From the Graham Greene references in Don't Sing to the short-storyish monologue I Trawl the Megahertz--there's lots of connections between Prefab Sprout and literature. So, I'm wondering: Which are your favorite writers, and what are you reading at the moment?

My list of favorite writers includes Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford, Richard Ford and many others whom I cannot think of right now. Thomas Pynchon used to be on that list, I especially loved Mason&Dixon which came out in 1997, if I recall correctly; a very special year, when the long wait for new works from Pynchon and Prefab Sprout was finall over (and then, very soon started again). Pynchon's most recent book, though, Against the Day, is terrible, I read the first 400 pages and then had to quit; what was touching and enlightening in Mason&Dixon, has turned excrutiatingly pointless.

The greatest book I've read in a couple of years is Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land which came out last fall. Although it's kind of the third part of a trilogy, you don't really need to have read the other two novels, and I cannot recommend it forcefully enough, especially to Sprouts fans. Ford is interested in a lot of the same topics as Paddy McAloon, and he brings to them a wit, a tenderness and quite often a brillance that is not unlike McAloon's.

I can't be doing with fiction. I've read J.G. Ballards 'Crash', just for the audacious theme, and the fact I like his take on things (bar the Sci-Fi nonsense). But like most novels it can't sustain its own good idea.

Actually I read 'The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-time' by Mark Haddon, which was hilarious and moving (can't believe I just wrote that).

Beyond that I only really read non-fiction.

I prefer films and plays, but that's moving beyond your topic.

Good idea for a thread Rae

A writer I´ve just discovered is William Gaddis. I´ve read a novel of his called Carpenter´s Gothic...I´ve never read anything like it. Anyone familiar with him?
Jonathan Franzens The Corrections was really good as well...
I like Philip K Dick too. Have you seen the Scanner Darkly movie?

/Peter

I did, thought it was really good! I'm not as big a reader as I would like to be...the last book I read was Nick Hornby's 'A Long Way Down.' It was really good as well.

How's that for a couple of reviews? :D

jj
very interesting point but am I missing something?
how can a fictional piece of writing not sustain its own idea whilst film can?

I am really curious..

However for fiction recently I've enjoyed

jonathan strange & mr norrell by susannah clarke
kafka on the shore by murakami
underworld by don delillo

speaking of sprouts which I wasn't does anyone remember kitchenware running adverts for a sprout single with the line from salingers "raise high the roof beam,carpenters"?-am I imagining this? does anyone see any links anyway between ps & salinger(esp re swoon)?

& ideas for a newish thread..

best music books..

say..

peter guaralnicks careless love
bill drummond 45
bob dylan chronicles
james young songs they never play on the radio

and jj..bet you hate this one(!)..

michael gray-song & dance man III the art of bob dylan


has anyone else got music books they rate or is the whole idea of it beyond the pale?

is there a great book to be written about ps??

A lot of PS songs seem suffused with Graham Greene's take on Catholicism. Greene's pervading theme is that Catholics have to experience the bad and be drawn to it to be 'real' Catholics: no faith without doubt, no resistance without temptation, the essential tragedy implicit in the dichotomy of desire and the power of love. (Blimey, I'm starting to sound like Jesse 'Derrida' James.) Heart of the Matter is the peak, I think but The End of The Affair is magnificent. As was the Paddy MacAloon remix.

So - Lucifer asking Michael for advice, Swans and the resisting of adultery, "Lord don't blind me...", "Sing me no deep hymn of devotion...". The idea of Catholics on the dangerous edge of things - 'Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, he mercy sought and mercy found' - places Paddy firmly in Greeneland.

Great line in the Hours' album, Narcissus Road: "If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much room."

A few authors now - some books a bientot:

Elmore Leonard - top class American sparseness and feel for dialogue
Carl Hiassen - very, very funny
Robertson Davies - Canadian out-Englishing the English with grace and elegance of prose and plot
Iain Banks - Wasp Factory, the one about a rock star, Crow Road, The Bridge
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers - masterpiece history of the twentieth century through the eyes of a fictionalised, embittered novelist al la Somerset Maugham
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited is a classic study of divine grace operating on a very interesting family and friends

Recently, though - Life of Pi spectacularly good, Cold Mountain is brilliant, real literature. I like Michael Dibdin's detective stories - Aurelio Zen, a grumpy fifty year old Italian police inspector - they really evoke Italy when I lived there, the infusion of politics and the state into real life. Dorothy L Sayers is a very wise and amusing detective story writer, too - 1930s.

Non fiction - Touching the Void. And Richard Dawlin's eloquent and closely argued The God Delusion is laugh out loud funny.

It's a problem I find in the very nature of the novel itself. It's a bit much saying that a novel is beyond being able to achieve thematic cohesion, but it's a medidative kind of cohesion that just doesn't turn me on.

Film is a kinetic art form, that plays in fixed linear time , exactly like music does (no doubt why the two are so inter-related). It's the linearity of both music and film that allow themes to be sustained with far more economy than the structure of a novel can. For me at any rate.

With the novel there's far to much scope for superfluous description, and it's hard to sustain the momentum of ideas, for the length of time a novel often seems to require. Again that's not to say that all novels are crap, or that all films, plays and pieces of music are self contained little gems. It's that, for me, the novel can never sustain the taut , structural cohesion of a symphony or brilliantly crafted film.

Funny you should ask that, when I've brought up J.G. Ballard, because he wrote a short essay whereby he said that he felt that most novels would have made better short stories (including his own). From my personal bias I have to agree with him.

But there's obviously something I'm missing out on because one of my mates is always throwing books at me saying "Read this seriously!", and I always end up collapsing come page 40.

But that's just me. I'm a luddite. :D

Hope that helps explain!

jj

thanks for that-it makes a sort of sense & esp re short stories-have you read carvers short cuts and/or seen altmans film?
if so could you think of a greater depth(but I know thats the wrong word!);..maybe more of a lingering in the book?

Rick, mate, you're gonna have to repeat all that! Remember, I can hardly read! :D

but i bet you can read better than i can type!

Yes it does. I understand exactly what you are saying and it gives us some insight into your character. No doubt if a team of psychologists, preferably Jungian, pieced together the various messages sent over all the threads they could construct a remarkable identikit for us all.

And though you miss out on a great art, in not loving the novel, people like me, who do - in fact I find short stories unsatisfying because they don't have the time to roll out the feeling necessary for bathing in fiction - presumably miss something of the feeling, maybe its intensity, that you have for music.

Jamie - or indeed, JJ or one of the other four Js, as Jamal would have it - when this thread has run its course you might start one on 'films that have used music well'. The Red Shoes is a good place to start.

Ha! Kev I hardly know how to take any of that! :lol:

But yes, perhaps I have missed out on something, but I prefer art forms with a more visceral form, more sensory immediacy.

Take Ted Hughes 'The Rain Horse' in terms of short story. It's really a sustained piece of poetry, or at least it has that effect on me. Or Daphne du Mauriers earthy, disturbing and archetypal short stories (often turned into brilliant films incidently!). Great stuff.

What's this insight Kev?! And please, spare me the Jung! :D

but he can't type better than you can type!
:unsure: :rolleyes: :D

Well.. it just seems to fit with the way you post - blitzes of blurred thought, huge intelligence and insight allowed to balloon out of perspective, like a frenetic jazz piece, but with slower, calmer passages, then plink, plonk, bash :angry: :P ;) punctuated by facial images. Sorry, rather a trite view probably. You might like Anthony Burgess - he was also a musician, wrote and conducted several symphonies. Clockwork Orange is really just a long short story.

now thats an insight!

HA HA!!!LOL :lol: :lol:

Jazz posting. That's a new one ;)

Could be my dyslexia, making me over-compensate. I'm always thinking "Nah, I have to clarify that".

Anyway somehow a conversation with someone who doesn't really like novels has started on a thread about...novels we're reading. How did that happen? :D

Yes Anthony Burgess does have a musical style to his writing. I've been trying to hunt down those two symphonies, but no luck.

I had a nostalgic dream last night wherein I was reading the novelisation of Grange Hill. Those were the days. Until I find these literary masterpieces again, Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, Philip Roth's American Pastoral and Brendan O'Neill's From Bosnia to Baghdad: How the West Spread Al-Qaeda will have to do.

Oh well if we're doing non-fiction then Camille Paglias 'Sexual Personae' is currently making me uneasy about Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa', and a wide range of other art works/poems ect.

Which is quite a trick to pull off, because I used to think the 'Mona Lisa' was shit.

Hey Jim Williams, great line- up of reading.
"untold stories" by Bennett is a long book (over 500-600 pages). I had started to read this sometime ago but never did finish it.I found the 300 and some odd pages I read as kind of depressing, yet, I got the feeling he was not trying to swim in a pool of self-pity for a guy who believed he only had months to live because he was diagnoised with cancer.
I like his ability to put you behind his eyes and relive the world and life he had. It took me some time to fully imagine and get use to the names and towns and the details of Britian. American towns and cities and styles are way different. Someday I can try and finish this book.

Currently I'm reading the book "Tunesmith", inside the art of songwriting - By Jimmy Webb. It's a good book if you dabble into making or composing your own songs. It is also good reading even if you don't play any instrument. :)

Exactly the same for me. Mind you, us teenagers are famous for our short attention spans!

Yeah , Jamie :lol:

With all the girlfriends and hanging out on the corners, just way too busy ! :)

'I am alive and you are dead: a journey inside the mind of Phillip K Dick' - Emmanuel Carrere

Was introduced to James Lee Burke in February and am now onto book number eight by the guy. Whether it's his Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland crime stuff or his historical fiction, the guy consistently and pleasingly gets it right.
I've also recently read Joseph O'Connor's 'The Star of the Sea' which was brilliant.
Ian McEwan and Iain Banks (not Iain M Banks) rarely disappoint, the latter's Crow Road being one of my all time faves. Graeme Swift is another writer who usually comes up with the goods. Probably old news but Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer was very enjoyable.
From a non-fiction perspective, stuff by a guy called Jeremy Sea is worth seeking out. His Snakebite Survivor's Club is a fascinating read and on the strength of it I picked up 'The Wreck at Sharpnose Point' which was also pretty good.

I'm a big fan of Paul Auster and John Irving; I've read all of their books;
at the moment I am reading "dead famous" by ben elton (the german translation)
and I think it's a very good book with a damn good analysis of reality TV
PR

To Jesse James

Hello
Early in this thread you mentioned the novel Crash by Ballard, from which a passage has stuck in the back of my mind. This was near the end: Ballard sees how an abandoned car somewhere in the street is completly destroyed by a pack of youngsters. Somehow this, as a kind of symbol, has kept coming back to my mind whenever I note how people or society tend to be destructive, cruel, discriminative towards those who have become weak in every sense. It's such a competitive world ours, isn't it. :huh:

Yeah, Ballards whole approach to modern society, is that beneath the surface of our technocratic docility and order, lies some primeaval psychopathy. He's interested in how humans fetishize the technology around them. He's said that when he was a young boy in Shanghai in World War II, during its capture by the Japanese, he saw the surreal first hand (the modern world undone by the brutal), and that obviously had a huge effect on his world view.

I like his stuff, but sometimes his charactors feel like cyphers to illustrate whatever contemporary strain of thinking attracts him at the time (Satres 'Nausea' gets turned into a short story, and the phsyciatric philosophies of R.D. Laing get visited frequently), but I still like his stuff, and thinks he's often very inventive.

Funnily enough, having spoken so highly of films compared to books on here, I thought Cronenbergs adaptation of 'Crash' was awfull!. So theres a bit of irony for ya' ;)

Lee Child
Robert B Parker
Nelson DeMille
John Sandford

[QUOTE=Jesse James,May 5 2007, 02:54 PM][QUOTE=Jaime Arg.,May 5 2007, 02:10 PM]


Funnily enough, having spoken so highly of films compared to books on here, I thought Cronenbergs adaptation of 'Crash' was awfull!. So theres a bit of irony for ya' ;)

[/QUOTE]

I actually read "Crash" by J. Ballard, and BESIDES, saw the movie at the time of release. ;) I had read a Spanish edition of the novel around 1991, a copy I happened to find in a jumble sales. (It could have been any other book). I remember how shocking was the story, I being still rather naive those years. I didn't like either the adaptation for it. The movie didn't get me as disturbed as the original stuff. Of course I can't get deeply in discussion of these things as you do, your knowledge of references is broad, which I admire. Are u a teacher of Philosophy, Sociology, Literature or something? I profit from your writing to improve my English.

Talented Mr Ripley, The Prisioner, The Perfume, Unbereable lightness of Being..., and if they shot "Happiness TM" well I've already read it...






Saludos.
:)

Yeah, the books effectivness is based on the grotesque 'idea' and Ballards calm and deliberate style. With the film it just reduces the books ideas to de-eroticised (is that a word?) carnival of prosthetics and horror make-up.

In terms of me being a teacher..... :lol: No sorry Jaime.Arg I'm far from any of that mate! But feel free to steal any word I dredge up (just check I've spelt it right first ;) )

I'm about to read all the Rebus books again, starting from Book 1 "Knots and Crosses". They great and with fantastic attention to detail for Edinburgh, a place I know very well.

Even if the TV series is better since they ditched John Hannah, it still doesn;t do the books any justice.

Just finished "Nineteen Eighty-Four", absolutely brilliant (one of those books you don't think you need to read because you already know what its all about...but it was so much better than I was expecting).

And I found this passage...

"...His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots. He only had six thoughts..."

A possible source for "...I've got six things on my mind..." ?

I've also just finished a collection of 'classic' short stories, including "A Passion in the Desert" by Balzac, which may have had been an influence on the previously mentioned (and brilliant) "Life of Pi".

Best of all was an odd little story called "Seeds" by Sherwood Anderson (who I hadn't previously heard of).

What the heck. Iwas just given that book to me by my son ,who is in college and didn't need it anymore so he gave it to me. Now ,Duffy, since you read it a second time ,well, then so am I.
Brilliant thought on the 'I've Got six things on my mind'.........source.

This is the stuff I like. :D

possible logical sources.

Wow, Duffy, that's a most impressive idea you got going there on account of "six things on my mind"! The McAloon-Orwell-connection's already established, so it sounds most plausible to me (I always found Two Wheels Good a lame play on Orwell's phrase, though).

No book has impressed me quite like Nineteen-Eightyfour; I read it when I was 13, and while it fit right in with the first onsets of adolescent angst and moroseness, it left a mark. 25 years later, I'm still astounded by the lucidity and originality of Orwell's writings and thoughts whenever I read something by him (mostly essays and reviews, once or twice a year). I think I'll go back to 1984 soon, thanks to your observation.

Also (thanks for rescucitating this thread, Duffy and Life's), I'm just reading a pervesely hilarious, witty, gross, and outrageously entertaining cycle of novels by Simon Raven, called Alms For Oblivion. An English friend of mine recommended it to me (knowing that I'd enjoyed Anthony Powell's A Dance To the Music Of Time), but he also told me that Raven had passed into obscurity, if not downright contempt, in Britain. Anyone around who's read Alms For Oblivion?

Great stuff Duffy! I feel exactley the same as you did in terms of reading 1984; I've seen and read so many references to Orwells drama that I feel as if I know the book already.

Does it say what the six thoughts are?

On a generally related note, has anyone here read 'Brave New World'?. An utter train wreck of a book, but probably the more prophetic.

Is that the one where Jack fell down the hill?

You got to be kidding. I don't know if I should laugh from comic relief or what :huh:

J.J. unfortunately I've given the book back to the University from where it was borrowed and I can't remember the six things...except one of them "Julia". What really impressed me most I think about 1984 (and the bit I wasn't expecting) was the 'love' story between Winston and Julia ('love' in a very unconventional sense). And this is where the quote doesn't fit in with McAloon's lyrics...

"...I've got six things on my mind, you're no longer one of them..."

but at the time "Julia" was still one of the six things on Winston's mind.

We read 'Brave New World' at school. I enjoyed it at the time, wouldn't mind re-reading it in light of 1984 (after I've re-read Catcher in the Rye, perhaps).

Although it does contain a lot of 'speculation' about things that might happen in what was then the future (it was written in 1948), I thought 1984 was more 'satirical' (not sure that's quite the right word) than science fiction...it seems to be 'about' things happening in Orwell's lifetime, (although still relevant). It's almost presenting a parallel universe rather than a future dystopia (well that's how I read it...).

Whereas, if my memory serves me, Brave New World is much more a 'science fiction' vision of the future...

...but then I suppose for any of science fiction's dystopian societies to have 'relevance' they have to resemble in some way the society in which they were written... :rolleyes:

...I also think Brave New World is much more about society itself...whereas 1984 is about an individual within a society (one we can all identify with to a greater or lesser extent...we're all small cogs within the modern machine).

From what I understand, George Orwell is a serious writer, and so I have no doubts that in terms of literary value and how well the various ideas are developed and explored, 1984 trumps Brave New World.

Brave New World is awful on those terms. The charactors seem almost incidental beyond functioning as plot cyphers, there is no dimension given to either people or place, dull style, gross leaps of logic are employed in order to generate conflict ect. And strangely, I think that's because the books central premise is so strong. The totalitarian order of Brave New World is so wickedly subversive, so neutralising and enveloping of any conflict or sense meaning, that the dramatic conventions needed to instill any plot dynamic seem contradictory, too far outside of the books central logic. Funnily enough, this was the problem Brett Easton Ellis faced with 'American Psyhco'; such severe superficiality and murderous monotony, whilst an interesting theme, makes for a crap read.

Fat boy Christopher Hitchens (an Orwell biographer amongst otherthings) got it right here:

"We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons towards a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley… rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught."

And some writer called Neil Postman said:

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. "

Sorry for the long quotes! Just thought it was interesting.

An impressive post.
It sheds a new light for me on these two classics.
The conflicting problem I face here, is I feel a need to re-read these books again.

!@#$%&* Jesse, Neato :)

J.J.

really interesting post, thanks...

I'm immediately struck by the irony of the apparent legions of viewers who regularly tune in (and 'bliss out') to the TV equivalent of wallpaper (as per Huxley's "man's infinite appetite for distractions")...

...I'm talking about 'Big Brother' of course. :D