Spring is sprung in 2015: What Are You Reading, Vernally Speaking?

Might be the wrong translation, although I haven't yet come across one that seemed too bad.

"A Vulgar Neighborhood" by John Plummer, originally published in October of 1862. Come take a tour of Whitechapel, while quivering with contemptuous titillation:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2012/05/penny-dreadfuls-in-whitechapel.html

i'm getting my first taste of joy williams in taking care and it's a doozy.

"She was an exact child, afraid of a great many things."

im reading jorge luis borges' "labyrinths" for the first time. im a bit underwhelmed tbh, then again im not someone with a overly philosophical/theological mind. sorry borges.

― tayto fan (Michael B), Wednesday, April 29, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Borges is more like a game? Frankly I think games are shit so don't mind me.

reading karate chop, a collection of short stories by a danish writer, dorthe nors, at the moment. really good stuff, a little like carver in that blunt and bleak way - very good stuff.

i get why someone would be underwhelmed by borges as a lot of the most famous stuff is closer to thought problem than story. (forking paths has characters but they are joke pulp characters; the narrator in library def has pathos but it is the pathos of his entire civilization and by extension ours so he is not exactly personally vivid. tlon uqbar and pierre menard are ideas.) labyrinths deep cuts i would recommend whose pleasures are less dry: the secret miracle, the house of asterion, the circular ruins maybe?, the thing near the end about the leopard.

i am reading 2666 and robert jordan although a few days ago i could have sworn i was reading the left hand of darkness; i think it fell under the bed.

also i got to port royal/fort beauregard a few weeks ago in a couple days of heavy shelby foote, but i was on planes.

civilization was the wrong word up there, his condition is more fundamental than that.

Some of those stories are like literary essays, which is surely no one's expectations. Possibly reading and thinking about him as a librarian in parallel might help.

Thinking about this now, and it could be what bugged me about Vila-Matas.

Anyway I am reading 120 Days of Sodom. I'll take it to the De Sade thread but so far I'd say boredom is useful.

Another spring, another Trollope novel (Phineas Redux).

Adam Mars-Jones, BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS.

Tremendous writer of criticism.

C by Tom McCarthy. Promises to be good. Present tense and contracted verbs to counter Victorianism but conservative nonetheless as I believe English culture to be even when transported to the other side of the globe, as close as I could get on the train from Brisbane to Surfers Paradise years ago (and the cream scones!). But the highrises felt like Hawaii, although I've never been there. (Does no one like Nick Clegg?)

Was not impressed with Satin Island. Had to return before starting The Blazing World because it was recalled. Same goes for Family Life by Akhil Sharma but managed to finish -- reading lazily (not attentively). The Ten Thousand Things still on coffee table. Multiple copies; should be safe. (Also promises to be good.)

Finished "The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux. I guess a train travelogue through Asia written in the '70s is kind of a minefield for potentially un-PC observations and characterizations, what with the need to quickly limn a character or bottle the atmosphere of an exotic locale in a knowing way, but Theroux comes out of it mostly unscathed, although some of his characterizations do seem a bit cliched at times. Quite readable as a picture of a unique time and place (or I should say, of many unique places at a particular time). That moment (1975) was probably just about the last point in time that a trip like that could still feel like a real adventure. Passing through the tail end of the Vietnam war helps a bit.

Now reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

I have been reading Didion's Blue Nights. I'm not sure what to make of it, yet. It consists of Didion bouncing around in her memories and often regretful emotions concerning her adopted daughter who died in young adulthood. Its primary value is exposing the thought processes of someone in grief who is struggling to find meaning in a welter of memories, so as to regain some sort of mental balance in their presence.

It is a very exposing exercise and it is difficult not to engage in a certain amount of criticism of the author, not as an author, but as a person. Didion herself invites this reaction, in part because she also engages in frequent bouts of self-doubting and self-criticism. One wants to shake her from time to time and talk some sense into her. Of course, that would do no good and that is not 'the point'.

All one can do is participate silently as a witness to this parade of memories, griefs, doubts, apologies, self-excusing, and assorted revelations, which ceremony of confessing and witnessing ultimately is the only real point of the book. It makes it very hard to be the reader, though, even if it was cathartic for the author.

About 90 pages into On The Road, and more than pleasantly surprised so far by Kerouac's version of polish. It's cast as a memoir, with the shining train moving out of the shadows---the author/narrator's early real-life troubles, minimally alluded to here, a proto-Beat scene already seeming stagnant, Neil/Dean's mentioned childhood with his wino father, whom he begged for in the streets and courtrooms--and passing through more: in Chicago, he notes the the "tired" bop of the late 40s, between Bird's creative peaks and Miles' recasting, the "old" and "sad" people and places (more the latter) along the way---and he's already mentioning that he and Dean fell out later, that the rejuvenation of young jades in Denver didn't last. But he remembers the excitement of discovery too, and the details are vivid and lucid, like Jack London's railroad and backstreet chronicles (although JK's more excitable, duh).

Also the vitality and resourcefulness of other people on the road, such as the guy in "a toolbox on wheels... driving it standing up, like a milkman."

"shining train," yeesh--thinking of "train of thought"---so far he's mostly hitchhiking, occasionally hopping a bus.

what if your gut reaction is these people are immature and they are getting away with it? does that make you old (even if you are only 17 or 18 -- from what I can remember -- maybe I've got it all wrong and I'm misremembering or it would be different now)? why can some people get away with it? are they just optimists? are they just open?!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Nobody Knows My Name by (according to the book's cover blurb) "America's angry young man", James Baldwin. Some of the topical details are outdated, but it is still full of observations and analysis relevant to what was called "the race question" back in the day.

When I finish this, I have checked out a copy of Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin, to see if it suits my mood. If it doesn't, I've got plenty more where that came from.

Almost at the end of Cloud Atlas, which has been pretty good. Been reading it mainly on buses or might have had it finished sooner.

Started Wolf Hall as my bedtime book though it might just wind up being my travel book once i get through the next 20 pages of Cloud Atlas.
Anyway am enjoying it greatly. Have read first few chapters.

Still reading Edward Conlon's Blue blood which is pretty great too. Cop memoir about end of the last millennium/beginning of this one.

Also just grabbed Senor Nice in a charity shop buy.
& a set of Aleister Crowley short stories including The Drug though I'm not overly impressed so far. But they had it for €5 in the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop and I thought I'd give it a chance since I might not see it again. I'd had it pointed out by a friend who bought a set of his Simon Iff stories. The idea of a psychic detective sounds interesting so I might grab a copy of that iff it turns up again.

On chapter twelve of the most recent winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award,Station Eleven, which seems to be the story of a post-pandemic traveling theater troupe. So far so good.

Been wondering about that one. Might have to get it.

About a week ago read Zazen by Vanessa Veselka, which is going to be one of these books that I start recommending to certain friends ad nauseum. Very sharp, sad, funny, and it could so very easily become a mean-spirited slog but never does. It's available free on the Red Lemonade site. I read a few of Veselka's essays afterwards, also very good.

read tom mccarthy remainder last week, loved it. now reading elena ferrante my brilliant friend & so far it's killer

Cool, you might like the Elena Ferrante--The Neapolitan Novels thread too.

I have been reading Didion's Blue Nights. I'm not sure what to make of it, yet. It consists of Didion bouncing around in her memories and often regretful emotions concerning her adopted daughter who died in young adulthood. Its primary value is exposing the thought processes of someone in grief who is struggling to find meaning in a welter of memories, so as to regain some sort of mental balance in their presence.

It's thin compared to its predecessor. What I remember most were the constant allusions to fried chicken.

Eric Larson - Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Dennis Altman - The Death of the Homosexual?
*C.S. Lewis - The Magician's Nephew

Cool, you might like the Elena Ferrante--The Neapolitan Novels thread too.

― dow, Thursday, May 14, 2015 9:20 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think i posted on it after reading days of abandonment. so far brilliant friend isn't as intense but still completely killer. i mean it's still pretty intense, 100 pages in and about 5 people have died, shed blood or split their skulls open. in a bildungsroman about 2 girls growing up in italy? lol

Italy: where the word vendetta was coined

thin compared to its predecessorhaven't read the latest, but The Year of Magical Thinking was pretty involving, and would have been even if I didn't already know what happened after she finished it (pretty sure, because I'd never been a big Didion follower at all, but this hooked me; still think about it sometimes).

Okay, read a little further into the third section which flashes back. Now I see how this is going to work.

Nearly done w/De Sade's 120 Years of Sodom. The thing to pick up post-UK election. Lighten the mood. More on the De Sade thread if I can be, ahem, arsed.

Raced through a bunch of Leskov's stories. Picaresques involving gypsies, artisans, princes, counts, monks, ghosts and whatever else. 19th century canon worthy. I'm calling it!

Just got to the part of On The Road in which narrator steals a copy of the following while leaving LA for the East Coast, but so far he's too wired/busy "reading landscapes" instead. Then I saw this. Good book?
https://booksyo.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/le-grand-meaulnes-by-alain-fournier/

like the cover, anyway

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RB%2B9wVAtL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

my fuzzy memory of it: good if rather slight. seems to have a lot of writer fans, though.

I agree with Youn about ON THE ROAD. I think the main characters are terribly obnoxious.

I don't like Tom McCarthy at all.

I greatly admire CLOUD ATLAS and WOLF HALL.

I am reading Simon Reynolds' RETROMANIA. I have been quite pleased to see how it opens up and explores past versions of retro. But I turn off when SR says 'I had got into acid house ... I wanted to embrace the phuture'. I find this attitude incomprehensible.

I've read well into Left Hand of Darkness. I'm not sure how it will end, but then I am not very invested in the characters or their problems, so any ending would be equal to any other from my present pov.

It is interesting to see how LeGuin has assembled her other world as a pastiche or mosaic of various bits of human cultures and earth's geography, but it is also worth noting that the most original features of her created world are often the least convincing. For my money, the few interspersed 'folk tales' she wrote are easily the best feature of the book. They have the right tone, pacing and details to be very convincing and they shed a more interesting light on the culture she imagined than any other part of the story. They are very like Scandinavian folk tales.

The least gratifying part for me is that, although LeGuin has assembled a decent set of insights into human (nb: she is very clear that her world is inhabited by humans) culture and politics, these insights are all available in a better and more complete form to anyone who has read widely in literature and history. So, her novel is going to be of much more interest to someone just beginning to explore life and literature than to a creaking old literary geek like me.

(re finding main characters in On The Road to be xpost obnoxious etc.)
Just got to the beginning of OTR's Part Two, where the narrator rates Dean and treasured buddy Ed as "mindless cads" for their exploitation of women, and, after driving from Frisco to Virginia in four days, Dean is in a full-blown mania and still rising. At this point, narrator Sal seems to agree with you.
Dean doesn't really show up that much in Part One. When Sal finally gets to Denver, he finds that Dean and Carlo Marx/Allen Ginsberg have fallen out with other returned natives and NYC expats. Sal watches D and C in overnight mind-meld, interrogating and answering each other re recent behavior, burning through the veils of illusion, with an occasional break for stealing a car and helling 'round the mountains.
But he spends more time with other old and new acquaintances, including Roland Major, who writes and lives Hemingway-wannabee stories about real artists who can't get away from arty types. He's best dealt with in Hemingway fashion: "Don't bother to go over there, Jake, you can probably hit him from here."
The best part so far is Sal going to Mill City. California, which he says is the only community in America where whites and blacks live side by side (true? This is the late 40s). Everybody seems very happy, including his host, the merry Remi, a friend from prep school. The author was a scholarship student at Horace Mann; I don't know how Remi, real or imagined, got to such a place, since he supposedly was shuttled from one bad school to another in the boondocks of France, which is why, Sal explains, he now tends to stagger ant-like under a load of stolen groceries, in the barracks where desperadoes drink & wait to go do cut-rate construction work in Okinawa (Sal & Remy's fellow rent-a-cops, though very cop-like in a showy way, don't catch on this kind of heist).
Remi and Lee Ann, his "honey-colored" girl friend (whose shack Remi and Sal are staying in, of course) scrounge all week so they can go into San Francisco, dressed to the nines and burning through a hundred 1947 dollars in three hours, on a typical Saturday night. Things get even more bipolar, and then eminent Dr. Remi pere and latest hot young wife arrive in America; Remi is desperate to impress his father with swanky dining in San Fran, but Roland Major (now a journo, still living the Life of Hem) shows up and Sal's drunkenly talking wine and roses to Remy's new not-Mom.
The pathos and comedy of this section (and a later part of Part One) pulled me in, although the dialogue can seem two-dimensional, possibly because the author really is relying mostly on memory. Description is his thing, and there's a lot more of it.

The least gratifying part for me is that, although LeGuin has assembled a decent set of insights into human (nb: she is very clear that her world is inhabited by humans) culture and politics, these insights are all available in a better and more complete form to anyone who has read widely in literature and history. So, her novel is going to be of much more interest to someone just beginning to explore life and literature than to a creaking old literary geek like me.

I don't follow you. You're separating TLHD from lit and history?

No, I'm saying that everything LeGuin offers the reader in TLHoD that is new and original is kind of second rate, while the less original or borrowed parts of TLHoD are available in better and more complete forms elsewhere, either in other works of literature, or else in history. You have to read a lot of books to get at those better sources, but by now I've read a lot of those better books, so all I am left with that's new to me are the parts that don't excite much interest in me. For someone less well read, this would not be so true.

Clearer?

What I remember from the book after twenty years most vividly is its treatment of gender and sexuality.

Yeah, think the consensus has always been that its treatment of gender and sexuality=core of its appeal.

Just started Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, which isn't a Smiths song but rather a queer YA book (by a writer named Peter Cameron) that my prof insists that I read.

i _loved_ on the road

Patricia Highsmith - The Price of Salt

Brent Armendinger - The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (poems)

Renata Adler - After The Tall Timber

long winded essays & reportage from an old school New Yorker writer. her infamous takedown of Pauline Kael is by far the "best" or in my mind the only thing here w/passion and flow.

Saul Bellow - There Is Simply Too Much To Think About

title works as a succinct review of the old braniac's collected non fiction. early pieces got me hungry only to quickly fill up and push the remainder aside undigested as it were.

I own Adler's early 2000s collection, the one with the Rehnquist, Bork, and Lewinsky essays. I wish they were better known.

she certainly has insight and reach in those pieces and it was interesting to read about watergate from the 1976 perspective but idk, something about the pacing and a certain loftiness of tone left me unsatisfied (and i expected to love this collection, maybe too much). haven't read her novels. yet.

I'm about one-third of the way into Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers -- both literally and figuratively. I like parts of it, especially the descriptions of mid-'70s New York bohemia, but the characters are pretty unconvincing, and the writing is so ... written. I was trying to describe my reaction to the prose to my wife, and she said, "Was she an MFA?" Yeah -- exactly. (She was -- Columbia, 2001.)

I like Kushner's essays on Lispector and her intro to Malaparte's The Skin well enough but yeah dreading to pick that novel up.