imomus: (Default)
[personal profile] imomus
"Juvenilia" is a term applied to literary or artistic works produced by authors in their youth. Since I've recently returned to fiction after a long time writing my stories in song form, I thought it might be interesting to delve back to the teenage me, who wanted, almost religiously, to be a writer. Under the picture (lots of orange to offset the green) you'll find a podcast, a curiosity discovered in the New York boxes I've been rummaging through recently: a tape of the 19 year-old me reading his short stories and poems.



Juvenilia (stereo mp3 file, 28.3 MB, 30mins 54secs)

They're not very well read, I'm afraid. I'm really rushing at the end because the tape is running out. And what a weird accent I had back then! Sort of Scottish Cockney. As for the fiction, it's Scottish Gothic in style; Kafka meets James Hogg, with secondary splashes of Pittura Metafisica. Giorgio de Chirico actually wrote some short stories, which I remember being very impressed by. I've always liked writing by painters better than writing by writers. If a writer has a sideline or background in drawing -- Günter Grass, Alasdair Gray -- I like their work, as a rule of thumb. I also love, say, Klee's poems, or that weird expressionist play Kokoshka put on. What was it called? Oh yes, Murderer, Hope of Women.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 12:33 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Not related to today's post, but you might be interested in this recent post over at sexpigeon.org, which is in a similar vein to you book of jokes: http://www.sexpigeon.org/slappers/?p=643

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 12:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
Ha, I must stop inventing these genres! At least the internet datestamps everything. It's quite a nice implementation, though.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 12:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
Clumsy use of tenses here, though:

"When the black guy gets to where he’s going, he robs the cab driver at gunpoint. The cab driver, also Ethopian, was dismayed. Normally he doesn’t pick up blacks, but this guy was Ethiopian."

Also, why is a male blond called a "blonde" throughout?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 01:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com
another interesting writer/draughtsman would be pierre klossowski, older brother of balthus (some of whose paintings i found fascinating for a little while).

alfred kubin wrote a remarkable surrealist novel.

after the sixties, most of günter grass' writings seem to have become as awful as his drawings and sculpture.

kafka did some doodles on his manuscripts that suggest he maybe could have been a decent draughtsman, too.

but one of the greatest drawing and writing minds has been george herriman, and he, of course, did both at the same time.

(somewhere i read that gertrude stein, after picasso read her some of his poems, told him, "pablo, go painting". they were both big fans of herriman, by the way)

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 01:26 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
To my ears, your accent doesn't sound so different to what it is now. Nor the writing, for that matter (although you did rather overdo the faux-formal back then, but so do all teenage novelist wannabes).

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 01:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com
I've always liked writing by painters better than writing by writers.

a bit of an odd predilection - i hope you like your own writing well enough despite of it.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 04:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com

Ah, George Herriman! You must listen to this BBC Radio 4 profile of him (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ram/thu1130.ram). The only compaint I'd make about it -- apart from the fact that radio has no pictures, and you really need them in this case -- is that they really advance the thesis of a book called "High and Low" but don't cite it!

mike

Date: 2007-09-02 04:31 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
>If a writer has a sideline or background in drawing -- Günter Grass, Alasdair Gray -- I like their work, as a rule of thumb.

Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller ...

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 04:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vertigoranger.livejournal.com
What's your opinion of the work of Mervyn Peake, an illustrator and writer?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 05:11 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cap-scaleman.livejournal.com
What do you think of authors like Don Delillo? I personally regard him as a bit boring, actually.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 05:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
Actually I've never read Peake. When I was living in Paris with Shazna she went through a Peake phase and started calling me Gollum, though!

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 05:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
My impression of Delillo -- without having read him! -- is that his work is characterized by something I don't like, which is what I call "logistical machismo". In other words, he has that ultra-masculine, typically American tone of "Let's take a long hard look at how the world really works, which might involve conspiracies that only a clique of insiders really know about..."

In other words, it's an unpleasant mixture of fantasy and hardboiled realism, with the fantasy in what I would see as the wrong place.

This is, though, pure prejudice. (Also he should change his name from "Don + Italian Surname", cos it sounds like he's in the mafia.)

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 05:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
I'm now having a nightmare imagining all my favourite Italian writers having emigrated to the US, written hardboiled-fantasy bestsellers, and changed their name to Don. Don Pavese ("Amongst Guys Only", "The Moon and the Contract"), Don Calvino ("If on a Winter's Night a President...", "Invincible Cities")...

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 05:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cap-scaleman.livejournal.com
Oh, you haven't heard about Hysterical Realism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism)? Don Delillo is considered an author of Hysterical Realism fiction, but when I read Mao II I found his writing very minimal, very little emotions. Ain't that a problem among Post-Modernist writers? Or maybe it was the minimalists fault that we see too little emotion in certain books?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 05:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
I hadn't heard the term, but the combination of the journalistic-logistic and the fantastical-mythical seems to get right to the core of "the problem of America today" -- what happens when a super-pragmatic mindset turns super-paranoid?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 06:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cap-scaleman.livejournal.com
It duplicates and write a book based on conspiracy theories recieved by Playboy in the 60's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus%21_Trilogy).


(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 06:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com
i just listened in a few minutes so far, but that seems to be a decent feature, will continue. actually, i don't mind the missing pictures so much, since i have all the books of the new, very well made herriman edition from fantagraphics, and i hope the feature gets some listeners to buy a book or look at the pictures on the web, anyway, in a place where you can really read the comics, and not just get the short glimpse a documentary film would grant you.
i have the catalogue of the "high and low" exhibition from the museum of modern art, 1990. i assume that's the book you refer to. it has a variety of interesting pictorial documents, although i completely disagree with the premise of the book, that there is "high" and "low" cultures influencing each other, and put "modern art" against "trivial culture", with "comics" being "trivial culture" and "painting" being "high art", which is absurd. no art form can be "profound" or "banal" in itself.
another fascinating picture writer: ben katchor (http://www.katchor.com/)

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 07:08 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nina-blomquist.livejournal.com
i know this orange stool, it's on auguststraße!

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 07:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] microworlds.livejournal.com
It could be worse, they could switch genders, change their names to Donna, and start writing chick lit novels with titles such as "The Devil Wears Blue Jeans", "Shopping Addicts Anonymous", "My Shoes Reflect My Personality", or "Chocolate: Obsessions."

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 07:55 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] microworlds.livejournal.com
But that doesn't mean I'm a misogynist, I'm just characterizing the common titles seen in chick lit.

Re: mike

Date: 2007-09-02 08:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] neil-scott.livejournal.com
I enjoyed the Kafkaesque stories v.much, as much for the context as the content.

Writers who draw? So you like Evelyn Waugh?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-02 10:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
That's right, they've just opened!

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 01:52 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mandyrose.livejournal.com
Pierre Klossowski also acted in a Bresson film, and I love it.

thus spake wikipedia

Date: 2007-09-03 03:19 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
The word was reintroduced into English in the 17th century from French, and was until recently still felt as French, hence blonde for females/noun and blond for males/adjective.

blond adonis

Date: 2007-09-03 03:30 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I prefer opera Dons to mafia Dons. Don Giovanni, Don Carlos...

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 03:47 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I think this must be why your music clicked so well with me when I first heard it around fifteen or sixteen. Your songs were all like little singing books, so textual. John Darnielle was important to me in the same way. I had been a very writerly girl in my childhood and adolescence, and had a few years of classical piano lessons. At a certain point, I chanced upon a four-track, realized I could write songs, and never really returned to literature. Now ten years on I continue to write a trickle of literary/historical-inflected songs whose time for release will never come, woe is me...

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 07:40 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nina-blomquist.livejournal.com
the glasnoodle salad is pretty good.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 10:30 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Momus, does your ego know no bounds? Who on earth do you think will make it to the end of thirty minutes of this bad prose, badly read? Sure, it's the kind of stuff all writers have somewhere in a bottom drawer. But the wiser ones leave it there!

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 11:26 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
I take the attitude that if even one person was entertained by even one minute of it, it was worth flinging the mp3 up.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 02:07 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Yes, and no doubt there'd be at least one person entertained by you mooning to the camera. Does that mean we can expect you to post that photo soon?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-03 08:05 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Sounds as though Shazna saw Steerpike as a Gollum type, I'm really suprised you're a Peake virgin, I assumed his orientalism would have enticed you if not the character dualites, at least confess to reading or seeing the TV serialisation of Mr Pye.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-04 09:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] imomus.livejournal.com
You're clearly a newbie -- I've mooned several times!

(no subject)

Date: 2007-09-04 05:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] turkishb.livejournal.com
Peake is Charles Dickens without the allegorical content. I enjoy him formally, but Gormenghast really does feel as if one is shin-deep in stone the whole read.