Finished all the novella's of the expanse.

Drive My favorite and free to read here.
The Butcher of Anderson Station Thought it was okay, wish it was a bit longer.
The Churn My least favorite, felt like I barely learned any more about Amos while I thought it was going to be his backstory. Also very little sci-fi happening in the book.
Gods of Risk Story that happens between book 2 and 3. A short story from one of Bobbie's familymembers.

Finished: There & Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter. A collection of articles written over a number of years and for different publications, some are very good and insightful.

Finished: Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy. Published in 1983, it's a critique of Western culture posing as a self help book; it has some moments of brilliance and it has held up well.

Listened to Blood Meridian read by Richard Poe. ****, I love this book. This is my 4th time through. The narrator gives an excellent performance and makes McCarthy's idiosyncratic style a lot more accessible. Who knew violence could be so beautiful. Just don't make the mistake of listening to it before you go to bed like I did. Listening about scalphunters slaughtering a peaceful tribe of Indians in explict detail before you go to bed tends to give you nightmares afaict

Fun fact: Glanton and the scalphunters were real people.


Also listened to The Things They Carried read by Bryan Cranston. The performance by Cranston reading the all time great short story by the same name is A++. Understated yet powerful, reminds me of The Old Man and the Sea read by Charlton Heston.

Here's a recent piece from The Wall Street Journal that responds to the concerns you raise. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-huma...ion-1444428977
Generally, some good points about the way the academic study of literature has developed are made in this philippic. But the WSJ does love to bash the humanities ...

The University of California press has a new imprint that is subject to the usual peer review standards but ends up free to download on PDF. The author gets no royalties and has to find $7500 to help cover costs. I can't decide whether this is a good idea or a transparent rip off.

Thanks, Russell. I'll read it right away.

My main point was not articulated well in my OP. Yes, a tiny audience reading your work in your lifetime (or at all) is disheartening. I mean, really, think about a film maker spending 5-6 years on a project, posting it to youtube and getting 300 views -- yikes. Is this guy likely to keep putting out 2 films a decade? But the more important point is specific to English research that focuses not on history of a novel or of an author but on a specific interpretation of a work. What is the goal here? As far as I can tell, there is no argument to be made that English scholars are working toward an ever-building body of knowledge. At least the scientists and historians who get 5 downloads of an article can claim their work is a collective effort toward those once-a-generation discoveries or whatever. Many of my English profs actively discouraged secondary reading as "nothing exists outside the text" anyway. There is further evidence for this, as you point out Russell, in that much work 10 or more years past is hardly ever looked at again.

So if close to no one is reading your life's work and there is no accumulation of knowledge, what exactly is the point? I suppose one could argue that research is in itself gratifying, some sort of argument from recognition-independent self-indulgence, but surely there are better ways to appease this type of hedonism that at least makes some sort of broader contribution.

All that aside, I wish I could take one English class per term for the rest of my life. I love reading great novels and having an intelligent person mediate discussion. Just don't ask me to write you any papers.

The argument has been made that the vast majority of scholarship in the Humanities is done solely for career advancement, and we'd be all better off if we stopped using it as a metric.

In my experience, a model of academics who are only researching to get promoted doesn't quite ring true. They moan about how the admin and teaching are getting in the way of research, but less obviously because they want to get promoted and more because they want to research for research's sake. (There's another argument to be had about the extent to which we prioritize research over the teaching which really pays our salaries, but that's mostly separate)

I think it would be truer to say that that the warped metrics change the nature of that research - preventing slow gestation deep works in favour of churning out junk packed full of whatever the current buzz words are. There's also a trend I see of people trying to coin neologisms in the hope that their ****ty concept will catch on and generate a brazzilion citations. Ultimately it's up to the individual to balance career progression with doing the sort of research that gives you pride in your work.

I do believe in research led teaching (Russell's point), and the expansion of universities means more academics means more research and that necessarily dilutes quality and fractures the core syllabus, but there does seem to be a problem in how we manage that extra volume, and incentivize academics in a way which generates decent research and decent lives. (It's all allied, of course, to the huge supply of phds, becoming adjunct professors and post docs etc, which allows a brutal regime for early career academics.)

I LOVE Chandler. I read Farewell My Lovely about once every 5 years or so. So much fun. I've always loved that "butterflies" line, too.

I'm pretty sure Chandler is my most reread writer. Love him.

White Noise is awesome, but The Names is a close 2nd for me.

Reading the Modiano Occupation Trilogy now.

Re-reading parts of Infinite Jest for the 3rd time.

Definitely the funniest sad book of alltime. Many of the sentences/ paragraphs are frighteningly funny.

Eschaton - ''Pemulis is bug-eyed with fury, and is literally jumping up and down in one spot so hard that his yachting cap jumps slightly off his head with each impact, which Troeltsch and Axford confer and agree they have previously seen occur only in animated cartoons.'
~ one of the funniest sentences not just in IJ but anywhere.

Yes, it bears careful reading. Luckily, there are many websites that can tell you what bearing that sentence has on a fact from the first 40 pages. The good thing is, there are no 'tricks,' most of the answers are in fact, black and white, in the novel somewhere. DFW wrote several times about his concern for passive entertainment and what it was doing to us - a theme written about from the very beginning of the novel.

This is not accurate, strictly speaking. The 3 main characters do meet, and the storylines of all 3 do intersect -- just somewhat in the future, a bit past the end of the book's chronology.

Infinite Jest has people searching for it, finding it by accident or on purpose, and is the MacGuffin that moves some of the action around. 2 of the main characters and one of the important minor characters go to try and find the Master of Infinite Jest.

With very close reading you can see all the lines intersecting if you pay careful attention to one of the main characters, and why they were watching ETA. At least, DFW said that was his goal and if a serious reader thought it couldn't be done he had failed.

The intersection with Orin you mentioned and the future interaction/'ending' with the other main story line becomes easier to see. The very beginning and last ~ 80 pages or so give very important clues [page 934 with JvD, note as she is the important connector with all 3 main characters and JOI of course]. The chronology is key, and DFW helps us keep it straight -mostly - with the named years and the explanation of them which I mention below.


But, of course there isn't one clear resolution. Whether or not Don and JvD wind up together simply isn't the point of the novel. It's not a Sherlock Holmes or Tom Clancy novel.
IJ is about a lot of things but surely not a simple Boy Meets Girl tale. [Or, in Orin's case, Boy Meets Absurd-Looking Transvestite, something I bet DFW didn't do casually].

The obvious themes in IJ are what it's really about: Our relationship with entertainment, how brothers/families act, relationships btw fathers/sons/daughters and Mothers/ibid, drugs & addiction, experimental art, the pleasure/pain in competitive sports, being passive/active people overall, family abuse/incest - a Literary Topic if there ever was one, irony, being a teenager, love, dating, divorce, affairs and broken families, and the nature of pomo itself. Among others

Eschaton, as many readers including me would note, is probably THE signature piece of DFW's writing.

[If you'd just like to read one of his short stories, read Girl with Curious Hair instead.]
It also comes almost exactly 1/3 of the way through the book, including endnotes.

Yes, if you hate pomo, IJ is never going to be a fun read for you. And it does take some trust to get through some of the first ~200 pages. Then it starts opening up then the Eschaton scene comes and you're hooked.

Joelle Van Dyne arrives on page 219 and is primary link btw the 2 major plot lines, this chapter also contains about 6-7 extremely valuable pieces of information w/r/t her, Orin, JOI, the chronology, and IJ itself.

[/quote]

I still swear by the 2-bookmarks method - thus eliminating the need for any page-flipping. Then any words I need to lookup I just use my phone. I would, imho, recommend people not use Kindles, but to each their own.

I so hearby award you the 'I finished Infinite Jest' badge for People Who Like to Read Difficult Fiction!

I don't think it's a classic by any means, but The Secret History is about 6 classics students. I mean not English but whatevs amirite?

Probably still overrated today, but ahead of its time and probably the first/best novel examining the bleak outlook and utter alienation by rich kids of the 1980s.

Given the fact he wrote it while 19 and published at 21, still in Bennington, and the fact it still has wild appeal to young people today, you can see why it survives.

I'm now 100 pages into Jonathan Franzen's new novel Purity, loving it to death. His writing really hits home with me somehow.

I kept thinking Less Than Zero reminded me of Play It As It Lays, but thought it was just me. Later I saw an interview with Ellis and he acknowledged Didion was inspiration for LTZ. He doesn't say directly what Didion, but it's hard to think PIAIL wasn't part of it.

I file them (PIAIL and LTZ) with Desperate Characters and Light Years. I think the latter two are sophisticated explorations of the same themes with Light Years being the most subtle, accurate and scary.

Nice post ND.

Started a re-read of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Fits with what I've read recently: Less Than Zero, Play It As It Lays, Desperate Characters and Light Years.

I'm souring on Purity a little now, 220 pages in.

Walker Percy is one of my favorite authors. I've read all his novels except for Love in the Ruins. I believe he's very underrated these days because he was so Catholic and so unapologetically southern.

I'd throw Day of the Locust in there if you haven't read it yet

And the just-announced Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Thanks, good suggestion, I read it when I was in undergraduate school, so sometime pre-1970. I remember it distinctly because I liked it so much. Nathanael West was out of favor with the academic establishment at that time and two of my professors were very critical when it showed up on my reading list. An argument ensued that I should have avoided.

It is on my re-read list along with Miss Loneyhearts.

Added: To be fair, my advisor in my creative writing program was an exception who like West, but even he thought West was a very minor talent.

Thanks.

Just dl'd The Odessa File to my kindle, can't remember if I've read it or not. Read his first book, of course, loved it.

been reading the Parker books by Donald E Westlake and they great fun.

he's a hard boiled thief and despite being written decades ago they still hold up as hard nosed crime books.

the Mel Gibson film playback, which was great, was based on the first book in the series the hunter.