jazzy_dave | Entries tagged with book

Julie Otsuka "The Buddha in the Attic" (Anchor)

Otsuka's beautifully written, heart-wrenching novel is written as a first-person everywoman memoir of Japanese mail-order "picture brides" brought to San Francisco in the early twentieth century to work alongside their labouring husbands. For most, it was a joyless life of hard labour and disappointment. Otsuka follows them up until World War II when their lives or the lives of their children and grandchildren were disrupted with sudden removal to internment camps for the duration of the war:

"There were six brothers from a strawberry ranch in Dominguez who left wearing cowboy boots so they wouldn't get bitten by snakes. . . . There were children who left thinking they were going camping. There were children who left thinking they were going hiking, or to the circus, or swimming for the day at the beach. There was a boy on roller skates who did not care where it was he was going as long as there were paved streets." The final chapter is written in the first person of someone who watched her Japanese neighbours herded away: "We began to receive reports of lights left on in some of the Japanese houses, and animals in distress. A listless canary glimpsed through the Fujimoto's' front window. Dying koi in a pond over at the Yamaguchi'. And everywhere the dogs. . . . Last loads of laundry still cling to the line. In one of their kitchens---Emi Saito's---a black telephone rings and rings. . . . Morning glories begin to grow wild in their gardens. . . . A lemon tree is dug up over at the Sawada's'. Locks are jimmied off of front and back doors. Cars are stripped." Otsuka has begun with stories of hardship and dashed hope and ends with quiet, emotion-charged intimate details of one of America's most shameful episodes.

A difficult and painful read.

Current Mood: calm
Crossposts: https://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/4495621.html

Jack Kerouac "Pomes All Sizes" (City Lights Publishers)

An interesting collection of poems from Kerouac covering a ten year period that shows the various periods of his life through travel and differing inspirations. Kerouac was also a traveler, so this collection comes from various places throughout those years, wherever he happened to be at the time.

The topics covered include God, Buddha, the blues, wine, drugs, Beat friends, and thoughts of the moment. Kerouac's style is very in the moment, often not even letting spelling and punctuation get in the way of the thought trying to reach the page.

He remains such a powerful influence, and this book is an excellent collection of his work.

Current Mood: mellow
Crossposts: https://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/3620475.html

Nigel Slater "Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger" (Fourth Estate)

An autobiography told through food. Dinners cooked well, cooked awfully, cooked with or without love. Sweets. Just about anything that you can put into your mouth.

This book has a great balance between the delicious and the disgusting, both described very plasticly. The description of eating spaghetti for the first time is hilarious. It also has a great balance between the very personal, almost ideosynchratic, and the culture this is grounded in. I also found it really touching at times.

Nostalgia all the way. Not a sentimentalised vision of the past, but a slice of hard cold reality served with a dressing of wit.

I would recommend it to any foodie lover.

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: https://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/3178128.html

Anita Brookner -"Incidents In The Rue Laugier" (Penguin)

This is a fine beautifully written novella. She weaves wonderfully between the perceptions of self versus how we are perceived and the gaps and the traps that exist on both levels. She shows, again in this book, that there are no straight lines in life. One can have a vision and determination, but always along the way there will be circumstances and decisions and new channels in personal relationships, beliefs, attitudes, ways of living that could not have been foreseen or fixed.

ncidents in the Rue Laugier involves family conflicts and class differences, a doomed love affair, and a marriage that ultimately was, in its own crabbed way, successful. But Anita Brookner presents more than an interesting story – she examines the nature of marriage and the struggle to build a joint life using limited individual resources.

I love the way she creates the sense of missed opportunities because of misunderstanding and miscommunication, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, but all building the walls that separate, that define a life, and become too high to scale, or become so much of the fabric of life and perception that they are not even seen as walls.

A book of quiet reflections on life.

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: https://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/3165967.html

Terry Southern "Now Dig This : The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995" (Grove Press)

Terry's wild, salacious humor fully present here, in a miscellany of forms, but also, sadly, this collection somewhat chronicles his decline into a Capote-like self parody once his era was gone. Still, Terry Southern on his worst day could write (and talk--several of the pieces in this collection are hilarious interviews)in a way most writers can only dream about.

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: http://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/2195219.html

John Peel " Margrave of the Marshes" (Bantam hardback)

I starters this book at the beginning of last year and the reason for the slow read is that i had often read a chapter and moved onto a new book in the meantime, and many chapters i re-read as much of the book was very enjoyable.

Cant say i am surprised by the varied and interesting life Peel lead. The public's reaction to his death said much about the affection this man enjoyed in his career and rightly so, in such a negative world his positivity in his field was clear, even if you weren't really into music. Definitely preferred Peels half of this book to the latter half mind. I have always enjoyed the existence of people who put your own ability into perspective. I've always fancied myself as a music buff but in comparison to this man you realise how blinkered you are. How a man can keep his passion up for the business and move with the times like he did amazes me. Hats off to John and his book.

Current Mood: satisfied
Crossposts: http://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/2026224.html

Immanuel Kant "Critique Of Pure Reason" (Penguin Modern Classics)

To call Kant "dense" is an understatement on par with saying the same about the core of a neutron star. Kant's critiques are not easy going, but the bright side is that his description of the human condition, an attempt to restore science and knowledge in a world transformed by Newton and Hume, is worth the effort.

The Critique of Pure Reason is a watershed in Western philosophy, rightly likened to Kant's own description of a "Copernican revolution" in thought. The book is Kant's groundwork for knowledge itself: the nature of space and time and logic as preconditions for knowledge, shared among all humans, at the cost of sacrificing metaphysics to the transcendental realm of the "unconditioned". In exchange, we restore free will, morality, and (for those so inclined) God to the world of human existence.

Kant is very much the "lawyer" and the detail-man, and his almost obsessive need to sort human nature into a concrete taxonomy is perhaps the weakest part of the work. Still, Kant's division into the phenomenal and the noumenal, the human and the unconditioned, remains foundational, and to understand Kant's argument here is to understand everything that comes after in the Continental tradition. Even if you disagree with Kant's conclusions, there is a wealth of thought to draw upon, from Kant's conception of human existence to his ideas on "things in themselves", morality, and freedom.

The Critiques are a chore, took a good half a year to read it through, occasionally leaving it for awhile before slogging through again, but the kind of chore that pays off dividends.

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: http://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/1921422.html

Emile Zola "Therese Raquin" (Oxford World Classics))

Therese Raquin is a harrowing story of lust, murder, terror, and madness.

A French officer brings his black-haired love child, the daughter of his North African mistress, to his sister in France, a Mme Raquin. He returns to Africa where he is soon reported killed. Mme Raquin, a widow, is only too happy to raise her orphaned niece as a companion to her sickly son Camille. Young Thérèse, full of healthful vitality, is forced to endure the claustrophobic life of her sick cousin. Seeing nothing of the world, she becomes a silent introvert, suppressing her natural desires. When she reaches adulthood, Thérèse apathetically complies when Mme Raquin insists that she marry Camille so she can continue to be his caretaker.

Thérèse gradually comes to loathe her banal, sickly husband, but continues to repress her feelings and desires. This comes to an end when she meets Laurent, Camille's virile, self-indulgent friend. The two begin a passionate affair behind the backs of the unsuspecting mother and husband. When circumstances make it impossible for them to continue their clandestine meetings, sexual frustration drives them to plot to murder Camille so they can eventually marry. The plot is successful, but each is tormented by the fear of detection, and instead of the bliss they expected, their lives become a living hell.

The novel created a sensation when it was first published in 1867, for its violence, its sexual candor, and most of all for its amorality. This is a tale devoid of religious content or social message. Zola's defended his novel, saying his purpose was "to study temperament, not character." He contrasts the sanguine nature of Laurent with the nervous constitution of Thérèse, and treats their romance and its tragic end as something as inevitable as a chemical reaction. Zola's psychological analysis may seem primitive and simplistic, but it was a bold venture for its time. The characters and their mental states are always believable even though modern psychologists would explain them in more sophisticated terms.

Zola's preface describes the book in quasi-scientific terms, as a scientific observation that takes an inevitable course that he did not decide. He places himself at odds with the romantics, but the novel itself shares many of the same dramas and conventions , and is thus considerably more interesting than the naturalistic description it claims to be.

Therese Raquin has none of the social criticism for which his later novels were famous for but it convey a sense of the lives, institutions, and surroundings of mid-19th century Paris. It is an intense and memorable novel, highly recommended.

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: http://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/1267239.html

The books i bought at the quaintly lopsided edifice of Book Place Canterbury are paperbacks ; one on art , the other on philosophy.

The painters book is an old Fontana paperback from 1962 and cheap at fifty pence.

Whilst in Canterbury i visited the West Gate Inn pub to half another Sixpoint Bengali Tiger ale.

The river Stour as seen from the High Street. I like the reflection in the water.

I then caught the bus to Ashford to do my cinema visit. The bus was late leaving Canterbury and it arrived in Ashford half an hour later than it should.It visits Wye on the way down which has a rail station manned by a signalman as the barriers there are not automatic - so he has to pen and shut the gates before a train goes through. Consequently, as the village lies on one side of the railway line the bus has to go into the village and out again the way it came in. The us got caught both ways waiting for trains to either alight at the station or pass through.

The film i saw was the new Wes Andesron film "The Grand Budapest Hotel", with a host of stars and is based on the writings of Stefan Zweig. The plot of the film ,nabbed from Wikipedia, is under the cut for those who want to read it.

( Read more... )

The owner's story begins in 1932 during the final years of the hotel's glory days, when he worked as a lobby boy. Zubrowka is on the verge of war but this of little concern to Gustave, the Grand Budapest's devoted concierge. When he is not attending to the needs of the hotel's wealthy clientele or managing its staff, Gustave courts a series of aging, blonde women who flock to the hotel to enjoy his "exceptional service." One of the ladies is Madame D, and Gustave spends the night with her prior to her departure.

A few days later, he is informed that Madame D has died under mysterious circumstances. He races to her wake and the reading of the will, where he learns that she bequeathed him Boy With Apple, a valuable painting, in her will. This enrages her family, all of whom hoped to inherit it. Her son, Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis, lashes out at Gustave. With the help of Zero, Gustave takes the painting and returns to the Grand Budapest, securing the painting in the hotel's safe. During the journey, Gustave makes a pact with Zero - in return for the latter's help, he makes Zero his heir. Gustave is shortly after arrested and imprisoned for the murder of Madame D.

Zero aids Gustave in escaping from Zubrowka's maximum security prison by sending a series stoneworking tools concealed inside cakes. Along with a group of hardened cons, Gustave digs his way out of his cell. They part ways and Gustave teams up with Zero to prove his innocence. Their adventure takes them to a mountaintop monastery where they meet with Serge X, the only person who can provide Gustav with an alibi for the night of Madame D's murder. They are pursued by J.G. Jopling, a cold-blooded assassin who manages to kill Serge. Zero and Gustave steal a sled and chase Jopling as he flees the monastery on skis. During a face-off at the edge of a cliff, Zero pushes the assassin to his death and rescues his mentor.

Back at the Grand Budapest, the military have commandeered the hotel and are in the process of converting it into a barracks. The outbreak of war is now imminent. A heartbroken Gustave vows to never again pass the threshold. They are joined by Agatha, Zero's love interest. She agrees to go inside to retrieve the painting but is discovered by Dmitri. A chase and a gunfight ensue before Gustave's innocence is finally proven via a confessional letter, penned by Serge, that was hidden in the painting's frame. It contains the latest version of Madame D's will which reveals that she was the mysterious owner of the Grand Budapest. She leaves much of her fortune, the hotel and the painting to Gustave, making him fabulously wealthy in the process. He becomes one of the hotel's regular guests.

During a train journey across the border, enemy soldiers inspect Gustave and Zero's papers. Narrating the story, Zero describes Gustave being taken out and shot. As his heir, Zero inherits the fortune Gustave leaves behind. Zero vows to continue his legacy at the Grand Budapest but the ongoing conflict and the ravages of time slowly begin to take their toll. Agatha succumbs to a disease and dies a few years later.

An aging and devastated Zero confesses to the Author that he cannot bring himself to close the hotel because it is his last link to his dearly departed wife and the best years of his life. The Author later departs for South America and never returns to the hotel, leaving both it and Zero's ultimate fate unknown. Back in the present, the girl finishes reading the chapter about the Grand Budapest and leaves the courtyard.

It was a very good film, highly stylized , and will probably need watching again ,It was not as funny as i hoped despite being billed as a comedy drama. If you like the Royal Tenebaums you should enjoy this.

I arrived back in Teyhnam fifteen minutes before midnight. I was quite tired as well.

The final part of this post will deal with the jazz CD's i bought in Faversham.

The other book on Doctor Who arrived in the post this morning, JohnTulloch and Manuel Alvarado's “Doctor Who,The Unfolding Text” (Macmillan). .This book from 1983 is one of the earliest critical analysis ,in a sociological context ,of the TV programme, and was part of the Communication And Culture series edited by Stuart Hall. It will complement the philosophical tome.

Tomorrow receiving a large package form my brother. I don't know as yet exactly what it is but he did say that “There is one major item that I think .. [ I ] .. will like a lot! “

Current Mood: cheerful

Douglas R. Hofstadter "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (Penguin)

Fascinating book. The book is centred around recursive auto references; those generates twisted hierarchies, which, according to the author, can explain much about Intelligence, Consciousness, DNA, symbols and meaning. The book spans over Zen and Zenone, Bach and Cage, Escher and Magritte, Gödel and Turing, Cantor and Russell; I loved every-single page. Hofstadter investigates all these aspects (and more even) at very different levels. The auto-references allow him to jump up and down, and move in stimulating vortexes, culminating, right before a Ricercar in 6 voices, in a digression about free will, life and death at various levels.

He takes up many topics that very loosely related, including music, artificial intelligence, genetics, etc. Also, each "serous" chapter is prefaced by an amusing dialogue between Achilles and a Tortoise (from Zeno's "paradoxes') and other droll characters.

In fact this book can have a profound impact on the way a person thinks. It so cleverly challenges ideas and exposes the reader in a very manageable way to various ideas. Though it is not "light reading," I really delighted in the experience of it, realizing what he was doing as I was reading. I wholeheartedly recommend this book!

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: http://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/880151.html

Just finished reading this classic SF novel, which became a really good film version directed by Francois Truffaut

Ray Bradbury writes in his introduction that it took him just nine days to complete this book in the basement of the U.C.L.A. library, on a rented typewriter. "Fahrenheit 451" was first published in 1953 as featured in Hugh Hefner’s "Playboy" magazine after being rejected by every book publisher Bradbury approached. It later became a best selling novel and now carries the reputation of being a classic.

"Fahrenheit 451" is a futuristic dystopia novel. In some unnamed city during an undisclosed time, life as we know it no longer exists. The government uses mind control to insure everyone is always in a happy peaceful frame of mind. Guy Montag is a fireman, though his job is not to put out fires. Like every other fireman in the country, his job is to start fires. Reading is prohibited and every time a citizen is suspected of concealing books, the fire alarm blares and the firemen rush to the site and burn the house down. The resident family is then imprisoned. Bradbury originally titled the book "The Fireman" but changed the title to "Fahrenheit 451" because that is the temperature at which paper catches fire.

The opening line of the book is “It was a pleasure to burn.” Guy loves his job, and while he is busy putting out fires every day, his wife Mildred is at home, pacified by government provided entertainment. The government brainwashing tactics are clever and the futuristic life style Bradbury imagines is astonishingly intuitive considering home computers did not become available until the 1970’s and the idea of virtual reality was generally unheard of until much later. Entire walls in the Montag house were constructed of computerized screens where Mildred interacted with televised characters. And when she wasn’t tuned in to her “computer family” she wore a headset that provided background music to prevent her from thinking. Thinking was considered to be a very dangerous pastime.

Everything was going just fine until Guy has a chance encounter with a very unusual little girl who has some strange ideas. As a result, Guy begins having an occasional thought or two of his own.

This is a very entertaining book, that simply ended too soon. A sweet 158 page novel with a story that may not be far-fetched from the life our planet’s increasing population and simultaneous shrinking resources could lead us to in the future.

Current Mood: accomplished

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Book 75 - Julie Otsuka "The Buddha in the Attic"
Book 33 - Jack Kerouac "Pomes All Sizes"
Book 35 - Nigel Slater "Toast"
Book 33 - Anita Brookner "Incidents In The Rue Laugier"
Book 47 - Terry Southern "Now Dig This"
Book 14- John Peel " Margrave of the Marshes"
Book 71 - Immanuel Kant "Critique Of Pure Reason"
Book 45 - Emile Zola "Therese Raquin"
Yesterday's Visits Part 2
A Surprise Package
Book 66 - Douglas R. Hofstadter "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"
Book 8 - Ray Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451"

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Entries tagged with book

Book 75 - Julie Otsuka "The Buddha in the Attic"

Book 33 - Jack Kerouac "Pomes All Sizes"

Book 35 - Nigel Slater "Toast"

Book 33 - Anita Brookner "Incidents In The Rue Laugier"

Book 47 - Terry Southern "Now Dig This"

Book 14- John Peel " Margrave of the Marshes"

Book 71 - Immanuel Kant "Critique Of Pure Reason"

Book 45 - Emile Zola "Therese Raquin"

Yesterday's Visits Part 2

A Surprise Package

Book 66 - Douglas R. Hofstadter "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"

Book 8 - Ray Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451"