Disaccumulation Briefing No.5

I am getting rid of a slew of cult American novels and beat books: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dice Man, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and A Boys Own Story by Edmund White. I am also disaccumulating The S.E. Hinton anthology which collects That Was Then This Is Now, Rumble Fish and The Outsiders.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow I never got around to, it could be great (no idea). No time now.

Bukowski’s post office has to go – I hate Bukowski – it reminds me of how young and naive I once was. I’m also getting rid of some real stinker Kerouac attempts, such as Pic, Visions of Cody, Satori In Paris, Lonesome Traveller and The Subterraneans – which has a nice cover at least. I’m also getting rid of the Penguin Ann Charters-edited Selected Letters and ‘Jack’s Book’, an oral anthology of Kerouac, also Penguin, who cares?

Similarly, Junky, Ticket That Exploded and Naked Lunch are leaving, I hate Burroughs’ early work, unnecessary, nihilistic. I hate my own youthful and naive interest in it even more. Some related objects are going, a Jack London biography by Alex Kershaw, plus White Fang and Call of the Wild. I’m keeping the east end slum work. Juan The Landless by Juan Goytisolo I consider part of the beat lineage, but I’m keeping his earlier book Count Julian, which is wonderful.

Also going is a bunch of French post WW2 eurofiction, existentialo-stuff, starting with Cendrars’ Confessions of Dan Yack. I’m keeping Dan Yack itself, got rid of some of the others, I love Cendrars’ Profound Today text, it’s a great piece of modernism.

A slew of Camus is going: Happy Death, Exile and Kingdom, The First Man. Sarte’s Age of Reason is also leaving, although I’m keeping Nausea, then there’s a Marquis de Sade anthology with an intro by de Beauvoir, and a book on de Beauvoir called de Beauvoir Today, by Alice Schwarzer. Anais Nin’s Spy In The House of Love and Kafka’s Trial are also going, I just don’t have the time or space.

Three Brits

Three British classics are leaving, Oleander, Jacaranda by Penelope Lively, Scoop by Waugh and John Buchan’s 39 steps. I covered the Lively novel very reluctantly for my English Literature A-Level (A).

Disaccumulation Briefing No.4

Today, I disaccumulated The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. I also got shot of a load of David Lodge novels, Thinks, Therapy, Nice Work, and Scenes From Academic Life (an anthology). I may be keeping Changing Places.

I have a load of ‘Britpulp’, including an anthology called Britpulp! Among these are Tribes by Alexander Stuart, Yardie by Victor Headley, Acid Casuals by Nicholas Blincoe, Rilke on Black by Ken Bruen, Awaydays by Kevin Sampson and Sheepshagger by Niall Griffiths, which was marketed in a Britpulp way but was more literary. Irvine Welsh has to go too, the anthology of Trainspotting, Acid House and Marabou Stork… I find his work disgusting and amoral. You’ll Have Had Your Hole I went to see at Leeds Playhouse and hated it – if he had swapped the male character for a woman it would have been much more active – Welsh assumed his horror of male rape was everyone else’s, not true.

Related – sort of – are a load of Will Self books, Sweet Smell of Psychosis, Junk Mail (journalism) and Scale (an excerpt for the Penguin 60s series). Wasp Factory by Iain Banks must go. Also leaving the shelves is an anthology of the New Gothic with Angela Carter, and Nick Cave’s novel And The Ass Saw The Angel. I’m also shedding and a bunch of Granta anthologies, those charity shop staples…

Gotta go

This cover is so of its time in a way that Pynchon both was and wasn’t. I love Pynchon but I can’t keep him, he did his affective work, re-tooled the subjectivity a little… I got to him after Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stuff though, and so that was much more of an explosion to me, still is in some ways… V and Slow Learner have also gone, but I kept The Crying of Lot 49.

Disaccumulation Briefing No.3

Mailer’s book on Chicago was great, but I have a Mailer anthology. I never got around to Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and I have too much to do, and it is too many centimetres wide for my ‘circumstances’. I’m keeping Bauhaus To Our House though. Black Dahlia by James Ellroy I read, but cannot for the life of me remember why or what I got from it.

I’m getting rid of Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, I also sent Ghosts in the Machine to Barnardo’s. He was a dodgy geezer, a rapist, and his victims included Orwell’s wife.

I just got rid of Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing by Hunter S. Thompson. Frankly, I find the fetish of supposed transgression that these books peddle infantile these days. This stuff seeped into mainstream culture and I don’t think that’s such a good thing now. I do like Roy Harper’s ‘Hell’s Angel’s though, from Flat, Baroque and Beserk.

Jay McInery and Brett Easton Ellis were a shout from their time, they did their work, but aren’t needed on the shelf anymore. Douglas Coupland was and is their heir, but I am only keeping Generation X, Shampoo Planet and Life After God have gone.

Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith is great, a real lesson in how not to be, but not a place I need to revisit.

Disaccumulation Briefing No.2

Here’s a box of mixed-up books that I just dropped off at Barnardo’s: A Fortune Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani is on top, a book which ran on a flimsy conceit, but it got me travelling… to northern Spain, then Andalucia, then Morocco, and in that it did its work, but I can no longer keep it. Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There is the other bit of travel writing from that time, funny, but ubiquitous, like British Castles in some ways, once you’ve seen one… (actually that cliche was never true).

Deeper down is a shelf of American writers. I hedged a bit over getting rid of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, but ultimately I never really got what I was supposed to from this, except the opening, roving, scopic eye of the first few pages – very Martin Jay – I have the same relationship to Invisible Cities by Calvino, I find it opaque, it doesn’t engage me. Gotta go. David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do is great, but once I got the overblown is-it-or-isn’t-it (postmodern) style, I knew I wouldn’t return to it. Falling Man by Don DeLillo I read, but it didn’t move me and I don’t really know why.

Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker were totems for a while, if only because there were some coincidental personal connections to Acker, and specifically to Empire of the Senseless. Charles Shaar Murray, who I interviewed twice and hung out with a bit, was Acker’s partner, before she took herself off to die. Empire of the Senseless is a track by the Acker collaborators The Mekons, and I know lots of people who know The Mekons, indeed I went to a very insidery gig at the New Playhouse in Bradford, where a stripped-down Mekons played.

Next up are some British writers. Amis’s Yellow Dog was funny, but I’m only keeping the masterpiece – Money – I’m chucking Other People, Dead Babies, Einstein’s Monsters – and even London Fields – with its excellent picture of a dartboard, which also went too far in some ways. Money is the only Amis I will ever need. Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia – I count him as sort-of Amis’s generation and milieu – did a lot of work for me, but I don’t need to keep it. The Good Times by James Kelman I never got around too, and don’t think I’ll ever have time, I’m content to keep hold of Greyhound For Breakfast, which I know well-ish.

Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit has resonance for me in as much as the TV series was filmed at one point in Todmorden market, but I don’t need to hold a copy. The Flying Scotsman by Graeme Obree is a tale of obsession and deep depression from the world class cyclist, one I got my dad and he passed on to me. I think of my father cycling up and down the Calder Valley, a very much older generation and gender to Winterson.

Je ne regrette rien about this lot.

Bye bye Balzac

Marx read Balzac, and David Harvey discusses his work, so I had a go at reading him, but found him so turgid… gotta go. This is important though, part of Balzac’s human Comedy, it re-introduced characters from earlier works. Old Goriot is set during the Bourbon Restoration, which changed French social structures, and the book illuminates the struggle for status and class (sound familiar?). No wonder Marx and Harvey are interested.

The ‘stamp’

My books have these in them, and when they go to the chazzer they get a big ‘Ex Libris’ stamp on them. A friend once described this as ‘prissy’, but it works for me, especially with lending out, and I stamp them when they’ve been read the whole way through, with a big ‘R’.

Big Barnardo trip No.2

Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten, Austen Schmausten.

Bronte to the big Barnardo

I have just been reading Raymond Williams on the Bronte sisters and this period of mid-Victorian literature, he’s brilliant, it’s all that structures of feeling stuff, and I’ve been running through my mind trying to locate how a novel might be written about now, in terms of how the social is changing, opening out and liberating, at the same time as it undermines and erodes. Actually, it may not be a novel at all, which is needed to communicate this in 2013.

I finally visited the Bronte Parsonage with my partner and her kids, despite living very near to it all my life. Predictably, it was over-priced and photography was excessively policed by the Bronte Industry Volunteer Militia. It was interesting to find out that Mr. Patrick Brunty changed his name to the Eurified, more sophisticated sounding Bronte…

Can’t keep one of these on the shelf though, it’s too obvious, there’s not enough space. Same goes for Austen (see above). Nice cover though.