hoffmann, it’s worked both ways: I read his stories because of the music of Schumann and Offenbach, and reading his stories led me to seek out his music. It doesn’t seem to work in the opposite direction: I know some music by Paul Bowles, but am not inclined to read any of his fiction.
Machenbach wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "Lucy Mangan writes about creating a library in the house she and her husband bought in Norfolk.Mind you, I more or less live in a library as I have bookshelves/-cases in every room an..."
If you are like me, you may have closet space. I have given those clothes I knew in my heart that I would never wear again to charity. This has freed up CLOSET space. I now have 2 bookcases in a closet and am in the process of keeping the small collections together - too many Kiplings, books about language, and books about trains and transit.
Machenbach wrote: "NB Whilst I have replied to you, I'm fully aware that all of the above is just white noise to you Bill."White noise, perhaps, but some traces of a signal got through. “… stretching way too hard for an intellectualism that seems disproportionate to the subject/object” in fact, made me think of White Noise, whose protagonist, head of a department of Hitler Studies, is disdainful of a colleague who wants to start a department of Elvis Studies. I can’t find much about Reversing into The Future: New Wave Graphics 1977 - 1990, but the general vibe I’m receiving reminds me that there are two (mainly) pop-music related volumes on my shelves: Album Cover Album: The Book of Record Jackets and Album Cover Album: The Second Album.
Bill wrote: "MK wrote: "Bill - have you checked out https://www.fantagraphics.com/ They have a fantastic couple of days sale before Xmas."Thanks – I have a few Fantagraphics titles on my shelves, but tend to ..."
If you are into snarky, I highly recommend - https://www.seattletimes.com/comics-t...
There will be a paywall after a few looks, but there's also a website - https://www.tundracomics.com/ or on Facebook as well.
Tam (#448) wrote: "... 'Hope and the Gates of Dawn'..."
Well, Tam, that is all very interesting, and I liked the poem too. There must be something in my childhood that makes me think of gates primarily from the inside, keeping things out (and now I’m grown up I can say Cavafy – Gates – Barbarians), even better if along with the gates I’m inside a walled garden, best of all a secret one, unseen by the eyes of the world; and not especially from the outside, even if when opened they do give access to a new, possibly withheld, knowledge. There’s also the question of what the gates are made of. In the context of a suburban dwelling, as Mrs VL once pointed out to me when a gate had to be replaced, metal says Keep Out and wood says Come In - so wood it was. Dawn/Eos/Aurora seems to have herself a pair of stone gates, which say I’m not sure what, except perhaps This Is How I Look Best In A Pose, stone-hard material contrasting with soft flesh.
Lincoln: Yes, a bit hemmed in, though you do get a decent view of the west front from the castle, if you climb the steps to the top a corner tower, where you then have before you not just the cathedral but a panorama of the city and the country around. The castle of course is not to be missed - Magna Carta, the penitential chapel, the green sward of the bailey resembling a high-walled garden.
Trieste: I'd love to go, having only ever visited through the medium of Jan Morris' wonderful "Trieste and the Meanig of Nowhere".
Well, Tam, that is all very interesting, and I liked the poem too. There must be something in my childhood that makes me think of gates primarily from the inside, keeping things out (and now I’m grown up I can say Cavafy – Gates – Barbarians), even better if along with the gates I’m inside a walled garden, best of all a secret one, unseen by the eyes of the world; and not especially from the outside, even if when opened they do give access to a new, possibly withheld, knowledge. There’s also the question of what the gates are made of. In the context of a suburban dwelling, as Mrs VL once pointed out to me when a gate had to be replaced, metal says Keep Out and wood says Come In - so wood it was. Dawn/Eos/Aurora seems to have herself a pair of stone gates, which say I’m not sure what, except perhaps This Is How I Look Best In A Pose, stone-hard material contrasting with soft flesh.
Lincoln: Yes, a bit hemmed in, though you do get a decent view of the west front from the castle, if you climb the steps to the top a corner tower, where you then have before you not just the cathedral but a panorama of the city and the country around. The castle of course is not to be missed - Magna Carta, the penitential chapel, the green sward of the bailey resembling a high-walled garden.
Trieste: I'd love to go, having only ever visited through the medium of Jan Morris' wonderful "Trieste and the Meanig of Nowhere".
Bill wrote: "I’ve been glancing through the music posts – not in any depth as I recognize few of the names and of those few can conjure up an aural image only for The Beatles. A recent email from Barnes & Nobel..."in my teens the books that the indie bands championed did have an effect on me. Mick Jones, from the Clash was into JG Ballard and i remember buying High Rise from a university bookshop in 1995 but hating it(lol), i re-read it aged 41 and loved it. Robert Smith and his version of L'Etranger becoming "Killing an Arab" led me to enjot that Camus novel and 80s guitar heroes The Chameleons led me to "The Star Rover" by Jack London. These are the main ones i can remember, so i would answer yes in my younger days, less so now
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Books mentioned in this topic
Zofloya, or The Moor (other topics)The Big Sleep (other topics)
Travels with My Aunt (other topics)
Travels with My Aunt (other topics)
Singing The Sadness (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Reginald Hill (other topics)Nadine Gordimer (other topics)
Diedrich Diederichsen (other topics)
Jackie Kay (other topics)
Jackie Collins (other topics)
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Nostalgia isn't what it used to be!