What Are You Reading?

I love Tennyson's Ulysses, Joyce's is rubbish. 😵

I read his writing on Joyce as more to my way of thinking than the excerpt illustrates. But I am hesitant to associate myself with the man who wrote the first biography of Hitler and "The Jews, are They Human". Just say'n.

TJATH is a pro-Semitic book that satires a previously written book by another author entitled ‘The English. Are they human?” It was welcomed and praised by British Jews and hated by anti-semites. 

The Hitler book is very hard to come by so I’ve not read it, but Lewis’s own subsequent criticism and disavowing of it plus his publication of ‘The Hitler Cult and How It Will End’, which I own and have read, not to mention his being ‘beastly dead’ since 1957, provide ample evidence that it is perfectly safe to ‘associate’ oneself with Lewis. 

I’ve not read Catcher since middle school when it was gifted to me (with a strong insistence that I actually read the thing) by one of my many egghead relatives. I wouldn’t read it again let alone study it. It is a morose little genre satire with little practical use.

My reading and study of Joyce’s two important satirical books (FW is vastly superior to Ulysses) goes along with the works of Lewis (all of them, both as artist and writer, satiric and non) and the two late McLuhans. Eric McLuhan’s ‘The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake’ is a beautiful summation of their work. If it were up to me every copy Joyce’s tomes would come with the complete works of Lewis and the McLuhans.

Getting to Joyce/Lewis via Marshall and Eric has been very fruitful, valuable and enjoyable!

I found an excerpt of TJ,ATH and I recalled reading it in my early teens when I was trying to find out everything I could about the history of the Jews. To understand, let me explain. My first barbershop was owned by a couple of Jews that had survived Buchenwald. I was a constant reader from the time my mom first showed me how. But they had a couple of picture books in the barber shop. They have both influenced me for life. One was "Small Arms of the World", and the other didn't have a name. It was pictures of from the death camps, and it was a very thick book. So I have been fascinated by the history of the Jews since I got my first haircut. I was just reading last night about Richard 1 and his weak attempts to protect the Jews as well as his enemies inciting violence against them. So 65 years or so of study and I have read a lot of what's out there, even Mein Kampf. None of my Jewish friends were ever religious or interested in their past in the least.
Anyway, I saw a few other books by Wyndham Lewis that I want to read. Thanks for the lead.

Incidentally, while Lewis was a fervent critic of Joyce he did step back from it later in life. Joyce of course died before the inevitable thaw and reconciliation and Lewis included his literary regrets indirectly in his late, Nobel deserving, novel ‘Self Condemned’. (Note the absence of a hyphen is Lewis’s title vis a vis the absence of an apostrophe in FW).

There is no progressive point to be made condemning Lewis as he already did it to himself with the same aesthetic detachment he brought to bear on Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, et al.

Lots of killing in Frank Hamer book, tough booger!

Some people need killing and it takes a tough man to do it.

I have always heard that he was quite a gentleman.

Bought it on your recommendation start it after the 3 from the library are done.
Thanks.
Liked the movie so....
Noticed on Amazon there were a couple more about him.

Positive Humanism

Reading "The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt, an historical novel about Cambridge and math.

Also reading "Two Pints" by Roddy Doyle, a collection of hilarious dialogues between the Irish equivalent of "working joes" in a bar. Really funny, but rib hurting funny if you like Irish culture.

Replace Capitalism

I re-read The Caine Mutiny about every ten years. Great book, too.