My Heart by Frank O'Hara

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

"Did you hear what I said?"

"No. What was it?"

"I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn't feel scared. I certainly wasn't brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it's like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I've always iked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You kept saying I don't know I don't know, but you did. Right? Don't shake, you have to be a still bed for me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word 'curl', such a slow word, you can't rush it . . . ."

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt

I just want to give my immediate thoughts upon finishing this book. What I Loved is essentially the story of art critic/professor Leo Hertzberg and wife Erica and their relationship with artist Bill Weschler and wife Violet Blom. When Leo's son Matthew drowns in a fatal canoeing accident, the dynamics between the four of them change imperceptibly, especially with Bill/Violet's son Mark growing up habitual drug abuser and pathological liar, essentially blurring the lines between truth and fantasy (kept on thinking about that Picasso quote "art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth"... my life is constantly plagued by IB memories so it seems). The plot is inconsequential I feel; what was fascinating for me was Leo's intelligent though irrational self-drawn connections between art and life and people, whether it can be held that "life imitates art far more than art imitates life".

"The difference between Lucille and Violet was one of character, not knowledge. Violet's confusion about Mark was as great as Lucille's. What Violet didn't question, however, was the strength of her own felling for him and her need to act on it. Lucille, on the other hand, felt powerless. Bill's two wives had become Mark's two mothers, and while the marraiges had come one after the other,  Lucille's motherhood and Violet's adopted motherhood had coexisted for years and now had outlived Bill's death. The two women were the surviving poles of a man's desire, bound together by the boy he had father with only one of them. I couldn't help but feel that Bill was still playing a crucial role in the story that was unfolding before me, that he had created a fierce geometry among us, and that it had lived on. Again, I found hints in the painting that hung in my apartment: the women who left and the one who fought and stayed; the strange little car in the plump Violet's lap - a thing that wasn't itself and wasn't a symbol either, but a vehicle of unspoken wishes. When Bill painted that canvas he had been hoping for a child with Lucille. He had told me that himself. I started to study the painting again, and the longer I looked at it, the more I began to feel that Mark was there in the canvas, too, hiding in the body of the wrong woman."

What I Loved invokes certain cliches - eating disorders for one, and the characters of Teddy Giles and Mark Weschler seem like direct reincarnations of James St. James/the Club Kid scene. Don't really know if that's a bad thing. Increasingly I feel that the books I think are good aren't necessarily the ones I enjoy the most.

What I read: 20-29 March 2011

Wah my titles are so imaginative....

Anyways:

1. Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

This was okay but very very similar to Lolita plot/characterisation-wise. Which is the ultimate recipe for failure, to write something that is essentially copped out from one of the greatest literary classics.

2. Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

Natalie attempts to read a non-fiction novel (If you can actually get over the pretentiousness with which I address myself in third person)!! Sometimes I try to indulge my pseudo-intellect by reading non-fiction. Other times I take the easy way out and wear lens-less geek specs. Anyway I think this is a great book provided you are actually aware/well-informed of foreign policy/international relations and because I am obviously not, I feel kind of embarassed not being able to understand all these smart cynical criticisms he makes. But one thing I can safely say is that Chomsky should maybe try not to be so anti-establishment about US diplomatic ties and wrangle everything as a giant conspiracy to establish some dystopian plutocracy.

 3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Okay, but would make a fantastic book to study for lit. Only that I got very confused over the multiple Heathcliffs and Catherines.

4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Good, but I read the abridged version so I feel I'm in no position to comment unless I read the voluminous 1400 page original. In French. Which DAMN STRAIGHT is going to happen some time in the near future.

5. Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa

Great!!!!! Beautifully written/plotted, but the subject content (prostitution, sado-machoism) is quite graphic/gruesome so not really for the faint hearted.

6. After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Okay.... I feel sometimes Murakami gets trapped in the cliches of his own writing: JAZZ MUSIC, disenchanted but intellectual and kinda-sorta attractive social misfits, edgy 60s subculture references - okay I don't know why but I got so pissed with the whole discussion about Alphaville (the French movie) in the book. This is probably one of the least surrealist/absurdist works he has written hence more relatable by default, but I feel that the fantasy element (i.e. the sister who sleeps and never wakes up/gets trapped in her dream) seemed forced and wasn't cohesive with the main storyline.

7. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

This is kind of embarassing but I didn't get the satire/comedy, in fact I didn't understand the book at all. Postmodern fiction continues to haunt me like my worst nightmare.

8. Silk by Alessandro Baricco

Woah I LOVE THIS. One of the best books I've read. It's pretty brief at 100 pages but an excellent story and so poetic you kind of have to slow-mo through this book to savour the goodness okay this analogy is going off track but you get my point. Pity though that the movie adaptation (starring Keira Knightley, I had such high hopes) looked like a low-budget period costume freak show.

9. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Contrary to what Sasha says about the narrator being self-indulgent/self-serving/whiny/melodramatic,  I really like this! Prozac Nation is 10x whinier in comparison. I like how the abnormality of the Esther-Buddy relationship is juxtaposed against social conventions of the time, as well as the narrator's deadpan. Quite similar to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in terms of 1960s misconceptions of mental illnesses and the lobotomies/shock therapies/tortures patients were subject to.

10. Let the Right One In by John Ajivide Lindqvist

BAD. Well it had vampires, so I guess that lowered my expectations considerably.

These Days - Nico

I've been out walking

I don't do too much talking these days

These days