BookStrut 2005
jaymack
5,199 Posts
i found myself getting into bukowski in the last few months, and have been checking out some of the authors he mentions like dostoevsky, and kafka. good reading. easy to follow. insane. anyone read some good shit this year?
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well, if you wanna follow the bukoski path, you gotta read John Fante... bukowski def. cribbed some of short story style from him.. "ask the dust" is a great fucking read... also for more dusty, down and out depression california stuff, i def recommend 'fat city" by leonard gardner about some boxers in Stockton, CA. like a grimier, better version of Cannery Row... and to complete the above theme, "now and on earth" by jim thompson. his first book and much less pulpy and crime themed then his later work.
"Boredom" and "Contempt", both by Alberto Moravia, are amazing.
If you like Bukowski, You will probabaly like Henry Miller (who is a maybe th emost talented US author ever, IMO).
That reminds me, i started The Diary of Anais Nin the other day, but forgot to keep reading it. OOF.
Oh i had never read Narcissus and Golmund by Hesse until this year. Its very good.
never heard of any of them, but will def scope em out. thanks.
yup. read the tropic books. black spring. crazy cock. some others.
sometimes gets a little tough to follow.
next im going for a book of hemmingways memoirs from paris.
if youn do, PM me and tell me whatcha think...
bukowski on fante:
I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. I did most of my reading at the downtown L.A. Public Library, and nothing that I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me. It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, that those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers. Their writing was an admixture of subtlety, craft and form, and it was read and it was taught and it was ingested and it was passed on. It was a comfortable contrivance, a very slick and careful Word-Culture. One had to go back to the pre-Revolution writers of Russia to find any gamble, any passion. There were exceptions but those exceptions were so few that reading them was quickly done, and you were left staring at rows and rows of exceedingly dull books. With centuries to look back on, with all their advantages, the moderns just weren't very good. I pulled book after book from the shelves. Why didn't anybody say something? Why didn't anybody scream out? I tried other rooms in the library. The section on Religion was just a vast bog to me. I got into Philosophy. I found a couple of bitter Germans who cheered me for a while, then that was over. I tried Mathematics but upper Maths was just like Religion: it ran right off me. What I needed seemed to be absent everywhere. I tried Geology and found it curious but, finally, nonsustaining. I found some books on Surgery and I liked the books on Surgery: the words were new and the illustrations were wonderful. I particularly liked and memorized the operation on the mesocolon. Then I dropped out of Surgery and I was back in the big room with the novelists and short story writers. (When I had enough cheap wine to drink I never went to the library. A library was a good place to be when you had nothing to drink or to eat, and the landlady was looking for you and for the back rent money. In the library at least you had the use of the toilet facilities.) I saw quite a number of other bums in there, most of them asleep on top of their books. I kept on walking around the big room, pulling the books off the shelves, reading a few lines, a few pages, then putting them back. Then one day I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me. I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing. I finished Ask the Dust and looked for other books of Fante's in the library. I found two: Dago Red and Wait Until Spring, Bandini. They were of the same order, written of and from the gut and the heart. Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me. Not long after reading these books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, `Don't call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!' Fante was my god and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didn't bang at their door. Yet I liked to guess about where he had lived on Angel's Flight and I imagined it possible that he still lived there. Almost every day I walked by and I thought, is that the window Camilla crawled through? And, is that the hotel door? Is that the lobby? I never knew. Thirty-nine years later I reread Ask the Dust. That is to say, I reread it this year and it still stands, as do Fante's other works, but this one is my favourite because it was my first discovery of the magic. There are other books beside Dago Red and Wait Until Spring, Bandini. They are Full of Life and The Brotherhood of the Grape. And, at the moment, Fante has a novel in progress, A Dream of Bunker Hill. Through other circumstances, I finally met the author this year [1979]. There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and a terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told but I feel that he doesn't want me to tell it here. But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm. That's enough. Now this book is yours.
The streetwise gutsiness of Bukowski and Miller pervades Cuban poet Gutierrez's raunchy, symbolic, semi-autobiographical debut novel of life in 1990s Havana. Although the title suggests a triptych, the work more closely resembles a mosaic of short stories bursting with vivid images of exhilaration, depravity, desire and isolation. Narrator Pedro Juan, middle-aged and fed up, has rejected his career as a journalist because "I always had to write as if stupid people were reading me." Resisting the mass exodus from Cuba of August 1994, Pedro Juan now wanders the streets of Havana like a footloose Bacchus, indulging himself with women, marijuana and rum. He survives through a series of menial jobs. His rooftop apartment in central Havana has a spectacular Caribbean view but is, like all dwellings in the decaying economy, frequently without water. Pedro Juan is imprisoned more than once for minor crimes; after one lengthy sentence, he returns home to discover that his lover has replaced him with another man. He eventually drifts back into the urban maelstrom. Prolific, explicit sex scenes reinforce the plight of the artist, and thus a society, limited to physical pleasures where life offers no intellectual or creative rewards. "It's been years since I expected anything, anything at all, of women, or of friends, or even of myself, of anyone." Gutierrez's talent lies in creating a macho, self-abusive protagonist who remains engagingly sympathetic. This searing, no-holds-barred portrait of modern Cuba, expertly translated by Wimmer into prose strong in the rhythms and vulgar beauty of the city, comes complete with a sexy jacket photo. It will attract readers who like their fiction down, dirty and literate. (Jan.)
Its a very "raw" novel, his other work as well. Might get bored with it at times as the story goes nowhere. I like his insight.
read this, got a bit hard in some bits......guy describes a bovine vestibule of the vagina real hott like.
Really good though. Highly recommended if you like magic realism / fantasy.
that's what i'm saying. i haven't read a piece of fiction for years...unless you count the 9/11 report.
600+ pages on small print (also read it this year). I really needed some fiction after that.
So this one is older than 2005, but I just read it this year. Light, quick reading, but it the really hit home for me. Made me feel good like "Broke Diaries" did a couple years back.
I'm excited about this one. I can say that I like it for sure cause I read it in the bookstore for half an hour. I like her magazine writing a lot. Great writing style to focus on. (I'm a newswriter myself)
Kafka kills it. I don't know if you have read it but read the Metamorphosis...really tripped out story but relates to the general, loss of identity in a changing world, theme he uses in much of his works. There is also a movie out there thats related to something about Kafka and is equally as tripped out. My 12th grade English teacher made us watch it and it was actually pretty dope. If I can get my hands on a copy I will let you know.
Kafka is amazing. Check out the novels 'The Trial' and 'The Castle' as well as his short stories.
BTW, despite Bukowski's being influenced by Fante, they are VERY different types of writers. Fante's cool but much more conventional in delivery and subject matter than Bukowski.
If you can find it, check out the collected writings of Herbert Huncke. He existed on the fringe of the NY Beats, living as a junkie and thief, but was an interesting writer. Very spare, but deep.
also checking out the Ewan McGregor book with Charlie Brooman, about the 2 of them zipping across the world on their motorcycles. So far not bad.....
Last read books (that i recommend), quite basic shit but anyhow:
Carlos Castaneda "teachings of don juan"
Masaru Emoto "hidden messages in water"
Herman Hesse "siddharta"
Douglas Coupeland "hey Nostradamus"
/Leo
Got mine from Eddie himself who had it autographed by all the Monks, one of my proudest posessions. My friend Adam's dad went to Brown Communications with Eddie and Gary in Minneapolis after the Monks split and they came back to the US. We hooked up with them(Gary, Eddie and Dave Day-Monks' banjo player) to record our first demos in 1992 at Gary's studio in Turtle Lake, MN(of which Gary is now the Mayor). Eddie was writing the book at the time with his then wife, a local German gal who had been a part of the whole Monks experience. There is actually one scene in the book that is based on that long weekend than anything that actually happened to the Monks. Eddie wrote liners for our first single, which was a cover of the Monks' "Oh How To Do Now" featuring Gary, Eddie and Dave(they had not yet located the other 2 members).
Haven't spoken to Eddie in a long time, but I am pretty sure he still resides in Carson City, NV. There has long been talk of a movie about the Monks.
here is a link of the Monks in 1966 on German TV
http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=1HJVVBVy_CU&search=60s%20live%20garage%20wild
http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=I9tbO-C-GnY
I've been geeking out on these lately. I read a little of both of them in high school but this translation is far superior to the one I read back then. I'm flying through them.
Before that I read this:
His books are always really interesting if not a little overanalytical (no Greil, that yelp that Elvis made in the middle of a Sun Records outtake was not just like Ahab scanning the seas looking for Moby Dick). Overall, I liked Lipstick Traces better.
big ups. that footage is unbelievable!
i just started Amerika yesterday.
he bwrite of a young man sent to america by his folks for knocking up their maid. kafka had never even been to the states, so this should be interesting.
Metamorphosis is next.
Amerika is Kafka doing slapstick. It's a lot different from his other stuff but I like it.
Good looking on that recommendation. I've wanted to see the John Huston film of the same name ever since reading about it in Javier Cercas' Soldiers of Salamis (a very good read about the Spanish civil war set in the present day)-- I never really realized that it was based on a novel.
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is something I always recommend. I recently read Knut Hamsun's Hunger which should be interesting to all Kafka fans as it predates Kafka's work and actually has many elements that are now considered Kafka-esque. I also really enjoyed Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn. I watched the film a couple of days later and it was pretty terrible in comparison.
This shit was my joint for the whole second half of this year.
Johnny Cash: He Walked The Line - Garth Campbell
Triksta: Life and Death And New Orleans Rap - Nik Cohn
Chronicles Vol 1 - Bob Dylan
Margrave Of The Marshes - John Peel
Equations of Mathematical Physics