Salman Rushdie

[Mark Kohut]

What a reader you are, Becky. Bravo, i do not know how you do it, have
done it. FW too? took me two years to read Proust!

just a PS on your thread for whatthehellness. As I remember it, NAKED
& THE DEAD is not as viscerally graphic as many other war
novels...maybe because of when it was published--Mailer famously
accepted the publishers' judgment to substitute 'fug' for "fuck' as
soldiers' lingo....about which I think it was Tallulah  Bankhead,
"noted libertine' who said upon meeting Norman, 'so you are the writer
who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck'?...and 4-5 decades later, a
colleague of mine, reading N &D for the first time
could not believe the 'fig and as we were republishing the new
paperback edition he decided to write Stormin' Norman and suggest that
NOW was the time to publish the fuck into it....and got a response
thru his agent that the book had existed so long the way it was, he
had decided (surely long ago) to let it be...

There is an incredibly visceral scene of the soldiers wrestling a
cannon up a muddy mountain in rain and whatever....this scene is as
good as any of the best pure physical "adventure' writing out there, i
suggest----like the FIRST whaling attack in Moby Dick---both of these
without their overarching philosophical symbolic meanings, one might
say and of which N & D rises above by its attempt to capture the
characterological strains of America with a loose allegory of Military
types as Leaders as in business and society...the Authoritarian, the
Command and Control mentality, our varying soldiers as citizens who
need to find an attitude to it, etc. Command and Control, end of
national unity for a cause (except money)  growing and soon to
permeate the US and much more.

But Becky and Keith, consider reading Mailer's short novel,
written-at-lightning speed, called Why Are We in Vietnam? A hunting
trip in Texas is the story (see Faulkner's The Bear as influence).
Always a minor fave.

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> These are all books which deserve a second or third reading as much as M&D.  Gatsby's short and easy to read but there is a huge amount of symbolism and double-back meaning (when the meaning of something you read at the end of the book turns out to have been clarified at the beginning so when you read it the second time you go "aha!" and "omg!").
>
> Finnegans Wake took me many months to finish - I think 9.  But I only read about a couple or three pages a day - I read until I could make sense of something and then I put it down, spine broken, passage marked.  I'd  pick it up a bit later in that day or the next and read another few lines or paragraphs.  It worked.  I got into the idea that if there is a stream of consciousness,  then this one was a stream of unconsciousness (dream state reality).   I read it more or less meditatively.  This needs many readings to make real sense of.
>
> Smilla's Sense of Snow was fun -
>
> Early DeLillo is the best -
>
> Capote writes very, very well.
>
> The Orphan Master is intelligent and strange but not nearly as dense as the others on your list.  It got me reading about North Korea in a more serious way, though.  "Nothing to Envy" is intense.
>
> I've never read The Naked and the Dead - I'm sure it's a wonderful book as far as literary value goes but I don't think I'd like it because of the graphic war stuff.
>
> Bekah
>
>
>> On Jan 11, 2015, at 5:48 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Satanic Verses is another of those books I had yet to read. So glad I did! Next is Gatsby. (I know, almost shameful). I'm determined to get to Finnegan's Wake this year, too.
>>
>> When the Mad Duck thing came up, I was resistant, cuz I have these huge stacks of unread books, great books(!), including lots of Faulkner, Smilla's Snow, Delillo, Capote, Orphan Master, Naked and Dead, (and I've already read M&D twice), but after about two pages, I was marveling yet again at the wizardry of our resident anti-saint, Mr. P.
>>
>> Quack on...
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 8:33 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I used to see him waiting for publishing folks on the ground floor of
>> the Flatiron Building where I worked. He was without Secret Service
>> but not yet "out". Then, years later when he was touring on his own
>> again, he filled the 4th floor upstairs of the Union Square B &N...(he
>> phoned this talk in that night, I have to say)..I watched the
>> autograph line for awhile, it was dwindling down...and I moseyed down
>> those three long, long escalators and walked outside, turned right and
>> almost bumped into him catching up with Pashma (?) on the sidewalk.,
>> just another couple in Union Square. Like a time-slip, strange,  but
>> he had obviously come down a service elevator and come out a back
>> door. it was not long before they parted as a couple.
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 8:25 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Funny, my brother says his favorite is Shalimar. I'm looking forward to all of it.
>> >
>> > Happy New Year to all. I'm fortunate to be associated with a crew as sick as ya'll!
>> > (Yes, I said ya'll. At least I didn't say "all a ya'll ").
>> >
>> > Love always,
>> >
>> > Bob
>> >
>> >
>> > Www.innergroovemusic.com
>> >
>> >> On Jan 11, 2015, at 6:30 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Omg - yes!  Imo,  that's his best best work.  "Midnight's Children" is close,  but it's kind of harder in ways.  That said,  it won the Man Booker (1981),  the Booker of Bookers (1993), and the Best of the Bookers (2008).
>> >>
>> >> The Moor's Last Sigh" was good,  but "Fury," "Shame," and "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," were stupid. "Shalimar the Clown" was okay.  I rather enjoyed "The Enchantress of Florence," although I am likely a minority.  Never read Grimus - the only novel by Rushdie I haven't read.  His biography is pretty interesting although in places it sounds like a tribute to those who helped him in the fatwa and a trashing of those who didn't.
>> >>
>> >> Bek
>> >> babbling
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>> On Jan 11, 2015, at 2:58 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Just finished reading The Satanic Verses. What a killer book! ;-) Look forward to more Rushdie.
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> Www.innergroovemusic.com-
>> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> >>
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> www.innergroovemusic.com
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l