Reading/Have Read/Should Write About

 

Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew

Tried to write about it for a few hours—did write something, mostly complaining about how hard it is to write, etc. etc. etc. Deleted it. Slim Bernhard—not the best starting place for anyone interested in Tommy B, but not a particularly bad one either. (Correction, which also features a Wittgenstein (in disguise) is probably the best I’ve read by Bernhard so far).

Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being and Mystery and Manners

These books are essential. 

Essential.

Anyone who wants to write fiction must read Mystery and Manners, a collection of O’Connor’s lectures and essays on her craft. The Habit of Being, which collects her letters, is fascinating–of particular interest are her letters to A., a younger woman who liked O’Connor’s stories and wrote to her until the end of her life.

I sort of graze on these books.

Kafka’s Diaries

More grazing.

More essential.

Emmanuelle Guattari’s memoir I, Little Asylum

Did you know that Felix Guattari had a pet monkey? Boubou was her name. She died in a tree. Full review forthcoming.

Alain Badiou’s The Age of the Poets

Don’t know if I’ll ever work up the courage to write about this one, but what I’ve read so far—the first four essays in the collection—is really compelling. Badiou tackles Plato’s rejection of the poets from his ideal state—Badiou reckons that “no truth can ever deliver the meaning of meaning, or the sense of sense”:

Plato banned the poem because he suspected that poetic thought could not be the thought of thought. We once again welcome the poem in our midst, because it keeps us from supposing that the singularity of a thought can be replaced by the thought of this thought.

By which I take this to mean: The spirit of the spirit.

Dmitry Samarov’s Where To? A Hack Memoir

Been enjoying the vignettes here—Samarov has a direct and descriptive but wry style. His stories spill over into rants, comic asides, lovely ugly grotesque anecdotes, and tales of warmth and friendship. Love the illustrations too. Great stuff.

William T. Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories

I like Vollmann, but this one is hard to get into. Wonderful dark moments, great little fragments of stories, but 150 pages in and I feel like I’m reading the scraps left out of some other, better, tighter novel.