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Sunday, March 06, 2005

Book Club Blog Link Log

- Tim Worstall's third weekly BritBlog Roundup has been posted. Check it out!
- Richard Ingrams Diary, Observer, 6th March. What's wrong at the BBC/ The unintended consequence of extending maternity leave/ Blunkett's Online University no longer exists.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990, Yale University Press, 718 pp.) is Camille Paglia's first major work, and the work with the most scholarly focus: a survey of western literature with an emphasis on sexual decadence. Paglia starts with a view of human nature wherein gender roles are heavily biologically determined, and views all of Western Culture through this lens: all art either embraces the natural or struggles in denial against it.Throwing in her lot with Hobbes and Dionysus, she follows in the tradition of a work like Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, where engaging assertion and overstatement are more important than rigorously proving a case. She argues passionately, with poetic flair: for her, human sexuality is dark, cruel, sadistic, powerful, daemonic, perverse, murky, decadent, pagan...
- Camille Paglia, "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s", published in the classics and humanities journal Arion in winter 2003.
- From Camille Paglia (wikipedia)
"One day in New York that summer (1968), she happened to run into Catherine Deneuve on Fifth Avenue and found herself "stalking" her through Saks Fifth Avenue."
- "The North American intellectual tradition," Camille Paglia, Salon, March 04, 2000
"To hell with European philosophers: The breakthroughs of non-European thinkers are the 1960s' greatest legacy."
- From Salon's Ask Camille:
"The brothel episodes in Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour" (1967), starring the gorgeously luminous Catherine Deneuve, introduced me to the now widely publicized fact that men of wealth and power often frequent prostitutes for lavish role-reversal scenarios, where the male is abased and enslaved. It's a Babylonian version of penance and absolution."
- Fax Off and Die You Bitch! - The Paglia/Burchill fax war
- The Modern Review, 1991-1999
Brazen intellectual Paglia whipped up controversy as a liberator of critical thinking from priggishness and pretension, championing pop culture and pornography in erudite yet incendiary essays, last collected in Vamps & Tramps (1994). Now in a more reflective mode, the diva of shock discourse and a veteran of 30 years of teaching, turns to poetry, an art form she treasures for its 'exhilarating spiritual renewal.' Paglia's seemingly racy title is found in one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. It's an appeal to God, not a call to party, and serves as a sure indication that even though she's advocating for serious literature and 'unfashionable' humanist values, she's as free of pedantry and as electrifying as ever. Among the many intriguing autobiographical disclosures she offers in her to-the-ramparts introduction is the fact that Harold Bloom was her doctoral advisor, and she is, indeed, on a Bloomian mission as she presents 43 poems worthy of sustained attention that she believes will speak to a diverse audience. Her selections truly are enticing and engaging, ranging from Shakespeare to Wanda Coleman, and including along the way Blake, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke, Jean Toomer, and Joni Mitchell. Some poems are de rigueur, many are unexpected, and all are powerful and rendered piquantly fresh via Paglia's smart, pithy, and relevant interpretations. As Paglia asserts, poetry
- PAGLIA WARNS INTERNET: ONLY ART LASTS, Drudge Report Exclusive, 6, March, 2005
""In our voracious 24-hour news cycles, we're rafting down the roaring river of media. It's exciting and exhilarating, but it's good to remember that SOME things last--and they're in art!""
- Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf - Craig Brown, Telegraph, 28 Feb, 2004
- Wolf/Paglia, Jemima Lewis, Telegraph, 22, February , 2004
- Jackie Danicki, Talking blogs in the City of Angels
"I got a cab back to where I am staying in Park La Brea. Along the way, the driver asked me what I do. “Have you heard of blogs?” I asked. “Of course I’ve heard of blogs!” he replied. “That’s all we hear on the radio all day in our cabs, the conservatives and the liberals are all blogging and it’s all blog-this and blog-that. It’s pretty interesting.”"

Posted by Nick @ 17:25 GMT
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Current Book Club Book

Boris Vian, L’Écome des Jours, 1947, Translated by Stanley Chapman as 'Froth on the Daydream'1967, 1970, 1988

Current Book Club Book on the Back Burner

Herman Melvills's 'Moby Dick

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Previous Book Club Books

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Senhor Jose is an official in a registry office, with a passion for unearthing every detail and reconstructing people's lives from the bare data in the archive documents. One file in particular challenges him: a woman's date and place of birth are missing, and so he begins his research in earnest.

The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results and a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool. In Alan Bennett’s new play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

A panoramic vision of America at the beginning of the 21st century, seen through the turbulent lives of the Lambert family. This novel is a moving family drama and a dissection of American society in an age of greed and globalism.

A collection of poems from a tenderly observant poet who writes about what all of us can understand. The title poem describes the poet's journey by train from Hull to London, using the tones and rhythms of ordinary speech and focusing on the urban landscape of the industrial north.

Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, Persian poet Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alledged crime. He is spared, and thus begins the blend of fact and fiction that is 'Samarkand'.

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves.

A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as

Koestler's story, first published in 1940, of an old-guard communist who falls victim to Stalin's purges, yet attains a personal freedom in his destruction.

This novel opens with the narrator in hospital after a serious car crash in which he killed a doctor's husband. When he leaves hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the doctor. They begin an affair which involves sexual experiments on London motorways.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognizes herself. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past. a love story about people stifled by grief or regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hopes have dried up. It's a journey across landscapes within and without, about the music that sometimes arises from the dust.

Writer Jake Donaghue's adventures in London and Paris include falling in and out of love, kidnapping a canine film star, and trailing a onetime friend.

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker...

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious Third Force. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream.

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