Book Recommendations

[Daisy]

A thoroughly brilliant book by a scholar in the tradition of Erich Auerbach and Lionel Trilling:



From Publishers Weekly
This is the book culture critic Said was completing when he died in 2003. The critical survey had its genesis in a popular course Said taught at Columbia University, "Late Works/Late Style," examining "artists... whose work expresses lateness through the peculiarities of its style." Writing with insight and meticulous phrasing, Said studies the output of creative talents during their final years. The passing parade of artists, writers and composers includes Beethoven, Mozart, Jean Genet, Glenn Gould, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. In one piece, Said details dramatic contrasts between Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Luchino Visconti's film adaptation of that novel; in another, he compares Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1911) with Benjamin Britten's 1973 opera of Mann's novella, composed near the end of Britten's career. While "late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor," Said concludes there also is "artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction." As Said examined the effect of impending death on artists, leukemia led him to his own final pages, resulting in this erudite collection.

[Ilsa]

Otto Weininger (April 3, 1880 – October 4, 1903) was an Austrian philosopher. In 1903, he published the book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) which gained popularity after Weininger's suicide at the age of 23. Today, the book is generally viewed as misogynistic and antisemitic in academic circles; however, it continues to be held up as a great work of lasting genius and spiritual wisdom by others.

[Ilsa]

Ernst Jünger (March 29, 1895 — February 17, 1998)
Storm of Steel

Ernst Jünge was a German writer. In addition to his many novels, he is well known for Storm of Steel, an account of his experience during the First World War. Many regard him as one of Germany's greatest modern writers and a hero of the conservative revolutionary movement following World War I. Others dismiss him as a militarist or reactionary.

Jünger was born in Heidelberg and grew up in Hannover as the son of a pharmacist. He went to school between the years of 1901 and 1913 and was member of the "Wandervogel" movement. He ran away from home to join the French Foreign Legion where he served in North Africa. During World War I he served with distinction in the Imperial German Army on the Western Front. In the first week of January 1917 he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and in September of 1918 was awarded the German Empire's highest military decoration of that time, the Pour le Mérite (informally known as the "Blue Max"). Received as a Lieutenant at the age of 23, he was one of the youngest soldiers ever to be given this award.
His war experiences are described in Storm of Steel (German title: In Stahlgewittern) which was published in 1920. The book has been seen as tending to glorify war, especially in comparison to the other major German WWI work, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque. However, Storm of Steel never rejects nor extenuates war brutalities. Jünger served as a lieutenant in the army of the Weimar Republic until his demobilisation in 1923. He studied marine biology, zoology, botany and philosophy and became a well-known entomologist. He married Gretha von Jeinsen (* 1906 - † 1960) in 1925; they had two children, Ernst (1926-1944) and Alexander (1934-1993).
In the 1920s Jünger published articles in several right-wing nationalist journals, and further novels. As in Storm of Steel, in the book Feuer und Blut (1925, "Fire and Blood") Jünger glorified war as an internal event. According to Jünger war elevates the soldier's life, isolated from normal humanity, into a mystical experience . The extremities of modern military techniques tested the capacity of the human senses. He criticized the fragile and unstable democracy of the Weimar Republic, stating that he "hated democracy like the plague." Although never a member of the National Socialist movement around Adolf Hitler, Jünger never publicly criticized the regime before the war. Jünger however refused a chair offered to him in the Reichstag following the Nazi Party's ascension to power in 1933, and he refused the invitation to head the German Academy of Literature (Die deutsche Akademie der Dichtung). Even though he never endorsed the Nazi Party, and indeed kept them at a careful distance, Jünger's Storm of Steel sold well into the six-figure range by the end of the 1930s

[Ilsa]

Gustav Meyrink was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on January 19th (sixty years earlier another mystic writer, Edgar Allan Poe, had been born, as emphasized by some admirers) 1868. He was the illegitimate son of Baron Karl von Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen and actress Maria Wilhelmina Adelheyd Meier. (In 1919, when Meyrink had already become a renowned writer, the Varnbülers are said to have offered Meyrink the use of the family name. The offer was politely rejected.). Meyrink's role in Austrian literature is similar to that of Poe in American literature.

[trieffiewiles]

Thank you. There ought to be more mention of Meyrink on this site. I honestly think that his mastery of language, atmospherics (particularly when applied to disturbed or, more often than not, supernatural mindsets), and what-have-you are even better than the best of Poe's. Meyrink was definitely a writer that one could classify as a true 'psychonaught' - explorer of inward dimensions, the mind, inner space. Add that to find that his temperament reveled in adjectives like eerie, perverse, labyrinthine, gloomy, mysterious- how much more could the people on this board be looking for?

[trieffiewiles]

Ilsa, since you recommended the Apocalypse Culture books, I think you might enjoy (and I recommend them to everyone else) 'Art that Kill . . .' by George Petros, 'Amok Fifth Dispatch' by Stuart Swezey, and 'Amok Journal: Sensurround Editon' by Swezey again. They go in a similar direction as the Apocalypse Journals in that they are compendia of unknown, forbidden, and often knowingly obscured esoterica from the fringes of past and contemporary sub-cultures.

I assure you, in case you feel the same way- otherwise I hope I don't offend you, that the man on the front of 'Art that Kills' is NOT the main, or even A main focus of the book, Petros or the publisher probably just thought the picture was cool (it is Richard Kern I believe) and that it might help sell the book.

[paeng]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/16/society.art

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...extract108.xml

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n02/eagl01_.html

Also, Modern Times, Modern Places.

[Cyril Tourneur]

one of the things I'd like reading when I was a teenager...mmm...maybe I should look for some invaluable first edition (and this is the first real gothic novel in my opinion, not Walpole's Otranto) when I think about it, I discovered him at the same time when I was reading CAS



Vathek (alternatively titled Vathek, an Arabian Tale or The History of the Caliph Vathek) is a Gothic novel written by William Thomas Beckford. It was composed in French beginning in 1782, and then translated into English by Reverend Samuel Henley in which form it was first published in 1786 without Beckford's name as An Arabian Tale, From an Unpublished Manuscript, claiming to be translated directly from Arabic. The first French edition was published in 1787. A notable modern edition was issued in paperback by Ballantine Books as the thirty-first volume of the celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in June, 1971. This edition, edited by Lin Carter, was the first to incorporate into the main text The Episodes of Vathek, scenes omitted from the original edition that had later been published separately.

Vathek capitalised on the 18th century obsession with all things Oriental (see Orientalism), which was inspired by Antoine Galland's translation of The Arabian Nights (itself re-translated, into English, in 1708). Beckford was also influenced by similar works from the French writer Voltaire. His originality lay in combining the popular Oriental elements with the Gothic stylings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). The result stands alongside Walpole's novel and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in the first rank of early Gothic fiction.

Vathek was written by William Beckford when he was 21, in the year 1782. The language in which it was originally written is French. He often stated that Vathek was written as an emotional response to “the events that happened at Fonthill at Christmas 1781”, and that it took him two days and a night, or three days and two nights. He gives two accounts of how long it took him. Vathek was written during a time when the European population was entranced by orientalism. It is both an Arabian tale because of the oriental setting and characters and the depiction of oriental cultures, societies, and myth, as well as a Gothic novel because of the emphasis on the supernatural, ghosts, and spirits, as well as the terror it tries to induce on the reader.

The main character of the story, Vathek is inspired from a real life Caliph named Al-Wathiq ibn Mutasim, an Abbassid Caliph who succeeded his father on the same day he died. He had a great thirst for knowledge and became a great patron to scholars and artists. During his reign, a number of revolts broke out, and he joined the parties to quell these revolts personally. He died on August 10, 847, due to an extremely high fever.

Vathek’s narrative uses a third person, omniscient, semi intrusive narrator. While the narrator is not omniscient in the sense of knowing what the characters feel, he hardly talks about the feelings of the characters, he is omniscient in the sense that he knows what is happening everywhere; and while it may not be intrusive to the point of telling the reader how to feel, it is certainly intrusive in the way it takes the reader from place to place, the most obvious instance being on page 87 when, after a narrative focusing around Gulchenrouz the narrator tells us "But let us return to the Caliph, and her who ruled over his heart". The narrative is often made up of lists that chronicle the events one after the other, without emphasis on character development. Characters and events are introduced forcefully at times. One such example is the introduction of Motavakel, Vathek’s brother. Up to the point when he is introduced in the novel as the leader of a rebel army, the reader is not even aware of Vathek having a brother. The reader is also never treated to Motavakel’s character, except through Carathis mentioning him. The novel, while it may lend itself to be divided into chapters, is not. It is one complete manuscript without pause.



after reading this novel, I looked up the biography of Beckford, and the interesting thing is that he used the protagonist of the story as a 'role model' for his life

William Thomas Beckford - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William_Thomas_Beckford

[Cyril Tourneur]

and cos i started talking about CAS in my last post, I recommend his 'Tales of Zothique'...if you can try to get your hands on the Necronomicon Press Edition











Clark Ashton Smith himself described the Zothique cycle in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp, dated November 3, 1953:

Zothique, vaguely suggested by Theosophic theories about past and future continents, is the last inhabited continent of earth. The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times. Some have remained submerged; others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. Zothique, as I conceive it, comprises Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India, parts of northern and eastern Africa, and much of the Indonesian archipelago. A new Australia exists somewhere to the south. To the west, there are only a few known islands, such as Naat, in which the black cannibals survive. To the north, are immense unexplored deserts; to the east, an immense unvoyaged sea. The peoples are mainly of Aryan or Semitic descent; but there is a black kingdom (Ilcar) in the north- west; and scattered blacks are found throughout the other countries, mainly in palace-harems. In the southern islands survive vestiges of Indonesian or Malayan races. The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners. There are no fire-arms—only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc. of antiquity. The chief language spoken (of which I have provided examples in an unpublished drama) is based on Indo-European roots and is highly inflected, like Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.

Stories in the Zothique Cycle

* "The Black Abbot of Puthuum"
* "The Charnel God"
* "The Dark Eidolon"
* "The Death of Ilalotha"
* "Empire of the Necromancers"
* "The Garden of Adompha"
* "The Isle of the Torturers"
* "The Last Hieroglyph"
* "The Master of the Crabs"
* "Morthylla"
* "Necromancy in Naat"
* "The Tomb Spawn"
* "The Voyage of King Euvoran"
* "The Weaver in the Vault"
* "The Witchcraft of Ulua"
* "Xeethra"

Introduction to 'Tales of Zothique' by Will Murray

[Cyril Tourneur]

we had some talk about the Watchmen comics which I recommend

Watchmen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Watchmen

and I also want to add the Sandman series...







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandman_(Vertigo)

probably I'm going to add further comics here, later