Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?

Successor thread to Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Lillian Faderman - The Gay Revolution
Muriel Spark - Aiding and Abetting

anne hébert - kamouraska
jill leovy - ghettoside

i am reading LUCRETIUS

it is AMAZING

i think i should start doing drugs just in its cosmic psychedelic mindblown honor

Which translation? Or are you among the few who can read the original latin?

ronald melville for oxford, which dates to the late 90s. it seems to be quite sound. i've never read it before but i've studied epicureanism and it's clear he's trying to be accurate enough to get the arguments right. sublime verse too.

one must admire any philosopher who introduces the concept of atoms into the wider world, in verse!

and w/ reflexive aplomb

And often it is a matter of great importance
How these same atoms combine, in what positions
They are held, what motions they give and take.
For these same atoms form sky, sea, land, rivers, sun,
The same compose crops, trees, and animals,
And have different motions, different combinations.
Why, in my verses everywhere you see
Are many letters common to many words,
But yet you must admit that words and lines
Differ in meaning and the sounds they make.
Such power have letters through mere change of order;
But atoms can bring more factors into play
To create all things in their variety.

Started Moby-Dick - Sure am all abt the canon this xmas season!

this year's christmas dickens is Pickwick Papers. which i've not really got that far into (for external reasons) and it doesn't feel much like the dickens that i've liked (i have 3 left after this, Nickelby, Chuzzlewit, Twist. and Drood.)

been thinking about reading edwin drood as my first ever dickens and then working my way backwards, i dunno.

halfway through gurdjieff's meetings with remarkable men. enjoying the tall tales but feel that i'm maybe not picking up on some embedded esoteric subtext contained within (or if it's even actually there or not). planning on sourcing a copy of the first part of all & everything (beelzebub's tales to his grandson) for reading next year, in any case.

i started with Our Mutual Friend and read the second half first, entirely by accident.

am only reading PP during this trip home because a local pub* gets a one line mention in it, figured it was fitting.

* former royal coaching inn, now a Wetherspoons.**

** https://www.jdwetherspoon.com/pubs/all-pubs/england/gloucestershire/the-royal-hop-pole-tewkesbury

I read that same Lucretius translation a little while ago. It is amazing.

This strange cataclysmic ending scene:

And all the holy temples of the gods
Death filled with lifeless bodies, and everywhere
The shrines of the celestials, which the priests
Had filled with guests, stood loaded high with corpses.
For reverence now and worship of the gods
Counted for little, present grief was all.
No longer too the ancient customs stood
Of burial, which the city was wont to use.
Confusion and fear were everywhere, and in sorrow
Each buried his own as circumstance allowed.
And sudden need and poverty inspired them
To many actions horrible and shameful.
They placed their own kin on the funeral pyres
Of others, and with frenzied cries set light to them,
And often in the fighting that ensued
They shed much blood rather than leave the bodies.

dope as hell

Save it for the Lucretius spoilers thread.

Lol

Started Viv Albertine clothes Music Boys after buying it yesterday.
& before that From A to Biba which I'd had sent to my mum's place.
& before that Bukowski's Ham on Rye which was a charity shop find.
Now just got Gathering of Promises about Texas psychedelia
and Always in Trouble the Esp-Disk Oral History.
So need to work out which I'm reading first.
Also got a bio of 4AD cos it was 2 for £5 in Fopp and I'd seen the julian Cope novel One Three One which I'd meant to read so also have those 2.

been meaning to read the esp-disk oral history thing since it came out. wonder just how much stollman dissing made it into print. & wasn't aware of the texas psych book, looks interesting... still need to get around to eye mind: the saga of roky erickson and the 13th floor elevators.

nabokov - invitation to a beheading

for a book club, which is nice. thank god it's short though, falling so flat for me. i used to think i loved nabokov, having only read 'ada', but this is really musty imo. and apparently one of his most well-regarded.

It's one of my least favourite, fwiw--the other one that i didn't think that great was Look at the Harlequins

I am reading The Quiet American and rereading Chuang Tzu.

invitation to a beheading is one of my favorite books ever and one that made me cry irl
and i'm reading lolita. i read it when i was 17 or so but totally forgot everything about it except the obvious.

Still reading Kevin Kwan's "Crazy Rich Asians" and dipping into the "The Poems of Nazim Hikmet".

reading: Her Infinite Variety by Louis Auchincloss. from 2000. aka Y2K. i would like to own a complete leather-bound Auchincloss collection. for my law library.

he basically wrote the same book and got sloppier but what a book!

been meaning to read the esp-disk oral history thing since it came out. wonder just how much stollman dissing made it into print. & wasn't aware of the texas psych book, looks interesting... still need to get around to eye mind: the saga of roky erickson and the 13th floor elevators.

― no lime tangier, Saturday, December 26, 2015 12:23 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not really got very far in either new book so far.
But Eye Mind was a good read and one I should reread not having read it more than once.
the Gathering oF Promises which is by Ben Graham seems to mainly focus on the IA related bands so I hope it does get further volumes on lesser known garage bands from the region and the up to present day thing that was initially supposed to be part of it added.

ONly read as far as the Stollman biography at the beginnning of the ESp bok so only knw about his parents and then his college time so far but also looks promising.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I love thrillers. And I hate self-conscious literary fiction. As soon as reviewers say, “He/she makes beautiful sentences,” alarm bells ring. I like fiction that’s interested in the world, not in other fiction.

What do you plan to read next?

The new Lee Child.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/books/review/david-hare-by-the-book.html?ref=books&_r=0

ditto. snagged the new Child from dad yesterday.

did anyone else read City on Fire? i'm nearly finished and somehow i'm still unsure what i think of it.

Kicking off the year with Plato's Republic, which I have not read since summer 2006. I would like to learn it a lot better.

tr.?

G.M.A. Grube revised by C.D.C Reeve. Last time it was Allan Bloom. I don't know which is best.

i used the grube in school and for some reason have the belief that i should read it properly in that version rather than the reeve revision which i've read more than once for teaching purposes since then anyway. maybe it's just the cover. but i've been feeling like i need to bust out of my hackett ghetto for plato. i've been eyeing the update that loeb recently published (to keep the greek in eyeball range if not understand it), but i haven't been able to justify spending the $25 per volume.

the Bloom commentary is fascinating even though he's obv on the side of wrong

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

(plot has p much NOTHING to do w/ great Nick Ray/Bogart film, but this is clammy and excellent)

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Last year was a pretty slow reading year for me, so starting 2016 with something this lovely can hopefully provide decent encouragement.

I read Aiding and Abetting last week. She had the, uh, spark through the end of her life.

Have you read bio and autobiography, Alfred?

i read the autobio. which is a first volume never succeeded by another. it was ... i guess it was disappointing in how doggedly unrevealing it was, is what i would say.

which is aiding and abetting? the lord lucan one?

i read 'reality and dreams' last year; i think it was the only novel of hers i read that year, which was unusual, for me; either i've read around five or none. an ex sent me a copy -- they were posting a lot of books to people they thought would like them rather than just give them to a thrift store or try and sell them, despite the much greater inconvenience and cost. something about this speaks to how i feel about late spark, somehow.

I haven't read the autobiography. Yeah, A&A is about the Lucan case. Her manipulation of word of mouth accounts and experimenting with chronology are impressive for such a short book.

I think I own Aiding and Abetting, so maybe that's another for this year! This is the first Spark I've read and I'm really enjoying how dialogue-heavy it is. It reminds me a lot of Waugh at his most acerbic. Word count for 'prime' so far is about 200.

Finished Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. It's unabashedly genre fiction but enlivened by what feels like a genuine insider feel for the details of a subculture which doesn't often feature in books of the genre: wealthy Singaporean Chinese society. It seems like there are some pacing issues: the first 400 pages could have moved a bit faster, and then everything happens in a rush at the end. Also it's obviously setting things up for a sequel so lots of threads are left hanging. Not sure I'll ever read the sequel but I enjoyed it.

Now I'm reading The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann, occasionally interleaved with Poems of Nazim Hikmet (tr. Blasing and Konuk).

I read most of Hugh Kenner's critical study, Ulysses, but decided that unless I was going to reread Joyce, my interest in the last 50pp was growing unsteady.

So, now I am reading Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Giles Milton, a narrative history of Europe's trade with the spice islands during the age of discovery, centering around various English voyages and the early East India Company. It sets a tone considerably breezier than a scholarly history would be, while remaining sober enough to avoid excessive burbling and the stylistic atrocities that show up in so much popularized narrative history.

Just finished Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight, it's an absolute delight. Probably going to recommend this to everyone I know.

Need to get further in Juan Filloy's Caterva but got distracted by King Leopold's Ghost.

Yes, gave my copy of the Szerb away - need to get another.

Just finished Iain Sinclair, LONDON OVERGROUND.

Despite being lazy ('Again I remembered interviewing Allen Ginsberg in 1967') and self-referential ('as I said in Downriver ...'), going on about the usual suspects ('Bill Griffiths is the true prophet of place', 'Angela Carter takes mythic ownership of Brixton') and paying far too little attention to the reality and extent of the Overground (which he doesn't realize goes to Crystal Palace) -- this book does have something. There were passages where I really felt I was reading great work, flashes of blazingly good, poignantly apt prose that only Sinclair's talent could produce.

Aimless, I think Kenner's book Ulysses is one of the very best critical books I have ever read.

It might be the single best book specifically on Ulysses.

I agree. I bought the Kenner on your recommendation, albeit a recommendation you made in an ILB thread many years ago. Kenner seems extremely sharp on Joyce, Pound, Eliot, et. al.

currently zipping through lawrence wright's "the looming tower," which is really great. beautifully written and enthralling. also just started rachel carson's "silent spring," which i picked up on a whim a few months back. surprised to find that the drawings were done by louis darling (with his wife lois), who illustrated beverly cleary's early books.

currently reading "the big short", which i got as a xmas gift years ago but never read. thought i would read it before seeing the film adaptation so i can "actually," everyone i talk to about it

Marilynne Robinson's Lila, which I enjoyed and admired but didn't love, not like Gilead. Great writing as usual, I liked the character, didn't mind that the whole book was just the sustained note of her thoughts. Maybe I just got a bit fed up with Ames saying he'd been thinking about why God allows good people to suffer for the best part of his seventy-plus years, but give him a few more days and he might just crack it. I do wonder how much my conception of her books differs from her own, she does an incomparable job of humanising religious thought - I never would have imagined enjoying the ramblings of an old preacher half as much as I do - but for her there will still be the greater truth behind it.

I've been reading Chekhov short stories from the Penguin classics volume titled Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories.

Yesterday I also started to read a self-published memoir I found at the local charity shop. It has an ISBN, but even if I noted it here, I doubt anyone would ever run across a copy anywhere for any reason. It takes place in NE Oregon, where the author grew up on a ranch a couple of dozen miles north of the Wallowa mountains - a place where I love to hike for weeks every summer.

It is all very quotidian, the sorts of stories rural families accumulate, about the time Uncle Dan rode at the front of the July 4th parade and his horse bucked him off, or when the salamander plugged up the drain pipe and the kitchen flooded. (NB: neither of these stories are in the book.) Still I like reading such things from time to time. They are generally very soothing.

What a strange coincidence. Just glanced at an electronic copy of that memoir this morning, which was open on my laptop, but didn't have a chance to really plow through. Got to wondering about the origin of the word Wallowa, whether it was related to Walla Walla, then got to up to look for a book on Chief Joseph which come to think of if I didn't actually get.

Bruce Bawer - Prophets & Professors: Essas on the lives and Works of Modern Poets
* Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb
J. Hoberman - The Dream Life

Found it

wondering about the origin of the word Wallowa

I can answer that. There is a book called Oregon Geographical Names, by Lewis MacArthur that records the origin. It comes from a Nez Perce word describing a kind of weir they built of osier willow to trap fish. A large fish trap was built at the outlet of Wallowa Lake (a huge 5 mile long glacial lake), which gave the lake and the river their name. Decades later, it was also given to the mountain range behind the lake and to Wallowa County.

reading The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell. never heard of him. Paul Cornell says that Gareth Powell is going to be a major voice in SF. never heard of Paul Cornell either. Colin Harvey and Warren Ellis are also big fans of this book. never heard of them either. they could have all been in Supergrass as far as i know.

anyway, it IS a page-turner. two stories at once with alternating chapters. and nice and simple to follow for a simpleton like me.

Scoop: Boot's just now gotten his two passports to Ishmaelia. Everybody's ridic, but so far, spacey white sons of Empire are left behind by enterprising Negroes and Women, especially the networking beauty in the tiny black car(s), who knows no bounds, it seems. Not so much zings as short, sharp, storytime jabs, tirelessly delivered by Johnny Ramone.

Paolo Sorrentino, Youth: novel written simultaneously with the making of the same story as a movie, and unforunately this is very obviously the script given the minutest amount of effort needed to turn it into prose, and not very good prose either. Hope the film is better

Shūsaku Endō, White Man: told as the memoirs of a cross-eyed sadist Nazi collaborator in Lyon, just before the Nazis flee the oncoming Allies. Like a minimalist version of Tournier's Erl-King/Ogre

Helle Helle, This Should Be Written i the Present Tense: intertia-struck Danish woman lets her life go to bits, pretends to go to uni, cheats on boyfriend, etc. Actually very good! Apparently she is Denmark's most popular novelist, despite/because of having identical first and last names

2Stoned Andrew Loog Oldham's 2nd volume of memoir. Here he starts pretty loosely chronologically then goes back to touring the US with the Stones in 65 or 6. Think it's forward from there so Immediate etc coming.

Got Inside the Dream Palace on the Chelsea Hotel as my bog book at the moment. Only got as far as plans to build it in the 19th century so far. Need to get a bookmark for it so I don't waste time lonking for my page.
Also need to finish Ford Maddox Ford which I was about 2/3 through before Xmas.

& I have the 4AD bio Facing The Wrong Way as my travel etc book for buses etc. Got as far as Prayers on Fire or possibly a little after. Interesting so far anyway.

with Scandinavia in the rearview mirror for now here's my latest library haul:

Christopher Hitchens - And Yet
Brian Moore - The Mangan Inheritance
Stacy Schiff - The Witches: Salem 1692
Mary Gatskill - Veronica

I read the Gaitskill in November and got the Hitchens as an Xmas present to myself.

Finished Moby Dick - really incredible: such a weird book, so audacious with its content and language. Just made what was pretty much a perfect xmas period even better.

Ernesto Sabato - The Tunnel. Read this in a single, long-ish commute. Starts off with the plot of The Outsider, demystifies and amplifies it into his own achievement.

really enjoyed your thoughts on Robinson, ledge - her thinking seems so worth reflecting on, worth the time to draw out. I haven't done Lila yet bought bought it in hardback as soon as it came out because Gilead, that's just one of those books that sticks with you.

I'm reading Blindness, having just finished Cain, I love Saramago to pieces and may do The Gospel According to Jesus Christ next

I've recently enjoyed a few addiction memoirs (White Out by Michael Clune), Blackout by Sarah Hepola) & looking for another heroin one I read Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson which I think I heard of in the 90s & wow that was not really my thing at all.

I got a heap of books for Christmas, so it's been my new year's resolution to read more. Right now I'm reading Marlon James' 'A History of Seven Killings', which of course is on everyone's radar but is definitely really really good. Also tucking into Steven Pinker's 'Sense of Style' which is one of the best books on the English language and writing I've ever come across.

really enjoyed your thoughts on Robinson, ledge

Thanks! Let me know what you think when you get round to it.

Eve Babitz - Eve's Hollywood: a NYRB reissue. Pretty artless but very entertaining

I saw that and its rave reviews, but I didn't like the little bit I read.

But now your description sort of makes me want to read it.

Oh man, the NYRB holiday sale catalog had a bunch of blurbs casting her as the Anti-Didion, or the younger, fun Didion: she still tattled on the tails of Tinsel Town, but she was young and fun you bet. However, I also read a bunch of excerpts meant to sell this same point (in Paris Review, I think), and I never say this but omg LOL what a self-satisfied self-indulgent klutzy sisassypants she seems to be. So cute how she never bothered to look up correct spellings of common words contained in her semi-zingers, all her friends seemly agree. Was she some kind of ironic fave, like William Hung etc.?

But you know NYRB and Paris Review, so maybe I should give her more of a chance.

er "sassypants," "seemingly" (blush, but bet she typed too fast too!)

All of that is kind of true, and yet and yet and yet... Partly it is just that her anecdotes are actually very interesting, no matter how they're told

I was really put off by the lackluster style as well but if Mr. Morrison recommends...

I have a hunch that the translator David Magarshak bears much responsibility for this, but I am not finding the Chekhov short stories very impressive. I expect I'll soldier on, but I wouldn't recommend this version.

Haven't read those, but enjoyed his versions of The Idiot and Bros K. Will give Babitz a decent chance if ever come across one of her books.

OK, I must admit the Babitz became significantly less charming as it went along and she got older and more up herself.

Now reading Hermione Eyre: Viper Wine -- sort-of historical novel about real-life 17th Century society beauty obsessed with staying young and her doting explorer husband, recast in this book as something of an alchemist and sort-of time-traveller, leading to all sorts of cheerful and funny anachronisms. Really good so far

Simenon - Tropic Moon. probably the only Simenon I'll ever need. As noted its a tad similar to the African passages in Celine's Journey... but its handling of a kind of mood -- that of corruption and degradation is so intense. It would be a lot more known about if Maigret hadn't overwhelmed the shelves, took NYRB to curate it and in that sense its one of the finer things they've bought out.

Vasily Grossman - Armenian Sketch. Read this in a sitting - always in this conversational mode, but its so much more than that. Doubt travelogues are as good as this - its so digressive. And it doesn't exactly gets you to go to Armenia (although sign me up) because you almost certainly wouldn't get what Grossman is able to get out of it (or Mandelstam, probably goes double for him). The descriptions of people, food, architecture, culminating with the humanist speeches at the wedding (and Soviet politics are also never far away) - its a performance of a writer fully able to transmit what he sees, hears and feels to his pen.

Christopher Isherwood - Mr Norris Changes Trains
Jacob Weisberg - Ronald Reagan
Louise Bogan - The Blue Estuaries: Poems

I finished The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann. I've been meaning to read more fiction this year, so I went through the NY Times notable books lists from a couple of years ago to find some things that sounded interesting and are in paperback. This is one of those. It was kind of an odd combination of a dysfunctional family drama and a murder story (not a mystery, it uses the horrific elements for suspense and tragic effect and as a springboard to other themes, somewhat in the vein of The Shack or The Lovely Bones). It's definitely not a feel-good story. The characters are kind of selfish and self-absorbed and pretty much completely fail to rise to the occasion, but they remain somewhat sympathetic nonetheless. Not sure why the author thought this particular combination of themes was compelling, but I guess, yeah, sometimes awful things happen and they just make things worse for people who already have problems of their own.

Now I'm reading Guantanamo Diary. It seems like this will be 300 pages of me thinking "Wow, that's really fucked up."

Ullman is directors Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman's daughter, so some pedigree for grim dysfuntional family dramas there, i guess

Vasily Grossman - The Road. Short stories and articles. So far the stories are sorta ok and develop the theme of the novels (short stories are boring me more and more these days tbh) but this only really gets going in the account of the Nazi concentration camp in "The Hell of Treblinka". Grossman's writing is full of moral force, and a coolness in the face of inhumanity, but also managing to be conversational and tender. I can't see any of the various journo-historians w/an agenda (LOL Anne Applebaum) and number-of-dead counters getting anywhere near this.

Marianne Fritz: The Weight of Things -- odd, intense, elliptical little Austrian novel about women betraying one another, motherhood, madness, step-parents, all that fun stuff

Fritz seems fascinating, especially for her later novels, which sound radically resistant to translation: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/01/the-nonessential-on-marianne-fritz/

Thomas Bernhard was not a fan... http://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/adrian-west-on-marianne-fritz/

A contrasting view was held by Thomas Bernhard, who addressed his esteemed publisher, Siegfried Unseld, with characteristic charm in 1986:

Before my departure I have had another glance at your recent publishing catastrophe: the 3,000 pages you have had printed and allowed to appear are the greatest embarrassment I have been acquainted with to this day. To print and bind over 3,000 pages of mindless proletarian trash with all the bombast of a centenary event belongs, quite frankly, in the record books: as a world record of stupidity. I am not speaking so much of the begetter of this idiocy, rather of the fact that the publisher has handicapped himself by releasing this fatuous vulgarity.

iow, Thomas Bernhard was not her intended audience

I for one would consider it an honor to be on the wrong side of Thomas Bernhard. I mean, he's a noted curmudgeon, no?

indeed! oddly enough, though, the earlier parts of the Marianne Fritz book made me think of them--similar bitterness about post-war Austria, its complacency, etc

and, tbf, the book he was criticising apparently had pages looking like this
http://www.asymptotejournal.com/admin/data/NMIII.jpg

I'd have to say I also am not her intended audience.

You don't have to say it, we guessed already

Oh, and I'm reading and enjoying Bill Schelly's Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America - such a sad story, in many ways.

I'd have to say I also am not her intended audience.

I'd hasten to add that the book I read was NOT like that page at all

Yes I think that was her debut work.

I will be starting on Josef Winkler "When the time comes" shortly - also translated by Adrian West and he said somewhere her main work will never be translated but I don't see why you couldn't get at least a volume's worth across to English to get the flavour of the work - looks like a cross of Stein and Cardew's Treatise.

love this from that paris review thing:

"In general, the detractors of long, complex, unorthodox, or vexatious books have their counterpart in a small but fervent cult of readers: Joyceans, Nabokovians, those who claim to think highly of William Burroughs. In many cases, the esteem that accrues to difficult authors has little to do with their being read; a genius is born not of resolute bookworms slogging through arcane texts but of that critical mass of reviews, essays, and dissertations required to generate the clichés the reading public needs in order to sound intelligent—to make the comparison, no less inept for its ubiquity, of Knausgaard to Proust, or to apply the adjective Kafkaesque to any story about bureaucracy."

Wow.

He is an idiot, even if I'll always like him for bringing Josef Winkler into English.

Ugly THings #40 which is as good as the previous ones I've read and is almost book size. THis smoring I read the interview with Stu Boy king the original drummer with the Dictators tracing the history of the band at least up until they kicked him out.

Also read the thing on the Wrecking Crew which makes me want to see the new documentary thing.

Also reading Facing the Wrong Way the 4Ad biography still. Very interesting. Got as far as Dead can Dance''s Spleen and Ideal

Wrecking Crew doc interesting but mildly disappointing as these things can be.

wrecking crew doc gave me some chills just because the people involved are so friggin' cool and it's kinda unbelievable that they were a part of so many amazing things, but, yeah, it's not that illuminating. more like one of those labor of love things done by someone who isn't that probing. cool just to hear those people talk though. and see them.

Yup

Hadnt even realised there was a 4AD book, sounds very promising

Suhrkamp, whose director, the legendary Siegfried Unseld, hoped to market Fritz as a “female Joyce.”

A female Arno Schmidt wasn't good enough?

4AD book was in Fopp as a 2 for £5 choice. I mainly grabbed it to get the Julian Cope novel 131.
Very interesting so far. I didn't know much of the history. Just familiar with bits of the music.

Lately I've been reading Alex Mar's Witches in America, which is breezy but facile: Mar tries to put her own personality, suspended between the longing for connection with greater forces and a reflexive skepticism, at the center of her reportage on various traditions of American paganism, but she mostly winds up seeming smug. The book is interesting enough on the merits of its subject matter, but even as Mar interviews self-identified necromancers and hangs out in swamps to undergo Crowleyan initiations, the prose never really becomes lively enough to dispel the impression that this is the kind of book about researching witchcraft a Slate contributor would write.

I've also finally gotten around to Balzac's Pere Goriot; in some ways I think I like Balzac less for his own sake than for that of the writers for whom he opens a path, but I appreciate his attention to the phantasmagoric grime of city
Iife and the way he undercuts the possible sentimentality of the plot by hinting at the perverse qualities of Goriot's consuming paternal love.

I've also been reading Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and Seduction and Betrayal: the former is one of the most successful attempts to construct a novel by the juxtaposition of lyrical fragments that I've read lately. (I'm also just a sucker, for boring personal reasons, for writers who recollect youth in Kentucky with a cold eye from a northern remove.)

Finally, I've posted about her in the ILE obituary thread, but in the days since the writer and activist Bryn Kelly's intensely saddening death, I've been reading and rereading her essays and blogs: her story "Other Balms, Other Gileads" is still one of the most moving things I've read about the everyday experience of HIV stigma today, although it doesn't quite prepare one for the scathing humor of her pseudonymous writing on medical bureaucracy and queer relationships as the Hussy and the Party Bottom. Links to most of her writing can be found here: http://topsidepress.tumblr.com/post/137350042394/i-love-your-profound-insecurity-i-love-you-even

*Witches of America, that is

Finished Pickwick Papers. Not great. His most successful novel I'm told, certainly the best selling whilst he was alive. But I found it bitty.

Started War And Peace. Not sure the chapter a day scheme suits me so I'm going for a book a month. There are 15 I think. First one is a manageable 150 pages.

Kevin Barry - Beatlebone --- very funny, lovely writing, even makes a shit like John Lennon seem likeable

after four years finally finished against the day... guess i'd have to read the whole thing straight through again to make some kind of sense of all the interweaving narrative strands that i'd completely forgotten about. one day, maybe.

Hate it when that happens.

that's one of the reasons i keep restarting 'mason & dixon' instead of just finishing it

now trying to decide whether i should read the last two thirds of finnegans wake or alternatively try to find where i got up to in tristram shandy

I went back and finished up the second half of Pierre Hadot's The Veil of Isis, which I put aside last year. That is a cool book, about the idea in Western culture of nature as veiled and elusive (and, apparently, many-breasted)

http://a405.idata.over-blog.com/364x600/4/18/31/72/Images-2/Lucrece-Frontispice.JPG

I also have a bit left in Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism, which I probably should not have stuck with since it isn't quite what I was looking for, and I'm nearly finished Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which is amazing.

JUst had Girl In A Band delivered this afternoon so read the first chapter of that so might be the first thing I read from now with something being slightly put back. Looks very interesting, sorry to read the bitter feelings though.

now trying to decide whether i should read the last two thirds of finnegans wake or alternatively try to find where i got up to in tristram shandy

― no lime tangier, Wednesday, 20 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some ny resolutions you have made for yrself!

Tristram Shandy will be waaaaaay more rewarding

posted in the hope it will amuse you all as much as it amused me, a letter from Hunter S Thompson to Anthony Burgess...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX73jDVU0AA4l4R.jpg

does burgess's non-clockwork stuff belong on the unfashionable writers thread? who the hell reads that stuff? and there is a lot of it too.

i just counted. 33 novels. and then there are 30+ other non-fiction things. and is any of it in print in the u.s. other than ACO? the U.K. is obviously a different kettle of kipper. is he big in europe still? i must know.

Also, i started the third in Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy. Ancillary Mercy.

xpost
Burgess def seems like one of those post-war Brits whose books are largely going out of print (the odd 'hit' like Clockwork Orange excepted) - Angus Wilson, William Cooper, John Braine, John Wain, even Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene.

The biography of Burgess by Roger Lewis is prob the most entertaining hatchet job I've ever read.

yeah, greene was in print here consistently for decades and now you would have a tough time finding anything new.

i mean i'm guessing that greene sold more in the u.s. than all those other people combined with the exception of clockwork which was a book that everyone had to buy even if they never read it.

with amis i would come across tons of paperbacks of lucky jim over the years and not much else. and he wrote a ton. even his kid doesn't seem that popular around these parts anymore. feel like london fields was the height of his popularity and that was quite a while ago.

There's a Europa edition of Earthly Powers in print. I finished it but didn't like it very much. I've read that and Clockwork and I don't think Burgess is a writer for me.

NYRB have been reissuing some Kingsley Amis, and I think they are going to issue a vol of his poetry

Burgess is a funny one - I think he's got a little cult still, people with a real mania for Earthly Powers in particular (met someone recently who's read it like 6 times, it's their favourite book), but yeah… he wrote so much, but I've only ever really seen Earthly Powers, Clockwork Orange, the Enderby novels and Nothing Like the Sun knocking about in shops.

his books are still in plentiful supply here in secondhand book shops, anyhow. other than clockwork think i've only read his 60's bond knock-off/parody tremor of intent. do have a copy of 1985 but looking through it seems like it's nothing but an old reactionary's lament for the way of the world.

Nothing Like the Sun and Dead Man in Deptford (his Christopher Marlowe novel) both hold up well, and I see Earthly Powers in used bookstores fairly often, but among my reader friends I don't really ever hear him talked about outside the context of Clockwork Orange.

Oh, and Re Joyce is one of the better introductions to Joyce I've read (I don't know what this says about its availability now, but I remember having it at hand during my first time going through Ulysses as a teenager).

Bowie otm re Earthly Powers.

Yes in my 2nd hand trawls the Burgess I come across the most are intros to Joyce.

sometimes see copies of that truncated fw that he edited, and just wonder what the purpose of doing that would be? never looked inside, so maybe it has valuable editorial matter...

Best novels of his I've read are Earthly Powers a Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and a few others from the same era: Honey For The Bears and The Doctor Is Sick.

Oh and search the first volume of the autobio Little Wilson and Big God. But destroy the second volume You've Had Your Time. Follows the classic pattern of: this it is was really like to be me in the Old Weird AmericaBritain, End of Book I, *Fame and *Fortune, Remarriage* Begin Book II And then I wrote... Darn these kids, etc.

if anyone can ever find burgess's intro to the u.k. edition of last exit to brooklyn online lemme know. be interested in reading that.

I've read maybe six or seven books by Burgess. I especially liked the first of his Enderby books, and generally found his novels to be competently written with just enough intellectual skew to give them added point and interest.

He was smart and well read, and it showed, but that's never really enough on its own, is it? He had an idiosyncratic set of opinions and prejudices, but the majority of them were reactionary and backward-facing. The best I can say for him is that he never wrote a book Oprah could endorse.

btw, I am currently reading a large collection of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the Library of America compilations.

william golding will likewise always have one book in print in the states. man do we love that one book though.

Heh, just the other day I was reading the Paris Review interview with Gore Vidal and was surprised by this part:

VIDAL

I wouldn’t say that I am fanatically attentive. There’s only one living writer in English that I entirely admire, and that’s William Golding. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Italian and French writers. I particularly like Italo Calvino.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think Golding good?

VIDAL

Well, his work is intensely felt. He holds you completely line by line, image by image. In The Spire you see the church that is being built, smell the dust. You are present at an event that exists only in his imagination. Very few writers have ever had this power. When the priest reveals his sores, you see them, feel the pain. I don’t know how he does it.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever met him?

VIDAL

Once, yes. We had dinner together in Rome. Oxford don type. I like his variety: Each book is quite different from the one before it. This confuses critics and readers, but delights me. For that reason I like to read Fowles—though he is not in Golding’s class. Who else do I read for pleasure? I always admire Isherwood. I am not given to mysticism—to understate wildly, but he makes me see something of what he would see. I read P. G. Wodehouse for pleasure. Much of Anthony Burgess.

interesting to see that vidal rated fowles (somewhat). & speaking of, there's a nice appreciation of golding in his wormholes collection of essays/occasional pieces.

yeah I've picked up a few burgess books 2nd hand but only read enderby & clockwork orange, earthly powers appeals to me & I keep meaning to read it. picked up a book of essays embarrassingly titled homage to qwertyuiop and iirc the 1st essay was moaning about feminism and I stopped reading, this may be an unfair (semi)recollection tho. I liked his listicle book about the best novels since the war

99 Novels? That is fun.

I'm proud that I finally finished L. Randall Wray's Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, over a bit of a winter break, along with volume one of Descartes' Philosophical Writings (Cambridge). Wray doesn't write very well, but this seems to be the only book length summary of modern monetary theory (MMT) at least for the general public. I also started a couple books by Abba Lerner (one of the foundational figures for MMT), but am going to need to backtrack in one fo them since I was reading it in doctor's offices and car service waiting areas, where I couldn't concentrate. Lerner is actually a very enjoyable writer, if a little twee at times.

Not sure I will be able to finish off anything of that sort until the next time I have extended time off, unfortunately.

burgess's two autobiographical vols are excellent, and I liked A Dead Man in Deptford a *lot* when it came out, but haven't really returned to it since. Read a number of other things (Any Old Iron, Honey for the Bears) and they're... not v compelling. That feeling you get with Nabokov, where it feels like his eye is on something else, a separate and only partial visible set of mechanisms influencing the main events, which in Nabokov often works extremely well, in Burgess gives a feeling of... I was going to say detachment, but it's not quite the right word - they don't speak very directly though.

Current/recent reading:

Love in a Dish by MFK Fisher. A really enjoyable set of essays on food, eating and taste. you feel the importance of qualities in life, and of being able to show sensual discernment. judgment and decision-making well-informed by ones affections and tastes.
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart. Again, tremendously enjoyable, intelligent and informative, with an underlying peculiarity of personality. Written before he became a Tory pol, but I couldn't help continually trying to square that with what I was reading. Setting that to one side he is an extremely competent writer - stage managing, for instance, the first example of a dead goat polo match in Afghanistan since the removal of Taliban government extremely well. Some sections rise something above that:

On a blanket on a mud roof, a large dog still slept, the night’s snowfall dusting his coat. While I looked at the dog, a small group of boys looked at me. It was two hours’ walk to their nearest neighbour, so the children spent all their time with their cousins. When they were fifteen or so, they married their cousins.

Still, it's not really about style. Stewart's descriptions of his experience walking through the interior of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, in 2002 is totally compelling. He is adventurous to the point of folly, to the point of a mania or pathology in fact. Several times it seems like he's deliberately courting foreseeable death either by weather or violence. As I say, it's hard not to speculate about him - there's that mania for walking, something that looks like a wish for annihilation either through religious reverie or death, the kinship, noted a couple of times, between Scottish border country, with its windy dwellings and community headmen, and Afghanistan. There's his close and unsentimental sympathy for the people he hosts, and his clear intelligence and judgment. A stated major factor in him becoming a politician was to campaign against ill-informed institutional intervention in Afghan politics. There's his High Tory Catholicism (which I infer from him mentioning having a rosary, but I may have misread) - that's a combination which I associate still with concealed intellectual alienation. There are obvious comparisons to people like TE Lawrence. He's not stupid, but suspicions remain that he extrapolates distrust of national institutions in Afghanistan to distrust of them in the very different circumstances of Britain. He's been successful and not stupid in the areas of broadband legislation and environmental infrastructure though. I presume he participates in that conservatism that says people are happier within existing structures, an argument used too often against reform, and post-thatcher results in a deliberate and atavistic conversion of social structures into cash for chancers, corporate business and landlords.

Anyway, it's an excellent read and very informative on the way very domestic and tribal Afghan politics intersects with international politics.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Started and enjoyed, but put down. I'm a little bit suspicious of such free-flowing observations, but it's done with vim and concision, so I'll probably pick up again. I really like her manner of including quotations within the body of her text only as italics, with a marginal note to indicate source.

Europe at Midnight - Dave Hutchison. Second book in trilogy discussed in previous thread. I enjoyed reading it a lot, though I'm struggling to remember anything significant I wanted to say about it now. In recollection its shifting allegiances and fragmentary plots feel messy, but that wasn't really the experience of reading it.

A readable paper on some of Lerner's ideas (not that anyone asked):

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp272.pdf

Interesting and perceptive comments on The Places In Between. I enjoyed that quite a bit when I read it several years ago. Apart from his occasional essays in the NY Review of Books, none recently though, I haven't really kept up with his career since then.

The Places In Between by Rory Stewart. Again, tremendously enjoyable, intelligent and informative, with an underlying peculiarity of personality. Written before he became a Tory pol, but I couldn't help continually trying to square that with what I was reading.

Just read Alan Bennett's diary in the LRB, where he said almost exactly the same thing. sounds great! (the book, not being a tory MP)

Speaking of post-Kentuckians, one way, have you read Mary Gaitskill, and if so, what did you think? (question from another ex-resident, though not native)

just finished jd salinger's collected stories - the highs were high, the lows were still p good but a little boring. particularly liked "the laughing man".

now i have a big backlog of books since i did a kind of winter panic binge in the same way as i do with wine/beer/whiskey/rich tinned food - not sure what i'll start next.

just been to the excellent cosmonauts exhibition at the science museum and want to read a load of russian sci-fi or experimental lit. haven't read sorokin so might just go for the ice trilogy. recommendations wd be good tho.

did start Shredded, the apparently v good account of the clusterfuck at RBS, yesterday, but as I say my heart is elsewhere right now.

Speaking of post-Kentuckians, one way, have you read Mary Gaitskill, and if so, what did you think? (question from another ex-resident, though not native)

― dow, Sunday, January 24, 2016 1:15 AM

dow, I've read a little of Gaitskill's work: Bad Behavior, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, out of which Veronica is probably my favorite. Two Girls handles abuse and struggles with embodiment powerfully and unsentimentally, but its ending felt too neat with the two protagonists fumbling toward connection without the novel really dealing with the messiness of that kind of intimacy, so I appreciate Gaitskill's more complex treatment of conflictual friendship in the later novel. The Mare doesn't have the most promising premise, but I would like to read it this year.

The Mare was pretty good: imagine an As I Lay Dying structure giving order to a National Velvet horse story. She creates one of the more convincing moms in recent lit memory.

I don't really clamor for new horse stories, Alfred, but the rest of yr description does sound appealing.

i remember not liking two girls but it was ages ago. wasn't there an ayn rand character in that book? bad behavior is a cool time capsule though. read that first. kinda her best in my humble internet opinion...but again haven't read it in decades.

Her short stories are marvels imo

veronica might be one of my favorite novels. i came to mary gaitskill through her amazing granta essay from 2009, "lost cat". apparently it's now paywalled on the granta site, but someone has reposted it <a href="https://catastrophysicist.wordpress.com/lost-cat-by-mary-gaitskill/";>here</a>

yikes, forgot to convert that to bbcode.

anyway, this isn't fully formed but: "sensitive" always seems to me like the most apt word to describe her writing, and one of the things that i like/find interesting about it is the way her characters can seem almost psychically empathic in ways that make me think of theories of affect. the lost cat essay definitely reflects that radical sensitivity (altho it also makes clear her biggest weaknesses)

Bad Behaviour was one of my great discoveries of last year. "Heaven," in particular, is shattering.

fizzles, rs' dad's telegraph obituary is worth reading

Fizzles probably knows these already, but the Strugatsky Brothers (ie Hard to Be a God, Roadside Picnic) are great. There's a Theodore Sturgeon-edited Soviet SF anthology that's also very good.

Don't think I'd ever read any Gaitskill before the (sensitive, empath, even) onslaught of Because They Wanted To, femme top and all. This is back when I was reading nothing but short stories---no novels, that is; couldn't take the time to get that involved---but What a collection. That's what got me back into contemporary fiction.
Another unexpected express ride, just recently: Amazon's Look Inside option gave me a whole amazingly compressed, eloquent essay from The Essential Ellen Willis: born in 1941 to intelligent, educated blue collar parents in Queens, her childhood ambition is to be a smart, successful, no-BS man---and a dish, an adorable woman of the world. So there she is at 20, receiving her degree---and already married, despite her reservations. Wants to be a Writer--but off to Africa, because hubbie accepts a job there, working for Uncle Sam. Still, she had a glimpse in Berkeley: she secretly considers herself an anarchist, in the gestalt/consciousness-raising sense: no good to be a libertarian if you can't liberate the minds nad bodies of (insert your own example the budding Koch brothers,for instance) among many other self-styled radicals who want to replace one kind of authortarianism with another whether they realize it or not. And: many, though certainly not all, of these people are---men.
She never uses sexism as an alibi, but does, in a few pages, map her own experience, and others observed, in trying to find a way through the conundrums and double binds of gender roles-- via Relationship, office and/or antiwar movement politics---up through the year of publication, 1969. The ending is in mid-flight, mid-war.
Talent and professional skills are required to write like this, but you can't really write like this: you write your own version of it, if and when you can live it, passionately and and compulsively and coherently truthfully enough to testify.

Also with more punctuation (sorry).

Stewart had at times considered a parliamentary career. He had discussed with friends an idea that might help prepare him: he would live in a housing project for two or three years, to better understand British poverty. (It frustrates him that he never did this.)

As a student, Stewart liked to turn the mundane into the extraordinary: when he wounded his hand on a broken champagne bottle, he asked to be stitched without anesthesia. Emily Bearn, a British journalist, has written of an evening in Oxford, when he wandered into a room and recited poetry while she was throwing up into a wastebasket.

#wildTimes

ppl got very into his speech about hedgehogs.

I think I basically like having him around.

That Middleland thing he and the BBC cobbled together in the middle of the Scottish independence referendum was a right load of old pony though.

thanks for the recommendations, James. I think I had the Theodore Sturgeon collection in mind without realising it - remembering getting it out of the library when i was in my v heavy SF phase, but don't remember much apart from the cover.

also, never read any of the brothers Strugatsky, so have immediately purchased those!

also, don't mind having rs around, but feel those "what does it *feel* like to be a human being" experiements in empathy and experience are salutary. its mistake is perhaps not all that serious, and I'm sure rs is aware of it, but it lies in the difference between something experienced through choice and the same thing experienced through birth, accident or whatever fate is.

his father's obit (thanks nakh - it was good), indicates the same spirit - it is the distancing effect of being able to experience many things. still, he doesn't seem too much of a cunt and clearly has a desire to use what he learns for the benefit of others as well as learning for the benefit of himself.

just been to the excellent cosmonauts exhibition at the science museum and want to read a load of russian sci-fi or experimental lit.

if not too early for what you're looking for: think some of khlebnikov's prose might just reach the outer-realms of sf. definitely qualifies for the experimental part, anyway.

cheers nlt. in fact i think that may hit the nail on the head as the way the early part if the exhibition is curated focuses on how the artistic imagination of kazimir malevich and ilya chashnik was converted into impulses towards and visions of the cosmos that were then scientifically and culturally realised. it's that abstraction, extreme to the point of mysticism, (and often with a lot of odd hokum in there - blavatsky always seems present) that's interesting, as it feels like they came to drive a wider cultural purpose and define its peculiar character.

also with the rs thing, I've realised i was trying to say that people such as stewart have a tremendous and only partially realised desire to *belong* - there's a bit in the book where a british soldier calls him a fucking nutter and he's delighted at the praise: he likes the mess room company of soldiers. anyway, that's surely enough about him.

I really enjoyed a mid-60s paperback, Paths In The Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction, which had 0 editorial & translator credits (intro by noteworthy American SF anthologist-author Judith Merrill, who is amazed by short-term quality leap in Soviet SF as represented here, but she's frustrated by some of the translations, which I had no prob with, as a total ignoramus). I talked about several of these stories on the older (b. 2011) Rolling Science Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative etc.

damn i really need to get on to that thread but yet again i failed to get on it when it started and am now daunted by its length. will check out your posts, dow.

David Thomson's "How to watch a movie"

Presumably, in his case, it's best done while masturbating furiously over Nicole Kidman in a nude scene

ugh

François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy.

I have nearly finished Antony Beevor's WWII book. I feel this is a massive achievement.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/sep/24/biography.film. To give some context to my distasteful remark. Or any Thomson book that mentions Kidman, really.

I know the context.

I picked up Hume's Treatise, which I've never read in full. It's pretty dazzling. There must be upwards of a thousand individual arguments in this book. It's fun getting into his system and seeing how everything flows from his basic distinction between impressions and ideas, which itself he's only able to articulate as a difference in degree.

Couldn't it be like, "I get the impression that you're avoiding me; here's my idea about why, and my idea about how such relationships as ours are affected by technology," ideas which also come from impressions, and somewhere else (judging by the gaps, leaps past the empirical and experiential, or so it seems)."

"Also my idea about why I mess up punctuation in posts, but not emails."

There's no mention of wanking over Nicole Kidman in the Thomson book but it is dreadful for other various reasons

Hume is quite funny in parts, although that's kind of beside the point. A couple passages I half remember but have never been able to find again: one in which he comments that there is nothing so remotely related to a man that he is incapable of feeling pride about; and the other (which especially struck home with me at the time I was reading a fair bit of moral philosophy, though just scratching the surface really) was something about thinkers being satisfied with the thought that what they are thinking about is important, regardless of the impact of that thinking on real life. Sorry, I'm sure I'm probably missing a key twist. It's been quite a while since I read his Treatise, so I don't have anything else to add.

Never tackled the full treatise, but hume always seems very engaging and pretty wise. I really ought to read more of him.

Couple of Brazilians. Raduan Nassar - A Cup of Rage. This is an intensely insane novella about a night of passion and its aftermath. I found it funny too, but I'm like that. Each chapter is a sentence each (one of these is about 25 pages). Dissolves in your mind straight after you finish it, leaving a smell. Onto Clarice Lispector - Hour of the Star. The quote on the back says somehting around this being a Brazilian Joyce. Maybe there is some Beckett at moments. Her sentences are as worked over (maybe more so, its ridic actually, must've been a nightmare to write like this) but there is this fervent mysticism to it that I imagine could be like another not so popular Brazilian like Paulo Coellho (whom I've never read and who I think I'd hate from what I read about him). Nassar - like Hilda Hilst - is a lot more in that modernist lineage (one that stretches all the way to De Sade as much as Beckett - Brazilian modernism ftw)

I could never get into the Lispector I tried, though I'd wanted to. I can't remember exactly what I read--probably a short story collection (or maybe just part of one).

I have the passion according to g.h. sitting on my bedside cabinet and ive never been able to get into it. just find it incredibly hard to read.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence

Totally understand how Lispector could be alienating but I find lots to like. You could burn out on them. I do want to get The Complete Short Stories. Must've been an insane project, its translator gave a really good interview about it.

the only lispector I've read are the handful of stories translated by elizabeth bishop, istr these are supposed to be really bad translations or something but I really liked them

Lispector transcends translation -- even a 'bad' translation will make an impact.

But Dodson is v thoughtful and the book contains every story she wrote.

Re: Thomson, I'm sure the new one is poor, he writes too much, about a subject that obviously no longer really engages him. And yes, there is something embarrassing - or grossly sexist, if you prefer - about the way he writes about a great many female actors, not just Kidman. But at the same time I detect a strain of puritanism in some of the criticisms aimed at him for openly expressing his scopophilia - cinema is a machine for desiring and I think Thomson is brave for at least trying to articulate this, however clumsily.

Raduan Nassar - A Cup of Rage. This is an intensely insane novella about a night of passion and its aftermath. I found it funny too, but I'm like that. Each chapter is a sentence each (one of these is about 25 pages). Dissolves in your mind straight after you finish it, leaving a smell.

^^^ yeah, this was mad but fun. Although I found the narrator's obsession with the alleged sexiness of his own feet fairly off-putting

to be fair, I'd probably be more charitable to Thomson if I actually liked Kidman

julien gracq, 'reading writing'
locke's essay
a bit of emerson

bit more of rilkes neue gedichte

started reading a bit of celine's 'journey to the end of the night', it's all very modern and loose and slangy

What's the Gracq like? I've read a couple of novellas by him, liked them a lot.

Went back to God Save the Kinks earlier. Started it when I bought it over Xmas. Just got as far as You Really Got Me. Not sure how much I like the writing style but did want a history of the band since I was picking up most of at least their 60s lps over the last few years. & it was in the 2 for £5 offer in FOPP.
Think it was another book that I picked up mainly to get the other book I picked up but can't think what that was at the moment. Still do want toget the 60s history in some detail.

Got as far as Thomas Wolfe in Inside the Dream Palace the Chelsea Hotel history.

& as far as Throwing Muses and Pixies touring in Facing The Other Way the 4AD story

Jon Savage's book on the Kinks is pretty good for an official bio; they prob turn up in his collected reviews etc. too.

I've laid aside the Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories for now. There's some remarkable stuff in there and a large part of its value rests in being an acutely observed compendium of Ashkenazy jewish culture in the 20th century.

Now I am reading Netta Larsen's short novel, Passing, that regards two main women characters who are African Americans in the 1920s, but light-skinned enough to 'pass' for white. One chooses to 'pass' and the other doesn't, although she happily takes advantage of her ability to move about much more freely in society than if she were dark-skinned.

What's the Gracq like? I've read a couple of novellas by him, liked them a lot.

i've never read any of his fiction. it seems like an ideal book of criticism to me, it's basically only about canonical works or authors, it views/organizes most things through general reflections on broad literary phenomena (chapters called 'reading', 'writing', 'the novel', comparison to cinema, etc.), but it's written in catches and turns, so that he rarely seems to be trying to make a point, just to state long-considered reflections. his judgments always sound assured, and he has an insider's perspective on career/craft development, but a non-literary-world-game-player's amateur perspective on reading for pleasure and private satisfactions. it seems quite french (and the works mentioned are predominantly french). i read it whenever i want to recompose my mind, it's so measured and well-wrought.

that sounds great!

Dave Hutchinson: Europe at Midnight -- really good, just my cup of tea: like Alan Furst writing SF about topology/maps/borders/parallel universes
Diane Williams: Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine -- intensely irritating, a sort of platonic ideal of the worst of the McSweeney's aesthetic
Amelie Nothomb: Sulphuric Acid -- concentration death camps as reality TV - fairly entertaining but I don't believe a word of it

Actually, having read some more of it, Amelie Nothomb: Sulphuric Acid has turned out to be facile crap.

i don't know helen macdonald but her most recent book made some year-end lists and i LOVE that she mentions sylvia townsend warner in the new york times in 2016 so i'm a new fan of hers. also she says she likes sci-fi. dunno if i really want to read her hawk memoir but people say its great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/helen-macdonald-by-the-book.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

also, i like that her hawk memoir was partially inspired by henry green.

also, she was the coolest kid reader:

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was an obsessive reader, the kind of child who’d read the back of the cereal packet six times over breakfast. My favorites were Gerald Durrell, Willard Price, John Masefield and two books about schoolboys running away to live feral in the woods: “Brendon Chase,” by “B.B.,” and “My Side of the Mountain,” by Jean Craighead George. Susan Cooper’s “Dark Is Rising” sequence and Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea Quartet” were the best of all.

i guess i really have to read wolf hall, huh? i mean you don't have to hit me over the head a million times. i can't keep seeing people mentioning that book all the time and not be curious. just doesn't SEEM like something i would ordinarily read.

George MacDonald - The Princess and the Goblin
Gabriella Ambrosio - Before We Say Goodbye
Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone
Guillermo Verdecchia - Fronteras Americanas

A Majority of Scoundrels, Don Berry, probably the best 'popular' history written about the fur trade in the west of North America. The author has a very engaging narrative voice and an excellent command of the details. Berry just recounted the story of Hugh Glass, subject of The Revenant movie, but when you embed that story in the context of the whole early fur trade milieu, it just seems like part and parcel of the craziness.

D Eggers, THE CIRCLE

recently finished joe wambaugh's echoes in the darkness abt the philly main line murders. Started off p compelling but something abt the writing style and the characters really started to grate and I was happy to be done w it tbh

also joyce carol oates black girl, white girl. setup + tone reminded me a lot of Curtis sittenfeld's prep which I wonder if shes read this. anyway, its good; felt it was nearly young-adult (ish) and would be good for like a jr in hs to read prob, not too long, not super foreign to relate to, etc

Gillian Slovo: Ten Days -- novel about mass riots in the UK, heavily based on the 2011 outbreaks, based on lots of interviews with participants on both rioter and police sides. Interesting, but fairly pedestrian prose.

I spent the last week not reading Hume and instead reading David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. It’s a 1966 history of moral thinking about slavery, mainly concentrating on New World slavery up to the late 18th century. I learned a lot. I will definitely be reading the two sequel volumes on the "Age of Revolution" and the "Age of Emancipation" (the last one just came out in 2014).

charles stross, glasshouse -- solid sci-fi with some gender issues
geraldine brooks, year of wonders -- well-written and i am morbidly fascinated with the plague, but the protagonist was too saintly and the conclusion was quite a stretch
timothy snyder, bloodlands -- humanity deserves extinction

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks.

http://i.imgur.com/QbBu6va.jpg

^Either that is carefully staged, or the owner of that bookshelf should be beaten without mercy.

Shkreli?

oh god, apparently it is Shkreli. How is that even possible?

just finished
Ben Yandell - The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers

a biography of mathematicians who solved some of 23 problems listed in 1900. Repitition is a problem: the standard story is a European who went to Germany for higher education, became a professor, and had to flee to America in the late 30s. Sometimes they go insane (e.g. Goedel would only eat his wife's food and starved to death when she was in the hospital.) The long chapter on Kolmogorov was quite interesting and I want to look into his work -- it has a lot of crossover with the later chaos/complexity theory.

Was interested in that because it won that one award for math writing and l really liked any of the other books I came across that had won it.

The prize is named after an ilx0r, I believe.

Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much.

'anatomy of a dinner party from hell' sounds like my shit

Recently started The Horse's Mouth, and right off it delivered: "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried-fish shop." I was dimly aware of the trilogy, but not that this is vol. 3. Should I read the first two first?

Don't think so.

Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much.

Nakh - How is Wine for Dummies?

Carter Scholz also wrote criticism for The Comics Journal for a while

just started lucia berlin's a manual for cleaning women, read about 5/6 of the stories from it last night. it's really good. deadpan, funny, enigmatic at times, and grim - a lot of it has a kind of catholic texan or mexican setting.

catholic texmex

that is a lot of stories to read in one sitting

the wine for dummies book is at least playfully amusing given that said dummy is filmed drinking a bottle of wine retailing at....$11,995.00

there was an article about rupert murdoch where the hack describes him having (i think) kant's critique of judgment on his bookshelf and noted how choosing that instead of the critique of pure reason for example showed the depth of his erudition

that is a lot of stories to read in one sitting

they are quite short. i went from "not enjoying this too much" to being unable to stop. v good stories.

Recently started The Horse's Mouth, and right off it delivered: "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried-fish shop." I was dimly aware of the trilogy, but not that this is vol. 3. Should I read the first two first?

I read them backwards starting w/horse's mouth, over several years, many books in between, still enjoyed. always something gained from chronology I suppose, but not necessary here.

see i got 'a manual for cleaning women' thinking it was going to be a much weirder sort of experience and when i realised i'd parsed the title wrong i put it down

(not a joke)

how did you read the title originally? i guess it's short stories in a fairly classic way.

i felt strange leaving it on my desk when the cleaner came in - it was the only book on an empty desk. i hid it a few weeks ago but became lax over time. hope she didn't find it and feel like she's in a horror movie.

'a manual for cleaning the dirt off women'

essentially yes! i had literally never heard the term 'cleaning woman', only 'cleaning lady'. i guess it's some sort of weird class thing.

i think i kind of read it both ways, though the story with that title makes it clear.

i would say "the cleaner" - think that's common in the uk, strange that it's freed itself from gender norms.

yes, certainly 'the cleaner' before 'cleaning lady'. but, again, 'cleaning woman', never. i had thought, perhaps, that the latter was american, but i guess not.

i guess like "dinner lady" or whatever is p common too. lollipop lady - did they have those in the us?

what's weird is that "lady" is more posh than "woman", right? lords and ladies. is it a case of posh people's shame causing them to give the person who cleans their house a grander title?

i'm from luton, mate, i don't know how american children get to school. i think it involves SUVs -- i think re lady vs woman it's to do with a particular sector of the lower middle class assuming a kind of affected posh shame, though, i don't know what actual posh people call them. 'scouts'.

it's interesting how totally wrong 'dinner woman' and 'lollipop woman' sound if you try those out, they don't even sound like valid english phrases

anyway so yeah i should actually read this book is what you're saying?

yeah it's good. recommend it.

we had lunch ladies here. at school.

i made a mental note of that book - along with the "hawk lady" book that i mention above - when it showed up on the NYT top ten of the year.

will keep that one in mind.

i'm doing a writing course at the moment and the first night the teacher used stories by lydia davis, kafka, ben marcus, and an irish writer called joanna walsh.

was familiar with the first 3 and i have joanna walsh's non-fiction book about staying in hotels, which i love, partly because i love hotels. there's a good extract here - http://granta.com/hotel-haunting/

but i really liked the two stories of walsh's he gave us - both from this: http://galleybeggar.co.uk/store/3am-books/fractals - it's kind of like lydia davis, sparse, sometimes feels personal to the writer, confessional at times.

http://i.imgur.com/Qpi4Jpj.gif
xpost

Lucia Berlin sounds remarkable, and very close to (current) home and past literary interests. With the Black Mountain connections, I'm surprised her name is unfamiliar to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSEuQRf99xM

Thanks for the reassurances about reading The Horse's Mouth first, guys. Good interview here (and note, in right rail, other contributors to this Fall-Winter 1954-1955 issue, incl Andy Warhol already):
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5071/the-art-of-fiction-no-7-joyce-cary

Peter Stamm - All Days are Night
Elena Ferrante - Story of the Lost Child

I think those two are quite similar - all the big and small emotions are flattened as things that happen (almost more so in Ferrante, as the 'operatic' element kicks in) but for this Nothern and that Southern European author its life presented as processes the characters are made to go through. So the flight and to, then back, to where you come from in the Ferrante but also that alienation (coded as alienation) of characters drawn up by Stamm (there is a flight of sorts too). In both art and its practice is unable to save anyone, only providing punctuation as we carry on from time spent in life and the various jails it has to offer: failed marriages, oppressive families. Happiness is presented as moments of light from the cell window, at other points its solitary confinement.

I literally just bought that Stamm today

Didn't find the emotions to be flattened in The Neapolitan Novels, though obv we're meant to feel the onslaught of events, emotions, information/sensory overload at times---as Lila-Lina has those moments of maltdown, re "dissolving boundaries," when the rationalized order of things reminds us it's an illusion, and she lives in dread of this experience, as a control freak, but building to rebellion vs the bullshit promises/establishment of control etc--um, the other thing is, I read the books as they were published in the US, so had some breathing spells. Reading them one after another sounds flattening indeed, exhausting!

Although, according to interviews, the whole thing was written pretty quickly, and the narrator gives the impression of that, typing away while looking for Lila, or maybe still competing, trying to cover her ass vs. headlines OLD HALF-FORGOTTEN LIT CELEB BROAD'S OUTLIER LIFELONG FRENEMY SOURCE FOUND DEAD, EPIC SUICIDE NOTE TELLS ALL, as well as, as she pretty much admits, suddenly sees/is seized by a way to tell all and jump past the unknowable (is she really an opportunist hack? She can't know---views of literature do change, and change again---and we never see her earlier writing, just get "and then I wrote" paraphrasing, ditto with Lina, who is not the only control freak, eh first-person narrator---writing, as a pro or an outlier, is there as slippery fuel for development of central characters, wherever they go)(watch out, other characters)

Also watch out, readers---I don't rec reading nonstop.

i plan on reading all of them in one go. i am a fan of immersion. if its something worth immersing myself in.

I have all three and im going to read them all in row, about 100 pages in on the first

you and douglas adams have the same definition of trilogy, i take it.

xpost "cover her ass" *just in case* those headlines (not a spoiler)(although saying it isn't is, sorry damn)

you and douglas adams have the same definition of trilogy, i take it.

― ledge

ha, I have the first three with the fourth on order from the library, bit of a brain fart

I finished reading the Poems of Nazim Hikmet (translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk). A while back, I read Philip Larkin's collected poems straight through (like a novel) and this is another one that works well that way. The poems stay pretty close to the life, and the life is eventful enough and the main particulars easy enough to summarize that the connections draw themselves pretty well without in-depth background knowledge. A big chunk of these are prison poems and another chunk are exile poems. (I was reading this at the same time as Guantanamo Diary, so there were a lot of emotional resonances there, making for difficult reading at times.) It's hard to imagine these could be translated better.

the (exceedingly short) novels of friedrich dürrenmatt

dow - the speed of events is such there is no space to feel much? Its not so much onslaught as that. Mostly I think its good that I dunno - her father's death is give maybe a couple of paras as is the changing of the neighbourhood due to immigration. Did laugh at the passing mention of 9/11.

I had breathing spells because I got them via Inter-library loans. One of them lasted a year - mostly because the 4th wasn't yet translated by the time I finished the 3rd.

I finished reading the Poems of Nazim Hikmet (translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk).

Ritsos' Diaries of Exile possibly works in a similar way. Maybe some of Vallejo's stuff too.

dürrenmatt is great!

Sorry for assuming you were gobbling up The Neapolitan Novels, xyzzzz. New paperbacks---wanna check the Stanwyck bio, though some (not this Times writer) say it's way too detailed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/paperback-row.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0

xpost: have only read the two barlach novels so far, but yes, liked their mix of surface realism and phantasmal grotesquerie.

just finished Peter May's The Blackhouse, which i was hoping would be Scottish equiv of scandi-noir being based on Lewis but it didn't get there. wasn't helped by things like this:

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
‘You’re not infectious or anything?’
‘Of course not. Why?’
‘Because you look bloody terrible.’
‘Thank you. That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

which seems ok until you realise these are 6/7 year old kids talking. he also used the phrase 'puked and vomited' in the last chapter. puked AND vomited. aren't they the same thing? luckily, it was cheap.

tørgny lindgren's "sweetness"

Just got Women Crime Writers of the 1940s & 50s: eight novels in two volumes, edited by Sarah Weinberg, published by the Library of America. Several concise pages of introductory material here:
http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=187

Sarah Weinman, that is.

Nice line-up in that set:

Laura by Vera Caspary (1943) -- this was a bit arch for my tastes at the time, should re-read it
The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis (1946) -- don't know this one
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947) -- great book
The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1947) -- also great, nicely claustrophobic
Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong (1950) -- don't know it
The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith (1954) -- classic Highsmith nightmare material, really good
Beast In View by Margaret Millar (1955) -- very underrated writer
Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens (1958) -- don't know it

starting on cortázar's first novel the winners

Patrck McGilligan - Young Orson
* Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

Shifted some stuff around near the bed which lead me to pick up Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes , Music, Music, Music, Boys Boys, Boys which I started over Xmas again. I'm finding it very interesting. Just got as far as Viv becoming Mick Jones steady after Steve Jones tried to seduce her very unsubtly by demanding a blowjob off her. So punk is starting to happen. She's got a guitar that mick Jones helped her select but no sign of teh Slits as yet.

Still reading through the 4AD history Facing the Other Way which has got into the 90s and the generation or wave after Throwing Muses and Pixies. Still mainly reading this on buses which is why it's taking so long to get through, though book is a few hundred pages long.

& still reading Inside the Dream palace teh Chelsea Hotel history on the bog. Got as far as Warhol making films in the mid 60s so maybe about 1/2 way though the book.

åsne seierstad, "one of us"

I finished Guantanamo Diary. I imagine some day this will be assigned in schools as a cautionary tale of a time when America lots its moral compass, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. Slahi has a very appealing and relatable authorial voice, and even a subtle sense of humor. Some of the scenes are just so absurd that they must have happened: such as the guard who promises to watch a movie with Slahi before she gets transferred out of GTMO, and so on her last day they watch "Black Hawk Down" together.

Just finished our own Phil Dellio's collection Interrupting My Train of Thought, which I've been reading a few entries at a time over the last few months (I tend to always have a music and/or film book--and this one has a lot of both--on the go for breaks from my school reading as a means of sanity-preservation). Great stuff, with a bit of it coming from ILX. If you ILXers keep turning out such quality (published) writing--see also, Us Conductors, Wolf in White Vans, several 33 1/3 volumes--I'm gonna have to create a special ILX section on my bookshelf.

Oh, and I created a S*****y playlist with 194 of the songs mentioned in the book, in case anyone was looking for 14 hours of musical distraction or accompaniment.

Didn't know of Interrupting My Train of Thought, and not sure who he is on ilx, but i read the buying-nixon-books essay on the amazon preview pages and it seemed very promising

Tbh i dont know who ANYONE is on ilx, and can't keep track when people change their usernames, so he could be me for all i know

A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell. Had read the first two or three Dance... novels many years ago, but couldn't remember a damm thing about them, beyond the odd name (Widmerpool, Jenkins.) Now I can see much more clearly the humour in the writing, and the debt to Proust; very much enjoying the movement between England and France, school and university, childhood and adulthood, and so on. Planning on persevering with the whole sequence this time.

Am also in the process of moving, to a smaller flat, after eight years of accumulating...stuff...all in the same place. Looking at all these bloody boxes of books, the Kindle finally seems a LOT more appealing.

wait, Phil. D, right? i never knew that. until now.

"Tbh i dont know who ANYONE is on ilx,"

I'm me!

i was in a good book with lots of ilxors! if you've never read it i think you can probably find it for a penny on amazon.

Interrupting My Train of Thought is by the ilxor known as Clemenza, I think

ah, okay. i guess phil d. would have been too obvious.

Sorry--Interrupting My Train of Thought is indeed clemenza's.

What was this book with you and other ILXors, scott?

Have fun with Powell, Ward. I read the sequence in 2007, and while it was rewarding it wasn't as complex as I wanted. Widmerpool faded in and out of plausibility.

"What was this book with you and other ILXors, scott?"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007FGT02Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

WITH ESSAYS BY: Matt Ashare * Tom Breihan * Aaron Burgess * Jon Caramanica * Daphne Carr * Jeff Chang * Ian Christie * Kandia Crazy Horse * John Darnielle * Laina Dawes * Geeta Dayal * Rob Harvilla * Jess Harvell * Michaelangelo Matos * Anthony Miccio * Amy Phillips * Dave Queen * Ned Raggett * Simon Reynolds * Chris Ryan * Scott Seward * Greg Tate * Derek Taylor * Douglas Wolk

9 or 10 ILXoRz!

xpost

Thanks Alfred - complex in terms of narrative incident and architecture, or in terms of profundity of thought (or both?)

Tbh i dont know who ANYONE is on ilx

I'm your favourite living author! I just need a small loan to publish my next book...

I have once again started War & Peace, after a couple of short failed attempts in college.

Kindle this time, went with the Briggs translation which is nice & breezy so far (maybe a bit *too* glib with modern turns of phrase but i aint mad)

I'll circle back in a month when i'm inevitably mired lol

GOOD LUCK AND GODSPEED. i don't think i could do it...

i cheated & watched the miniseries that just aired on tv, that way i can keep the names straight by having a face to picture. it's worked so far!

sooooo many names tho, jfc

there should be a kindle version where they turn all the names into jones, smith, etc.

mr veg suggested i give them nicknames lol

notepad.jpg

I'm away from home for several days and brought The Places In Between, Rory Stewart, which I've now begun, along with several alternates in case I get bored with it. So far, he manages to sketch his brief encounters with various Afghan officials, soldiers, and villagers with sufficient vividness that one gets distinct (if simple) ideas about them, rather than their being mere clichés of travel literature. His ability to speak Farsi and to cope with various local dialects of it certainly helps.

I'm currently reading Miriam Toews's All my Puny Sorrows; I've been reading it slowly, because this is probably not a great time in my life to be reading about suicidal depression (not to sound worrying), but I'm impressed with Toews's simultaneous lightness of tone and resistance to sentimentality. I'm also going slowly through Jane Bowles's letters in Out in the World: it's wonderful to have more of Bowles's prose, but there's a claustrophobic quality to the letters, which largely describe a life spent struggling against silence, and Jane's comparisons of her own work to Paul's are often painful to read.  I've also been reading Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Angela Davis's Abu Ghraib-era interviews in Abolition Democracy. The former is a brilliant and damning comment on the American legal system, but remains strangely tied to the discourse of liberal reformism and barely engages with abolitionist voices or the legacy of Black Power movements; the latter draws crucial connections between the prison industrial complex and militarism abroad, and makes me hope intensely that Davis still intends to finish her book on prisons.

I'm enjoying the Women Crime Writers of the 1940s & 50s set dow described upthread. I had some cognitive dissonance reading Laura because it was impossible not to visualize Lydecker as Clifton Webb even though he's described as a big fat guy with a van dyke. First-person narration by Lydecker, McPherson, and Laura adds some complexity not possible in the movie but also makes the proceedings less unified. I'm curious how this TCM Effect will influence my readings of In a Lonely Place and The Blank Wall (filmed as The Reckless Moment).

Think the film version ofIn A Lonely Place is supposed to be very different from novel? Haven't read it yet.
one way street, feel better, okay? Hope so. Speaking of Jane Bowles, I recently clicked on the collection Your Sister's Hand In Mine---most of which I've already read, but I know I'll buy it---and Amazon emailed me, thinking I might like these (among other more familiar suggestions):

Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

Mina Loy, Insel(Neversink)

Neila Larsen, Passing

Leopoldine Core, When Wretched: Stories

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New Edition)

Larbi Layachi, A Life Full of Holes

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Millicent Dillon, A Little Original Sin: The Life of Jane Bowles

Anybody read 'em?

Passing and Sleepless Nights are both very good. Aimless a little upthread was reading Passing, too.

Nightwood is an acquired taste, one I was unable to acquire. Have the Loy but haven't read it yet.

I've been curious about Insel, have a copy of Nightwood around that I've been meaning to read.

Currently slowly going through The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell, it's not as entrancing as Troubles so far but what is?

didn't know mina loy had written a novel! need to acquire a copy asap.

i liked nightwood fine, but i really liked that collection of early stories virago press put out.

xposts: further suggestion based on your list, h.d.'s fiction is well worth a read too.

Yeah, the stories were much more my thing than Nightwood.
http://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780860685869-us.jpg

Weirdly, both the Loy books I've got have the same cover. I mean, when the photo is that cool I see why you use it...
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1564786307.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1612193536.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Joy Williams is one of my favorite living authors, but i don't know what is in that collection. but i would read it no matter what was in it.

okay, 13 stories never collected before. will buy that when i see it somewhere. i've been meaning to RE-read her stuff for ages. cuz it's been awhile for the older collections. i have almost everything. missing a few things. don't have her guidebook to the Florida Keys, but i would buy it if i saw it.

i just think it's cool that they would put a huge retrospective volume like that out in 2015. so many people who have been writing as long as she has get lost in the shuffle. and its not like her stuff ever sold like crazy.

Ack, not When Wretched, it's When Watched!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FPbbyBtKL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Wondered why I couldn't find it--Amazon just kept suggesting Magic: The Gathering cards when I looked for it, which seemed peculiar

reading Patrick Modiano -- here's what I posted on Facebook earlier this week:

Very strange, after the subdued & reflective tone of the three novellas collected in the volume 'Suspended Sentences', to go all the way back to "La Place de l"etoile" (the author's debut), a wildly uneven postmodern goof of a book, about a thinly characterized self-loathing Jew who is simultaneously obsessed with & repulsed by the French "national character" (not excluding its virulent anti-semitism) -- e.g. at one point, he beats up his provincial schoolmates for being insufficiently reverent towards the canon of minor French novelists, then in the next chapter finds himself drawn into an international scheme to abduct and traffic French girls from the countryside, which he abandons halfheartedly before chapter's end. I'm not finished with it yet, but this is a lot closer to the angry settling-of-scores I was expecting from Modiano, who wears his fascination with the occupation and its collaborators on his sleeve; I'm curious to see how the ambitious 22 year-old author of "La Place..." grew & evolved through the other two novels collected here.

Yes, been meaning to check him out!
Haven't seen anything by Joy Williams in a long time, but her early stories incl. subtle displacement, more or less in passing ---somebody can't find their $1000 sunglasses, early 70s $---never mind. the author's got some other lenses---then her first novel, State of Grace, where the opening monologue was somebody carefully pulling a cloud of images out of her ear, then they all settle into focus, oh shit (nominated for National Book Award, as well it might have been, lost to Gravity's Rainbow).

Finished "La Place de l'étoile" last night -- a strange book indeed. Pastiche of Celine & parody of Proust eventually give way to Kafka, as the shifts in tense & narrative perspective (from first- to third-, even occasionally second-person) become so frequent & jarring, sometimes within a single paragraph, that he had begun to suspect incompetence on the part of the translator &/or proofreader.

åsne seierstad, "one of us"

"one of us"? Like in Freaks?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/books/review/asne-seierstads-one-of-us-about-rampage-in-norway.html

Jonasson - The 100 year old man who etc. etc.
For a book club, which I didn't attend because I was sick. But, I'm 2/3rds through so I might as well finish. It has two parts: a ridiculous adventure yarn where the title character kills a team of criminals one by one, either accidentally or in somewhat self defense; and Forrest Gump, the movie, where staying out of politics is a position spelled out by having every -ist get killed, while the title dude survives by not being into politics -- a stupid philosophy that is not conducive to comedy.

The laundrette in my new building has a bookshelf with a copy of that, I wasn't tempted to read it because I saw the film and it was unadulterated waste

really enjoying 'europe in autumn'; thanks to fizzles and james m. for mentioning its sequel

Joy Williams is one of my favorite living authors

_Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much._

This latter sounds great, thanks. Spark sounds good too, don't think I ever got round to reading that one.

Didnt actually mean KSR--I enjoyed his starship novel last year too, though I think Gypsy was a bit better--just referring to SF novel bloat in general, where the material for a cracking short story or novella is bulked up unnecessarily for the market. See also literary fiction too, I guess.

Anyway, I'm glad Gypsy and Europe in Autumn are getting some love!

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/short-story-collection-smuggled-out-of-north-korea-global-interest-bandi

not sure what to think of this, but I'll give it a chance. fun to try to draw the line between realism and fiction.

Another vote for Sleepless Nights, would like to read again someday. Seem to remember a really good description of seeing Billy Holiday. Also enjoyed what I have read of her Collected Short Stories.

The title of the other one I am thinking of is actually The New York Stories f Elizabeth Hardwick.

NYRB Winter Sale---50 books at 50% off (wondering about Poets In A Landscape and Pages From The Goncourt Journals)(maybe the Cendrars):

http://www.nyrb.com/collections/winter-sale?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Winter%20Sale&utm_content=NYR%20Winter%20Sale+CID_093896182073cb3e11f6921e1ab46742&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Browse%20the%20books

An early version of the Billie Holiday chapter in Sleepless Nights is available here, incidentally, and it conveys the tone of the book fairly well: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/03/04/billie-holiday/

Didnt actually mean KSR--I enjoyed his starship novel last year too, though I think Gypsy was a bit better--just referring to SF novel bloat in general, where the material for a cracking short story or novella is bulked up unnecessarily for the market. See also literary fiction too, I guess.

Anyway, I'm glad Gypsy and Europe in Autumn are getting some love!

Started into 131 by Julian Cope this morning after finishing the Viv Albertine book last night. Very touching that Viv Albertine.
131 is a bit more comical using Cope's usual idiomatic style, not sure how much of that is sui generis. I haven't really come across any people who talk like that myself but there you go.
THink I've read a number of people struggling with the book so not sure how far I'll go with it since I do have a number of other things I want to read, but so far so good.

Philip Schultz: The Wherewithal. -- verse novel about (deep breath) the Holocaust, Polish pogroms, the Zodiac killer, Vietnam War, a kafkaesque take on wirking in californian social security, being an inadvertant murderer... Very good, but somewhat overstuffed, and not everything quite meshes together

you had me at holocaust followed by zodiac killer

:Picked up Children of the Revolution out of the debris around my bed and started into that again. Just read a history of Mott The Hoople up to All The Young Dudes that has me wanting to pick up physical copies of their lps.

glad to see your debris field is bearing fruit; I still need to find time to weed out the library books from mine

stevo, Mott's Brain Capers was one of my most-played albums of and in the 70s, but most of their LPs were good. if sometimes uneven, incl the comps-with-rarities, Rock & Roll Queen and Greatest Hits. Live, recorded on Broadway, improves on some early studio tracks, and is mesmerizing overall (or was; haven't listened to any of their records in a long time). It's much longer on CD, but I haven't listened to their CDs at all. Nevertheless, they play themselves in my head fairly often.

Yeah was listening to soundfiles of Brain Capers yesterday. Pretty great.

About time I got through the Dave Thompson book though since it's been somewhere around my bedroom for the last couple of years.
& I should know more about the Glam scene really since I do enjoy bits and pieces from that era.

While sticking my head pretty far into in The Horse's Mouth, also thinking I need to get John Berger's A Painter of Our Time, and this---anybody read it?
http://brooklynrail.org/2016/02/art_books/john-berger-on-artists

I finished mopping up the last of the gravy from A Majority of Scoundrels last night and picked up The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter Wilson to wind up the evening. It is enormous, as any book must be that tries to cover that conflict. So enormous that I cannot imagine myself finishing it unless Wilson proves to be an unusually gripping storyteller, but I can imagine sticking with it long enough to make a small start on filling this gaping void in my historical knowledge.

Just had the book With The Beatles featuring the photography of Robert Whitaker drop through the mailbox. It's more visual than text based but does have some comments I think mainly from the photographer.
Got some beautiful photos in it.
Oversized so wonder how a copy of it disappeared in the mail to me just before this one was ordered. Very glad to have a copy.

I should probably mention also that I finished The Places In Between last week while vacationing. It was a very readable travel book, more vivid than most. I'd recommend it, just for its minor, but shining, virtues. As usual with the travel genre, one learns many small and interesting things, but the sinews that hold it all together are rarely very strong. Because the essence of the genre is to give minor pleasure it just as rarely matters.

I haven't read that specific selection of Berger's essays, dow, but a lot of his writings from the sixties through the eighties are among my favorite works of art criticism (as an outsider to that field, at least); at his best, he's able to make the act of looking remarkably vivid (as that reviewer says) while maintaining a dynamic sense of historical context.

read milan kundera - laughter and forgetting this week. i loved the author when i was in high school but i've pretty much lost the taste for it.

Mildly curious to have a go at one of Berger's novels - probably has to be G.. Anyone read it?

Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, an overwhelming experience. Most things I read can be considered sad (even depressing but I don't think about it in those terms) but because its re-cast as fiction - which has that effect to protect you so that you can get inside the horror, or simply serves as material to be mastered. Nothing like that here. Alexiviech gives you no breathing space as you find yourself inside a collage of decay, irresponsibility and destruction, and a destruction of everything - humans, animals, plants, children, food. In the end there is something of the writer as editor of people - she allows them their voice, but its much better than a mere documentary in her re-workings. Look forward to more sometime. Moved onto Josef Winkler's When the Time Comes which convincingly at the Genet-like transcendence, the collage here is of death and pain, but its done with such artfulness and prose-poetic rhythm that you keep turning the pages. Images are continuously re-thought - death is looked at telescopically in these images that make it sound almost attractive (the body is simply returned to the earth, its so normal it happens all the time, like life) and yet it is all collages in this inorganic manner too - all seems like a painting (and a medieval one too, at times I thought this was sent hundreds of years ago instead of the mid-20th century). He is the kind of writer tnat you need to live inside for several books at a time (if you can bear it) so I'm looking forward to reading Garden of Bitter Oranges when its published later this year.

NYRB Winter Sale---50 books at 50% off (wondering about Poets In A Landscape and Pages From The Goncourt Journals)

Started on The Goncourt Journal! Its compulsive reading atm: a mixture of acid bitchyness, passges of excellent crit (the way they lay into Flaubert after a reading of Salammbo, whom they otherwise have much affection for). Also has plenty of misogny - which in turn reflects on various inadequacies - the men as portrayed here can't stop talking about women. Must've been a key text for Proust.

There's a really virtuosic pastiche of the Goncourt journals late in Recherche, iirc. (I mean, I think it's virtuosic but haven't read enough of the actual brothers to properly judge.)

Alexievich does sound like a harrowing writer, xyzzzz__; I'll have to come around to her.

Yeah, that Chernobyl book, it really really got to me. Frequently quite horrific. Annoyingly, I see it's coming out soon in the UK in a revised/updated/expanded edition, so I seem to have been harrowed by the inferior version.

The Dalkey Archive version is pretty good. I don't know what 'superior' would mean.

ows - in a sense she gets across a raw suffering (which is a cliche peculiar to Russian Lit). She presents things as they appear to have been in a documentary fashion but is also able to cast the net sideways (bits on how Chehkov and Tolstoy - as good as they are - are useless as offering anything to the readers then). Its a bit like the film Come and See. Klimov said somewhere that he didn't show everything, otherwise people wouldn't be able to stand it. Comparison of media aside (and I know its a big aside) Alexiviech probably goes a bit further, as she can show by writing it in a piece of paper and possibly trusts her readers to be able to withstand it some more because: 1) we are far away from it, reading and 2) its harder to picture things in your mind off the page. That 2nd point is more personal, I can switch that off.

This really has a feel of science fic at times.

Flopson -- I'm reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, too -- my first Kundera. Shortly after checking it out from the library, I met a young woman who had just read it for a class. Must be something in the air...

There's a really virtuosic pastiche of the Goncourt journals late in Recherche, iirc. (I mean, I think it's virtuosic but haven't read enough of the actual brothers to properly judge.)

― one way street, Tuesday, 16 February 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One more thing: I think the Goncourt's are all over Recherche... There is a Proust account on twitter - basically someone re-writing Proust as tweets, and for a lot of the time it could double as a Goncourt twitter.

This really has a feel of science fic at times.

Speaking of which I really enjoyed Roadside Picnic. Can't believe I hadn't read it before in fact as I've been peripherally aware of it for a while. It's great at leaving lacunae into which you can project, which in itself is the nature of the Zone.

In addition it's populated by people trying to get by in life, in the normal way, in a totally destabilised environment. Something PDK does well too - people have jobs and needs and families etc. One of the best books I've read I think.

Also read some Khlebnikov prose, which was quite futurist in many of its PROCLAMATIONS about MACHINES, but also contained some stark landscapes and proto-science fiction material as no lime tangier said. Only I wasn't very compis mentis when I read it as I'd given myself a fucking huge headache by playing bloodborne for too long, and I kept on getting the landscapes confused (crypto-Lovecraftian cities of monstrosities superimposed onto futuristic pre-revolutionary industrial russia) so I'm going to give it another proper go next week.

The Zone is referred to in Voices of Chernobyl btw. But it also discusses Chernobyl as the end of physics.

"Flopson -- I'm reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, too"

it's because i mentioned him on that unfashionable writer thread. i spoke his name and now he is alive...

Just got 1966 by jon Savage through the post. Not really had a chance to do more than give it a peripheral look, BUt am seriously looking forward to reading it.

Very favorable Christgau review, posted now on his site, of the 2-CD musical companion to Savage's book, with more tracks than the songs commented on in the latter, I'm told (additional commentary in the CD booklet).

I'm gonna order the Berger books I mentioned (already got xpost G, high time I read that too), and an amazingly inexpensive Robert Walser New Directions book with tipped-in art, mentioned in this amazingly amazing view of ND's pocket universe (also need to get Beauty Is A Wound, based on description here)
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-staying-small-helps-new-directions-publish-great-books?mbid=nl_160216_Daily&CNDID=27752069&spMailingID=8551884&spUserID=MTA5MjQwNTU0OTUwS0&spJobID=861641249&spReportId=ODYxNjQxMjQ5S0

Having read another 60 pages of Thirty Years War I can definitely say that Peter Wilson is not an unusually gripping storyteller. I'll keep ploughing ahead, but I very much doubt I'll plough to the end.

I've read C. V. Wedgewood's Thirty Years War, which was fairly readable (and somewhat shorter than Wilson's). I guess the drawback is that it's missing the latest scholarship. It did a good job of sketching the different phases of the conflict, major battles, motivations of various rulers and generals, and high-level politics. What I felt like it was missing was a vivid sense of what life was like for a soldier, peasant or burgher caught up in the war. I intend to read Simplicissimus at some point, which hopefully delivers a bit more of that.

New Strugatsky Brothers translation coming in a few months, 'The Doomed City': http://www.amazon.com/Doomed-City-Arkady-Strugatsky/dp/1613749937/ref=sr_1_1/177-0272354-7602832?ie=UTF8&qid=1455746192&sr=8-1&keywords=strugatsky+doomed

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, the novel that was their own favorite, the novel that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English.

The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.

The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

wow, sounds great. i really like the postscripts in the editions I've been reading about how they had to fight through the institutional and cultural stupidities to get what they could published. in hard to be a god one of them (I can't remember which, Arkady?) says to his brother - i just want to write Dumas style swashbuckler with cardinals and sword fighting! no satire! and so his brother relents and they write it. then there's a bout of concerted cultural and journalistic attacks on the arts, dictating what should and shouldn't be written, and Beria's denouncing decadence, so they rewrite with a Don Rebia purging an alien medieval land of all enlightenment (later changed to Don Reba). bloody odd book of course for that very reason, but enjoyable.

This one, posted by James Morrison on Rolling Speculative etc, is billed as a century of science fiction from Russia and the Soviet Union (just came out a couple months ago, James says):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016C3KATY?ref_=pd_ys_nr_all_8

started roadside picnic last night after the mentions here. in 3 pages it explains more than the film ever does.

Lol

andrei voronin, a young astronomer plucked from leningrad in the 1950s

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01556/andriy_voronin_1556340a.jpg

Speaking of New Directions in the New Yorker, ND's going to publish a new Delmore Schwartz collection; here's Ashbery's intro, which I meant to just skim but couldn't:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-heavy-bear-on-delmore-schwartz?intcid=mod-latest

Cool!

Ordered some more Carter Sholz from the library. Will report later, I guess.

Just started more Carter Scholz myself: a short collection of stories he wrote with Jonathan Lethem about Kafka ('Kafka Americana')--best one so far has Kafka getting TB treatment and moving to the US to become a scriptwriter for Frank Capra

Sounds good. Had requested that one too, still Pending and not yet In Transit.

speaking of the New Yorker, i was visiting my parents and my dad had bought that hardcover collection of 50's new yorker stuff and i wish i had stolen it from him. lotsa gold in there.

Read more Kafka Americana at lunch, another great Scholz story has Kafka, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives all at an insurance sales conference in some vast inescapable European hotel

From the description alone I like.

Feel like I used to own a copy of that book but never read all of it, or maybe I read one of the stories in some other venue, "K is for Kafka," is that one?

Yeah, 'K for Fake', riffing on Orson Welles--it was in an issue of McSweeney's, too, according to the copyright info

Yesterday I picked up a well-designed, nicely printed hard cover collection of selections of Thomas Carlyle that was put out around 1950 as part of The Reynard Library, which was a very nicely done series. This copy was in very good condition with a dust jacket, for $2.

So, I read the first selection last night, an essay "Signs of the Times". TC was a gifted haranguer, but he spoiled whatever value his ideas had by affixing them to the most extreme hardline position he could achieve, so whatever was reasonable in them is mixed up with total nonsense and spoiled.

i'm reading a ton of things at once as per usual, but also doing a writing class at faber, and this week the teacher gave us karl ove knausgaard, like i think the opening of the first book. apart from ruining my streak of having read all the stories he'd given us and seeming like the wanker mature student of a 12-week class - i find it p interesting.

i mean, some of his observations are brilliant, but parts of it also seem facile, stupid, or poorly explored.

for instance (and this nearly ruined the whole thing for me, insofar as it's a six-page sample that was finished when i finished it)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cb23i4TW0AEw8E0.jpg

i mean... is he really, REALLY incapable of finding a simple reason, besides cellar coolness, as to why a funeral home might not be on the eighth floor of a building and an insurance office would? like damn this wooden box full a 15-stone policy is a nightmare to move.

are the books full of this kind of thing? i'm aware this is pedantry but this was so bad as to make me a lot more suspicious of the rest...

I gave up on Karl O. K. after ~200 pages of the first volume of My Struggle. He didn't seem to have much to say and took his own sweet time to say it. His digressions into broad social observation struck me as particularly useless.

My current book is Kipling's first novel, The Light That Failed, which he wrote at age 24. It is an interesting mixture, exhibiting the pacing of a born storyteller and flashes of excellent style, all muddled up with a lot of juvenile posturing and painfully immature judgment.

The Light That Failed is very enjoyable, but you're otm about the posturing etc. Still well worth reading, though. Seems to be out of print, which is a bit of a surprise.

i don't think that's pedantry in the slightest tbh; it undermines the total observation. also you lose trust in the author (not just in the quality if their observations, but in the intellectual materials they've used to construct their world), and if you're going to spend a lot of time in his company that's fatal. xpost to LG.

currently reading Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. it's good. has as its principle "what it is that is deep about magic would be kept" and criticizes Frazer for categorizing the magical and religious notions of the peoples he writes about as "mistakes".

Fizzles that Wittgenstein sounds amazing, is it in German or English?

Also I agree that the Knausgaard seems like an essay-novel in the Musil tradition, but minus the intelligence, to the point of veering into Literary Seinfeldism: "What's the deal with morgues?" & so forth

Currently reading The Atrocity Exhibition; forever uncertain what to think of it, or how to feel; perpetually on the brink of setting it on a bench somewhere & walking away fast

Holy smokes, there's a Wicker Man on the cover of that Wittgenstein book!

Upcoming edition anyway.

German with facing-page translation. It's very very slender. What's good about it is the fairly light application of methods of philosophical thought you get in Philosophical Investigations - the care not to see causation in proximity - to a quite focused area. It's all quite liberating, every paragraph has you saying 'yes!' and punching the air slightly:

Even the idea of trying to explain the practice - say the killing of the priest-king - seems to me wrong-headed. All that Frazer does is to make this practice plausible to people who think as he does. It is very queer that all these practices are finally presented, so to speak, as stupid actions.

But it never does become plausible that people do all this out of sheer stupidity.

When he explains to us, for example, that the king must be killed in his prime because, according to the notion of the savages, his soul would not be kept fresh otherwise, we can only say: where that practice and these views go together, the practice does not spring from the view, but both of them are there.

funny, i was thinking about The Atrocity Exhibition yesterday - was reading Benjamin's essay on Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, which contains a section on World Exhibitions:

World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. he surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others. .. World exhibitions propagate the universe of commodities.

I didn't really get round to applying this to Ballard particularly, though it feels kin, as does this bit in fact:

Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service.

Have to be careful though, "similar words used in a similar way" does not equal "the same". i did end up here because of a comment on form and function in High Rise, so am just letting all percolate through at the moment.

I too was just now thinking about Ballard, but it was while I was staring at this picture. Aviation, crashes, filming, death.

i like those long articles i have read by knausgaard but there is no way i would ever read those books. would much rather read kipling. so maybe he is the new DFW for me. will read his wide-eyed reportage, but don't need the fiction.

i have been ignoring all the talk about him, so the concept was p fascinating to me when i heard about it. but yeah i dunno if i would read the books, that bit i screengrabbed annoyed me too much.

i'm still reading 2nd volume of ferrante but i also picked up francis davis's Like Young and i couldn't put it down and man he really sends me that francis davis. he's so good.

lmao @ literary seinfeldism

i like those long articles i have read by knausgaard but there is no way i would ever read those books.

vol.5 and/or 6 is about Brevik and Hitler, a section of that sounds like one of those excellent essays he has been knocking off so I am looking forward to that.

Thanks for Wittgenstein's still very relevant take on Frazer, Fizzles. Recalls my impressions of Dawkins, Maher, Hitchens and many lesser lights on Isalm, for inst.

I also like this:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/modernism_in_sf

Even better, I think:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/postmodernism_and_sf

Lots of links in those; I just now read this, which seems pretty astute:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ballard_j_g

I too was just now thinking about Ballard, but it was while I was staring at this picture🔗. Aviation, crashes, filming, death.

why i want to fuck noel edmonds.

it's the trad ballard plot - smith is the professional drawn into the orbit of the charismatic psychopath edmonds, climax is Smith crashing a helicopter with his wife beside him.

this fits somewhere

Finished Percival Everett, ERASURE (2001). Terrifically intelligent and challenging novel.

Love that book. He's an a,amazingly versatile writer. Have you read anything else of his?

I have not yet! But very impressed by this one. So much in it.

I was going to comment: I love KAFKA AMERICANA.

Knausgaard's comment above about death relating to the ground seemed not that ridiculous to me, on the face of it. But I haven't read his books and thus can't understand what he does or why, yet.

I just started Northanger Abbey last night. The straightforward pleasure of Austen's narrative voice is hard to beat.

Been trying to get back into reading for fun (yet again, I have breaks for various reasons, often involving academia or depression). Recent reads have involved some classics that I have inexplicably ignored, a couple of my beloved experimentals, and some things I never thought I would ever read but ended up loving.

A rough list of the last few months from memory:

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex + Oedipus at Colonus (not got around to Antigone yet)
Margaret Atwood - Oryx & Crake (goodish but a bit underwhelming, for some reason I never read the Handmaid's Tale at school so my mum has loaned me it to read soon)
James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
Raymond Roussel - Locus Solus
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Georges Perec - W, or the Memory of Childhood
Patrick Ness - Chaos Walking trilogy (my YA-loving friend lent these to me, they are young adult sci-fi books and I really really like them, got some quite high-concept stuff going on while remaining very accessible for kids/teens)
Christine Brooke-Rose - Xorandor (and just started Verbivore)

I think there might have been a couple of others recently that I have forgotten. That's one problem of getting back into reading at a relatively high speed (though I'm probably still slower than most of you) - I forgot that I need at least a couple of days between books to let them settle in. Also I have such a bad memory it's feasible that I might have posted about some of these before.

finished a cortázar collection from the late sixties/early seventies (a change of light & other stories). some almost straight up horror and hard-boiled pulp type stuff mixed in with the more recondite material... wasn't so sure about the one with the ghost of chopin thwarting the invasion of an unnamed latin american country, but otherwise some good stuff in there.

then some early bolaño: the skating rink & nazi literature in the americas (really liked the latter & going to have to find a copy of distant star)

now: perec's things, a story of the sixties

also, i really need to read some roussel!

Emil.y, i think you've hit some real gems in your return to reading! Giovannis room and invisible cities are wonderful books. And you remind me i need to dig out that christine brooke-rose book i bought when that thread about her was revived, and then never got round to reading.

Handmaids tale is not a perfect book, but still a very very effective one. By far her best SF work (though i say that as someone who thinks the rest of her SF is actually pretty risible)

Packing for a long spell of nomadism, think I can manage a bag of books (everything else goes into storage tomorrow). How do you decide what books to take? It's maddening. And I can't find anything in the damn boxes.

Might take Invisible Cities with me, if I can find it - one of my favourites.

no lime tangier, some Cortázar and Bolaño works coming up soon on my list of "books I bought ages ago but still haven't read", so I think we might have very similar reading interests. Definitely recommend Roussel, both Locus Solus and New Impressions of Africa.

I'd never read any James Baldwin before and adored Giovanni's Room, have since picked up some of his non-fiction, so hopefully will get around to that soon.

One book that I did forget to list was Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo - very sharp Afrofuturist satire with excellent formal elements.

I've read a couple of bolano's books, and I have 2666 or whatever sitting somewhere if I can find it. Grr.

hrabal is hilarious

He sure is.

I want to read James Baldwin later this year too.

So I finished Pages from the Goncourt Journals. So much in here, even though its very much the chronicle of two people who gave their lives to one thing: literature - partly because that's what they were good at (and not much else; women were such an obsession because they were a mystery - almost alien beings), but also because the stuff they were writing about like Flaubert and Zola was the stuff that 'won'. So while the subject is cult (Lit in general is a minority interest) they display a tabloid-like ear for both dialogue and speculation - people's lives and tribulations. A snatch of conversation that lingers on for long after you've read it. Something from his cousin:

Just imagine: they [the cousin's rural family] are people who for five generations have married for love

But there is are bits indicating a panorama of Paris in the 19th Century: one of the brothers - Jules - dies (at 39) Edmond carries on (3/4 of this is Edmond) and the entries surrounding his brother's death are touching and dignified. The Paris Commune starts up and this is chronicled as engagingly as what he is usually interested in.

But literature is what they gave themselves and there are insights at what the coming century will bring. The feud with Maupassant (his descent into madness and death doesn't stop Edmond from pissing away in his grave, but the charge of Flaubert minus sticks). There are snatches of a hilarious portrait of Mallarme, just this person that is beyond any comprehension. Edmond notes the weirdness of Baudelaire and so on. And then:

I am interested in novels in which I can feel the transcription in print, so to speak, of creatures in flesh and blood, in which I can read a little or a great deal of the memoirs of a life that has been lived

Where so much 20th century fic goes to (and where these Journals have been in although ironically you get a sense the life is often frustrating, in a they-are-rich-but-are-they-happy sorta way)

and regarding novels about high society:

...but unfortunately, to write novels or plays about that world you mustn't belong to it

Which is basically Proust.

I have finished some other things. Margerite Duras - The Vice-Consul. I love her devices for uncovering so much pain, but that whole world of people who went away (in this case to South Asia, where she grew up in) to get away and were lost. Almost dangerous in the wrong mood but the distancing and the drawing of characters who conceal as much as reveal keeps the reader marching on - the timing between both modes is really well done. The films based on this stuff just increase the fascination. Jean Rhys - Voyage in the Dark has sentences so worked over, which is v apt as it mirrors that sense of someone being suffocated, of being unable (and unwilling) to fit in - before outside forces inevitably distort and crush the already fragile sense of self and resistance and search for love and fulfillment. I've read a few of her fictions but also feel I am getting just started with Rhys. It takes time. Finally Han Kang - Human Acts. I loved The Vegetarian, where resistance and opposition was dramatised as a simple dietary switch. Here this is a lot more full-on, this time its a journalistic novel surrounding the repression of student uprisings in early 80s South Korea by the military government. I get it but also find it kinda stiff, kept thinking to my earlier read of Alexiviech's Voice of Chernobyl, how she is able to set and let oppressed voices fly away and speak and simply be whatever they are able to be at that time. Something I need to reflect more on.

Wow--loved 'The Vegetarian', didn't even know she had another book in English. It sounds interesting, even if not fully successful. Is it the same translator as Vegetarian?

Yeah, I should read more Duras, having loved The Lover, but maybe I haven't because I also found myself thinking that she knew a lot about guys like me. But finally---with most bridges, burned or not, having dissolved---what could words hurt-?

Also, have any of y'all read Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins? What did you think? And what's a good English translation of The Second Sex?

I've only read the Parshley translation, but according to Toril Moi, both of the available translations of The Second Sex have their problems (the earlier Parshley version is significantly abridged, while the newer version by Borde and Malovany-Chevallier is sometimes stilted and inaccurate): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

han kang sounds like someone i need to read

i have been reading the wake. the novel in invented anglo saxon from a year or two ago, not the other thing

also eve babitz's memoir, which was delightful

renata adler's selected journalism or essays or whatever they called it, which as a collection was terribly organized (though i guess ... they had what they had) despite some fantastic writing. though the first couple pieces, the civil rights one and the israel one, seem ... curiously naive (or, possibly, so arch i'd totally failed to parse it); i'd put it down in frustation at those but the national guard and g. gordon liddy stuff was fantastic. i don't know if i needed 200 pages of jeremiads against the supreme court and the new york times, but they certainly weren't bad --

what else. zuleika dobson, re which: i am adopting a policy: if anyone tells you they think this book is not terrible, never trust them again

Wow--loved 'The Vegetarian', didn't even know she had another book in English. It sounds interesting, even if not fully successful. Is it the same translator as Vegetarian?

― like Uber, but for underpants (James Morrison), Monday, 29 February 2016 00:40 (9 hours ago) Permalink

Yes. Deborah Smith has started a press for fictions from the South Asia as well:

http://tiltedaxispress.com/

And I think she is doing a new book by Bae Suah too.

xposts: thanks for the roussel recommendations, emil.y... the little i know about his work comes via robbe-grillet's short essay and reading somewhere or other about the surrealists' early appreciation of him.

Knausgaard's comment above about death relating to the ground seemed not that ridiculous to me, on the face of it. But I haven't read his books and thus can't understand what he does or why, yet.

it was the ambiguity of his speculation about why this is that i found ridiculous, though i don't expect you to read posts.

Speaking of Northanger Abbey, I'm reading Frances Burney's Evelina.

Many similarities to Austen, although she seems to drag us even deeper into the madness, the rules upon rules of good manners, of language, interpreting meaning based on slight nods, shifts, having to live with snobs and fops of the most vapid kind who use and abuse these rules. Not to say it's an always subtle dance - the intensity with which the men of the book harass our heroine is something else - observing her fighting off one suitor after another is great fun, but also surprisingly violent. She paints a picture of a society where male sexual aggression taking even threatening physical form is the norm - in 'quality' upper class company. Of course she falls in love with the only guy in the book who isn't up in her face.

The book can be hysterically funny. What she definitely shares with Austen is the ability to make crystallized weapons out of sentences and build up to the most vivid descriptions of idiocy.

Great stuff.

Also a sweet peek into the fashionable London of the late 1700s with all its gardens and venues of entertainment.

When the curtain dropt they all rejoiced.

"How do you like it?"-and "How do you like it?" passed from one to another with looks of the utmost contempt. "As for me," said Mr. Branghton, "they've caught me once; but if ever they do again, I'll give 'em leave to sing me to Bedlam for my pains: for such a heap of stuff never did I hear: there isn't one ounce of sense in the whole opera, nothing but one continued squeaking and squalling from beginning to end."

"If I had been in the pit," said Madame Duval, "I should have liked it vastly, for music is my passion; but sitting in such a place as this, is quite unbearable."

Miss Branghton, looking at me, declared, that she was not genteel enough to admire it.

Miss Polly confessed, that, if they would but sing English, she would like it very well.

The brother wished he could raise a riot in the house, because then he might get his money again.

And, finally, they all agreed that it was monstrous dear.

evelina is a fantastic novel. captain mirvan's incessant trolling of lovel is a++.

And of course the only-sometimes innocent Evelina was "compelled to laugh" at his dirtiest trick.

yes, i love Evelina. that's the only Burney I've read.

I've got her journals and letters lined up next, but itching to read the next novel.

xposts: thanks for the roussel recommendations, emil.y... the little i know about his work comes via robbe-grillet's short essay and reading somewhere or other about the surrealists' early appreciation of him.

― no lime tangier, Monday, February 29, 2016 10:55 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If that's the guy I think it is I have a biography of him somewhere I bought a few years ago that I never read.
Isn't he the mega rich guy who supposedly travelled the world on a cruise ship but never left his cabin.

Made me think of l ron hubbard rather than roussel!

reading some good stuff

updike - of the farm
rupinder gill - on the outside looking indian
greg Jackson - prodigals

i always argue with a specific friend of mine about patents/ip law even though none of us know anything about is aside from intuition and folk anecdata (someone patented the peanut butter sandwich, etc) so i bought 3 books on patents/innovation policy and we're gonna cycle read them. i'm starting with the first

james bessen and michael j meurer - patent failure
- pro patents in theory but critical of practice especially since 90s when patent litigation has exploded. very empirical focus

michele boldrin and daniel k levine - against intellectual monopoly
true to their thesis this book is available for free download on their website http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

mariana mazzucato - the entrepreneurial state
less directly related to patents but more generally about the positive role of the state in innovation (internet, us gov actually made a profit off solyndra, etc etc)

Currently reading the lovely pocket-sized Pushkin Press translation of Un beau ténébreux by Julien Gracq, a writer with whom I was not previously familiar. Very lyrical & beautifully written novels set at beach resorts are not typically my thing, but this one is scratching an itch for me...

When we read Evelina in my 18th century lit course twenty years ago the class liked it more than any Austen.

xp (I say "not typically my thing" because the opening chapters of one of my very favorite novels, Thomas l'obscur, could almost be read as a parody of the tendency observed in Gracq & others)

February was so dismal for reading. I couldn't concentrate on anything. This was after getting through about seven books in January. In the last couple days I've read some Edgar Allen Poe and Georges Simenon and this seems to be working.

In a "Ask Greil" response on greilmarcus.net, GM mentions some novels:

02/15/16
...Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet, the best rock-band novel, even though in the course of the book they barely perform. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, about the sixties as a teenage boy’s blessing or curse decades after the fact. People swooned over Lauren Groff’s ginned-up, unbelievable-from-either-side Fates and Furies—or felt they had to, as the incandescent, uncanny Arcadia was ignored. It’s one of the great excavations of hidden American history in fictional form and a story where absolutely nothing is predictable.

GM OMT--You Don't Love Me Yet is underrated.

Sounds interesting.

Review of the latest Dan Spiotta book led me to the link i posted here: Luna

Recently:

 Johnson, Alaya Dawn: A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’I (Novella) - award-nominated SF vampire/human power relationships exploration; not bad
 Bertino, Marie-Helene: Safe as Houses {Stories) - really good short stories, with a lot of surreal elements
 Rosenkrantz, Linda: My Life as a List (Memoir) - from the woman who did 'Talk', as recently NYRB-resurrected; brief, charming memoir of being a Jewish kid in the Bronx in WW2, occasionally suspecting her mother was a spy for Hitler
 Joseph, Paterson: Sancho: An Act of Remembrance (Play) - really good monologue about the life of the slave-born multi-talented composer/writer/actor who was friends with/championed by, among others, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Johnson, among others
 Scholz, Carter: Radiance (Novel) - sole solo novel by new ILB favourite, really good and grim, office politics in the nuclear war industry during the time of Reagan/Bush 1's SDI frolic

Please forgive wanky formatting, have c&p-ed from a list I'm trying to keep to remember what I've read at the end of the year

it's frustrating to me that they look like tickboxes

Just finished October in 1966 by Jon Savage. Pretty interesting really.

Just had Sid get arrested for the Death of Nancy in Inside the Dream Palace.

& Ivo has sold 4AD in Facing The Other Way

There's not much point in making brief commendatory comments on a Jane Austen novel, but I finished Northanger Abbey and, of course, it is chock full of small perfections and excellences.

I did find it a shame that Austen put her normally level-headed heroine through several pages of acting like a ninny, merely to score some editorial points against Gothic romances. It would have been a better novel if she'd omitted that minor piece of it, as it was superfluous to the plot and pulled her main character out of character.

JUst found taht my local remainder/2nd hand bookshop has got a range of Michael Moorcok books from 2 years back in these include anthologies of several of his characters including a Jerry Cornelius short fiction thing which I'll go back for. But I just bought a copy of THe Nomad of Time.
THink i'll be back for several others,
Maybe this should have gone more in the recent purchases thread cos it might takle me a while to actually read these.

After I finish the 4AD history I'll probably get back into the copy of Stoned2 by Andrew Loog Oldham I started before Xmas. BUt I have been meaning to read more Moorcock for a while. Though do wish I had got through more of him in my teens or 20s.

rupinder gill - on the outside looking indian

This title is catnip to my poor undiscriminating pun-loving heart, how does the book measure up?

I don't know, Catherine Morland is pretty naive and silly throughout the book. Are you referring to her morbid suspicions at the Abbey? Because for someone ignorant about the motivations of more or less everyone she meets I wouldn't say it's all that out of character. And it does drive home the point of the novel.

xp its really cute. have only read abt half so far. its a memoir abt sortof having a second adolescence after feeling stifled in her youth by her traditional indian parents

Catherine Morland's innocence and naivety is obvious on every page of Northanger Abbey, but these do not equate with empty-headed silliness. Her strange fantasies about General Tilney's faking his wife's death and burying a weighted coffin, then secretly keeping his wife in a dungeon and feeding her at midnight after the servants and his children were in bed, so that no one would know she was still alive - these do not reflect her normal trusting outlook and goodness of heart. Instead, she's briefly transformed into an over-excitable silly goose, which she has shown no propensity toward beforehand.

People get the strangest ideas in the dark! It's not the most believable turn of event, but I just thought it funny. And I do think there's a point to it, and to having a climax of sort to her reading induced fantasies.

I moved on from Burney's Evelina to her journals and letters:

Mr. Stephen Fuller, the sensible, but deaf old gentleman I have formerly mentioned, dined here also; as did Mr. Rose, whose trite, settled, tonish emptiness of discourse is a never-failing source of laughter and diversion.

"Well, I say, what, Miss Burney, so you had a very good party last Tuesday?—what we call the family party—in that sort of way? Pray who had you?"
"Mr. Chamier."
"Mr. Chamier, ay? Give me leave to tell you, Miss Burney, that Mr. Chamier is what we call a very sensible man!"
"Certainly. And Mr. Pepys."
"Mr. Pepys? Ay, very good— very good in that sort of way. I am quite sorry I could not be here; but I was so much indisposed—quite what we call the nursing party."
"I'm very sorry; but I hope little Sharp is well?
"Ma'am, your most humble! you're a very good lady, indeed!—quite what we call a good lady! Little Sharp is perfectly well: that sort of attention, and things of that sort,—-the bow-wow system is very well. But pray, Miss Burney, give me leave to ask, in that sort of way, had you anybody else?"
"Yes, Lady Ladd and Mr. Seward."
"So, so!—quite the family system! Give me leave to tell you, Miss Burney, this commands attention!—what we call a respectable invitation! I am sorry I could not come, indeed; for we young men, Miss Burney, we make it what we call a sort of rule to take notice of this sort of attention. But I was extremely indisposed, indeed—what we call the walnut system had quite—-Pray what's the news, Miss Burney?—in that sort of way, is there any news?"
"None, that I have heard. Have you heard any?"
"Why, very bad! very bad, indeed!—quite what we call poor old England! I was told, in town,—fact—fact, I assure you— that these Dons intend us an invasion this very month, they and the Monsieurs intend us the respectable salute this very month;—the powder system, in that sort of way! Give me leave to tell you, Miss Burney, this is what we call a disagreeable visit, in that sort of way."
I think, if possible, his language looks more absurd upon paper even than it sounds in conversation, from the perpetual recurrence of the same words and expressions—

Margerite Duras - Summer Rain
Cesare Pavese - Told in Confidence and Other Stories
Ann Quin - Passages

The Duras has her main theme (a love ravaged) in among an immigrant family on welfare in a 'sink estate' and that aspect doesn't quite come off (although I'll have to reflect on this a bit more - maybe I am not used to Duras really depicting this in her fiction). The scenes between the family and teacher had its comic moments. The Pavese is a bunch of short stories - 'Nudism' has his masterful descriptions of nature and those windows into an eroticism I hadn't quite seen as clearly. Ann Quin had a renewal theme - from a love that is frustrated and never quite comes through - that could be fruitful to read alongside someone like Jean Rhys, Duras or Pavese - except the former is so much more elliptical. They all talk about what is essential.

I'm really curious about that Ann Quin novel; I've only read Three, which was troubling, and vivid in a claustrophobic way.

I think Three might be my favourite, but Passages is possibly her most accomplished. (Lots of qualifiers there, ha.)

Read Three such a long time ago, can't remember a thing about it

I am now reading Fathers and Sons, Turgenev, in the Rosemary Edmonds translation published by Penguin Classics in 1965. Very readable so far. I will be interested to see how Turgenev describes his main "nihilist" character, compared to how Dostoevsky would frame such a character: as a craven, fiery-eyed monster.

I finished The First Bad Man by Miranda July. It was pretty consistently enjoyable, often quite funny and ended up packing an emotional punch (especially applicable to any parents out there). Probably the best part was the relationship between Clee and Cheryl, though I don't want to ruin it with spoilers. I think July's fearlessness as a writer is both a blessing and a curse, but more often a blessing. Some of the overtly wacky California stuff, like the color therapist, seemed kind of superfluous to me.

Started reading London the Biography by Peter Ackroyd. Been meaning to for years, probably decades. Bought it for a nominal price plus p+p last year and it's been sitting there.
But will be interesting I think.

Also gone back to Stoned2 after finishing the 4AD bio.

When we read Evelina in my 18th century lit course twenty years ago the class liked it more than any Austen.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, March 4, 2016 1:40 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

shaking my fist

rereading Pride and Prejudice bc i'm teaching it. it's pretty dece.

i've never taught Austen before. try to imagine how annoyed by me my students are lately.

Richard Wright, Black Boy
Dionne Brand, What We All Long For
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Thomas King, Truth and Bright Water

i got new(ish) penguin classics eds of:

clark ashton smith
algernon blackwood
arthur machen

and i have to say, the opening of the story s.t. joshi chose to open the smith with does not fill me with excitement about descending this particular rabbit hole:

"I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua ..."

That Machen anthology is a bit odd too, in that it doesn't include The Great God Pan

Is that Penguin Classics the White people and other Weird stories one?

if you find a good opium dealer you will be all set with those books.

how do you think one pronounces the name 'tirouv'. 'terry'?

stevolende, yes it is. aw fuck they're ALL s t joshi. gughghghgh

AMEN to o. nate's take on Miranda July's The First Bad Man.

Really liked this Rivka Galchen essay The Only Thing I Envy Men in the New Yorker, part of a longer essay Little Labors coming out later this year.

When I discovered how brilliant Muriel Spark’s novels were—they also were mostly out of print when I found them—I did feel a bit of fury, an emotion I nearly always deny myself, but that was that. (My daughter’s middle name is Spark.) And yet I had never envied men their literary place, and I still don’t, and I had never envied men much of anything, ever … until very recently. I now envy men, but for just one thing.

I found this over on Twitter. I RTed off Helen Dewitt who seemed chuffed by the mention of The Last Samurai

When on earth was Muriel Spark out of print? the mind boggles.

aw fuck they're ALL s t joshi. gughghghgh

Do all the introductions say how (x) is pretty good but not quite up to the level of lovecraft?

xp
I think quite a lot of her stuff was oop till quite recently - like The Bachelors has just come back out, but I can't remember seeing it in bookshops ever (outside those odd 90s omnibus volumes), ditto The Public Image. Don't know if I've ever seen a new copy of Robinson on shelves. Usually, Girls/Prime/Ballad and a changing cast of three or four others were all I'd see new (2nd hand totally different, obviously).

rivka galchen is great

reading the Penguin edition of Thomas Ligotti stories -- I started last night with "The Last Feast of the Harlequin", which was gripping (if ultimately disappointing)

Perhaps my experience is slightly skewed by living in Scotland, but I see quite a lot of secondhand Spark out and about (tho' yes, Public Image and Robinson are nowhere near as common as her best-known trio - Prime in partic is everywhere)

i bought a lot of new trade paperback spark editions in the late 80's. they had a bunch with similar covers/designs back then. had to dig in 2nd hand stores for some of the more oddball 70's ones.

in the u.s. obviously.

speaking of the new yorker, i tried to read a recent don delillo story in there and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....didn't make it.

i have to remember to never ever do this again:

"and their odd obscurity, seemed to cluster around . . . something."

it's fine, really. just remind me not to do that if i do that.

it is a little weird that a 25 year old writer in 2001 would be "clumsily seeking out books by women". like it was hard to find good ones?

i wish that thing had been about muriel spark. i could read about her all day long.

No, it isn't hard once you get started, but when you have 'lofty' ideas of literature, it can seem as though the world of Proper Literature and High Art and Experiment solely belongs to men, with perhaps the exception of Woolf, though she's not as good as Joyce anyway (am reframing my thoughts as a teen here, feel free to mock that attitude but it was what I was socialised into). I don't think I discovered Quin and Lispector and Sarraute &c &c until I was around 25ish.

that makes sense. it's terrible though! women rule.