Now reading Knausgaard #6. I think I’ve got a problem…
I have continued to enjoy them, but there’s definitely an aspect of comfort reading even in the boringness (not to mention Karl Ove’s amazing failures of judgement that make me feel a lot better about all my decisions).
(an affectionate pastiche)
So did I tell you about the time when I was a teenager and me and my friend, Jan Vidar, tried to go to a party in Kristiansand on new year’s eve? His friend, Tom, said he would buy the beer for him, and dropped the bottles off in his car. But Jan Vidar’s brother found it and made him return it and swap it back for the money. Tom winked at us, and later we went and got it back. I had to hide it in the woods outside my house before evening. I was wary of my father, but his mood always changed whenever our grandparents were coming, and he said alright we could go to town until 2 in the morning. They think we’ll be going to a friend’s house, so we’ll need to hitchhike and then take a bus. So I said goodbye to my grandma and started the walk through the snow to Jan Vidar’s house after collecting the beer. The snow had settled on the dark bottles, and the sky was luminous and open. Every time a car comes by, I think it’s my uncle Gunnar, so I have to hide the beer in the ditch and walk on, but it’s not him so I go back and collect it. Past the parquet factory, where all the kids work in the evenings, assembling palettes. It was piecework, and they were country kids, never realised that the tally could be cheated. For a while I was worldly and a curiosity, the local girls used to cycle ten kilometres just to take a look at me, but there was nothing interesting in them to me. Past the frozen waterfall and the ravine where it was never warm even in summer. At the top there was Pal’s house, he was slow on the uptake and we could tease him, his mother was always angry with red eyes. I was rude to her once, and laughed about it with Jan Vidar afterwards, and now she always looks at me with hatred. His house is a mess, broken machinery all over the lawns, why do people want to live like that? I thought, or do they think it’s normal?. His father was always quiet and kind, and would let us in to play anyway.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) and Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe (1974).
A Confederacy of Dunces. This really is an incredible book, even funnier than I remembered it, and a bit sadder too. Ignatius is such an amazing invention … grotesque in every way and a total tool, but somehow heroic. It could be dated given the setting (1960s New Orleans) but holds up remarkably well.
Porterhouse Blue is a bit more dated – but in recompense has some fantastically funny lines, and will be all-too-familiar to anyone who’s spent any time in a Cambridge/Oxford college.
As I said to my friend and pupil Pancetti, as we walked on the Via Corso, Rome is the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti, firstly my friend, and only then my pupil. My pupils could only become so after first being my friend. Or rather, my pupils would only accept me as their tutor after they accepted me as their friend. And that would only be possible in Rome, the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti smiled and agreed. I can think clearly here, in Rome, on the Via Corso, unlike in Austria, that base land of the petite bourgeois. Petite bourgeois Austria, that land of the self-satisfied yeoman, satisfied in all their base passtimes. Lower Austria is the place where all that is high minded goes to stultify and die. No, I will never leave Rome again, I told Pancetti, I will never go from where I can think clearly as an artist and a human and return to self-satisfied Austia, petite bourgeois Lower Austria. Pancetti only smiled and continued to walk on his perfectly polished loafers, bought only from the most expensive shops in the Via Corso. He is so excellently cultured, the very finest human in the world – a human like him could only exist in Rome, never could have arisen in base Lower Austria, to which I shall never go back. I walked down the Via Corso…
Repeat for three hundred pages, and then you get a new paragraph
I like to keep things positive when chatting about books, films, music etc if only because there’s just so much negativity available on the internet, and I often get the sense people find it much easier to rip on stuff than talk about something they really love.
On the other hand – it’s great fun. And maybe can tell us more about our tastes. So the Bernhard book got me thinking – what are people’s least favourite books/authors? Who do you think is overrated? Why?
Why? Why are you writing like that?! Stop referring to your hair as your “rug”!
By Tim Moore (2004)
I keep returning to Tim Moore, since in theory he’s right up my street, disappearing on ridiculous self-inflicted adventures which just so happen to go wrong in entirely foreseen ways. In this one he walks a donkey along the Santiago de Compostela.
It did have quite a few of the things that frustrate me, including the totally accidental I didn’t intend to turn this into a book because that’s my job wackiness, and his tendency to give up and get his wife to fly over and bail him out, which I swear happens in every book and completely deflates the sense that things are out of control.
Nevertheless, reliably funny, and being forced to get along with his fellow pilgrims stops him sinking into misanthropy which can be a problem in his other books.
Howard Roark was a chess genius. He had known this, utterly securely, since his sixth birthday, when he had discovered the chess set in his attic and immediately known how to play. Sitting on pile of magazines which contained the dreary, identical thoughts of the chess ancients, he had there and then created his own unique and devastating attack. He knew that any any honest chess player could not beat it.
Reading through the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology was frankly a bit of a chore, but it was brightened by Rand’s trademark bizarre language. Here are some of my favourites:
Mathematics is the science of measurement
erm…
Man can perceive the length of one foot directly; he cannot perceive ten miles
Never, ever, has any man been able to see ten miles.