misc book thread

[eward]

from Gravrity's Rainbow if you want to reach into history there's The Recognitions--this keeps within the idea of running with the big-idea writers--

I've had The Recognitions on my Kindle for over a year now. One day, soon soon, I will finally get to it.

[jenkins]

Guillermo Rosales

Born in Havana, Rosales was a lifelong misfit diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Rosales committed suicide in Miami in 1993, at the age of 47. Before doing so, he destroyed most of his work.

the book:

It has been hailed for its precise, lapidary style

basically it's an easy read and he heavy-metal shreds the whole way through. it's like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest but with only the cuckoos, and written by Knut Hamsun or etc great talent, also written by one of the cuckoos.

it's a short book and it's the best book recommendation i've ever offered. i found my way to the book by chance. but it's that feeling where i always belonged here. if you like tremendous books about troubled souls in troubled lives (lol who doesn't) this is a book you've been wanting to hear about.

[jenkins]

he allows me to look at heavy stories in clear ways, with even some lightness, is why i think he's a general good idea for a reader

[jenkins]

an intellectual version of The Halfway House, a sick man being taken care of, in this one it's literal sickness, tuberculosis, based on the author's own experience. sick and dying people tend to write good books. that's when they do all their best existential thinking, you know. it's a different type of reading because the writing is designed a different way. this one is like nightmare poetry prose.

i'm obsessed with this line in it

Here in this hospital, will I end up like the pilgrim dreaming of riches who, upon waking, shows me his penniless hand, minus a finger or thumb?

[jenkins]

it’s a Japanese classic about being human feeling impossible. he downward spirals. the writing genre is: I-Novel (私小説 Shishōsetsu, Watakushi shōsetsu) used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author's life.

the writer and the woman he lived with drowned themselves in a river, he was 38.

this is how I feel less alone in the world. This calms me.

[jenkins]

^he twice tries suicide, fails both times, the first time a woman successfully dies, he's sent to a mental hospital and leaves without being able to feel either happy or not happy



this book, somehow, introduced interior monologue to literature, le monologue intérieur, which had only been sampled from in larger pieces, or appeared as soliloquies, this is linked with stream of consciousness and subjective fiction, which influenced Joyce, who brought it to another level with Ulysses, he noticed what was happening, the only other person who noticed what was happening had been, of course, Mallarmé

it's fucking insane to me that interior monologue wasn't an established writing form until 1887

[Robyn]

I am reading two different books by Roberto Bolano atm. Whores who kill (don't know the english title`?) and The Unknown University. I have cried several times during the last couple of days, he's my new favorite author, like he reminds me so much of other authors I enjoy, I have seen several things straight out lifted from this,  it's crazy that I haven't discovered this until now... i have read The Savage Detectives before btw.

[Robyn]

Wait, what is this thread about? I was trying to found a book thread. I have written about 30 pages in my notebook tonight. Bolano inspires me.

[Robyn]

No like really, Bruno K. Öijer has been my favorite author for the last 6 years... I borrowed my old teacher's  copy of Öijer's collected poems, and   carried it in my bag like a bible for three years, before he got really anxious about it and wanted it back, just so he could give me my own copy of it as a graduation present. Now I feel like I will carry Bolanos poems as a bible for at least the next three years.

[WorldForgot]

Swift intro to the distro and attitude of subversive polti-lit
(and The Good Fight's latest szn comes to mind, like, how many P-Anonz are there? How many dimensions are taking form in the shadows of American discourse, on the net, in garages, at bookstores in maybe silent aggressions?)
from the BLACK OAK CLIQUE-- WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.
Theze Zinez surge in dozenz and not all as impassioned, but this is where we are.

A compendium of the discourse loop itself playing out, an autocritique:  collection of Queer Insurrection textz, from 06 and onward concerning Milwaukee's own fight against our existent social order and its relationship to Euro cellz.

To cite queer insurrectional praxis and the ideas from these
texts in our own context, we originally set out to collect
words and stories from criminal queers, insurrectional transfemminists, and other uncontrollables on this side of the
water and to present them under the title "Queer
Insurectionalism in Europe". After much outreaching,
chasing ghosts and bullying our friends, we decided we
were doing something wrong. Some of the beauty contained
in Queer Insurrectional praxis in Europe lies in the fact that
it is so subversive, underground, and refuses to
communicate itself. It's not the actions aren't happening, or
that the people don't exist, but rather that many of us have
chosen to lurk in the shadows, to slip the noose of
identification, and to let those cops who keep assuming
"only men smash things" keep on assuming that- in the end
maybe it's what keeps us out of jail and able to act
Further, we got this impression, that words somehow imply
death, that a chronology of actions or events would imply
something past and not something which occupies our
present. For this reason we opted instead to search out
recent and historical pictures of peoples actions, or
combative posturing and to display them throughout the
zine with a breif description of each and its context offered
in the last pages.

Their latest is particularly poetic: BE GAY, DO CRIME! . I feel that this one especially pushes past the group's self-described "Nihilism,"

Both the gang-form known as Bash Back! and this publication were expressions of a milieu based in Riverwest, a discreet (and at times not so discreet) anarchist neighborhood since the end of World War II. After the war, the nascent bohemian anarchist subculture that had been developing in the war resister camps among writers and art freaks, and some christians, splintered in a diaspora that bore the newly freed mystics to New York and San Francisco. A small enclave ended up in Riverwest and stayed, joining the Galleanist anarchist lineage rooted in the city. The neighborhood remained a constant site of struggle, sometimes armed, with the forces of law and order. In the neighborhood one can find a certain crossroads at which a variety of struggles have intersected: queer struggles, struggles against racism and fascism, against the police, for the liberation of foodways, along with a dense layering of underground cultures. Distinct anarchist currents consistently cohabitated that neighborhood, debating positions and ways. Around the time of the Nardini Gang communiques, insurrectionaries, queers, race traitors, and eco-extremists came together under the roof of an anarchist space. This particular infoshop (the Cream City Collectives) was one of the many anarchist spaces that had stood at that exact intersection going back decades.

This is the place where we found ourselves when, a few months after the initial publication of “Toward the Queerest Insurrection,” emissaries from the future spoke through fires set across the seas. Insurrection broke out. Not in Milwaukee, but in Greece. Civilization died within the bounds of the nation-state mythologized as the epicenter of its birth. The police executed a teenage anarchist named Alexis Grigoropoulos in another long-term anarchist neighborhood, Exarcheia (ex-, out of; -archeia, rulership). Exarcheia is a place where anarchy, the Beautiful Idea, had never gone quiet, and so when a cop murdered a youth – an encounter so devastatingly routine in the US – there at the crossroads which is now Alexis’ hero-shrine, the whole world caught fire. The insurrection had come.

[eward]

That is quite fascinating

[Drenk]

Lucy Ellmann* has, like, a book coming in July, a 1000 pages sentence, the interior monologue of a woman with "the fact of" being the recurring chorus of the books. It's called Ducks, Newburyport. Here is an extract:

… I dreamt last night about somebody complaining that he owned a “lesser Cézanne” while I was tearing heartshaped buttons off a shirt, and something about a ferret, the fact that my dreams have become more practical and less expansive, I think, since we got poorer, the fact that I should be swinging wild but instead my dreams are just about tidying the hen coop or unloading the dishwasher, or losing my address book, or I’m cooking noodles for everybody and Leo has a plane to catch in half an hour and there’s no taxi, or I find myself on a bicycle carrying a huge box, the fact that once I dreamt I ate one tiny piece of ham, and that was it, that was the whole dream, the fact that I dream all the wrong stuff and remember all the wrong stuff, what a goofball, “a genuine idiot,” the fact that why do I remember that Amish wool shop and not my mom, …

*Her father wrote the most well known biography of James Joyce called...Joyce.

She wrote this article about bookstores. It's fun.

https://books.substack.com/p/diary-lucy-ellmann-on-not-going-into

A Waterstone’s bookshop in London—I did a reading there, and during the questions afterwards, a member of the audience asked me how I’d put the disparate elements of my novel together. Being incapable of giving a sensible explanation, and thinking of Schoenberg’s witty answer to a similar enquiry in Hollywood about his 12-tone scale, I said cheerily “That is none of your business”—for which I was thoroughly scolded later on by my editor. And, subsequently, by a friend of my editor. And maybe even a few other people too. I was just trying to be funny.

[WorldForgot]

36 Writing Craft Essays by Chuck Palahniuk

"In 2005 Chuck Palahniuk began submitting original writing essays on craft to his official fan site ChuckPalahniuk.net.  36 essays later and Chuck had amassed a wealth of knowledge on his readers; tools and writing tenants that could fill a book --"

1: Establishing Your Authority

Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in. Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect.
2: Developing a Theme

At the core of Minimalism is focusing any piece of writing to support one or two major themes. Learn harvesting, listing, and other methods, after a fun excursion into the spooky side of Chuck's childhood.
3: Using “On-The-Body” Physical Sensation

Great writing must reach both the mind and the heart of your reader, but to effectively suspend reality in favor of the fictional world, you must communicate on a physical level, as well. Learn to unpack the details of physical sensation.
4: Submerging the “I”

First-person narration, for all its immediacy and power, becomes a liability if your reader can't identify with your narrator. Discover Chuck's secret method for making a first-person narrator less obtrusive. Bonus: This essay includes the story 'Guts.'
5: Nuts and Bolts: Hiding a Gun

Sometimes called "plants and payoffs" in the language of screenwriters, Hiding a Gun is an essential skill to the writer's arsenal that university writing courses almost never touch upon. Learn to identify and use multiple forms, including the Big Question, the Physical Process, and the Clock.
6: Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs

You've always heard the maxim, "Show, don't tell..." but almost no writing teacher ever explains... How. Discover how to strengthen your prose by unpacking abstract and static verbs into descriptive action.
7: Nuts and Bolts: “Big Voice” Versus “Little Voice”

An interesting character has strong opinions, and voicing them can lend mood and texture to the work, but you can't allow these "Big Voice" rants to eclipse the "Little Voice" needs for descriptive physical action. In this essay, you'll learn to strike that balance.
8: Nuts and Bolts: Using Choruses

This verbal repetition can create a beat of bland time that lets your story breathe, or it can refresh previous plot points and trigger strong emotions. Steal this natural aspect of spoken rhetoric to enliven your prose.
9: Nuts and Bolts: Saying It Wrong

Great writers like Mark Richard and Amy Hempel re-invent the world, partly by re-inventing the language. In this essay, Chuck introduces you to the mysteries of "Burnt Tongue," and its three principal uses.
10: Beware the ‘Thesis Statement’

Abstract and summarizing lead statements feel natural to journalism and academic writing, but will suck the life from your fiction. Learn to unpack and rearrange these abstractions for greater effect.
11: Reading Out Loud – Part One

Lots of things that look smart on the page fall apart in the auditorium. Discover the numerous reasons Chuck writes for the ear as well as the eye, along with how to make the most of live reading opportunities.
12: Reading Out Loud – Part Two

All humans are storytellers and every fiction is veiled autobiography. Learn to explore and exhaust your personal issues by creating something bigger than yourself, and don't miss Chuck's ingenious assignment for personalizing your character's perception of time.
13: Nuts and Bolts -- Punctuating with Gesture and Attribution

Smart actors use the stage business of peeling an apple or lighting a cigarette to create a layer of interest that dialogue alone can never convey. Learn to punctuate your dialogue with gesture and attribution to propel interest and achieve better pacing.
14: Nuts and Bolts -- The Horizontal Versus the Vertical

Every story possesses the "horizontal" movement from plot point to plot point and finally to resolution, as well as the "vertical" development of character, theme, and emotional resonance. Discover Chuck's approach to building a story in layers.
15: When You Can’t Find a Writing Workshop…

When you can't find a writing workshop, you can still find a setting where you're almost forced to daydream. Chuck paints some funny options for this while recommending that you daydream with a pen in your hand.
16: Learning from Clichés… then Leaving them Behind

To achieve excellence, a writer must learn to identify and eliminate clichés. Chuck demonstrates the use of placeholders where more inventive language is needed, while counter-intuitively recommending style mimicry as a positive stage of learning.
17: Talking Shapes: The ‘Quilt’ Versus the Big ‘O’

What does Fight Club have in common with The Great Gatsby? In this first "talking shapes" essay, Chuck reveals two of the more encompassing plot shapes that you can begin to recognize as you create from the same basic patterns.
18: Textures of Information

Lists, recipes, documentaries--almost everything verbal or textual is storytelling in some form. Chuck makes the case for lifting from various non-fiction forms and quick-cutting between them to enrich the textures of your fiction.
19: Effective Similes

Every time you compare something inside of a scene to something that's not present, you distract your reader. Learn to limit the use of "like" or "as" and to unpack static verbs, along with other methods for forging stronger comparisons.
20: Talking Shapes: The ‘Thumbnail’

In this second "talking shapes" essay, Chuck explores a basic paradox of storytelling, while revealing what you can do about it. The Thumbnail opening foreshadows major plot points in advance and creates authority, without giving too much away.
21: Talking Shapes: The ‘Cycle’

An excellent plot for horror and dark fantasy, the Cycle enlists and seduces the reader even as it enlists and seduces the protagonist. Learn what to look for from a few of Chuck's favorites, while putting this plot shape to work for yourself.
22: Talking Shapes: The Rebel, the Follower, and the Witness

Take a look at your work. Are you writing a classic rebel-follower-witness story? If not, what kind of myth are you creating? This essay takes up the mythic patterns prominent in our culture and provides great examples.
23: Nuts and Bolts: Using Your Objects

An object, in fiction, can serve multiple purposes--from Memory Cue, to Gesture Prop, to Buried Gun, to simple Through-Line Image. Learn to make the most of physical objects.
24: Stocking Stuffers: 13 Writing Tips From Chuck Palahniuk

Christmas comes early today! In this essay Chuck provides a grab-bag of incredibly useful ideas that don't require too much individual elaboration. From delineating the three types of speech, to simple maxims for the writing life.
25: Killing Time: Part One

Several methods exist in fiction for showing the passage of time--from subtle to not-so-subtle. Here, Chuck glosses various approaches while highlighting his preferred method.
26: Discon nected Dialogue: Part One

The temptation for new writers to answer every question raised in a fictional dialogue with a perfect, clever, instant response is very strong. Chuck demonstrates how this flattens the energy of a scene and what to do instead.
27: Body Language: Part One

Leave it to Chuck to make an assignment of watching movies with the sound turned off... and have this make perfect sense. This essay explores gesture and movement as an important counterbalance to your dialogue.
28: Objects

In the best stories, key objects morph to serve several different functions, reappearing throughout while picking up additional resonance. Learn to use a limited number of objects to maximum effect.
29: Required Reading -- Absurdity

In this essay, Chuck explores authority, specificity, pacing, and brevity as points of power in two classic shorts--one from E.B. White and one from Shirley Jackson. You'll be challenged to carry these principles into your own experiments.
30: Utility Phrases: When All Words Fail

What does your character say when he doesn't know what to say? Utility phrases fill a beat of bland time, possibly framing a gesture, possibly allowing the reader to recover from a shock, all the while developing characterization.
31: Names Versus Pronouns

How can you replace tired third-person pronouns with proper names without monotonous repetition? In this essay, Chuck challenges you to develop a whole range of names for each character and object in your fiction.
32: Nuts and Bolts: Plot Points

In this return to "nuts & bolts" basics, Chuck emphasizes the importance of determining your plot points in advance. The homework portion entails listening for themes and issues that go perpetually unresolved.
33: Tell a Lie, Bury a Gun

Chuck exposes one of the more subtle and influential forms of the Buried Gun... the Lie. Have your character lie or make a false promise early, then the backfire can propel a climactic resolution.
34: A Story from Scratch, Act One

Here, Chuck presents the rough draft of Act One in his short story "Fetch," complete with notes and commentary. See his process in action as he begins to apply all the techniques and strategies of previous essays.
35: A Story from Scratch, Act Two

In the rough draft of Act Two, Chuck demonstrates how to reinforce physical details, along with "on-the-body" sensation, "Burnt Tongue," and other critical distinctions from previous lessons.
36: A Story from Scratch, Act Three

In Act Three, Chuck demonstrates the importance of keeping established elements present to the story as it moves forward. He also brings in the "Buried Gun" and reveals strategies for building tension and maintaining character arc.

[jenkins]

if you're like "oh but i don't like his writing" it's still a good list that reminds you of the million things you don't need to remember while writing but you need to ingrain in your head before you write. there's a book variation that's mainly pep talk and i like when he's pure theory

[jenkins]

both because i like to read the classics and because i have this grand vision of my own writing ability i shittalked this book once i started it but to be honest i was suspicious of my shittalking and okay what happened by the end was lmao she kills it seriously

this book made me feel like a better person ready for better writing