More bookses.
Aug. 13th, 2002 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksIt wasn't what I was originally going to write this journal entry about, but the cat just jumped over twice his own height from a stationary start. Wow. Go Lucien. I was very impressed.
Mind you, all I was going to do was write about a couple more books, which I am not going to bother to put in another separate link-thingie.
The Folk of the Air, by Peter S. Beagle. Beagle is justly famous for The Last Unicorn, and has also put out several other magnificent fantasy novels, but The Folk of the Air is in my opinion his best. There is so much to this book. It starts with the funniest introductory chapters I have yet encountered in fiction, changes tone like a chameleon, and ends up a deep meditation on what it would actually be like to encounter magic, how the English language would be inadequate to describe the experience, and what the difference is between pretending to know what it would be like to be involved with magic, and actually knowing. Also one of the most impressive villains out there, Nicholas Bonner, a creature outside time, outside life, and outside reality who discovers that he fits remarkably well into Southern California: "'Arms, legs, senses, fancies, follies, and lovesome honey appetites, all of them still with me, and none left in this land an hundred years gone could find words to put Nick back into nothingness again...' A single chuckle escaped him, to take up its own independent life in Barton Park. It brushed Farrell's knee and he vomited." I suppose there are some people who might claim that this book is a wee bit hard on the SCA, but any slandering of them in it is made with deep love. I haven't even mentioned the goddess who turns up in the novel. I have occasional suspicions that the entire book was written simply as an attempt to provide the correct English vocabulary to write an accurate description of her. It's a damned interesting attempt. Out of print, but not impossible to find, and so very worth the effort.
Little, Big by John Crowley. I will be the first person to admit that I do not understand the ending of this book. I have absolutely no idea what happens. It makes no sense logically, and yet it works out all right Somehow. I mean, it's obviously the correct ending. Possibly I should stop trying to figure it out. That said, the ending is the least of the reasons to read this magnificent sprawl of a book. It's more like a place than a book, really. It has edges, and stairs, and rooms, and nooks and crannies just out of sight of the plot where you can sit down and read for a while in what could be a different book entirely... if you want it to be. There's a house in the novel, Edgewood, which was made by an architect by collapsing four different house plans in on one another, so that it presents a completely different front in each direction, one Gothic, one neo-Palladian, and so on. The book has about the same structure, really. There are individual paragraphs in it that casually propose ideas that most other novelists would have based an entire book around, brilliant ideas, but Crowley was getting at something else. I read an interview with him once in which he stated that most novels involved a real garden with imaginary fairies at the bottom of it, and that he had wanted to make an imaginary garden with real fairies in it, instead. Your guess is as good as mine, really. An absorbing, deliriously entertaining read.
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus. My non-fiction selection. It's not just of the twentieth century; Greil Marcus, who is by profession a music critic, produces the definitive work on the intellectual history of a certain kind of culture out of his hat. The culture he traces is one there is no single word for. It is the culture of a certain kind of art, the art that drives at creating a utopia through art itself. This is a book about the Catharists and the Paris Commune and the Dadaists and the Surrealists and the Free Spirits and punk rock and the Situationists, and it clearly demonstrates the ties these movements have to one another, and the artistic/religious/philosophical underpinnings they all have in common. This is a book about a succession of great dreams, and many of the more frustrating moments of my adolescence were spent in kicking the book across the room, because they are truly great dreams, dreams of liberation of the human spirit from constraint, dreams of removing the burdens of history, dreams of real attempts to re-form society into a shape which would give every individual expression of the greatest parts of themselves, and the other thing the book is about is how these specific philosophical underpinnings consistently lead, and have consistently led, to nihilism, decay, and pleasure in the triumph of pain. The production of pain and destruction will create more pain and destruction, no matter how noble the edifice the destroyers intend to build in place of what they destroy, and no matter whether they inflict the pain on others or on themselves. This is the book with which, by argument, I formulated my ideas on the nature and purpose of art in the world. This is the book that convinced me, through example, that depression, when applied to art, becomes nihilism, which becomes a devouring nothingness. This is therefore the book that convinced me, in the depths of adolescent depression, that I had to relearn how to live. It can be a hell of a depressing read itself, because of what the people it is about were like and the things they did to one another-- this is a book that is seeking real explanations for the worst side of human behavior, and there is a section examining the attempts of punk rock to understand/fight against/escape from/use the inescapable historical facts of the Holocaust that contains the most upsetting photos and imagery I have personally ever encountered. But the book is fearless, peerlessly researched, and entirely unique; it justifies itself. It is an inescapably changing experience for the reader. It was worth it for me.
I am going to bed, I think.
Angst-O-Meter: too damn high.
Mind you, all I was going to do was write about a couple more books, which I am not going to bother to put in another separate link-thingie.
The Folk of the Air, by Peter S. Beagle. Beagle is justly famous for The Last Unicorn, and has also put out several other magnificent fantasy novels, but The Folk of the Air is in my opinion his best. There is so much to this book. It starts with the funniest introductory chapters I have yet encountered in fiction, changes tone like a chameleon, and ends up a deep meditation on what it would actually be like to encounter magic, how the English language would be inadequate to describe the experience, and what the difference is between pretending to know what it would be like to be involved with magic, and actually knowing. Also one of the most impressive villains out there, Nicholas Bonner, a creature outside time, outside life, and outside reality who discovers that he fits remarkably well into Southern California: "'Arms, legs, senses, fancies, follies, and lovesome honey appetites, all of them still with me, and none left in this land an hundred years gone could find words to put Nick back into nothingness again...' A single chuckle escaped him, to take up its own independent life in Barton Park. It brushed Farrell's knee and he vomited." I suppose there are some people who might claim that this book is a wee bit hard on the SCA, but any slandering of them in it is made with deep love. I haven't even mentioned the goddess who turns up in the novel. I have occasional suspicions that the entire book was written simply as an attempt to provide the correct English vocabulary to write an accurate description of her. It's a damned interesting attempt. Out of print, but not impossible to find, and so very worth the effort.
Little, Big by John Crowley. I will be the first person to admit that I do not understand the ending of this book. I have absolutely no idea what happens. It makes no sense logically, and yet it works out all right Somehow. I mean, it's obviously the correct ending. Possibly I should stop trying to figure it out. That said, the ending is the least of the reasons to read this magnificent sprawl of a book. It's more like a place than a book, really. It has edges, and stairs, and rooms, and nooks and crannies just out of sight of the plot where you can sit down and read for a while in what could be a different book entirely... if you want it to be. There's a house in the novel, Edgewood, which was made by an architect by collapsing four different house plans in on one another, so that it presents a completely different front in each direction, one Gothic, one neo-Palladian, and so on. The book has about the same structure, really. There are individual paragraphs in it that casually propose ideas that most other novelists would have based an entire book around, brilliant ideas, but Crowley was getting at something else. I read an interview with him once in which he stated that most novels involved a real garden with imaginary fairies at the bottom of it, and that he had wanted to make an imaginary garden with real fairies in it, instead. Your guess is as good as mine, really. An absorbing, deliriously entertaining read.
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus. My non-fiction selection. It's not just of the twentieth century; Greil Marcus, who is by profession a music critic, produces the definitive work on the intellectual history of a certain kind of culture out of his hat. The culture he traces is one there is no single word for. It is the culture of a certain kind of art, the art that drives at creating a utopia through art itself. This is a book about the Catharists and the Paris Commune and the Dadaists and the Surrealists and the Free Spirits and punk rock and the Situationists, and it clearly demonstrates the ties these movements have to one another, and the artistic/religious/philosophical underpinnings they all have in common. This is a book about a succession of great dreams, and many of the more frustrating moments of my adolescence were spent in kicking the book across the room, because they are truly great dreams, dreams of liberation of the human spirit from constraint, dreams of removing the burdens of history, dreams of real attempts to re-form society into a shape which would give every individual expression of the greatest parts of themselves, and the other thing the book is about is how these specific philosophical underpinnings consistently lead, and have consistently led, to nihilism, decay, and pleasure in the triumph of pain. The production of pain and destruction will create more pain and destruction, no matter how noble the edifice the destroyers intend to build in place of what they destroy, and no matter whether they inflict the pain on others or on themselves. This is the book with which, by argument, I formulated my ideas on the nature and purpose of art in the world. This is the book that convinced me, through example, that depression, when applied to art, becomes nihilism, which becomes a devouring nothingness. This is therefore the book that convinced me, in the depths of adolescent depression, that I had to relearn how to live. It can be a hell of a depressing read itself, because of what the people it is about were like and the things they did to one another-- this is a book that is seeking real explanations for the worst side of human behavior, and there is a section examining the attempts of punk rock to understand/fight against/escape from/use the inescapable historical facts of the Holocaust that contains the most upsetting photos and imagery I have personally ever encountered. But the book is fearless, peerlessly researched, and entirely unique; it justifies itself. It is an inescapably changing experience for the reader. It was worth it for me.
I am going to bed, I think.
Angst-O-Meter: too damn high.
