Picked up any good reads at the bookstore?

[mids]

I don't finish books all the time. Bollocks to forcing yourself to read something you're not enjoying. I'm now reading Hard Girls by Martina Cole. It's not very good. I think it might have been ghost-written by Peggy Butcher.

[Repat Van]

I don't know, it's like leaving food on your plate, it's just not the done thing...

even if I leave it momentarily (like with the utter shoite - The Human Stain) I will go back to it to finish. I must, I just MUST. I'm a bit OCD like that. Although I did manage to not finish Fight Club and wished I had dropped 'City of God' instead of wasting two weeks of my life.

That is potentially the first book, I have ever read, where I think the film is better.

[lala]

I've added James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia to my long list of Books In Progress. I'm a big fan of Ellroy, though more of his more recent thrillers (American Tabloid and the Cold Six Thousand) than his rather contrived murder tales. The Dahlia is one of the latter, but Ellroy is always a good 'un for dialogue, pace and atmosphere.

I watched the Brian De Palma adaptation of The Black Dahlia last week. Awful, awful film, but it made me want to read the book, to expunge the memory of the film.

[lala]

This thread would appear to be the best place to note the passing of Frank Kermode, literary critic and scholar.

[feral]

Aug 19, 2010 10:01:41 GMT Repat Van said:

I don't know, it's like leaving food on your plate, it's just not the done thing...

even if I leave it momentarily (like with the utter shoite - The Human Stain) I will go back to it to finish. I must, I just MUST. I'm a bit OCD like that. Although I did manage to not finish Fight Club and wished I had dropped 'City of God' instead of wasting two weeks of my life.

That is potentially the first book, I have ever read, where I think the film is better.

You're going to hate this, Van, but it's another similarity we share. I cannot leave a book unread even if it's utter shite. I have no idea why other than that it just doesn't feel correct.
There is just one that I bravely forced myself to chuck in the bin after only having read a chapter or two . Something by Salmon Rushdie . I think it was " The Moor's last sigh" but I wouldn't swear to it .
I still feel slightly guilty about it -plus there's that niggle : maybe it would have got better further on if I'd just stuck with it . Now I'll never know

[Repat Van]

Go away Feral, just GO AWAY!

Although yes I have the same niggle which is what forced me to finish 'Catcher in the Rye'.

I should have ignored the niggle.

[lala]

I'm also pretty compulsive when it comes to finishing books. I think you have to read the book to the bitter end, so you can loathe and hate it fully. Quitting halfway might be suggest (to whom I know not) the fault was my lack of sticking power, rather than the book being rubbish.

[Marshall]

I just quit on a book after about 20 pages: VLAS by Philip K. Dick (who I usually like).

[lala]

Bah. See? No sticking power. It was the best book ever written after page 21.

[Marshall]

lol, not unless he abrubtly changed the style he was writing in.
I made it to the end of The Idiot, so I have at least some sticking power.

[lala]

LINE 26: On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean.

[/b]Lines are one of Conrad's preoccupations. One of his later books was to be called The Shadowline. It's rather good, and much shorter than Nostromo.

In this case, 'crossing the imaginary line' indicates moving into a slightly different world, where the rules and conventions of Europe do not apply. We're transitioning from a rational, civilized, real protestant word into something more nebulous - the fictional world of Costaguana.

Of course, it would be wrong to think that this is a binary opposition, where Europe is one and Coastaguana the other - it is more a case of concealment and actuality. One of Conrad's abiding fascinations is how civilization is a veneer applied to man's savage, true nature. This is explored in Heart of Darkness, where 'civilised' Europe is exposed as being no different from 'savage' Congo. But it also applies to Costaguana, where real motives often differ from stated goals - Decoud's conversion to patriotism in order to woo Antonia being a benign example.

[lala]

Having made off with Frank Kermode yesterday, the Grim Reaper bags Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, today.

Morgan, who was born in Glasgow in 1920, was recognised internationally as one of the great poets of the 20th century and his fame grew largest late in life. Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, in 2004 he was appointed "Scots Makar", in effect Scotland's poet laureate, with his poetry widely taught in Scotland's schools.

He passed away at his care home in Glasgow, after a bout of pneumonia, but he had been battling prostate cancer since 1999. When he was diagnosed, his doctor told him he could live six months, or six years. Famously, he replied: "I will take the six years, thank you".

Morgan lived another decade, and went on to write Gorgon and Beau, a poem about the disease and the battle between healthy and cancerous cells.

thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/39Edwin-Morgan-was-poetry39s-true.6485109.jp

[lala]

LINE 27: They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes.

This line seems straightforward enough, describing the curious becalming of sailing ships that cross the invisible line marking the entrance to the Golfo Placido. There's slightly more to it than that, however. Lines, as I said, seem to hold a fascination for Conrad. They appear to mark not only geographical boundaries, but boundaries between the physical and metaphysical worlds. In the aforementioned The Shadow Line, the crew of the ship are terrified by the phantom of a former captain, who is thought to be lurking to revenge himself on them. Lines may be seen as fault lines between this world and the next, where physical laws are blurred and confounded, and strange influences may play upon a man's mind and soul.

(Curiously, Conrad denies such an interpretation, saying, of supernatural element of The Shadow Line, "The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is." Yet his books are richly populated with ghosts, spirits and phantoms. We've already met the ghosts of the gringos in Nostromo, the Shadow Line contains a spook, and Under Western Eyes has a cameo by the ghost of the terrorist Haldin.)

Rejecting Conrad's rejection - what would he know about the books he wrote? - we can see this line foreshadows later events. All the main characters will experience the weirding effect of this fissure between the real word and the other, two in particular meeting their fate in the mysterious, spirit plagued shadow realm of the Golfo Placido.

Yes, I am wondering if I should be submitting this as a thesis.

[Repat Van]

And whaddya know. 'Cry, The Beloved Country, has suddenly improved. Seems like sometimes listening to the niggle is for the best...

[Muz]

approved?

[Muz]

"Yes, I am wondering if I should be submitting this as a thesis."

Nah, just carry on posting them and I'll nick em.

[lala]

You'd be laughed at and the good people of Swindon would throw sticks and turds at you, for being such a pretentious shite.

[Muz]

What good people of Swindon?

[lala]

LINE 28: Before them the head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless and opaque clouds.

This paragraph introduces subtly menacing language. Though he gulf is 'calm' the 'great body' of could is 'opaque.' Though not ominous in its self, this idea will be developed over the next few lines, creating a subtle sense of unease.

Motives and ideas which are clear cut and simple in the West will become opaque in Costaguana, once the traveller crosses "imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera" - perhaps we could expand this idea further and suggest that the Conrad's use of the words 'imaginary line' isn't just intended to signify that the line is imaginary (talk about stating the bleedin' obvious), but that it marks the move from the real, objective world (at least as it is seen by the denizens of that world) into to the intensely subjective and weird (in every sense) world of Costaguana.

The fate of the protagonists - whether the practical Nostromo, the cynical Decoud or idealistic Gould (all of whom are outsiders who must cross that 'imaginary line') will be to lose their way in the opaque mists.

it is also reminiscent of the final lines of Heart of Darkness:

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky-- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

Conrad mentions the cloud blocking the head of the gulf again, and refers to the 'imaginary line' on the Punta Mala-Azuera axis in the very final line of Nostromo, as if, after a five hundred or so page sojourn, we are finally exiting the realm, crossing the line once more, to return to more familiar waters.

[lala]

LINES 29-37 : On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow. Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the mountains, the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to seaward and vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank always strives for, but seldom wins, the middle of the gulf. The sun -- as the sailors say -- is eating it up.

I must confess I have been very negligent and I have not been keeping up with our serial. To help catch up, e'll take a big bite out of the remainder of the first chapter. I'm sure you're all desperately eager. I suspect some of you little sneaks may even have been peeking ahead at chapter two.

it is worth looking at these lines altogether as they contain a unifying motif - the struggle between darkness and light. Day and night serve a symbolic function in the novel, and that is hinted at here. the opening sentences of this extract are replete with the sort of ominous language I mentioned when we looked at line 28 - how long ago that seems! There are 'shadows' and 'darkness,' evil sounding 'black vapours,' that are dispelled by the sun in what is portrayed as a literal struggle, with the dark clouds trying to storm the gulf, only to be defeated by the rays of the sun.

It's interesting that Conrad associates the clouds and the darkness with the land, while the sun is placed in the position of dispelling the roiling clouds that menace the gulf.

This suggests Sulaco and the gulf must lie on the western seaboard of South or Central America, as the sun is described rising above the Cordillera, the great mountain range that effectively cuts Costaguana in two, and seperates Sulaco and the Occidental province from the berserk lunacies of the interior.

But it might also reflect the instinctive prejudices of a life long mariner for terra firma. Nostromo himself, as we'll learn, was a seaman who made the calamitous decision to try his luck on land.

As Captain Mitchell might remark, that turned out to a fatality.