The Rotters Club was brilliant, especially as it was set in places I know, and namechecked music I know, but gets docked half a point for gratuitous Nazi interlude.

Is that the bit that takes place at the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge, where one of the characters is having a dirty weekend?

I liked it a lot, there was a TV adaptation a couple of years ago too. Plus a sequel as well but I've not read it.

I'm reading Gillian Tendall's The House By The Thames, which has interesting stuff about Bankside, but she's started doing something that really winds me up in biography, and treating the subject as a close friend, always Christian name, and so on "Bill enjoyed spending time with his family", etc. It's even worse because you know that it's all extrapolated from tiny bits of information.

Got sufficiently irate/bored that I needed a distraction book and I'm reading Riaan Manser's "Round Africa On My Bicycle", which is quite entertaining, although not very well written. There's enough going on (30 odd countries, with lots of jungle, corruption and punctures does that) to keep it interesting and not make me care about the writing quality.

Jon wrote:

QUOTE:
The Rotters Club was brilliant, especially as it was set in places I know, and namechecked music I know, but gets docked half a point for gratuitous Nazi interlude.

Is that the bit that takes place at the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge, where one of the characters is having a dirty weekend?

No, it's the encounter with holocaust survivors in Denmark. Didn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the book.

Jonathan Wilson's excellent football tactics thing, and William Gaddis' stunning Agapé Agape.

The Tango Singer was finished a few days ago, and is superb to the point where I must get hold of more of Eloy Martínez's stuff. I loved it.

I'm now reading Goethe's Faust in the evenings and weekends, and because it's a very very large edition from the Folio Society that doesn't fit in my bag to take into work every day (although I'm tempted if only because I'd look absolutely hilarious reading it on public transport), I've also got the Folio Society's collection of 'Great Short Stories' to read during the daytime.

Back to the Poetry Anthology, and also Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought.

Toro, I was reading something today about how Pound asserted that Ovid influenced him - but apparently he actually lacked a knowledge of Ovid. does this sound right? could I just go and read a particular bit or is it more of a constant thread type thing do you reckon? (I didn't get the impression the author of the article knew for certain)

Well, my knowledge of Ovid is not really sufficient to comment authoritatively;)

But it sounds in line with his general working methods - Pound was an incredible intellectual dilettante, reading anything and everything that came to hand, picking everything that fitted into his idiosyncratic worldview, and wedging it into his own work - particularly the Cantos - often verbatim. That means he covers, refers to in both form and content, a vast body of material. But it also means, necessarily, that much of it won't have been understand in great depth, or won't have been remembered very long afterwards. I think he more or less acknowledges this as one of the causes of his great error towards the end of the Cantos.

Just off the top of my head, though, there are certainly bits of the Pisan Cantos very similar in tone to Ted Hughes' Ovid - though the influence is probably working in the other direction there...

Thanks, that's cool, I will try to follow that up.

I'm back in the library now; the reference in the article was to Guide to Kulchur and apparently Pound said that "a great treasure of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and in the subject matter of Ovid's long poem, and that only in this form could it be registered." So the verity is something external to both texts, I guess. Which means that it doesn't really matter how shaky his knowledge of the text was, maybe? And Hughes says wrt Ovid that the "right man met the right material at the right moment" so something quite similar. Certainly assertions of this sort de-privilege the notion of 'the original' - we are in any case conscious of the way intertextuality seems to work in a web-like structure, perhaps, not a straight line - and they allow the modern poets to claim the same for themselves as they do for Ovid. Which is probably fair enough. It's not as if he wouldn't have done the same.


Oh God I think I'm going to have to try to read Joyce. I don't want to! I'm scared.

Finished off a couple of books this week - A book on Dubai by Christpher Davidson, which makes me think this is a much more interesting part of the world than I thought; Soccer Revolution by Willy Meisl, which is quite remarkable (review shortly on the appropriate thread), and Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which was very very enjoyable even if a bit fluffy.

Read Nabokov's Bend Sinister, which was fantastic. Now back in the poetry anthology and the Nussbaum, which is okay but dragging and very, er, womanly...

Have you read any other Nussbaum, Toro? I have this copy of Cultivating Humanity that's been staring at me from my bookshelf for a couple of years and am wondering whether or not to pull it down. I'm thinking not, but if you've had good experiences with her, I'll give it a go.

I haven't, no. I enjoyed that, though it was pretty frothy and... the philosophical equivalent of chicklit, if that makes any sense. It couldn't possibly have been written by a man.

Now reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Herve This' Kitchen Mysteries, sort of a popular version of Molecular Gastronomy, which I'll have to get around to before too long. Also Alex Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism, Or How To Stop Worrying And Love Molecular Biology. Publishers have slightly garbled the subtitle there. Rosenberg is brilliant, perhaps my fave PhiBiGuy, but the position he wants to defend here, insofar as its clear at all, seems wrong to me.

Just finished Misha Glenny's McMafia. The first third of the book - the stuff involving Russia and the Balkans - is fucking superb. Really great stuff. The rest has some good material but is quite uneven and occasionally reads like Glenny has ADD.

The chapter on cybercrime, for instance, starts realy promisingly, but after six pages and for no apparent reason suddenly becomes a chapter on criminal gangs in Brazil's favelas. Then it ends with a bit on how Chinese triads are infiltrating Brazil, which leads Glenny to say something along the lines of "I knew that to really get at the heart of this, I would need to go to China". Which, you'd think, is a pretty obvious segue.

Bafflingly, the following chapter is about the Japanese yakuza.

Finished the This and Vonnegut - loved the second, graetly enjoyed the first, although it's a bit too beginner-ish, and I'll have to read the "proper" book. Am now on the home stretch of that poetry anthology, and also re-reading Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy