Rob Atkinson > Recent Status Updates

Fascinating and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny account of Paris's seamier side just after the Second World War...Great photographs too.

Already encountering sloppy scholarship and editing. "In about 475, Saint Genevieve erected a church on the spot where Denis finally died at Catolacus. Over the next four centuries, it metamorphosed into a Gothic cathedral -- Europe's first." Though St. Denis in its ultimate form is credited as being the first Gothic cathedral, the Gothic style was still a couple of centuries off in 875.

Purpose: "I mean it mostly as a reminder of what life was like in cities when they were as vivid and savage and uncontrollable as they were for many centuries, as expressed by Paris, the most sublime of the world's great cities."

"The exigencies of money and the proclivities of bureaucrats -- as terrified of anomalies as of germs, chaos, dissipation, laughter, unanswerable questions -- have conspired to create the conditions for stasis, to sanitize the city to the point where there will be no surprises, no hazards, no spontaneous outbreaks, no weeds." Sounds familiar to this 21st century New Yorker...

For starters, a beautifully mounted book, well designed and copiously illustrated with curious images and photos.

Amusing enough farce, but plays fast and loose with historical fact and chronology...given the bibliography of historical sources (for a comic NOVEL?) you'd think Buckley might be less cavalier -- or make fewer mistakes, if it's unknowing. If the former one would expect he'd acknowledge that he's taken a freer approach and bent facts to serve the needs of his story, perhaps in an afterword...

Great fictional cameo just now by Alfred Jarry (whom I assume Gide knew fairly well). I'm struck by haw layered and 'meta' this novel is turning out to be, post-modern avant la lettre. The appended journal of its writing should be very illuminating.

Lucid organization and writing thus far, but shaky analysis, and questionable assertions aplenty...cf without question that Nero burned Rome, and his dependence on the Rodney Stark study 'Cities of God' which seems to have a strongly pro-Christian, anti Greco-Roman bias, at least based on the assumptions here presented as fact.

The more I read the more I'm convinced of this novel's influence on Poe...hints of "The Bells" and perhaps "The Tell-Tale Heart" now...

I feel certain Edgar Allan Poe must have read this novel upon its release in 1841-2; shades of 'The Raven' and "Fall of the House of Usher" have cropped up here already. Amongst other things Dickens seems to be both poking fun at, and using for atmospheric effect, the conventions on the gothic novel. Hadn't expected that!

I've heard good things about this translation... But Mark Steele's introduction is terribly written and his synopsis of the first seven Fantômas novels is incomprehensible.

So far this reads like "Cloud Atlas" if it had been authored by Umberto Eco. A good thing!

Every year or so I pick up a Dickens novel I haven't read yet...and I'm always amazed at how witty and entertaining he is. Thank heavens he was so prolific! I think I've got another decade's worth awaiting me. I'll savor them.

A birthday gift from my brother, a biography of a gear hero of mine. Thanks Sam!

One has to wonder if the dadas here collected would be amused, horrified, or gladdened that their works are collected nearly a hundred years hence in this volume, and are thereby made part of the artistic and literary canon! Some of it -- particularly the Cabaret Voltaire era texts and much of the poetry -- remain opaque if not wholly inscrutable. But the later manifestos speak as loud and clear as ever.

Loving Shriver already...whip smart and curmudgeonly, blackly humorous, just my kind of writer.

Loving Shriver already...whip smart and curmudgeonly, blackly humorous, just my kind of writer.