Certified Canadian export currently interned in Australia.
This show features mostly casual, quasi-academic literature discussion, with a focus on long-form analyses rather than reviews. My point of focus is and likely will remain fiction that is either lauded or maligned for complexity, ambiguity, and impenetrability. In short, I'd like to offer you what I wish I had access to myself.
I'm here for the dialogue. If you agree with my perspectives, great - tell me why. If you disagree, even better - tell me why! Looking forward to discussing books with you all. Feel free to reach via any of the channels below.
Appreciate you watching Steve. You're referring to one of the three books sitting horizontally on top of Proust? They're the three heavy hitters from the Slovenian press Corona/Samizdat. Top to bottom they are A Bended Circuity by Robert S Stickley, America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic by Phil Freedenberg & Jeff Walton, and The Manifold Destinies of Eddie Vegas by Rick Harsch.
@@wastemailinglist726 Thank you so much! A Bended Circuity looks baffling in a very interesting way. I’ve now got it on preorder from the publisher. About the Schmidt primer - very well done. It’s exactly what I’d been looking for for a while. I appreciate the way your videos are approachable to a lay reader, but you reference enough academic concepts that someone interested in literary theory can find some leads for further investigation. I suppose I now have no excuse to put off School for Atheists (the only Schmidt volume I could easily find) any longer. Hope to see more videos in the future. Also, I enjoyed looking at the other books on your shelf. It looks like we’ve read a lot of the same things. Including Hogg?? I’ve never actually talked to anyone else who has read that one. Very interesting collection!
Fabulous video! I'm only halfway through Solenoid, savouring it as slowly as i can, knowing I've found a new favourite. But "favourite" doesn't seem to do it justice.
Thank you for taking the time out to watch! Solenoid is a really special book and I'm glad you're taking the time to savour it. Prepare yourself for his upcoming new translation THEODORUS
Im not musician but as I understood Eszter tried for decades to play Bach by using Pythagorean tuning. Which is futile cause Bach wrote his works keeping in mind different tune. It's like playing on untuned piano. I think it adds another layer on top of Eszter's madness.
@@Aginor27 Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. Daughter of Richard Ellmann (yes, that one). 1000 pages of the internal monologue of a stressed out mother as shes baking pies. And the whole thing is written in a single rambling sentence (with a couple interruptions). Really enjoyed it.
Man, you are so good at reviewing books! Why did you stop doing this? Please, come back with other reviews! Can I ask you a favor? I would like to see every single book that is on your shelf. Thank you very much. Bye.
Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. A thousand-page single-sentence delight about a woman baking pies in her kitchen. I tore through it in like two weeks given it's hypnotic quality. Highly recommended
Do you ever plan on discussing the school for atheists? I find it really weird how despite being the only one of Schmidt's typoscripts which is still readily available in English it also seems to be the only one of his works which virtually no one talks about.
I’m currently halfway through this novel and after loving it for the first few hundred pages, I’m starting to find myself now entering a sort of love-hate kind of mood with it (which is more a comment on my experience and expectations than some sort of essentialist comment on the novel itself, but still). I think the thing is that I want more of the substance of the novel’s themes and perhaps less of the back-and-forth kind of ‘antics’ of the novel, which I do enjoy, but I think I was expecting (or hoping for) the prose of these things to be a little more Pynchonian in its own way, where as instead I’m finding it a little more sci-fi in how it feels. Don’t get me wrong, it’s superbly written - I just think my expectations were skewed going into it. Will persevere, of course.
I started it last night and can't put it down! The complexity of the book has not made it unenjoyable to me so far, something that I can't say for Gravity's Rainbow, since you brought it up. I got slight vibes of the Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem.
Basically this whole video is making me realize David Foster Wallace is a chumpppppp!!! Way, WAY more trippy shit out there. Definitely want to try Bottoms Dream
WASTE: any plans to review Finnegans Wake? Maybe you’ve done that already. Another beast of a book. Definitely worth reading. Much harder than Ulysses but far more rewarding 💥
Any advice on where to look for vol. 4 two novels? It’s not just that it’s pricey, but I can’t find it for sale online anywhere. I can find copies of ZT and Evening edged in gold, but not even one listing of Vol. 4.
Seth, you are certainly not alone in your interest in Kafka's stories, letters and journals. Both Thom Jones and Lydia Davis have cited Kafka's diaries at some point in their writing careers. That is pretty good company if you asked me.
Hi. I've just found your channel, and there is a great deal of overlap in taste concerning prose between you and I. Krasznahoraki is one of the first modern writers in translation I fell in love with, and it was Satantango. It was the same month I discovered Roberto Bolano, both Murakamis, Caser Aira, Lispecter, Calvino, Borges, Knausgaard, Pavic, and so many others when I first became really excited by literature fifteen years ago - half a lifetime ago. I found your channel wondering if anybody was paying any attention to Krasznahorkai's writing. Thankfully, I found my answer to be yes: at least a few people are. W.A.S. indeed. What was which could have been is the "what was" which can still be. We do await in silence rather than for silence. More people need to talk about books like Krasznahorkai's on here. Not because we love it, or doing it, which of course we do on both accounts, but because it is important. In so many words: I love tupperware parties as much as the next socially-displaced housewife, but who wants to be launched in pursuit of an incoming silent empire, really?
22:40 La=bimmel, La=bammel, La=bumm 😊 Wonderful to learn that apparently an effective translation into English of Schmidt's work was actually possible (hats off to John E. Woods!). I have a bit of a feeling that „Bottom‘s Dream“ and the etym theory are a bit of a deterrent and so get in the way of people's perception of Schmidt. If Schmidt's incredible humor and wordplay from Woods also ignites in English, I can also only recommend the reading order for beginners: "Scenes from the Life of a Faun", "Dark Mirrors" and "Republica Intelligentsia". Once you're "in", it will also be a lot of fun with "B/Moondocks". In the late work I find "The School for Atheists" and "Abend mit Goldrand" (both without a first-person narrator, by the way) are great and I've only read parts of "Zettel's Traum" occasionally. I'm waiting for someone to make a reading book out of the best parts (there's already an attempt, but it obviously doesn't hit the best spots). ...and Schmidt as the inventor of emojis! Wonderful! 28:24 The German title ("eine MärchenPosse - 55 Szenen aus der Lä/e/Endlichkeit für Gönner der Verschreibk/Kunst") is nowhere near as explicit as the translated version (In "MärchenPosse" the "Po" (butt) is not orthographically emphasized, the different versions Ländlichkeit/Lendlichkeit/Endlichkeit, are "Country life", "Life of the hip" and "Finiteness").
Schmidt also recommended to not read the entirety of Zettel's Traum, especially not from the beginning; Book 4 & 7 were the best, in his opinion. -- For Schmidt it's recommendable, if not important to find "access" to his work, to start chronologically. -- And, iirc, the English title for Abend mit Goldrand was 'defused' because it was too 'obscene' ('rim' -- possibly derived from Poe's "golden rim" in 'The Sleeper.')
I'm Arnohooked! Thanks so much for pointing me to these fabulous novels. You gotta love all the word magic. The Republic Egghead is chock-full. From opening pages: Winer (great name for an American!!) - "and I had to present my papers immediately: identity card with photo, thumbprint, tooth structure, penis type." -- What are the types of penises on official record? Arno doesn't miss an opportunity to stick his satiric needle into the fleshy backsides of...well, everybody and everything.
Listened to you speak on Pynchon in a podcast - and it’s the best insight I’ve ever heard. Through it, I just learned about your channel. Are you planning on covering each of Pynchon’s works? I’d personally love to listen to them - and believe they would serve as a massive asset for anyone reading Pynchon.
Thanks for this! I'm gonna start my Arno Schmidt run. First up: The Egghead Republic, followed by the 4 novellas - N's Children, Life of a Faun, B's H & Dark Matter.
I haven't read this book but became interested when I heard there was a great work of surrealism called Solenoid. I wonder if the author knows of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in electromagnetism which experiments require well-insulated solenoids ..it seems like he's influenced by this odd quantum mechanical effect in which am isolated solenoid can affect the motion of charged particles outside of its confinement space.
Thanks so, so much for this incisive video, Seth. On the strength of your enthusiasm and insights, I look forward to Solenoid. Perhaps you are familiar - what you outline here reminds me of a Dalkey Press author, Czech Michal Ajvaz. I posted reviews on his 4 translated novels. Here's one you might enjoy - glenncolerussell.blogspot.com/2022/12/empty-streets-by-michal-ajvaz.html
I discovered Cartarescu through a chilean booktuber called Ricardo but then when I looked up the author online The Untranslated popped up first and it's just the amazing resource I found this year loved it
Thanks for this video. I've been putting off a more substantial engagement with Vollmann for years. The only thing I've read by him is Whores for Gloria, which I really liked, but the main reason for choosing it was that it's short. One of my reading goals for next year, though is to read some books by him next year I'm especially drawn to The Royal Family for what I understand to be its extensive focus on the intersection between poverty and social marginalization (especially of queerness and transgressive sexuality). So, I might start there, but before now the only descriptions of You Bright and Risen Angels I'd come across described it is mediocre Pynchon-aping. Your account of it, though, has whet my appetite! Based on how an understanding of queerness has become such a big focus of public discourse in the US, you'd think that Vollmann would be experiencing a Renaissance now. In the past, I've come across a lot of talk that describes him, in a roundabout way, as a perv because of how much he writes about the transgression of norms around gender and sex. Based on reading as well as excerpts from Poor People, though, my sense is that Vollmann simply has a deep love and compassion for socially marginalized people - including for those who are too beaten-down to be hailed as heroes. If you do more videos on Vollmann, I'd love to see your take on one of his books that really hones in on such folks - the aforementioned ones, or Lucky Star (another one high on my list), or even The Book of Dolores.
It must be exhausting knowing you’re incapable of saying anything remotely insightful or interesting about Schmidt, so you hide behind your pseudo-intellectual performance that gives the dullard at Better than Food a run for his money. Namely, needlessly long pretentious pauses, sitting next to your pristine bookcase full of littwitter approved books by losers who spend all day knowing they have money by taking pictures of recently acquired books, and speaking - via your terrible script - like a first year uni student who just discovered their macbook has a built-in thesaurus. “To combat, shall we say, the paucity of online discussion surrounding this particular author.”
To bring some owls to Athens - there's a great study about Russian/Soviet socialist realism: Katerina Clark (Yale) - The Soviet Novel: History As Ritual (3rd edition ISBN 978-0253060488) A truly fascinating read which has greatly enhanced (better: corrected) my understanding of this genre - the "realism" part of the term can be very misleading. I cannot recommend the book enough.
Hi, I just discovered your channel and I'm impressed. Your review is amazing, I'm so happy you enjoyed Cărtărescu's book. I recommend reading Nostalgia, it is the best start to enter the magical world of Cărtărescu. I'm a native Romanian speaker, so I was lucky enough to read it in the original language, but the English translation is splendid. Thank you for your work in promoting quality literature. I greet you with love from Romania 🤗
really enjoying your work on schmidt, thanks! surprised to see melancholia and not solaris as the film referencing that photograph: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ABIEQdBhpwA.html of the two directors i'd bet tarkovsky is the more likely to know those photographs
